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spiral galaxies and distant galaxies are visible against the black void of space A small portion of deep space observed by JWST. NASA/STScI/CEERS/TACC/S. Finkelstein/M. Bagley/Z. Levay Astronomers armed with early data obtained by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) are hunting galaxies that existed just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. Rohan Naidu, an astrophysicist based at Harvard's and Smithsonian's jointly operated Center for Astrophysics, and his colleagues have been particularly good at uncovering these cosmic relics. Just a few days after the JWST's first images were beamed across the planet in July, Naidu and his collaborators...

The motion of single atoms through liquid has been caught on camera for the first time. Using a sandwich of materials so thin they're effectively two-dimensional, scientists trapped and observed platinum atoms 'swimming' along a surface under different pressures. The results will help us better understand how the presence of liquid alters the behavior of a solid with which it is in contact – which, in turn, has implications that could in the development of new substances and materials. "Given the widespread industrial and scientific importance of such behavior it is truly surprising how much we still have to learn...

The researchers discovered that a new theoretical framework to unify Hermitian and non-Hermitian physics is established by the duality between non-Hermiticity and curved spaces. A physics puzzle is resolved through a new duality. According to traditional thinking, distorting a flat space by bending it or stretching it is necessary to create a curved space. A group of scientists at Purdue University has developed a new technique for making curved spaces that also provides the answer to a physics mystery. The team has developed a method using non-Hermiticity, which occurs in all systems coupled to environments, to build a hyperbolic surface...

Two players leverage quantum rules to achieve a seemingly telepathic connection It only looks like telepathy, but a quantum game harpoons our usual sense of reality. ==================================================================== The Moon isn’t necessarily there if you don’t look at it. So says quantum mechanics, which states that what exists depends on what you measure. Proving reality is like that usually involves the comparison of arcane probabilities, but physicists in China have made the point in a clearer way. They performed a matching game in which two players leverage quantum effects to win every time—which they can’t if measurements merely reveal reality as...

By shining a laser pulse sequence inspired by the Fibonacci numbers at atoms inside a quantum computer, physicists have created a remarkable, never-before-seen phase of matter. The phase has the benefits of two time dimensions despite there still being only one singular flow of time... This mind-bending property offers a sought-after benefit: Information stored in the phase is far more protected against errors than with alternative setups currently used in quantum computers. As a result, the information can exist without getting garbled for much longer, an important milestone for making quantum computing viable, says study lead author Philipp Dumitrescu. The...

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...