Sam Jarman

Time-reversal symmetry is an exotic behavior found in systems whose internal physics looks different when running forward versus backward in time. For some time, physicists have searched for this behavior in systems with ...

For decades, astronomers lumped brown dwarfs into a single category defined by mass alone—too big to be classified as planets but too small to become stars. However, this definition ignores the two very different mechanisms ...

To date, close to 30,000 satellites have been launched into Earth's orbit, leading to mounting concerns over the debris created when they collide. In a new analysis posted to the preprint server arXiv, Hugh Lewis of the University ...

For decades, astronomers have assumed that the Martian surface froze solid around 3 billion years ago and has stayed that way ever since. If this were really the case, any liquid water would have long since either been locked ...

Composing some 85% of the universe's total mass, dark matter betrays its presence only through gravity, unlike ordinary matter. Yet through new research published in Physical Review D, a team led by David Dunsky of New York ...

The origin of spin in spiral and elliptical galaxies has posed a long-standing puzzle for astronomers. One idea, known as tidal torque theory, proposes that galaxies' spins are an imprinted record of the early universe, imparted ...

Using a detector filled with nearly 9 metric tons of liquid xenon, researchers have delivered some of the most sensitive dark matter results ever recorded. In the latest analysis from the XENON collaboration, working at the ...

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 ...