Latest news with #physicists
Yahoo
21 hours ago
- Science
- Yahoo
Yes, It's Possible to Safely Jump Into a Black Hole, Scientists Say
Here's what you'll learn when you read this story: Scientists say humans could indeed enter a black hole to study it. Of course, the human in question couldn't report their findings—or ever come back. The reason is that supermassive black holes are much more hospitable. In a finding ripped from Interstellar, scientists say humans can indeed explore black holes firsthand. The catch? If you're going to jump into a black hole, don't plan on ever jumping back out into our universe. 'A human can do this only if the respective black hole is supermassive and isolated, and if the person entering the black hole does not expect to report the findings to anyone in the entire Universe,' Grinnell College physicists explain in a new article in The Conversation. That's because of special physics found in supermassive black holes, resulting in a combination of gravity and event horizon that wouldn't instantaneously pull the human being into a very dead piece of spaghetti. Because supermassive black holes are much bigger than stellar and intermediate black holes, all the parts of them are more spread out. A person falling in would make it to the event horizon—the border of the black hole beyond which not even light can escape, and where gravity is so strong that light will orbit the black hole like planets orbit stars—a lot sooner than in a smaller black hole. The person would stay cognizant and intact for longer. But, of course, they would never emerge—making this a one-way rollercoaster ride of scientific discovery into oblivion. Why does the math work this way? It's a matter of facts about black holes of different sizes, the researchers say: 'For a black hole with a mass of our Sun (one solar mass), the event horizon will have a radius of just under 2 miles. The supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy, by contrast, has a mass of roughly 4 million solar masses, and it has an event horizon with a radius of 7.3 million miles or 17 solar radii. This implies, due to the closeness of the black hole's center, that the black hole's pull on a person will differ by a factor of 1,000 billion times between head and toe, depending on which is leading the free fall.' This means avoiding 'spaghettification' (really!) and a safe, gentle float past the event horizon. Why does stuff go in but never come out? Well, scientists have only begun to understand the specific instances in which black holes eject energy or information—and that's unlikely to ever take the form of a missive, or even Morse code message, from a disappearing astronaut. Those black holes are very old, for example, with different physics than this special case. But, like in Interstellar, our imaginations reel at the idea of studying a black hole from the inside. Perhaps in some far future, someone will invent the right kind of tether to pull someone back out. And in that case, we can confirm some of the facts of life in a black hole, time dilation or not. Get the Issue Get the Issue Get the Issue Get the Issue Get the Issue Get the Issue Get the IssueGet the Issue Get the Issue You Might Also Like The Do's and Don'ts of Using Painter's Tape The Best Portable BBQ Grills for Cooking Anywhere Can a Smart Watch Prolong Your Life? Solve the daily Crossword
Yahoo
14-07-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Experts ask where the center of the universe is
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. About a century ago, scientists were struggling to reconcile what seemed a contradiction in Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity. Published in 1915, and already widely accepted worldwide by physicists and mathematicians, the theory assumed the universe was static – unchanging, unmoving and immutable. In short, Einstein believed the size and shape of the universe today was, more or less, the same size and shape it had always been. But when astronomers looked into the night sky at faraway galaxies with powerful telescopes, they saw hints the universe was anything but that. These new observations suggested the opposite – that it was, instead, expanding. Scientists soon realized Einstein's theory didn't actually say the universe had to be static; the theory could support an expanding universe as well. Indeed, by using the same mathematical tools provided by Einstein's theory, scientists created new models that showed the universe was, in fact, dynamic and evolving. I've spent decades trying to understand general relativity, including in my current job as a physics professor teaching courses on the subject. I know wrapping your head around the idea of an ever-expanding universe can feel daunting – and part of the challenge is overriding your natural intuition about how things work. For instance, it's hard to imagine something as big as the universe not having a center at all, but physics says that's the reality. First, let's define what's meant by "expansion." On Earth, "expanding" means something is getting bigger. And in regard to the universe, that's true, sort of. Expansion might also mean "everything is getting farther from us," which is also true with regard to the universe. Point a telescope at distant galaxies and they all do appear to be moving away from us. What's more, the farther away they are, the faster they appear to be moving. Those galaxies also seem to be moving away from each other. So it's more accurate to say that everything