Physics and Astronomy

Stephen Hawking and Kip Thorne may owe John Preskill a set of encyclopedias

In 1997, the three cosmologists made a famous bet as to whether information that enters a black hole ceases to exist — that is, whether the interior of a black hole is changed at all by the characteristics of particles that enter it.

Hawking’s research suggested that the particles have no effect whatsoever. But his theory violated the laws of quantum mechanics and created a contradiction known as th

A National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) scientist has demonstrated efficient production of single photons—the smallest pulses of light—at the highest temperatures reported for the photon source used. The advance is a step toward practical, ultrasecure quantum communications, as well as useful for certain types of metrology. The results are reported in the Feb. 23 issue of Applied Physics Letters.

“Single photon turnstiles” are being hotly pursued for quantum communicatio

Redshift 10 Galaxy discovered at the edge of the Dark Ages [1]

Using the ISAAC near-infrared instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope, and the magnification effect of a gravitational lens, a team of French and Swiss astronomers [2] has found several faint galaxies believed to be the most remote known.

Further spectroscopic studies of one of these candidates has provided a strong case for what is now the new record holder – and by far – of the most distant galaxy known i

Scientists from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Washington University have seen carbon and nitrogen anomalies on a particle of interplanetary dust that provides a clue as to how interstellar organic matter was incorporated into the solar system.

Interplanetary dust particles (IDPs) gathered from the Earth’s stratosphere are complex collections of primitive solar system material and carry various isotopic anomalies. Using an ion microprobe that allows isotopic imaging at a scale o

For the first time, scientists from UC Berkeley and Lawrence Livermore, in conjunction with astrophysicists from the California Institute of Technology, UC Santa Cruz, the National Science Foundation’s Center for Adaptive Optics and UC’s Lick Observatory, have observed that distant larger stars formed in flattened accretion disks just like the sun.

Using the laser guide star adaptive optics system created by LLNL scientists, the team was able to determine that some of the relativel

Astronomers at the University of California, Berkeley, have discovered the nearest and youngest star with a visible disk of dust that may be a nursery for planets.

The dim red dwarf star is a mere 33 light years away, close enough that the Hubble Space Telescope or ground-based telescopes with adaptive optics to sharpen the image should be able to see whether the dust disk contains clumps of matter that might turn into planets.

“Circumstellar disks are signposts for planet formati