A record-breaking star could reveal how the Milky Way’s giant black hole spins - Science News

There's another notable first in the field of quantum physics to report on, and it's all to do with electron spin: the tiny, built-in magnetism of these particles, as if each one is carrying a microscopic compass needle. Previously, the force of these spins has only proved enough to nudge individual atoms in one direction or another. Now though, researchers have managed to shift something much, much bigger. A team from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) in Japan has published a new study in Science Advances that details how a centimeter-sized object can be nudged by these quantum forces. It's an important step forward for science at the boundary of the quantum (very small scales) and the classical (everything else). Crucially, the experiment deals with an object big enough to be subject to gravity – a fundamental force that hasn't always sat well with the theories of quantum physics. "There have been many efforts to test whether quantum mechanics holds for anything larger than a few tens of nanometers, so far without success," says theoretical physicist Jason Twamley.

A new supercomputer simulation traces how thousands of small galaxies eventually became the Milky Way.