With no conclusive laboratory results, researchers are turning to other methods to find the elusive substance.
Category: cosmology – Page 32
Black holes are some of the most mysterious and awe-inspiring celestial objects in science, and while pairs of black holes or a black hole orbiting another object like a star, known as binary black holes, have been confirmed to exist, what about triple systems? This is what a recent study published in Nature hopes to address as a team of researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) announced the discovery of a “black hole triple”, meaning three black holes are orbiting each other simultaneously. This study holds the potential to help researchers better understand the formation and evolution of black holes and what this can teach us about the universe, overall.
For the study, the researchers examined the binary black hole system V404 Cygni, which consists of a central black hole being orbited by two stars, with one orbiting in 6.5 days while the other takes approximately 70,000 years to complete one orbit. It is this second object that has scientists scratching their heads, as it is confounding how an object so far away can be influenced by a black hole’s gravity. While black holes are often created from a supernova, or the collapse and explosion of a large star, this means the explosion should have pushed away the farther star in this system. Therefore, the team postulates this black hole was formed by what’s known as a “direct collapse”, which is a smaller and gentler process when a star collapses in on itself as opposed to producing an outward explosion.
“We think most black holes form from violent explosions of stars, but this discovery helps call that into question,” said Dr. Kevin Burdge, who is a Pappalardo Fellow in the MIT Department of Physics and lead author of the study. “This system is super exciting for black hole evolution, and it also raises questions of whether there are more triples out there.”
‘’Exploring black holes’’ by Wheeler and Taylor.
A primer on black holes and general relativity.
https://pubs.aip.org/aapt/ajp/article/89/1/121/1045741/Exploring-Black-Holes
The first edition of Exploring Black Holes: Introduction to General Relativity, authored by Oersted Medal winner Edwin Taylor and foremost relativist John Archibald Wheeler, offered a concise, directed examination of general relativity and black holes. Its goal was to provide tools that motivate students to become active participants in carrying out their own investigations about curved spacetime near Earth and black holes. To that end, the book used calculus and algebra, rather than tensors, to make general relativity accessible to second-and third-year students.
T he astoundingly complex LHC “atom smasher” at the CERN center in Geneva, Switzerland, are fired up to its maximum energy levels ever in an endeavor to identify — or perhaps generate — tiny black holes.
If successful a very new universe is going to be exposed – modifying completely not only the physics books but the philosophy books too.
Brian Keating is an experimental physicist at the UCSD, author of Losing the Nobel Prize, and host of the Into the Impossible podcast. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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Two supermassive black holes will collide in 10,000 years, warping space and time.
A Cosmic Collision in the Making
In a galaxy 9 billion light-years away, two enormous black holes are locked in a cosmic dance that will eventually end in a massive collision. These supermassive black holes, each hundreds of millions of times the mass of our sun, are currently orbiting one another. In about 10,000 years, they will merge in a violent event, unleashing enough force to distort space and time by creating gravitational waves—ripples in the universe’s fabric.
One proposed way of examining if such a force could exist is by closely monitoring asteroid trajectories, and few near-Earth asteroids are as well observed as Bennu. A new study by an international team of scientists analyzes Bennu to try and placing constraints on a possible fifth fundamental force in the search of ultralight dark matter.
Bennu, one of the most dangerous near-Earth objects, has been meticulously tracked by optical and radar astrometric data since it was discovered in 1999. As the destination for the OSIRIS-REx asteroid retrieval mission, additional X-band radiometric and optical navigation tracking data added even more trajectory precision. The idea is that any deviation in the expected trajectory of the asteroid could be the result of an unknown fifth force at work. The results of the study were published in the journal Nature Communications Physics.
Weekend posting was delayed by our trip to accept an honor from Caltech… but here it is! Almost entirely about space and science!! Stuff I promise you hadn’t heard before.
We just returned from Pasadena, where Caltech — my alma mater — installed me as Distinguished Alumnus. An honor that I sincerely never expected, given the many brilliant minds I knew when I was there. Reflecting on that is humbling — even ‘imposter syndroming’ — though people kindly urged me to think otherwise.
In today’s delayed posting, I’ll be mostly taking a pause from politics… though the topic of my previous blog — about the likelihood of blackmail poisoning top levels of the U.S. republic — remains horrifically plausible…