Liang Chen

When a massive star exhausts its thermonuclear fuel, its core collapses, and the outer layers are ejected into space at speeds of thousands of kilometers per second. This is how a supernova remnant is born — an expanding cloud of shock-compressed gas spanning light-years.

Cosmic rays are like a downpour pelting from all sides. But when the wind blows, the droplets change direction. In the same way, a solar storm, a cloud of magnetized gas from the Sun, bends the paths of these particles that normally rain down on Earth evenly. Cosmic rays are invisible messengers from distant galaxies.

For three years straight, every night, telescopes have stared at one point in the sky. There lies the galaxy Mrk 421, whose core shoots a jet of particles aimed almost exactly at Earth. Such objects are called blazars. A black hole at the galaxy's center spins matter into a disk, and some of it is ejected outward in two narrow beams.

For six straight years, the radio telescope at Effelsberg recorded the "breathing" of the distant blazar 1156+295 — a galaxy whose core shoots out a jet of plasma at nearly the speed of light. Every few months, its radio waves flared up and then faded.

Every second, invisible projectiles from the depths of space pierce through us. These are cosmic rays — atomic nuclei accelerated to speeds nearly indistinguishable from the speed of light. Their energy is hundreds of millions of times greater than what our most powerful accelerators can achieve. Where does this monstrous force come from?

A typical computer shuttles electricity along copper traces, and every operation is a queue: first one thing, then another. Light works differently. In a single beam, you can mix dozens of signals without them interfering, like different voices in a choir, singing at once but each heard distinctly. The new FieldCore chip uses five such "voices" at once.

A laser isn't just about light. If you make a particle oscillate like a pendulum and those oscillations sustain themselves, you get a phonon laser. Sounds complicated, but the idea is simple: instead of light waves, the device emits orderly waves of mechanical vibrations — phonons.

In the constellation Aquila, about 40,000 light-years away, one of the most powerful natural accelerators in the Galaxy is at work. It's the microquasar GRS 1915+105—a pair consisting of an ordinary star and a black hole.

Low-frequency radio waves (from 30 to 300 kilohertz) carry information through water and earth. But catching them with an ordinary antenna is hard: the wavelength reaches several kilometers, and a small receiver barely feels such a field.

The cosmic racer SS 433 tears through the Galaxy, ejecting two narrow jets of superheated gas at a quarter of the speed of light. This is a microquasar — a binary system where a black hole siphons matter from a normal star, and some of it escapes as jets.

Pulsar PSR J1740+1000 is a city-sized star spinning faster than a kitchen blender. After a supernova explosion, it left behind a dense core that accelerates particles to near-light speeds. These particles fly into space, and previously it was thought they scatter in all directions, like splashes from a stone thrown into water.

A single photon is like a perfectly smooth brick from which quantum technologies can be built. But to build a house, you need thousands of identical bricks. Rubidium atoms are natural emitters: each atom emits photons of exactly one wavelength, like a tuning fork that always produces a single note.