Physics News

Recent Gravitational-Wave Event Likely Created Low-Mass Black Hole

The first artist’s illustration shows a key part of the process that created this new black hole, as the two neutron stars spin around each other while merging. The purple material depicts debris from the merger. Image credit: NASA / CXC / M.Weiss.
Jun 5, 2018 by News Staff

A new study using X-ray data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory indicates that the neutron star merger that became the gravitational wave source, GW170817, likely created the lowest mass black hole known. The first artist’s illustration shows a key part of the process that created this new black hole, as the two neutron stars spin around each other while merging. The purple material depicts debris from the merger. Image credit: NASA / CXC /...

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This artist’s impression shows the evolution of the Universe beginning with the Big Bang on the left followed by the appearance of the Cosmic Microwave Background. The formation of the first stars ends the cosmic dark ages, followed by the formation of galaxies. Image credit: M. Weiss / Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Does Small Fraction of Dark Matter Particles Carry Electric Mini-Charge?

Jun 4, 2018 by News Staff

A duo of astrophysicists is proposing a new model for the invisible material that makes up most of the Universe: it’s possible that a small fraction...

Ruthenium. Image credit: Metalle-W / CC BY-SA 3.0.

Researchers Discover 4th Room-Temperature Ferromagnetic Element: Ruthenium

May 29, 2018 by News Staff

A platinum-group chemical element called ruthenium (Ru) is the fourth single element to have unique ferromagnetic properties at room temperature. Ruthenium....

di-Omega dibaryon. Image credit: Keiko Murano.

Physicists Predict Existence of ‘Most Strange’ Dibaryon Particle

May 25, 2018 by News Staff

Physicists from the HAL QCD Collaboration predict the existence of a new type of dibaryon, a particle that contains six quarks instead of the usual three....

The first measurement of a subatomic particle’s mechanical property reveals the distribution of pressure inside the proton. Image credit: Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility.

Physicists Measure Pressure Distribution inside Proton

May 18, 2018 by News Staff

The proton, one of the components of atomic nuclei, is composed of fundamental particles called quarks and gluons. A team of physicists at the Department...

This picture shows the setup of the experiment. Image credit: Jian-Wei Pan’s Group.

Global Experiment Challenges Einstein’s Principle of Local Realism: BIG Bell Test

May 11, 2018 by News Staff

A Bell test, named for the Northern Irish physicist John Stewart Bell, is a randomized trial that compares observations against the philosophical worldview...

Professor Stephen Hawking.

Professor Stephen Hawking’s Final Theory on Origin of Universe

May 3, 2018 by News Staff

Professor Stephen Hawking’s theory about the Big Bang, which he worked on in collaboration with Katholieke Universiteit Leuven’s Professor Thomas Hertog,...

Rovny et al looked for a signature of a discrete time crystal in a crystal of monoammonium phosphate. Image credit: Michael Marsland, Yale University.

Researchers Find Signs of ‘Time Crystal’ in Ammonium Dihydrogen Phosphate

May 2, 2018 by News Staff

A team of physicists at Yale University has observed a signature of a discrete time crystal (DTC) in an unexpected place: a crystal of ammonium dihydrogen...

Physicists Entangle Two Macroscopic-Scale Objects

Apr 30, 2018 by News Staff

Entanglement — an intriguing phenomenon in which two distant objects can manifest correlations, even if they are far away from each other —...

A cloud of atoms is held above a chip by electromagnetic fields; the EPR paradox was observed between the spatially separated regions A and B. Image credit: Department of Physics, University of Basel.

Physicists Observe Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Paradox in Bose-Einstein Condensate

Apr 30, 2018 by News Staff

A team of researchers in Switzerland has observed the quantum mechanical Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox in a system of interacting ultracold atoms. Their...

