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"Palatial Twistor Theory; in order to describe a general, Lorentzian, globally hyper-bolic 4-dimensional space-time in twistor terms, we appear to be driven to a holomorphic non-commutative twistor-geometry, even for Classical space-time."

Five Theories About the Universe to Blow Your Mind | 15:02Sideprojects | 733K subscribers | 1,568,801 views | November 8, 2022

This isn't the first time astronomers have measured M92's age, but previous estimates relied on just one synthetic collection of stars. Comparing thousands of them reduced the uncertainty introduced by the assumptions baked into each one. The new technique reduced the uncertainty of the cluster age by about 50 percent, Ying says. The team found the cluster is 13.8 billion years old, give or take 750 million years. That's strikingly close to the best estimate of the age of the universe: a smidge over 13.8 billion years, plus or minus 24 million years, according to the Planck satellite's measurement of...

In a Bose-Einstein condensate, the bosons within a material have such low energy that they all occupy the same state, acting as a single particle. This allows quantum properties to be seen on a macroscopic scale. A Bose-Einstein condensate was created in a lab for the first time in 1995, at a temperature of a mere 170 nanokelvin.Now, let’s look at what happens in a typical leaf during photosynthesis.Plants need three basic ingredients to make their own food — carbon dioxide, water, and light. A pigment called chlorophyll absorbs energy from light at red and blue wavelengths. It reflects light...

Developing commercial fusion energy requires scientists to understand sustained processes that have never before existed on Earth. But with so many unknowns, how do we make sure we're designing a device that can successfully harness fusion power?We can fill gaps in our understanding using computational tools like algorithms and data simulations to knit together experimental data and theory, which allows us to optimize fusion device designs before they're built, saving much time and resources.Currently, classical supercomputers are used to run simulations of plasma physics and fusion energy scenarios, but to address the many design and operating challenges that still remain,...

Researchers at Microsoft say they have created elusive quasiparticles called Majorana zero modes – but scientists outside the company are sceptical Microsoft researchers have made a controversial claim that they have seen evidence of an elusive particle that could solve some of the biggest headaches in quantum computing, but some experts are questioning the discovery. Quantum computers process information using quantum bits, or qubits, but current iterations can be prone to error. “What the field needs is a new kind of qubit,” says Chetan Nayak at Microsoft Quantum. He and his colleagues say they have taken a significant step...

Originally built to speed up calculations, a machine-learning system is now making shocking progress at the frontiers of experimental quantum physicsQuantum physicist Mario Krenn remembers sitting in a café in Vienna in early 2016, poring over computer printouts, trying to make sense of what MELVIN had found. MELVIN was a machine-learning algorithm Krenn had built, a kind of artificial intelligence. Its job was to mix and match the building blocks of standard quantum experiments and find solutions to new problems. And it did find many interesting ones. But there was one that made no sense. “The first thing I thought...

In the most massive test to date, physicists have probed a major paradox in quantum mechanics and found it still holds even for clouds of hundreds of atoms.Using two entangled Bose-Einstein condensates, each consisting of 700 atoms, a team of physicists co-led by Paolo Colciaghi and Yifan Li of the University of Basel in Switzerland has shown that the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) paradox scales up.The researchers say this has important implications for quantum metrology – the study of measuring things under quantum theory...One of the tools we use to close one of the gaps is quantum mechanics, a theory that arose...

In November 2021, the Parker Solar Probe skimmed within a more-than-hair-singeing 8.5 million kilometers (5.3 million miles) of the Sun, a feat enabling it to detect the fine structure of the solar wind as it gusted tons of charged particles out into the Solar System through a hole in the Sun's corona, or atmosphere.The probe's readings give us the closest look yet at how the fast solar wind is generated, suggesting that a specific type of magnetic reconnection is what drives this powerful force of nature, according to a team of physicists led by Stuart Bale of the University of...

Concept Black Hole Illustration A team of researchers has affirmed Stephen Hawking’s prediction about the evaporation of black holes via Hawking radiation, though they’ve provided a crucial modification. According to their research, the event horizon (the boundary beyond which nothing can escape a black hole’s gravitational pull) is not as important as previously believed in producing Hawking radiation. Instead, gravity and the curvature of spacetime play significant roles in this process. This insight extends the scope of Hawking radiation to all large objects in the universe, implying that, over a sufficiently long period, everything in the universe could evaporate. Research...

Supramolecular assemblies of six rubidium and one iron atom. Scanning tunneling microscopy revealed the clear signal of the one iron atom. (Ajayi et al., Nature, 2023) ***************************************************************************** Atoms may not have bones, but we still want to know how they are put together. These tiny particles are the basis on which all normal matter is built (including our bones), and understanding them helps us understand the larger Universe. We currently use high-energy X-ray light to help us understand atoms and molecules and how they're arranged, catching diffracted beams to reconstruct their configurations in crystal form. Now, scientists have used X-rays...

