Latest news with #spacetime
South China Morning Post
7 days ago
- Science
- South China Morning Post
China joins US in hunt for ripples in spacetime with new telescope in Tibet
High on the Tibetan Plateau, China has completed a cutting-edge telescope designed to detect ripples in spacetime from the dawn of the universe with the help of the United States – strengthening a global effort to probe how everything began. The Ali Cosmic Microwave Background Polarisation Telescope (AliCPT), perched at 5,250 metres (17,220 ft) in Tibet 's remote Ali prefecture, was finished this month after eight years of construction involving 16 institutions worldwide, including Stanford University, according to state broadcaster CCTV. Led by the Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP) in Beijing, the project is one of the few surviving examples of China-US collaboration in basic science at a time when geopolitical tensions have sharply curtailed joint research. Among the project's international partners, Stanford University played a key role in building and testing the telescope's detectors and readout systems, ensuring the 'brains' of the instrument could operate reliably in freezing conditions before being shipped to Tibet, according to a 2020 paper in Proceedings of SPIE. The cutting-edge Ali Cosmic Microwave Background Polarisation Telescope took eight years to build. Photo: Handout The US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) could also contribute to the project.
Yahoo
15-07-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Scientists detect biggest ever merger of two massive black holes
Scientists have detected ripples in space-time from the violent collision of two massive black holes that spiralled into one another far beyond the distant edge of the Milky Way. The black holes, each more than 100 times the mass of the sun, began circling each other long ago and finally slammed together to form an even more massive black hole about 10bn light years from Earth. The event is the most massive black hole merger ever recorded by gravitational wave detectors and has forced physicists to rethink their models of how the enormous objects form. The signal was recorded when it hit detectors on Earth sensitive enough to detect shudders in space-time thousands of times smaller than the width of a proton. 'These are the most violent events we can observe in the universe, but when the signals reach Earth, they are the weakest phenomena we can measure,' said Prof Mark Hannam, the head of the Gravity Exploration Institute at Cardiff University. 'By the time these ripples wash up on Earth they are tiny.' Evidence for the black hole collision arrived just before 2pm UK time on 23 November 2023 when two US-based detectors in Washington and Louisiana, operated by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (Ligo), twitched at the same time. The sudden spasm in space-time caused the detectors to stretch and squeeze for one tenth of a second, a fleeting moment that captured the so-called ringdown phase as the merged black holes formed a new one that 'rang' before settling down. Analysis of the signal revealed that the colliding black holes were 103 and 137 times the mass of the sun and spinning about 400,000 times faster than Earth, close to the theoretical limit for the objects. 'These are the highest masses of black holes we've confidently measured with gravitational waves,' said Hannam, a member of the Ligo scientific collaboration. 'And they're strange, because they are slap bang in the range of masses where, because of all kinds of weird things that happen, we don't expect black holes to form.' Most black holes form when massive stars run out of nuclear fuel and collapse at the end of their life cycle. The incredibly dense objects warp space-time so much that they create an event horizon, a boundary within which even light cannot escape. Physicists at Ligo suspect the black holes that merged were themselves products of earlier mergers. That would explain how they came to be so massive and why they were spinning so fast, as merging black holes tend to impart spin on the object they create. 'We've seen hints of this before, but this is the most extreme example where that's probably what's happening,' Hannam said. Scientists have detected about 300 black hole mergers from the gravitational waves they generate. Until now, the most massive merger known produced a black hole about 140 times the mass of the sun. The latest merger produced a black hole up to 265 times more massive than the sun. Details are to be presented on Monday at the GR-Amaldi meeting in Glasgow. Before the first gravitational wave detectors were built in the 1990s, scientists could observe the universe only through electromagnetic radiation such as visible light, infrared and radio waves. Gravitational wave observatories provide a new view of the cosmos, allowing researchers to see events that were otherwise hidden from them. 'Usually what happens in science is, when you look at the universe in a different way, you discover things you didn't expect and your whole picture is transformed,' said Hannam. 'The detectors we have planned for the next 10 to 15 years will be able to see all the black hole mergers in the universe, and maybe some surprises we didn't expect.'
