The same pulling force that causes “tears” in a glass of wine also shapes embryos. It’s another example of how genes exploit mechanical forces for growth and development.
Category: physics – Page 10
The simulated Milky Way: 100 billion stars using 7 million CPU cores
Researchers have successfully performed the world’s first Milky Way simulation that accurately represents more than 100 billion individual stars over the course of 10 thousand years. This feat was accomplished by combining artificial intelligence (AI) with numerical simulations. Not only does the simulation represent 100 times more individual stars than previous state-of-the-art models, but it was produced more than 100 times faster.
Published in Proceedings of the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis, the study represents a breakthrough at the intersection of astrophysics, high-performance computing, and AI. Beyond astrophysics, this new methodology can be used to model other phenomena such as climate change and weather patterns.
Uncovering new physics in metals manufacturing
For decades, it’s been known that subtle chemical patterns exist in metal alloys, but researchers thought they were too minor to matter — or that they got erased during manufacturing. However, recent studies have shown that in laboratory settings, these patterns can change a metal’s properties, including its mechanical strength, durability, heat capacity, radiation tolerance, and more.
Now, researchers at MIT have found that these chemical patterns also exist in conventionally manufactured metals. The surprising finding revealed a new physical phenomenon that explains the persistent patterns.
In a paper published in Nature Communications today, the researchers describe how they tracked the patterns and discovered the physics that explains them. The authors also developed a simple model to predict chemical patterns in metals, and they show how engineers could use the model to tune the effect of such patterns on metallic properties, for use in aerospace, semiconductors, nuclear reactors, and more.
From Data to Physics: An Agentic Large Language Model Solves a Competitive Adsorption Puzzle
We show that an agentic large language model (LLM) (OpenAI o3 with deep research) can autonomously reason, write code, and iteratively refine hypotheses to derive a physically interpretable equation for competitive adsorption on metal-organic layers (MOLs)—an open problem our lab had struggled with for months. In a single 29-min session, o3 formulated the governing equations, generated fitting scripts, diagnosed shortcomings, and produced a compact three-parameter model that quantitatively matches experiments across a dozen carboxylic acids.
Black hole mergers could give rise to observable gravitational-wave tails
Black holes, regions of spacetime in which gravity is so strong that nothing can escape, are intriguing and extensively studied cosmological phenomena. Einstein’s general theory of relativity predicts that when two black holes merge, they emit ripples in spacetime known as gravitational waves.
Once the gravitational waves originating from black hole mergers fade, subtle hints of these waves could remain, known as late-time gravitational-wave tails. While the existence of these tails has been widely theorized about in the past, it was not yet conclusively confirmed.
Researchers at Niels Bohr Institute, University of Lisbon and other institutes worldwide recently performed black hole merger simulations based on Einstein’s general relativity equations, to further probe the existence of late-time gravitational-wave tails. Their simulations, outlined in a paper in Physical Review Letters, suggest that these tails not only exist, but could also have a larger amplitude than originally predicted and could thus be observed in future experiments.
Ultrafast light-driven electron slide discovered
When an intense laser pulse hits a stationary electron, it performs a trembling motion at the frequency of the light field. However, this motion dies down after the pulse, and the electron comes to rest again at its original location. If, however, the light field changes its strength along the electron’s trajectory, the electron builds up an additional drift motion with each oscillation, which it retains even after the pulse. The spatial light intensity acts like a slope that the electron slides down.
This effect, known for decades, is called ponderomotive acceleration. However, due to the low spatial dependence of intensity even in focused light beams, this light-driven sliding effect can only be clearly observed for long-lasting laser pulses with many oscillations of the field.
In a recent study, researchers have demonstrated pronounced ponderomotive acceleration during just a single light oscillation. The crucial trick was the use of sharp metallic needle tips, which exhibit an extremely strong spatial variation in light intensity when illuminated with laser light. The work is published in the journal Nature Physics.
Astronomers discover new pulsating ultraluminous X-ray source
Using ESA’s XMM-Newton satellite, European astronomers have observed ultraluminous X-ray sources (ULXs) in the galaxy NGC 4631. As a result, they detected a new pulsating ULX, which received the designation X-8. The research is published November 6 on the arXiv preprint server.
ULXs are point sources in the sky that are so bright in X-rays that each emits more radiation than a million suns emit at all wavelengths. They are less luminous than active galactic nuclei, but more consistently luminous than any known stellar process. Although numerous studies of ULXs have been conducted, the basic nature of these sources still remains unknown.
Some persistent ULXs exhibit pulsations and therefore are categorized as ultraluminous X-ray pulsars (ULXPs). Discovering and studying objects of this type could be crucial for advancing our understanding of accretion physics—for instance, mechanisms that enable the sustained X-ray luminosities of ULXs which exceed the Eddington limit.