Imagine a particle so elusive, so rare, that it’s difficult even to catch a glimpse of it. That’s the challenge researchers face when they try to study the Higgs boson, a fundamental particle—also called the God particle—responsible for giving mass to other particles. However, recent breakthroughs by the ATLAS collaboration at CERN have begun to unlock some of its most …
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Gravitational waves—ripples in space-time caused by violent cosmic events—travel at the speed of light in every direction, eventually fading out like ripples in water. But some events are so destructive and extreme that they create disturbances in spacetime more like powerful waves than small ripples, with enough energy to reach our own detectors here on Earth. Today, the LIGO Collaboration …
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Scientists have detected ripples in space-time from the violent collision of two massive black holes that spiralled into one another far beyond the distant edge of the Milky Way. The black holes, each more than 100 times the mass of the sun, began circling each other long ago and finally slammed together to form an even more massive black hole …
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