Speculative new research outlines a method for detecting extraterrestrial civilizations: by catching the gravitational waves produced by the collapse, or failure, of their warp drives. Sounds wild, but the concept is grounded in the principles of Einstein’s general relativity.
Light famously cannot escape the event horizon of a black hole, leaving astrophysicists to theorize and speculate what it’s like beyond the limits of human perception. Now, NASA researchers take that theorization a step further, in the form of an animation that takes you (the viewer) into the black hole.
Despite keeping us grounded and warping light that travels through space, gravity is actually quite a weak force. The smaller the mass, the less gravity appears to have any pull, until at quantum scales it appears to have no force at all.
If you asked an astrophysicist what is yet to be discovered in the universe, there’s a good chance they’d paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld: It’s full of known unknowns.
Stay calm, everybody stay calm. But it’s finally happening: The European Space Agency is committing itself to the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA), a gravitational wave observatory that will study some of the universe’s most enigmatic phenomena.
A team of scientists found a compact object 40,000 light-years from Earth that is either a very massive neutron star or an itsy-bitsy black hole, but they’re not sure which.
The quantum world operates by different rules than the classical one we buzz around in, allowing the fantastical to the bizarrely normal. Physicists have described using quantum entanglement to simulate a closed timelike curve—in layman’s terms, time travel.
In the 95 years we’ve known about antimatter, physicists have not tested how the elusive inverse of ordinary matter is affected by gravity, the force that pulls masses to Earth and seems to affect all things in the classical realm.
No space-based gravitational wave observatory exists…yet. But that hasn’t stopped a team of astronomers from demonstrating how the gravitational universe might look, using simulated data to create a “synthetic gravitational sky.”
A rapidly spinning dead star’s wacky fluctuations in brightness are due to the extreme environment surrounding the object, according to a team of astronomers who observed it.