Entrepreneur
14-07-2025
- Business
- Entrepreneur
How Culture Shapes Success More Than Capital or Innovation
Entrepreneurs who treat culture as an add-on rather than the foundational context that shapes all business rules and behaviors are setting themselves up for failure. Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. Entrepreneurship is not simply a matter of innovation or capital investment. It is the act of entering a domain — an economic spacetime — defined by its own norms, expectations and conduct. Entrepreneurs often refer to these contextual forces as "culture," but they rarely unpack what this term truly means. In practice, culture is not an abstract or academic concern; it is the very infrastructure that governs business behavior in a given domain. A business domain is not just a market opportunity. It is a new geography or a different industry that an entrepreneur steps into to venture a business or to initiate a new transaction. Each domain is embedded in a specific spacetime, and each spacetime inherits a living, breathing culture. Entrepreneurs who fail to understand this culture face constraints not because of written laws, but because of unwritten norms — what people expect, how they interact, what they value and how they trust. The interdependency between law and culture Culture is not separate from the law. It is the foundation of it. Contemporary legal systems are not engineered in a vacuum; they are legislated through the lens of prevailing socio-economic customs. These customs form the invisible boundary of what is acceptable or expected. Thus, culture is the primary source of legal context, not merely its reflection. Laws are written with assumptions about how people behave. They are structured around what society permits and prohibits, which is itself a derivative of culture. Understanding this interdependency between law and culture is not optional for entrepreneurs — it is foundational. The governing rules of any spacetime, be they legal or commercial, reflect the conduct of the people within it. They mirror the accepted norms, the unwritten etiquette of interaction and the systemic trust or distrust that fuels the economy. In simpler terms, the rules of the game are set by how the society functions. And society functions according to the culture that shapes it. Yet most entrepreneurs approach culture as a peripheral topic, something to be managed through branding, communication or internal HR. That is a mistake. Culture is not an add-on to business. It is the context in which the business exists. Studying regulations without studying culture is like learning the words of a language without understanding their meaning. You may comply on paper but fail in practice. Business culture must not be generalized or imported. It must be adaptive and contextual. Every entrepreneurial venture is embedded in a local spacetime, and the organization's culture must reflect that. A business operating in Tokyo cannot assume the cultural rules of Seattle. A startup in fintech must not adopt the same cultural principles as a legacy manufacturing firm. Organizational culture, in this sense, is not a choice — it is a necessity. It must reflect the spacetime in which the business operates. This is why cultural studies are more essential than regulatory studies for entrepreneurs. Legal compliance is procedural. Cultural alignment is strategic. Councils and legal advisors may provide interpretations of existing regulations, but it is the entrepreneur — who architects the enterprise — who must understand the deeper context that surrounds those laws. Without this understanding, legal compliance becomes shallow, and the organization remains culturally incompatible with the domain it seeks to serve. Entrepreneurs must become anthropologists of their target spacetime. They must study the living patterns of behavior, the symbolic codes, the assumptions and the embedded logics that people carry in their daily economic transactions. These are not just soft insights. They are the operating system of the domain. The more an entrepreneur understands these codes, the better positioned they are to design a business model that fits, rather than disrupts, the flow of that spacetime. Cultural alignment is not only about market entry. It defines internal operations as well. How people work, how they communicate, how they evaluate risk and how they define leadership — these are all cultural constructs. An organization built without reference to the culture in which it operates will struggle with internal coherence. It may recruit the right talent, develop the right products and access the right capital, but it will suffer from persistent misalignment with its environment. That misalignment is what causes business models to fail — not the lack of innovation, but the lack of resonance. Furthermore, understanding culture allows the entrepreneur to decode the "why" behind every regulation. When you grasp the cultural foundations of a society, you no longer see laws as arbitrary rules to follow. You see them as social contracts emerging from a collective understanding of order, fairness and risk. This is crucial because it transforms the entrepreneur's relationship with the legal environment — from external compliance to internal coherence. The mindset shift you need to make What does this mean in practical terms? It means the entrepreneur must shift from a legalistic mindset to a contextual one. Instead of asking, "What are the rules?" they must ask, "Why do these rules exist in this form, at this time, in this place?" That question leads to a deeper appreciation of the spacetime context and informs better decision-making — not only for legal and operational planning but also for brand positioning, partnership formation and long-term scaling. The entrepreneur's role is to synthesize. Not just to bring together capital, labor and technology, but to fuse their venture with the cultural DNA of the domain they enter. This synthesis is what makes a business not just viable but sustainable. It allows the business to evolve with its spacetime rather than against it. In the end, entrepreneurship is a contextual act. It does not exist in a vacuum. It is always situated, always embedded, always bound by the spacetime it occupies. Success does not come from disrupting blindly; it comes from aligning wisely. Entrepreneurs must, therefore, treat culture not as a variable but as a constant — one that defines the possibilities and limits of their business domain.
