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...
Apollo 11 brought humans onto the surface of the Moon for the first time in 1969. Shown here is Buzz Aldrin setting up the Solar Wind experiment as part of Apollo 11, with Neil Armstrong snapping the photograph. (Credit: NASA/Apollo...
Traditionally, atoms are viewed as dense nuclei, a mix of protons and neutrons, surrounded by electrons that move in specific orbital paths. This picture is useful in some circumstances, but the full suite of quantum information encoded in an atom...
Our Universe, from the hot Big Bang until the present day, underwent a huge amount of growth and evolution, and continues to do so. Our entire observable Universe was approximately the size of a modest boulder some 13.8 billion years...
