gravitational waves – Quanta Magazine

Hopes of Big Bang Discoveries Ride on a Future Spacecraft

Elise Cutts — Wed, 17 Apr 2024 14:50:47 +0000

At a conference in Japan a few years ago, David Dunsky attended a talk about gravitational waves, ripples in the fabric of space-time created when massive objects like stars and black holes accelerate. Dunsky was a graduate student in particle physics at the time, and his interests seemingly lay elsewhere. Particle physicists seek the more fundamental truth underpinning the physical rules we’re...

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The Year in Physics

Nadia Drake — Thu, 21 Dec 2023 21:06:38 +0000

By one metric, this year’s biggest physics news happened 80 years ago. Yet while the success of a movie about the making of the atomic bomb was a surprise, the discoveries coming out of actual physics laboratories — including the grandest laboratory of them all, the universe itself — were no less impressive than the surge in interest about J. Robert Oppenheimer. The James Webb Space Telescope...

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Extra-Long Blasts Challenge Our Theories of Cosmic Cataclysms

Charlie Wood — Mon, 11 Dec 2023 15:22:13 +0000

On December 11, 2021, a beam of gamma rays — the most energetic form of light — slammed into NASA’s Swift satellite. Within 120 seconds, the satellite had swiveled toward the blast and spotted the glowing embers of a cosmic catastrophe. Ten minutes later, alerts went out to astronomers around the world. Among them was Jillian Rastinejad, a graduate student at Northwestern University.

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An Enormous Gravity ‘Hum’ Moves Through the Universe

Jonathan O'Callaghan — Thu, 29 Jun 2023 00:00:08 +0000

Astronomers have found an extra-low hum rumbling through the universe. The discovery, announced today, shows that extra-large ripples in space-time are constantly squashing and changing the shape of space. These gravitational waves are cousins to the echoes from black hole collisions first picked up by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) experiment in 2015.

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At Long Last, Mathematical Proof That Black Holes Are Stable

Steve Nadis — Thu, 04 Aug 2022 13:38:35 +0000

In 1963, the mathematician Roy Kerr found a solution to Einstein’s equations that precisely described the space-time outside what we now call a rotating black hole. (The term wouldn’t be coined for a few more years.) In the nearly six decades since his achievement, researchers have tried to show that these so-called Kerr black holes are stable. What that means, explained Jérémie Szeftel...

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