Sam Jarman

Venus may be overwhelmingly inhospitable today, but many planetary scientists believe that it wasn't always this way. Billions of years ago, some observational evidence suggested that our planetary neighbor may have looked ...

Named for the mythical valley where the god Dionysus was raised in secret by nymphs, the asteroid 44 Nysa inhabits the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Through observations by the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers ...

So far, almost all stellar-mass black holes detected by astronomers have been found in binary systems. However, astronomers have long suspected that these binary black holes are the exception and that, within the Milky Way, ...

Using spectral data from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), astronomers have gained some of the clearest evidence yet that white dwarf stars are accreting debris from disintegrating exoplanets. Captured while ...

Topological photonics can force propagating light to travel in a single direction—allowing researchers to route optical signals around corners and past defects without any of it scattering backward. So far, however, this ...

Semiconductor spin qubits are one of the most promising building blocks for future quantum computers, but turning them into a working, large-scale quantum computer has so far proven difficult. For now, two big questions remain ...

For most theories in physics, the order of operations has little impact on the result. When setting a dial to a certain position, for example, it doesn't matter whether it's turned clockwise or counterclockwise—the result ...

Neural networks have transformed how machines find patterns in data, from recognizing faces in photos to predicting the shapes of proteins. So far, all of this progress has been made on ordinary classical computers, but with ...

Heavy polar molecules are some of the most sensitive tools physicists have for probing what lies beyond the Standard Model, the theory that describes the particles and forces we know about. But turning that sensitivity into ...

Over the past decade, perovskite LEDs have become increasingly vibrant and affordable to produce. With careful tweaks to their chemical composition, these crystal-based light emitters can be tuned across the visible spectrum—matching ...

Researchers in the U.S. have carried out the most stringent tests to date of the idea that an ultraviolet glow in the atmospheres of giant planets could partly arise through the indirect interaction between dark matter and ...

Quantum computers promise to solve problems that would take even the fastest conventional supercomputers a vast amount of time, but the quantum information they store and process is extremely sensitive to even tiny disturbances ...

More than a century after Albert Einstein first transformed our understanding of gravity, his general theory of relativity continues to withstand ever more demanding experimental tests. Now, an international team led by Ignazio ...

For over a century, the accepted value for a firefly's brightness has mostly stood, tracing its origins to experiments carried out in 1912. Through rigorous new analysis published in the American Journal of Physics, David ...

Since gravitational waves were first detected in 2015, instruments including LIGO, Virgo and KAGRA have picked up a steady stream of signals from colliding black holes, building a catalog that now numbers in the hundreds. ...