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Can Light be “Squeezed” to Improve Sensitivity of Gravitational Wave Detectors?

The search is on to detect the first evidence of gravitational waves travelling around the cosmos. How can we do this? The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) uses a system of laser beams fired over a distance of 4 km (2.5 miles) and reflected back and forth by a system of mirrors. Should a gravitational …

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Can a Wormhole Generate its Own Magnetic Field?

Wormholes are a strange consequence of Einstein’s theory of general relativity. These “shortcuts” through the fabric of space and time may link two different locations in the universe; they may even connect two different universes together. This also leads to the possibility that wormholes can allow travel between two points in time. These strange entities …

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Supercomputer Will Simulate Colliding Black Holes

You just know this is going to take some serious computer horsepower. Rochester Institute of Technology’s Center for Computational Relativity and Gravitation was recently awarded $330,000 from the National Science Foundation to simulate collisions between black holes. Dubbed “newHorizons”, this will be a cluster of 85 dual core processors acting like a single large computer. …

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Galaxy Collision Separates Out the Dark Matter

There’s more dark matter than regular matter in the Universe, and they’re normally all mixed up together in galaxies. But astronomers using the Chandra X-Ray Observatory have found a situation where dark matter and normal matter can be wrenched apart. In a collision between giant galaxy clusters, hot gas clouds in the clusters encounter friction …

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Colliding Galaxies Simulated

A supercomputer simulation gravitational interaction between colliding galaxies. Image credit: Stelios Kazantzidis. Click to enlarge Just like many businesses, galaxies grow through mergers and acquisitions. As galaxies are made up of countless individual stars, simulating these mergers is tremendously challenging, even for the most powerful supercomputers. A international team of researchers have produced a new …

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Sirius’ White Dwarf Companion Weighed by Hubble

The brightest star in the nighttime sky is Sirius, aka the Dog Star. But did you know it has a white dwarf companion called Sirius B? Unfortunately, the light from this burned out star is washed out by Sirius’ brilliant glow. Astronomers have been able to use the Hubble Space Telescope’s sensitive instruments to isolate the light from Sirius B and measure its mass by how its gravity bends light emitted from the star. Even though it’s only 12,000 kilometers (7,500 miles) across, Sirius B has 98% of the mass of our Sun.

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Gravity Probe B Wraps Up Observations

After 17 months of productive data collection, NASA’s Gravity Probe B satellite has gathered all the data it needs to pronounce Einstein right or wrong. The probe was launched in April 2004, with four spherical gyroscopes designed to test two of Einstein’s predictions about General Relativity: how the Earth’s gravity warps space, and how its rotation drags space around with it. Scientists will now spend about a year analyzing the data before presenting their conclusions.