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Category: cosmology – Page 152

Gravitational waves rippling from black hole merger could help test general relativity

Scientists have discovered gravitational waves stemming from a black hole merger event that suggest the resultant black hole settled into a stable, spherical shape. These waves also reveal the combo black hole may be much larger than previously thought.

When initially detected on May 21, 2019, the gravitational wave event known as GW190521 was believed to have come from a merger between two black holes, one with a mass equivalent to just over 85 suns and the other with a mass equivalent to about 66 suns. Scientists believed the merger therefore created an approximately 142 solar mass daughter black hole.

Yet, newly studied spacetime vibrations from the merger-created black hole, rippling outward as the void resolved into a proper spherical shape, seem to suggest it’s more massive than initially predicted. Rather than possess 142 solar masses, calculations say it should have a mass equal to around 250 times that of the sun.

Magnetic Blob Orbiting Earth’s Closest Supermassive Black Hole Shoots Radiation Toward Us Every 76 Minutes

The latest evidence comes from a yet-to-be-peer-reviewed analysis of gamma-ray emission. The data is publicly available and it was used by researchers at the National Autonomous University of Mexico to create a timeline of emission from June 2022 to December 2022. The data is from NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. The team found a repeating emission, appearing every 76.32 minutes.

The light curve shows the repeating pattern clearly, and the period is consistent with observations from last year in a completely different wavelength. Radio observations also suggested that something is going around Sagittarius A* about every 74 minutes, with an uncertainty of 6 minutes higher or lower.

Sagittarius A*’s radius is 12 million kilometers (7.4 miles) and this object is expected to be fairly close to it, five times the black hole radius. To cover the orbital distance in just over an hour, the blob needs to travel at 30 percent of the speed of light, truly an impressive velocity.

Astronomers finally caught radio waves from 40 large galaxies in the nearby universe

Supermassive black holes reside in some of the biggest galaxies in the universe. They tend to be billions of times more massive that our Sun, and not even light itself can escape a black hole once it gets too close.

But it’s not all darkness. Supermassive black holes power some of the most luminous celestial objects in the universe – active galactic nuclei, which shine across the spectrum of light, including radio waves.

The active galactic nucleus in nearby galaxy Messier 87 is a prodigious emitter of radio waves, 27 orders of magnitude more powerful than the most powerful radio transmitters on Earth.

AzTECC71: The Faint Galaxy That Defies Optical Detection

Dr. McKinney noted, “With JWST, we can study for the first time the optical and infrared properties of this heavily dust-obscured, hidden population of galaxies because it’s so sensitive that not only can it stare back into the farthest reaches of the universe, but it can also pierce the thickest of dusty veils.”

Did galaxies produce stars in the early universe? This is what a recent study published in The Astrophysical Journal hopes to unveil as a team of international researchers analyze data from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) about a star-forming galaxy called AzTECC71 that existed approximately 900 million years after the Big Bang. What makes this discovery unique is that AzTECC71 is hidden behind a fair amount of dust which initially fooled astronomers to hypothesize that it’s not very big. How astronomers now hypothesize that AzTECC71 was producing a plethora of new stars despite its young age, which challenges previous notions of the formation and evolution of galaxies so soon after the Big Bang.

Color composite image of the galaxy, AzTECC71, which astronomers estimate existed approximately 900 million years after the Big Bang. This image was made using multiple color filters as part of the James Webb Space Telescope’s NIRCam instrument. (Credit: J. McKinney/M. Franco/C. Casey/University of Texas at Austin)

“This thing is a real monster,” said Dr. Jed McKinney, who is a postdoctoral researcher at The University of Texas at Austin and lead author of the study. “Even though it looks like a little blob, it’s actually forming hundreds of new stars every year. And the fact that even something that extreme is barely visible in the most sensitive imaging from our newest telescope is so exciting to me. It’s potentially telling us there’s a whole population of galaxies that have been hiding from us.”

With a quantum “squeeze,” clocks could keep even more precise time, MIT researchers propose

More stable clocks could measure quantum phenomena, including the presence of dark matter.

A new MIT study finds that even if all noise from the outside world is eliminated, the stability of clocks, laser beams, and other oscillators would still be vulnerable to quantum mechanical effects.

Clocks, lasers, and other oscillators could be tuned to super-quantum precision, allowing researchers to track infinitesimally small differences in time, according to a new MIT study.

The Universe in a lab: Testing alternate cosmology using a cloud of atoms

In the basement of Kirchhoff-Institut für Physik in Germany, researchers have been simulating the Universe as it might have existed shortly after the Big Bang. They have created a tabletop quantum field simulation that involves using magnets and lasers to control a sample of potassium-39 atoms that is held close to absolute zero. They then use equations to translate the results at this small scale to explore possible features of the early Universe.

The work done so far shows that it’s possible to simulate a Universe with a different curvature. In a positively curved universe, if you travel in any direction in a straight line, you will come back to where you started. In a negatively curved universe, space is bent in a saddle shape. The Universe is currently flat or nearly flat, according to Marius Sparn, a PhD student at Kirchhoff-Institut für Physik. But at the beginning of its existence, it might have been more positively or negatively curved.

What If You Traveled Through a Black Hole?

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Dark, mysterious and consuming everything around them, black holes will rip apart anything that passes their event horizons. But could there be more? What would happen if you fell into one of those monstrosities? How could you possibly travel through the black hole itself? And if you emerged on the other side, where would you end up?

Transcript and sources: https://whatifshow.com/travelling-through-a-black-hole/

00:00 What If You Traveled Through a Black Hole?
00:47 What’s a black hole?
02:04 Crossing a charged black hole.
02:49 A mind blowing experience.
04:35 Reaching the inner horizon.
05:35 Witnessing the history of the universe.
07:24 Following different laws of physics.

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Get our 100 best episodes in one mind-blowing book: http://bit.ly/ytc-the-what-if-100-book.

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