Lifeboat Foundation

The supermassive black hole at the heart of our galaxy isn’t just spinning — it’s doing so at almost maximum speed, dragging anything near it along for the ride.

Physicists calculated the rotational speed of the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole, called Sagittarius A* (Sgr A•, by using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory to view the X-rays and radio waves emanating from outflows of material.

In the very early universe, physics were weird. A process known as inflation, during which the universe went from a single infinitesimal point to everything we see today, was one such instance of those weird physics. Now, scientists from the Chinese Academy of Science have sifted through 15 years of pulsar timing data in order to put some constraints on what physics looks like.

The 15 years of data come from the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves or NANOGrav’s goal is to use an unconventional way to detect gravitational waves —by looking at pulsars. These fast-spinning objects are commonly used as “clocks” in astronomical terms.

Continue reading “The echoes from inflation could still be shaking the cosmos today” »

Black holes are regions in space where the gravitational pull is so strong that nothing can escape them, not even light. These fascinating regions have been the focus of countless studies, yet some of the physics underlying their formation is not yet fully understood.

Black holes are formed in what is known as gravitational collapse. This is essentially the contraction of a cosmological object, prompted by its own gravity drawing matter inward (i.e., toward the object’s center of gravity).

Whether or not such a collapsing object forms a black hole depends on the specific properties of the object. In some cases, an object may be very close to the threshold, having a hard time deciding whether or not to form a black hole. This type of collapse results in so-called critical phenomena.

The ability to jump forward and backwards in time has long fascinated science fiction writers and physicists alike. So is it really possible to travel into the past and the future?

Sperm can “defy the laws of physics”, according to new research.

The laws of motion have helped us to comprehend the behaviours of the natural world for centuries, but sperm appears to go against one of the laws set down by Isaac Newton.

Kenta Ishimoto and his fellow mathematical scientists from Kyoto University have revealed new research which suggests that sperm actually display qualities which don’t follow Newton’s third law of motion.

An international team of astrophysicists including Princeton’s Andy Goulding has discovered the most distant supermassive black hole ever found, using two NASA space telescopes: the Chandra X-ray Observatory (Chandra) and the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

The black hole, which is an estimated 10 to 100 million times more massive than our sun, is 13.2 billion light-years away in the galaxy UHZ-1, which means the telescopes are peering back in time to when the universe was “extremely young,” Goulding said — only about 450 million years old.

“This is one of the most dramatic discoveries to come out of the James Webb Space Telescope” and the discovery of the most distant growing supermassive black hole known, said Michael Strauss, professor and chair of astrophysical sciences at Princeton, who discussed the findings with the researchers but was not part of the research team. “Indeed, it completely smashes the old record.”

In October, a paper titled “Assembly theory explains and quantifies selection and evolution” appeared in the journal Nature. The authors—a team led by Lee Cronin at the University of Glasgow and Sara Walker at Arizona State University—claim their theory is an “interface between physics and biology” which explains how complex biological forms can evolve.

The paper provoked strong responses. On the one hand were headlines like “Bold New ” Theory of Everything’ Could Unite Physics And Evolution”

On the other were reactions from scientists. One evolutionary biologist tweeted after multiple reads I still have absolutely no idea what [this paper] is doing. Another said I read the paper and I feel more confused […] I think reading that paper has made me forget my own name.

Researchers at Columbia University have created a superatomic material that’s being lauded as the “world’s best semiconductor.” Through a surprising twist of physics, it’s expected to allow processing (switching) speeds in the femtosecond scale. Here’s why it will most likely be a piece of the semiconductors puzzle, not its final shape.

Einstein’s fascination with light, considered quirky at the time, would lead him down the path to a brand new theory of physics.

Living half a century before Einstein, a Scotsman, James Clerk Maxwell, revealed a powerful unification and universalization of nature, taking the disparate sciences of electricity and magnetism and merging them into one communion. It was a titanic tour-de-force that compressed decades of tangled experimental results and hazy theoretical insights into a tidy set of four equations that govern a wealth of phenomena. And through Maxwell’s efforts was born a second great force of nature, electromagnetism, which describes, again in a mere four equations, everything from static shocks, the invisible power of magnets, the flow of electricity, and even radiation – that is, light – itself.

At the time Einstein’s fascination with electromagnetism was considered unfashionable. While electromagnetism is now a cornerstone of every young physicist’s education, in the early 20^th century it was seen as nothing more than an interesting bit of theoretical physics, but really something that those more aligned in engineering should study deeply. Though Einstein was no engineer, as a youth his mind burned with a simple thought experiment: what would happen if you could ride a bicycle so quickly that you raced beside a beam of light? What would the light look like from the privileged perspective?