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Category: physics – Page 278

A study on dozens of galaxies within several billion light years of our own has revealed black holes that far exceed our expectations on just how big these monsters can grow.

The discovery not only helps us better understand the evolution of our Universe’s building blocks, it leaves us with a new intriguing question – just how do black holes like these get to be so incredibly massive?

By now, the collapsed cores of massive stars known as black holes need no introduction. We’ve heard about their cosmic crashes rippling space-time, watched them belch, and expect to capture the closest look yet at their nature very soon.

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Physicists have demonstrated accelerating light beams on flat surfaces.

Where acceleration has caused the beams to follow curved trajectories.

However, a new experiment has pushed the boundaries of what’s possible to demonstrate in a lab. For the first time in an expeirment, physicists have demonstrated an accelerating light beam in curved space. Instead of traveling along a geodesic trajectory (the shortest path on a curved surface) it bends away from this trajectory due to the acceleration.

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Credit: University of New Mexico For years, scientists have long wrestled with the control and manipulation of light, a long-standing scientific ambition with major implications for the development of technology. With the growth in nanophotonics, scientists are making gains faster than ever exploiting structures with dimensions comparable to the wavelength of light. Scientists at The University of New Mexico studying the field of nanophotonics are developing new perspectives never seen before through their research. In turn, the understanding of these theoretical concepts is enabling physic…

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One of the more well-known rules in physics is that light can only ever go one speed, so long as nothing stands in its way.

But new research has found there could be an interesting exception to this rule, where the mixing of light waves could bring them to a complete standstill.

The discovery hints at new ways of wrangling not just photons but nearly any kind of wave, which could be useful in technology that relies on information sent and stored using light.

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