Category: cosmology – Page 248
James Webb Space Telescope Shows Big Bang Didn’t Happen? Wait… | News Talk
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.”
Two Huge Black Holes Will Collide In Space: Space And Time Will Be Distorted, Scientists Warn
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.
Black Holes Are the Terrifying Behemoths of Space. Here’s How They Tick
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.
Black Hole Mysteries Solved
Recent theoretical and observational results have revealed new secrets about these shadowy objects, with deep implications for more than just black holes themselves.
HST Astronomers Identify what they Believe is a Rogue Black Hole
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.
Gravitational-wave observatory amasses discoveries
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.
Researchers developed a new robot that could help us travel around black holes
The machine functions in curved spaces defying the laws of Earth.
The robot recreates the same environment found around black holes. It does so by moving in a curved space. It could one day allow us to further study black holes.
There is one constant on Earth and that is that when humans, animals, and machines move, they always push against something, whether it’s the ground, air, or water. This fact consists of the law of conservation momentum and was up to now undisputed.
Curved spaces provide new principles However, new research from the Georgia Institute of Technology has come along to showcase the opposite — when bodies exist in curved spaces, they can move without pushing against something. The new study was led by Zeb Rocklin, assistant professor in the School of Physics at Georgia Tech, and it saw the engineering of “a robot confined to a spherical surface with unprecedented levels of isolation from its environment, so that these curvature-induced effects would predominate,” according to a statement by the institution published on Monday.
Full Story:
The new machine defies the laws of physics to function in curved spaces.
Scientists measure half-life of element that’s longer than the age of the universe
Circa 2019 This could lead to reactors that last nearly forever and spaceships that do not run out of fuel.
Deep under an Italian mountainside, a giant detector filled with tons of liquid xenon has been looking for dark matter—particles of a mysterious substance whose effects we can see in the universe, but which no one has ever directly observed. Along the way, however, the detector caught another scientific unicorn: the decay of atoms of xenon-124—the rarest process ever observed in the universe.
The results from the XENON1T experiment, co-authored by University of Chicago scientists and published April 25 in the journal Nature, document the longest half-life in the universe—and may be able to help scientists hunt for another mysterious process that is one of particle physics’ great mysteries.
Not all atoms are stable. Depending on their makeup, some will stabilize themselves by releasing subatomic particles and turning into an atom of a different element—a process called radioactive decay.
Scientists may have solved Stephen Hawking’s black hole paradox
Researchers may have solved Professor Stephen Hawking’s famous black hole paradox—a mystery that has puzzled scientists for almost half a century.
According to two new studies, something called “quantum hair” is the answer to the problem.
In the first paper, published in the journal Physical Review Letters, researchers demonstrated that black holes are more complex than originally thought and have gravitational fields that hold information about how they were formed.