in the universe is getting farther away from everything else, all at once. This idea is subtle but critical. It's easy to think about the creation of the universe like exploding fireworks: Start with a big bang, and then all the galaxies in the universe fly out in all directions from some central point. But that analogy isn't correct. Not only does it falsely imply that the expansion of the universe started from a single spot, which it didn't, but it also suggests that the galaxies are the things that are moving, which isn't entirely accurate. It's not so much the galaxies that are moving away from each other – it's the space between galaxies, the fabric of the universe itself, that's ever-expanding as time goes on. In other words, it's not really the galaxies themselves that are moving through the universe; it's more that the universe itself is carrying them farther away as it expands. A common analogy is to imagine sticking some dots on the surface of a balloon. As you blow air into the balloon, it expands. Because the dots are stuck on the surface of the balloon, they get farther apart. Though they may appear to move, the dots actually stay exactly where you put them, and the distance between them gets bigger simply by virtue of the balloon's expansion. Now think of the dots as galaxies and the balloon as the fabric of the universe, and you begin to get the picture. Unfortunately, while this analogy is a good start, it doesn't get the details quite right either. Important to any analogy is an understanding of its limitations. Some flaws are obvious: A balloon is small enough to fit in your hand – not so the universe. Another flaw is more subtle. The balloon has two parts: its latex surface and its air-filled interior. These two parts of the balloon are described differently in the language of mathematics. The balloon's surface is two-dimensional. If you were walking around on it, you could move forward, backward, left, or right, but you couldn't move up or down without leaving the surface. Now it might sound like we're naming four directions here – forward, backward, left and right – but those are just movements along two basic paths: side to side and front to back. That's what makes the surface two-dimensional – length and width. The inside of the balloon, on the other hand, is three-dimensional, so you'd be able to move freely in any direction, including up or down – length, width and height. This is where the confusion lies. The thing we think of as the "center" of the balloon is a point somewhere in its interior, in the air-filled space beneath the surface. But in this analogy, the universe is more like the latex surface of the balloon. The balloon's air-filled interior has no counterpart in our universe, so we can't use that part of the analogy – only the surface matters. So asking, "Where's the center of the universe?" is somewhat like asking, "Where's the center of the balloon's surface?' There simply isn't one. You could travel along the surface of the balloon in any direction, for as long as you like, and you'd never once reach a place you could call its center because you'd never actually leave the surface. In the same way, you could travel in any direction in the universe and would never find its center because, much like the surface of the balloon, it simply doesn't have one. Part of the reason this can be so challenging to comprehend is because of the way the universe is described in the language of mathematics. The surface of the balloon has two dimensions, and the balloon's interior has three, but the universe exists in four dimensions. Because it's not just about how things move in space, but how they move in time. Our brains are wired to think about space and time separately. But in the universe, they're interwoven into a single fabric, called 'space-time.' That unification changes the way the universe works relative to what our intuition expects. And this explanation doesn't even begin to answer the question of how something can be expanding indefinitely – scientists are still trying to puzzle out what powers this expansion. So in asking about the center of the universe, we're confronting the limits of our intuition. The answer we find – everything, expanding everywhere, all at once – is a glimpse of just how strange and beautiful our universe is. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Yahoo
14-07-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Scientists Detect Sign of Something Impossible Out in Deep Space
The very concept of black holes seems improbable. Albert Einstein infamously refused to believe they could exist, even though his theory of general relativity was instrumental in predicting them. Now, scientists have witnessed evidence of something about these baffling cosmic monstrosities that further stretches the boundaries of both physics and credulity: a titanic collision of two already enormous black holes so utterly extreme that it has scientists wondering if the event they seem to have detected is even possible. As detailed in a new yet-to-be-peer-reviewed paper by a consortium of physicists, the resulting black hole, whose signal has been designated GW231123, boasts an astonishing mass about 225 times that of our Sun — easily making it the largest black hole merger ever detected. Previously, the record was held by a merger that formed a black hole of about 140 solar masses. "Black holes this massive are forbidden through standard stellar evolution models," Mark Hannam at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), which