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The known Universe just got a lot bigger. A new map of the night sky published Tuesday charts hundreds of thousands of previously unknown galaxies discovered using a telescope that can detect light sources optical instruments cannot see. The international team behind the unprecedented space survey said their discovery literally shed new light on some of the Universe's deepest secrets, including the physics of black holes and how clusters of galaxies evolve. "This is a new window on the universe," Cyril Tasse, an astronomer at the Paris Observatory who was involved in the project, told AFP. "When we saw the...

Scientists think they've identified a previously unknown form of neural communication that self-propagates across brain tissue, and can leap wirelessly from neurons in one section of brain tissue to another – even if they've been surgically severed. The discovery offers some radical new insights about the way neurons might be talking to one another, via a mysterious process unrelated to conventionally understood mechanisms, such as synaptic transmission, axonal transport, and gap junction connections. "We don't know yet the 'So what?' part of this discovery entirely," says neural and biomedical engineer Dominique Durand from Case Western Reserve University. "But we do...

Measurements of gravitational waves from approximately 50 binary neutron stars over the next decade will definitively resolve an intense debate about how quickly our universe is expanding, according to findings from an international team that includes University College London (UCL) and Flatiron Institute cosmologists. When neutron stars collide, they emit light and gravitational waves, as seen in this artist's illustration. By comparing the timing of the two emissions from many different neutron star mergers, researchers can measure how fast the universe is expanding. Credit: R. Hurt/Caltech-JPL The cosmos has been expanding for 13.8 billion years. Its present rate of expansion,...

An invisible force is having an effect on our Universe. We can't see it, and we can't detect it - but we can observe how it interacts gravitationally with the things we can see and detect, such as light. Now an international team of astronomers has used one of the world's most powerful telescopes to analyse that effect across 10 million galaxies in the context of Einstein's general relativity. The result? The most comprehensive map of dark matter across the history of the Universe to date. ... "If further data shows we're definitely right, then it suggests something is missing...

Electrons flowing across the boundary between two materials are the foundation of many key technologies, from flash memories to batteries and solar cells. Now researchers have directly observed and clocked these tiny cross-border movements for the first time, watching as electrons raced seven-tenths of a nanometer – about the width of seven hydrogen atoms – in 100 millionths of a billionth of a second. Led by scientists at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University, the team made these observations by measuring tiny bursts of electromagnetic waves given off by the traveling electrons – a phenomenon...

Quantum physics sets the laws that dominate the universe at a small scale. The ability to harness quantum phenomena could lead to machines like quantum computers, which are predicted to perform certain calculations much faster than conventional computers. One major problem with building quantum processors is that the tracking and controlling quantum systems in real time is a difficult task because quantum systems are overwhelmingly fragile: Manipulating these systems carelessly introduces significant errors in the final result. New work by a team at Aalto could lead to precise quantum computers. The researchers report controlling quantum phenomena in a custom-designed electrical...

Something isn't quite right in the universe. At least based on everything physicists know so far. Stars, galaxies, black holes and all the other celestial objects are hurtling away from each other ever faster over time. Past measurements in our local neighborhood of the universe find that the universe is exploding outward faster than it was in the beginning. That shouldn't be the case, based on scientists' best descriptor of the universe. If their measurements of a value known as the Hubble Constant are correct, it means that the current model is missing crucial new physics, such as unaccounted-for fundamental...

Our home galaxy, the Milky Way, makes for a pretty space picture, and it looks normal at a distance. But a new 3D map reveals a surprise: The Milky Way is being warped and twisted by its stars. The Milky Way is a spiral galaxy, in which stars and gas clouds exist mainly in its two spiral "arms." Our massive neighbor, the Andromeda galaxy, is also a spiral. Spiral galaxies usually appear very flat and easy to see through a telescope, said the researchers behind the new map, published Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy. Using 1,339 large, pulsating stars...

The light released from around the first massive black holes in the universe is so intense that it is able to reach telescopes across the entire expanse of the universe. Incredibly, the light from the most distant black holes (or quasars) has been traveling to us for more than 13 billion light years. However, we do not know how these monster black holes formed. New research led by researchers from Georgia Institute of Technology, Dublin City University, Michigan State University, the University of California at San Diego, the San Diego Supercomputer Center and IBM provides a new and extremely promising...

