SCIENCE

The universe is rippling with a faint ‘gravitational wave background’ created by colliding black holes, huge international study suggests

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On June 29, five independent teams of radio astronomers published a series of papers presenting evidence that the universe is filled with gravitational waves created by colliding supermassive black holes. The North American, European, Indian, Chinese and Australian teams monitored rapidly spinning dead stars known as pulsars to gather information about the gravitational waves. “The … Read more

SpaceX to launch European astronomy mission

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WASHINGTON — A European spacecraft is set to launch on a mission to help astronomers resolve an “embarrassing situation” in cosmology, although the launch itself is another kind of embarrassing situation for Europe. The European Space Agency’s Euclid spacecraft is ready to launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Liftoff is scheduled for 11:11 a.m. … Read more

Scientists edge toward scalable quantum simulations on a photonic chip

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A new system developed by researchers at the University of Rochester allows them to conduct quantum simulations in a synthetic space that mimics the physical world by controlling the frequency, or color, of quantum entangled photons as time elapses. Credit: University of Rochester illustration / Michael Osadciw Scientists have made an important step toward developing … Read more

Scientists find ‘ghost particles’ spewing from our Milky Way galaxy in landmark discovery (video)

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Astronomers have detected high-energy neutrinos coming from within our Milky Way galaxy, potentially opening up an exciting new window of research, a new study reports. Neutrinos are extraordinarily difficult to spot, as they rarely collide with atoms. A light-year’s worth of lead would stop only about half of the neutrinos flying through it (which explains … Read more