Physics Buzz

Gravitational waves have been on our radar non-stop lately, from LIGO's fourth reported detection —enhanced by data from Italy's Virgo project —to this year's physics Nobel going to three of LIGO's cofounders. But here we are again and, far from getting old, the news is more exciting than ever: we've picked up a new kind of signal, from merging neutron stars rather than black holes. That's not all, though—while black hole mergers are expected to be difficult or impossible to see, this collision produced electromagnetic waves across a broad portion of the spectrum, allowing multiple telescopes to pick up the signal and giving us our first confirmed glimpse of a binary neutron star system coalescing into a single object.

Studying something you’re not sure exists may seem strange to a non-scientist. But when you’re dealing with things so large or so small or so weird that no one even knows what to look for, theoretical predictions can be more than informative, they can be essential.

“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.”

Astronomers are building a global collaboration to identify recently discovered radio blips seemingly originating from deep space. Called "fast radio bursts," or FRBs for short, these enigmatic cosmic signals have so far confounded astronomers, and are the subject of a growing effort to track and observe them . An artist's rendition of the Parkes telescope observing a cosmic radio signal. Image: Swinburne Astronomy Productions. A lot of questions surround the origins of these strange signals, and astronomers are stepping up efforts around the world to identify where they're coming from. Each radio chirp lasts just a few milliseconds and were only identified after scientists went back and reviewed years-old data and found them hiding in plain sight. "We've known about these FRBs for a while but we don’t know a lot about them," said Emily Petroff , a PhD candidate at Swinburne University of Technology and organizer of the collaboration.

" A nightmare, long engendered in the modern mind by the mythology that follows in the wake of science, was falling off him. He had read of 'Space': at the back of his thinking for years had lurked the dismal fancy of the black, cold vacuity, the utter deadness, which was supposed to separate the worlds. He had not known how much it affected him till now... " - C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet Like Lewis, many initially envision the vacuum of space as a place of "utter deadness" and it fuels cold thoughts of a universe devoid of action. But for decades, physicists attempting to unify quantum mechanics and relativity have been accidentally painting a contradictory and compelling picture of what actually separates the worlds. The subtle, yet critical properties of the vacuum are now needed to fully describe many bizarre phenomena in the cosmos. From the Dirac sea model of a vacuum as an ocean of negatively charged particles to the Casimir effect t