A century ago, Emmy Noether published a theorem that would change mathematics and physics. Here’s an all-ages guided tour through this groundbreaking idea.
New research from Australian scientists shows strong evidence even mid-life stable stars like our sun have engulfed entire planets.
Open any astronomy textbook to the section on white dwarf stars and you’ll likely learn that they are “dead stars” that continuously cool down over time. New research published in Nature is challenging this theory, with the University of Victoria (UVic) and its partners using data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite to reveal why a population of white dwarf stars stopped cooling for more than eight billion years.
“We discovered the classical picture of all white dwarfs being dead stars is incomplete,” says Simon Blouin, co-principal investigator and Canadian Institute of Theoretical Astrophysics National Fellow at UVic.
“For these white dwarfs to stop cooling, they must have some way of generating extra energy. We weren’t sure how this was happening, but now we have an explanation for the phenomenon.”
Understanding how a thermonuclear flame spreads across the surface of a neutron star—and what that spreading can tell us about the relationship between the neutron star’s mass and its radius—can also reveal a lot about the star’s composition.
In Verlinde’s picture of emergent gravity, as soon as you enter low-density regions — basically, anything outside the solar system — gravity behaves differently than we would expect from Einstein’s theory of general relativity. At large scales, there is a natural inward pull to space itself, which forces matter to clump up more tightly than it otherwise would.
This idea was exciting because it allowed astronomers to find a way to test this new theory. Observers could take this new theory of gravity and put it in models of galaxy structure and evolution to find differences between it and models of dark matter.
Over the years, however, the experimental results have been mixed. Some early tests favored emergent gravity over dark matter when it came to the rotation rates of stars. But more recent observations haven’t found an advantage. And dark matter can also explain much more than galaxy rotation rates; tests within galaxy clusters have found emergent gravity coming up short.
Utilizing high-resolution three-dimensional radiation hydrodynamics simulations and a detailed supernova physics model run on supercomputers, a research team led by Dr. Ke-Jung Chen from the Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Academia Sinica (ASIAA) has revealed that the physical properties of the first galaxies are critically determined by the masses of the first stars. Their study is published in The Astrophysical Journal.
In the realm of physics, synthetic dimensions (SDs) have emerged as one of the frontiers of active research, offering a pathway to explore phenomena in higher-dimensional spaces, beyond our conventional 3D geometrical space. The concept has garnered significant attention, especially in topological photonics, due to its potential to unlock rich physics inaccessible in traditional dimensions.
Physicists just can’t leave an incomplete theory alone; they try and repair it. When nature is kind, it can lead to a major breakthrough.
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At some point, theoretical physics shades into science fiction. This is a beautiful little book, by a celebrated physicist and writer, about a phenomenon that is permitted by equations but might not actually exist. Or perhaps white holes do exist, and are everywhere: we just haven’t noticed them yet. No such controversy exists about black holes, wh…