The Guardian
14-07-2025
- Science
- The Guardian
Scientists detect biggest ever merger of two massive black holes
Scientists have detected ripples in space-time from the violent collision of two massive black holes that spiralled into one another far beyond the distant edge of the Milky Way. The black holes, each more than 100 times the mass of the sun, began circling each other long ago and finally slammed together to form an even more massive black hole about 10bn light years from Earth. The event is the most massive black hole merger ever recorded by gravitational wave detectors and has forced physicists to rethink their models of how the enormous objects form. The signal was recorded when it hit detectors on Earth sensitive enough to detect shudders in space-time thousands of times smaller than the width of a proton. 'These are the most violent events we can observe in the universe, but when the signals reach Earth, they are the weakest phenomena we can measure,' said Prof Mark Hannam, the head of the Gravity Exploration Institute at Cardiff University. 'By the time these ripples wash up on Earth they are tiny.' Evidence for the black hole collision arrived just before 2pm UK time on 23 November 2023 when two US-based detectors in Washington and Louisiana, operated by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (Ligo), twitched at the same time. The sudden spasm in space-time caused the detectors to stretch and squeeze for one tenth of a second, a fleeting moment that captured the so-called ringdown phase as the merged black holes formed a new one that 'rang' before settling down. Analysis of the signal revealed that the colliding black holes were 103 and 137 times the mass of the sun and spinning about 400,000 times faster than Earth, close to the theoretical limit for the objects. 'These are the highest masses of black holes we've confidently measured with gravitational waves,' said Hannam, a member of the Ligo scientific collaboration. 'And they're strange, because they are slap bang in the range of masses where, because of all kinds of weird things that happen, we don't expect black holes to form.' Most black holes form when massive stars run out of nuclear fuel and collapse at the end of their life cycle. The incredibly dense objects warp space-time so much that they create an event horizon, a boundary within which even light cannot escape. Physicists at Ligo suspect the black holes that merged were themselves products of earlier mergers. That would explain how they came to be so massive and why they were spinning so fast, as merging black holes tend to impart spin on the object they create. 'We've seen hints of this before, but this is the most extreme example where that's probably what's happening,' Hannam said. Scientists have detected about 300 black hole mergers from the gravitational waves they generate. Until now, the most massive merger known produced a black hole about 140 times the mass of the sun. The latest merger produced a black hole up to 265 times more massive than the sun. Details are to be presented on Monday at the GR-Amaldi meeting in Glasgow. Before the first gravitational wave detectors were built in the 1990s, scientists could observe the universe only through electromagnetic radiation such as visible light, infrared and radio waves. Gravitational wave observatories provide a new view of the cosmos, allowing researchers to see events that were otherwise hidden from them. 'Usually what happens in science is, when you look at the universe in a different way, you discover things you didn't expect and your whole picture is transformed,' said Hannam. 'The detectors we have planned for the next 10 to 15 years will be able to see all the black hole mergers in the universe, and maybe some surprises we didn't expect.'
The Guardian
13-07-2025
- Science
- The Guardian
Scientists detect biggest ever merger of two massive black holes
Scientists have detected ripples in space-time from the violent collision of two massive black holes that spiralled into one another far beyond the distant edge of the Milky Way. The black holes, each more than 100 times the mass of the sun, began circling each other long ago and finally slammed together to form an even more massive black hole about 10bn light years from Earth. The event is the most massive black hole merger ever recorded by gravitational wave detectors and has forced physicists to rethink their models of how the enormous objects form. The signal was recorded when it hit detectors on Earth sensitive enough to detect shudders in space-time thousands of times smaller than the width of a proton. 'These are the most violent events we can observe in the universe, but when the signals reach Earth, they are the weakest phenomena we can measure,' said Prof Mark Hannam, the head of the Gravity Exploration Institute at Cardiff University. 'By the time these ripples wash up on Earth they are tiny.' Evidence for the black hole collision arrived just before 2pm UK time on 23 November 2023 when two US-based detectors in Washington and Louisiana, operated by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (Ligo), twitched at the same time. The sudden spasm in space-time caused the detectors to stretch and squeeze for one tenth of a second, a fleeting moment that captured the so-called ringdown phase as the merged black holes formed a new one that 'rang' before settling down. Analysis of the signal revealed that the colliding black holes were 103 and 137 times the mass of the sun and spinning about 400,000 times faster than Earth, close to the theoretical limit for the objects. 'These are the highest masses of black holes we've confidently measured with gravitational waves,' said Hannam, a member of the Ligo scientific collaboration. 'And they're strange, because they are slap bang in the range of masses where, because of all kinds of weird things that happen, we don't expect black holes to form.' Most black holes form when massive stars run out of nuclear fuel and collapse at the end of their life cycle. The incredibly dense objects warp space-time so much that they create an event horizon, a boundary within which even light cannot escape. Physicists at Ligo suspect the black holes that merged were themselves products of earlier mergers. That would explain how they came to be so massive and why they were spinning so fast, as merging black holes tend to impart spin on the object they create. 'We've seen hints of this before, but this is the most extreme example where that's probably what's happening,' Hannam said. Scientists have detected about 300 black hole mergers from the gravitational waves they generate. Until now, the most massive merger known produced a black hole about 140 times the mass of the sun. The latest merger produced a black hole up to 265 times more massive than the sun. Details are to be presented on Monday at the GR-Amaldi meeting in Glasgow. Before the first gravitational wave detectors were built in the 1990s, scientists could observe the universe only through electromagnetic radiation such as visible light, infrared and radio waves. Gravitational wave observatories provide a new view of the cosmos, allowing researchers to see events that were otherwise hidden from them. 'Usually what happens in science is, when you look at the universe in a different way, you discover things you didn't expect and your whole picture is transformed,' said Hannam. 'The detectors we have planned for the next 10 to 15 years will be able to see all the black hole mergers in the universe, and maybe some surprises we didn't expect.'
