What We're Reading

In the last century, physicists have revealed a complex world of fundamental particles.

Brian Metzger, an astrophysicist at the Flatiron Institute's Center for Computational Astrophysics, weighs in on a series of recent studies that describe a giant flare erupting from a magnetar — a neutron star with an outlandishly intense magnetic field.

New measurements confirm a fleeting subatomic particle called the muon may be ever so slightly more magnetic than theory predicts, a team of more than 200 physicists reported this week.

Antimatter, the mysterious mirror-stuff of the universe, is hard to make and harder to study. A laser that literally chills it out could change all that.

Two years of analyzing the polarized light from a galaxy’s giant black hole has given scientists a glimpse at how quasars might arise.

Creating Bose-Einstein condensates — and crashing them together — in microgravity could lead to physics breakthroughs, better spacecraft navigation and more.

Physicists aim to make practical materials that conduct electricity with zero resistance

László Lovász of Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest and Avi Wigderson of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. will share this year’s Abel Prize — regarded as the field’s equivalent of the Nobel — for advances in understanding the foundations of what can and cannot be solved with computers.

The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), a set of 66 radio astronomy dishes perched high in the Chilean Andes, shut down on last March and has remained silent ever since. But ALMA managers announced that observations will resume this month, after a 6-month campaign of repairs and planning.

A gold ball just 2 millimeters wide, with a mass of about 90 milligrams, is now the smallest object to have its gravitational pull measured. Observations of that gold sphere tugging on another similarly sized sphere confirm that gravity behaves as expected even for extremely weak gravitational fields.