Matthew francis
10 articles-
Earth’s Stash of Gold Comes From Colliders Fit for Gods
Ron Dale via Shutterstock Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . One of science’s greatest feats is having described where we came from—not as individual people, or as a species, or even as a planet, but as stuff, the very material we’re made of. The Big Bang forged all of […] -
Is Our Universe Like Oil & Vinegar or Homogenized Milk?
Is our Universe inhomogeneous, lumpy and uneven on many size scales, like oil droplets in water?via Shutterstock Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . In the earliest moments after the Big Bang, the Universe was a turbulent mess, a high-temperature stew of quantum fluctuations. As with turbulence in water, […] -
“White Holes” Could Exist—But That Doesn’t Mean They Do
Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . A black hole is a one-way door to oblivion. According to general relativity, once anything crosses its boundary—the event horizon—it cannot return to the outside. For that particle, the black hole is the entire future.We’ll never actually get a chance to see […] -
How to See Quantum Drops of Light
An illustration of wave interferenceSybille Yates via Shutterstock Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . Though we can see in remarkably low-light conditions, humans aren’t quite sensitive enough to see individual photons—the particles that make up all types of light. In our day-to-day lives, we are so awash with light […] -
The Most Massive Object in the Universe—How Was It Created?
Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . The galaxy known prosaically as M87 doesn’t look like much. Unlike beautiful spiral galaxies (including the Milky Way), M87 appears as an orangish blob of stars through telescopes. Its only noticeable feature is the long streamer of gas emanating from the galactic […]
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Where Nature Hides the Darkest Mystery of All
Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . No known object in existence has as clear a division between “inside” and “outside” as a black hole. We live and see the outside, and no probe will bring us information about the inside. We can send radio messages or robotic spacecraft, […]
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An Arguably Unreal Particle Powers All of Your Electronics
A microscopic image of a metamaterial used to test relativity in a lab.Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . Like happy families, every free electron is alike: They all have the same mass, the same electric charge, and the same spin. But inside a solid, various […]
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Supernovas & Other Big Bangs: Where Your Body Comes From
“Some part of our being knows this is where we came from. We long to return. And we can. Because the cosmos is also within us. We’re made of star stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.” —Carl Sagan, Cosmos Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . […]
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Universal Remoteness: What the Multiverse Means About Us
Our Universe is vast and mostly empty. Even if many of the billions of planets we suspect are out there have life, most of the cosmos is uninhabitable, and those worlds are unreachable by any means we know. That’s just within our galaxy, which is one of about 100 billion in the part of the […]
