Wow!

The ability to instantaneously jump from one location in space to another clearly violates the laws of physics. Or does it?

Particles known as “bottom mesons” are not decaying in the way the Standard Model of particle physics says they should, and it’s causing some excitement.

The EmDrive propulsion system might be able to take us to the stars, but first it must be reconciled with the laws of physics.

The core of a neutron star is such an extreme environment that physicists can’t agree on what happens inside. But a new space-based experiment — and a few more colliding neutron stars — should reveal whether neutrons themselves break down.

A team of researchers with Università degli Studi di Padova and the Matera Laser Ranging Observatory in Italy has conducted experiments that add credence to John Wheeler’s quantum theory thought experiment. In their paper published on the open access site Science Advances, the group describes their experiment and what they believe it showed.

The nature of light has proven to be one of the more difficult problems facing physicists. Nearly a century ago, experiments showed that light behaved like both a particle and a wave, but subsequent experiments seemed to show that light behaved differently depending on how it was tested, and weirdly, seemed to know how the researchers were testing it, changing its behavior as a result.

Back in the late 1970s, physicist Johan Wheeler tossed around a thought experiment in which he asked what would happen if tests allowed researchers to change parameters after a photon was fired, but before it had reached a sensor for testing—would it somehow alter its behavior mid-course? He also considered the possibilities as light from a distant quasar made its way through space, being lensed by gravity. Was it possible that the light could somehow choose to behave as a wave or a particle depending on what scientists here on Earth did in trying to measure it? In this new effort, the team in Italy set out to demonstrate the ideas that Wheeler had proposed—but instead of measuring light from a quasar, they measured light bounced from a satellite back to Earth.

Particle physics data sorted by quantum machine learning but still needs work.

A supermassive dark opening isn’t the best place to live. Notwithstanding, there are physicists who think about existence existing in such outrageous spots and likely effectively occupied by some most progressive races – super outsiders. “Insides of super gigantic dark openings might be occupied by cutting edge human advancements living on planets with the third-kind circles,” Russian cosmologist Vyacheslav I. Dokuchaev at Moscow’s Institute for Nuclear Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences writes in his paper distributed in Cornell University’s online diary arXiv. “We could live inside a super gigantic dark gap in the long run… yet super-outsiders may have effectively outsmarted us,” claims Dokuchaev. His dubious hypothesis did not depend on sci-fi yet on Einstein’s speculations.

D-Wave system shows quantum computers can learn to detect particle signatures in mountains of data, but doesn’t outpace conventional methods — yet.

• By Davide Castelvecchi, Nature on October 22, 2017

The fifth observation of gravitational waves (GW) marks the beginning of a new era in astronomy. On August 17, 2017, the LIGO and VIRGO collaborations detected neutron stars merging for the first time and immediately alerted observatories around the world. In a matter of minutes the event had been located, another first for GW astronomy, and telescopes around the world begun studying it almost immediately.

The event observed, called GW170817, was produced in galaxy NGC 4993, located 130 million light-years from Earth. The gravitational signal was the strongest ever observed, lasting over 100 seconds, and it emitted a gamma-ray burst (GRBs), providing the first piece of evidence that GRBs are produced by neutron star collisions. It also provided the strongest evidence yet that neutron star mergers are responsible for the creation of the heaviest elements in the universe, like gold and platinum.

The importance of this observation cannot be understated. We are witnessing Galileo pointing the telescope up, or Henrietta Swann Leavitt working out the relation that will be used to measure cosmic distances. This observation brings a completely new dimension to astronomy. The seven papers published in Nature, Nature Astronomy, and Astrophysical Journal Letter are also record-breakers. They have over 45,000 authors – around 35 percent of all active astronomers in the world – who worked at the over 70 observatories that helped to make this discovery.

A thruster that’s being developed for a future NASA mission to Mars broke several records during recent tests, suggesting that the technology is on track to take humans to the Red Planet within the next 20 years, project team members said.

The X3 thruster, which was designed by researchers at the University of Michigan in cooperation with NASA and the U.S. Air Force, is a Hall thruster — a system that propels spacecraft by accelerating a stream of electrically charged atoms, known as ions. In the recent demonstration conducted at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Ohio, the X3 broke records for the maximum power output, thrust and operating current achieved by a Hall thruster to date, according to the research team at the University of Michigan and representatives from NASA.

“We have shown that X3 can operate at over 100 kW of power,” said Alec Gallimore, who is leading the project, in an interview with Space.com. “It operated at a huge range of power from 5 kW to 102 kW, with electrical current of up to 260 amperes. It generated 5.4 Newtons of thrust, which is the highest level of thrust achieved by any plasma thruster to date,” added Gallimore, who is dean of engineering at the University of Michigan. The previous record was 3.3 Newtons, according to the school.