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Gravity Probe B Launches

A special NASA spacecraft designed to test two aspects of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, Gravity Probe B, lifted off Tuesday from Vandenberg Air Force Base on board a Boeing Delta II rocket. The spacecraft was inserted into a perfectly circular polar orbit, and operators will begin calibrating its instruments over the next 60-days. If everything checks out, the spacecraft will begin making precise measurements about the effect of the Earth’s gravity for 12 months – analysis of the data will take a further year.

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Record for Furthest Galaxy is Broken Again

Astronomers from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) have shattered the record for finding the most distant galaxy ever seen. By using a gravitational lens to magnify more distant objects, the team has found a galaxy which is 13.2 billion light-years away; the galaxy is being seen when the Universe was only 470 million years old. The young object is 10 times less massive than our own Milky Way, and looks like it was a building block for present day galaxies.

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It's a Fine Line Between a Black Hole Energy Factory and a Black Hole Bomb

You might be surprised to learn there’s a way to extract enormous energy from a rapidly spinning black hole. Known as the “Penrose Process,” an advanced civilization would feed material into a black hole and extract energy as some of it is hurled into space. A new paper suggests that the process could be even more efficient, cycling the material back into the black hole for another round. Or maybe this will turn into an extremely powerful bomb.

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Is this the Lightest Black Hole or Heaviest Neutron Star?

About 40,000 light-years away, a rapidly spinning object has a companion that’s confounding astronomers. It’s heavier than the heaviest neutron stars, yet at the same time, it’s lighter than the lightest black holes. Measurements place it in the so-called black hole mass gap, an observed gap in the stellar population between two to five solar …

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How to Think About a Four-Dimensional Universe

In Einstein’s famous theory of relativity the concepts of immutable space and time aren’t just put aside, they’re explicitly and emphatically rejected. Space and time are now woven into a coexisting fabric. That is to say, we truly live in a four-dimensional universe. Space and time alone cease to exist; only the union of those …

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