Physical Sciences

What Happens When LIGO Texts You to Say it's Detected One of Einstein's Predicted Gravitational Waves
These plots show the signals of gravitational waves detected by the twin LIGO observatories at Livingston, Louisiana, and Hanford, Washington. The signals came from two merging black holes, each about 30 times the mass of our sun, lying 1.3 billion light-years away. LIGO, CC BY-ND
In Memoriam: Mercedes Richards (1955-2016)
Mercedes Richards, professor of astronomy and astrophysics
Prof. Christine Keating: Simple physical mechanism for assembly and disassembly of structures inside cells is identified
Top high-energy astrophysics prize awarded to Niel Brandt
Niel Brandt
Ed O'Brien receives NSF Career Award
Now you see it, now you don't: The quasar that just disappeared
The image shows an artist's conception of the changing-look quasar as is appeared in early 2015. The glowing blue region shows the last of the gas being swallowed by central black hole as it shuts off. The spectrum is the previous one obtained by the SDSS in 2003. Credit: Dana Berry / SkyWorks Digital, Inc.
Mysterious radio signals from space test Einstein's General Relativity theory
This illustration shows how two photons, one at a high frequency (nu_h) and another at a low frequency (nu_l), travel in curved space-time from their origin in a distant Fast Radio Burst (FRB) source until reaching the Earth. A lower-limit estimate of the gravitational pull that the photons experience along their way is given by the mass in the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. Credit: Purple Mountain Observatory, Chinese Academy of Sciences
Simple mechanism for assembly and disassembly of structures in cells identified
Synthetic liquid organelles. Fluorescently labeled, positively-charged peptides (red) are attracted to negatively-charged RNAs (invisible in this image) forming droplets that simulate cellular structures called liquid organelles. Credit: Keating Lab, Penn State University
Stephen Benkovic Named a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors
Stephen J. Benkovic
Weinreb Family Endows Early Career Professorship
Steven and Nancy Weinreb
Subscribe to Physical Sciences