Physics
Discoveries about matter, energy, space, time and the laws that shape the universe.
Latest in Physics
Physicists Report a New State of Matter in Ultracold Atoms
By repeatedly flipping how atoms push and pull on each other, physicists in Innsbruck say they created a 'fractional Fermi sea', an excited yet ordered state that breaks a standard theory. The experiment still awaits peer review.
Scientists Built a Material That Finds Its Own Rhythm
In a honeycomb of 37 small robotic cells, jittery little wiggles gradually merged into one big, slow, synchronized wave, a 'time crystal' that keeps its own beat without any conductor.
Those Giant Rocky Mega-Earths Might Not Exist After All
Every reported ultra-massive rocky planet orbits an unusually active star. Two astronomers argue that's no coincidence: the stars may be making the planets look heavier than they are.
A Supernova Seen Five Times Measures How Fast Space Expands
Using the light of a single exploding star bent by a galaxy cluster, astronomers estimate the universe's expansion rate at 65 km/s/Mpc, with about 3% uncertainty, adding a new independent voice to the Hubble tension.
Physicists Built the First Clocks That Tick to an Atomic Nucleus
Teams in Beijing and Vienna locked lasers to the thorium-229 nucleus and kept them there. The clocks don't beat the best atomic clocks yet, but one has already set new limits on some kinds of dark matter.
Genes Place the First Animals 200 Million Years Before Fossils
A recalibrated molecular clock puts the origin of animals around 800 to 700 million years ago, long before their oldest known body fossils from about 574 million years ago.
