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The first image of a black hole has been captured by astronomers, heralding a revolution in our understanding of the universe’s most enigmatic objects. The picture shows a halo of dust and gas, tracing the outline of a colossal black hole, at the heart of the Messier 87 galaxy, 55 million light years from Earth. The black hole itself – a cosmic trapdoor from which neither light nor matter can escape – is unseeable. But the latest observations take astronomers right to its threshold for the first time, illuminating the event horizon beyond which all known physical laws break down.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/10/us/katie-bouman-mit-black-hole-algorithm-sci-trnd/index.html

Nearly 40 years after it was proposed, mathematicians have settled one of the most profound questions in the study of general relativity. In a paper posted online last fall, mathematicians Mihalis Dafermos and Jonathan Luk have proven that the strong cosmic censorship conjecture, which concerns the strange inner workings of black holes, is false.“I personally view this work as a tremendous achievement — a qualitative jump in our understanding of general relativity,” emailed Igor Rodnianski, a mathematician at Princeton University.The strong cosmic censorship conjecture was proposed in 1979 by the influential physicist Roger Penrose. It was meant as a...

The heart of every major galaxy is said to contain a supermassive black hole — a place where anything, including light, can be devoured to the point of no return. For years, scientists have struggled to capture one of these deadly masses on camera, since the absence of light renders them nearly impossible to see. Now, for the first time, a group of scientists from the international Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project are expected to unveil a photograph of a black hole to the public.

There are ghostly shapes hidden in magnetic fields. They're not made of stuff in the way a lightning bolt or a beam of light is. A lighting bolt carries a fairly defined group of electrons from the sky all the way to the ground.... But magnetic fields contain things called skyrmions that are different from electrons and photons; a skyrmion is a knot of magnetic field lines looping around each other. As it drifts from one spot to the next, a skyrmion makes itself anew out of the magnetic field lines that are already there. The knot holds together because...

For more than a century, physicists have hunted for superconductivity in warmer materials.... In 1986, researchers uncovered ceramics that were superconductive at temperatures as high as 30 degrees above absolute zero, or minus 406 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 243 degrees Celsius). Later, in the 1990s, researchers first looked in earnest at very high pressures, to see if they might reveal new kinds of superconductors. The next big breakthrough came in 2001, when researchers showed that magnesium diboride (MgB2) was superconductive at 39 degrees above absolute zero, or minus 389 F (minus 234 C). Since then, the hunt for warm superconductors has...

Physicists who have been roaming the “landscape” of string theory—the space of zillions and zillions of mathematical solutions of the theory, where each solution provides the kinds of equations physicists need to describe reality—have stumbled upon a subset of such equations that have the same set of matter particles as exists in our universe. But this is no small subset: there are at least a quadrillion such solutions, making it the largest such set ever found in string theory.

To investigate Faraday waves, the team confined BECs to a linear one-dimensional waveguide, resulting in a cigar-shaped BEC. The researchers then shook the BECs using a weak, slowly oscillating magnetic field to modulate the strength of interactions between atoms in the 1D waveguide. The Faraday pattern emerged when the frequency of modulation was tuned near a collective mode resonance. But the team also noticed something unexpected: When the modulation was strong and the frequency was far below a Faraday resonance, the BEC broke into "grains" of varying size. Rice research scientist Jason Nguyen, lead co-author of the study, found the...

Atheism Is Inconsistent with the Scientific Method, Prizewinning Physicist Says In conversation, the 2019 Templeton Prize winner does not pull punches on the limits of science, the value of humility and the irrationality of nonbeliefLee Billings Marcelo Gleiser, a 60-year-old Brazil-born theoretical physicist at Dartmouth College and prolific science popularizer, has won this year’s Templeton Prize. Valued at just under $1.5 million, the award from the John Templeton Foundation annually recognizes an individual “who has made an exceptional contribution to affirming life’s spiritual dimension.” Its past recipients include scientific luminaries such as Sir Martin Rees and Freeman Dyson, as well...

Researchers there have developed a way to levitate and propel objects using only light, by adding specific nanoscale patterning to their surface. Scientists have the ability to move and manipulate tiny objects with the use of ‘optical tweezers.’ The tweezers move objects via the radiative pressure from a sharply focused beam of laser light. However, this impressive tool can only move small very small objects a very limited distance. The trick is to create very specific patterns on the object's surface. These nanoscale patterns interact with the light so that the object keeps ‘righting’ itself if disturbed so that it...

