Gravitational-Wave Search Resumes after Three Years and Lots of Headaches

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May 25, 2023

This week, we’re celebrating a changing of the tide. For the past three years, the once-mighty flow of discoveries from the world’s gravitational-wave detectors has been more of a trickle, due to those facilities being shut down for maintenance and upgrades. Now, however, they’re coming back online with a bang, on pace to find many more elusive ripples in spacetime from merging black holes, colliding neutron stars, and more. Read our lead story to learn more. Elsewhere, we have stories on quantum theory’s “measurement problem,” a once-in-a-decade supernova in a nearby galaxy, the universe’s most bizarre numbers, the curious case of a meteorite that recently fell on a house in New Jersey, and much more. Enjoy!

Lee Billings, Senior Editor, Space & Physics

Astrophysics Gravitational-Wave Search Resumes after Three Years and Lots of Headaches Researchers still hope to discover hundreds of new binary black hole mergers despite technical setbacks that have sidelined key detectors in Italy and Japan By Daniel Garisto

Quantum Physics Quantum Theory's 'Measurement Problem' May Be a Poison Pill for Objective Reality Solving a notorious quantum quandary could require abandoning some of science’s most cherished assumptions about the physical world By Anil Ananthaswamy

Astrophysics Six Gravitational-Wave Breakthroughs Scientists Can't Wait to See After years of downtime for upgrades, the world’s premier gravitational-wave observatories are coming back online with big hopes for transformative discoveries By Imre Bartos,Zsuzsa Márka,Szabolcs Márka

Astronomy Astronomers Have Spotted a Once-in-a-Decade Supernova--and You Can, Too The death throes of a massive star in the galaxy M101, located just 21 million light-years away from Earth, are entrancing professional and amateur astronomers alike By Meghan Bartels

Sponsor Content Provided by University of Chicago How Were Black Holes Discovered? Physicists were skeptical in the 1930s when 19-year-old Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar found that some stars are so massive they collapse in on themselves. Today UChicago scientists are studying gravitational waves for new insights into black holes and our universe.

Mathematics These Are the Most Bizarre Numbers in the Universe Most real numbers are unknown—even to mathematicians By Manon Bischoff

Extraterrestrial Life Is E.T. Eavesdropping on Our Phone Calls? Cell phone towers leak radio waves into space, but they’ll be tough for aliens to detect By Phil Plait

Quantum Physics The Universe Began with a Bang, Not a Bounce, New Studies Find New research pokes holes in the idea that the cosmos expanded and then contracted before beginning again By James Riordon

Planetary Science JWST Spots Biggest Water Plume Yet Spewing from a Moon of Saturn The huge watery cloud spurting from Enceladus could carry the ingredients for life farther into space than previously known By Alexandra Witze,Nature magazine

Space Exploration Can NASA's Artemis Moon Missions Count on Using Lunar Water Ice? How realistic is it to expect to find enough ice on the moon to support human habitation? By Leonard David,SPACE.com

Astronomy JWST Will Hunt for Dead Solar Systems--And Much More--In Its Second Year of Science White dwarfs, Earth-sized exoplanets, early galaxies and even Saturn’s moon Enceladus are on the agenda for JWST’s second year in space, but exomoons and others miss out By Jonathan O'Callaghan

Astronomy Saturn's Youthful Rings and Newfound Moons Put It in Stargazing Spotlight Saturn’s surprisingly young rings and record-breaking bounty of moons make the planet a ripe target for springtime sky watchers By Phil Plait

Weather NASA Mini Satellites Will Help Track Hurricanes Miniature satellites called CubeSats will collect meteorologic data that NASA hopes will help explain how and why some tropical storms intensify as they approach land By Daniel Cusick,E&E News

FROM THE STORE Scientific American Volume 328, Issue 6

QUOTE OF THE DAY "One major aspect of the measurement problem is this idea that observed events are not absolute ... [We show] there is no pain-free solution to this problem. If we ever can recover absoluteness, then we're going to have to give up on some physical principle that we really care about." Nicholas Ormrod, a quantum theorist at the University of Oxford, on the "measurement problem" in quantum physics and its potentially reality-dissolving effects

FROM THE ARCHIVE The Universe Is Not Locally Real, and the Physics Nobel Prize Winners Proved It Elegant experiments with entangled light have laid bare a profound mystery at the heart of reality By Daniel Garisto | October 2022

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