news 2024

A high-energy gamma-ray flare from the super-massive black hole in the Messier 87 (M87) galaxy was observed in 2018 for the first time in nearly a decade, thanks to an international effort involving McGill researchers. This discovery has yielded important insights into the physics of black hole jets, which are among the most efficient engines for distributing energy from the inside of a galaxy to the expanse of the Universe.

Quantum information is fragile and often difficult to protect during experiments. Protecting qubits from accidental measurements is essential for controlled quantum operations, especially during state-destroying measurements or resets on adjacent qubits in protocols like quantum error correction. Current methods to preserve atomic qubits against disturbances can waste coherence time, extra qubits, and introduce errors.

UdeM astronomers find a way to measure temperature changes in a star with greater-than-ever precision, a breakthrough that promises to be particularly useful for detecting and studying exoplanets. Étienne Artigau, the UdeM astrophysicist who led the development of an innovative technique that provides precise information on a star's temperature variations.

Waterloo researchers advance nanoscale imaging capabilities. Dynamic nuclear polarization (DNP) has revolutionized the field of nanoscale nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), making it possible to study a wider range of materials, biomolecules and complex dynamic processes such as how proteins fold and change shape inside a cell.

Physics prof's groundbreaking research shows significant progress in addressing miniaturization issues When we think about charging a battery, we typically imagine that the charge flows one way. For example, when we plug our smartphones in at night, we think of the charge as flowing from the outlet into the phone's battery.

A Canadian team led by René Doyon will help design and build the ANDES spectrograph, which will search for signs of life outside the solar system. In 2014, the European Southern Observatory (ESO) began construction of the world's largest telescope, the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), in Chile's Atacama Desert, 3,000 metres above sea level.

For the last seven decades, astrophysicists have theorized the existence of "kugelblitze," black holes caused by extremely high concentrations of light. These special black holes, they speculated, might be linked to astronomical phenomena such as dark matter, and have even been suggested as the power source of hypothetical spaceship engines in the far future.

In 2014, the European Southern Observatory (ESO) began construction of the world's largest telescope, the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), at an altitude of over 3,000 m in Chile's Atacama Desert. Scheduled to enter service in 2028, this giant telescope promises to mark a new era in ground-based astronomy.

A group of researchers at the University of Waterloo and the University of British Columbia have discovered a potential "cosmic glitch" in the universe's gravity, explaining its strange behaviour on a cosmic scale. For the last 100 years, physicists have relied upon Albert Einstein's theory of "general relativity" to explain how gravity works throughout the universe.

Techniques developed by researchers from Western University to create images from old, badly tarnished photographs could also be used to study other historic artifacts and fossils and prevent corrosion on modern materials. Chemistry professor T.K. Sham Chemistry professor Tson-Kong (T.K.

A collaboration of researchers including UBC scientists have observed gravitational waves from the collision of what is most likely a neutron star and an object likely to be a light black hole, 650 million light-years from Earth. The mass of the black hole is 2.5 to 4.5 times the mass of Earth's sun, meaning it falls in the so-called 'mass gap': heavier than heaviest known and theorized neutron stars but lighter than the lightest black holes in our galaxy.

The first cosmological measurements from a global collaboration bring us one step closer to solving the mystery of Dark Energy Canadian scientists working with the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) participated in the DESI collaboration's first-year analysis of an exciting new three-dimensional map of the universe, providing details about our cosmological past that have never been seen before.

Materials engineers have spent decades trying to make stronger metals by making their constituent crystals - their grains - smaller. And we mean small: to the nanoscale. That's because the smaller the grain, generally the stronger, tougher and lightweight the metal can be, while less energy is consumed and emitted when it's used in structural applications.

Characteristics of the supermassive black hole at the heart of our galaxy captured in unprecedented detail by international team that includes Waterloo scientists  Long-held theories on how black holes like the one at the centre of our galaxy, the Milky Way, evolve were proven right this week thanks to research made possible by Canadian scientists.

UdeM doctoral candidate in physics Emmanuel Bourret leads an international research group that has discovered C130, a rare carbon molecular structure. For years, C 130 fullertubes-molecules made up of 130 carbon atoms-have existed only in theory. Now, leading an international team of scientists, an UdeM doctoral candidate in physics has successfully shown them in real life - and even managed to capture some in a photograph.

University of Waterloo researchers combine Nobel prize-winning concepts to achieve scientific breakthrough Researchers at the University of Waterloo's Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC) have brought together two Nobel prize-winning research concepts to advance the field of quantum communication. Scientists can now efficiently produce nearly perfect entangled photon pairs from quantum dot sources.

The interstellar objects are usually paired as binary systems, but in a new study Clémence Fontanive shows that, as they get older, few actually keep their companion. Clémence Fontanive , a researcher at Université de Montréal's Trottier Institute for Research on Exoplanets, used NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to study some of the coldest and lowest-mass "brown dwarfs" of our solar system.

Open any astronomy textbook to the section on white dwarf stars and you'll likely learn that they are "dead stars" that continuously cool down over time. New research published in Nature is challenging this theory, with the University of Victoria (UVic) and its partners using data from the European Space Agency's Gaia satellite to reveal why a population of white dwarf stars stopped cooling for more than eight billion years.

Western researcher part of team that found a unique signature of a star ingesting surrounding planets and asteroids When a star like our Sun reaches the end of its life, it can expand to ingest the surrounding planets and asteroids that were born with it. Using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (ESO's VLT) in Chile, researchers, including Western physics and astronomy professor emeritus John Landstreet , have found a unique signature of this process for the first time, a scar imprinted on the surface of a white dwarf star.

An international team, including Western astrophysicists Els Peeters and Jan Cami , has shed light on the destruction and re-formation of a large quantity of water in a planet-forming disk located at the heart of the Orion Nebula. This discovery was made possible by an original multidisciplinary approach combining observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and quantum physics calculations.