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Archive for the ‘cosmology’ category: Page 212

Sep 2, 2020

Virtual Burning Man: Here’s what you need to know about festival

Posted by in category: cosmology

Get ready to check into the Multiverse, fellow travelers, and enjoy all the sights, sounds and experiences that the 2020 Burning Man has to offer.

Sep 1, 2020

“Dark Energy Originates from a Vast Sea of Objects Spread Throughout Cosmic Voids”

Posted by in categories: cosmology, physics, singularity

Scientists suggest that a counter-intuitive, hypothetical species of black holes may negate the standard model of cosmology, where dark energy is an inherent and constant property of spacetime that will result in an eventual cold death of the universe. “It’s the big elephant in the room,” says Claudia de Rham, a theoretical physicist at Imperial College London about dark energy, the mysterious, elusive phenomena that pushes the cosmos to expand so rapidly and which is estimated to account for 70% of the contents of the universe. “It’s very frustrating.”

Generic Objects of Dark Energy

Astronomers have known for two decades that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, but the physics of this expansion remains a mystery. In 1966, Erast Gliner, a young physicist at the Ioffe Physico-Technical Institute in Leningrad, proposed an alternative hypothesis that very large stars should collapse into what could be called Generic Objects of Dark Energy (GEODEs). These appear to be black holes when viewed from the outside but, unlike black holes, they contain dark energy instead of a singularity.

Aug 31, 2020

New evidence for quantum fluctuations near a quantum critical point in a superconductor

Posted by in categories: cosmology, quantum physics

Among all the curious states of matter that can coexist in a quantum material, jostling for preeminence as temperature, electron density and other factors change, some scientists think a particularly weird juxtaposition exists at a single intersection of factors, called the quantum critical point or QCP.

“Quantum critical points are a very hot issue and interesting for many problems,” says Wei-Sheng Lee, a staff scientist at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and investigator with the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences (SIMES). “Some suggest that they’re even analogous to black holes in the sense that they are singularities—point-like intersections between different states of matter in a quantum material—where you can get all sorts of very strange electron behavior as you approach them.”

Lee and his collaborators reported in Nature Physics today that they have found strong evidence that QCPs and their associated fluctuations exist. They used a technique called resonant inelastic X-ray scattering (RIXS) to probe the electronic behavior of a copper oxide material, or cuprate, that conducts electricity with perfect efficiency at relatively high temperatures.

Aug 30, 2020

Black hole ‘hair’ could be detected using ripples in space-time

Posted by in categories: cosmology, physics

Black holes are celestial objects with such massive gravity that not even light can escape their clutches once it crosses the event horizon, or point-of-no-return. The event horizons of black holes lock secrets deep within them — secrets that could completely revolutionize our understanding of physics.

Unfortunately, for decades many scientists thought whatever information falls into a black hole might be lost forever. But new research suggests that ripples in space-time, or gravitational waves may carry a faint whisper of this hidden information by revealing the presence of wispy “hairs” on a black hole’s surface.


Hair may record the information swallowed by the gravitational monsters.

Aug 30, 2020

10 Supermassive Black Holes Discovered By a Research Station In The Netherlands [Infographic]

Posted by in category: cosmology

In the past 30–40 years we have only been able to discover a handful of Supermassive Black Hole. Last year this research station found 10 more.

Aug 30, 2020

NSF Announces MIT-Led Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Fundamental Interactions

Posted by in categories: cosmology, physics, robotics/AI

IAIFI will advance physics knowledge — from the smallest building blocks of nature to the largest structures in the universe — and galvanize AI research innovation.

The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) announced last week an investment of more than $100 million to establish five artificial intelligence (AI) institutes, each receiving roughly $20 million over five years. One of these, the NSF AI Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Fundamental Interactions (IAIFI), will be led by MIT ’s Laboratory for Nuclear Science (LNS) and become the intellectual home of more than 25 physics and AI senior researchers at MIT and Harvard, Northeastern, and Tufts universities.

By merging research in physics and AI, the IAIFI seeks to tackle some of the most challenging problems in physics, including precision calculations of the structure of matter, gravitational-wave detection of merging black holes, and the extraction of new physical laws from noisy data.

Aug 28, 2020

Hubble Maps Giant Halo Around Andromeda Galaxy

Posted by in categories: cosmology, evolution

In a landmark study, scientists using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have mapped the immense envelope of gas, called a halo, surrounding the Andromeda galaxy, our nearest large galactic neighbor. Scientists were surprised to find that this tenuous, nearly invisible halo of diffuse plasma extends 1.3 million light-years from the galaxy—about halfway to our Milky Way—and as far as 2 million light-years in some directions. This means that Andromeda’s halo is already bumping into the halo of our own galaxy.

They also found that the halo has a layered structure, with two main nested and distinct shells of gas. This is the most comprehensive study of a halo surrounding a galaxy.

“Understanding the huge halos of gas surrounding galaxies is immensely important,” explained co-investigator Samantha Berek of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. “This reservoir of gas contains fuel for future star formation within the galaxy, as well as outflows from events such as supernovae. It’s full of clues regarding the past and future evolution of the galaxy, and we’re finally able to study it in great detail in our closest galactic neighbor.”

Aug 28, 2020

Physicists: Wormholes Large Enough to Travel Through Are Possible

Posted by in categories: cosmology, physics, space travel

Scientists at Princeton have good news for interstellar travel.

Aug 26, 2020

60Fe deposition during the late Pleistocene and the Holocene echoes past supernova activity

Posted by in categories: climatology, cosmology, particle physics, space travel

Nearby supernova explosions shape the interstellar medium. Ejecta, containing fresh nucleosynthetic products, may traverse the solar system as a transient passage, or alternatively the solar system may traverse local clouds that may represent isolated remnants of supernova explosions. Such scenarios may modulate the galactic cosmic-ray flux intensity to which Earth is exposed. Varying conditions of the traversed interstellar medium could have impacts on climate and can be imprinted in the terrestrial geological record. Some radionuclides, such as 60 Fe, are not produced on Earth or within the solar system in significant quantities. Their existence in deep-sea sediments demonstrates recent production in close-by supernova explosions with a continued influx of 60 Fe until today.

Nuclides synthesized in massive stars are ejected into space via stellar winds and supernova explosions. The solar system (SS) moves through the interstellar medium and collects these nucleosynthesis products. One such product is 60 Fe, a radionuclide with a half-life of 2.6 My that is predominantly produced in massive stars and ejected in supernova explosions. Extraterrestrial 60 Fe has been found on Earth, suggesting close-by supernova explosions ∼2 to 3 and ∼6 Ma. Here, we report on the detection of a continuous interstellar 60 Fe influx on Earth over the past ∼33,000 y. This time period coincides with passage of our SS through such interstellar clouds, which have a significantly larger particle density compared to the local average interstellar medium embedding our SS for the past few million years. The interstellar 60 Fe was extracted from five deep-sea sediment samples and accelerator mass spectrometry was used for single-atom counting.

Aug 26, 2020

‘Zombie star’ baffles astronomers after it survives FIVE supernova EXPLOSIONS

Posted by in categories: cosmology, futurism

Circa 2017 could be used in the future for force fields to survive supernova blasts directly.


A MYSTERIOUS star, dubbed the ‘Zombie star’, has baffled astronomers after it has survived five supernova explosions.