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Category: cosmology – Page 19

600,000 times bigger than our Sun, a hidden black hole is moving closer to our galaxy

Astronomers have recently identified a colossal black hole lurking in the shadows of our cosmic neighborhood. This celestial giant, estimated to be 600,000 times more massive than our Sun, resides in the Magellanic Clouds and is gradually approaching the Milky Way. The discovery has sparked significant interest among scientists who are now contemplating the potential consequences of an eventual collision between our galaxy and this massive cosmic entity.

A team of researchers from the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics has detected compelling evidence of a supermassive black hole within the Magellanic Clouds. These findings, published in The Astrophysical Journal on April 7, 2025, reveal a cosmic giant that dwarfs our Sun by a factor of 600,000 in terms of mass. The black hole’s enormous gravitational influence has long remained hidden from direct observation.

The Magellanic Clouds consist of two satellite galaxies orbiting our Milky Way at a distance of approximately 160,000 light-years. Their gradual approach toward our galaxy suggests an eventual merger that could dramatically reshape our cosmic neighborhood. Scientists are particularly concerned about the fate of this newly discovered black hole during such a collision event.

Quantum Maze!? The Supermaze Hypothesis Explained!

Are black holes really cosmic shredders—or are they complex quantum structures storing everything they consume? Discover the revolutionary Supermaze Hypothesis and Fuzzball Theory in this deep dive into black hole physics, quantum mechanics, and string theory. This could change everything we know about the universe!

Paper link : https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.

Chapters:
00:00 Introduction.
00:44 Inside the Supermaze – A New Perspective from String Theory.
02:42 The Fuzzball Revolution – Solving the Information Paradox.
04:43 Scientific Debate and the Road to the Theory of Everything.
06:57 Outro.
07:16 Enjoy.

MUSIC TITLE: Starlight Harmonies.

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Dark matter could make planets spin faster

Dark matter is a confounding concept that teeters on the leading edges of cosmology and physics. We don’t know what it is or how exactly it fits into our understanding of the universe. We only know that its unseen mass is a critical part of the cosmos.

Astronomers know dark matter exists. They can tell by the way galaxies rotate, by exploiting gravitational lensing, and by analyzing fluctuations in the Cosmic Microwave Background. But new research suggests that there might be another way to detect its presence.

The research is “Dark Matter (S)pins the Planet,” and it’s available on the arXiv preprint server. Haihao Shi, from the Xinjiang Astronomical Observatory at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, is the lead author. The co-authors are all from Chinese research institutions.

Stephen Hawking’s final paper bursts the multiverse bubble with a Holographic Universe theory

Renowned physicist Stephen Hawking passed away earlier this year, but his legacy to science will live on. His final theory on the origin of the universe has now been published, and it offers an interesting departure from earlier ideas about the nature of the “multiverse.”

Ideas about how the universe came to exist the way we see it today have been adapted and built on for decades. The new paper, authored by Hawking and Professor Thomas Hertog, adds to the literature with a new understanding of a theory known as eternal inflation.

After the Big Bang kickstarted the universe, it expanded exponentially for a brief fraction of a fraction of a second. When that inflationary period ended, the universe continued to expand at a much slower rate. But according to the eternal inflation model, quantum fluctuations mean that in some regions of the universe, that rapid inflation never stopped. That results in a gigantic “background” universe full of an infinite number of smaller pocket universes – including the one we live in.

CMS finds unexpected excess of top quarks

The CMS collaboration at CERN has observed an unexpected feature in data produced by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which could point to the existence of the smallest composite particle yet observed. The result, reported at the Rencontres de Moriond conference in the Italian Alps this week, suggests that top quarks – the heaviest and shortest lived of all the elementary particles – can momentarily pair up with their antimatter counterparts to produce an object called toponium. Other explanations cannot be ruled out, however, as the existence of toponium was thought too difficult to verify at the LHC, and the result will need to be further scrutinised by CMS’s sister experiment, ATLAS.

High-energy collisions between protons at the LHC routinely produce top quark–antiquark pairs (tt-bar). Measuring the probability, or cross section, of tt-bar production is both an important test of the Standard Model of particle physics and a powerful way to search for the existence of new particles that are not described by the 50-year-old theory. Many of the open questions in particle physics, such as the nature of dark matter, motivate the search for new particles that may be too heavy to have been produced in experiments so far.

CMS researchers were analysing a large sample of tt-bar production data collected in 2016–2018 to search for new types of Higgs bosons when they spotted something unusual. Additional Higgs-like particles are predicted in many extensions of the Standard Model. If they exist, such particles are expected to interact most strongly with the singularly massive top quark, which weighs in at 184 times the mass of the proton. And if they are massive enough to decay into a top quark–antiquark pair, this should dominate the way they decay inside detectors, with the two massive quarks splintering into “jets” of particles.

Astronomers confirm the existence of a lone black hole

A team of astronomers at the Space Telescope Science Institute, working with one colleague from the University of St Andrews’ Center for Exoplanet Science and another from the European Southern Observatory, has confirmed the existence of a lone black hole. In their paper published in The Astrophysical Journal, the group describes how they studied newer data regarding an object they had spotted several years ago to confirm its identity.

In 2022, members of essentially the same team reported the discovery of what they described as a “dark object” moving through the constellation Sagittarius. They suggested it might be a lone black hole. Shortly thereafter, a second research team challenged that result, suggesting it was more likely a neutron star. After continuing to study the object, the original research team has found more evidence backing up their original claim that it is likely a lone black hole.

Prior to this new finding, all the that have been identified have also had a —they are discovered due to their impact on light emitted by their companion star. Without such a companion star, it would be very difficult to see a black hole. The one identified by the team was only noticed because it passed in front of a distant non-companion star, magnifying its light and shifting its position in the sky for a short while.

An evolutionary algorithmic phase transition 2.6 billion years ago may have sparked the emergence of eukaryotic cells

An international collaboration between four scientists from Mainz, Valencia, Madrid, and Zurich has published new research in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shedding light on the most significant increase in complexity in the history of life’s evolution on Earth: the origin of the eukaryotic cell.

While the endosymbiotic theory is widely accepted, the billions of years that have passed since the fusion of an archaea and a bacteria have resulted in a lack of evolutionary intermediates in the phylogenetic tree until the emergence of the eukaryotic cell. It is a gap in our knowledge, referred to as the black hole at the heart of biology.

“The new study is a blend of theoretical and observational approaches that quantitatively understands how the genetic architecture of life was transformed to allow such an increase in complexity,” stated Dr. Enrique M. Muro, representative of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) in this project.