If humanity wants to travel between stars, people are going to need to travel faster than light. New research suggests that it might be possible to build warp drives and beat the galactic speed limit.
Scientists launch a balloon designed to measure ozone levels.
NOAA/Unsplash
Field theory describes the universe as energy flowing along unending lines. With this perspective, it is possible to define a new fundamental building block of matter.
A portrait of Albert Einstein on a transformer station in St.Petersburg, Russia.
(Shutterstock)
There are two types of time travel: going back in time and going forward in time. And remarkably, people can feel time at different rates - but usually don’t notice it.
Woodcut from Camille Flammarion’s 1888 book L'Atmosphère : météorologie populaire. The caption reads: ‘A missionary of the Middle Ages tells that he had found the point where the sky and the Earth touch’ and continues, ‘What is there, then, in this blue sky, which certainly exists, and which veils the stars during the day?’
Wikipedia
Albert Einstein may have been the ultimate example of a visionary genius, but that did not stop him from twice losing his way due to beliefs that were perhaps not so scientific.
A white dward (centre) and its companion pulsar make for an excellent natural gravitational laboratory.
Mark Myers/OzGrav
One of Einstein’s weirder predictions is that massive, spinning objects exert a drag on space-time itself. Now an orbiting pair of unusual stars has revealed this effect in action.
Finally dragged out of the shadows.
Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration /
Edgar Allen Poe, Sigmund Freud and cognitive scientists have all wrestled with the human tendency to behave in ways that are irrational and self-defeating.
The crucial phase of our discovery of black holes took place in a suitably dark period of human history – World War II.
The region around the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way, imaged with South Africa’s MeerKAT telescope.
South African Radio Astronomy Observatory (SARAO)
It’s all about the strong gravitational field of the black hole.
An artist’s impression of the path of star S2 as it passes very close to the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way. The very strong gravitational field causes the colour of the star to shift slightly to the red. (Size and colour exaggerated for clarity.)
ESO/M. Kornmesser
Astronomers traced a single star as it passed close to the black hole at the centre of our galaxy, and detected the telltale signature of Einstein’s gravity in action.
Exactly 99 years after Einstein’s theory of general relativity was proven right in our own solar system, scientists show that it also holds true for entire galaxies.
Jets from Centaurus A.
ESO/WFI (Optical); MPIfR/ESO/APEX/A.Weiss et al. (Submillimetre); NASA/CXC/CfA/R.Kraft et al. (X-ray
Jets from supermassive black holes behave in mysterious ways. Now scientists have now worked out what’s really going on.
New research concludes that there are many “Lost Einsteins” in America – children who had the ability to become inventors but didn’t because of where they were born.
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