This week’s landmark discovery of gravitational and light waves generated by the collision of two neutron stars eons ago was made possible by analyses and signal verification performed by Comet, an advanced supercomputer based at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at UC San Diego.
Astrophysicist Chris Fryer was enjoying an evening with friends on August 25, 2017, when he got the news of a gravitational-wave detection by LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory
AIP Publishing has announced its selection of Michael Keidar as the winner of the 2017 Ronald C. Davidson Award for Plasma Physics. The annual award is presented in collaboration with the American Physical Society Division of Plasma Physics to recognize outstanding plasma physics research by a Physics of Plasmas author.
Filling the universe with knots shortly after it popped into existence 13.8 billion years ago provides a neat explanation for why we inhabit a three-dimensional world. That is the basic idea advanced by an out-of-the-box theory developed by an international team of physicists.
For 40 years, the Death Star has remained one of science fiction’s most iconic figures. The image of Alderaan’s destruction at the hands of the Death Star’s superlaser is burned into the memory of millions of fans. But it’s long been argued that the technology utilized by the Death Star could never make the jump from sci-fi into reality – scientific theory says that rather than converging and combining their energy, the beams would just pass through one another. That was true – until now. A team of researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) have added a plasma – a charged mixture of ions and free electrons -- to the concept and successfully combined several separate lasers into a superbeam.
For the first time, NASA scientists have detected light tied to a gravitational-wave event, thanks to two merging neutron stars in the galaxy NGC 4993, located about 130 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Hydra.
Ms. Rachel Hamburg, a master’s student in UAH’s Department of Space Science and Dr. Péter Veres, a postdoctoral fellow at UAH’s CSPAR, both serve as burst advocates for the GBM Team. As a result, they were two of the first to know of the near-simultaneous detection of gamma rays and gravitational waves from a distant pair of merging neutron stars.
Four Northwestern University astronomers are part of an international research collaboration that is the first to detect the spectacular collision of two neutron stars using both gravitational waves and light. The discovery ushers in an exciting new era in astronomy -- multi-messenger astronomy with gravitational waves -- less than two years after the first detection of gravitational waves opened a new window onto the universe. The astronomers hold leading roles on both sides of discovery, in gravitational-wave astronomy and electromagnetic astronomy.
New research published in Science details perhaps one of the biggest discoveries so far in the field of astrophysics: the merger of two neutron stars. Two graduate students and two professors at the University of Notre Dame contributed to studies published on the collision.
A team of scientists using the Dark Energy Camera (DECam), the primary observing tool of the Dark Energy Survey, was among the first to observe the fiery aftermath of a recently detected burst of gravitational waves, recording images of the first confirmed explosion from two colliding neutron stars ever seen by astronomers.
Gold’s origin in the Universe has finally been confirmed, after a gravitational wave source was seen and heard for the first time ever by an international collaboration of researchers, with astronomers at the University of Warwick playing a leading role.
On Aug. 17, scientists around the globe were treated to near-simultaneous observations by separate instruments that would ultimately be confirmed as the first measurement of the merger of two neutron stars and its explosive aftermath.
Demonstrating the microfluidic-based, mini-metagenomics approach on samples from hot springs shows how scientists can delve into microbes that can’t be cultivated in a laboratory.
Oak Ridge National Laboratory nuclear physicists and their partners are using America’s most powerful supercomputers to characterize behavior of objects, from subatomic neutrons to neutron stars, that differ dramatically in size yet are closely connected by physics.
A Columbia team has definitively observed an intensely studied anomaly in condensed matter physics—the even-denominator fractional quantum Hall state—via transport measurement in bilayer graphene. “Observing the 5/2 state in any system is a remarkable scientific opportunity, since it encompasses some of the most perplexing concepts in modern condensed matter physics, such as emergence, quasi-particle formation, quantization, and even superconductivity …[It may have] great potential for real-world applications, particularly in quantum computing.” (Science)
Nuclear physicists are now poised to embark on a new journey of discovery into the fundamental building blocks of the nucleus of the atom. The completion of the 12 GeV Upgrade Project of the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility (CEBAF) at the Department of Energy's Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (Jefferson Lab) heralds this new era to image nuclei at their deepest level.
The University of Chicago’s Daniel Holz this morning saluted the three newest Nobel laureates in physics, with whom he worked as a member of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory. The Nobel Foundation honored Kip Thorne, Rainer Weiss and Barry Barish “for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves."
