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The Giant Magellan Telescope begins the four-year process to fabricate and polish its seventh and final primary mirror, the last required to complete the telescope’s 368 square meter light collecting surface, the world’s largest and most challenging optics ever produced. Together, the mirrors will collect more light than any other telescope in existence, allowing humanity to unlock the secrets of the universe by providing detailed chemical analyses of celestial objects and their origin.

Last week, the University of Arizona Richard F. Caris Mirror Lab closed the lid on nearly 20 tons of the purest optical glass inside a one-of-a-kind oven housed beneath the stands of the Arizona Wildcats Football Stadium. The spinning oven will heat the glass to 1,165°C so as it melts, it is forced outward to form the mirror’s curved paraboloid surface. Measuring 8.4-meters in diameter—about two stories tall when standing on edge—the mirror will cool over the next three months before moving into the polishing stage.

At 50 million times more powerful than the human eye, “the will make history through its future discoveries,” shares Buell Jannuzi, Principal Investigator for the fabrication of the Giant Magellan Telescope primary mirror segments, Director of Steward Observatory, and Head of the Department of Astronomy at the University of Arizona. “We are thrilled to be closing in on another milestone in the fabrication of the Giant Magellan Telescope.”

Is there an 8-dimensional “engine” behind our universe? Join Marion Kerr on a fun, visually exciting journey as she explores a mysterious, highly complex structure known simply as ‘E8’–a weird, 8-dimensional mathematical object that for some, strange reason, appears to encode all of the particles and forces of our 3-dimensional universe.

Meet surfer and renowned theoretical physicist Garrett Lisi as he rides the waves and paraglides over the beautiful Hawaiian island of Maui and talks about his groundbreaking discovery about E8 relates deeply to our reality; and learn why Los Angeles based Klee Irwin and his group of research scientists believe that the universe is essentially a 3-dimensional “shadow” of this enigmatic… thing… that may exist behind the curtain of our reality.

ENJOY THE MOVIE! and SHARE IT!

Main film credits:

Host: Marion Kerr.
Written, Directed and Edited by David Jakubovic.
Director of Photography: Natt McFee.
Lead animator: Sarah Winters.
Original Music by Daniel Jakubovic.
Rerecording mixer: Patrick Giraudi.
Line Producer: Piper Norwood.
Executive producer: Klee Irwin.
Producers: David Jakubovic, Stephanie Nadanarajah.
Also starring Daniel Jakubovic as Agent Smooth.

VISIT THE QGR WEBSITE: http://www.quantumgravityresearch.org.

The two major problems with most AI generated human images is with teeth and fingers. Most of the AI tools don’t get these two human features correct. But The Multiverse has eliminated the problem by training their model and eliminating the need to include fingers in your headshots. The company recently announced its latest AI model, Upscale to further enhance the AI headshots.

Upscale is a new imaging model that improves lighting, skin texture, and hair which are notoriously challenging for imaging models. The results are really good. I’ve been following The Multiverse AI on socials, and have been reading great things about them, so much so that their revenue has grown more than 10 times through word of mouth in a period of last four weeks.

The Multiverse AI works by leveraging a latent diffusion model to engineer a custom headshot. According to the company, up to “80% of images look like studio quality professional headshots of the user, with the percentage depending on the quality of input images.” While there is no criteria to define and measure that percentage, I agree on the part that at least a few of the 100 generated images can be used on your LinkedIn and resume.

Black holes may be less unique than previously thought, as the expansion due to a cosmological constant can hold apart a pair of holes and allow them to mimic a single black hole.

Black holes are astonishing objects that can pack the mass of Earth into a space the size of a pea. A remarkable attribute is their stunning simplicity, which is encapsulated in the celebrated uniqueness theorems [1]. Briefly stated, these theorems say that there is only one solution to Einstein’s equations of general relativity for a fully collapsed (nonevolving) system having fixed mass and angular momentum [2]. The implication is that all black holes that have settled down to equilibrium with the same mass and rotation are precisely the same: their entire behavior described by a single equation—the so-called Kerr solution—filling only a few lines of paper!

But there is a catch. The uniqueness theorems make a number of assumptions, the key one being that the space around the black hole is “empty”—in other words, there is no energy that might influence the black hole. Such energy can arise from fields, for example, those of the standard model, or from a “cosmological constant,” which is a form of dark energy that might be behind the accelerated expansion of our Universe today. In a fascinating study, Óscar Dias from the University of Southampton, UK, and colleagues demonstrate that uniqueness is violated in the presence of a positive cosmological constant [3]. Specifically, they show that a pair of black holes whose mutual attraction is balanced by the cosmic expansion would look the same to a distant observer as a single isolated black hole. The results may lead to a rethinking of how simple black holes really are.

Imagine trying to tune a radio to a single station but instead encountering static noise and interfering signals from your own equipment. That is the challenge facing research teams searching for evidence of extremely rare events that could help understand the origin and nature of matter in the universe. It turns out that when you are trying to tune into some of the universe’s weakest signals, it helps to make your instruments very quiet.

Around the world, more than a dozen teams are listening for the pops and electronic sizzle that might mean they have finally tuned into the right channel. These scientists and engineers have gone to extraordinary lengths to shield their experiments from false signals created by cosmic radiation. Most such experiments are found in very inaccessible places—such as a mile underground in a nickel mine in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada, or in an abandoned gold mine in Lead, South Dakota—to shield them from naturally radioactive elements on Earth. However, one such source of fake signals comes from natural radioactivity in the very electronics that are designed to record potential signals.

In this episode, we explore how a triple-lens supernova observed by the James Webb Space Telescope could help solve the mystery of the Hubble tension, which is the discrepancy between different measurements of the expansion rate of the Universe. We also learn about the details of the supernova and the galaxy cluster that caused the gravitational lensing effect, and how JWST and other telescopes can use this supernova to test various cosmological models and parameters.

Paper Link:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.

Chapters:
00:00 Introduction.
01:10 How JWST Discovered a Rare and Triple-Lens Supernova.
04:13 How H0pe Can Measure the Expansion Rate in a New Way.
09:00 How hOpe can test various cosmological models.
11:26 Outro.
12:24 Enjoy.

Best Telescopes for beginners:
Celestron 70mm Travel Scope.
https://amzn.to/3jBi3yY

Celestron 114LCM Computerized Newtonian Telescope.
https://amzn.to/3VzNUgU

Celestron – StarSense Explorer LT 80AZ