Lifeboat Foundation

Once hypothetical monsters born in a tangled nest of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, black holes are now recognized as bona fide celestial objects as real as stars, moons, and galaxies.

But make no mistake. Their engines are still as mysterious as they were when the German theoretical physicist Karl Schwarzschild first played with Einstein’s field equations and came to the conclusion that space and time could pucker up into pits of no return.

Goethe University Frankfurt physicists Daniel Jampolski and Luciano Rezzolla have gone back to step one in an attempt to make better sense of the equations that describe black holes and have come away with a solution that’s easier to picture, if no less bizarre.

The development of innovative magnetic nanodevices is one step closer to reality thanks to the observation by RIKEN physicists of a type of rotation that can be realized in materials consisting of light elements.

The ability to use electric currents to turn revolving mechanical parts led to the development of electric motors and caused an explosion in electrical devices. Now, physicists are trying to do the same thing but on a nanoscale. However, the development of innovative magnetic nanodevices requires the efficient electrical generation of rotation, or torque.

Usually, torque is generated in magnetic systems by converting electric charge to spin by using the strong spin–orbit interaction of a heavy-metal layer. The resulting spin current is then injected into adjacent ferromagnetic layers. But heavy-element materials are often incompatible with scalable production processes, and their high resistance makes them unsuitable for some applications.

Researchers at the Institute of Modern Physics (IMP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and their collaborators have synthesized two new isotopes—osmium-160 and tungsten-156—which sheds new light on nuclear structures and hints that lead-164 could be a doubly magic nucleus with increased stability.

The study was published in Physical Review Letters and highlighted as an Editors’ Suggestion.

“Magic numbers” of protons and neutrons can make an atomic nucleus particularly stable. The traditional magic numbers include 8, 20, 28, 50, 82 and 126. In previous studies, researchers discovered the vanishing of traditional magic numbers and the emergence of new magic numbers on the neutron-rich side of the chart of nuclides.

Physicists have theorized the existence of new types of celestial objects that they name “nestars.”

These are gravitational condensate stars, or gravastars, nestled among other gravitational condensate stars, like a Russian matryoshka doll, or nesting doll.

This type of doll is distinguished by its hollow, round form and the ability to be split apart to reveal a sequence of increasingly smaller dolls nestled inside.

Physicists found that the music of Johann Sebastian Bach contains mathematical patterns that help convey information.

By Elise Cutts

The proton is one of the main building blocks of all visible matter in the Universe.

A new paper theorizes that in rare cases, gravitational waves could propagate across the universe like a laser.

Raman Research Institute (RRI), founded in 1948 by physicist and Nobel Laureate, Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman is celebrating 75 glorious years.

In creating five new isotopes, an international research team working at the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) at Michigan State University has brought the stars closer to Earth.

The isotopes —known as thulium-182, thulium-183, ytterbium-186, ytterbium-187 and lutetium-190—are reported in the journal Physical Review Letters.

These represent the first batch of new isotopes made at FRIB, a user facility for the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science, or DOE-SC, supporting the mission of the DOE-SC Office of Nuclear Physics. The new isotopes show that FRIB is nearing the creation of nuclear specimens that currently only exist when ultradense celestial bodies known as neutron stars crash into each other.