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An artist’s impression of a red supergiant star in the final year of its life emitting a tumultuous cloud of gas. This suggests at least some of these stars undergo significant internal changes before going supernova. Credit: W.M. Keck Observatory/Adam Makarenko Astronomers Capture Red Supergiant’s Death Throes “For the first time, we watched a red supergiant star explode,” researcher says. For the first time ever, astronomers have imaged in real time the dramatic end to a red supergiant’s life — watching the massive star’s rapid self-destruction and final death throes before collapsing into a type II supernova. Led by researchers...

Particles forming swirling, tornado-like structures. (Mukherjee et al, Nature, 2022 ============================================================================== Scientists have observed a stunning demonstration of classic physics giving way to quantum behavior, manipulating a fluid of ultra-cold sodium atoms into a distinct tornado-like formation. Particles behave differently on the quantum level, in part because at this point their interactions with each other hold more power over them than the energy from their movement. Then, of course, there's the mind-boggling fact that quantum particles don't exactly have a certain fixed location like you or I, which influences how they interact. By cooling particles down to as close to...

This animation shows an artist’s rendition of the cloudy structure revealed by a study of data from NASA’s Rossi X-Ray Timing Explorer satellite. Credit: Wolfgang Steffen, UNAM ======================================================================== Upending textbook explanations, astrophysicists from the University of Miami, Yale University, and the European Space Agency suggest that primordial black holes account for all dark matter in the universe. Proposing an alternative model for how the universe came to be, a team of astrophysicists suggests that all black holes—from those as tiny as a pinhead to those covering billions of miles—were created instantly after the Big Bang and account for all dark...

(LOFAR/LOL Survey) The image above may look like a fairly normal picture of the night sky, but what you're looking at is a lot more special than just glittering stars. Each of those white dots is an active supermassive black hole. And each of those black holes is devouring material at the heart of a galaxy millions of light-years away – that's how they could be pinpointed at all. Totaling 25,000 such dots, astronomers created the most detailed map to date of black holes at low radio frequencies in early 2021, an achievement that took years and a Europe-sized radio...

The researchers created the tiny transistor by simultaneously applying a force and low voltage which heated a carbon nanotube made up of few layers until outer tube shells separate, leaving just a single-layer nanotube. The heat and strain then changed the "chilarity" of the nanotube, meaning the pattern in which the carbon atoms joined together to form the single-atomic layer of the nanotube wall was rearranged. The result of the new structure connecting the carbon atoms was that the nanotube was transformed into a transistor. Professor Golberg's team members from the National University of Science and Technology in Moscow created...

Imaginary numbers are necessary to accurately describe reality, two new studies have suggested. Imaginary numbers are what you get when you take the square root of a negative number, and they have long been used in the most important equations of quantum mechanics, the branch of physics that describes the world of the very small. When you add imaginary numbers and real numbers, the two form complex numbers, which enable physicists to write out quantum equations in simple terms. But whether quantum theory needs these mathematical chimeras or just uses them as convenient shortcuts has long been controversial. In fact,...

Illustration of the double pulsar PSR J0737−3039A/B. (Michael Kramer/MPIfRA) Two pulsars locked in close binary orbit have once again validated predictions made by Einstein's theory of general relativity. Over 16 years, an international team of astronomers has observed the pulsar pair, named PSR J0737−3039A/B, finding that the relativistic effects can be measured in the timing of their pulses – just as predicted and expected. This is the first time these effects have been observed. "We studied a system of compact stars that is an unrivalled laboratory to test gravity theories in the presence of very strong gravitational fields," says astronomer...

While all atomic nuclei except hydrogen are composed of protons and neutrons, physicists have been searching for a particle consisting of two, three, or four neutrons for over half a century. Experiments by a team of physicists of the Technical University of Munich (TUM) at the accelerator laboratory...now indicate that a particle comprising four bound neutrons may well exist. Should such particle exist, parts of the theory of the strong interaction would need to be rethought. In 2016, a group in Japan attempted to produce tetra-neutrons from helium-4 by bombarding it with a beam of radioactive helium-8 particles. This reaction...

In perhaps his most famous quip of all time, celebrated physicist Richard Feynman once remarked, when speaking about new discoveries, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.” When you do science yourself, engaging in the process of research and inquiry, there are many ways you can become your own worst enemy. If you’re the one proposing a new idea, you must avoid falling into the trap of becoming enamored with it; if you do, you run the risk of choosing to emphasize only the results that support it, while discounting...

https://thedebrief.org/darpa-funded-researchers-accidentally-create-the-worlds-first-warp-bubble/?fbclid=IwAR0Fk1AB54CDA-ctHDN4hMrIcI6C8Bw-UIAxOk-BFEsnlnNPFzmHEZkvJiM Warp drive pioneer and former NASA warp drive specialist Dr. Harold G “Sonny” White has reported the successful manifestation of an actual, real-world “Warp Bubble.” And, according to White, this first of its kind breakthrough by his Limitless Space Institute (LSI) team sets a new starting point for those trying to manufacture a full-sized, warp-capable spacecraft.

