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Category: cosmology – Page 230

A gold mine located over half a mile (one km) underground in Victoria, Australia, has been converted into the Stawell Underground Physics Laboratory to study dark matter, a press release from Australia’s Nuclear Science and Technology Organization (ANSTO) said.

Scientists believe that dark matter, the invisible substance largely unknown to mankind, makes up 85 percent of our universe’s mass. To know more about it, scientists have been building dark matter detectors, and one of the “most sensitive” detectors delivered some significant results last month.

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The oscillations in binary neutron stars before they merge could have big implications for the insights scientists can glean from gravitational wave detection.

Researchers at the University of Birmingham have demonstrated the way in which these unique vibrations, caused by the interactions between the two stars’ tidal fields as they get close together, affect gravitational-wave observations. The study is published in Physical Review Letters.

Taking these movements into account could make a huge difference to our understanding of the data taken by the Advanced LIGO and Virgo instruments, set up to detect —ripples in time and space—produced by the merging of black holes and neutron stars.

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You don’t have to know a whole lot about science to know that black holes normally suck things in, not spew things out. But NASA detected something mighty bizarre at the supermassive black hole Markarian 335. Two of NASA’s space telescopes, including the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR), amazingly observed a black hole’s corona “launched” away from the supermassive black hole.

Then an enormous pulse of X-ray energy spewed out. This kind of phenomena has never been observed before.

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To all who see them, the new images of space taken by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) are awe-inspiring.

Physicist Eric J. Lerner gets to the point:

Why are JWST images causing panic among cosmologists? And the predictions of which theory do they contradict? The papers don’t really speak. The truth that is not reported in these documents is that the hypothesis that the JWST images blatantly and repeatedly contradict the Big Bang Hypothesis is that the universe began 14 billion years ago in an incredibly hot, dense state and has since the pore is expanding. Since this hypothesis has been defended for decades as an indisputable truth by the vast majority of cosmological theorists, the new data cause these theorists to panic. “Now I’m lying awake at 3 a.m.,” says Alison Kirkpatrick, an astronomer at the University of Kansas at Lawrence, “and wondering if I did everything wrong.”

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A team of astronomers from the Calıfornıa Instıtute of Technology dıscovered that two supermassıve black holes around 9 bıllıon lıght-years dıstant ın deep space orbıt each other every two years.

Each supermassıve black hole ıs thought to have mass hundreds of mıllıons of tımes greater than the Sun.

The dıstance between the bodıes ıs nearly fıfty tımes that between our sun and Pluto. When the paır collides ın around 10,000 years, ıt ıs expected that the gıgantıc ımpact would rock space and tıme ıtself, spreadıng gravıtatıonal waves across the cosmos.

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A new approach to an age-old question.

Black holes are among some of the most mysterious objects in the Universe. They are the remnants of massive stars that have reached the end of their life cycles and collapsed into a region of spacetime that is incredibly dense. Their gravitational force is so strong that nothing can escape their surface.

Much like water gushing down a drain, the very fabric of space (and time) also appears to be draining away within some of the most enigmatic things in the universe — black holes. But, what exactly are they?

Are they more common than we think? Should we be concerned about them? What role do they play in the universe?

These are just some of the “big picture” questions some of the greatest minds of astrophysics have mulled over for many decades.

Continue reading “Black Holes Are the Terrifying Behemoths of Space. Here’s How They Tick” | >

In late May, a collaborative study, led by Kailash Suhu, was published claiming that they had managed to identify the first ever isolated black hole, identified by shorthand as OB11046. While by itself, this discovery presents no new information with regards to their nature, it highlights the staggering progress we’ve made in recent years in detecting these bodies.

Previously, black hole detection was very much limited by the fact that they do not emit, nor reflect any detectable electromagnetic radiation. As such, astronomers were only able to infer their presence via two mechanisms.

The first is by tracking the orbits of nearby celestial bodies and observe whether their motion can be modelled by the forces experienced by their neighbours. Any unusual motion can usually be explained by a nearby black hole contributions. The second requires the black hole to form an accretion disk. As matter is caught in the intense gravitational field, it orbits the black hole and is accelerated to intense velocities, causing the material to emit certain wavelengths of high energy electromagnetic radiation, such as x-rays.

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The first GWs were detected in 2015 by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO), when two black holes about 1.3 billion light-years away slammed into each other. LIGO consists of two interferometers — one in Louisiana, one in Washington state — which are L-shaped vacuum tunnels about 2.5 miles long on each side. A laser is shot from the crux of the L to mirrors at the end of each side, and if one of those laser beams arrives slightly late, the tardy beam is recorded by the detector. The detectors are sensitive enough to pick up nearby noises on Earth as well, such as passing trucks and falling trees. These events can mask or mimic gravitational-wave signals, so having two detectors far apart helps scientists distinguish real GW vibrations from false alarms.

The actual detector that spotted the first gravitational wave is now in the Nobel Prize Museum in Stockholm, Sweden, as the 2017 Nobel Prize in physics was awarded for this discovery. But LIGO didn’t stop there: A few months later, in collaboration with the newly completed Virgo interferometer in Italy, LIGO detected another gravitational wave event — this time produced by colliding neutron stars. The discovery also corresponded with a short gamma-ray burst and subsequent discovery of the merger site with optical telescopes. Within days of that momentous discovery, however, LIGO went offline for scheduled upgrades.

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