A mock debate on time with British physicist and science writer Julian Barbour and NYU philosophy professor Tim Maudlin, reposted from FQXi’s Setting Time Aright conference in Copenhagen.
Blasting over two million lights years from the centre of a distant galaxy is a supersonic jet of material that looks strikingly similar to the afterburner flow of a fighter jet, except in this case the jet engine is a supermassive black hole and the jet material is moving at nearly the speed of light….
Galaxies don’t seem to have enough matter inside them to keep forming new stars at the rates that they do. Now, astronomers have caught a galaxy in the act of recycling material that it previously threw out, which may explain the discrepancy. New observations provide the first direct evidence of gas flowing into distant galaxies…
Extraterrestrial life in the solar system may be hiding beneath the icy crust of Jupiter’s moon Europa, safe from blasts of radiation, U.S. researchers say. The frozen moon is subject to constant and significant blasts of radiation from Jupiter’s magnetic field that could annihilate life at shallow depths, so scientists are conducting an experiment to…
A report sponsored by NASA has concluded that the agency is failing to inspire the world, the nation or even its own staff, and is unlikely to achieve long-term objectives such as a manned Mars landing. In a report commissioned by Congress last year, the National Research Council also says that NASA’s budget doesn’t match…
At very low temperatures, close to absolute zero, chemical reactions may proceed at a much higher rate than classical chemistry says they should—because in this extreme chill, quantum effects enter the picture. A Weizmann Institute team has now confirmed this experimentally; their results would not only provide insight into processes in the intriguing quantum world…
Billions of times the mass of our own sun, so-called massive black holes present a baffling mystery with clues hidden at the very dawn of existence.