Read article 'The dawn of a new era'
One of the greatest scientific discoveries of the century took place on 14 September 2015. At 09.50 UTC on that day, a train of gravitational waves launched by two colliding black holes 1.4 billion li...
Read article 'General relativity at 100'
As in precision electroweak experiments, it is useful to parameterise plausible deviations from general relativity.
Read article 'Catching a gravitational wave'
Gravitational waves alternatively compress and stretch space–time as they propagate, exerting tidal forces on all objects in their path. Detectors such as Advanced LIGO (aLIGO) search for this subtl...
Read article 'Linking waves to particles'
Black holes are arguably humankind’s most intriguing intellectual construction. Featuring a curvature singularity where space–time “ends” and tidal forces are infinite, black-hole interiors ca...
Read article 'n_TOF deepens search for missing cosmic lithium'
An experiment at CERN’s neutron time-of-flight (n_TOF) facility has filled in a missing piece of the cosmological-lithium problem puzzle, according to a report published in Physical Review Letters. ...
Read article 'Hubble misses 90% of distant galaxies'
A team of astronomers has estimated that the number of galaxies in the observable universe is around two trillion (2 × 1012), which is 10 times more than could be observed by the...
Read article 'Testing times for space–time symmetry'
Throughout history, our notion of space and time has undergone a number of dramatic transformations, thanks to figures ranging from Aristotle, Leibniz and Newton to Gauss, Poincaré and Einstein. In o...
Read article 'Cosmic rays continue to confound'
Five years of data from the AMS experiment on board the International Space Station reveal intriguing features, says Sam Ting.
Read article 'Gaia compiles largest ever stellar survey'
The largest all-sky survey of celestial objects has been compiled by ESA’s Gaia mission. On 13 September, 1000 days after the satellite’s launch, the Gaia team published a preliminary cata...
Read article 'Secrets of discovery'
Did you expect that gravitational waves would be discovered during your lifetime? Yes, and I thought it quite likely it would come from two colliding black holes of just the sort that we did see. I wr...
