Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: cosmology

LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA detect most massive black hole merger to date

The LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA (LVK) Collaboration has detected the merger of the most massive black holes ever observed with gravitational waves using the LIGO observatories. The powerful merger produced a final black hole approximately 225 times the mass of our sun. The signal, designated GW231123, was detected during the fourth observing run of the LVK network on November 23, 2023.

LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory, made history in 2015 when it made the first-ever direct detection of , ripples in space-time. In that case, the waves emanated from a black hole merger that resulted in a final black hole 62 times the mass of our sun. The signal was detected jointly by the twin detectors of LIGO, one located in Livingston, Louisiana, and the other in Hanford, Washington.

Since then, the LIGO team has teamed up with partners at the Virgo detector in Italy and KAGRA (Kamioka Gravitational Wave Detector) in Japan to form the LVK Collaboration. These detectors have collectively observed more than 200 in their fourth run, and about 300 in total since the start of the first run in 2015.

Magnets Could Become the Next Generation of Gravitational Wave Detectors

When Einstein’s predicted ripples in spacetime pass through magnetic fields, they cause the current carrying wires to dance at the gravitational wave frequency, creating potentially detectable electrical signals. Researchers have discovered that the same powerful magnets used to hunt for dark matter could double as gravitational wave detectors. This means experiments already searching for the universe’s most elusive particles could simultaneously capture collisions between black holes and neutron stars, getting two of physics’ most ambitious experiments for the price of one, while potentially opening entirely new windows into the universe’s most violent events.

“This AI Outperformed Human Scientists”: Tasked With Reinventing Gravitational Wave Detectors, It Designed 50 Revolutionary Models That Could Change Everything

IN A NUTSHELL 🚀 Researchers have developed an AI program named Urania that designs more effective gravitational wave detectors. 🌌 These new detectors could significantly enhance our ability to observe distant cosmic events, including black hole mergers and early universe phenomena. 🔍 The AI-designed detectors cover a wider frequency range, potentially increasing the universe’s observable

Dark matter could create dark dwarfs at the center of the Milky Way

Dark matter is one of nature’s most confounding mysteries. It keeps particle physicists up at night and cosmologists glued to their supercomputer simulations. We know it’s real because its mass prevents galaxies from falling apart. But we don’t know what it is.

Dark matter doesn’t like other matter and may prefer its own company. While it doesn’t seem to interact with regular baryonic matter, it could possibly react with itself and self-annihilate. It needs a tightly-packed environment to do that, and that may lead to a way astrophysicists can finally detect it.

New theoretical research outlines how this could happen and states that sub-stellar objects, basically , could host the process. The research is titled “Dark dwarfs: -powered sub-stellar objects awaiting discovery at the ,” and it’s published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics. The lead author is Djuna Croon, a and assistant professor in the Institute for Particle Physics Phenomenology in the Department of Physics at Durham University.

Alex M. Vikoulov

Big News! My New Audiobook The Intelligence Supernova is Now Live! 🎧 I’m thrilled to announce the release of the audiobook edition of The Intelligence Supernova: Essays on Cybernetic Transhumanism, the Simulation Singularity & the Syntellect Emergence. This project has been incredibly close to my heart—it dives deep into the unfolding convergence of advanced AI, consciousness, and our collective evolution beyond biology. In this book, I explore the concept of the “Intelligence Supernova”—a coming explosion of synthetic and post-biological intelligence that may soon give rise to a planetary-scale mind, the Syntellect. It’s a philosophical and scientific journey that challenges you to imagine what lies beyond the Technological Singularity: digital immortality, mind-uploading, the emergence of infomorphs, and the architecture of a conscious Universe. This audiobook is for futurists, technophilosophers, and all curious minds ready to glimpse humanity’s metamorphic future. If you’re drawn to ideas like cybernetic immortality, experiential realism, or the Omega Point Cosmology, I think you’ll find this work especially meaningful.

