This Year's Physics Nobel Awards Scientists for Slicing Reality into Attoseconds

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October 05, 2023

Our top story this week is, naturally, the Nobel Prize in physics. This year's prize went to a trio of researchers who independently developed ways to study phenomena across attoseconds—spans of time so mind-bogglingly brief that there are about as many of them within a single second as there are seconds within the entire history of the universe. But the Nobels weren't all we covered, of course. Elsewhere we have stories on a new life for NASA's New Horizons mission beyond Pluto, a guide for viewing a "ring of fire" partial solar eclipse on October 14, quirks of quantum optics that could lead to breakthroughs in computing and communications, and much more. Enjoy!

Lee Billings, Senior Editor, Space & Physics @LeeBillings

Particle Physics This Year's Physics Nobel Awards Scientists for Slicing Reality into Attoseconds Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz, and Anne L'Huillier split the award for their ability to picture nature in a billionth of a billionth of a second By Daniel Garisto

Planetary Science Beyond Pluto, New Horizons Gets a Reprieve from NASA NASA has reversed course on plans to curtail the New Horizons spacecraft's planetary science studies following a rebellion among the mission's leaders By Jonathan O'Callaghan

Astronomy How to See the 'Ring of Fire' Annular Solar Eclipse of October 14 This annular solar eclipse will only reveal its full glory to a select few, but onlookers across much of the Western Hemisphere can catch a partial glimpse of the dazzling phenomenon By Phil Plait

Astrophysics Song of the Stars, Part 3: The Universe in all Senses An astronomy festival in Italy opted to make all of its events and workshops multisensory. They wanted to see whether sound, touch and smell can, like sight, transmit the wonders of the cosmos. By Timmy Broderick,Jason Drakeford,Carin Leong | 10:16

Planetary Science Bringing Mars Rocks to Earth Could Cost an Astronomical $11 Billion NASA's Perseverance rover has collected valuable samples, but a new report says the plan to fetch them is unworkable By Alexandra Witze,Nature magazine

Planetary Science Mars Sample-Return Missions Could Reduce Tensions with China on Earth The U.S. may not beat China at retrieving Martian rocks first, according to an independent review board's conclusion. But the U.S. can still lead with an exchange of samples here on Earth By Louis Friedman

Astrophysics Can Lucky Planets Get a Second Chance at Life? Worlds around red giant stars—and others that don't orbit any star at all—hint at an unexpected diversity of possibilities for planets and life in the universe By Conor Feehly

Black Holes Supermassive Black Hole Feeding Frenzies May Explain Blinking Quasars A new simulation shows black holes ripping apart and consuming their accretion disk in a matter of months, which may explain why some quasars quickly brighten and dim By Stephanie Pappas

Astronomy Giant Satellite Outshines Most Stars in the Sky At times, the enormous BlueWalker 3 telecommunications satellite is brighter than some of the most iconic stars visible from Earth By Shannon Hall,Nature magazine

Materials Science 2023 Nobel Prize in Chemistry Goes to Tiny Quantum Dots with Huge Effects Three scientists won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their discovery of quantum dots, an entirely new class of material that is used in large-screen TVs and cancer surgery By Josh Fischman

Quantum Physics Entangled Light from Multitasking Atoms Could Spark Quantum Breakthroughs A colorful quirk of quantum optics could lead to significant advances in quantum communication and computing By Dina Genkina

Quantum Computing What's a Qubit? 3 Ways Scientists Build Quantum Computers Scientists are trying to master the basic computing element known as a qubit to make quantum computers more powerful than electronic machines By Katherine Wright

Ethics Nobel Prize Debate Misses the Mark on the Real Culprits Ignoring Scientific Merit The furor over a Nobel Prize winner's derailed career lets scientists off the hook for their own responsibilities to fix a broken academic reward system By C. Brandon Ogbunu

Ethics Nobel Prizes Are Taking Longer to Award Groundbreaking Research Nobel laureates sometimes wait 20 years or more after making their award-worthy discovery to receive the prize By Lilly Tozer,Nature magazine

Sociology It's Time to Hear from Social Scientists about UFOs Whether or not UFOs exist, we need to pay attention to how they are influencing our politics and culture By Greg Eghigian,Christian Peters

QUOTE OF THE DAY "If the science can be done on a shoestring, then perhaps that's fine. But of course, a shoestring in space is probably many full scientific programs on Earth." Mike Brown, a planetary astronomer at Caltech, on NASA's plans to extend the planetary science studies of the New Horizons mission

FROM THE ARCHIVE It's Time to Rethink the Nobel Prizes They can go to a maximum of three people, and they can't be awarded posthumously, but that wasn't part of Alfred Nobel's original vision  By Brian Keating | October 2017

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