The question of how quickly the universe is expanding has been bugging astronomers for almost a century. Different studies keep coming up with different answers—which has some researchers wondering if they've overlooked a key mechanism in the machinery that drives the cosmos. Now, by pioneering a new way to measure how quickly the cosmos is expanding, a team led by UCLA astronomers has taken a step toward resolving the debate. The group's research is published today in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.At the heart of the dispute is the Hubble constant, a number that relates distances to the...

Astronomers have revealed details of mysterious signals emanating from a distant galaxy, picked up by a telescope in Canada. The precise nature and origin of the blasts of radio waves is unknown. Among the 13 fast radio bursts, known as FRBs, was a very unusual repeating signal, coming from the same source about 1.5 billion light years away. Such an event has only been reported once before, by a different telescope. "Knowing that there is another suggests that there could be more out there," said Ingrid Stairs, an astrophysicist from the University of British Columbia (UBC). "And with more repeaters...

If stupidity were a virtue this guy would become the first man to be declared a saint while still alive.

The trouble is, math is sort of broken. It's been broken since 1931, when the logician Kurt Gödel published his famous incompleteness theorems. They showed that in any mathematical system, there are certain questions that cannot be answered. They're not really difficult — they're unknowable. Mathematicians learned that their ability to understand the universe was fundamentally limited. Gödel and another mathematician named Paul Cohen found an example: the continuum hypothesis. The continuum hypothesis goes like this: Mathematicians already know that there are infinities of different sizes. For instance, there are infinitely many integers (numbers like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5...

Late in 2018, the gravitational wave observatory, LIGO, announced that they had detected the most distant and massive source of ripples of spacetime ever monitored: waves triggered by pairs of black holes colliding in deep space. Only since 2015 have we been able to observe these invisible astronomical bodies, which can be detected only by their gravitational attraction. The history of our hunt for these enigmatic objects traces back to the 18th century, but the crucial phase took place in a suitably dark period of human history – World War II. The concept of a body that would trap light,...

Thought this bears notice. Heat! Energy!

Albert Einstein's desk can still be found on the second floor of Princeton's physics department. Positioned in front of a floor-to-ceiling blackboard covered with equations, the desk seems to embody the spirit of the frizzy-haired genius as he asks the department's current occupants, "So, have you solved it yet?" Einstein never achieved his goal of a unified theory to explain the natural world in a single, coherent framework. Over the last century, researchers have pieced together links between three of the four known physical forces in a "standard model," but the fourth force, gravity, has always stood alone.No longer. Thanks...

Everything around you – your desk, your laptop, your coffee cup – in fact, even you – is made of stardust, the stuff forged in the fiery furnaces of stars that died before our sun was born. Probing the space surrounding a mysterious stellar corpse, scientists at the University of Arizona have made a discovery that could help solve a long-standing mystery: Where does stardust come from? When stars die, they seed the cosmos around them with the elements that go on to coalesce into new stars, planets, asteroids and comets. Most everything that makes up Earth, even life itself,...

Black holes are among the most mysterious places in the universe; locations where the very fabric of space and time are warped so badly that not even light can escape from them. According to Einstein's theory of general relativity, at their center lies a singularity, a place where the mass of many stars is crushed into a volume with exactly zero size. However, two recent physics papers, published on Dec.10 in the journals Physical Review Letters and Physical Review D, respectively, may make scientists reconsider what we think we know about black holes. Black holes might not last forever, and...

Danish physicist Niels Bohr was a scientific genius who also displayed a coincidental penchant for espionage and intrigue. He employed these skills, along with a bit of science, to foil the Nazi at several turns. His small crusade began in 1933 after the Nazis came to power in Germany. Over the next few years several scientists fled Germany with Bohr’s help. Many escapees went on to work on the Manhattan Project, including Edward Teller, James Franck and Otto Frisch. Some of them stayed with Bohr in Denmark, working at the Bohr Institute until moving elsewhere.

Scientists have long known that synthetic materials—called metamaterials—can manipulate electromagnetic waves such as visible light to make them behave in ways that cannot be found in nature. That has led to breakthroughs such as super-high resolution imaging. Now, UMass Lowell is part of a research team that is taking the technology of manipulating light in a new direction. The team—which includes collaborators from UMass Lowell, King's College London, Paris Diderot University and the University of Hartford -has created a new class of metamaterial that can be "tuned" to change the color of light. This technology could someday enable on-chip optical...