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NASA visualization shows a black hole's warped world Seen nearly edgewise, the turbulent disk of gas churning around a black hole takes on a crazy double-humped appearance. The black hole's extreme gravity alters the paths of light coming from different parts of the disk, producing the warped image. The black hole's extreme gravitational field redirects and distorts light coming from different parts of the disk, but ex

Alternative theory of gravity makes a nearly testable prediction A massive simulation done with a "chameleon" theory of gravity. Enlarge / Galaxy clusters generated by the Universe simulator IllustrisTNG. TNG Collaboration From our current perspective, the Universe seems to be dominated by two things we find frustratingly difficult to understand. One of these is dark matter, which describes the fact that everything from galaxies on up behaves as if it has more mass than we can detect. While that has spawned extensive searche

Satellites play chase to measure gravity, achieve picometer accuracy Satellites tracked to the picometer, test tech for gravitational wave detector. Enlarge NASA/JPL-Caltech The spinoffs from gravitational wave detectors are not just new scientific discoveries. The technology also has other uses. A good example of this is the gravity-measuring mission, GRACE Follow On, which was launched last year. The first reports on its laser rangefinder's performance have been released, and it makes for impressive reading. Gravitational wave detectors

This week, I settled down to watch the first episode of The 100. If you haven't seen the show, I'll just point out that it takes place in the near future (though it ran, on the CW, in the near past). For reasons that I won't get into, there is a spacecraft with a bunch of teenagers that is traveling from a space station down to the surface of the Earth. During the reentry process, one kid wants to show that he is the master of space travel and that he's awesome. So what does he do? He gets out of his seat and floats around as a demonstration of his mastery of weightlessness. Another teenager p