black holes – Quanta Magazine

Mathematicians Prove Hawking Wrong About the Most Extreme Black Holes

Steve Nadis — Wed, 21 Aug 2024 14:31:25 +0000

To understand the universe, scientists look to its outliers. “You always want to know about the extreme cases — the special cases that lie at the edge,” said Carsten Gundlach, a mathematical physicist at the University of Southampton. Black holes are the enigmatic extremes of the cosmos. Within them, matter is packed so tightly that, according to Einstein’s general theory of relativity...

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Mathematicians Attempt to Glimpse Past the Big Bang

Steve Nadis — Fri, 31 May 2024 14:08:57 +0000

About 13.8 billion years ago, the entire cosmos consisted of a tiny, hot, dense ball of energy that suddenly exploded. That’s how everything began, according to the standard scientific story of the Big Bang, a theory that first took shape in the 1920s. The story has been refined over the decades, most notably in the 1980s, when many cosmologists came to believe that in its first moments...

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Can Information Escape a Black Hole?

Janna Levin — Thu, 11 Apr 2024 13:09:00 +0000

Nothing escapes a black hole … or does it? In the 1970s, the physicist Stephen Hawking described a subtle process by which black holes can “evaporate,” with some particles evading gravitational oblivion. That phenomenon, now dubbed Hawking radiation, seems at odds with general relativity, and it raises an even weirder question: If particles can escape, do they preserve any information about the...

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What Is Quantum Teleportation?

Janna Levin — Thu, 14 Mar 2024 13:00:37 +0000

Quantum teleportation isn’t just science fiction; it’s entirely real and happening in laboratories today. But teleporting quantum particles and information is a far cry from beaming people through space. In some ways, it’s even more astonishing. John Preskill, a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology, is one of the leading theoreticians of quantum computing and information.

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To See Black Holes in Stunning Detail, She Uses ‘Echoes’ Like a Bat

Michael Greshko — Mon, 12 Feb 2024 17:43:29 +0000

Unlike many astronomers, Erin Kara didn’t grow up star-struck. “I don’t have that story of being that little kid staring up at the stars and wanting to do this, which gave me some anxiety,” she said. “Did that make me a fake?” But after discovering astrophysics as an undergraduate, Kara was hooked. Now an observational astrophysicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology...

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