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Scientists opened a sealed envelope after 10 years. Gravity still didn’t make sense
For 10 years, physicist Stephan Schlamminger had been chasing one of the most stubborn numbers in science. Now, after a decade of experiments, corrections, and painstaking analysis, the answer was sitting inside a sealed envelope.
Schlamminger, a physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), had spent much of the previous decade trying to measure the universal gravitational constant. Known to physicists as big G, this fundamental number determines the strength of gravitational attraction throughout the universe.
The number hidden in the envelope was the key that would finally unscramble his experimental data and reveal what his team had measured.
NIST Measures Gravity With Masses Small Enough To Move By Hand
For over 225 years, scientists have struggled to pinpoint the value of big G, the universal gravitational constant, despite its fundamental role in governing the cosmos. Now, after a decade-long effort, NIST physicist Stephan Schlamminger has unveiled results from a painstaking measurement of this elusive constant.
“The time had come to open the envelope,” Schlamminger admitted, unsure of the secret number his team’s work would reveal. Despite gravity’s constant presence, big G remains the least well-known of the four fundamental forces, a disparity researchers hope to resolve with increasingly precise experiments using masses small enough to move by hand.
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Scientists outline how spacecraft could reach a nearby black hole within a century
A physicist outlines how laser-driven nanocraft could someday reach a nearby black hole and test gravity directly. (CREDIT: Wikimedia / AI-Generated / CC BY-SA 4.0)
Humanity may someday attempt something considerably more ambitious than photographing a black hole: sending a spacecraft directly to one.
The idea would require a suitable black hole to be discovered surprisingly close to Earth, along with technologies that do not yet exist. But calculations suggest the journey is not forbidden by physics.
Cosimo Bambi of Fudan University explores the concept in iScience, describing gram-scale spacecraft propelled by enormous ground-based laser arrays. If a black hole exists 20 to 25 light-years away, a probe traveling at one-third the speed of light could reach it in 60 to 75 years.
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