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Quasars represent some of the most luminous and energetic phenomena in the universe. These distant powerhouses are driven by supermassive black holes—colossal gravitational engines with masses millions to billions of times that of our sun—which actively devour surrounding matter at incredible rates.

As gas, dust, and stellar material spiral inward through an accretion disk superheated to millions of degrees, this matter releases tremendous energy across the electromagnetic spectrum before crossing the event horizon. The resulting emissions can outshine entire galaxies despite originating from a region no larger than our solar system.

The discovery of billion-solar-mass black holes in distant quasars challenges conventional growth models in astrophysics. Scientists have observed these supermassive black holes (SMBHs) at redshifts beyond z≳6, when the universe was less than a billion years old—theoretically insufficient time for them to reach such enormous masses through standard Eddington-limited accretion from stellar-mass seeds.

The trumpets have sounded, the simulation hypothesis, the idea that we are all living in a simulation of our universe created by our distant descendants living in the “real” universe, is dead.

In a new paper, Italian physicist Franco Vazza, a researcher in astrophysics simulations, claims that it is impossible to simulate even a sizeable portion of the universe within itself.

This conclusion seems intuitively obvious. While the universe may be bigger on the inside, it doesn’t seem like you should be able to represent the whole thing inside itself.

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White holes are theoretical bodies in physics that are basically time-reversed black holes, meaning instead of permanently trapping matter inside themselves, they release it constantly. Recently, one team of physicists claimed that black holes can turn into white holes, another team says they know how to detect them, and yet another group claims that white holes make up dark matter. Has the time for white holes come?

Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.

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Like a scene out of a sci-fi movie, astronomers using NASA telescopes have found “Space Jaws.” Lurking 600 million light-years away, within the inky black depths between stars, there is an invisible monster gulping down any wayward star that plummets toward it. The sneaky black hole betrayed its presence in a newly identified tidal disruption event (TDE) where a hapless star was ripped apart and swallowed in a spectacular burst of radiation.

These disruption events are powerful probes of black hole physics, revealing the conditions necessary for launching jets and winds when a black hole is in the midst of consuming a star, and are seen as bright objects by telescopes.

The new TDE, called AT2024tvd, allowed astronomers to pinpoint a wandering supermassive black hole using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, with similar supporting observations from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the NRAO Very Large Array telescope that also showed that the black hole is offset from the center of the galaxy.

What if everything around you — your phone, your chair, even the stars — has some form of consciousness? In our new video, we dive into mind-bending theories from scientists and philosophers that challenge how we see reality itself. This isn’t science fiction — it’s a serious debate shaking up physics, philosophy, and neuroscience. Could the entire universe be aware? And what does that mean for us? 🌀 Tap in and prepare to question everything you thought you knew about existence.

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A large team of astronomers and astrophysicists affiliated with several institutions in China has discovered a binary star system, where one of the stars is a millisecond pulsar and the other is made mostly of helium. In their paper published in the journal Science, the group describes how they discovered that a pulsar under study since 2020 had a companion star—one that was gravitationally bound to it.

Researchers on the team first spotted the back in May of 2020, and soon thereafter noticed that not only did it spin incredibly fast, but for one-sixth of its orbit, its radiation emissions were blocked. That suggested an object was passing between it and Earth. Over the next four years, the team studied the apparent binary system to learn more about its characteristics and confirm that there truly was a second star.

Pulsars are a type of neutron star that emit beams of radiation from their poles. They appear to pulse as viewed from Earth due to their spinning—the radiation signal can only be seen when one of the poles is pointed directly at the Earth.

Self-driving cars which eliminate traffic jams, getting a health care diagnosis instantly without leaving your home, or feeling the touch of loved ones based across the continent may sound like the stuff of science fiction.

But new research, led by the University of Bristol and published in the journal Nature Electronics, could make all this and more a step closer to reality thanks to a radical breakthrough in .

The futuristic concepts rely on the ability to communicate and transfer vast volumes of data much faster than existing networks. So physicists have developed an innovative way to accelerate this process between scores of users, potentially across the globe.

An international research team led by the Paul Scherrer Institute PSI has measured the radius of the nucleus of muonic helium-3 with unprecedented precision. The results are an important stress test for theories and future experiments in atomic physics.

1.97007 femtometer (quadrillionths of a meter): That’s how unimaginably tiny the radius of the atomic nucleus of helium-3 is. This is the result of an experiment at PSI that has now been published in the journal Science.

More than 40 researchers from international institutes collaborated to develop and implement a method that enables measurements with unprecedented precision. This sets new standards for theories and further experiments in nuclear and .