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James Webb Telescope’s Latest Captures.

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The James Webb Space Telescope is the largest, most powerful space telescope ever built. It will allow scientists to look at what our universe was like about 200 million years after the Big Bang. The telescope will be able to capture images of some of the first galaxies ever formed. It will also be able to observe objects in our solar system from Mars outward, look inside dust clouds to see where new stars and planets are forming and examine the atmospheres of planets orbiting other stars. The Webb telescope is as tall as a 3-story building and as long as a tennis court! It is so big that it has to fold origami-style to fit inside the rocket to launch. The telescope will unfold, sunshield first, once in space The James Webb Space Telescope sees the universe in light that is invisible to human eyes. This light is called infrared radiation, and we can feel it as heat. Firefighters use infrared cameras to see and rescue people through the smoke in a fire. The James Webb Space Telescope will use its infrared cameras to see through dust in our universe. Stars and planets form inside those dust clouds, so peeking inside could lead to exciting new discoveries! It will also be able to see objects (like the first galaxies) that are so far away that the expansion of the universe has made their light shift from visible to infrared! in this video, we are looking into James Webb Telescope’s Latest Captures.

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The Universe is immense. Does it have an edge out beyond the Cosmological Event Horizon? Or in time, before the Big Bang? Or in higher dimensions like Hyperspace?

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Continue reading “The Edge of the Universe” »

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In the future humanity may build enormous structures, feats of mega-engineering that may rival planets or even be of greater scope. This episode catalogs roughly 100 major types of Megastructure, from those that are cities in space to those that rival galaxies.

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Continue reading “The Megastructure Compendium” »

A year ago, astronomers discovered a powerful gamma-ray burst (GRB) lasting nearly two minutes, dubbed GRB 211211A. Now, that unusual event is upending the long-standing assumption that longer GRBs are the distinctive signature of a massive star going supernova. Instead, two independent teams of scientists identified the source as a so-called “kilonova,” triggered by the merger of two neutron stars, according to a new paper published in the journal Nature. Because neutron star mergers were assumed to only produce short GRBs, the discovery of a hybrid event involving a kilonova with a long GRB is quite surprising.

“This detection breaks our standard idea of gamma-ray bursts,” said co-author Eve Chase, a postdoc at Los Alamos National Laboratory. “We can no longer assume that all short-duration bursts come from neutron-star mergers, while long-duration bursts come from supernovae. We now realize that gamma-ray bursts are much harder to classify. This detection pushes our understanding of gamma-ray bursts to the limits.”

As we’ve reported previously, gamma-ray bursts are extremely high-energy explosions in distant galaxies lasting between mere milliseconds to several hours. The first gamma-ray bursts were observed in the late 1960s, thanks to the launching of the Vela satellites by the US. They were meant to detect telltale gamma-ray signatures of nuclear weapons tests in the wake of the 1963 Nuclear Test Ban Treaty with the Soviet Union. The US feared that the Soviets were conducting secret nuclear tests, violating the treaty. In July 1967, two of those satellites picked up a flash of gamma radiation that was clearly not the signature of a nuclear weapons test.

Did you hear that #physicists simulated a baby #wormhole in a lab? Well, it’s even more true that #StringTheory and #ExtraDimensions were discovered in the ’60s. Think I’m joking? I’m not. To learn what’s true/false in the wormhole story, read this first.

This research could potentially lead to a better understanding of the galaxy and its many mysteries.

It’s a cosmic riddle: How can galaxies remain together when all the matter we observe isn’t enough to keep them intact? Scientists believe an invisible force must beat play, something so mysterious they named it “dark matter” because of its lack of visibility.

This mysterious presence accounts for nearly three times more than what we can observe — a startling 27% of all existence! The mysterious dark matter is a profound mystery to scientists, its existence making up nearly one-third of the universe’s energy and mass yet remaining elusive due to its ability to avoid detection.

Continue reading “Researchers plan to use quantum computers in search for dark matter” »

This type of gamma ray burst (GRB) is thought to occur when a massive star explodes in a supernova, leaving behind a black hole. The explosion creates an extraordinary jet of light which makes up the GRB itself, and then the supernova causes a dimmer afterglow. This particular GRB appears so bright partially because it is about 2.4 billion light years away from Earth, making it one of the closest GRBs ever spotted in addition to being the brightest.

“If we look at all of the gamma ray bursts that have been detected, this one stands apart,” says Jillian Rastinejad at Northwestern University in Illinois. “Informally, we’ve been calling it the BOAT – the brightest of all time.” She and her colleagues calculated that a GRB this bright is expected to occur only once every thousand years or so.

Astronomers have spotted a strange blast of gamma radiation from space that defies categorisation, and it may mean a gap in our understanding of how black holes form.

Gas clouds across the universe are known to absorb the light produced by distant massive celestial objects, known as quasars. This light manifests as the so-called Lyman alpha forest, a dense structure composed of absorption lines that can be observed using spectroscopy tools.

Over the past decades, astrophysicists have been assessing the value of these absorption lines as a tool to better understand the universe and the relationships between cosmological objects. The Lyman alpha forest could also potentially aid the ongoing search for dark matter, offering an additional tool to test theoretical predictions and models.

Researchers at University of Nottingham, Tel-Aviv University, New York University, and the Institute for Fundamental Physics of the Universe in Trieste have recently compared low-redshift Lyman alpha forest observations to hydrodynamical simulations of the intergalactic medium and dark matter made up of dark photons, a renowned dark matter candidate.