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Category: physics – Page 298

Fusion technology promises an inexhaustible supply of clean, safe power. If it all sounds too good to be true, that’s because it is. For decades scientists struggled to recreate a working sun in their laboratories – little surprise perhaps as they were attempting to fuse atomic nuclei in a superheated soup. Commercial fusion remains a dream. Yet in recent years the impossible became merely improbable and then, it felt almost overnight, technically feasible. For the last decade there has been a flurry of interest –and not a little incredulity –about claims, often made by companies backed by billionaires and run by bold physicists, that market-ready fusion reactors were just around the corner.

Until recently the attractions and drawbacks of nuclear fusion reactors were largely theoretical. Within a decade this will not be the case.

Mon 12 Mar 2018 14.24 EDT Last modified on Mon 12 Mar 2018 19.15 EDT.

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Back in 2015, researchers in Spain created a tiny magnetic wormhole for the first time ever. They used it to connect two regions of space so that a magnetic field could travel ‘invisibly’ between them.

Before you get too excited, it wasn’t the kind of gravitational wormhole that would theoretically allow humans to travel rapidly across space in science fiction TV shows and films such as Stargate, Star Trek, and Interstellar, and it wouldn’t have been able to transport matter.

But the physicists managed to create a tunnel that allowed a magnetic field to disappear at one point, and then reappear at another, which is still a pretty huge deal.

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We know that the universe is expanding, but a strange discrepancy in just how fast that expansion is occurring continues to confound physicists—and make them wonder whether there’s some new, unexplained physics afoot.

For every 3.3 million light years, or one megaparsec, the universe expands around another 70 kilometers per second faster. There are two discrepant measurements of this so-called “Hubble constant.” The light from the most distant parts of the universe reveals an expansion of 68 km/s per megaparsec, while a method taken from extrapolating data from nearby sources reveals a rate of 73 km/s per megaparsec. Scientists can’t explain this discrepancy by chance alone, which means they’re leaving something out, either in their experiments or in the laws of physics. A team of researchers have an idea for another measurement that could help close the gap between these numbers—by measuring how gravity affects the light from distant supernovae.

“If you want to tell the difference between new physics and unknown errors, you need another measurement,” study author Thomas Collett from the University of Portsmouth in the UK told Gizmodo. “If you have measurements that have completely independent methods and they’re all pointing in the same direction, you can robustly believe it’s new physics, not that they’re screwing up in the same way.”

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T he first light which ever shone in the universe has been detected by astronomers scouring the skies for the earliest stars.

Using a simple radio antenna positioned in the quietest place on Earth — the western Australian desert — scientists picked up a signal of the long-sought ‘cosmic dawn.’

The breakthrough was described as ‘revolutionary’, ‘trailblazing’ and the most important discovery in astronomy since the detection of gravitational waves in 2015.

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Physicists have confirmed the existence of a new form of atomic nuclei, and the fact that it’s not symmetrical challenges the fundamental theories of physics that explain our Universe.

But that’s not as bad as it sounds, because the 2016 discovery could help scientists solve one of the biggest mysteries in theoretical physics — where is all the dark matter? — and could also explain why travelling backwards in time might actually be impossible.

“We’ve found these nuclei literally point towards a direction in space. This relates to a direction in time, proving there’s a well-defined direction in time and we will always travel from past to present,” Marcus Scheck from the University of the West of Scotland told Kenneth MacDonald at BBC News at the time.

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A study on dozens of galaxies within several billion light years of our own has revealed black holes that far exceed our expectations on just how big these monsters can grow.

The discovery not only helps us better understand the evolution of our Universe’s building blocks, it leaves us with a new intriguing question – just how do black holes like these get to be so incredibly massive?

By now, the collapsed cores of massive stars known as black holes need no introduction. We’ve heard about their cosmic crashes rippling space-time, watched them belch, and expect to capture the closest look yet at their nature very soon.

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