“The first image of a black hole, captured in 2019, has revealed more support for Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity,” reports CNN, adding that the new finding suggests his theory is now 500 times harder to beat. [W]hile light can’t escape the inside of a black hole, it’s possible for light to make a getaway in a region around the…
Tag: Institute for Advanced Study
Is Planet Nine a Black Hole?
“Astrophysicists have recently begun hatching plans to find out just how weird Planet Nine might be,” reports the New York Times. Long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot shares their report:
Although it is probably wishful thinking, some astronomers contend that a black hole may be lurking in the outer reaches of our solar system. All summer, they have been arguing over how to find…
Freeman Dyson, Visionary Technologist, Is Dead at 96
darenw shares a report: Freeman J. Dyson, a mathematical prodigy who left his mark on subatomic physics before turning to messier subjects like Earth’s environmental future and the morality of war, died on Friday at a hospital near Princeton, N.J. He was 96. His daughter Mia Dyson confirmed the death. As a young graduate student at Cornell in 1949, Dr. Dyson…
New map of Milky Way reveals giant wave of stellar nurseries
Astronomers at Harvard University have discovered a monolithic, wave-shaped gaseous structure—the largest ever seen in our galaxy—made up of interconnected stellar nurseries. Dubbed the “Radcliffe wave” in honor of the collaboration’s home base, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the discovery transforms a 150-year-old vision of nearby stellar nurseries as an expanding ring into one featuring an undulating, star-forming filament that…
Study unveils new supersymmetry anomalies in superconformal quantum field theories
Researchers at the University of Southampton and the Korea Institute for Advanced Study have recently showed that supersymmetry is anomalous in N=1 superconformal quantum field theories (SCFTs) with an anomalous R symmetry. The anomaly described in their paper, published in Physical Review Letters, was previously observed in holographic SCFTs at strong coupling, yet their work confirms that it is already present…
ALMA spies a cool gas ring around our Milky Way’s central black hole
New observations by the ALMA telescope in Chile have revealed a never-before-seen disk of cool, interstellar gas wrapped around Sagittarius A*, the giant black hole at the center of our galaxy. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/cool-gas-ring-milky-way-central-black-hole…
Researchers detect evidence of six new binary black hole mergers within LVC data
Scholars at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) recently submitted a paper announcing the discovery of six new binary black hole mergers that exceed the detection thresholds defined by the LIGO-Virgo Collaboration (LVC), the group responsible for the first direct observation of gravitational waves on February 11, 2016. Source: https://phys.org/news/2019-04-evidence-binary-black-hole-mergers.html…
Traversable Wormholes Can Exist, But They’re Not Very Useful For Space Travel, Physicists Say
A new study from physicists at Harvard and Stanford says that wormholes can exist but they’re not very useful for humans to travel through. “It takes longer to get through these wormholes than to go directly, so they are not very useful for space travel,” said the author of the study, Daniel Jafferis. From the report: Despite his pessimism for…
In Bubbles, She Sees a Mathematical Universe
For Karen Uhlenbeck, winner of the Abel Prize for math, a whimsical phenomenon offers a window onto higher dimensions. Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/08/science/uhlenbeck-bubbles-math-physics.html?partner=rss&emc=rss