Dark alien planet discovered by NASA. An alien world blacker than coal, the darkest planet known, has been discovered in the galaxy. The world in question is a giant the size of Jupiter known as TrES-2b. NASA's Kepler spacecraft detected it lurking around the yellow sun-like star GSC 03549-02811 some 750 lightyears away in the direction of the constellation Draco. The researchers found this gas giant reflects less than 1 percent of the sunlight falling on it, making it darker than any planet or moon seen up to now. [The Strangest Alien Planets] "It's just ridiculous how dark this planet is, how alien it is compared to anything we have in our solar system," study lead-author David Kipping, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told SPACE.com.
"However, it's not completely pitch black," co-author David Spiegel of Princeton University said in a statement. "It's a mystery as to what's causing it to be so dark," Kipping said. This article was reprinted with permission from SPACE.com. Physics I: Classical Mechanics - Download free content from MIT. Weird World of Quantum Physics May Govern Life. NEW YORK — The bizarre rules of quantum physics are often thought to be restricted to the microworld, but scientists now suspect they may play an important role in the biology of life.
Evidence is growing for the involvement of quantum mechanics in a wide range of biological processes, including photosynthesis, bird migration, the sense of smell, and possibly even the origin of life. These and other mysteries were the topic of a panel lecture June 1 held here at the Kaye Playhouse at Hunter College, part of the fifth annual World Science Festival. Quantum mechanics refers to the strange set of rules that governs the behavior of subatomic particles, which can travel through walls, behave like waves and stay connected over vast distances. [Stunning Photos of the Very Small] "Quantum mechanics is weird, that's its defining characteristic. These oddities generally don't affect everyday macroscopic objects, which are thought to be too hot and wet for delicate quantum states to withstand.
The-Observable-Universe.jpg. Splitting the Unsplittable: Physicists split an atom using quantum mechanics precision. Researchers from the University of Bonn have just shown how a single atom can be split into its two halves, pulled apart and put back together again. While the word "atom" literally means "indivisible," the laws of quantum mechanics allow dividing atoms -- similarly to light rays -- and reuniting them. The researchers want to build quantum mechanics bridges by letting the atom touch adjacent atoms while it is being pulled apart so that it works like a bridge span between two pillars. The results have just been published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Dividing atoms? What sounds like nuclear fission and radioactivity is, however, a precision process using quantum mechanics. The atom has a split personality The fragile quantum effects can only occur at the lowest temperatures and with careful handling.
The parts compare their "experiences" Quantum systems as tools? A cog in a gearbox "For us, an atom is a well-controlled and oiled cog," said Dr. TOP TEN UNSOLVED PROBLEMS IN PHYSICS. Chinese physicists achieve quantum teleportation over 60 miles. Hold onto your seats: Chinese physicists are reporting that they’ve successfully teleported photonic qubits (quantum bits) over a distance of 97 kilometers (60mi). This means that quantum data has been transmitted from one point to another, without passing through the intervening space.
Now, before you get too excited, we’re still a long, long way off Willy-Wonka-Mike-Teevee-style teleportation. It’s important to note that the Chinese researchers haven’t actually made a photon disappear and reappear 100 kilometers away; rather, they’ve used quantum entanglement to recreate the same qubit in a new location, with the same subatomic properties as the original qubit. The previous record for transmitting entangled qubits was 16 kilometers, performed by another Chinese team back in 2010. What’s the purpose of such pseudo-teleportation, then? Read more at Technology Review. Expansion Map. Radio telescopes capture best-ever snapshot of black hole jets.
An international team, including NASA-funded researchers, using radio telescopes located throughout the Southern Hemisphere has produced the most detailed image of particle jets erupting from a supermassive black hole in a nearby galaxy. "These jets arise as infalling matter approaches the black hole, but we don't yet know the details of how they form and maintain themselves," said Cornelia Mueller, the study's lead author and a doctoral student at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany. The new image shows a region less than 4.2 light-years across -- less than the distance between our sun and the nearest star. Radio-emitting features as small as 15 light-days can be seen, making this the highest-resolution view of galactic jets ever made. The study will appear in the June issue of Astronomy and Astrophysics and is available online. Mueller and her team targeted Centaurus A (Cen A), a nearby galaxy with a supermassive black hole weighing 55 million times the sun's mass.
Motion Mountain - The Free Physics Textbook for Download. Antimatter:Mirror of the Universe. Here are 10,000 reasons to be excited about deep-space exploration. They'll ask why we continue to strive to see further and deeper into space than ever before, without knowing what we'll find. They'll ask why we insist upon exploring a solar system that, by their account, has no immediate bearing on our lives.
And they'll ask why, in light of recent budgetary crises, space agencies the world over deserve funding to seek out answers to the mysteries of a Universe that we will never fully understand. Strawmen are made of straw. The first two questions are asked by ignoramuses. The last question, however, can be rightly asked by those (like me) who can easily answer the first two questions.
To use an analogy, I love travel. But even if we all can agree on the value of travel, is it still not grossly irresponsible to pay for your vacation to Europe or your study-abroad in India when you can't pay your rent, utilities or student loans without a credit card? I loved Hubble, and I'm sure I'll equally love the Webb telescope. The Scale of the Universe. Radio Broadcast Extent. The History of the Universe in 200 Words or Less. Quantum fluctuation. Inflation. Expansion. Strong nuclear interaction. Particle-antiparticle annihilation. Copyright 1996-1997 by Eric Schulman. This piece was the inspiration for the book A Briefer History of Time and led to the Annals of Improbable Research Universal History Translation Project. Interested in learning more about any of these events? Visualizing The Size And Scale Of Our World.
