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Black Hole Police Spot Extragalactic Black Hole Using the Very Large Telescope, astronomers have discovered a stellar-mass black hole in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a neighbor galaxy to our own. A stellar-mass black hole in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a neighbor galaxy to our own, has been found by a team of international experts, renowned for debunking several black hole discoveries. “For the first time, our team got together to report on a black hole discovery, instead of rejecting one,” says project leader Tomer Shenar. Furthermore, they discovered that the star that gave rise to the black hole vanished with...

Bent alkyne (left), diradical (center) and cyclobutadiene molecules under atomic force microscopy. (Leo Gross/IBM) If chemists built cars, they'd fill a factory with car parts, set it on fire, and sift from the ashes pieces that now looked vaguely car-like. When you're dealing with car-parts the size of atoms, this is a perfectly reasonable process. Yet chemists yearn for ways to reduce the waste and make reactions far more precise. Chemical engineering has taken a step forward, with researchers from the University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain, the University of Regensburg in Germany, and IBM Research Europe forcing a...

Newton’s Theory of Gravity explains most large-scale events fairly well. ... However, the theory is not foolproof. Einstein’s theories of general and special relativity, for example, explained data that Newton’s theory couldn’t. Scientists still use Newton’s theory because it works in the overwhelming majority of cases and has much simpler equations. Dark matter was proposed as a way to reconcile Newtonian physics with the data. But what if, instead of reconciliation, a modified theory is needed.... Mordehai Milgrom...developed a theory of gravity (called Modified Newtonian Dynamics or “Mond” for short) in 1982 that postulates gravity functions differently when it becomes...

A pulsar with its jets and magnetic fields (NASA) ====================================================================== Far out in the Milky Way, roughly 22,000 light years from Earth, a star unlike any other roars with a magnetic force that beats anything physicists have ever seen. At a whopping 1.6 billion Tesla, a pulsar called Swift J0243.6+6124 smashes the previous records of around 1 billion Tesla, discovered surrounding the pulsars GRO J1008-57 and 1A 0535+262. For a bit of context, your average novelty fridge magnet comes in at around 0.001 Tesla. The more powerful MRI machines manage to hit around 3 Tesla. A few years ago, engineers...

A fiery-looking, red-orange energetic jet blasting bright light from the center of a galaxy. An artist's illustration of neutrinos originating from a high-energy Blazar Benjamin Amend, Clemson University Born in the cradle of deep space, blasting across the universe at nearly the speed of light and harnessing energy up to a million times greater than anything achieved by the world's most powerful particle accelerator, cosmic rays are atom fragments that relentlessly rain down on Earth. They get caught in our atmosphere and mess up our satellites. They threaten the health of astronauts living in orbit, even when sparse in number....

Caption:When measuring a nucleus with a certain “magic” number of neutrons — 82 — the magnetic field of the nucleus exhibits a drastic change, and the properties of these very complex nuclei appear to be governed by just one of the protons of the nucleus. Credit: Adam Vernon ================================================================================================== A curious thing happened when MIT researchers Adam Vernon and Ronald Garcia Ruiz, along an international team of scientists, recently performed an experiment in which a sensitive laser spectroscopy technique was used to measure how the nuclear electromagnetic properties of indium isotopes evolve when an extreme number of neutrons are added...

NASA has a provided a tantalizing teaser photo ahead of the highly-anticipated release next week of the first deep-space images from the James Webb Telescope – an instrument so powerful it can peer back into the origins of the Universe. An engineering test image. (NASA, CSA, and FGS team) The US$10 billion observatory – launched in December last year and now orbiting the Sun a million miles (1.5 million kilometers) away from Earth – can look where no telescope has looked before thanks to its enormous primary mirror and instruments that focus on infrared, allowing it to peer through dust...

Researchers in Germany have demonstrated quantum entanglement of two atoms separated by 33 km (20.5 miles) of fiber optics. This is a record distance for this kind of communication and marks a breakthrough towards a fast and secure quantum internet. Quantum entanglement is the uncanny phenomenon where two particles can become so inextricably linked that examining one can tell you about the state of the other. Stranger still, changing something about one particle will instantly alter its partner, no matter how far apart they are. That leads to the unsettling implication that information is being “teleported” faster than the speed...

What’s unusual about this molecule is that the ion’s electric field distorts the atom in such a way that it causes the dipole’s orientation to flip at a particular distance. At shorter distances, the atom and the ion repel, while at larger distances, they attract. The distance at which this dipole flip occurs determines the bond length of the molecule. To make this molecule, the researchers prepared a cloud of rubidium-87 atoms at a temperature of just 20µK, since higher temperatures would risk the thermal energy of the atoms and ions overcoming the weak strength of the bond. The team...

