(Credit: Wikimedia Commons)
Even before LIGO published its fifth detection this week, most modern scientists had already accepted gravitational waves as an observable manifestation of Einstein’s general relativity. But that hasn’t always been the case.
As recently as the 1970s, scientists weren’t sure gravitational waves were strong enough to detect. Other theorists rejected their existence outright.
Unsure Genius
Interestingly, Einstein himself was a prominent dou ...read more
A cloud of debris ejected into space as two neutron stars merge. (Credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center/CI Lab)
The first gravitational wave observed from a neutron star merger offers the potential for a whole raft of new discoveries. Among them is a more precise measurement of the Hubble constant, which captures how fast our universe is expanding.
Ever since the Big Bang, everything in the universe has been spreading apart. It also turns out that this is happening faster and faster — ...read more
When two neutron stars collide, the aftermath creates heavy elements like gold. (Credit: National Science Foundation/LIGO/Sonoma State University/A. Simonne)
Before “he went to Jared,” two neutron stars collided.
That’s what scientists learned from studying the debris fallout after a cosmic explosion called a kilonova — 1,000 times brighter than a standard nova — which appeared, and was witnessed by astronomers, in earthly skies Aug. 17.
For decades, astronomers d ...read more
When you go outside you may expect rain to occasionally fall from the sky, maybe even excrement from our flying friends — but a rogue space station? As we learned from Sir Isaac Newton, “What goes up must come down,” and China’s Tiangong-1 space station is coming down fast.
The space station will plummet to Earth any time between now and April 2018, the Guardian reported last week. News broke in September 2016 that the 8.5-ton space station, called Tiangong-1, meani ...read more
Self-driving vehicles could soon be cruisin’ down California streets with no humans. (Credit: Waymo)
You’ve read about self-driving cars cruising around California as companies try to prove and perfect their tech. A human sits in each car, but not because they want to joyride: it’s the law.
But that could change.
Last week, California lawmakers proposed legislation that would make it legal for companies to test self-driving cars without a human watchdog in the vehicl ...read more
Two neutron stars merge into a kilonova. (Credit: Illustration by Robin Dienel, courtesy of the Carnegie Institution for Science)
For hundreds of millions of years, two city-sized stars in a galaxy not-so-far away circled each other in a fatal dance. Their dimensions were diminutive, but each outweighed our sun.
They were neutron stars — the collapsed cores left behind after giant stars explode into supernovas. Closer and closer they spun, shedding gravitational energy, until the stars t ...read more
The Journal of Neuroscience recently featured a debate over the hypothesis that Parkinson’s disease is, at least in some cases, caused by prions – misfolded proteins that spread from neuron to neuron.
A prion is a protein that has taken on an abnormal shape and that can spread itself by making other, healthy molecules of the same protein adopt its abnormal configuration. The best-known prion disease is variant CJD aka “mad cow disease”, but some researchers believe that ...read more
The LIGO detector in Livingston, Louisiana. (Credit: LIGO Collaboration)
The massive collaboration of scientists that’s hunting gravitational waves—with a lot of success—is set to make another big announcement on Monday.
A flurry of press releases this week have teased the news, which is set to break on Oct. 16, although they’ve been short on details. At 10 a.m. Eastern, a team from the groundbreaking gravitational wave detector LIGO will make an announcement at th ...read more
