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Category: cosmology – Page 146

Kugelblitz! Powering a Starship With a Black Hole

To construct a Dyson Shell (or Cap), an exceptionally light and very absorptive material would be necessary, because a 20-mile-radius (32 km), 0.4-inch-thick (1 cm) titanium Dyson Shell would have a mass of more than 1,200 Empire State buildings! Alternatively, a Dyson Cap that absorbs radiation that would be fed into a heat engine would have a lower mass, but would also deliver an inferior acceleration.

Furthermore, a gamma-ray laser is currently the only conceivable technology that could be used to make a Schwarzschild Kugelblitz. However, such a laser’s output frequency would need to exceed current technology by more than a billion times. Its pulse duration would have to be a hundred billion times shorter than that of lasers today. The total energy of a single laser pulse would need to be equivalent to the energy the sun puts out in 1/10 of a second.

While it’s true that the technical challenges render it unlikely that a SK will be fueling an interstellar starship anytime soon, it’s imperative that we embrace a wide range of theoretical research. SKs can produce many petawatts of useable radiation; therefore, they hold the potential to be an ideal source of power for interstellar starships. Thus, in time, Schwarzschild Kugelblitzes may merit a position of distinction on the vast technology arc that could one day take us to the stars.

James Webb Space Telescope may have found the oldest black hole in the universe

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has spotted the oldest black hole ever seen, an ancient monster with the mass of 1.6 million suns lurking 13 billion years in the universe’s past.

The James Webb Space Telescope, whose cameras enable it to look back in time to our universe’s beginnings, spotted the supermassive black hole at the center of the infant galaxy GN-z11 just 440 million years after the universe began.

Astrophysical Enigmas Solved by Emerging Dark Matter Theory

Dark matter may be more vibrant than previously thought, UC Riverside study reports.

Thought to make up 85% of matter in the universe, dark matter is nonluminous and its nature is not well understood. While normal matter absorbs, reflects, and emits light, dark matter cannot be seen directly, making it harder to detect. A theory called “self-interacting dark matter,” or SIDM, proposes that dark matter particles self-interact through a dark force, strongly colliding with one another close to the center of a galaxy.

In work published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, a research team led by Hai-Bo Yu, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of California, Riverside, reports that SIDM simultaneously can explain two astrophysics puzzles in opposite extremes.

Two possible ways to use black holes as energy source in the distant future

A pair of astrophysicists at Tianjin University, in China, has proposed ways that humans in the distant future might use black holes as an energy source. In their paper published in the journal Physical Review D, Zhan-Feng Mai and Run-Qiu Yang outline two possible scenarios in which energy could potentially be harvested from primordial black holes.

As scientists continue to look for ways to meet the energy needs of a growing global population, some have begun to look for options that may not have been considered in the past. In this new effort, the researchers consider the possibility of tapping as a way to power human needs of the future by turning them into batteries.

The first option suggests future astro-engineers could “charge” a primordial black hole (a very small black hole with no spin that formed soon after the Big Bang) by feeding it electrically charged particles until the black hole begins to repel them, signaling it is fully charged, like a battery. Energy could then be collected from the black hole through the use of superradiance, whereby some of the electromagnetic or carrying more energy than was fed in are deflected into the black hole, captured first and converted into a usable energy source.

Defying Physics: “Forbidden” Emissions From a Spiral Galaxy

This whirling Hubble Space Telescope image features a bright spiral galaxy known as MCG-01–24-014, which is located about 275 million light-years from Earth. In addition to being a well-defined spiral galaxy, MCG-01–24-014 has an extremely energetic core, known as an active galactic nucleus (AGN), so it is referred to as an active galaxy.

Even more specifically, it is categorized as a Type-2 Seyfert galaxy. Seyfert galaxies host one of the most common subclasses of AGN, alongside quasars. Whilst the precise categorization of AGNs is nuanced, Seyfert galaxies tend to be relatively nearby ones where the host galaxy remains plainly detectable alongside its central AGN, while quasars are invariably very distant AGNs whose incredible luminosities outshine their host galaxies.

We Now Have Precise Math To Describe How Black Holes Reflect Our Universe

Astronomers developed a set of equations that can precisely describe the reflections of the Universe that appear in the warped light around a black hole.

The proximity of each reflection is dependent on the angle of observation with respect to the black hole, and the rate of the black hole’s spin, according to a mathematical solution worked out by physics student Albert Sneppen of the Niels Bohr Institute in Denmark in July 2021.

This was really cool, absolutely, but it wasn’t just really cool. It also potentially gave us a new tool for probing the gravitational environment around these extreme objects.