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Brian Keating is an experimental physicist at the UCSD, author of Losing the Nobel Prize, and host of the Into the Impossible podcast. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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Books and resources mentioned:
Losing the Nobel Prize: https://amzn.to/3E6GSHI
Into the Impossible: https://amzn.to/3Fb6F2E

Continue reading “Losing the Nobel Prize” »

Using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT), astronomers have discovered an exoplanet orbiting Barnard’s star, the closest single star to our sun. On this newly discovered exoplanet, which has at least half the mass of Venus, a year lasts just over three Earth days. The team’s observations also hint at the existence of three more exoplanet candidates, in various orbits around the star.

Located just six light-years away, Barnard’s star is the second-closest stellar system—after Alpha Centauri’s three-star group—and the closest individual star to us. Owing to its proximity, it is a primary target in the search for Earth-like exoplanets. Despite a promising detection back in 2018, no planet orbiting Barnard’s star had been confirmed until now.

The discovery of this new exoplanet—announced in a paper published today in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics—is the result of observations made over the last five years with ESO’s VLT, located at Paranal Observatory in Chile. “Even if it took a long time, we were always confident that we could find something,” says Jonay González Hernández, a researcher at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias in Spain, and lead author of the paper.

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Scientists FINALLY FOUND a new way to travel faster than light!

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Two supermassive black holes will collide in 10,000 years, warping space and time.

A Cosmic Collision in the Making

In a galaxy 9 billion light-years away, two enormous black holes are locked in a cosmic dance that will eventually end in a massive collision. These supermassive black holes, each hundreds of millions of times the mass of our sun, are currently orbiting one another. In about 10,000 years, they will merge in a violent event, unleashing enough force to distort space and time by creating gravitational waves—ripples in the universe’s fabric.

One proposed way of examining if such a force could exist is by closely monitoring asteroid trajectories, and few near-Earth asteroids are as well observed as Bennu. A new study by an international team of scientists analyzes Bennu to try and placing constraints on a possible fifth fundamental force in the search of ultralight dark matter.

Bennu, one of the most dangerous near-Earth objects, has been meticulously tracked by optical and radar astrometric data since it was discovered in 1999. As the destination for the OSIRIS-REx asteroid retrieval mission, additional X-band radiometric and optical navigation tracking data added even more trajectory precision. The idea is that any deviation in the expected trajectory of the asteroid could be the result of an unknown fifth force at work. The results of the study were published in the journal Nature Communications Physics.

Physicists finally know whether black holes destroy the information contained in infalling matter. The problem is that the answer hasn’t lit the way to a new understanding of space-time.

All our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike – and yet it is the most precious thing we have. – Albert Einstein (1879−1955)

Astronomers have observed light bending around a black hole, a phenomenon predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity. By studying X-rays from a black hole in the Zwicky 1 galaxy, scientists detected unexpected “light echoes” coming from behind the black hole, proving that the black hole’s gravity was curving space-time and allowing light to bend around it.

Although this effect was predicted over a century ago, it’s the first time astronomers have witnessed it. The researchers now aim to investigate how black hole coronas produce intense X-ray flares and continue studying space-time distortion.

A spinning white dwarf drags space-time around it 100 million times more powerfully than Earth.

Astronomers have recently provided compelling evidence of a star dragging space-time, showcasing one of Einstein’s lesser-known predictions. This phenomenon, known as “frame-dragging,” describes how a spinning object distorts the very fabric of space-time around it. While this effect is nearly imperceptible in everyday life, even on a planetary scale, certain cosmic conditions make it much more noticeable. A study published in Science details these observations using a radio telescope to study a rare pair of compact stars.

Continue reading “Astronomers Witness A Star Dragging Space-Time Around With It” »

A recent study in Physical Review Letters explores the effects of ultralight dark matter in extreme-mass-ratio inspirals (EMRIs), which could be detected by future space-based gravitational wave detectors like LISA (Laser Interferometer Space Antenna).