Category: SCIENCE

Many mavericks look to Einstein as a unique figure, whose lone genius revolutionized the Universe. The big problem? It isn’t true.

Many of us, when we think about scientists, think them as followers, rather than as trailblazers. Nearly all of them simply gobble up the prevailing wisdom of the day, falling into line by following accepted lines of thinking with barely any imagination at all. Then, in an epic twist, a freethinker comes along — someone with a towering intellect but little-to-no experience, who maybe even lacks a formal education in the field — and they immediately see things that no one else has ever seen before. With just a little bit of hard work, they find solutions to puzzles that have stymied the greatest minds prior to them. This idea of a lone, maverick genius lives on in popular culture. Many of us, as a result, believe that if we had the good fortune of coming into a field just like that, we could be the ones who’d make those great breakthroughs that the world’s greatest professionals had all missed.

That’s the myth we frequently tell ourselves about “lone geniuses” throughout history, with the most famous and most common example served up being that of Albert Einstein. The common narrative is that Einstein, an outcast and a dropout…

What are dark matter and dark energy? The large-scale structure of the cosmos encodes them both, with ESA’s Euclid mission leading the way.

Measuring our Universe is challenging from within the Milky Way.

Optical measurements pinpoint stars, while longer wavelengths reveal dust.

From space, ESA’s Euclid mission has grander aims.

Over six years, total, it will map out huge areas of the entire sky.

These maps aren’t merely large-area, but also deep and high-resolution.

The most common visual depictions of the history of the Universe show the Big Bang as a growing tube with an “ignition” point. Why is that?

For thousands of untold generations, humanity has pondered our cosmic origins with a sense of awe and mystery, as though it were akin to pondering the nature of God. But over the course of the 20th century, a clear picture emerged as supported by an overwhelming suite of scientific evidence: the scenario of the hot Big Bang. A finite amount of time ago, the Universe began from a hot, dense, relatively uniform but rapidly expanding state, and has evolved and cooled ever since. Today, 13.8 billion years after that event, humanity has been able to reconstruct our cosmic history, from those earliest moments to the present day, explaining the formation of elements, atoms, stars, galaxies, the cosmic web, rocky planets, and eventually, intelligent life as well.

In many ways, it truly is the greatest story ever told: not a biblical or philosophical or poetic account of all of creation, but a scientific one. And yet, when we see it depicted, visually, it often looks like a fluted glass, tipped on its side, that flares at one end and closes on the other. Some have likened it to a tube or a cylinder, including Jennifer…

An in-depth interview with astronomer Kelsey Johnson, whose new book, Into the Unknown, explores what remains unknown about the Universe.

When it comes to understanding the entire Universe, there are impressive lists one can make about both what we do and what we don’t yet understand, at least, in a provisional sense. Modern science, particularly with a view to the theoretical and experimental/observational advances of the 20th and 21st century, has made sense of an enormous number of details in our cosmic past. We understand that:

• our Universe is expanding,
• that it can trace its history back to a hotter, denser, more uniform past,
• with the earliest phases describable by a hot Big Bang,
• which itself was preceded by a phase of cosmic inflation,

and that all that we see and experience today — stars, galaxies, planets, moons, the cosmic web, and even life itself — having arisen in the aftermath of these impressive events in our shared history.

As impressive as these cosmic “knowns” are, there remains much to still explain. Why do the fundamental constants have the values that they do, and are there any…

The Universe changes remarkably over time, with some entities surviving and others simply decaying away. Is this cosmic evolution at work?

Here on Earth, all living organisms obey certain rules and laws, and are subject to the phenomenon of evolution, including (and often, primarily) through the process of natural selection. Organisms, in terms of:

• the functions they can perform,
• the structures they possess,
• and the underlying genetic sequences that encode them,

all of which largely determine their biology, all change over time, or evolve. Some organisms, or even entire groups of organisms, will go extinct when resources run scarce or competitors arise, while others will survive, giving rise to future organisms whose lineages will persist. The survivors are selected for, naturally, while those who go extinct are selected against, naturally.

