- 4385 - PHYSICS - in the year 2023? - The James Webb Space Telescope, now in year two of science operations, continues to return stunning images of the universe, and the trickle of science results from 2022 has now swelled into a torrent. From its perch a million miles away, JWST studies everything from the universe’s most distant galaxies to the planets and moons right next door. The telescope’s observations continually challenge well-established theories and force scientists to reimagine how familiar cosmic objects came to be.
------------------- 4385 - PHYSICS - in the year 2023
- Black holes are also at the center of one
of 2023’s most notable discoveries, and evidence for gravitational waves
produced by colliding supermassive black holes. To detect those ripples in
space-time, several astronomers scrutinized the cosmos for 15 years.
-
- The quantum world saw some remarkable
advances in quantum computing’s most basic hardware, the qubits that in their
final form could power enormously complex calculations. Researchers also made
improvements in quantum error correction, which remains one of the trickiest
problems to solve.
-
- JWST has also seen the light from galaxies
that glowed some 300 million years after the great Big Bang that created the
universe as we know it. In JWST images, those galaxies are “just so bright”. Astronomers are struggling to explain how
those galaxies grew so big so fast, as their size defy expectations.
-
- The same is true for the supermassive black
holes that anchor galaxies to the cosmic tapestry. Scientists expected to see a
few bulky black holes in the early universe, but JWST is spotting them by the
bucketful. And they’re showing up earlier, and with more heft, than
expected. Astronomers hope such
observations will reveal how those gargantuan black holes formed?
-
- In our galaxy’s Orion nebula, JWST recently
spotted 42 intriguing pairs of objects that orbit one another. These worlds
might be stars, or they might be free-floating planets. It’s hard to tell. But
either way, these enigmatic worlds don’t fit neatly into existing theories
describing how either stars or free-floating planets form.
-
- Quantum researchers have taken a step
toward developing a more reliable quantum computer. In this system, information
is stored topologically; it is woven into almost mythical particles that share
memories and remember their pasts. Braiding two of these “non-abelian anyons”
together stores information in the twists, thus, you can measure one or the
other without losing that information.
By maintaining nearly indestructible records of their journeys through
space and time, “non-abelian anyons” could offer the most promising platform
for building error-tolerant quantum computers.
-
- Scientists tackling the trickiness of
quantum error correction announced that they had developed a powerful new class
of codes that could help with the problem of flimsy, error-prone quantum bits.
-
- In a feat reminiscent of a magic trick,
scientists reported earlier this year that they had pulled energy out of a
vacuum. Or had they? Rather than conjuring something from nothing, physicists
managed to teleport energy over microscopic distances. The leap worked because
the team exploited the strange properties of the quantum vacuum, a peculiar
type of nothing that is actually imbued with a sort of sizzling quantum energy.
-
- Earlier this year, scientists discovered a
new type of phase transition, akin to the transformation of a solid into a
liquid. Except this was a transition in the structure of information. When
quantum bits (or qubits) are entangled, measuring one reveals the states of any
others.
-
- When it comes to these systems, we throw
around the term “quantum” almost as if quantum and not-quantum exist in a
binary. That isn’t necessarily true. In the effort to quantify quantumness, or
the degree to which a quantum system cannot be simulated on a classical
computer, researchers recently unveiled a new metric, bringing the total known
metrics to three. First there was entanglement. Then there was “magic.” Now,
there’s “fermionic magic.”
-
- It’s an old problem in physics: Quantum
mechanics describes the world one way, Einstein’s theory of gravity another,
and when the two come together you.
Science has pioneered a computationally driven approach to quantum
gravity that involves deriving the shape of space-time from first
principles,searching for an even deeper fundamental “something” that might
connect the two.
-
- And yet quantum gravity keeps showing up in
the solutions to seemingly intractable paradoxes. A group of leading theorists believe they’ve
pinpointed the mistake that led to Hawking’s famous black hole information
paradox, in which indestructible information inside a black hole is seemingly
lost as the black hole evaporates.
-
- Hawking’s apparent mistake was that he (and
the generations of physicists that followed) didn’t realize that the normally
reliable “semiclassical” treatment of gravity can’t handle the complexity of
states a black hole can produce, unexpectedly breaking down at the black hole’s
outer surface. The group has now developed a more sophisticated theory of
gravity that can handle the region just inside the event horizon and doesn’t
violate any current experimental data.
-
- When galaxies collide, their supermassive
central black holes merge, This is a
smashup so violent that it shakes the very fabric of space-time itself. In
June, multiple international collaborations announced that they had found the
resulting gravitational waves. To do this, the teams used pulsars, rapidly
spinning stellar corpses that serve as perfect cosmic clocks. The gravitational
waves alter the apparent rhythm of the pulsars, but it took 15 years of study
to identify this signature of violent events that continually rock the cosmos.
-
-
March 10, 2024 PHYSICS - in
the year 2023 4385
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