Warp drive pioneer and former NASA warp drive specialist Dr. Harold G “Sonny” White has reported the successful manifestation of an actual, real-world “Warp Bubble.” And, according to White, this first of its kind breakthrough by his Limitless Space Institute (LSI) team sets a new starting point for those trying to manufacture a full-sized, warp-capable spacecraft. “To be clear, our finding is not a warp bubble analog, it is a real, albeit humble and tiny, warp bubble,” White told The Debrief, quickly dispensing with the notion that this is anything other than the creation of an actual, real-world warp bubble....

The international Forward Search Experiment team, led by physicists at the University of California, Irvine, has achieved the first-ever detection of neutrino candidates produced by the Large Hadron Collider at the CERN facility near Geneva, Switzerland. In a paper published today in the journal Physical Review D, the researchers describe how they observed six neutrino interactions during a pilot run of a compact emulsion detector installed at the LHC in 2018.

Quantum computers could one day blow boring old classical computers out of the water, but so far their complexity limits their usefulness. Engineers at Stanford have now demonstrated a new relatively simple design for a quantum computer where a single atom is entangled with a series of photons to process and store information.Quantum computers tap into the weird world of quantum physics to perform calculations far faster than traditional computers can handle. Where existing machines store and process information in bits, as either ones and zeroes, quantum computers use qubits, which can exist as one, zero, or a superposition of...

Eureka! A research team featuring dozens of scientists working in partnership with Google‘s quantum computing labs may have created the world’s first time crystal inside a quantum computer. This is the kind of news that makes me want to jump up and do a happy dance. These scientists may have produced an entirely new phase of matter. I’m going to do my best to explain what that means and why I personally believe this is the most important scientific breakthrough in our lifetimes. However, for the sake of clarity, there’s two points I need to make first: 1. Time crystals...

A weird quantum effect that was predicted decades ago has finally been demonstrated – if you make a cloud of gas cold and dense enough, you can make it invisible. Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) used lasers to squeeze and cool lithium gas to densities and temperatures low enough that it scattered less light. If they can cool the cloud even closer to absolute zero (minus 459.67 degrees Fahrenheit, or minus 273.15 degrees Celsius), they say it will become completely invisible. The bizarre effect is the first ever specific example of a quantum mechanical process called Pauli...

A rare manuscript by theoretical physicist Albert Einstein goes under the hammer in Paris on Tuesday, with auctioneers aiming for a stratospheric price tag. The manuscript, containing preparatory work for Einstein's key achievement the theory of relativity, is estimated at between two and three million euros (2.3-3.4 million), according to Christie's which is hosting the sale on behalf of the Aguttes auction house. "This is without a doubt the most valuable Einstein manuscript ever to come to auction," Christie's said in a statement. The 54-page document was handwritten in 1913 and 1914 in Zurich, Switzerland, by Einstein and his colleague...

The simplest way to construct a wormhole is to "extend" the idea of a black hole with its mirror image, the white hole. This idea was first proposed by Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen, hence the reason wormholes are sometimes called "Einstein-Rosen bridges". This creates a tunnel through space-time. Einstein and Rosen constructed their wormhole with the usual Schwarzschild metric, and most analyses of wormholes use that same metric. So physicist Pascal Koiran at Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon in France tried something else: using the Eddington-Finkelstein metric instead. His paper, described in October in the preprint database arXiv, is...

Engineers have successfully transferred digitally encoded information wirelessly using nuclear radiation instead of conventional technology. Radio waves and mobile phone signals rely on electromagnetic radiation for communication but in a new development, engineers from Lancaster University in the UK, working with the Jožef Stefan Institute in Slovenia, transferred digitally encoded information using “fast neutrons” instead. The researchers measured the spontaneous emission of fast neutrons from californium-252, a radioactive isotope produced in nuclear reactors. Modulated emissions were measured using a detector and recorded on a laptop. Several examples of information, i.e., a word, the alphabet, and a random number selected blindly,...

The record for the coldest temperature ever achieved has been broken with the cooling of rubidium gas to 38 picokelvins (3.8 * 10-11 K). The work could lead to new insights into quantum mechanics. Temperature is a measure of the energy in atoms' or molecules' vibrations. The lowest temperature theoretically possible is absolute zero – 0 K or −273.15 ºC (−459.67 ºF) – which would require a complete cessation of movement. That's probably impossible practically, but for decades physicists have shown we can get very, very close by using lasers to damp atomic motion. In Physical Review Letters German scientists...

Researchers Show New Strategy for Detecting Non-Conformist Particles Called Anyons By observing how strange particles called anyons dissipate heat, researchers have shown that they can probe the properties of these particles in systems that could be relevant for topological quantum computing. A team of Brown University researchers has shown a new method of probing the properties of anyons, strange quasiparticles that could be useful in future quantum computers. In research published in the journal Physical Review Letters, the team describes a means of probing anyons by measuring subtle properties of the way in which they conduct heat. Whereas other methods...