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Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: October 2nd, 2023
  • Revered_Beard@lemmy.worldtoscience@lemmy.world•Peacock feathers can be lasersEnglish
    6·
    1 month ago

    To be clear, it’s not that they shoot laser beams from their feathers as some sort of mating ritual or defense mechanism (which, honestly, is probably how I would have used my own laser feathers, if I had them), but that there are strikingly identical nano structures that can reflect back a little bit of laser light, under laboratory conditions:

    After staining the feathers with a common dye and pumping them with soft pulses of light, they used laboratory instruments to detect beams of yellow-green laser light that were too faint to see with the naked eye. They emerged from the feathers’ eyespots, at two distinct wavelengths.

  • Revered_Beard@lemmy.worldtoscience@lemmy.world•The biggest black hole smashup ever detected challenges physics theoriesEnglish
    5·
    2 months ago

    From what I understood of the article, it’s not just the size (which you can get from merging previous black holes), but the combination of size, speed, and angle that are raising eyebrows.

    Smash two random black holes together, and the odds are, they’re spinning at different random angles. Do that a bunch of times, and unless their angles all happened to be lined up just right, the the resulting spin will be a lot slower than the maximum speed a black hole of that size can spin. But these were spinning at 80% and 90% of their max speed.

    Okay, so maybe they were both “normal sized” black holes that gobbled up a lot of matter around a galactic nucleus? That might work, except then you’d expect them to both be spinning in the same direction - but they weren’t.

    So, none of the scientists’ predictions are really matching what they actually observed. Maybe it was one of those things, maybe those models are off a bit, or maybe there’s another model to explain these kinds of black holes that we just haven’t thought of yet.