Vishal Sharma shares his insights on how innovations in generative AI will help everyone (and everything) on Earth.
A new model describes the population of black hole binaries without assumptions on the shape of their distribution—a capability that could boost the discovery potential of gravitational-wave observations.
Since the first groundbreaking observation of gravitational waves from a black hole merger [1], a worldwide network of observatories–LIGO, Virgo, and KAGRA—has discovered nearly a hundred mergers involving black holes and neutron stars (Fig. 1). The nature of this population of compact objects has implications for nearly every aspect of astrophysics and cosmology. However, understanding how gravitational-wave sources fit into our astrophysical theories has proved challenging. Many of the discoveries have confirmed our expectations, but some—such as those of asymmetric black hole binaries or of unexpectedly massive black holes—defy them.
About 4.5 billion years ago, a small planet smashed into the young Earth, flinging molten rock into space. Slowly, the debris coalesced, cooled and solidified, forming our moon. This scenario of how the Earth’s moon came to be is the one largely agreed upon by most scientists. But the details of how exactly that happened are “more of a choose-your-own-adventure novel,” according to researchers in the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory who published a paper in Nature Geoscience.
Researchers at the Quantum Machines Unit at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) are studying levitating materials—substances that can remain suspended in a stable position without any physical contact or mechanical support.