Now available on Amazon: Audible: https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Intelligence-Supernova-Audiobook/B0FGZ3JMPM #IntelligenceSupernova #CyberneticTranshumanism #SimulationSingularity #SyntellectEmergence #SyntellectHypothesis #cybernetics #singularity #transhumanism #posthumanism #AGI #superintelligence

Amazon.com: The Intelligence Supernova: Essays on Cybernetic Transhumanism, The Simulation Singularity & The Syntellect Emergence (Audible Audio Edition): Alex M. Vikoulov, Ecstadelic Media Group, Virtual Voice: Books.

Globular clusters: The Vera Rubin Observatory is just getting started

Astronomers have studied the globular cluster 47 Tucanae extensively, but still have many questions. It may have an intermediate mass black hole in its center like Omega Centauri is expected to have. There are reasons to believe it may be the remnant of a dwarf galaxy that was gobbled up by the Milky Way, like other GCs. Also like other GCs, its center is extraordinarily dense with stars, and astronomers aren’t certain how far the cluster spreads.

Individual stars in 47 Tuc are difficult to observe because they’re so tightly packed in the center and because they’re difficult to differentiate from field stars on its outer edges. Can the Vera Rubin Observatory help?

Early data from the Vera Rubin and its Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) were designed to test and refine the telescope’s system. But it’s still good quality data, and researchers are using it to not only understand how the Vera Rubin Observatory (VRO) performs, but also for concrete science results.

3200 Megapixels: The World’s Largest Telescope Unveils Its First Snapshot

In an era where technology constantly pushes the boundaries of space exploration, the Vera Rubin Observatory offers a new window into space. Its camera, the most powerful ever designed for a telescope, promises to unveil new aspects of our universe. Astronomers and sky enthusiasts eagerly await the first images that might redefine our view of distant galaxies and obscure cosmic phenomena.

Perched atop Cerro Pachón in Chile, the Vera Rubin Astronomical Observatory has just created a real event: its very first photographic capture of the universe in 3,200 megapixels. This site, dedicated to the in-depth study of the southern sky, is named after the astronomer Vera Rubin, famous for her research on dark matter. A feat that marks a new era for astronomy!

Black-hole solutions in quantum gravity with Vilkovisky-DeWitt effective action

Physicists propose that calculations of certain aspects of quantum gravity can currently be done even without a full theory of quantum gravity itself. Basically, they work backwards from the fact that quantum gravity on the macro scale must conform to Einstein’s relativity theories. This approach is effective until the small scale of a black hole singularity is close.

(See my Comment below for an article link to POPULAR MECHANICS that discussed the scientific article in an accessible manner.

We study new black-hole solutions in quantum gravity. We use the Vilkovisky-DeWitt unique effective action to obtain quantum gravitational corrections to Einstein’s equations. In full analogy to previous work done for quadratic gravity, we find new black-hole–like solutions. We show that these new solutions exist close to the horizon and in the far-field limit.

Is Earth inside a huge void? ‘Sound of the Big Bang’ hints at possible solution to Hubble tension

Earth and our entire Milky Way galaxy may sit inside a mysterious giant hole which makes the cosmos expand faster here than in neighboring regions of the universe, astronomers say.

Their theory is a potential solution to the “Hubble tension” and could help confirm the true age of our universe, which is estimated to be around 13.8 billion years old.

The latest research —shared at the Royal Astronomical Society’s National Astronomy Meeting (NAM 2025) at Durham University—shows that sound waves from the early universe, “essentially the sound of the Big Bang,” support this idea.

Stars That Shouldn’t Shine Are Pointing Straight to Dark Matter’s Identity

Deep in the center of our galaxy, scientists believe a strange type of star may be quietly glowing—not from fusion like our Sun, but from the invisible fuel of dark matter.

These “dark dwarfs” could act like cosmic detectors, collecting heavy, elusive particles that heat them from the inside. If we find them—and especially if we spot one missing its lithium—it could finally point us toward what dark matter really is.

Dark dwarfs & dark matter basics