A few years ago researchers using the radio-based Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) performed an extraordinary observation, the likes of which remains a dream for most other astronomers. The EHT team announced in April 2019 that it had successfully imaged the shadow of a supermassive black hole in a nearby galaxy by combining observations from eight different radio telescopes spread across our planet. This technique, called interferometry, effectively gave the EHT the resolution, or the ability to distinguish sources in the sky, of an Earth-sized telescope. At the optical wavelengths...…A few years ago researchers using the radio-based Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) performed an extraordinary observation, the likes of which remains a dream for most other astronomers. The EHT team announced in April 2019 that it had successfully imaged the shadow of a supermassive black hole in a nearby galaxy by combining observations from eight different radio telescopes spread across our planet. This technique, called interferometry, effectively gave the EHT the resolution, or the ability to distinguish sources in the sky, of an Earth-sized telescope. At the optical wavelengths...WW…

he far side of the moon is a strange and wild region, quite different from the familiar and mostly smooth face we see nightly from our planet. In 1959 the Soviet Luna 3 space probe took the first photographs of this hidden region. Instead of wide plains, the images showed a moonscape spiked with mountains. Observations since then have shown that the far side is also full of rugged craters, and within them there are yet more craters. Soon this rough terrain and the space just above it will have even stranger features: it will be teeming with radio telescopes, deployed by a new generation of...…he far side of the moon is a strange and wild region, quite different from the familiar and mostly smooth face we see nightly from our planet. In 1959 the Soviet Luna 3 space probe took the first photographs of this hidden region. Instead of wide plains, the images showed a moonscape spiked with mountains. Observations since then have shown that the far side is also full of rugged craters, and within them there are yet more craters. Soon this rough terrain and the space just above it will have even stranger features: it will be teeming with radio telescopes, deployed by a new generation of...WW…

It is not often that a comedian gives an astrophysicist goose bumps when discussing the laws of physics. But comic Chuck Nice managed to do just that in a recent episode of the podcast StarTalk. The show’s host Neil deGrasse Tyson had just explained the simulation argument—the idea that we could be virtual beings living in a computer simulation. If so, the simulation would most likely create perceptions of reality on demand rather than simulate all of reality all the time—much like a video game optimized to render only the parts of a scene visible to a player. “Maybe that’s why we can’t...…It is not often that a comedian gives an astrophysicist goose bumps when discussing the laws of physics. But comic Chuck Nice managed to do just that in a recent episode of the podcast StarTalk. The show’s host Neil deGrasse Tyson had just explained the simulation argument—the idea that we could be virtual beings living in a computer simulation. If so, the simulation would most likely create perceptions of reality on demand rather than simulate all of reality all the time—much like a video game optimized to render only the parts of a scene visible to a player. “Maybe that’s why we can’t...WW…

It is not often that a comedian gives an astrophysicist goose bumps when discussing the laws of physics. But comic Chuck Nice managed to do just that in a recent episode of the podcast StarTalk. The show’s host Neil deGrasse Tyson had just explained the simulation argument—the idea that we could be virtual beings living in a computer simulation. If so, the simulation would most likely create perceptions of reality on demand rather than simulate all of reality all the time—much like a video game optimized to render only the parts of a scene visible to a player. “Maybe that’s why we can’t...…It is not often that a comedian gives an astrophysicist goose bumps when discussing the laws of physics. But comic Chuck Nice managed to do just that in a recent episode of the podcast StarTalk. The show’s host Neil deGrasse Tyson had just explained the simulation argument—the idea that we could be virtual beings living in a computer simulation. If so, the simulation would most likely create perceptions of reality on demand rather than simulate all of reality all the time—much like a video game optimized to render only the parts of a scene visible to a player. “Maybe that’s why we can’t...WW…

Although it would not get you past a brick wall and onto Platform 9¾ to catch the Hogwarts Express, quantum tunneling—in which a particle “tunnels” through a seemingly insurmountable barrier—remains a confounding, intuition-defying phenomenon. Now Toronto-based experimental physicists using rubidium atoms to study this effect have measured, for the first time, . Their findings appeared in Nature on July 22.The researchers have showed that quantum tunneling is not instantaneous—at least, in one way of thinking about the phenomenon—despite recent headlines that have suggested otherwise. “This...…Although it would not get you past a brick wall and onto Platform 9¾ to catch the Hogwarts Express, quantum tunneling—in which a particle “tunnels” through a seemingly insurmountable barrier—remains a confounding, intuition-defying phenomenon. Now Toronto-based experimental physicists using rubidium atoms to study this effect have measured, for the first time, . Their findings appeared in Nature on July 22.The researchers have showed that quantum tunneling is not instantaneous—at least, in one way of thinking about the phenomenon—despite recent headlines that have suggested otherwise. “This...WW…

Two entirely different ways of “weighing” the cosmos are producing disparate results. If more precise measurements fail to resolve the discrepancy, physicists may have to revise the standard model of cosmology, our best description of the universe.“If this really is a glimpse of the standard model breaking down, that would be potentially revolutionary,” says astronomer  of the Ruhr University Bochum in Germany.Similar concerns over the correctness of the standard model have been raised over the past few years by two independent calculations of the so-called Hubble constant, or the rate...…Two entirely different ways of “weighing” the cosmos are producing disparate results. If more precise measurements fail to resolve the discrepancy, physicists may have to revise the standard model of cosmology, our best description of the universe.“If this really is a glimpse of the standard model breaking down, that would be potentially revolutionary,” says astronomer  of the Ruhr University Bochum in Germany.Similar concerns over the correctness of the standard model have been raised over the past few years by two independent calculations of the so-called Hubble constant, or the rate...WW…