Whether we examine satellites orbiting around planets, planets orbiting around stars, stars moving around a galaxy, or galaxies moving within a galaxy cluster, the effects of gravity are what keep these objects moving in bound, stable orbits. Measuring the properties...
Taking us beyond the limits of any prior observatory, including all of the ground-based telescopes on Earth as well as Hubble, NASA’s JWST has shown us the most distant galaxies in the Universe ever discovered. If we assign 3D positions...
Rogue planets may be numerous in the galaxy, but it surprises most to learn that there are between 10 and 100,000 rogue planets for every star in our galaxy, putting the total number of planets wandering through the Milky Way...
From our own perspective on Earth, we’ve identified the presence of spiral arms.By viewing the Milky Way in infrared wavelengths of light, we can see through the galactic dust and view the distribution of stars and star-forming regions behind them....
Quantum gravity attempts to combine Einstein’s general theory of relativity with quantum mechanics. Quantum corrections to classical gravity are visualized as loop diagrams, as the one shown here in white. Alternatively, it’s possible that gravity is always classical and continuous,...
The Universe itself, through a variety of nuclear processes involving stars and stellar remnants, as well as other means, can naturally copiously produce nearly 100 elements of the periodic table. Neutron star mergers are known to produce the heaviest elements,...
When two particles are entangled in the quantum mechanical sense, it’s as though some sort of hidden, invisible connection exists between them, and that a seemingly “random” property of one member of the pair can be known to better than...
The excellent popular science book, Waves in an Impossible Sea: How everyday life emerges from the cosmic ocean, written by Matt Strassler (left), has been selected as Starts With A Bang’s best science book of 2024. (Credit: Matt Strassler)Matt Strassler’s...
The Firefly Sparkle galaxy observed with JWST (left) reveals ten bursty star clusters stretched and magnified by gravitational lensing. The reconstruction of the original galaxy (middle) is made possible by the creation of a map for the foreground lens, revealing...
The Google Willow chip is the first quantum chip to have more than 100 qubits, with 105 qubits to it. Its most significant advance is in quantum error-correction, but contrary to claims made by the founder and lead of Google...
