@Scietic⭐

  Gravity is a distortion in space-time, which is felt as a pull on things proportional to a combination of their energy and momentum. The source of the curvature is the stress-energy tensor and this makes no distinction between mass and energy. They are treated as related by the famous E=mc^2. When you first learn about gravity in school, you learn Newton’s law: that the force of gravity between two objects, one of mass M1 and one of mass M2, has a strength proportional to the product M1M2. { F = (GM1M2)/r^2} But that was true before Einstein. It turns out that Newton’s law needs to be revised: the Einsteinian statement of the law is (roughly) that for two objects that are slow-moving (i.e. their speed relative to one another is much less than c, the speed of light) and have energy E1 and E2, the gravitational force between them has a strength proportional to the product E1E2. How are these two statements, the Newtonian and the Einsteinian, consistent? They are consistent becaus...

  An elliptical galaxy, full of dark lanes of gas, likely formed in the merger of two other galaxies. Elliptical galaxies host less (or no) star birth than spiral galaxies like the Milky Way. (Image credit: NASA, ESA and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)) WHAT ARE ELLIPTICAL GALAXIES?  Elliptical galaxies are the most abundant type of galaxies found in the universe but because of their age and dim qualities, they're frequently outshone by younger, brighter collections of stars. Elliptical galaxies lack the swirling arms of their more well-known siblings, spiral galaxies. Instead, they bear the rounded shape of an ellipse, a stretched-out circle. One of the most famous elliptical galaxies is Cygnus A, which is located roughly 600 million light-years from Earth and is an extremely bright radio source. Cygnus A is not only well-known to astronomers, but has a place in science fiction; it was featured in the 1985 novel "Contact," a Carl Sagan story that later inspired a H...

 The Standard Model is a physics theory that explains how all particles and fundamental forces except gravity interact. In the 1970s, scientists realized that the accepted theories of the time predicted that elementary particles could not have mass. Except that they knew that wasn’t true; experimeThe sun helped prove Einstein right...nts had already shown that these particles did have mass. Something was missing. Three physicists (Robert Brout, François Englert, and Peter Higgs) developed a mechanism that explained this apparent conflict. This mechanism was later an essential ingredient of what is now the Standard Model of particle physics. They proposed that the Standard Model was missing a field that would interact with elementary particles and that the interaction gives these particles mass. Weinberg, Salam, and Glashow later constructed a complete theory explaining the known interactions of particles, along with their masses. This theory contained an essential ingredient – the...