The Pinwheel Galaxy has a new bright spot. ... an animation showing a bright star explosion appearing in a spiral galaxy Long Island, New York-based astrophotographer Steven Bellavia produced this composite animation of the Pinwheel Galaxy using an image taken on April 21 and comparing it to another image taken on May 21, which clearly shows the supernova appearing. (Image credit: Steven Bellavia) Astronomers and amateurs alike are excited about a new star explosion visible in small telescopes. The new supernova popped into visibility on May 19 in the Pinwheel Galaxy, (also designated as Messier 101, or M101). The galaxy...

Red giant star Betelgeuse. (ALMA - ESO/NAOJ/NRAO, E/O'Gorman/P.Kervella) Since what has come to be known as the Great Dimming that took place in the latter half of 2019 and early 2020, the red giant star Betelgeuse just will not stop with the wackiness. The dying star's regular cycles of brightness fluctuation have changed, and now Betelgeuse has grown uncharacteristically bright. At the time of writing, it was sitting at 142 percent of its normal brightness. It's been fluctuating back and forth on a small scale but on a steady upward trend for months and hit a recent peak of 156...

Over the past few decades, scientists have made incredible progress in understanding and manipulating biological systems at increasingly small scales, from protein folding to genetic engineering. And yet, the extent to which quantum effects influence living systems remains barely understood...Quantum effects are phenomena that occur between atoms and molecules that can't be explained by classical physics...Instead, tiny objects behave according to a different set of laws known as quantum mechanics.

Einstein's general theory of relativity predicts the existence of black holes, formed when giant stars collapse. But that same theory predicts that their centers are singularities, which are points of infinite density. Since we know that infinite densities cannot actually happen in the universe, we take this as a sign that Einstein's theory is incomplete. But after nearly a century of searching for extensions, we have not yet confirmed a better theory of gravity.But we do have candidates, including string theory. In string theory all the particles of the universe are actually microscopic vibrating loops of string. In order to...

Illustration of a supernova remnant, ejecting a white dwarf at high speed. (Mark Garlick/Science Photo Library/Getty Images) When stars like our Sun die, they tend to go out with a whimper and not a bang – unless they happen to be part of a binary (two) star system that could give rise to a supernova explosion. Now, for the first time, astronomers have spotted the radio signature of just such an event in a galaxy more than 400 million light-years away. The finding, published today in Nature, holds tantalizing clues as to what the companion star must have been like....

Quantum machine - Inside the 30-meter tube. (ETH Zurich/Daniel Winkler) Albert Einstein wasn't entirely convinced about quantum mechanics, suggesting our understanding of it was incomplete. In particular, Einstein took issue with entanglement, the notion that a particle could be affected by another particle that wasn't close by. Experiments since have shown that quantum entanglement is indeed possible and that two entangled particles can be connected over a distance. Now a new experiment further confirms it, and in a way we haven't seen before. In the new experiment, scientists used a 30-meter-long tube cooled to close to absolute zero to run...

Artist impression of a black hole accretion. Astronomers led by the University of Southampton have discovered the largest cosmic explosion ever observed, known as AT2021lwx. Over ten times brighter than any known supernova and three times brighter than the brightest tidal disruption event, the explosion has been ongoing for more than three years. Researchers believe the explosion is due to a massive gas cloud, possibly thousands of times larger than the sun, being violently disrupted by a supermassive black hole. Credit John A. Paice www.johnapaice.com Astronomers have discovered the largest cosmic explosion ever observed, AT2021lwx, which is believed to have...

Researchers using NASA's James Webb Space Telescope have discovered multiple debris rings within a previously discovered ring around the young star Fomalhaut. Photo Courtesy of NASA May 9 (UPI) -- Researchers using NASA's James Webb Space Telescope observed multiple debris rings surrounding a young star. The James Webb Telescope's Mid-Infrared Instrument, which is designed to capture very long wavelengths of light, found three nested belts surrounding the Fomalhaut star, out to a distance of up to 14 billion miles, NASA said Monday. Observations by NASA's Infrared Astronomical Satellite first discovered Fomalhuat's dust ring, the first asteroid belt seen outside of...

ESA / Hubble & NASA Physicists believe most of the matter in the universe is made up of an invisible substance that we only know about by its indirect effects on the stars and galaxies we can see. We’re not crazy! Without this “dark matter”, the universe as we see it would make no sense. But the nature of dark matter is a longstanding puzzle. However, a new study by Alfred Amruth at the University of Hong Kong and colleagues, published in Nature Astronomy, uses the gravitational bending of light to bring us a step closer to understanding. Invisible but...