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New data from the Hubble Space Telescope confirms that the universe is expanding nine percent more rapidly than theoretical calculations predicted.

Those original calculations were based on data from the early universe, so many scientists suspected that something sped up the works. But the new Hubble data suggests that the universe could be substantially younger than previously believed — perhaps by as much as a billion years, according to the Associated Press.

Researchers at the XENON dark matter observatory have spotted something incredibly rare. Unfortunately, it’s not dark matter, but it is the next best thing. The detectors at the observatory have spotted the decay of xenon-124, the rarest event ever recorded in human history.

The XENON experiment is designed to detect dark matter, which is not an easy task. The reason that dark matter is so mysterious is that it pretty much never does anything, which makes it hard to spot. Dark matter doesn’t give off light, or have any sort of magnetic field, and it almost never interacts with normal matter in any way.

The eyes of the world turned to Messier 87 earlier this month when scientists released the first ever image of a black hole. And this image from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope shows more about the giant galaxy in which the now-famous black hole resides.

The imaged black hole was truly gargantuan, with a mass equivalent to 6.5 billion times that of our Sun. And the galaxy surrounding it, Messier 87, is equally huge. Known as a supergiant elliptical galaxy, it is one of the most massive galaxies in the universe and hosts a large number of globular clusters.

The image captured by Spitzer shows the galaxy in infrared, as opposed to the radio wavelengths used to capture the black hole image. The infrared light coming from the galaxy at wavelengths of 3.6 and 4.5 microns is shown in blue and green, which is what marks the stars in the image. The areas of red are dust features which glow with a wavelength of 8.0 microns.

Continue reading “Supermassive Black Hole Resides Inside a Supermassive Galaxy” »

Yes, black holes get all of the attention. They’re mysterious, they lurk in the shows of interstellar space, they break the laws of known physics, they can trap you forever, they have a cool-sounding and easy-to-understand name. They’ve got great branding.

But some things are even weirder and scarier than black holes. And what makes them weirder and scarier is that they’re weird and scary within the known laws of physics. Which means we understand them. Which means we can explain, in great and gruesome detail, just how awful they are.

Take, for example, the neutron star.

Continue reading “Say Hello To Neutron Stars, Your Worst Nightmare” »

When it reopens in 2021, the Large Hadron collider should be able to detect rare particles with possible links to the world of dark matter and energy.

The latest measurement of the expansion rate of the Universe is in, and it has confirmed with more certainty than ever that we have a real dilly of a pickle on our hands. Once again, the result has shown that the Universe is expanding much faster than it should be based on the conditions just after the Big Bang.

The Universe’s rate of expansion is called the Hubble Constant, and it’s been incredibly tricky to pin down.

According to data from the Planck satellite that measured the cosmic microwave background (the conditions of the early Universe just 380,000 years after the Big Bang, the Hubble Constant should be 67.4 kilometres (41.9 miles) per second per megaparsec, with less than 1 percent uncertainty.

Continue reading “Astronomers Just Detected The Universe Is Expanding Much Faster Than It Should Be” »

From the point of view of nuclear theory, the decay rates of both two-neutrino and neutrinoless double electron capture can be connected to quantities called nuclear matrix elements. Such quantities contain information about nuclear structure that is extracted from nuclear models and can be applied by researchers in the field of nuclear-structure theory.

For half a century, our view of the world has been based on the standard model of particle physics. However, this view has been challenged by theories that can overcome some of the limitations of the standard model. These theories allow neutrinos to be Majorana particles (that is, they are indistinguishable from their own antiparticles) and predict the existence of weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) as the constituents of invisible ‘dark matter’ in the Universe. Majorana neutrinos mediate a type of nuclear decay called neutrinoless double-β decay, an example of which is neutrinoless double electron capture. A crucial step towards observing this decay is to detect its standard-model equivalent: two-neutrino double electron capture. In a paper in Nature, the XENON Collaboration reports the first direct observation of this process in xenon-124 nuclei, using a detector that was built to detect WIMPs.

Continue reading “Dark-matter detector observes exotic nuclear decay” »

New measurements from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope confirm that the universe is expanding roughly 9 percent faster than expected based on its trajectory observed shortly after the Big Bang, according to a new study.

The Hubble Space Telescope measurements, which were published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters on Thursday, minimize the chances that the disparity is an accident from 1 in 3,000 to only 1 in 100,000 and suggest new physics might be needed to better comprehend the cosmos, said a Johns Hopkins University press release.

Continue reading “New Hubble Measurements Confirm Universe Is Expanding at a Faster Rate” »

Deep inside a mountain in central Italy, scientists are laying a trap for dark matter. The bait? A big metal tank full of 3.5 tons (3,200 kilograms) of pure liquid xenon. This noble gas is one of the cleanest, most radiation-proof substances on Earth, making it an ideal target for capturing some of the rarest particle interactions in the universe.

It all sounds vaguely sinister; said Christian Wittweg, a doctoral candidate at the University of Münster in Germany, who has worked with the so-called Xenon collaboration for half a decade, going to work every day feels like “paying a Bond villain a visit.” So far, the mountain-dwelling researchers haven’t captured any dark matter. But they recently succeeded in detecting one of the rarest particle interactions in the universe. [11 Biggest Unanswered Questions About Dark Matter]

According to a new study published today (April 24) in the journal Nature, the team of more than 100 researchers measured, for the first time ever, the decay of a xenon-124 atom into a tellurium 124 atom through an extremely rare process called two-neutrino double electron capture. This type of radioactive decay occurs when an atom’s nucleus absorbs two electrons from its outer electron shell simultaneously, thereby releasing a double dose of the ghostly particles called neutrinos.

Continue reading “Researchers Just Measured an Atom with a Half-Life of 18 Sextillion Years” »