California scientists think they’ve found a way to make objects levitate using concentrated light — a theory that could even propel spacecraft farther than they’ve ever traveled before, according to a report. Researchers at the California Institute of Technology believe that by covering the surfaces of objects with microscopic nanoscale patterns specially designed to interact with beams of light, they could be propelled without fuel — and potentially by light sources millions of miles away, according to Phys.org.The findings, first detailed in the online science journal Nature Photonics, already have scientists salivating over the potentially out-of-this-world applications. One could be the...

Spacecraft already navigate our solar system using gravity wells as slingshots. The same basic principles operate in the intense gravity wells around black holes, which bend not only the paths of solid objects, but light itself. If a photon, or a light particle, enters a particular region in the vicinity of a black hole, it will do one partial circuit around the black hole and get flung back in exactly the same direction. Physicists call those regions "gravitational mirrors" and the photons they fling back "boomerang photons." Boomerang photons already move at the speed of light, so they don't pick...

At temperatures of 120 kelvin, or -240 degrees Fahrenheit, they saw clear signs that heat can travel through graphite in a wavelike motion. Points that were originally warm are left instantly cold, as the heat moves across the material at close to the speed of sound. The behavior resembles the wavelike way in which sound travels through air, so scientists have dubbed this exotic mode of heat transport "second sound."

Albert Einstein was born in Germany on March 14, 1879. He began teaching himself calculus at age 14. With a doctorate from the University of Zurich, Einstein wrote papers on electromagnetic energy, relativity, and statistical mechanics. Einstein predicted a ray of light from a distant star would appear to bend as it passed near the sun. When an eclipse confirmed this, the London Times ran the headline, Nov. 7, 1919, “Revolution in science – New theory of the Universe – Newtonian ideas overthrown.” In 1921, Albert Einstein won the Nobel Prize in physics. Describing the theory of relativity, Albert Einstein...

Researchers from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology teamed up with colleagues from the U.S. and Switzerland and returned the state of a quantum computer a fraction of a second into the past. "This is one in a series of papers on the possibility of violating the second law of thermodynamics. That law is closely related to the notion of the arrow of time that posits the one-way direction of time from the past to the future,"

FULL TITLE: QUANTUM TIME Scientists have built world’s first ‘time machine’ in experiment which defies the laws of physics ============================================================ Lead researcher Dr Gordey Lesovik said by putting scattered electrons back into their original shape they had effectively created a state which went against the 'direction of time' ============================================================ SCIENTISTS have built the world’s first time machine — sort of. Working with electrons in the bizarre realm of quantum mechanics, they first created the equivalent of a break for a game of pool. The “balls” scattered and, according to the laws of physics, should have appeared to split in a...

There’s a crisis brewing in the cosmos. Measurements over the past few years of the distances and velocities of faraway galaxies don’t agree with the increasingly controversial “standard model” of the cosmos that has prevailed for the past two decades. Astronomers think that a 9 percent discrepancy in the value of a long-sought number called the Hubble Constant, which describes how fast the universe is expanding, might be revealing something new and astounding about the universe. The cosmos has been expanding for 13.8 billion years and its present rate of expansion, known as the Hubble constant, gives the time elapsed...

Scientists have finally been able to accurately calculate the weight of the Milky Way, overcoming the difficult hurdle of measuring dark matter, the European Space Agency (ESA) announced Thursday. After years of struggling to estimate the size of our galaxy, astronomers with NASA and the ESA used data from the Hubble Space Telescope and the ESA’s Gaia mission to determine the Milky Way weighs about 1.5 trillion solar masses within a radius of 129,000 light years from the center. Because dark matter makes up about 90 percent of the galaxy, estimates of the Milky Way’s weight have differed widely in...

February 22, 2019 |   Salvatore Cezar Pais is a US Navy researcher. Salvatore has three amazing patents that would be incredible breakthroughs in physics if they are true. The least extreme is a patent for Piezoelectricity-Induced Room Temperature Superconductor. The other two patents are gravity wave generator and inertial mass reduction.If these could be realized as technologies then we are talking Star Trek level spaceships. The gravitational wave generator could be used for propellentless propulsion to near the speed of light. Being able to reduce inertia would also mean capabilities which currently seem beyond known physics.The more likely situation...

Located in the constellation of Hercules, about 230 million light-years away, NGC 6052 is a pair of colliding galaxies. They were first discovered in 1784 by William Herschel and were originally classified as a single irregular galaxy because of their odd shape. However, we now know that NGC 6052 actually consists of two galaxies that are in the process of colliding. This particular image of NGC 6052 was taken using the Wide Field Camera 3 on the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. A long time ago gravity drew the two galaxies together into the chaotic state we now observe. Stars from...