Faster quantum computers can learn from their own mistakes

by quasarn01 | Jul 15, 2026 | Latest in Physics

Quantum computers promise to solve problems that would take even the fastest conventional supercomputers a vast amount of time, but the quantum information they store and process is extremely sensitive to even tiny disturbances from their surroundings. To keep these...

Faintest planet ever imaged from Earth found after more than 10 years of hide-and-seek

by quasarn01 | Jul 15, 2026 | Astronomy

A team of astronomers has discovered a third planet orbiting the star Beta Pictoris. The new planet, Beta Pictoris d, is 100 times fainter than Beta Pictoris b—the first planet discovered in the same system—and is among the lightest exoplanets ever imaged from the...

A new stellar census strengthens the case for a 13.8-billion-year-old universe

by quasarn01 | Jul 15, 2026 | Astronomy

Astronomers have used the ages of more than 155,000 stars in the Milky Way to independently estimate the age of the universe, and their findings may be good news for the standard cosmological model. The new research was reported in a paper submitted to the arXiv...

Are we missing the universe’s ‘noosignatures?’

by quasarn01 | Jul 14, 2026 | Astronomy

Astrobiology has long been split into two camps: a search for “biosignatures” and a search for “intelligence.” These look for very different things, but they also leave a huge gap in between. It took 3.5 billion years for us to go from the...

Astronomers uncover the earliest known signs of galaxy-building in action

by quasarn01 | Jul 14, 2026 | Astronomy

Astronomers at Durham University have made a major advance in understanding how galaxies formed and evolved in the early universe. Using powerful new observations, the team discovered the most distant example ever found of a compact, star-forming structure at the...