Global Energy Awards

New analysis supports Einstein’s relativity and narrows neutrino mass ranges, hinting at evolving dark energy. Gravity, the fundamental force sculpting the universe, has shaped tiny variations in matter from the early cosmos into the vast networks of galaxies we see today. Using data from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), scientists have traced the evolution of these cosmic structures over the past 11 billion years. This research represents the most precise large-scale test of gravity ever conducted, offering unprecedented insights into the universe’s formation and behavior. Researcher Héctor Gil Marín, from the Faculty of Physics and the Institute of Cosmos Sciences of the University of Barcelona (ICCUB), has co-led this new analysis and says that “these data allow us to study how fast the largest structures of the Universe have formed, to put limits to Einstein’s General Relativity theory at cosmological scales much larger than those of the solar system.” The research...

When you bake a loaf of bread or a batch of muffins, you put the dough into a pan. As the dough bakes in the oven, it expands into the baking pan. Any chocolate chips or blueberries in the muffin batter become farther away from each other as the muffin batter expands. The expansion of the Universe is, in some ways, similar. But this analogy gets one thing wrong while the dough expands into the baking pan, the Universe doesn't have anything to expand into. It just expands into itself. It can feel like a brain teaser, but the Universe is considered everything within the Universe. In the expanding Universe, there is no pan. Just dough. Even if there were a pan, it would be part of the Universe and therefore it would expand with the pan. Even for me, a teaching professor in physics and astronomy who has studied the Universe for years, these ideas are hard to grasp. You don't experience anything like this in your daily life. It's like asking what direction is farther north of t...

Albert Einstein's theory of gravity, general relativity, is famously incomplete. As proven by physics Nobel laureate Roger Penrose, when matter collapses under its own gravitational pull, the result is a " singularity "  a point of infinite density or curvature. At a singularity, space, time and matter are crushed and stretched into nonexistence. The laws of physics as we know them suffer a complete breakdown. If we could observe singularities, our physical theories couldn't be used to predict the future from the past. In other words, science would become an impossibility. Penrose also realized nature may hold a remedy for this fate  black holes. A defining feature of a black hole is its event horizon, a one-way membrane in space-time . Objects including light that cross the event horizon can never leave due to the black hole's incredibly strong gravitational pull. In all the known mathematical descriptions of black holes, singularities are present in their core. ...

Researchers have developed a new computational method to explore the neutron matter inside neutron stars at densities higher than previously studied. This method provides insights into the behavior of neutrinos during supernova explosions , enhancing the accuracy of simulations and potentially improving our understanding of such cosmic events. Advances in Neutron Matter Simulation When a star dies in a supernova, its remnants may collapse into a neutron star . In these incredibly dense objects, protons and electrons merge to form uncharged neutrons, creating a substance known as neutron matter. A team of researchers has recently explored neutron matter at higher densities than ever before, calculating its spin and density correlations using advanced nuclear interaction models . Spin and density correlations describe the likelihood of finding a neutron at a specific location and with a particular spin direction. These properties are crucial for understanding how neutrinos scatter and tr...