Physics Buzz

When magnetic fields clash, they can rapidly unleash powerful explosions. Now scientists may have solved the decades-old mystery behind how these outbursts can happen so quickly. The findings could one day help explain the origins of the most powerful explosions in the universe and point to ways to build stable nuclear fusion reactors.

Speaking today at a press conference in western Italy , scientists from the LIGO and Virgo collaborations reported new results detailing the observation of yet another gravitational wave signal, this one emanating from a source at least a billion light years away.

In honor of yesterday's  Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day , here is a look at some important scientific advancements made by parent-child collaborations. Just imagine the dinner conversations… *Please note that each person mentioned is an esteemed scientist in his or her own right, with many other important contributions that aren’t mentioned in these brief highlights.

“We are looking back in time by simply studying the grandfathers and all our stellar ancestors.” Dr. Anna Frebel is an Assistant Professor of Physics at MIT and the author of Searching for the Oldest Stars , and she looks for and studies stars that are almost as old as the universe itself . “That's why we call this kind of work stellar archaeology.”

The universe is teeming with galaxies, but gravity distorts our view of them. Astrophysicists with the ongoing Dark Energy Survey have now collected giant catalogs of the distorted shapes of 24 million distant galaxies, making it possible to probe the underlying structure of the rapidly expanding universe.

Image: Princeton Press In Katherine Freese's new book The Cosmic Cocktail: Three Parts Dark Matter , she traces the history of dark matter and her career as an astrophysicist navigating through it. For the last few years, she's been developing her theory of dark stars , giant primordial stars powered by dark matter annihilations, which she talks about in this week's podcast . Most recently she and her fellow researchers have been probing whether they are not only bright and gigantic, but also if they pulsate. Certain kinds of stars, called Cepheids , expand and contract regularly in a cycle of heating and cooling. As they heat up, they expand out until they're so big they start cooling down and contracting again. On Earth it looks like they're getting brighter and dimmer over time. The length of their cycle depends on their average luminosity. Knowing their absolute brightness means that scientists can tell how far away they are by gauging how dim they

Buried underneath a mile of solid ice at the bottom of the world, two instruments are at the forefront of a new effort to corroborate or refute one of the most controversial scientific results in the ongoing search for dark matter.  One of the DM-Ice17 detectors being lowered into the ice at the South Pole in 2010. Image: The University of Wisconsin-Madison The University of Wisconsin's DM-Ice17 experiment wrapped up two years of data collection at the South Pole in its hunt for the universe's missing mass. The two prototype detectors, immersed under a mile and a half of solid ice, are looking for the faintest pinpricks of light from a single particle of dark matter colliding with an atom. The two detectors finished their run in June and are the precursors to a future experiment that will be able to see if the Earth is passing through a cloud of invisible dark matter. It's the first experiment to look for dark matter south of the equator.

At 1:28 PM EST today, the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN mission (MAVEN) will blast off from Cape Canaveral en route to study the evolution of the red planet's atmosphere. While the spacecraft will launch in a matter of hours, this launch date almost had to be pushed back two years due to the U.S. government shutdown in October. As Universe Today reported earlier today, NASA administrator Charles Bolden had to make the case that continuing to prepare for MAVEN's launch was critical to protecting life and property – a necessary condition that was required for most employees to continue working during the shutdown. Instead of touting the mission's science objectives, Bolden focused on MAVEN's role as a communications relay for ground missions on Mars. Without MAVEN, Bolden argued , data coming from the Curiosity and Opportunity rovers may have been lost. Thanks in part to Bolden's efforts, the MAVEN mission is still on for today. You can watch the la

There are some giant stars out there. Our sun is more than 300,000 times more massive than Earth. That's pretty big, but there are stars much larger. One particularly big one, imaginatively named WR 102ka, is located near the center of the galaxy is 100 times larger than our sun. Ever since scientists started noticing these behemoths near the galactic core, they've wondered where they came from. Now a team of scientists from the University Potsdam in Germany think they have an answer. The Peony Nebula, which lies between us and WR 102ka. The nebula blocks out all but the giant star's infrared light. The yellow circle indicates WR 102ka location behind the dust and gas. Image:NASA. Stars form when vast clouds of gas and dust coalesce together, growing denser and denser, until its atoms start fusing together and set off a nuclear reaction . Sometimes they form by themselves with  no other stars nearby, and sometimes they're created within vast star cluster full o

Reproducibility forms one of the cornerstones of physics; independent scientists need to corroborate a finding before it's widely accepted in the scientific community. But sometimes the window of observation only lasts for several hours twice every hundred years or so. That makes reproducibility fairly difficult. Earlier this summer, Venus passed in front of — or transited — the sun for the last time this century. While the astronomical event amazed viewers across the world, a group of physicists were re-creating an observation from over 250 years ago: the discovery of Venus' atmosphere. At the same time, they've stoked the fire in a debate over who first made this discovery. The entire Venus transit of 2012 in one image. Image courtesy of NASA.

There's something funky in the universe: dark matter, that is. And now you can learn about its history with some new beats and rhymes. Michael Wilson, AKA Coma Niddy, has been making science music videos for awhile now, and he sent me his latest dark matter rap this weekend. The rap hasn't reached Snoop Lion status yet, but it could become the next Large Hadron Rap (created by former Physics Central team member Kate Mcalpine). As far as I can tell, the science in the lyrics is quite accurate, and Niddy's ability to condense such a complex topic into a rap is commendable. The song's catchy to boot. You can watch the video below, and I've re-posted the science-y lyrics from Coma Niddy's Youtube page as well.

Earlier today, some big names in the world of science journalism started a fascinating discussion on Twitter about reporting from the arXiv preprint server for physics papers. Because these papers usually have yet to be peer-reviewed (or may never be peer-reviewed), several questions naturally arose during the discussion. How can a journalist trust one of these papers? What steps should reporters take to verify the claims in an arXiv paper, and should the process differ from reporting on a peer-reviewed article? How much faith should reporters place in the peer-review process? As a writer who frequently writes about papers from the arXiv, I've grown to appreciate this gold mine of often undiscovered physics research. But it can also be a tomb for dubious papers and speculative musings. Consequently, I decided to do a quick (non-scientific) analysis of arXiv articles to see which categories (e.g. astrophysics or high energy physics) may have more articles that are eventually pe

The astrophysicists behind the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) have an ambitious goal: Pinpoint roughly 1.5 million galaxies from the past 6 billion years and over one hundred thousand quasars stretching back to the universe's infancy 12 billion years ago. They're about one third of the way there. With the latest data released yesterday, the team has composed a 3-d map of hundreds of thousands of galaxies and stars surveyed thus far. Additionally, the researchers have unveiled a teaser video , seen below, that allows you to drift through a cosmic sea. Aside from providing a breathtaking view of our cosmic surroundings, BOSS scientists are discovering more about the dark energy and matter that comprise 96 percent of our universe. Additionally, the survey should reveal more details about our universe's expansion. Mapping this huge chunk of the universe, while aesthetically pleasing, was motivated by scientific necessity. Artifacts from the early univers