Holographic images of free-flowing air particles may help climate change and biological weapons watchdogs better monitor the atmosphere, according to a recent Kansas State University study. Principle investigator Matthew Berg, associate professor of physics, said the study, published in Nature's Scientific Reports, is key to understanding the aerosol composition of Earth's atmosphere.
In the journal Nature Physics, researchers report taking a first step toward controlling electrons’ behavior inside matter—and thus the first step down a long and complicated road that could eventually lead to the ability to create new states of matter at will.
Fifty years ago, scientists discovered that the Earth is occasionally hit by cosmic rays of enormous energies. Since then, they have argued about the source of those ultra-high energy cosmic rays—whether they came from our galaxy or outside the Milky Way. The answer is a galaxy or galaxies far, far away, according to a report published Sept. 22 in Science by the Pierre Auger Collaboration.
Prof. Daniel Zajfman's universal ion trap cools to a tenth of a degree above absolute zero. The new method does not depend on the type or the weight of the ion and, thus, might be used to investigate the properties of large biological molecules or nanoparticles, among other things.
Computational cosmologists at Berkeley Lab recently achieved a critical milestone in preparation for upcoming CMB experiments: scaling their data simulation and reduction framework TOAST to run on all 658,784 Intel Knights Landing Xeon Phi processor cores on NERSC’s Cori supercomputer. The team also implemented a new TOAST module to simulate the noise introduced when ground-based telescopes look at the CMB through the atmosphere.
Playdough and Legos are among the most popular childhood building blocks. But what could you use if you wanted to create something really small—a structure less than the width of a human hair? It turns out, a team of chemists has found, this can be achieved by creating particles that have both playdough and Lego traits.
UPTON, NY—Particles emerging from even the lowest energy collisions of small deuterons with large heavy nuclei at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC)—a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility for nuclear physics research at DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory—exhibit behavior scientists associate with the formation of a soup of quarks and gluons, the fundamental building blocks of nearly all visible matter.
Recent experiments conducted on the DIII-D National Fusion Facility suggest that up to 40 percent of high-energy particles are lost during tokamak fusion reactions because of Alfvén waves.
When the moon threw its shadow on the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory during the Aug. 21 partial solar eclipse, it created the perfect backdrop for the 45th annual SLAC Summer Institute (SSI). This year, the program was all about the fascinating universe. The two-week summer institute attracted an international crowd of 123 participants, mostly graduate students and postdoctoral researchers, who discussed “cosmic opportunities” in particle physics and astrophysics research with world-renowned experts in the field.
A new biomedical tool using nanoparticles that deliver transient gene changes to targeted cells could make therapies for a variety of diseases — including cancer, diabetes and HIV — faster and cheaper to develop, and more customizable.
Argonne and Columbia researchers reveal new significance to a decades-old chemical reaction theory, increasing our understanding of the interaction of gases, relevant to combustion and planetary atmospheres.
The American Physical Society has recognized Blair Ratcliff, an emeritus physicist at SLAC and Stanford University, with the 2017 Division of Particles and Fields Instrumentation Award “for the development of novel detectors exploiting Cherenkov radiation” – an advance that greatly enhanced BABAR’s capabilities and influenced the design of other experiments.
In an article published today (Thursday, Aug. 24) in an American Physical Society journal, researchers reported observing unexpected instantaneous phase shifts during atomic scattering.
Oak Ridge National Laboratory physicist Thomas M. Cormier provides an update of ALICE, “A Large Ion Collider Experiment” at CERN's Large Hadron Collider to explore the physics of the early universe.
Argonne scientists Matt Dietrich and Tom Peterka have received DOE Early Career Research Program awards. Peterka was awarded for his work to redefine scientific data models to be communicated, stored and analyzed more efficiently. Dietrich was recognized for his work probing potential new physics beyond the Standard Model that could help explain why matter came to dominate the universe.
Results from its first run indicate that XENON1T is the most sensitive dark matter detector on Earth. The sensitivity of the detector – an underground sentinel awaiting a collision that would confirm a hypothesis – stems from both its size and its “silence.”
Quantum physics teaches us that unobserved particles may propagate through space like waves. This is philosophically intriguing and of technological relevance: a research team at the University of Vienna has demonstrated that combining experimental quantum interferometry with quantum chemistry allows deriving information about optical and electronic properties of biomolecules, here exemplified with a set of vitamins. These results have been published in the journal "Angewandte Chemie International Edition".
In an experiment designed to mimic the conditions deep inside the icy giant planets of our solar system, scientists were able to observe “diamond rain” for the first time as it formed in high-pressure conditions. Extremely high pressure squeezes hydrogen and carbon found in the interior of these planets to form solid diamonds that sink slowly down further into the interior.