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The long-awaited first results from the Muon g-2 experiment at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory show fundamental particles called muons behaving in a way that is not predicted by scientists’ best theory, the Standard Model of particle physics. This landmark result, made with unprecedented precision, confirms a discrepancy that has been gnawing at researchers for decades. The strong evidence that muons deviate from the Standard Model calculation might hint at exciting new physics. Muons act as a window into the subatomic world and could be interacting with yet undiscovered particles or forces. “Today is an extraordinary...

A person falling into a black hole and being stretched while approaching the black hole’s horizon. Credit: Leo Rodriguez and Shanshan Rodriguez, CC BY-ND =================================================================== To solve the mysteries of black holes, a human should just venture into one. However, there is a rather complicated catch: A human can do this only if the respective black hole is supermassive and isolated, and if the person entering the black hole does not expect to report the findings to anyone in the entire universe. We are both physicists who study black holes, albeit from a very safe distance. Black holes are among...

(© Elvis Popovic/CGS Society) PHYSICS In a Comprehensive Test, The 'Impossible' EM Drive Has Failed to Produce Thrust… Again PAUL M. SUTTER, UNIVERSE TODAY5 APRIL 2021 The EM Drive is a hypothetical rocket that proponents claim can generate thrust with no exhaust. This would violate all known physics. In 2016, a team at NASA's Eagleworks lab claimed to measure thrust from an EM Drive device, the news of which caused quite a stir. The latest attempt to replicate the shocking results has resulted in a simple answer: the Eagleworks measurement was from heating of the engine mount, not any new...

A new prototype solar panel from the Technical Institute of Copenhagen (TIC) promises to be a game changer for renewable energy prospects....Traditional solar panels work by intercepting photons. Naturally the Earth is opaque to photons, so at night the panels are useless. But the Sun emits another kind of particle that shines right through the Earth, even at night: solar neutrinos....neutrinos pass through the Earth, they do change on their way through – a bit like the way white light is changed into a rainbow as it passes through a triangular prism.” Keying in on this relationship, Pierrot was able...

Polarized view of the black hole in M87. The lines mark the orientation of polarization, which is related to the magnetic field around the shadow of the black hole. Credit: EHT Collaboration ===================================================================== Wits University astrophysicists are the only two scientists on African continent that contributed to the study. The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration, a multinational team of over 300 scientists including two astrophysicists from the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits University), has revealed a new view of the massive object at the center of the M87 galaxy: how it looks in polarized light. This is the first time...

An amateur astronomer just spotted a strange new object in the sky. And it’s bright enough for you to see with binoculars from your backyard. The discovery image (left) of a new nova that recently appeared in the constellation Cassiopeia. The right image shows how the same region of the sky appeared just four days prior. Yuji Nakamura At around 7 P.M. JST on the evening of March 18, Japanese amateur astronomer Yuji Nakamura spotted something strange: A new point of light in the familiar constellation Cassiopeia the Queen. Researchers at Kyoto University quickly followed up using the 3.8-meter Seimei...

Update (24 March 2021): The Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) experiment is still insisting there's a flaw in our best model of particle physics. As explained below, previous results comparing the collider's data with what we might expect from the Standard Model threw up a curious discrepancy by around 3 standard deviations, but we needed a lot more information to be confident it truly reflected something new in physics. Newly released data have now pushed us closer to that confidence, putting the results at 3.1 sigma; there's still a 1 in 1,000 possibility that what we're seeing is the result...

The new explosion, illustrated here, is bluer than an ordinary supernova and more than 100 times as bright. SAKKMESTERKE / Science Source =================================================================== A supernova-like explosion dubbed the Camel appears to be the result of a newborn black hole eating a star from the inside out. ================================================================ In 2018, astronomers were shocked to find a bizarre explosion in a galaxy 200 million light-years away. It wasn’t like any normal supernova seen before — it was both briefer and brighter. The event was given an official designation, AT2018cow, but soon went by a more jovial nickname: the Cow. The short-lived event...

LHCb experiment cavern at LHC. Credit: CERN Imperial physicists are part of a team that has announced ‘intriguing’ results that potentially cannot be explained by our current laws of nature. The LHCb Collaboration at CERN has found particles not behaving in the way they should according to the guiding theory of particle physics – the Standard Model. The Standard Model of particle physics predicts that particles called beauty quarks, which are measured in the LHCb experiment, should decay into either muons or electrons in equal measure. However, the new result suggests that this may not be happening, which could point...

The nova (left) and the same patch of sky four days earlier. (Yuji Nakamura/NAOJ) According to reports in The Astronomer's Telegram, a star in the region of the constellation of Cassiopeia has just gone nova, and the glow is still visible in the night sky. If you live in the Northern Hemisphere and have even a basic telescope, you might want to head out and point it in that direction. The first detection was made on 18 March 2021 by amateur astronomer Yuji Nakamura from the Mie Prefecture in Japan. In four frames captured using a 135-millimeter lens and a...

