A Road Trip with Commander Chris

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Can Entangled Particles Communicate Faster than Light? December 21, 2024
Entanglement is perhaps one of the most confusing aspects of quantum mechanics. On its surface, entanglement allows particles to communicate over vast distances instantly, apparently violating the speed of light. But while entangled particles are connected, they don’t necessarily share information between them. In quantum mechanics, a particle isn’t really a particle. Instead of being […]
Paul M. Sutter
IceCube Just Spent 10 Years Searching for Dark Matter December 20, 2024
Neutrinos are tricky little blighters that are hard to observe. The IceCube Neutrino Observatory in Antarctica was built to detect neutrinos from space. It is one of the most sensitive instruments built with the hope it might help uncover evidence for dark matter. Any dark matter trapped inside Earth, would release neutrinos that IceCube could […]
Mark Thompson
Star Devouring Black Hole Spotted by Astronomers December 20, 2024
A team of astronomers have detected a surprisingly fast and bright burst of energy from a galaxy 500 million light years away. The burst of radiation peaked in brightness just after 4 day and then faded quickly. The team identified the burst, which was using the Catalina Real-Time Transient Survey with supporting observations from the […]
Mark Thompson
What Makes Brown Dwarfs So Weird? December 20, 2024
Meet the brown dwarf: bigger than a planet, and smaller than a star. A category of its own, it’s one of the strangest objects in the universe. Brown dwarfs typically are defined to have masses anywhere from 12 times the mass of Jupiter right up to the lower limit for a star. And despite their […]
Paul M. Sutter
Archaeology On Mars: Preserving Artifacts of Our Expansion Into the Solar System December 19, 2024
In 1971, the Soviet Mars 3 lander became the first spacecraft to land on Mars, though it only lasted a couple of minutes before failing. More than 50 years later, it’s still there at Terra Sirenum. The HiRISE camera NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter may have imaged some of its hardware, inadvertently taking part in what […]
Evan Gough