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Category: cosmology

Moon’s thick crust could amplify elusive gravitational-wave signals

Gravitational waves are tiny ripples in the fabric of spacetime that are produced when massive objects in the cosmos accelerate or collide. By detecting these waves, astrophysicists can study various cosmic events, including black hole mergers, neutron star collisions and the early evolution of the universe.

There are several gravitational-wave observatories in different geographic regions worldwide. While these detectors are highly sensitive to the tiny changes associated with ripples in spacetime, they cannot yet detect waves across all frequency ranges.

Researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Peking University recently revisited the possibility of using the moon to amplify gravitational waves with frequencies between 0.01 and 1 hertz (Hz), a range that remains largely inaccessible to current gravitational-wave detectors.

Near a black hole, gravity changes a quantum circuit’s readings, not its rules

Imagine holding one of our most precise quantum devices at a fixed position outside a black hole. A Josephson junction—two superconductors separated by an ultrathin barrier—can turn a voltage into a quantum oscillation with extraordinary precision. Would intense gravity change that quantum rule, or only change how a faraway observer reads the device?

In our study published in the Journal of High Energy Physics, we found a clean answer. The local Josephson physics remains intact. Gravity instead changes the translation between measurements made beside the circuit and measurements assigned by an observer far from the black hole.

Oxygen collisions at the LHC show new indications of extreme state of matter

All four main LHC experiments have found new signs that oxygen and neon collisions may create the extreme state of matter that existed during the first microseconds after the Big Bang.

One year after the first-ever collisions of oxygen at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the main LHC collaborations—ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb—have each reported signs of the state of matter known as quark–gluon plasma (QGP) produced in these collisions.

QGP is a state of matter that forms under intense pressure and at temperatures more than 100,000 times hotter than the center of the sun. Under these extreme conditions, composite particles break down into quarks and the gluons that ordinarily hold them together. Scientists believe this was the state of the universe in the first microseconds after the Big Bang. In the present-day universe, nearly 14 billion years later, they can recreate and study QGP with high-energy nuclear collisions at the LHC.

Machine learning narrows search for additional particles in the Higgs boson family

What if the Higgs boson found in 2012 is not alone but is the only sibling we have encountered so far? Scientists at CERN discovered the particle that year, and it was a major discovery because it explained how other particles acquire mass. For a long time, scientists thought this was the final piece of the puzzle.

They have a framework called the Standard Model that describes the smallest particles in everything we see. This includes electrons in atoms and light particles called photons. However, this framework does not explain everything. It does not tell us about dark matter or why the universe has so much more matter than antimatter. It is like having a map that shows only half the world.

The discovery of the Higgs boson created new questions. Many physicists started wondering whether the Higgs we found is the only one of its kind. They began to ask whether there is a larger family of these particles hiding in the universe. If we find more members of this family, we might finally understand the parts of nature that the current framework misses.

JWST captures rare glimpse of early black hole growing inside network of young galaxies

Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have captured one of the clearest views yet of how an early supermassive black hole may grow within a network of young galaxies. The compact active galaxy, seen just a billion years after the Big Bang, lies beside a 12,000-parsec-long filament containing multiple galaxies that are expected to merge within a few hundred million years.

The findings, posted to the arXiv preprint server on July 6, suggest astronomers may be witnessing a short-lived phase in the evolution of rapidly growing black holes while also shedding light on how the first massive galaxies assembled in the early universe.

Shaking atoms to bring black-hole quantum chaos into the lab

Physicists have discovered a surprisingly simple way to reproduce one of the most fascinating models in modern physics—linked to black holes, quantum chaos and exotic electronic materials—using ultracold atoms trapped in light.

Instead of trying to build a highly complex system from scratch, the researchers show that gently “shaking” a standard optical lattice can transform it into an accurate simulator of the Sachdev–Ye–Kitaev (SYK) model, a theoretical model known for its extreme and unusual quantum behavior.

The findings are published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

Black Hole Collisions May Follow a Surprisingly Simple Rule

The size of a black hole formed by the merger of two orbiting black holes can be predicted using simple thermodynamics. Two black holes locked in orbit do not remain apart forever. As they spiral closer, they eventually collide in an extraordinarily energetic event that warps the surrounding univ

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