Astronomy and astrophysics articles within Nature Physics

Featured

  • Measure for Measure |

    Adaptive optics allows scientists to correct for distortions of an image caused by the scattering of light. Anita Chandran illuminates the nature of the technique.

    • Anita Mary Chandran

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The transition from a metastable state to the ground state in classical many-body systems is mediated by bubble nucleation. This transition has now been experimentally observed in a quantum setting using coupled atomic superfluids.

    • A. Zenesini
    • , A. Berti
    •  & G. Ferrari

  • News & Views |

    Determining the melting temperature and electrical conductivity of ammonia under the internal conditions of the ice giants Uranus and Neptune is helping us to understand the structure and magnetic field formation of these planets.

    • Kenji Ohta

  • News & Views |

    Particles in space can be accelerated to high energy, the distribution of which follows a power law. This has now been reproduced in laboratory experiments mimicking astrophysical scenarios, which helps to understand the underlying mechanisms.

    • Giovanni Lapenta

  • Article |

    Laboratory experiments reveal the underlying mechanism of turbulent reconnection, including electron acceleration. These findings are directly relevant for studies of flares in the solar corona.

    • Yongli Ping
    • , Jiayong Zhong
    •  & Jie Zhang

  • News & Views |

    A potential observation of low-energy antihelium-3 nuclei would have profound impacts on our understanding of the Galaxy. Experiments at particle colliders help us understand how cosmic antimatter travels over long distances before reaching Earth.

    • Aihong Tang

  • News & Views |

    Lorentz symmetry violations might produce anomalies in the propagation of particles travelling through the Universe. The IceCube Collaboration performed the most precise search for such an effect with neutrinos, finding no sign of anomalous behaviour.

    • Giulia Gubitosi

  • News & Views |

    Bayesian history matching is a statistical tool used to calibrate complex numerical models. Now, it has been applied to first-principles simulations of several nuclei, including 208Pb, whose properties are linked to the interior of neutron stars.

    • Arnau Rios

  • News & Views |

    Originally suggested for the detection of gravitational waves, resonantly vibrating metal beams have been used in a recent laboratory experiment to measure Newton’s constant of gravitation and to verify Newton’s gravitational law.

    • Christian Rothleitner

  • News & Views |

    Promising machine learning techniques can deduce the properties of merging black holes from gravitational wave signals a million times faster than current state-of-the-art methods.

    • Rory Smith

  • Article |

    A search for axion-like dark matter with a quantum sensor that enhances potential signals is reported. This work constrains the parameter space of different interactions between nucleons and axion-like particles and between nucleons and dark photons.

    • Min Jiang
    • , Haowen Su
    •  & Dmitry Budker

  • Research Highlight |

    • Stefanie Reichert

  • Measure for Measure |

    Initially used to measure the brightness of radio sources, the jansky has spread to other areas of astronomy, as Natasha Hurley-Walker recounts.

    • Natasha Hurley-Walker

  • News & Views |

    Table-top superfluid experiments offer a way of bringing the physics of astrophysical black holes into the lab. But the presence of two event horizons in these superfluid black holes complicates matters — and makes them more interesting.

    • Giovanni Modugno

  • Editorial |

    The Nobel Prize in Physics 2020 has been awarded to Roger Penrose for his work on black hole formation, and to Andrea Ghez and Reinhard Genzel for their observation of a supermassive compact object at the Galactic Centre.

  • Measure for Measure |

    In first-century China, emperor Wang Mang standardized weights and measures in his newly established dynasty. Noa Hegesh tells the story of sound as the basis for this standardization.

    • Noa Hegesh

  • News & Views |

    Observing accreting black holes in the early Universe allows precise comparison of clocks over intercontinental distances on Earth. This is achieved with a novel observation strategy using the next generation of very long baseline interferometry systems.

    • Rüdiger Haas

  • Research Highlight |

    • Stefanie Reichert

  • Article |

    The presence of axion-like dark matter candidates is expected to induce an oscillating magnetic field, enhanced by a ferromagnet. Limits on the electromagnetic coupling strength of axion-like particles are reported over a mass range spanning three decades.

    • Alexander V. Gramolin
    • , Deniz Aybas
    •  & Alexander O. Sushkov

  • News & Views |

    An elegant experiment showing that acoustic waves are amplified after scattering by a rotating body demonstrates an effect predicted in 1971 by Yakov Zel’dovich. This result has implications for the understanding of scattering from black holes.

    • Bruce W. Drinkwater

  • News & Views |

    A laser–plasma experiment has recreated shock waves in collisionless, weakly magnetized conditions and evidenced electron acceleration to relativistic energies, offering unprecedented insight into a long-standing problem in astrophysics.

    • Laurent Gremillet
    •  & Martin Lemoine

  • Article |

    Braneworld cosmologies describe our universe as a four-dimensional membrane embedded in a bulk five-dimensional anti-de Sitter spacetime. In a possible holographic realization, observers on the brane experience cosmology, and gravity is localized.

    • Stefano Antonini
    •  & Brian Swingle

  • Letter
    | Open Access

    The cores of neutron stars could be made of hadronic matter or quark matter. By combining first-principles calculations with observational data, evidence for the presence of quark matter in neutron star cores is found.

    • Eemeli Annala
    • , Tyler Gorda
    •  & Aleksi Vuorinen

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