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Hybrid design could make nuclear fusion reactors more efficient

Two types of fusion reactor called tokamaks and stellarators both have drawbacks – but a new design combining parts from both could offer the best of both worlds

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Liquid crystals could improve quantum communication devices

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Liquid crystals could improve quantum communication devices

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What "naked" singularities are revealing about quantum space-time

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How to wrap your mind around the real multiverse

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Atoms at temperatures beyond absolute zero may be a new form of matter

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How materials that rewind light can test physics' most extreme ideas

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How materials that rewind light can test physics' most extreme ideas

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Time may be an illusion created by quantum entanglement

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This new visualization of a black hole illustrates how its gravity distorts our view, warping its surroundings as if seen in a carnival mirror. The visualization simulates the appearance of a black hole where infalling matter has collected into a thin, hot structure called an accretion disk. The black hole?s extreme gravity skews light emitted by different regions of the disk, producing the misshapen appearance. Bright knots constantly form and dissipate in the disk as magnetic fields wind and twist through the churning gas. Nearest the black hole, the gas orbits at close to the speed of light, while the outer portions spin a bit more slowly. This difference stretches and shears the bright knots, producing light and dark lanes in the disk. Viewed from the side, the disk looks brighter on the left than it does on the right. Glowing gas on the left side of the disk moves toward us so fast that the effects of Einstein?s relativity give it a boost in brightness; the opposite happens on the right side, where gas moving away us becomes slightly dimmer. This asymmetry disappears when we see the disk exactly face on because, from that perspective, none of the material is moving along our line of sight. Closest to the black hole, the gravitational light-bending becomes so excessive that we can see the underside of the disk as a bright ring of light seemingly outlining the black hole. This so-called ?photon ring? is composed of multiple rings, which grow progressively fainter and thinner, from light that has circled the black hole two, three, or even more times before escaping to reach our eyes. Because the black hole modeled in this visualization is spherical and non-rotating, the photon ring looks nearly circular and identical from any viewing angle. Inside the photon ring is the black hole?s shadow, an area roughly twice the size of the event horizon ? its point of no return. This visualization is ?mass invariant,? which means it can represent a black hole of any mass. The size of the black hole's shadow is proportional to its mass, but so is the size of the accreetion disk, so its properties scale accordingly. Simulations and movies like these really help us visualize what Einstein meant when he said that gravity warps the fabric of space and time.

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How the weird and powerful pull of black holes made me a physicist

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Quantum time travel: The experiment to 'send a particle into the past'

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Quantum time travel: The experiment to 'send a particle into the past'

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Quantum 'arrow of time' suggests early universe had no entanglement

One way to explain why time only moves forward is the quantum arrow of time, and it has major implications for both the universe's early period and its eventual demise

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Quantum to cosmos: Why scale is vital to our understanding of reality

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Quantum to cosmos: Why scale is vital to our understanding of reality

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2GFMTHY quantum computer

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How quantum entanglement really works and why we accept its weirdness

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X-ray laser fires most powerful pulse ever recorded

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What are fractals and how can they help us understand the world?

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