Black Holes Evaporate--Now Physicists Think Everything Else Does, Too

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June 22, 2023

This week, we're thinking about endings—or, at least, the surprising physics of what might happen trillions upon trillions of years from now. Our lead story discusses a new study that predicts objects possessing mass—i.e., most everything—will all eventually dissolve into a fog of ethereal particles. The physics are complicated, but arise from the same insights Stephen Hawking leveraged in the 1970s to theorize that black holes evaporate. Elsewhere, we've got stories on life's computational limits, the Earth-tilting effects of rampant groundwater mining, the quantum underpinnings of photosynthesis, the high-pressure physics of deep-sea submersibles, and much, much more. Enjoy!

Lee Billings, Senior Editor, Space & Physics

Black Holes Black Holes Evaporate--Now Physicists Think Everything Else Does, Too Physicists knew black holes eventually disappear particle by particle. Now they think everything else does, too By Adam Mann

Renewable Energy World's Largest Fusion Project Is in Big Trouble, New Documents Reveal The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) is already billions of dollars over budget and decades behind schedule. Not even its leaders can say how much more money and time it will take to complete By Charles Seife

Oceans See How Crushing Pressures Increase in the Ocean's Depths If the missing Titan submersible were near the Titanic, it would experience pressure higher than that of a great white shark bite By Sophie Bushwick

Oceans What Safety Features Should Subs like the Titan Be Equipped With? With the Titan vessel's fate yet to be determined, an expert explains the safety features that should be onboard such a submersible By Eric Fusil,The Conversation

Extraterrestrial Life To Find Life in the Universe, Find the Computation The discovery that life on Earth looks a lot like information propagating itself offers new clues, and new directions, to the hunt for life elsewhere By Caleb A. Scharf

Plants Quantum Light Experiment Proves Photosynthesis Starts with a Single Photon Scientists have used quantum technology to track individual particles of light as they begin the process of photosynthesis By Meghan Bartels

Water Rampant Groundwater Pumping Has Changed the Tilt of Earth's Axis Human depletion of groundwater has shifted the global distribution of water so much that the North Pole has drifted by more than four centimeters per year By Davide Castelvecchi,Nature magazine

Astronomy Why Does Smoke Turn the Sky Orange? The wildfire smoke that smothered the U.S. Northeast last week has surprising connections to astrophysics—and to the historic search for our place in the cosmos By Phil Plait

Astronomy JWST's Hunt for Habitable Exoplanets Finds Disappointment, Again Observations from the James Webb Space Telescope suggest that TRAPPIST-1 c, the second world in a seven-planet system, lacks an atmosphere By Alexandra Witze,Nature magazine

Astronomy Have Astronomers Seen the Universe's First Stars? The James Webb Space Telescope is giving us our first glimpse of stars in the early universe. By Carin Leong,Lee Billings | 05:05

Dark Matter JWST's Glimpses of Early Galaxies Could Shed Light on Dark Matter Bold new simulations suggest the James Webb Space Telescope might be able to distinguish between competing dark matter models by studying primordial dwarf galaxies By Lyndie Chiou

Astronomy This Astronomer Discovered What the Stars Were Made Of, and Few Believed Her Discovery Nearly 100 years ago a young astronomer named Cecilia Payne changed the way we see the stars in the sky because she was able to look into their burning heart and see something no one else ever had By Lucy Evans,Katie Hafner,The Lost Women of Science Initiative

Astrophysics Strange Giant Filaments Reveal a Mystery at the Milky Way's Heart Astrophysicist Farhad Yusef-Zadeh has spent decades peering into the center of the Milky Way galaxy, discovering hundreds of enigmatic filaments in the process By Meghan Bartels

QUOTE OF THE DAY "What if the search for life in the universe is really a search for how the cosmos computes? That's the intriguing, and perhaps unsettling, possibility that we are exploring as a part of our quest to find out whether or not we are alone." Caleb Scharf, an astrobiologist at NASA's Ames Research Center, on how the tenets of information theory could become guiding principles in the hunt for extraterrestrial life

FROM THE ARCHIVE How the Inside of a Black Hole Is Secretly on the Outside Mysterious "islands" help to explain what happens to information that falls into a black hole By Ahmed Almheiri | September 2022

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