neural network astrophysics

At the end of a massive star's life, its core collapses in a fraction of a second, giving birth to a supernova flash. This cataclysm shakes spacetime itself, emitting gravitational waves — ripples that race across the Universe.

An artist makes a quick charcoal sketch, and the face in the portrait is already recognizable. Astrophysicists face a similar challenge: the spectrum of a star is its individual portrait, revealing temperature, composition, and gravity.

At the heart of every neutron star lies a symphony — an intricate interplay of quantum fields and relativistic gravity.

An electron microscope is a giant pipe organ: instead of pipes (electromagnetic lenses, instead of air) a stream of accelerated electrons. It once merely painted mute frescoes of the atomic world, condemning scientists to grueling decipherment.

The universe speaks in the language of gravitational waves — ripples in the fabric of spacetime itself.

Perovskite crystals harvest sunlight almost as well as silicon, but cost pennies. Their trouble is an inborn fragility: from warmth and ordinary water in the air, they “get sick.” Inside, disorder builds up, and the shiny plate turns cloudy, losing its abilities within a couple of days.

A pot of soup simmering with three ingredients. The chef adjusts the proportions on the fly, and the progress is tracked by the position of a point on a triangular scale. That's roughly how physicists tackle neutrinos from a supernova explosion.

A doctor stares at a gray-white smudge on the screen. It's the face of an unborn child. One shadow in the right place, and you can plan surgery in time. But not everyone sees that shadow: cleft lip or palate is rare, and a young specialist might go years without ever spotting one.

For six straight years, the HARPS-N telescope on La Palma island stared at the Sun as if it were a distant star — taking spectra, tracking brightness, and recording every quiver of spectral lines. All this was to understand how to distinguish a star's subtle sway from a genuine planetary signal. A star doesn't sit still: its surface boils like a pot of soup.

Cosmic particles with energies millions of times greater than anything our accelerators can produce slam into the atmosphere and create a shower of secondary particles. This shower emits radio waves that antennas on the ground pick up. But the signal is weak: it's swamped by the radio noise of our galaxy and the receivers' own noise.

Thousands of universes were born in a computer, all to tell us about our own. Each one has its own galaxy clusters, arranged by the laws of gravity like peas in a jar shaken with varying force. From how the peas settle, you can tell what kind of hand shook the jar.

A star trembles like a bell after being struck. These tremors, tiny fluctuations in brightness and surface, can be caught by a telescope. From the frequencies of these 'stellar notes,' astronomers infer what's happening inside: how old the star is, how it's structured.