Recent content by Brian Koberlein
Maggie Chiang for Simons Foundation Illustration of two black holes about to merge. Gravitational wave astronomy has been a tremendous breakthrough in our understanding of black holes. We can now detect not just the electromagnetic spectrum of light, but also the very ripples of spacetime created by the mergers of stellar-mass black holes. But our detections of mergers are still tricky and require…
SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory Illustration of a quantum gravity calculation between the Earth and Moon. Trying to solve quantum gravity is frustrating. We have made tremendous progress in quantum theory, but it seems that every time we find a new quantum technique, there’s a reason it doesn’t quite work with gravity. Take, for example, the case of quantum fluctuations and…
NASA Goddard Spaceflight Center Infographic describing the best current theory on the evolution of PBHs. Black holes live forever, at least according to general relativity. Once material crosses a black hole’s event horizon, it is trapped forever. Until the last day of cosmic time. But we know that isn’t true. General relativity is a classical model. It doesn’t take into account…
CMG Lee A Venn Diagram of how the main theories of physics are interconnected. Modern cosmology is built upon three theoretical pillars: special relativity, Newtonian gravity, and quantum mechanics. Each is supported by a wealth of experimental evidence, but each describes the physical world in a way that contradicts the other two. Quantum theory describes the tiny. Objects driven by the…
LIGO/Caltech/MIT/R. Hurt (IPAC) Discoveries made by the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA (LVK) network since LIGO’s first detection of gravitational waves emanating from pairs of colliding black holes. General relativity stands as one of the bedrock theories in modern physics. Its strange view of relative time and space has been confirmed by countless experimental and observational tests, from rotational…
Jose-Luis Olivares, MIT In this illustration a quark zooms through quark-gluon plasma, creating a wake in the plasma. In its earliest moments, the Universe was hot and dense. A plasma sea of quarks and gluons out of which hydrogen, helium, and humans eventually formed. This early cosmic state is sometimes called the primordial soup, and thanks to new research, we now know just how fitting the term…
Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics Simulation of the gravitational lensing of starlight by a binary black hole. Most galaxies have a supermassive black hole at their center, but some galaxies have two. These supermassive binaries form when two galaxies collide and merge. We can detect some of these binaries, such as by observing the periodic changes of a quasar or by observing the…
Vladimir Vustyansky / NASA This illustration depicts a conceptual Lunar Crater Radio Telescope on the Moon’s far side. We now have direct images of two supermassive black holes: M87* and Sag A*. The fact that we can capture such images is remarkable, but they might be the only black holes we can observe. That is, unless we take radio astronomy to a whole new level. 1 It’s incredibly…
NSF/AUI/NSF NRAO/B. Saxton New research suggests that the highlighted Wolf-Rayet star may explode as a supernova within a million years. Supernovae play a central role in the birth of new stars. They provide a rich source of gas and dust to form stellar nurseries, and their explosions can trigger shockwaves that trigger the birth of new stars. But it all depends on where supernovae occur. A…
NASA/GSFC Illustration the evolution of the Universe from the Big Bang to today. Time again for a tale of things dark and mysterious. A tale of dark matter. It’s a well-told tale, but this time it involves an interactive dance between dark matter and neutrinos. 1 Dark matter is, of course, the majority of matter in the cosmos according to the standard model and, by definition, cannot…
Astrobiology Center, NINS Illustration of four baby planets in the V1298 Tau system in the process of becoming super-Earths and sub-Neptunes. The closest planet to the Sun is Mercury. It’s a tiny world, even smaller than Saturn’s moon Titan and Jupiter’s moon Ganymede. That’s unusual for a planetary system. Most star systems have a large world between the size of Earth and…
NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/J. da Silva Artist’s impression of an active supermassive black hole in the early universe. Nearly every galaxy has a supermassive black hole in its core. Whether the black hole forms first and then the galaxy around it—or the other way around—is still a matter of some debate, but we know the evolution of both are deeply connected. We can use that relationship to study the…
ESO/L. Calçada/M. Kornmesser Artist’s impression of strontium emerging from a neutron star merger. It’s quite a challenge to make an Earth-like world. You need enough mass to hold an atmosphere and generate a good magnetic field, but not so much mass that you hang on to light elements such as hydrogen and helium. You also need to be close enough to your star that you remain comfortably warm,…
NASA/SDO/Goddard Space Flight Center A giant sunspot seen at the edge of the Sun. The Sun is not only our closest stellar neighbor, it’s also the star we understand the most. As we’ve observed it over the centuries, we’ve learned that the Sun is not an immortal constant. It goes through active and quiet cycles, it has become warmer over geologic time scales, and it occasionally…
NASA GISS The Mars24 software displays a Mars sunclock, a graphical representation of the planet Mars showing its current standard Mars time. Do you know what time it is? It’s an easy question, right? Just look at your phone or watch. But is that really the exact time? Oh, well, for that you can look to Coordinated Universal Time, or UTC. It’s what your phone clock is synced to, give…
NASA/JPL-Caltech The typical artistic view of a Jupiter-like world (left) compared to a look based on new research (right). Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system. It’s also one of the largest planets in the Universe. There are planets out there with much more mass, but thanks to gravity, they are generally more dense, not “bigger.” This raises an interesting question…
Mike Peel; Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics, University of Manchester The Lovell Radio Telescope at Jodrell Bank Observatory, near Goostrey, Cheshire, England. If you ever feel like you are constantly on the move, that’s because you are. And not only in your daily life. You spin around the world once a day, the Earth dances with the Moon around the Sun, and the Sun and everything else in…
Volker Springel/Max Planck Institute For Astrophysics/SPL Simulation showing the web of galaxies and voids in the cosmos. Suppose you slammed together two neutrons at near-luminous speed. The resulting collision would create a cascade of particles from protons, electrons, and neutrinos to more exotic fare. We can’t predict the exact number or type of particles produced, but we do know one…
ESA/Hubble & NASA, ESO/ Lutz Wisotzki et al The early Universe as seen by the MUSE spectrograph on ESO’s Very Large Telescope. So first the Big Bang happens. Everything is incredibly hot and dense; there are photons flying everywhere, but they keep colliding with electrons and ionized nuclei. Then, finally after about 380,000 years the cosmos is becomes cool enough for atoms to stabilize. The…
Pixabay - Public Domain An illustration of Hawking radiation near a black hole. Hawking radiation has never been proved, but it’s generally thought to be real. Essentially, the argument is that when you combine black hole event horizons with quantum fuzziness, thermal energy can escape a black hole. We don’t have a fully quantum theory of gravity, but we do have several semi-classical…