This AI can explain the physical laws of virtual worlds.
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Category: physics
“The first direct detection of gravitational waves was announced on February 11, 2016, spawned headlines around the world, snagged the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics, and officially launched a new era of so-called “multi-messenger” astronomy. But a team of physicists at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, Denmark, is calling that detection into question…”
“Andrew Jackson and his group have been saying for the past few years that LIGO’s detections are not real,” says LIGO Executive Director David Reitze of Caltech. “Their analysis has been looked at by many people who have all concluded there is absolutely no validity to their claims.” Reitze characterized the New Scientist article as “very biased and sensational.”
“Nothing they’ve done gives us any reason to doubt our results.”
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New research into a very weird type of ice known as Ice VII has revealed how it can form at speeds over 1,000 miles per hour (1,610 kilometres per hour), and how it might be able to spread across yet-to-be-explored alien worlds.
This ice type was only discovered occurring naturally in March, trapped inside diamonds deep underground, and this latest study looks in detail at how exactly it takes shape – apparently in a way that’s completely different to how water usually freezes into ice.
Based on a mathematical model devised by researchers from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, there’s a certain pressure threshold across which Ice VII will spread with lightning speed. This process of near-instantaneous transformation is known as homogeneous nucleation.
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Jocelyn Bell Burnell, astrophysicist extraordinaire who helped discover radio pulsars while a graduate student in 1967 (though only her adviser was recognized when the discovery snagged a Nobel Prize in physics in 1974), is getting long-overdue recognition.
Bell Burnell, now a visiting professor of astrophysics at the University of Oxford and chancellor of Scotland’s University of Dundee, was awarded the weighty Breakthrough Prize in physics in September for her pulsar discovery and science leadership.
And tonight (Oct. 25), Bell Burnell will speak to an audience at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Ontario, Canada, about her life-changing discovery and how she persisted despite being passed up for the Nobel 44 years ago to become the prominent scientist she is today. You can watch the talk right here on Live Science.
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This discovery not only opened up an exciting new field of research, but has opened the door to many intriguing possibilities. One such possibility, according to a new study by a team of Russian scientists, is that gravitational waves could be used to transmit information. In much the same way as electromagnetic waves are used to communicate via antennas and satellites, the future of communications could be gravitationally-based.
The study, which recently appeared in the scientific journal Classical and Quantum Gravity, was led by Olga Babourova, a professor at the Moscow Pedagogical State University (MPSU), and included members from Moscow Automobile and Road Construction State Technical University (MADI) and the Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia (RUDN).
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Scientists believe they’ve discovered a new method to pin down just how fast our universe is expanding over time.
In a new study, a team of researchers from the University of Chicago found that studying the gravitational waves emitted by cosmic collisions could lead to more resolute predictions about how quickly the universe is expanding.
The scientists are so confident in this method that they say they could have a ‘precise measurement’ of the universe’s rate of expansion in roughly five to ten years.
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According to Einstein’s General Relativity, gravity travels at the speed of light. Proving it is far from simple, though: unlike light, gravity can’t simply be switched on and off, and is also extremely weak.
Over the years, various attempts have been made to measure the speed using studies of astronomical phenomena, such as the time delay of light as it passes through the huge gravitational field of Jupiter. While the results have been broadly in line with Einstein’s prediction, they’ve lacked the precision needed for compelling evidence. That’s now been provided by the celebrated detection of gravitational waves. Analysis of the signals picked up by the two giant LIGO instruments in the US has confirmed that gravity does indeed travel through space at the speed of light.
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