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Category: physics

A 100-solar-mass black hole merger ripples spacetime, and may flash in gamma rays

An international team from China and Italy has reported a possible cosmic encore to the landmark 2017 multi-messenger discovery. In November 2024, the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA observatories detected gravitational waves from a binary black hole merger, designated S241125n. Remarkably, just seconds later, satellites recorded a short gamma-ray burst (GRB) from the same region of the sky.

Typically, binary black hole mergers are not expected to produce electromagnetic counterparts. S241125n could be a very rare gravitational-wave event that has been linked to a GRB across multiple wavelengths, extending multi-messenger astronomy into a new regime. Although the association is not yet definitive and will require further follow-up, the probability of a chance coincidence appears low, making the result statistically intriguing while warranting caution.

The Abstraction Fallacy: Why AI Can Simulate But Not Instantiate Consciousness

The core issue: computation isn’t an intrinsic physical process; it’s an extrinsic, descriptive map. It logically requires an active, experiencing cognitive agent, a “mapmaker”, to alphabetize continuous physics into meaningful, discrete symbols.

Computational functionalism dominates current debates on AI consciousness. This is the hypothesis that subjective experience emerges entirely from abstract causal topology, regardless of the underlying physical substrate. We argue this view fundamentally mischaracterizes how physics relates to information. We call this mistake the Abstraction Fallacy. Tracing the causal origins of abstraction reveals that symbolic computation is not an intrinsic physical process. Instead, it is a mapmaker-dependent description. It requires an active, experiencing cognitive agent to alphabetize continuous physics into a finite set of meaningful states. Consequently, we do not need a complete, finalized theory of consciousness to assess AI sentience—a demand that simply pushes the question beyond near-term resolution and deepens the AI welfare trap. What we actually need is a rigorous ontology of computation. The framework proposed here explicitly separates simulation (behavioral mimicry driven by vehicle causality) from instantiation (intrinsic physical constitution driven by content causality). Establishing this ontological boundary shows why algorithmic symbol manipulation is structurally incapable of instantiating experience. Crucially, this argument does not rely on biological exclusivity. If an artificial system were ever conscious, it would be because of its specific physical constitution, never its syntactic architecture. Ultimately, this framework offers a physically grounded refutation of computational functionalism to resolve the current uncertainty surrounding AI consciousness.

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Galactic islands of tranquility: ‘Little red dots’ may have brewed life’s building blocks

Astronomers have found that both the core of our Milky Way and the earliest proto-galaxies in the universe share a surprising trait: They are unusually calm and quiet in terms of harsh radiation. This tranquility is not just a cosmic curiosity; it may be essential for forming complex molecules that provide the ingredients of life.

A new study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters highlights how the Milky Way’s center and mysterious early proto-galaxies known as “little red dots” (LRDs) harbor massive black holes within peaceful, dust-and gas-rich environments. These conditions create natural laboratories for prebiotic chemistry, suggesting that the universe may have supported life’s chemical precursors far earlier than previously imagined.

The work was led by Professor Remo Ruffini and Professor Yu Wang from the International Center for Relativistic Astrophysics Network (ICRANet) and the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF).

Seeing global trade through the lens of physics

New research from the Complexity Science Hub (CSH) shows why widely used algorithms for measuring economic complexity produce trustworthy results and how these tools may benefit diverse areas such as ecology, social science, and agentic AI. The paper is published in the journal Physical Review E.

The universe is humming with ripples in spacetime: Scientists just doubled our catalog of black hole and neutron star collisions

“The message from this catalog is: We are expanding into new parts of what we call ‘parameter space’ and a whole new variety of black holes,” LVK member Daniel Williams, of the University of Glasgow in the U.K., said in the statement. “We are really pushing the edges, and are seeing things that are more massive, spinning faster, and are more astrophysically interesting and unusual.”

The catalog also demonstrates just how sensitive the LVK detectors have become. Some of the neutron star mergers occurred up to 1 billion light-years away, while some of the black hole mergers occurred up to 10 billion light-years away. These detections have allowed scientists to test the theory that first predicted the existence of both black holes and gravitational waves, Einstein’s magnum opus theory of gravity, general relativity.

Physicists finally see strange magnetic vortices predicted 50 years ago

A team of physicists has experimentally confirmed a long-predicted sequence of exotic magnetic phases in an atomically thin material. When cooled, the material forms tiny magnetic vortices before transitioning into a second ordered magnetic state—exactly as predicted by a famous theoretical model from the 1970s. Observing both phases together for the first time validates key ideas about how magnetism behaves in two dimensions. The findings could help inspire ultracompact technologies built on nanoscale magnetic control.

Galaxy-group motion suggests slower expansion in our cosmic neighborhood

Two new studies have measured the expansion of the universe in our immediate cosmic neighborhood using a novel method that analyzes the motion of two nearby galaxy groups within their surrounding cosmic flow. The results indicate that the local universe is expanding more slowly than previously estimated, bringing measurements of nearby galaxies into close agreement with observations of the early universe. The findings also suggest that less dark matter is required to explain the dynamics of galaxies within these groups than previously assumed.

The two studies were recently published in Astronomy & Astrophysics by an international team including David Benisty from the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP). Each paper analyzes observational data for a different nearby galaxy group—the Centaurus A group and the M81 group—to determine both their masses and the value of the Hubble constant.

The Hubble constant describes how fast the universe expands, expressed as a ratio of the recessional velocity to the distance a galaxy has toward us. The Hubble constant is measured in km/s per Megaparsec, 1 Megaparsec being 3.3 million light years.

Oval orbit casts new light on black hole–neutron star mergers

Scientists have uncovered the first robust evidence of a black hole and neutron star crashing together but orbiting in an oval path rather than a perfect circle just before they merged. This discovery challenges long-standing assumptions about how these cosmic pairs form and evolve.

Researchers from the University of Birmingham, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, and Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics published their findings today (11 Mar) in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Most neutron star-black hole pairs are expected to adopt circular orbits long before merging. But the analysis of the gravitational-wave event GW200105 shows that this system traveled on an oval orbit long before merging to form a black hole 13 times more massive than the sun. An oval orbit is something never seen before in this kind of collision.

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