What's up in
How do scientists react to major breaking science news? For astrophysicists after the big gravitational waves announcement, it was meeting for two weeks in Santa Barbara, California.
Just months after their discovery, gravitational waves coming from the mergers of black holes are shaking up astrophysics.
The spokesperson for the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory called it “a promising start to mapping the populations of black holes in our universe.”
The astrophysicist, conceptual writer and host of standing-room-only scientific soirees at a repurposed factory in Brooklyn sees science as a powerful force in culture.
A satellite spotted a burst of light just as gravitational waves rolled in from the collision of two black holes. Was the flash a cosmic coincidence, or do astrophysicists need to rethink what black holes can do?
The path from a revolutionary set of equations to the detection of gravitational waves was strewn with obstacles and controversy, explains the physicist Daniel Kennefick — and the struggle continues.
Ripples in space-time have been detected a century after Einstein predicted them, launching a new era in astronomy.
By replacing black holes with fuzzballs — dense, star-like objects from string theory — researchers think they can avoid some knotty paradoxes at the edge of physics.
New tools may reveal how quantum information builds the structure of space.