Are the mysterious stars clues to one of the greatest mysteries in the universe?
Category: cosmology
Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have discovered the most distant quiescent galaxy ever seen – one that had already stopped forming stars just 700 million years after the Big Bang. This challenges existing models of galaxy evolution, which can’t explain how such massive, red and
Researchers have announced a groundbreaking experiment that simulated a traversable wormhole using a quantum computer. While no physical rupture in space-time was created, the study offers a significant step toward understanding Einstein-Rosen bridges, theoretical constructs first described by Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen. Published in the journal Nature, the findings represent a promising avenue for probing quantum gravity experimentally.
A Glimpse of Wormhole Dynamics
The experiment, conducted on Google’s Sycamore quantum processor, involved simulating two minuscule black holes connected by a tunnel-like space-time structure. A quantum message was transmitted between these points, and researchers observed behaviors consistent with wormhole-like dynamics. Study co-author Joseph Lykken, a physicist at Fermilab, remarked, “It looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck,” indicating the simulation closely mimicked a theoretical wormhole.
Astronomers at the University of Warwick have made an exciting discovery—a rare, high-mass compact binary star system located just 150 light-years away in the Milky Way. This marks the first time such a system has been observed, offering valuable insights into the origins of type 1a supernovae.
Astronomers have confirmed a pair of white dwarfs on a collision course to become a type 1a supernova—the brightest cosmic explosion. This system, the heaviest of its kind ever identified, has a combined mass of 1.56 times that of the sun.
Separated by only 1/60th of the Earth-sun distance, the stars currently orbit each other in just over 14 hours. However, gravitational wave radiation will gradually draw them closer over billions of years. On the verge of their explosive end, the stars will orbit so rapidly that a single orbit will take only 30–40 seconds.
Supermassive black hole 9 billion light-years away consumes largest star ever observed
A pair of top quarks has been detected in the detritus spraying forth from the collision of two atoms of lead.
It’s the first time that this specific quark-antiquark pair has been spotted in a collision between two nuclei. The detection strengthens evidence that all six quark flavors existed at the dawn of time, in the soupy quark-gluon plasma thought to have suffused the Universe in the moments after the Big Bang.
This means that we’re a step closer to taking new measurements of this primordial soup, and gleaning new insights into how our Universe formed from the very beginning.
The CMS collaboration at CERN has observed an unexpected feature in data produced by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which could point to the existence of the smallest composite particle yet observed. The result, reported at the Rencontres de Moriond conference in the Italian Alps this week, suggest that top quarks—the heaviest and shortest lived of all the elementary particles—can momentarily pair up with their antimatter counterparts to produce an object called toponium.
Other explanations cannot be ruled out, however, as the existence of toponium was thought too difficult to verify at the LHC, and the result will need to be further scrutinized by CMS’s sister experiment, ATLAS.
High-energy collisions between protons at the LHC routinely produce top quark–antiquark pairs (tt-bar). Measuring the probability, or cross section, of tt-bar production is both an important test of the Standard Model of particle physics and a powerful way to search for the existence of new particles that are not described by the 50-year-old theory. Many of the open questions in particle physics, such as the nature of dark matter, motivate the search for new particles that may be too heavy to have been produced in experiments so far.
A team of physicists have discovered a new approach that redefines the conception of a black hole by mapping out their detailed structure, as shown in a research study recently published in Journal of High Energy Physics.
The study details new theoretical structures called “supermazes” that offer a more universal picture of black holes to the field of theoretical physics. Based in string theory, supermazes are pivotal to understanding the structure of black holes on a microscopic level.
“General relativity is a powerful theory for describing the large-scale structure of black holes, but it is a very, very blunt instrument for describing black-hole microstructure,” said Nicholas Warner, co-author of the study and professor of physics, astronomy and mathematics at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. In a framework of theories extending beyond Einstein’s equations, supermazes provide a detailed portrait of the microscopic structure of brane black holes.
A nearby cosmic ticking time bomb has been found! Just 150 light years away, a pair of white dwarf stars are on a death spiral, destined to explode in a type 1a supernova. This discovery confirms long-held theories and could help unlock the secrets behind these dazzling, universe-measuring explos
In the paper accompanying the launch of R1, DeepSeek explained how it took advantage of techniques such as synthetic data generation, distillation, and machine-driven reinforcement learning to produce a model that exceeded the current state-of-the-art. Each of these approaches can be explained another way as harnessing the capabilities of an existing AI model to assist in the training of a more advanced version.
DeepSeek is far from alone in using these AI techniques to advance AI. Mark Zuckerberg predicts that the mid-level engineers at https://fortune.com/company/facebook/” class=””>Meta may soon be replaced by AI counterparts, and that Llama 3 (his company’s LLM) “helps us experiment and iterate faster, building capabilities we want to refine and expand in Llama 4.” https://fortune.com/company/nvidia/” class=””>Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has spoken at length about creating virtual environments in which AI systems supervise the training of robotic systems: “We can create multiple different multiverses, allowing robots to learn in parallel, possibly learning in 100,000 different ways at the same time.”
This isn’t quite yet the singularity, when intelligent machines autonomously self-replicate, but it is something new and potentially profound. Even amidst such dizzying progress in AI models, though, it’s not uncommon to hear some observers talk about the potential slowing of what’s called the “scaling laws”—the observed principles that AI models increase in performance in direct relationship to the quantity of data, power, and compute applied to them. The release from DeepSeek, and several subsequent announcements from other companies, suggests that arguments of the scaling laws’ demise may be greatly exaggerated. In fact, innovations in AI development are leading to entirely new vectors for scaling—all enabled by AI itself. Progress isn’t slowing down, it’s speeding up—thanks to AI.