It's 2021, and we finally don't have to worry quite so much about our spacecraft getting lost in interstellar space. Using the positions and shifting light of stars, both near and far, astronomer Coryn A.L. Bailer-Jones has demonstrated the feasibility of autonomous, on-the-fly navigation for spacecraft traveling far beyond the Solar System. Interstellar space navigation may not seem like an immediate problem. However, already in the last decade human-made instruments have entered interstellar space, as first Voyager 1 (in 2012) and Voyager 2 (in 2018) crossed the Solar System boundary known as the heliopause. It's only a matter of time...

Scientists are celebrating the long-sought discovery of the odderon, a strange phenomenon that appears only rarely when protons collide at high energies, such as inside particle accelerators. Though the odderon was first predicted to exist in the early 1970s, it wasn’t until recently that physicists finally gathered the data they needed at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider to confirm a true discovery. The discovery contributes to physicists’ understanding of how all the matter in the universe interacts at the smallest levels. Unlike the famous Higgs boson, which was officially discovered in 2012, the odderon isn’t a particle exactly. Instead, it’s the...

Two professors are calling for abolishing the physics term “quantum supremacy” because it is “uncomfortably reminiscent of ‘white supremacy.'” In an op-ed, titled, “Physicists Need to Be More Careful with How They Name Things” for the Scientific American, St. Anselm College physics professor Ian Durham, University of Bristol math professor Karoline Wiesner, and freelance journalist Daniel Garisto call for doing away with the physics term “quantum supremacy” in an anti-racist measure. The popular term, coined in 2012 by quantum physicist John Preskill, refers to quantum computers outperforming classical ones. It has nothing to do with racism, which the authors of...

A traversable wormhole would be a shortcut through space. (ESO/L. Calçada) =============================================================== In my last post, I talked about the idea of warp drive and whether it might one day be possible. Today I'll talk about another faster-than-light trick: wormholes. Wormholes are an old idea in general relativity. It's based on work by Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen, who tried to figure out how elementary particles might behave in curved spacetime. Their idea treated particle-antiparticle pairs as two ends of a spacetime tube. This Einstein-Rosen Bridge would look like a black hole on one end, and an anti-black hole,...

Superconductivity is a complete loss of electrical resistance. Superconductors are not merely very good metals: it is a fundamentally different electronic state. In normal metals, electrons move individually, and they collide with defects and vibrations in the lattice. In superconductors, electrons are bound together by an attractive force, which allows them to move together in a correlated way and avoid defects. In a very small number of known superconductors, the onset of superconductivity causes spontaneous electrical currents to flow. These currents are very different from those in a normal metal wire: they are built into the ground state of the...

Pip-squeak particles called neutrinos are dishing out more than scientists had bargained for.A particle detector has spotted a puzzling abundance of the lightweight subatomic particles and their antimatter partners, antineutrinos, physicists report May 30 at arXiv.org. The finding mirrors a neutrino excess found more than two decades ago. And that match has researchers wondering if a new type of particle called a sterile neutrino — one even more shadowy than the famously elusive ordinary neutrinos — might be at large.Such a particle, if it exists, would transform the foundations of particle physics and could help solve cosmic puzzles like the...

Explanation: From where do these neutrinos come? The IceCube Neutrino Observatory near the South Pole of the Earth has begun to detect nearly invisible particles of very high energy. Although these rarely-interacting neutrinos pass through much of the Earth just before being detected, where they started remains a mystery. Pictured here is IceCube's Antarctic lab accompanied by a cartoon depicting long strands of detectors frozen into the crystal clear ice below. Candidate origins for these cosmic neutrinos include the violent surroundings of supermassive black holes at the centers of distant galaxies, and tremendous stellar explosions culminating in gamma ray bursts...

IT TRIGGERED A SUBATOMIC CASCADE — AND COULD HAVE AN AVALANCHE OF IMPLICATIONS FOR THE FUTURE OF PHYSICS.Crash Course Scientists have now confirmed that an unusually powerful particle of antimatter crashed down into Antarctica back in December 2016. The collision seems to have triggered a subatomic cascade effect called Glashow resonance, Live Science reports, which is a theoretical phenomenon that requires more energy to set off than even the most powerful particle accelerators can provide. Scientists didn’t expect to see tangible evidence of Glashow resonance, but now that they have it helps further confirm the Standard Model of subatomic physics....

Scientists have long theorized that supermassive black holes can wander through space—but catching them in the act has proven difficult. Now, researchers at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian have identified the clearest case to date of a supermassive black hole in motion. Their results are published today (March 12, 2021) in The Astrophysical Journal. “We don’t expect the majority of supermassive black holes to be moving; they’re usually content to just sit around,” says Dominic Pesce, an astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics who led the study. “They’re just so heavy that it’s tough to get them...

A new study shows that extreme black holes could break the famous “no-hair” theorem, and in a way that we could detect. According to Einstein’s general theory of relativity, black holes have only three observable properties: mass, spin and charge. Additional properties, or “hair,” do not exist. Andriy_A / Shutterstock Identical twins have nothing on black holes. Twins may grow from the same genetic blueprints, but they can differ in a thousand ways — from temperament to hairstyle. Black holes, according to Albert Einstein’s theory of gravity, can have just three characteristics — mass, spin and charge. If those values...