Category Astronomy/Space

Earth and our entire Milky Way galaxy may sit inside a mysterious giant hole which makes the cosmos expand faster here than in neighbouring regions of the universe, astronomers say.

Their theory is a potential solution to the ‘Hubble tension’ and could help confirm the true age of our universe, which is estimated to be around 13.8 billion years old.

The latest research – shared at the Royal Astronomical Society’s National Astronomy Meeting (NAM) in Durham – shows that sound waves from the early universe, &...

For decades, scientists have looked to light as a way to speed up computing. Photonic neural networks—systems that use light instead of electricity to process information—promise faster speeds and lower energy use than traditional electronics.

But despite their potential, these systems have struggled to match the accuracy of digital neural networks. A key reason: most photonic systems still mimic the structure and training methods of digital models, introducing errors when translating from software to hardware.

Now, a research team from Northwestern Polytechnical University and Southeast University in China has developed a new kind of photonic neural network tha...

A mystery interstellar object discovered last week is likely to be the oldest comet ever seen—possibly predating our solar system by more than 3 billion years, researchers say.

The “water ice-rich” visitor, named 3I/ATLAS, is only the third known object from beyond our solar system ever spotted in our cosmic neighborhood and the first to reach us from a completely different regi...

The LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA (LVK) Collaboration has detected the merger of the most massive black holes ever observed with gravitational waves using the LIGO observatories. The powerful merger produced a final black hole approximately 225 times the mass of our sun. The signal, designated GW231123, was detected during the fourth observing run of the LVK network on November 23, 2023.

LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory, made history in 2015 when it made the first-ever direct detection of gravitational waves, ripples in space-time. In that case, the waves emanated from a black hole merger that resulted in a final black hole 62 times the mass of our sun...