CERN lights up the Large Hadron Collider for Run 3, a four year continuous run after its second long shutdown in 2018. The world's largest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, is back in action after a three year break for maintenance and an upgrade with more energy, higher intensity beams and greater precision. The LHC at CERN, outside of Geneva, is set to run 24/7 for nearly four years at a record energy of 13.6 trillion electronvolts. The upgrades should give LHC tools greater precision and allow for more particle collisions, brighter light and more discovery about particles in...

The collaboration has observed a new kind of “pentaquark” and the first-ever pair of “tetraquarks” The international LHCb collaboration at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has observed three never-before-seen particles: a new kind of “pentaquark” and the first-ever pair of “tetraquarks”, which includes a new type of tetraquark. The findings, presented today at a CERN seminar, add three new exotic members to the growing list of new hadrons found at the LHC. They will help physicists better understand how quarks bind together into these composite particles. Quarks are elementary particles and come in six flavours: up, down, charm, strange, top...

Starting Tuesday it will run around the clock for nearly four years at a record energy of 13.6 trillion electronvolts..."We aim to be delivering 1.6 billion proton-proton collisions per second"...This time around the proton beams will be narrowed to less than 10 microns - a human hair is around 70 microns thick - to increase the collision rate...

CERN is set for a series of events starting on July 3, 2022, with the first celebrations of the ten-year anniversary of the discovery of the Higgs boson particle. On July 5, 2022, there will be collisions at unprecedented energy levels at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The LHC, which is the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator, is at the center of conspiracy theories surrounding CERN. Scientists have posited that we can use gravity to test for the possibility that other dimensions exist, and the LHC has been critically looked at for this reason. "One way of seeing...

Quantum sensors, which detect the most minute variations in magnetic or electrical fields, have enabled precision measurements in materials science and fundamental physics. But these sensors have only been capable of detecting a few specific frequencies of these fields, limiting their usefulness. Now, researchers at MIT have developed a method to enable such sensors to detect any arbitrary frequency, with no loss of their ability to measure nanometer-scale features. The new method, for which the team has already applied for patent protection, is described in the journal Physical Review X... Quantum sensors can take many forms; they're essentially systems in...

As if cracking open a cosmic Russian nesting doll, astronomers have peered into the center of the Milky Way and discovered what appears to be a miniature spiral galaxy, swirling daintily around a single large star. The star – located about 26,000 light-years from Earth near the dense and dusty galactic center – is about 32 times as massive as the sun and sits within an enormous disk of swirling gas, known as a "protostellar disk". (The disk itself measures about 4,000 astronomical units wide – or 4,000 times the distance between Earth and the Sun). Such disks are widespread...

Trapped-ion quantum computers are quantum devices in which trapped ions vibrate together and are fully isolated from the external environment. These computers can be particularly useful for investigating and realizing various quantum physics states. Researchers at NIST/University of Maryland and Duke University have recently used a trapped-ion quantum computer to realize two measurement-induced quantum phases, namely the pure phase and mixed or coding phase during a purification phase transition. Their findings, published in a paper in Nature Physics, contribute to the experimental understanding of many-body quantum systems. To measure the purification phase transition first outlined by Gullans and Huse, the...

It has long been known that there are two types of excitation for electrons, as in addition to their charge they have a property called spin. Spin and charge excitations travel at fixed, but different speeds...However, theorists are unable to calculate what precisely happens beyond only small perturbations, as the interactions are too complex. The Cambridge team has measured these speeds as their energies are varied, and find that a very simple picture emerges...Each type of excitation can have low or high kinetic energy... with the well-known formula E=1/2 mv2, which is a parabola. But for spin and charge the...

Deconstructing whiteness in an introductory physics classroom may seem like a nonsensical goal, but according to a pair of critical whiteness scholars from Seattle Pacific University, this endeavor is actually an important step toward the larger undertaking of freeing students and professors alike from the weighty fetters of whiteness. Funded through a $495,847 National Science Foundation grant, researchers Amy Robertson and W. Tali Hairston aim “to develop a knowledge base that could lead to awareness of how power relations may be embedded in the way physics is taught and learned.” The two record introductory physics classes and interview participants, then...

Nuclear fusion is a widely studied process through which atomic nuclei of a low atomic number fuse together to form a heavier nucleus, while releasing a large amount of energy. Nuclear fusion reactions can be produced using a method known as inertial confinement fusion, which entails the use of powerful lasers to implode a fuel capsule and produce plasma. Researchers...recently showed what happens to this implosion when one applies a strong magnetic field to the fuel capsule used for inertial confinement fusion. Their paper, published in Physical Review Letters, demonstrates that strong magnetic fields flatten the shape of inertial fusion...

University of Sydney lecturer Manisha Caleb explained in the report: “My colleagues and I (the MeerTRAP team) made the discovery when observing the Vela-X 1 region of the Milky Way about 1,300 light-years away from Earth, using the MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa. “We spotted a strange-looking flash or “pulse” that lasted about 300 milliseconds.” The team scoured through old data from that region of space and found similar signals had been emitted before but had been missed by previous research. The strange pulses were said to be repeating every 76 seconds. The location of the strange object emitting...