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Nine hundred million years after the Big Bang, in the epoch of our universe's earliest galaxies, there was already a black hole 1 billion times the size of our sun. That black hole sucked in huge quantities of ionized gas, forming a galactic engine — known as a blazar — that blasted a superhot jet of bright matter into space. On Earth, we can still detect the light from that explosion more than 12 billion years later. Astronomers had previously discovered evidence of primeval supermassive black holes in slightly younger "radio-loud active galactic nuclei," or RL AGNs. RL AGNs are...

The news: Honeywell, a US company best known for its home thermostats, has announced that it has built the world’s most powerful quantum computer. While all eyes were on IBM and Google, which last year knocked heads over quantum supremacy, Honeywell has been working quietly on quantum tech that it plans to make available to clients via the internet in the next three months. How it works: Most quantum computers, including those being developed by IBM and Google, are built around superconducting qubits, which use supercooled circuits. Honeywell’s quantum computer uses a different technology, called ion traps, which hold ions—the...

Freeman J. Dyson, a mathematical prodigy who left his mark on subatomic physics before turning to messier subjects like Earth’s environmental future and the morality of war, died on Friday at a hospital near Princeton, N.J. He was 96. His daughter Mia Dyson confirmed the death. As a young graduate student at Cornell in 1949, Dr. Dyson wrote a landmark paper — worthy, some colleagues thought, of a Nobel Prize — that deepened the understanding of how light interacts with matter to produce the palpable world. The theory the paper advanced, called quantum electrodynamics, or QED, ranks among the great...

String theory is perhaps the most controversial big idea in all of science today. On the one hand, it's a mathematically compelling framework that offers the potential to unify the Standard Model with General Relativity, providing a quantum description of gravity and providing deep insights into how we conceive of the entire Universe. On the other hand, its predictions are all over the map, untestable in practice, and require an enormous set of assumptions that are unsupported by an iota of scientific evidence. For perhaps the last 35 years, string theory has been the dominant idea in theoretical particle physics,...

"We are sidestepping all of the scientific challenges that have held fusion energy back for more than half a century," says the director of an Australian company that claims its hydrogen-boron fusion technology is already working a billion times better than expected.

The way the fabric of space and time swirls in a cosmic whirlpool around a dead star has confirmed yet another prediction from Einstein's theory of general relativity, a new study finds. That prediction is a phenomenon known as frame dragging, or the Lense-Thirring effect. It states that space-time will churn around a massive, rotating body. For example, imagine Earth were submerged in honey. As the planet rotated, the honey around it would swirl — and the same holds true with space-time. Satellite experiments have detected frame dragging in the gravitational field of rotating Earth, but the effect is extraordinarily...

Prof Claudia de Rham’s ‘massive gravity’ theory could explain why universe expansion is accelerating Cosmologists don’t enter their profession to tackle the easy questions, but there is one paradox that has reached staggering proportions. Since the big bang, the universe has been expanding, but the known laws of physics suggest that the inward tug of gravity should be slowing down this expansion. In reality, though, the universe is ballooning at an accelerating rate. Scientists have come up with a name – dark energy – for the mysterious agent that is allowing the cosmos to expand so rapidly and which is...

The death of this reigning physics paradigm, the Standard Model, has been predicted for decades. There are hints of its problems in the physics we already have. Strange results from laboratory experiments suggest flickers of ghostly new species of neutrinos beyond the three described in the Standard Model. And the universe seems full of dark matter that no particle in the Standard Model can explain. But recent tantalizing evidence might one day tie those vague strands of data together: Three times since 2016, ultra-high-energy particles have blasted up through the ice of Antarctica, setting off detectors in the Antarctic Impulsive...

Scientists have captured the first ever footage of atoms bonding at a scale around half a million times smaller than the width of a human hair. Using advanced microscopy methods, the team of UK and German researchers captured the breaking of a chemical bond between two rhenium atoms. The video shows the two atoms to the left of the footage, between 0.1 and 0.3 nanometres, appearing as black blobs as they bond and break. Atoms are ‘the building blocks of the world’ and the matter around us is made up of layers and layers of atoms – unless they’re a...

Gravitational waves are caused by calamitous events in the Universe. Neutron stars that finally merge after circling each other for a long time can create them, and so can two black holes that collide with each other. But sometimes there's a burst of gravitational waves that doesn't have a clear cause. One such burst was detected by LIGO/VIRGO on January 14, and it came from the same region of sky that hosts the star Betelgeuse. Yeah, Betelgeuse, aka Alpha Orionis. The star that has been exhibiting some dimming behaviour recently, and is expected to go supernova at some point in...

