Tag: physics
-
Even after death, Stephen Hawking stirs up fresh cosmological tiffs and tributes
Physicist Stephen Hawking visited the Large Hadron Collider’s underground tunnel in 2013. (CERN Photo / Laurent Egli) The ashes of the late British physicist Stephen Hawking will get a fitting resting place in Westminster Abbey, near the graves of Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin. But you could argue that the true monuments to Hawking’s memory…
-
Breakthrough Prize ceremony shines glitzy scientific spotlight on cosmic mappers
A color-coded projection map of the full sky shows temperature variations as measured by NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe. (NASA Photo) This year’s Breakthrough Prizes, cast as the “Oscars of Science,” are going to genetic engineers, disease fighters, math whizzes — and the scientists on the cosmos-mapping team behind the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, or WMAP.…
-
No-surprise Nobel: LIGO physicists win prize for gravitational wave discoveries
The beamlines for the LIGO detector site at Hanford stretch out across the desert terrain of southeastern Washington. Each arm of the L-shaped detector is 2.5 miles long. (Credit: LIGO) This year’s Nobel Prize for physics is going, unsurprisingly, to three people who represent the hundreds of researchers behind the first direct detection of gravitational waves…
-
LIGO goes back to the gravity-wave grind
The beamlines for the LIGO detector site at Hanford stretch out across the desert terrain of southeastern Washington. Each arm of the L-shaped detector is 2.5 miles long. (Credit: LIGO) The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory is back on the hunt for ripples in spacetime, months after reporting the first signature of a black hole collision in gravitational…
-
Maybe black holes (and wormholes) aren’t as monstrous as we thought
Here’s one concept for the look of a black hole. Image: Ute Kraus, [CC BY-SA 2.5] via Wikimedia Commons Black holes may have gotten a bad rap. And wormholes just might be a realistic way to travel Star Trek-style after all. Years ago, the traditional wisdom about those exotic cosmic phenomena was pretty forbidding: Once…
-
Hanford’s scientists finally spill gravitational-wave secrets – but they still can’t tell all
The beamlines for the LIGO detector site at Hanford stretch out across the desert terrain of southeastern Washington. Each arm of the L-shaped detector is 2.5 miles long. (Credit: LIGO) HANFORD, Wash. – Physicists here had to keep mum for nearly five months about the gravitational-wave breakthrough they helped make, but they made up for their…
-
Gravitational waves found! LIGO experiment watches two black holes smash together
A computer simulation shows two black holes shortly before they merge into one. (Credit: SXS) WASHINGTON, D.C. – After more than a decade of looking, scientists say they’ve detected the gravitational waves given off when two black holes merged into one bigger black hole. “Ladies and gentlemen, we have detected gravitational waves. We did it!” Caltech…
-
Super Thursday: LIGO schedules the big reveal about its gravitational wave quest
This 3-D visualization shows the gravitational waves produced by two orbiting black holes. (Credit: NASA) It looks as if scientists have chosen Thursday as the day to announce a potentially Nobel Prize-winning discovery: the first detection of gravitational waves, a century after they were predicted by Albert Einstein. After months of rumors, simultaneous events have…