general relativity
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Scientists Propose New Way to Find Aliens: Detect Their Failing Warp Drives
Speculative new research outlines a method for detecting extraterrestrial civilizations: by catching the gravitational waves produced by the collapse, or failure, of their warp drives. Sounds wild, but the concept is grounded in the principles of Einstein’s general relativity. Warp drives, inspired by Albert Einstein’s grasp of cosmological physics, were first mathematically modeled by physicist…
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Nesting Doll Stars Proposed as Solution to General Relativity
If you asked an astrophysicist what is yet to be discovered in the universe, there’s a good chance they’d paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld: It’s full of known unknowns. Besides the regular matter and energy we know and love, the universe is also composed of two big mysteries: dark energy and dark matter. Theoretical astrophysicists aim to…
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Antimatter Reacts to Gravity in the Same Way as Ordinary Matter, Physicists Find
In the 95 years we’ve known about antimatter, physicists have not tested how the elusive inverse of ordinary matter is affected by gravity, the force that pulls masses to Earth and seems to affect all things in the classical realm. Now, a group of physicists have. Members of the Antihydrogen Laser Physics Apparatus (ALPHA) collaboration…
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Meet the ‘Event Horizon Explorer’, Which Aims to See Light Rings Around Black Holes
Astronomers transfixed the public in April 2019 when they released the first-ever image of a black hole, produced by radio wave data from a collaboration of telescopes around the world known collectively as the Event Horizon Telescope. Now, a team of physicists and researchers have developed the plans for the successor to that project: a…