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An international team of scientists is rethinking the basic principles of radiation physics with the aim of creating super-bright light sources. In a new study published in Nature Photonics, researchers from the Instituto Superior Técnico (IST) in Portugal, the University of Rochester, the University of California, Los Angeles, and Laboratoire d’Optique Appliquée in France proposed ways to use quasiparticles to create light sources as powerful as the most advanced ones in existence today, but much smaller.

Quasiparticles are formed by many electrons moving in sync. They can travel at any speed—even faster than light—and withstand intense forces, like those near a black hole.

“The most fascinating aspect of quasiparticles is their ability to move in ways that would be disallowed by the laws of physics governing individual particles,” says John Palastro, a senior scientist at the Laboratory for Laser Energetics, an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, and an associate professor at the Institute of Optics.

Russian astrophysicists propose the Casimir Effect causes the universe’s expansion to accelerate. Mystery effect speeds up the universe — not dark energy, says study.

Vera C. Rubin Observatory will help shed light on the dark universe.

The upcoming Vera C. Rubin Observatory will help astronomers better understand two perplexing phenomena: dark energy and dark matter. Dark energy, which accounts for 68 percent of the universe, is an enigmatic factor responsible for the observed rapid expansion of the universe. Dark matter, which comprises 27 percent of all matter, has gravitational pull but does not interact with light, therefore remaining hidden.

Together, these mysterious components form what scientists refer to as the dark universe.

Continue reading “The Rubin Observatory will map dark matter and dark energy” »

A new feat has been achieved in the realm of astronomy. The first supernova was observed, recognized, and classified using a wholly automated approach without human participation.

Led by Northwestern University, an international team of scientists has created a cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) tool known as the Bright Transient Survey Bot (BTSbot).

NASA/JPL-Caltech / D. Lang (Perimeter Institute)

Continue reading “New AI tool successfully detects and classifies supernova” »

During the mid-20th century, scientists discovered that protons have the ability to resonate, akin to the vibrations of a bell. Over the subsequent thirty years, advancements have led to 3D pictures of the proton and significant insight into its structure in its ground state. However, there remains limited knowledge about the 3D structure of a resonating proton.

A recent experiment conducted at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility has delved deeper into the three-dimensional structures of both proton and neutron resonances. This research provides one more puzzle piece to the vast picture of the chaotic, nascent universe that existed just after the Big Bang.

The Big Bang is the leading cosmological model explaining how the universe as we know it began approximately 13.8 billion years ago.

When two black holes collide, the impact is so big that we can detect it all the way here on Earth. These objects are so immense that their collisions send ripples through spacetime itself. Scientists call these ripples gravitational waves.

Gravitational waves are distortions or ripples in the fabric of space and time. They were first detected in 2015 by the Advanced LIGO detectors and are produced by catastrophic events such as colliding black holes, supernovae, or merging neutron stars.

A fully automated process, including a brand-new artificial intelligence (AI) tool, has successfully detected, identified and classified its first supernova.

Developed by an international collaboration led by Northwestern University, the new system automates the entire search for new supernovae across the night sky—effectively removing humans from the process. Not only does this rapidly accelerate the process of analyzing and classifying new supernova candidates, it also bypasses human error.

The team alerted the astronomical community to the launch and success of the new tool, called the Bright Transient Survey Bot (BTSbot), this week. In the past six years, humans have spent an estimated total of 2,200 hours visually inspecting and classifying supernova candidates. With the new tool now officially online, researchers can redirect this precious time toward other responsibilities in order to accelerate the pace of discovery.

And that’s where the trouble really starts. Down there, nature is governed by quantum mechanics. This amazingly powerful theory has been shown to account for all the forces of nature, except gravity. When physicists try to apply quantum theory to gravity, they find that space and time become almost unrecognizable. They seem to start fluctuating wildly. It’s almost like space and time fall apart. Their smoothness breaks down completely, and that’s totally incompatible with the picture in Einstein’s theory.

(01:54) As physicists try to make sense of all of this, some of them are coming to the conclusion that space and time may not be as fundamental as we always imagined. They’re starting to seem more like byproducts of something even deeper, something unfamiliar and quantum mechanical. But what could that something be? Joining me now to discuss all this is Sean Carroll, a theoretical physicist who hosts his own podcast, Mindscape. Sean spent years as a research professor of physics at Caltech [California Institute of Technology], but he is now moving to Johns Hopkins as the Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy. He’s also an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute. But no matter where he is, Sean studies deep questions about quantum mechanics, gravity, time and cosmology. He’s the author of several books, including his most recent, Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime. Sean, thank you so much for joining us today.

Dark energy, one of the most controversial physics ideas, is getting another challenge. After all, if this force is supposed to make up about 68% of the mass-energy of the universe, where exactly is it? A new paper by a pair of Russian astrophysicists says dark energy simply doesn’t exist. Instead, they point to the mysterious Casimir effect as the explanation for the accelerating expansion of the universe.

The study, from Professor Artyom Astashenok and undergraduate student Alexander Teplyakov of the Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University, takes issue with the fact that as far as dark energy’s suggested role, “no one knows what is it and how it works,” as remarks Astashenok in a press release.