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Thank you to Brilliant for Supporting PBS. To learn more go to https://brilliant.org/SpaceTime/
PBS Member Stations rely on viewers like you. To support your local station, go to: http://to.pbs.org/DonateSPACE
Author Heinrich Päs shares 5 key insights from his new book, The One: How an Ancient Idea Holds the Future of Physics.
Simulations show that nonlinear spacetime dynamics manifest in the postmerger gravitational-wave signal of binary black hole coalescence.
“Spacetime tells matter how to move; matter tells spacetime how to curve.” This statement by physicist John Wheeler captures a defining feature of general relativity: its prediction of nonlinear spacetime dynamics. Such nonlinear evolution should be most evident in energetic spacetime events such as merging black holes, prompting the question of whether we can test for it using observations of gravitational waves emitted during such mergers. Two independent teams, led by Keefe Mitman at the California Institute of Technology [1] and Mark Ho-Yeuk Cheung at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland [2], show that this is the case. Using numerical simulations, they show the presence of nonlinearity in postmerger gravitational-wave signals.
A pair of worlds that are just around the corner in cosmic terms look to be in the right spot to potentially host life as we know it.
A report in the February issue of the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics details the discovery of two exoplanets the orbit the red M-dwarf star GJ (or Gliese) 1002 in its habitable zone and are not far off from the mass of Earth.
These two characteristics top the list of things that make another planet worth getting excited about in terms of the odds it might have some sort of critters or even just primitive microorganisms hanging out.
A new model explains a possible route for the extraterrestrial rock before it blasted Earth.
A group of physicists may have discovered that black holes are actually made of and not only that but they may be responsible for the expansion of the universe itself.
Links to the research findings:
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/acb704
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/acac2e
Dr. Tamar Gutnick, first author and former postdoctoral researcher in the Physics and Biology Unit at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST), said, “If we want to understand how the brain works, octopuses are the perfect animal to study as a comparison to mammals. They have a large brain, an amazingly unique body, and advanced cognitive abilities that have developed completely differently from those of vertebrates.”
“Octopuses have eight powerful and ultra-flexible arms, which can reach anywhere on their body. If we tried to attach wires to them, they would immediately rip it off, so we needed to get the equipment out of their reach by placing it under their skin.”
West Virginia University physicists have made a breakthrough on an age-old limitation of the first law of thermodynamics.
Paul Cassak, professor and associate director of the Center for KINETIC Plasma Physics, and graduate research assistant Hasan Barbhuiya, both in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, are studying how energy gets converted in superheated plasmas in space.
Their findings, published in Physical Review Letters, will revamp scientists’ understanding of how plasmas in space and laboratories get heated up, and may have a wide variety of further applications across physics and other sciences.