made the detection, said in a statement about the work. "This is the most massive black hole binary we've observed through gravitational waves, and it presents a real challenge to our understanding of black hole formation." Black holes can produce huge, propagating ripples in spacetime called gravitational waves, which were predicted by Einstein back in 1916. Nearly 100 years later, LIGO — which consists of two observatories on opposite corners of the US — made history by making the first ever detection of these cosmic shudders. The merger was first spotted in November 2023 in a gravitational wave, GW231123, that lasted just a fraction of a second. Even so, it was enough to infer the properties of the original black holes. One had a mass roughly 137 times the mass of the Sun, and the other was around 103 solar masses. During the lead up to the merger, the pair circled around each other like fighters in a ring, before finally colliding to form one. These black holes are physically problematic because it's likely that one, if not both of them, fall into an "upper mass gap" of stellar evolution. At such a size, it's predicted that the stars that formed them should have perished in an especially vicious type of explosion called a pair-instability supernova, which results in the star being completely blown apart, leaving behind no remnant — not even a black hole. Some astronomers argue that the "mass gap" is really a gap in our observations and not the cause of curious physics. Nonetheless, the idea is "a hill at least some people were willing to get wounded on, if not necessarily die on," Cole Miller of the University of Maryland, who was not involved in the research, told ScienceNews. But perhaps the black holes weren't born from a single star. "One possibility is that the two black holes in this binary formed through earlier mergers of smaller black holes," Hannam said in the statement. Equally extreme as their weight classes are their ludicrously fast spins, with the larger spinning at 90 percent of its maximum possible speed and the other at 80 percent, both of which are equal to very significant fractions of the speed of light. In earthly terms, it's somewhere around 400,000 times our planet's rotation speed, according to the scientists. "The black holes appear to be spinning very rapidly — near the limit allowed by Einstein's theory of general relativity," Charlie Hoy, a member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration at the University of Portsmouth, said in the statement. "That makes the signal difficult to model and interpret. It's an excellent case study for pushing forward the development of our theoretical tools." The researchers will present their findings at the GR-Amaldi meeting in Glasgow, which takes place this week. "It will take years for the community to fully unravel this intricate signal pattern and all its implications," according to LIGO member Gregorio Carullo at the University of Birmingham — so, tantalizingly, we're likely only scratching the surface of this mystery. More on space: James Webb Space Telescope Spots Stellar Death Shrouds
Gizmodo
09-07-2025
- Science
- Gizmodo
Record-Setting Qubit Performance Marks Important Step Toward Practical Quantum Computing
The promise of so-called 'quantum advantage' is simple. By harnessing the counterintuitive rules of quantum mechanics, quantum computers should be able to—in theory—surpass the computational potential of any classical supercomputer. But before quantum advantage drastically changes information technology as we know it, researchers have yet to address the many hurdles that are preventing quantum computers from entering into the mainstream. That said, quantum computing as a field has evolved dramatically over the last few years, and physicists are increasingly getting better at dealing with the extreme quirkiness of these potentially revolutionary systems. One such breakthrough concerns qubits—the smallest unit of information for quantum computers, much like a classical bit (0 or 1) on an ordinary computer. In a paper published Tuesday in Nature Communications, researchers announced a major milestone in improving the quality of qubits: a record-breaking coherence time for transmon qubits, a type of superconducting qubit. Their record—a maximum duration of 1 millisecond—far surpasses the previous time of 0.6 milliseconds, set by Fermilab last year. Scientists are interested in coherence time for a variety of reasons. Unlike classical binary bits, qubits can exist in superpositions of multiple states, much like different points on a sphere. This particularity of qubits allows quantum bits to carry and process an exponentially larger load of data on a scale that far outperforms any conventional supercomputer. Ironically, it's this exact quality that also makes qubits extremely sensitive to background noise, meaning they 'kind of pick up everything you also don't want,' explained Mikko Möttönen, the paper's senior author, during a video call with Gizmodo. When this happens, the qubits lose the valuable information they contain in a process called qubit decoherence. To accommodate for this data loss, scientists commonly apply a procedure called quantum error correction, in which they place single, physical qubits (like a transmon chip) into an intricate circuit collectively referred to as a 'logical qubit,' said Ioan Pop, a physicist at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany, during a video call with Gizmodo. Although not