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Category: physics – Page 2

AI Uncovers Wild Spin of the Milky Way’s Supermassive Black Hole

Back in 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) team revealed the first-ever image of a supermassive black hole in the galaxy M87. In 2022, they followed up with the iconic image of Sagittarius A at the heart of the Milky Way. While these images were groundbreaking, the data behind them held even deeper insights that were hard to decode.

Neural Networks Meet Black Hole Physics

Previous studies by the EHT Collaboration used only a handful of realistic synthetic data files. Funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) as part of the Partnership to Advance Throughput Computing (PATh) project, the Madison-based CHTC enabled the astronomers to feed millions of such data files into a so-called Bayesian neural network, which can quantify uncertainties. This allowed the researchers to make a much better comparison between the EHT data and the models.

The Universe Is ‘Suspiciously’ Like a Computer Simulation, Physicist Says

We have long taken it for granted that gravity is one of the basic forces of nature – one of the invisible threads that keeps the universe stitched together. But suppose that this is not true. Suppose the law of gravity is simply an echo of something more fundamental: a byproduct of the universe operating under a computer-like code.

That is the premise of my latest research, published in the journal AIP Advances. It suggests that gravity is not a mysterious force that attracts objects towards one another, but the product of an informational law of nature that I call the second law of infodynamics.

It is a notion that seems like science fiction – but one that is based in physics and evidence that the universe appears to be operating suspiciously like a computer simulation.

Telescopes in Chile Capture Images of the Earliest Galaxies in the Universe

Thanks to observatories like the venerable Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and its next-generation cousin, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers are finally getting the chance to study galaxies that existed just one billion years after the Big Bang. This period is known as “Cosmic Dawn” because it was during this period that the first stars formed and came together to create the first galaxies in the Universe. The study of these galaxies has revealed some surprising and fascinating things that are allowing astronomers to learn how large-scale structures in the Universe came to be and how they’ve evolved since.

For the longest time, it was thought that this cosmological period could only be seen by space telescopes, as they don’t have to deal with interference from Earth’s atmosphere. With advanced technologies ranging from adaptive optics (AO) and coronagraphs to interferometry and spectrometers, ground-based telescopes are pushing the boundaries of what astronomers can see. In recent news, an international team of astronomers using the Cosmology Large Angular Scale Surveyor (CLASS) announced the first-ever detection of radiation from the cosmic microwave background (CMB) interacting with the first stars in the Universe. These findings shed light on one of the least understood periods in cosmological history.

The study that details their findings, which recently appeared in The Astrophysical Journal, was led by Yunyang Li — an observational cosmologist from the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics (University of Chicago) and The William H. Miller III Department of Physics and Astronomy at Johns Hopkins University (JHU). He was joined by many JHU colleagues, as well as astrophysicists from the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the Argonne National Laboratory, the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, and many prestigious universities.

With potential implications for mechanical systems, study reveals physics of the ‘nick shot’ in squash

In squash, the “nick shot” is an emphatic, point-ending play in which a player strikes a ball that ricochets near the bottom of the wall and rolls flat along the floor instead of bouncing, leaving an opponent with no chance to return it.

While the shot is as old as the game itself, a team of researchers has now revealed the physics behind it, showing how perfect placement and just the right roll conspire to kill the ball’s bounce.

The research, led by Brown University Professor of Engineering Roberto Zenit, was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. While the findings could be useful in developing shock-dampening technologies, Zenit says the work grew out of his interest in using science to explain the everyday world.

The Center of Our Universe Does Not Exist. A Physicist Explains Why

About a century ago, scientists were struggling to reconcile what seemed a contradiction in Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity.

Published in 1915, and already widely accepted worldwide by physicists and mathematicians, the theory assumed the Universe was static – unchanging, unmoving and immutable. In short, Einstein believed the size and shape of the Universe today was, more or less, the same size and shape it had always been.

But when astronomers looked into the night sky at faraway galaxies with powerful telescopes, they saw hints the Universe was anything but that. These new observations suggested the opposite – that it was, instead, expanding.

Earth-based telescopes offer a fresh look at Cosmic Dawn

For the first time, scientists have used Earth-based telescopes to look back over 13 billion years to see how the first stars in the universe affect light emitted from the Big Bang.

Using telescopes high in the Andes mountains of northern Chile, astrophysicists have measured this polarized microwave light to create a clearer picture of one of the least understood epochs in the history of the universe, the Cosmic Dawn.

“People thought this couldn’t be done from the ground. Astronomy is a technology-limited field, and from the Cosmic Dawn are famously difficult to measure,” said Tobias Marriage, project leader and a Johns Hopkins professor of physics and astronomy. “Ground-based observations face additional challenges compared to space. Overcoming those obstacles makes this measurement a significant achievement.”

There’s an infinite amount of energy locked in the vacuum time. Could we ever use it?

The bottom line is that no matter what the zero-point energy is, it’s the background of the universe on top of which all of physics takes place. Just as you can’t go lower than the ground floor of a building with no basement, you can’t get lower than the ground state of the universe — so there’s nothing for you to extract, and there’s no way to leverage that into useful applications of energy.

So, unfortunately, any work you do in the universe will have to be done the old-fashioned way.