A visualization of the polarization of the CMB, as detected by Planck. The CMB is a snapshot of the oldest light in our Universe, imprinted on the sky when the Universe was just 380,000 years old. It shows tiny temperature fluctuations that correspond to regions of slightly different densities, representing the seeds of all future structure: the stars and galaxies of today. A small fraction of the CMB is polarized – it vibrates in a preferred direction. This is a result of the last encounter of this light with electrons, just before starting its cosmic journey. For this reason, the polarization of the CMB retains information about the distribution of matter in the early Universe, and its pattern on the sky follows that of the tiny fluctuations observed in the temperature of the CMB. In these images, the color scale represents temperature differences in the CMB, while the texture indicates the direction of the polarized light. The patterns seen in the texture are characteristic of E-mode polarization, which is the dominant type for the CMB. The large oval shows the CMB polarization as seen by Planck on the entire sky. For the sake of illustration, both data sets have been filtered to show mostly the signal detected on scales around 5° on the sky. However, fluctuations in both the CMB temperature and polarization are present and were observed by Planck also on larger as well as smaller angular scales. To provide a taste of the fine structure of the measurement obtained by Planck, a zoomed-in view on a smaller patch of the sky, measuring 20° across, is also provided on the left. This is first shown with the same filtering as the all-sky image (upper frame), then with a different filter that shows mostly the signal detected on angles on the sky of about 20 arcminutes (lower frame). Image credit: ESA / Planck Collaboration.

Physicists Find New Way of Exploring Cosmic Microwave Background

Apr 25, 2018 by News Staff

A team of Canadian physicists has developed a new way to improve our knowledge of the Big Bang by measuring radiation from its afterglow, called the cosmic...

An expanding, ring-shaped Bose-Einstein condensate shares several striking features with the early Universe. Image credit: Emily Edwards, University of Maryland.

Rapidly Expanding Bose-Einstein Condensate Could Offer Insight into Unanswered Cosmological Questions

Apr 23, 2018 by News Staff

The rapid expansion of a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC), a cloud of atoms cooled to temperatures very near to absolute zero in which all the atoms occupy...

The wavelength of emitted light grows, that is, the energy decreases, along the gold nanorod array; a Bose–Einstein condensate forms when an energy minimum of the lattice is reached. Image credit: Tommi Hakala & Antti Paraoanu, Aalto University.

Physicists Create Bose-Einstein Condensate of ‘Surface Plasmon Polaritons’

Apr 18, 2018 by News Staff

A team of physicists at Aalto University in Finland has successfully created a Bose-Einstein condensate of light coupled with metal (gold) electrons, so-called...

A snapshot of a simulation showing a binary black hole formed in the center of a globular cluster. Image credit: Northwestern Visualization / Carl Rodriguez.

Globular Star Clusters May Foster Repeated Merging of Multiple Black Holes

Apr 12, 2018 by News Staff

Stellar-mass black holes that reside in globular clusters — small regions of space, usually at the edges of a galaxy, that are packed with hundreds...

NA62 experiment in CERN’s North Area. Image credit: NA62 / CERN.

CERN Physicists Observe Hints of Ultra-Rare Kaon Decay

Mar 27, 2018 by News Staff

Physicists from the NA62 Collaboration at CERN reported today that they had observed a candidate event of an extremely rare charged kaon decay (K+ →...

On October 19, 2014, Comet Siding Spring made a remarkably close encounter with Mars, buzzing the planet at just one third of the Earth-Moon distance. Image credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

Physicists Solve Mystery of Why Comets Emit X-Rays

Mar 15, 2018 by News Staff

The long-standing mystery of why comets give off X-ray emission has been solved by a group of experimental physicists led by the University of Oxford,...

For a substance that is ubiquitous on Earth, three quarters of our planet is covered with it, scientists can still be surprised by some of water’s properties. Image credit: Brisch27.

Scientists Observe Mysterious Phase Transition in Supercooled Water

Mar 9, 2018 by News Staff

An international team of researchers, led by Arizona State University chemist C. Austen Angell and University of Amsterdam’s Dr. Sander Woutersen, has...

Propagation of waves through an astrophysical disk can be understood using the Schrödinger Equation. Image credit: James Tuttle Keane, California Institute of Technology.

Massive Astronomical Objects Governed by Schrödinger Equation

Mar 6, 2018 by News Staff

Surprisingly, the Schrödinger Equation — the fundamental equation of quantum mechanics — emerges while studying massive astronomical structures. Propagation...

Artistic impression of a quantum ball lighting. Image credit: Heikka Valja.

Physicists Create ‘Shankar Skyrmion’ — Quasiparticle with Properties of Ball Lightning

Mar 5, 2018 by News Staff

An international team of physicists from Amherst College and Aalto University has created the Shankar skyrmion, a quasiparticle consisting of a knotted...

Liang et al demonstrated that photons can be made to interact. Image credit: Christine Daniloff / MIT.

Researchers Create New Kind of Photonic Matter

Feb 19, 2018 by News Staff

A team of physicists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and elsewhere has created a new kind of photonic matter that could enable quantum...

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