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Category: physics – Page 10

Newly discovered ‘cosmic unicorn’ is a spinning dead star that defies physics: ‘We have a real mystery on our hands’

That implies the radio wave blasts of CHIME J1634+44 are being generated in a way that is unique for this dead star.

What is also weird about these pulses is the fact that they arrive in pairs, but only when the dead star in the CHIME J1634+44 binary has spun several times without emitting a burst.

“The time between pulse pairs seems to follow a choreographed pattern,” team member and ASTRON astronomer Harish Vedantham said in a statement. “We think the pattern holds crucial information about how the companion triggers the white dwarf to emit radio waves.

Monster black hole merger is biggest ever seen

Physicists have detected the biggest ever merger of colliding black holes. The discovery has major implications for researchers’ understanding of how such bodies grow in the Universe.

“It’s super exciting,” says Priyamvada Natarajan, a theoretical astrophysicist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, who was not involved in the research. The merger was between black holes with masses too big for physicists to easily explain. “We’re seeing these forbidden high-mass black holes,” she says.

The discovery was made by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), a facility involving two detectors in the United States. It comes at a time when US funding for gravitational-wave detection faces devastating cuts. The results, released as a preprint on the arXiv server1, were presented at the GR-Amaldi gravitational-waves meeting in Glasgow, UK, on 14 July.

What is consciousness, and could AI have it?

In the Voltaire Lecture 2025, Professor Anil Seth will set out an approach to understanding consciousness which, rather than trying to solve the mystery head-on, tries to dissolve it by building explanatory bridges from physics and biology to experience and function. In this view, conscious experiences of the world around us, and of being a ‘self’ within that world, can be understood in terms of perceptual predictions that are deeply rooted in a fundamental biological imperative – the desire to stay alive.

At this event, Professor Seth will explore how widely distributed beyond human beings consciousness may be, with a particular focus on AI. He will consider whether consciousness might depend not just on ‘information processing’, but on properties unique to living, biological organisms, before ending with an exploration of the ethical implications of an artificial intelligence that is either actually conscious – or can convincingly pretend to be.

Component reconnection drives filament splitting and double-decker formation in solar physics

A new study led by researchers from the Yunnan Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has unveiled a novel mechanism for filament splitting and the formation of double-decker filaments. Their findings were published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Common feature between forest fires and neural networks reveals universal framework

Researchers from the University of Tokyo in collaboration with Aisin Corporation have demonstrated that universal scaling laws, which describe how the properties of a system change with size and scale, apply to deep neural networks that exhibit absorbing phase transition behavior, a phenomenon typically observed in physical systems. The discovery not only provides a framework describing deep neural networks but also helps predict their trainability or generalizability. The findings were published in the journal Physical Review Research.

In recent years, it seems no matter where we look, we come across in one form or another. The current version of the technology is powered by : numerous layers of digital “neurons” with weighted connections between them. The network learns by modifying the weights between the “neurons” until it produces the correct output. However, a describing how the signal propagates between the layers of neurons in the system has eluded scientists so far.

“Our research was motivated by two drivers,” says Keiichi Tamai, the first author. “Partially by industrial needs as brute-force tuning of these massive models takes a toll on the environment. But there was a second, deeper pursuit: the scientific understanding of the physics of intelligence itself.”

Unusual Plasma Waves Above Jupiter’s North Pole

A spacecraft observes a new oscillation mode in the low-density plasma.

The Juno space probe has spent the past nine years observing Jupiter and its moons. As the spacecraft’s mission draws to a close, the precession of its orbit has caused its closest approach to the gas giant to shift toward the north pole, enabling it to uncover a surprise: an unusual pattern of plasma waves in the planet’s magnetosphere. Now Robert Lysak of the University of Minnesota and his colleagues describe these waves and propose a mechanism for generating them [1]. Their theory offers a new component to include in planetary magnetosphere models and opens a new plasma regime to further exploration.

According to textbook plasma physics, collective waves of electrons in a plasma called Langmuir waves tend to oscillate parallel to magnetic-field lines at a so-called plasma frequency that’s much greater than the ions’ angular frequency around these field lines, their gyrofrequency. Meanwhile, ions tend to oscillate perpendicular to magnetic-field lines as Alfvén waves, with an upper frequency limit corresponding to the ion gyrofrequency. The waves detected by Juno, however, departed from that paradigm: The Alfven waves’ frequency extended only to the plasma frequency, which was less than the ion gyrofrequency. And the waves’ frequency never exceeded the plasma frequency.

Holographic precision, super-resolution vision: Scientists reveal hidden world of vital cellular structures

A team of NYU chemists and physicists are using cutting-edge tools—holographic microscopy and super-resolution imaging—to unlock how cells build and grow tiny, dynamic droplets known as biomolecular condensates.

Earth Could Be in a Massive Cosmic Bubble That’s Warping the Universe, Astrophysicists Reveal

A cosmic void could be distorting how we see the universe expand. Sound from the Big Bang may hold the clues. According to astronomers, Earth and the entire Milky Way galaxy might be located within a vast, low-density region of space—essentially a cosmic void—that causes the universe to expand mo

Cosmic Heavyweights Collide — LIGO Detects Largest, Fastest-Spinning Black Holes Yet

In addition to their high masses, the black holes are also rapidly spinning.

“This is the most massive black hole binary we’ve observed through gravitational waves, and it presents a real challenge to our understanding of black hole formation,” says Mark Hannam of Cardiff University and a member of the LVK Collaboration. “Black holes this massive are forbidden through standard stellar evolution models. One possibility is that the two black holes in this binary formed through earlier mergers of smaller black holes.”

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