It looks like fireflies flickering in the darkness. Slowly, more and more amass, lighting up the screen in large chunks and clusters. But this is not a video about insects. It’s a simulation of the ...

A new model is bringing scientists a step closer to understanding the kinds of light signals produced when two supermassive black holes, which are millions to billions of times the mass of the Sun, ...

Much remains a mystery about the first billion years of the universe’s history, the epoch in which the cosmos emerged from its dark ages with the dawning of the earliest stars and galaxies. Now ...

Surprisingly, some of the universe's brightest objects are black holes. As scorching gas and dust flow around and into a black hole, they glow with fierce intensity across the light spectrum. Now, a ...

The Anderson transition is a phase transition that occurs in disordered systems, which entails a shift from a diffusive state (i.e., in which waves or particles are spread out) to a localized state, ...

Light transport simulation and rendering techniques form the backbone of modern computer graphics, enabling the creation of photorealistic images by accurately modelling the behaviour of light in ...

Simulations suggest this mechanism could provide a tenfold increase in frequency—likely hitting a peak power of 100 trillion watts in XUV ANN ARBOR—A laser pulse surfing in the wake of an electron ...

New simulations by a research team led by UC San Diego’s Alexey Arefiev point the way toward making matter from light. The process starts by aiming a high-power laser at a target to generate a ...

The best theory physicists have for the birth of the universe makes no sense. It goes like this: In the beginning—the very, if not quite veriest, beginning—there’s something called quantum foam. It’s ...