A strange “chirping” signal from a distant supernova has revealed the birth of a magnetar, confirming that these incredibly magnetic neutron stars can power the universe's brightest stellar explosions. The discovery also marks the first time Einstein's general relativity has been used to explain the mechanics of a supernova.
More than half a century ago, Sir Roger Penrose envisioned a scenario in which energy could be extracted from a black hole spinning at extreme speeds. He proposed that a particle entering its ergosphere—a region of space dragged around by a rotating black hole—could split into two. One part could fall into the black hole while the other escaped carrying more energy than the original particle. Building on this theory, physicist Yakov Zel’dovich later predicted that a wave interacting with a sufficiently fast, rotating object could extract energy from it and become amplified.
Inspired by this theoretical construct, researchers at the Advanced Science Research Center at the CUNY Graduate Center (CUNY ASRC) have published a paper in Nature demonstrating a new approach to wave amplification through interaction with rotating bodies. Rather than mechanically rotating matter, however, the team engineered a radio-frequency device with properties modulated in space and time to mimic spinning. The device creates a synthetic form of ultrafast rotation that enables access to rotational speeds far beyond what can be achieved mechanically, allowing researchers to overcome limitations that have long hindered experimental studies of ultrafast rotational dynamics.
“Our approach facilitates a new method of wave–matter interaction in which waves with selected rotational properties extract energy from synthetic time-engineered rotation, producing a form of broadband selective amplification,” said principal investigator Andrea Alù, distinguished professor and Einstein Professor of Physics at the CUNY Graduate Center and founding director of the CUNY ASRC’s Photonics Initiative.
Decades-old experiments have now been enlisted to set new bounds on the properties of a hypothetical particle that bears a tiny fraction of the electron’s charge.
One candidate for the mysterious dark matter believed to pervade the Universe is a hypothetical form of matter called millicharged particles (mCPs), which carry a tiny fraction of the charge on an electron. A research team has now proposed that such particles, if they exist, might be detected by letting them accumulate in simple laboratory-scale devices already used for creating and measuring electric charge [1, 2]. The team has shown that previous measurements made with such devices can be used to set new limits on the properties of mCPs.
The standard model of particle physics accommodates the 17 particles that make up regular, visible matter, but researchers are seeking to extend it to include gravity or dark matter or both. Dark matter seems to be demanded by astronomical observations and—aside from its gravitational interactions—should interact minimally, if at all, with light and with other matter.
For nearly a century, astronomers have known that the universe is expanding. In the late 1990s, two independent teams, the Supernova Cosmology Project, led by Saul Perlmutter, and the High-Z Supernova Search Team, led by Brian Schmidt and Adam Riess, discovered something strange: The expansion is speeding up. The finding earned them the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics. The leading explanation for this acceleration is “dark energy,” a mysterious force usually modeled as a constant called Lambda, pushing space apart. Combined with cold dark matter, this gives us the LCDM model, the standard picture of the cosmos for the past 25 years.
LCDM is remarkably successful. It fits observations of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), i.e., the leftover glow from the Big Bang, as well as maps of galaxy clustering and the brightness of exploding stars called Type Ia supernovae. But it has one nagging problem: the Hubble tension.
Cosmologists have proposed dark energy that switches sign over cosmic history. A rigorous new analysis published in Physical Review D checks whether it actually closes the gap.
Draft presentation of a paper coauthored with Timothy Eastman and Ruth Kastner, which you can read here: https://open.substack.com/pub/footnotes2plato/p/on-t…
Stars like our sun are formed from the collapse of stellar objects called prestellar cores, cold and dense concentrations of gas and dust held together by gravity. While many questions remain about the exact mechanisms of star formation, advanced radio telescopes have given researchers new insights into the inner workings of infant stars.
Now, publishing in Astronomy & Astrophysics, researchers from Kyushu University and Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics have, for the first time, detected a phenomenon known as ambipolar diffusion occurring in a prestellar core. This phenomenon weakens the magnetic support of the core, leading to gravitational collapse to form an infant star called a protostar.
These findings provide further insight into the key processes of early star formation and, by extension, how stellar systems are created.
The solar system may look isolated, but the Milky Way could be filled with rogue black holes drifting silently between the stars. These invisible black holes do not shine or reflect light, making them almost impossible to detect unless their gravity bends the light of a distant star. To learn more about rogue black holes near our solar system, you can watch this video.
Paperlink: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.
Chapters:
00:00 Introduction.
00:52 The Galaxy Is Full of Invisible Black Holes.
02:55 The Nearest Black Hole May Be Closer Than We Think.
06:16 How Scientists Search for Something That Emits No Light.
09:27 Outro.
09:44 Enjoy.
MUSIC TITLE: Starlight Harmonies.
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