The outskirts of the Milky Way are home to the galaxy’s oldest stars. But astronomers have spotted something unexpected in this celestial retirement community: a flock of young stars.
Columbia University, the Flatiron Institute in New York City and the Max Planck Society in Germany are joining forces. Their new partnership, called the Center for Nonequilibrium Quantum Phenomena, aims to understand, control and manipulate the uniquely useful properties of quantum materials.
Article written in collaboration with Columbia University.
On November 3, the emperor of Japan conferred the nation’s medal of honor to physicist Hirosi Ooguri. The medal includes a purple ribbon, recognizing Ooguri’s contributions to the arts and sciences.
The Flatiron Institute is pleased to announce that bioengineer Stanislav Shvartsman will lead a new research group within the Center for Computational Biology. The new Developmental Dynamics group will combine experiments, theory and computing to study the contributions of encoded genomic instructions and self-organizing physical mechanisms to embryo development.
The American Mathematical Society (AMS) will recognize mathematician David Eisenbud with its 2020 AMS Award for Distinguished Public Service.
The American Physical Society has awarded its 2020 Aneesur Rahman Prize for Computational Physics to Antoine Georges. He shares the prize with Gabriel Kotliar of Rutgers University.
For the first time, astrophysicists have heard a black hole ringing like a bell. By reanalyzing the first black hole merger ever detected, the astrophysicists measured the gravitational wave ‘tones’ emitted following the event. The breakthrough comes 10 years earlier than expected and confirms that the properties of black holes are just as Einstein predicted in his theory of general relativity in 1915.
Press release done in coordination with Stony Brook University.
Mathematician Alex Eskin of the University of Chicago has been awarded the 2020 Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics. The award recognizes Eskin for his “revolutionary discoveries in the dynamics and geometry of moduli spaces of Abelian differentials, including the proof of the ‘magic wand theorem’ with Maryam Mirzakhani.” (The magic wand theorem received its whimsical name due to its usefulness across many areas of mathematics.)
Fleets of microscopic machines toil away in your cells, carrying out critical biological tasks and keeping you alive. By combining theory and experiment, researchers have discovered the surprising way one of these machines, called the spindle, avoids slowdowns: congestion.
Astronomers have spotted a distant pair of titanic black holes headed for a collision. Each black hole’s mass is more than 800 million times that of our sun. As the two gradually draw closer together in a death spiral, they will begin sending gravitational waves rippling through space-time. Those cosmic ripples will join the as-yet-undetected background noise of gravitational waves from other supermassive black holes.
Top of Reddit's /r/science for July 10, 2019.