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Category: cosmology

On Sept. 6, a new satellite left Earth; its mission is to tell us about the motions of hot plasma flows in the universe.

Launched from Tanegashima Space Center in Japan, the X-Ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission (XRISM) satellite will detect X-ray wavelengths with unprecedented precision to peer into the hearts of galaxy clusters, reveal the workings of and supernovae, as well as to tell us about the elemental makeup of the universe.

XRISM, pronounced “crism,” is a collaborative mission between the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and NASA, with participation by the European Space Agency.

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This simulation was then compared with real-time data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite, which has revolutionized our understanding of the positions and velocities of stars in open clusters.

“Our simulations can only simultaneously match the mass and size of the Hyades if some black holes are present at the centre of the cluster today (or until recently),” said Dr. Torniamenti.

The most plausible simulations suggest the presence of two to three black holes currently residing in the Hyades star cluster. At the same time, scenarios in which the black holes were ejected less than 150 million years ago (constituting the last quarter of the cluster’s life) cannot be completely ruled out.

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New observations made with the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory provide a “missing link” in our knowledge of black hole and star interactions.

A Sun-like star in a galaxy near ours is slowly being eaten by a relatively small black hole.

Though it’s small for a black hole, it is extremely active and devours the equivalent mass of three Earths every time the star passes close by, a press statement reveals.

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The bubble itself is composed of previously identified structures that themselves have been considered some of the universe’s largest arrangements of matter. This includes several superclusters, or groups of galaxy clusters, that each contain 10 clusters and span up to 200 million light-years. At the heart of Ho’oleilana lies the Bootes supercluster and the Bootes void, which is a 330 million-light-year-wide space of nothingness.

Related: Galaxy shapes can help identify wrinkles in space caused by the Big Bang

“We were not looking for it. It is so huge that it spills to the edges of the sector of the sky that we were analyzing,” Brent Tully, study leader and an astronomer at the University of Hawaii, said in a statement. “As an enhancement in the density of galaxies, it is a much stronger feature than expected. The very large diameter of one billion light years is beyond theoretical expectations.”

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Year 2020 The ecology of the human brain is so complex that it even seems like it’s own not only story within itself but also could be like a self perpetuating universe of all sorts. Even neurons resemble the universe. What I believe is that the human brain is actually like an infinite spaceship that has infinite potential not only as a computational source but as sentience that is actual sentient in itself not just a story but kinda the god in the machine like a black box of limitless potential not only a computer but much more possibly a universe that guides us and shapes us. Even when we see the ecology of the mind we see so many stories and realities able to create its own multiverse… More.

What the science of visual illusions can teach us about our polarized world.

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Since the 1960s there has been plenty of evidence to support the existence of dark matter through astrophysical and cosmological observations, and at this point we’re very confident that it exists. The question remains, though: what is dark matter actually made of?

Throughout the decades there have been many candidates for , such as weakly interacting (WIMPs), neutrinos, and primordial black holes. Candidates like WIMPs were originally theorized because they have properties that address issues in other parts of physics. Another candidate that could answer some thorny physics questions is called the .

Axions were originally theorized as a solution to a question known as the Strong CP Problem, but physicists also realized that axions could be produced in a way that would satisfy requirements for them to be dark matter. These are the particles that the DMRadio experiments search for.

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A combined team of physicists from the University of Sussex and the National Physical Laboratory, both in the U.K., has been designing experiments to identify ultra-light dark matter particles. In their paper published in the open-access New Journal of Physics, the group describes how they are attempting to use the high precision of atomic clocks to detect ultra-light dark matter particle “kicks” that would lead to time variations and, in so doing, would show evidence of dark matter.

Currently, dark matter is not something that has been shown to exist—instead it is more of a placeholder that has been created to explain observations of deviations from the Standard Model of physics—like certain gravitational effects on galaxies. Since its development as a theory back in the early 1930s, physicists around the world have been developing theories and experiments to prove that it exists.

Sadly, despite a lot of time and effort, no such proof has been found. In this new effort, the team in the U.K. is working on a novel way to add credence to dark matter theories—using atomic clocks to detect ultra-light dark matter particles.

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By analyzing the data from the Dark Energy Camera Legacy Survey (DECaLS), astronomers from the Christ University in Bangalore, India, have serendipitously discovered a new ring galaxy, which received designation DES J024008.08–551047.5 and may belong to the rare class of polar ring galaxies. The finding was reported in a paper published August 29 on the pre-print server arXiv.

The so-called polar ring galaxies (PRGs) are systems composed of an S0-like galaxy and a polar ring, which remain separate for billions of years. In general, these outer polar rings, composed of gas and stars, are aligned roughly in a perpendicular orientation with respect to the major axis of the central host galaxy.

However, although more than 400 PRG candidates have been discovered to date, only dozens of them have been confirmed as real polar ring by follow-up spectroscopic observations.

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An active supermassive black hole is one of the greatest wonders in the cosmos.

A dense, invisible object that can be billions of times the mass of our Sun is surrounded by a vast, churning disk and torus of material, blazing with light as it swirls down onto the black hole center. But how big do these structures grow?

For the first time, an unambiguous detection of near-infrared light reveals the outskirts of the massive accretion disk surrounding a supermassive black hole hundreds of millions times our Sun’s mass, in a galaxy called III Zw 002 some 1.17 billion light-years away.

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