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There is a "missing light crisis" taking place in the universe with a huge deficit on what there should be and what there actually is, astronomers have said. In a statement, experts from the Carnegie Institution for Science said "something is amiss in the universe" with 80% of the light missing. Lead author of the study Juna Kollmeier said: "It's as if you're in a big, brightly-lit room, but you look around and see only a few 40-watt lightbulbs. Where is all that light coming from? It's missing from our census." Published in Astrophysical Journal Letters, scientists found that the...

University of Queensland researchers say photons can move through time A simulation of two wormhole-travelling photons found they could interact This suggests, at the smallest scales, jumping through time is possible The experiment could solve some famous theories that 'prevent' time travel But whether this will be possible on a larger scale remains to be seen If a time traveller went back in time and stopped their own grandparents from meeting, would they prevent their own birth? That’s the crux of an infamous theory known as the 'grandfather paradox', which is often said to mean time travel is impossible -...

The University of Maryland physicist believes the delay could have been because the light was in fact slowed as it travelled due to something known as 'vacuum polarisation'. During this phenomenon, photons break down to something known as ‘positrons’ and electrons for a split second. before combining together again. When they split, quantum mechanics creates a gravitational potential between the pair of ‘virtual’ particles. Dr Franson argues that the process might have a gradual impact on the speed of the photon, meaning that over 168,000 light years, the photons may have suffered a near five-hour delay. If the physicist is...

Albert Einstein once told a friend that quantum mechanics doesn't hold water in his scientific world view because "physics should represent a reality in time and space, free from spooky actions at a distance." That spooky action at a distance is entanglement, a quantum phenomenon in which two particles, separated by any amount of distance, can instantaneously affect one another as if part of a unified system. Now, scientists have successfully hijacked that quantum weirdness -- doing so reliably for the first time -- to produce what many sci-fi fans have long dreamt up: teleportation. No, not beaming humans aboard...

Up to this point, the tunneling process only involved one particle tunneling through a single barrier. Hanns-Christoph Nägerl and a team of researchers at the Institute for Experimental Physics of the University of Innsbruck, in Innsbruck, Austria recently learned of a process for quantum particles to pass through as many as five different barriers simultaneously via an effect called Bose enhancement. They created what they call “a physical quantum simulator” that can imitate other quantum systems. They cooled cesium atoms to almost absolute zero or -459.67 degrees F. They next put the atoms in an essential optical lattice created with...

Sometimes it takes a second look — or even more — at an astronomical object to understand what’s going on. This is what happened after astronomers obtained this image of NGC 5548 using the Hubble Space Telescope in 2013. While crunching the data, they saw some gas moving around the galaxy in a way that they did not understand. From the supermassive black hole embedded in the galaxy’s heart, the researchers detected gas moving outward quite quickly — blocking about 90% of the X-rays being emitted from the black hole, a common feature of objects of this type. So, astronomers...

American Antigravity interviewed Eugene Podkletnov to discuss recent (2004 to 2013) experimental antigravity research in gravity modification and superconductors. For nearly two decades Dr. Podkletnov has been researching the link between gravitation and high-temperature superconductors, and just recently published the peer-review results of new experiments he’s conducted to measure the speed of a force-beam projected by a stationary superconducting apparatus he’s developed. Podkletnov is well-known for his experiments involving YBCO superconductors, which produced a gravity-shielding effect that was investigated by NASA and has been the subject of many peer-review papers. He describes continuing his experiments in this area, and indicates...

Over the past week there has been quite a buzz in the scientific community over a Dutch experiment reliably transmitting data instantly between two electrons via quantum entanglement. While many reports are sensationalizing the discovery, referring to it as a breakthrough in ‘teleportation’, there’s something almost as exciting as physical transportation already proven possible in the experiment: instant communication! While scientists have reached a 3-meter(or 10-foot) range with a 100% success rate, worldwide implementation would revolutionize communication. Instant text messages, infinitely scalable internet bandwidth, and sub-millisecond(or even sub-measurable) latency. Even now, our fastest long-distance communication efforts are too slow to...

The astronomers who this spring announced that they had evidence of primordial gravitational waves jumped the gun because they did not take into proper account a confounding effect of galactic dust, two new analyses suggest. Although further observations may yet find the signal to emerge from the noise, independent experts now say they no longer believe that the original data constituted significant evidence. Researchers said in March that they had found a faint twisting pattern in the polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the Big Bang’s afterglow, using a South Pole-based radio telescope called BICEP2. This pattern, they said,...

Imperial College London physicists have discovered how to create matter from light - a feat thought impossible when the idea was first theorised 80 years ago. In just one day over several cups of coffee in a tiny office in Imperial's Blackett Physics Laboratory, three physicists worked out a relatively simple way to physically prove a theory first devised by scientists Breit and Wheeler in 1934.Breit and Wheeler suggested that it should be possible to turn light into matter by smashing together only two particles of light (photons), to create an electron and a positron – the simplest method of...

