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LIGO mirrors have been cooled to near their quantum ground state

Physics World

LIGO is designed to detect gravitational waves, but it is also proving to be a fantastic laboratory for pushing the limits of quantum physics. By cooling objects massive enough to potentially feel a detectable gravitational force, the researchers hope to open a new window into gravity’s possible effects on quantum mechanics.

Cooling 145
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Solitary stellar-mass black hole found wandering through the Milky Way

Physics World

Black holes with masses comparable to stars have been detected in our galaxy before, but their presence has always been inferred either by their interactions with a companion star, which create a glow at X-ray wavelengths, or from the gravitational waves that are produced when they collide. Vivienne Baldassare. Getting a kick.

2011 98
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Exploding stars alone cannot account for rapid heavy-element production, study reveals

Physics World

Their research suggests that other cataclysmic events, such as neutron star mergers, could be responsible for creating some heavy elements. million years, so plutonium-244 in Earth’s crust can originate from far older, more distant events. The research is described in Science. It has a half-life of 80.6

2017 93
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Concerning primordial black holes

Physics World

Some regions might have got so compressed that they underwent gravitational collapse to produce black holes.”. 1 Catalogue of collisions Observations of gravitational waves from LIGO, Virgo and KAGRA have added a lot of data to our knowledge of black holes, which was previously based solely on electromagnetic (EM) detections.

Radiation 116
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The opportunities and challenges of doing science in China

Physics World

In 2011 I returned to Australia to work at Curtin University and in 2017 moved to China to the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences (UCAS) in Beijing. It aims to detect gravitational-wave events, fast radio bursts, or supernovae on the largely unknown timescales of less than one day.

2026 107
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James Peebles: a life in cosmology

Physics World

The problem I have is that a “bang” connotes an event in space–time. My new book is an attempt to see the commonality around science, sociology and philosophy. No-one ever said science is logical. Oh, everyone says science is logical, but it’s not true. How could you distrust science if it could give you such a thing?

2019 111
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Physics: The Science of the Universe and Everything In It

Environmental Science

Along with chemistry and biology , physics completes the trinity of the original “hard” sciences - those that use testable predictions and hypotheses, experiments, and mathematics and modelling as opposed to the “soft” sciences which use more qualitative data and which relies far less on testing. What is Physics? Sponsored Content.