Radiation Dosage Chart. Hubble Heritage Gallery of Images. Not-quite-so elementary, my dear electron. Electrons in atoms behave like waves, and when researchers excite them to higher orbits, those waves can split up, revealing the constituent characteristics of the electron. In a feat of technical mastery, condensed-matter physicists have managed to detect the elusive third constituent of an electron — its 'orbiton'.
The achievement could help to resolve a long-standing mystery about the origin of high-temperature superconductivity, and aid in the construction of quantum computers. Isolated electrons cannot be split into smaller components, earning them the designation of a fundamental particle. But in the 1980s, physicists predicted that electrons in a one-dimensional chain of atoms could be split into three quasiparticles: a ‘holon’ carrying the electron’s charge, a ‘spinon’ carrying its spin (an intrinsic quantum property related to magnetism) and an ‘orbiton’ carrying its orbital location1.
In 1996, physicists split an electron into a holon and spinon2. Meaning of Halflife. I'd like to illustrate what this really means. If living creatures had halflives the way radioactive atoms do, the world would be a very different place. What do you mean? Suppose there's an alien species with a halflife of, say, 70 years. You randomly pick out 16 baby aliens and track them to see how long they live. After 70 years, of course, 8 of them will still be alive. That doesn't sound so weird. True...but remember that the halflife is always the same, regardless of how old the aliens are.
That is kind of strange. It gets stranger. Methuselah isn't going to make it, though. Methuselah has just as much chance of surviving the next 70 years as any one of the 15 babies. Quantum decision affects results of measurements taken earlier in time. Quantum entanglement is a state where two particles have correlated properties: when you make a measurement on one, it constrains the outcome of the measurement on the second, even if the two particles are widely separated. It's also possible to entangle more than two particles, and even to spread out the entanglements over time, so that a system that was only partly entangled at the start is made fully entangled later on.
This sequential process goes under the clunky name of "delayed-choice entanglement swapping. " And, as described in a Nature Physics article by Xiao-song Ma et al., it has a rather counterintuitive consequence. You can take a measurement before the final entanglement takes place, but the measurement's results depend on whether or not you subsequently perform the entanglement. Delayed-choice entanglement swapping consists of the following steps. Two independent sources (labeled I and II) produce pairs photons such that their polarization states are entangled. Quantum teleportation achieved over ten miles of free space.
Quantum teleportation has achieved a new milestone or, should we say, a new ten-milestone: scientists have recently had success teleporting information between photons over a free space distance of nearly ten miles, an unprecedented length. The researchers who have accomplished this feat note that this brings us closer to communicating information without needing a traditional signal, and that the ten miles they have reached could span the distance between the surface of the earth and space. As we've explained before, "quantum teleportation" is quite different from how many people imagine teleportation to work. Rather than picking one thing up and placing it somewhere else, quantum teleportation involves entangling two things, like photons or ions, so their states are dependent on one another and each can be affected by the measurement of the other's state. However, the long-distance teleportation of a photon is only a small step towards developing applications for the procedure.
Heads Up, Hoverboarders: Here Comes Quantum Levitation. Few motifs of science fiction cinema have been more appealing to us than the subtle defiance of gravity offered by futuristic hovercraft. So every once in a while we check in to see how humanity is progressing on that front, and whether the promise of hoverboards will be delivered by 2015 as evidenced in Back to the Future Part 2.
We’re not quite there yet, but we’re definitely getting off the ground, so to speak. Get ready to hover your brain around the art of quantum levitation. That’s right, quantum. Because of its chemical properties, a superconductor (when brought to low enough temperatures using, say, liquid nitrogen) exhibits this effect, causing the energy from the magnet below to warp around the superconductive object in a way which “locks” it in space.
Even more impressive and ripe for practical transportation use: When the superconducting object is placed along a magnetic rail, it exhibits frictionless momentum. Connections: Spacetime Invisibility Cloaks. Einstein for Everyone. Einstein for Everyone Nullarbor Press 2007revisions 2008, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013 Copyright 2007, 2008, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013 John D. Norton Published by Nullarbor Press, 500 Fifth Avenue, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15260 with offices in Liberty Ave., Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 15222 All Rights Reserved John D. An advanced sequel is planned in this series:Einstein for Almost Everyone 2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1 ePrinted in the United States of America no trees were harmed web*bookTM This book is a continuing work in progress.
January 1, 2015. Preface For over a decade I have taught an introductory, undergraduate class, "Einstein for Everyone," at the University of Pittsburgh to anyone interested enough to walk through door. With each new offering of the course, I had the chance to find out what content worked and which of my ever so clever pedagogical inventions were failures. At the same time, my lecture notes have evolved. This text owes a lot to many. I i i. STEPHEN HAWKING: How to build a time machine. By STEPHEN HAWKING Created: 18:47 GMT, 27 April 2010 All you need is a wormhole, the Large Hadron Collider or a rocket that goes really, really fast 'Through the wormhole, the scientist can see himself as he was one minute ago. But what if our scientist uses the wormhole to shoot his earlier self?
He's now dead. Hello. Time travel was once considered scientific heresy. To see how this might be possible, we need to look at time as physicists do - at the fourth dimension. But there is another kind of length, a length in time. To see what that means, let's imagine we're doing a bit of normal, everyday car travel. Let's indulge in a little science fiction for a moment. Physicists have been thinking about tunnels in time too, but we come at it from a different angle. Enlarge Nothing is flat or solid. Unfortunately, these real-life time tunnels are just a billion-trillion-trillionths of a centimetre across. The fastest manned vehicle in history was Apollo 10. Paradoxes are fun to think about.