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Category: physics – Page 91

A s the mathematician De La Soul famously stated, three is the magic number. But if physicist Richard Feynman is to be believed, that figure is off by a factor of about 400. For Feynman, you see, the “magic number” is around 1/137 – specifically, it’s 1/137.03599913.

Physicists know it as α, or the fine structure constant. “It has been a mystery ever since it was discovered,” Feynman wrote in his 1985 book QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter. “All good theoretical physicists put this number up on their wall and worry about it.”

It’s both incredibly mysterious and unbelievably important: a seemingly random, dimensionless number, which nevertheless holds the secret to life itself.

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Two galaxies in the early universe, which contain extremely productive star factories, have been studied by a team of scientists led by Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden. Using powerful telescopes to split the galaxies’ light into individual colours, the scientists were amazed to discover light from many different molecules – more than ever before at such distances. Studies like this could revolutionise our understanding of the lives of the most active galaxies when the universe was young, the researchers believe.

When the universe was young, galaxies were very different from today’s stately spirals, which are full of gently-shining suns and colourful gas clouds. New stars were being born, at rates hundreds of times faster than in today’s universe. Most of this however, was hidden behind thick layers of dust, making it a challenge for scientists to discover these star factories’ secrets – until now. By studying the most distant galaxies visible with powerful telescopes, astronomers can get glimpses of how these factories managed to create so many stars.

In a new study, published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, a team of scientists led by Chalmers astronomer Chentao Yang, used the telescopes of NOEMA (NOrthern Extended Millimetre Array) in France to find out more about how these early star factories managed to create so many stars. Yang and his colleagues measured light from two luminous galaxies in the early universe – one of them classified as a quasar, and both with high rates of star formation.

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Gravity is the reason things with mass or energy are attracted to each other. It is why apples fall toward the ground and planets orbit stars.

Magnets attract some types of metals, but they can also push other magnets away. So how come you feel only the pull of gravity?

In 1915, Albert Einstein figured out the answer when he published his theory of general relativity. The reason gravity pulls you toward the ground is that all objects with mass, like our Earth, actually bend and curve the fabric of the universe, called spacetime. That curvature is what you feel as gravity.

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Astrophysicists have discovered why spiral galaxies like the Milky Way are rare in the Supergalactic Plane, a dense region in our Local Universe. The research, led by Durham University and the University of Helsinki, used the SIBELIUS supercomputer simulation to show that galaxies in dense clusters on the Plane often merge, transforming spiral galaxies into elliptical ones. This finding, which aligns with telescope observations and supports the standard model of the Universe, helps explain a long-standing cosmic anomaly about galaxy distribution.

Astrophysicists say they have found an answer to why spiral galaxies like our own Milky Way are largely missing from a part of our Local Universe called the Supergalactic Plane.

The Supergalactic Plane is an enormous, flattened structure extending nearly a billion light years across in which our own Milky Way galaxy is embedded.

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The world works at different levels — fundamental physics, physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, sociology — with each level having its own rules and regularities. Here’s the deep question: Ultimately, can what happens at a higher level be explained entirely in terms of what happens at a lower level? If the answer is ‘No’, if complete explanatory reduction fails, then what else could be going on?\
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Have you ever wondered what the universe looked like before the first stars were born? How did these stars form and how did they change the cosmos? These are some of the questions that the James Webb Space Telescope, or Webb for short, will try to answer. Webb is the most powerful and ambitious space telescope ever built, and it can observe the infrared light from the most distant and ancient objects in the universe, including the first stars. The first stars are extremely hard to find, because their light is very faint and redshifted by the expansion of the universe. But Webb has a huge mirror, a suite of advanced instruments, and a unique orbit that allows it to detect and study the first stars. By finding the first stars, Webb can learn a lot of information that can help us understand the early history and evolution of the universe, and test and refine the theoretical models and simulations of the first stars and their formation processes. Webb can also reveal new and unexpected phenomena and raise new questions about the first stars and their role in the universe. Webb is opening a new window to the cosmic dawn, where the first stars may shine. If you want to learn more about Webb and the first stars, check out this article1 from Universe Today. And don’t forget to like, share, and subscribe for more videos like this. Thanks for watching and see you next time. \
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Chapters:\
00:00 Introduction\
01:09 Finding the first stars\
03:21 Technical challenges and scientific opportunities\
07:18 Challenges and limitations \
10:04 Outro\
10:31 Enjoy\
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Quanta Magazine’s full list of the major computer science discoveries from 2023.

In 2023, artificial intelligence dominated popular culture — showing up in everything from internet memes to Senate hearings. Large language models such as those behind ChatGPT fueled a lot of this excitement, even as researchers still struggled to pry open the “black box” that describes their inner workings. Image generation systems also routinely impressed and unsettled us with their artistic abilities, yet these were explicitly founded on concepts borrowed from physics.

The year brought many other advances in computer science. Researchers made subtle but important progress on one of the oldest problems in the field, a question about the nature of hard problems referred to as “P versus NP.” In August, my colleague Ben Brubaker explored this seminal problem and the attempts of computational complexity theorists to answer the question: Why is it hard (in a precise, quantitative sense) to understand what makes hard problems hard? “It hasn’t been an easy journey — the path is littered with false turns and roadblocks, and it loops back on itself again and again,” Brubaker wrote. “Yet for meta-complexity researchers, that journey into an uncharted landscape is its own reward.”

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Researchers at the University of Sussex have discovered the transformative potential of Martian nanomaterials, potentially opening the door to sustainable habitation on the red planet.

Using resources and techniques currently applied on the International Space Station and by NASA, Dr. Conor Boland, a Lecturer in Materials Physics at the University of Sussex, led a research group that investigated the potential of nanomaterials—incredibly tiny components thousands of times smaller than a —for clean energy production and on Mars.

Taking what was considered a by NASA and applying only sustainable production methods, including water-based chemistry and low-energy processes, the researchers have successfully identified within gypsum nanomaterials—opening the door to potential clean energy and sustainable technology production on Mars.

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