involved in the study, Pop—a collaborator of Möttönen on a separate project—noted that such arrangements help quantum computers 'fight decoherence more effectively.' But quantum error correction can't completely recover the information lost from decoherence, prompting Möttönen and his team to investigate alternative approaches for fabricating the physical qubits themselves. The steps they took ranged from testing multiple wiring arrangements to simply making sure they had clean interfaces for the circuits. After multiple attempts, they stumbled upon a revision that resulted in a record-breaking coherence time of 1 millisecond. This might seem like an insignificantly small amount of time, but it's long enough for quantum computers to perform a tremendous number of complex operations, Möttönen explained (generally, qubits operate on a time of nanoseconds; one millisecond is equivalent to one thousand nanoseconds). Longer coherence time should reduce the amount of time and energy that goes into quantum error correction, Möttönen, a physicist at Aalto University in Finland, added. While there's no known way to completely eliminate qubit decoherence—a highly unlikely possibility—longer coherence times mean less frequent errors, especially when qubit numbers are scaled up, as is often the case with many existing quantum computers. For example, Google's Sycamore processor, which the company claimed had achieved quantum advantage in 2019, featured 53 qubits, whereas Quantinuum's processor, which supposedly outperformed Google's results, had 56 (to be clear, neither result, while impressive, actually achieved quantum advantage). 'I think the paper shows how much you can gain from being very careful with the fabrication,' said Pop. 'Am I surprised that clearing interfaces gives better qubits? I would say I'm not surprised. Am I impressed that they managed to do it? Yes—because it's not easy to control; it's basically like cooking, and it's very difficult to keep all parameters under control.' Having said that, the new result is more akin to one of 'probably a hundred or thousand more of these steps' to get to where we ultimately want quantum computers to go in terms of functionality, Pop added. 'I think what's super exciting is now that these quantum computers are already so accurate that you can do reasonable circuits,' Möttönen said. 'I think we just need them to be a little bit better [functionally], not just one random result but something more concrete. It will take a few years but not so long. It seems to be quite close.'
Yahoo
08-07-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
New study claims the universe will start shrinking in 7 billion years
If you purchase an independently reviewed product or service through a link on our website, BGR may receive an affiliate commission. How will the world end? While some, like Robert Frost, have waxed poetic about the end of life on Earth—fire or ice—others have been looking to science to solve the mystery. Even still, others have been looking at the bigger picture, trying to figure out when the entire universe will end. Now, a new study claims that the universe itself might start shrinking within the next 7 billion years, leading to what scientists call 'the Big Crunch.' The study was published by physicists from Cornell University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and several other institutions. Using data collected from many different astronomical surveys, including the Dark Energy Survey, the researchers have created a new model that predicts our universe will end with what scientists have long theorized will be a 'Big Crunch.' The model suggests the universe will end roughly 33.3 billion years after the Big Bang. Today's Top Deals XGIMI Prime Day deals feature the new MoGo 4 and up to 42% off smart projectors Best deals: Tech, laptops, TVs, and more sales Best Ring Video Doorbell deals Using that date, the researchers then began looking backward. So far, the universe is estimated to be around 13.8 billion years old. Based on that number and the model's prediction of when the universe will end, we have roughly 20 billion years before the universe collapses in on itself. This study, and the theory of the 'Big Crunch,' challenges long held assumptions that the universe will expand forever, eventually leading to a 'Big Freeze.' Instead, the researchers estimate that the universe will continue to expand for another 7 billion years. At that point, the universe will then begin contracting. Essentially, it will collapse in on itself until a single point remains, destroying everything. It's an interesting and somewhat terrifying theory, even if we aren't expecting it to happen in our lifetime. One easy way to think about it is to imagine the universe as a massive rubber band. As the universe expands, the rubber band stretches. But then it eventually reaches a point where it can't be stretched anymore, forcing the band to become stronger than its expansion force. This then causes everything to snap back together. It's a bit of a sad way for the universe to end, and I can't imagine what it would actually look like if there was any way to see it taking place. Luckily, it's not really something we have to worry about, and this research is far from actual confirmation that this is what will happen. For all we know, the theories could be incorrect, and the universe could indeed keep expanding forever. More Top Deals Memorial Day security camera deals: Reolink's unbeatable sale has prices from $29.98 See the
