Physicists are figuring out how close you can get to a black hole before you are unlikely to escape. That threshold is called the innermost stable circular orbit (ISCO).
Category: cosmology – Page 329
Black holes, regions in space with such an intense gravitational field that no matter or radiation can escape from them, are among the most mysterious and fascinating cosmological phenomena. Over the past five years or so, astrophysicists collected the first observations of the strong gravitational forces around black holes.
The LIGO-Virgo collaboration was able to detect gravitational waves around these celestial objects using some of the most advanced gravitational-wave detectors in the world. Meanwhile, the Event Horizon Telescope research group captured the very first image of a black hole shadow.
While both these observations are highly promising and captivating, neither of them is likely to unveil the event horizon, the boundary defining the specific region in space around a black hole from which nothing can escape. Nonetheless, they should contain a signature pointing to a neighboring region just outside of the event horizon, wherein light is bent so strongly that its path closes over itself and forms circular orbits known as light rings.
Dark matter engine
Posted in cosmology, space travel
The Dark matter engine is the key to the extreme acceleration capabilities of the modern space ship. Invented by Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth, the engines on the Planet Express ship harness the power created by burning dark matter in large furnaces, channels it through an afterburner that gives 200% fuel efficiency and propelles the ship through space fast enough to cover the whole universe in a matter of days.
How it works Edit
Let’s look at the real universe example of Rigel, a star in Orion’s Belt approximately 900 light-years away from Earth. This means that even traveling at the speed of light (300,000 km/s) it would take 900 years to get there. Traveling at 9 times the speed of light (2,700,000 km/s) it would take 100 years to get there and at 100 times the speed of light (30,000,000 km/s) it would take nine years. Albert Einstein’s famous statements that it would be mathematically impossible to travel faster than light seem to have held up through out the 3rd millennia and although in 2208 the scientific community allegedly raised the speed of light so that they could go faster, the problem that one cannot go faster than the speed of light remains.
Einstein’s equations describe three canonical configurations of space-time. Now one of these three — important in the study of quantum gravity — has been shown to be inherently unstable.
Published recently in Nature, an international team of researchers has observed a massive, rotating disk galaxy just 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang —1.5 billion years earlier in cosmic history than astronomers had expected to find such a galaxy based on previous studies. The research has fueled debate about how galaxies in the early Universe assembled.
The observations were made using one of the most powerful radio telescopes in the world, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile.
“This is an exciting discovery for astronomers because it provides clues as to how large-scale structure began to form in the Universe,” said Dr. Alfred Tiley from the UWA node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR).
Half of the normal matter in the universe has been hiding since the Big Bang. Astronomers have just detected it for the first time.
NASA has conducted an experiment in Antarctica, which has revealed new evidence that a parallel universe exists, except the rules of physics, are the opposite of ours.
Physicists have been debating among one another since 1952 of the possibility of a multiverse, whereby many universes exist parallel to ours. These universes could have different laws of physics, or even be similar to ours — just with different timelines.
The original theory was proposed by Quantum science pioneer Erwin Schrodinger, and even he admitted that he might have seemed a little crazy when he hosted that lecture. But now a new discovery has pushed scientists to reconsider if his theory is really as far-fetched as they thought it was. A cosmic ray detection experiment in Antarctica found a particle that very well may be from another universe.
In the late 1990s, cosmologists made a prediction about how much ordinary matter there should be in the universe. About 5%, they estimated, should be regular stuff with the rest a mixture of dark matter and dark energy. But when cosmologists counted up everything they could see or measure at the time, they came up short. By a lot.
The subject of the 2018 Nobel Prize in physics, chirped pulse amplification is a technique that increases the strength of laser pulses in many of today’s highest-powered research lasers. As next-generation laser facilities look to push beam power up to 10 petawatts, physicists expect a new era for studying plasmas, whose behavior is affected by features typically seen in black holes and the winds from pulsars.