Although the mechanism of natural selection was only uncovered in the 1800s, with the work of Alfred Russell Wallace and Charles Darwin, there are certainly analogous processes of evolution and — from a certain point of view — natural selection that occur on cosmic scales as well. How…

Artificial intelligence is much more than image generation and smart-sounding chatbots; it’s also a Nobel-worthy endeavor rooted in physics!

When most of us think of AI, we think of chatbots like ChatGPT, of image generators like DALL-E, or of scientific applications like AlphaFold for predicting protein folding structures. Very few of us, however, think about physics as being at the core of artificial intelligence systems. But the notion of an artificial neural network indeed came to fruition first as the result of physics studies across three disciplines — biophysics, statistical physics, and computational physics — all fused together. It’s because of this seminal work, undertaken largely in the 1980s, that the widespread uses of artificial intelligence and machine learning that permeate more and more of daily life are available to us today.

The core of AI’s capabilities are rooted in the ability to recognize patterns within data, even incomplete or corrupted data. Our brains seem to do this automatically, but AI is capable of far surpassing, even in a generalized form, what even specialized and expertise-possessing humans cannot. Today, AI has scientific applications where it outstrips humans ranging from astronomy to medicine to…

Interferometry gave us a black hole’s event horizon, but that was in the radio. What can we accomplish with a new optical interferometer?

It’s hard to imagine, but it was only five years ago, in 2019, that humanity feasted our collective eyes on the first direct image of a black hole’s event horizon. Thanks to the technique of very long baseline interferometry and the power of arrays of radio telescopes stitched together from all across the Earth, we were able to resolve the event horizon of the black hole M87*, despite the fact that it’s an impressive 55 million light-years away.

The Universe has been creating stars for nearly all 13.8 billion years of its history. But those photons can’t match the Big Bang’s light.

Although time might seem to pass slowly in some instances, it’s important to remember that our Universe has been around for a long time. It’s been 13.8 billion years since the hot Big Bang, and our entire cosmos has evolved by quite a large amount over that duration. As of right now, our cosmic vision extends for some 46.1 billion light-years in all directions, revealing somewhere between and estimated 6 and 20 trillion galaxies in the process. Among the typical large galaxies, there’s an average of hundreds of billions of stars contained inside; although most galaxies are small and low in mass, this still adds up to a cumulative 2 × 10²¹ stars.

Inside them, each star is made of perhaps an average of around 10⁵⁷ atoms. There’s a lot that’s happened in our Universe, but most of it — including the formation of most stars — is a part of our cosmic past, not our present or future. In fact, we can reconstruct the entire star-formation history of the Universe via a variety of methods, including by surveying the stars and galaxies found at all different epochs throughout cosmic history. One important piece of evidence…

The Parker Solar Probe is about to undergo its seventh encounter with Venus on its journey towards the Sun. Here’s how fast it’ll go.

On September 30, 2024, the Parker Solar Probe reached its 21st perihelion: its closest approach to the Sun.

Presently, perihelion is only 7.87 million km (4.89 million miles) from the Sun’s surface.

Its novel heat shield enables science operations under these extreme conditions.

From closest approach, the Sun appears 28 times larger than terrestrial views.

In all directions, at great distances, the Universe looks younger, more uniform, and less evolved. Does that mean Earth must be the center?

There are some remarkable and surprising facts about the Universe, but three of them, put together, force us into a profound set of restrictions on existence itself.

1. The Universe, on the largest scales, appears to be isotropic, or the same in all directions. No matter how far away we look, no direction appears to be “preferred” or to exhibit different properties than any other.
2. Also, on the largest cosmic scales, the Universe appears to be homogeneous, or the same at all locations. Whether we look “here” or “there” or “anywhere else,” we see roughly the same temperatures, densities, numbers of galaxies, etc., so long as we sample a large enough region of space.
3. And finally, the farther away we look in terms of distance — again, equally in all directions — the farther back we are seeing in time: seeing the Universe as it was at earlier and earlier moments.

Those three facts, of isotropy, homogeneity, and evolution in time, are some of the hallmarks of modern cosmology: both theoretically and observationally. But what does that mean…