Earth's gravitational wave observatories -- which hunt for ripples in the fabric of space-time -- just picked up something weird. The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and Virgo detectors recorded an unknown or unanticipated "burst" of gravitational waves on Jan. 14. The gravitational waves we've detected so far usually relate to extreme cosmic events, like two black holes colliding or neutron stars finally merging after being caught in a death spiral. Burst gravitational waves have not been detected before and scientists hypothesize they may be linked to phenomena such as supernova or gamma ray bursts, producing a tiny "pop" when...

A stunning new panoramic image of the Milky Way is revealing all sorts of fresh insight. The image shows the center of our Milky Way Galaxy, stretching about 600 light-years across, and reveals never-before-seen details of the Arches cluster, which is densest star cluster in our galaxy. And that bright white splotch in the middle of the image? That's the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy, which is illuminated on all sides.

No one really knows what happens inside an atom. But two competing groups of scientists think they've figured it out. And both are racing to prove that their own vision is correct. Here's what we know for sure: Electrons whiz around "orbitals" in an atom's outer shell. Then there's a whole lot of empty space. And then, right in the center of that space, there's a tiny nucleus — a dense knot of protons and neutrons that give the atom most of its mass. Those protons and neutrons cluster together, bound by what's called the strong force. And the numbers...

During a recent interview with CNN, Mallett, who is a respected physics professor, claimed that he had written a scientific equation that could serve as the basis for time travel - a concept that he became obsessed with as a young boy after reading The Time Machine by author H.G. Wells. It's a goal that he has been pursuing for most of his life and although the 74-year-old admits that he is unlikely to see time travel became a reality during his lifetime, there's a chance that his efforts will have contributed in no small part to the creation of...

On a hillside above Stanford University, the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory operates a scientific instrument nearly 2 miles long. In this giant accelerator, a stream of electrons flows through a vacuum pipe, as bursts of microwave radiation nudge the particles ever-faster forward until their velocity approaches the speed of light, creating a powerful beam that scientists from around the world use to probe the atomic and molecular structures of inorganic and biological materials. Stanford and SLAC have created a silicon chip that can accelerate electrons—albeit at a fraction of the velocity of that massive instrument—using an infrared laser to deliver,...

The theoretical notion of a 'quantum heat engine' has been around for several decades. It was first introduced around sixty years ago by Scovil and Schulz-DuBois, two physicists at Bell Labs who drew an analogy between three-level masers and thermal machines. In the years that followed, other researchers have developed a variety of theories building on the ideas of Scovil and Schulz-DuBois, introducing proposals of thermodynamic cycles at the quantum scale. Very recently, physicists have started testing some of these theories in experimental settings. One of these experiments was carried out by a team of researchers at the University of...

Scientists at the University of Bristol and the Technical University of Denmark have achieved quantum teleportation between two computer chips for the first time. The team managed to send information from one chip to another instantly without them being physically or electronically connected, in a feat that opens the door for quantum computers and quantum internet. This kind of teleportation is made possible by a phenomenon called quantum entanglement, where two particles become so entwined with each other that they can “communicate” over long distances. Changing the properties of one particle will cause the other to instantly change too, no...

The Abell 85 galaxy cluster, which is home to a black hole of 40 billion solar masses Mathias Kluge/USM/MPE ===================================================================== Astronomers from the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics and at the University Observatory Munich have found the largest known black hole in our galactic neighborhood using direct mass measurements. Located 700 million light-years from Earth in the Abell 85 cluster of galaxies in the constellation of Cetus, it has a mass 40 billion times that of the Sun. Ever since the existence of the first black hole was confirmed in 1971, they have gone from being a mathematical curiosity...

Using the first new method in half a century for measuring the size of the proton via electron scattering, scientists have produced a new value for the proton's radius in a new experiment...The new value for the proton radius that was obtained is 0.831 fm, which is smaller than the previous electron-scattering value of 0.88 fm...

Three supermassive black holes found lurking in one galaxy NGC 6240 is a well-studied example of a galaxy merger. But the discovery that it hides three supermassive black holes makes it a stunning example of a galaxy formed through a triple merger. By Alison Klesman  |  Published: Friday, November 22, 2019 RELATED TOPICS: BLACK HOLES | GALAXIES The strange galaxy NGC 6240 is an ultra-rare example of a galaxy harboring three supermassive black holes near its core. Astronomers already knew of the galaxy's active, northern black hole (N), but thanks to cutting-edge 3D-mapping techniques, they've now identified two more —...