Subtle shifts in stellar signals reveal pervasive waves from mergers of giant black holes.
Category: cosmology – Page 142
Researchers from the University of Tokyo pool knowledge of robotics and tissue culturing to create a controllable robotic finger covered with living skin tissue. The robotic digit has living cells and supporting organic material grown on top of it for ideal shaping and strength. As the skin is soft and can even heal itself, the finger could be useful in applications that require a gentle touch but also robustness. The team aims to add other kinds of cells into future iterations, giving devices the ability to sense as we do.
Albert Einstein proved decades ago that time and space are inseparable. However, because of the expansion of the Universe, events that occurred after the Big Bang now appear to have slowed down. As it turned out, time flowed many times slower at the dawn of the Universe than it does today.
Here’s What We Know
A team of astronomers led by researchers from the University of Birmingham, University College London and Queen’s University Belfast have discovered one of the most dramatic ‘switches on’ of a black hole ever seen. They will present their findings on Tuesday 4 July at the 2023 National Astronomy Meeting in Cardiff. The work will also be published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
J221951-484240, known as J221951, is one of the most luminous transients—astrophysical objects that change their brightness over a short period of time—ever recorded. It was discovered by Dr. Samantha Oates, an astronomer at the University of Birmingham, and her team, in September 2019 while searching for the electromagnetic light from a gravitational wave event. The team were using the Ultra-Violet and Optical Telescope on board the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory to look for a kilonova, the sign of a neutron star merging with another neutron star or a black hole. A kilonova typically appears blue, then fades and turns more red in color over a timescale of days. What they found instead something even more unusual: J221951. The transient appeared blue, but didn’t change color or fade rapidly as a kilonova would.
Multiple telescopes were used to follow-up J221951 and determine its nature, including NASA’s Swift/UVOT and Hubble Space Telescope, the South African Large Telescope, and ESO facilities such as the Very Large Telescope and the GROND instrument on the MPG/ESO 2.2-meter telescope at the La Silla Observatory.
Scientists have for the first time observed the early universe running in extreme slow motion, unlocking one of the mysteries of Einstein’s expanding universe. The research is published in Nature Astronomy.
Einstein’s general theory of relativity means that we should observe the distant—and hence ancient— universe running much slower than the present day. However, peering back that far in time has proven elusive. Scientists have now cracked that mystery by using quasars as “clocks.”
“Looking back to a time when the universe was just over a billion years old, we see time appearing to flow five times slower,” said lead author of the study, Professor Geraint Lewis from the School of Physics and Sydney Institute for Astronomy at the University of Sydney.
Wolf-Rayet (WR) stars are not only hot, bright, and massive. They are also in an advanced stage of evolution, losing mass at an incredible rate.
While surveying the neighboring Andromeda galaxy, astronomers discovered a new batch of Wolf-Rayet stars.
Some huge stars in galaxies may develop into Wolf-Rayet stars before going supernova. That’s why, Wolf-Rayet stars are intriguing candidates for studying the universe’s evolution.
In three months, the tool will begin a six year exploration of dark energy and dark matter.
Dark energy and dark matter discovery tool Euclid successfully launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral in Florida, USA, at 11:11 local time / 16:11 BST / 17:11 CEST on Saturday 1 July 2023. The first stage proceeded to return to Earth to be recaptured and reused at later flights.
Euclid had a long journey. “Between 23 and 28 June, Euclid was mounted atop the Falcon 9 adaptor, encapsulated in the rocket fairing, and transported to the Cape Canaveral Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40),” wrote ESA in a statement.
Euclid’s destination is the Sun-Earth Lagrange point L2, an equilibrium point… More.
Europe’s Euclid space telescope is scheduled to blast off Saturday on the first-ever mission aiming to shed light on two of the Universe’s greatest mysteries: dark energy and dark matter.
This thrum of gravitational waves is constantly pulsing through the universe. It opens a window into the earliest moments after the Big Bang.
Albert Einstein proposed in 1916 that the universe was constantly being pushed and stretched by space-time waves undulating throughout the universe. A group of scientists won the Nobel Prize for finding proof of these waves in 2016, using a laser interferometer to detect a high-frequency gravitational wave emanating from the collision of two black holes or neutron stars less than 100 times the mass of the sun.
Geoff Bennett:
Let’s expand our horizons a bit wider and look at important findings that are literally about space-time and the cosmos as we know it.
You might remember that Albert Einstein theorized that as heavy objects move through time and space, they create ripple effects in the fabric of our universe. Now an international team of scientists have detected new evidence of that. Researchers found new signs of gravitational waves, waves that are affected by huge movements, such as the collision of black holes.