Lifeboat Foundation

Sagittarius A* keeps flashing randomly on a daily basis. Astronomers mapped 15 years of radiation bursts to try to figure out why.

The supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, Sagittarius A*, keeps releasing random bursts of radiation on a daily basis and no one can figure out what is causing it. Now, an international team of researchers compiled 15 years of data to try and solve the mystery.

The team, led by a postgraduate student named Alexis Andrés, mapped a decade and a half’s worth of gamma-ray bursts from Sagittarius A* using NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory.

Continue reading “Black Hole at Heart of Milky Way Keeps Flashing and No One Knows Why” »

Supernovae and black holes, although they surprise scientists, are gradually being studied and recorded. Scientists are much more concerned with strange places in the Universe, which are difficult to explain by the laws of physics and nature we know. The Bootes Void is one such place. It is not considered to be emptiness by chance – there is absolutely nothing in it. Astronomers for a long time could not believe their own eyes, because in a colossal area of 300 million light years there was not a single galaxy or star. Solid blackness extends over unimaginable distances. Like anomalien.com on Facebook…

Circa 2020

We discuss the possibility to predict the QCD axion mass in the context of grand unified theories. We investigate the implementation of the DFSZ mechanism in the context of renormalizable SU theories. In the simplest theory, the axion mass can be predicted with good precision in the range ma = (2–16) neV, and there is a strong correlation between the predictions for the axion mass and proton decay rates. In this context, we predict an upper bound for the proton decay channels with antineutrinos, τ p → K + ν ¯ ≲ 4 × 10 37 $$ \tau \left(p\to {K}^{+}\overline{
u}\right)\lesssim 4\times {10}^{37} $$ yr and τ p → π + ν ¯ ≲ 2 × 10 36 $$ \tau \left(p\to {\pi}^{+}\overline{
u}\right)\lesssim 2\times {10}^{36} $$ yr. This theory can be considered as the minimal realistic grand unified theory with the DFSZ mechanism and it can be fully tested by proton decay and axion experiments.

And the “Local Bubble” continues to grow in size.

14 million years ago a series of supernovae exploded pushing gas outwards and making a bubble that had conditions ideal for the formation of new young stars that we see around us. These are the findings from researchers at the Center for Astrophysics (CfA) Harvard and Smithsonian, an institutional press release said.

Continue reading “A 14 Million-Year-Old Bubble Is the Source of All New Stars Around Us” »

Where did the material come from that created the Big Bang, and what happened in the first instance to create that material?

It depends.

Warp drive. Site-to-site transporter technology. A vast network of interstellar wormholes that take us to bountiful alien worlds. Beyond a hefty holiday wish-list, the ideas presented to us in sci-fi franchises like Gene Roddenberry’s “Star Trek” have inspired countless millions to dream of a time when humans have used technology to rise above the everyday limits of nature, and explore the universe.

Continue reading “Exotic Forces: Do Tractor Beams Break the Laws of Physics?” »

NASA’s new X-Ray Observatory will unlock the universe’s most explosive secrets.

The IXPE mission could change our understanding of black holes, nebulae, and supernovas.

Circa 2014

Scientists have come closer than ever before to creating a laboratory-scale imitation of a black hole that emits Hawking radiation, the particles predicted to escape black holes due to quantum mechanical effects.

The black hole analogue, reported in Nature Physics¹, was created by trapping sound waves using an ultra cold fluid. Such objects could one day help resolve the so-called black hole ‘information paradox’ — the question of whether information that falls into a black hole disappears forever.

Continue reading “Hawking radiation mimicked in the lab” »

😮 circa 2021.

The fundamental forces of physics govern the matter comprising the Universe, yet exactly how these forces work together is still not fully understood. The existence of Hawking radiation — the particle emission from near black holes — indicates that general relativity and quantum mechanics must cooperate. But directly observing Hawking radiation from a black hole is nearly impossible due to the background noise of the Universe, so how can researchers study it to better understand how the forces interact and how they integrate into a “Theory of Everything”?

Continue reading “A better black hole laser may prove a circuitous ‘Theory of Everything’” »