The aurora is more than just a breathtaking display of light. It may also hold the secret of a magnetic phenomenon related to the nuclear fusion powering the sun. This secret could even help create nuclear fusion in the lab, says a team of researchers. Nuclear fusion is a reaction that combines the nuclei of two atoms into one. The process powers stars, but getting a self-sustained fusion reaction going on Earth is very difficult, and has so far eluded scientists. For example, in February, researchers at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in California made headlines when they managed to spur...

The most powerful particle accelerator in the world, the Large Hadron Collider, has not yet created any black holes as some have feared, researchers say. Even if this atom smasher does create black holes, there is no danger of those black holes destroying Earth, added scientists of the new study published online March 5 in the journal Physical Review Letters.

Nearly 90 years after Werner Heisenberg pioneered his uncertainty principle, a group of researchers from three countries has provided substantial new insight into this fundamental tenet of quantum physics with the first rigorous formulation supporting the uncertainty principle as Heisenberg envisioned it. In the Journal of Mathematical Physics, the researchers reports a new way of defining measurement errors that is applicable in the quantum domain and enables a precise characterization of the fundamental limits of the information accessible in quantum experiments. Quantum mechanics requires that we devise approximate joint measurements because the theory itself prohibits simultaneous ideal measurements of position...

21 Image Caption: Artist's impression of a binary supermassive black hole system. Credit: ESA - C. Carreau ESAA pair of supermassive black holes in orbit around one another have been spotted by XMM-Newton. This is the first time such a pair have been seen in an ordinary galaxy. They were discovered because they ripped apart a star when the space observatory happened to be looking in their direction.Most massive galaxies in the Universe are thought to harbor at least one supermassive black hole at their center. Two supermassive black holes are the smoking gun that the galaxy has merged...

Shear mixing could be used to produce graphene flakes in bulk © CRANN Suspensions of high quality graphene can be produced quickly and cheaply using a common industrial mixer, researchers in Ireland have discovered.1 The scientists even managed to produce small amounts of graphene using a kitchen blender.While next generation electronic devices need ultra-pure, monolayer graphene produced by mechanical exfoliation or chemical vapour deposition, everyday electronics such as batteries and solar cells are produced using solution coating. Therefore, to use graphene in these kinds of electronics engineers require huge amounts of high quality graphene flakes suspended in solution.In 2008, Jonathan...

In a new national poll on America's scientific acumen, more than half of respondents said they were "not too confident" or "not at all confident" that "the universe began 13.8 billion years ago with a big bang." The poll was conducted by GfK Public Affairs & Corporate Communications. Scientists were apparently dismayed by this news, which arrives only a few weeks after astrophysicists located the first hard evidence of cosmic inflation. But when compared to results from other science knowledge surveys, 51 percent isn't too shameful -- or surprising. Other polls on America's scientific beliefs have arrived at similar findings....

A team of nearly 100 physicists from around the world have achieved results verifying that the elementary particle known as the neutrino exhibits a distinctive pattern of oscillation. This discovery shows that it is likely that the Standard Model, proposed in the 1970s to describe the fundamental forces and particles that make up all matter, is incomplete. The findings provide the needed confirmation to their previous discovery of neutrino oscillation and give the most precise measurement yet of neutrino mass. “These findings show that the Standard Model needs to be modified to better explain the fundamental forces that make up...

A space telescope scheduled for launch in 2007 will be sensitive enough to detect theoretical miniature black holes lurking within our solar system, scientists say. By doing so, it could test an exotic five-dimensional theory of gravity that competes with Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. That is, of course, if the tiny black holes actually exist. The idea, recently detailed online in the journal Physical Review D, is being proposed by Charles Keeton, a physicist at Rutgers University in New Jersey, and Arlie Petters of Duke University in North Carolina. Branes The Randall-Sundrum braneworld model, named after the scientists...

There’s no end to it. Gravity appears to be madly greedy and long armed. Members of the Virgo Super cluster are connected to each other, and they’re dozens of millions of light-years apart. Objects in the Pisces-Cetus Super cluster complex are even connected to each other by our invisible and obnoxiously possessive friend. And they are hundreds of millions of light years apart… In fact, you’re so popular that you are gravitationally pulled towards even most distant object in the observable Universe. And they, in turn, are linked to you. As a result, without the outward expansion and acceleration of...

On March 17, a team of radio astronomers announced they discovered purportedly direct evidence for cosmic inflation—a critical component of the modern Big Bang model. To make this discovery, the researchers used a specialized telescope called BICEP2 located on the Antarctic plateau.1 Radiation that has its strongest intensity in the microwave portion of the electromagnetic spectrum comes to us from all directions in space. Secular researchers interpret this cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB) as "relic radiation" from a time about 400,000 years after the alleged cosmic explosion. Now, a team of astronomers led by John M. Kovac of the Harvard-Smithsonian...