Lifeboat Foundation

Last year Kollmeier was named director of the fifth version of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, a project that aims to map the universe. The survey, which launches in 2020, will employ telescopes in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres to scan the entire sky. The telescopes will obtain spectra of bright objects in the sky, breaking up that light into component parts. “That’s where the astrophysics is,” says Kollmeier. “That tells you all the chemical abundances. That tells you all the transitions in the objects.” And that’s where she’ll begin to find answers to her questions: How do supermassive black holes grow? Can stars be used as clocks that tell us when and how a galaxy was formed?

Kollmeier didn’t get into astronomy by looking up at the stars. She meant to be a lawyer until she went to what she calls “nerd camp” and learned how to write code to classify stars. “The idea that you could interrogate the universe in this way … I felt like an explorer.” Now she’s going further than she once thought possible.

If there is a phenomenon out there that is actually more bizarre than black holes, it has to be white holes. Black holes can’t say that they might be the answer to where so much of the dark matter—and even most of the matter—in the universe is lurking.

The gravitational pull of a black hole is so insanely strong that not even light (so much for being the fastest entity in the cosmos), can defy it. Nothing can save you once you pass the grim point of no return otherwise known as the event horizon. However, Space.com observed that when Einstein predicted the existence of black holes in his theory of relativity, he also predicted the theoretical reverse of these galactic monsters. A white hole would be no threat to objects in space passing dangerously close, nothing can even enter its event horizon.

When black holes devour massive amounts of matter and energy, it is thought that everything which appears to vanish forever actually emerges from a white hole. Exactly where the victims of a black hole come out could be anywhere from another place in this universe to another universe entirely. Theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli theorized something even stranger linking the two. Black holes result from collapsed stars, but when these astral corpses die, they may actually turn into white holes.

Continue reading “Bye, black holes: white holes are even weirder” »

With the recent launch of the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) – which took place on Wednesday, April 18th, 2018 – a lot of attention has been focused on the next-generation space telescopes that will be taking to space in the coming years. These include not only the James Webb Space Telescope, which is currently scheduled for launch in 2020, but some other advanced spacecraft that will be deployed by the 2030s.

Such was the subject of the recent 2020 Decadal Survey for Astrophysics, which included four flagship mission concepts that are currently being studied. When these missions take to space, they will pick up where missions like Hubble, Kepler, Spitzer and Chandra left off, but will have greater sensitivity and capability. As such, they are expected to reveal a great deal more about our Universe and the secrets it holds.

As expected, the mission concepts submitted to the 2020 Decadal Survey cover a wide range of scientific goals – from observing distant black holes and the early Universe to investigating exoplanets around nearby stars and studying the bodies of the Solar System. These ideas were thoroughly vetted by the scientific community, and four have been selected as being worthy of pursuit.

Continue reading “Dream About the Future of Big Telescopes; Monster Space Telescopes That Could Fly by the 2030s” »

Dark energy means that the Universe’s expansion is accelerating. But how big will it get, and how fast?

Peering billions of light-years back to when the Universe was just 10 percent of its current age, astronomers have spotted a colossal pile-up: 14 young, starbursting galaxies merging into one of the most massive structures in the Universe.

Using some of the most powerful telescopes in operation today, an international research team discovered the extremely dense concentration of hot galaxies careening towards each other.

Eventually the megamerger will form a cluster of galaxies, gravitationally bound by dark matter and ultimately smooshing together into one ginormous galaxy.

Continue reading “This Megamerger of 14 Galaxies Could Become The Most Massive Structure in Our Universe” »

A team of international astronomers managed to observe 14 individual galaxies about to undergo an “megamerger” and become one humongous galaxy. This cataclysmic, yet formative process of our universe gives researchers the ability to see how celestial structures formed not too long after the Big Bang.

A spinning black hole could provide enough energy to power civilization for trillions of years — and create the biggest bomb known to the universe. Using the rotation of a black hole to supercharge electromagnetic waves could create massive amounts of energy or equally massive amounts of destruction. Kurzgesagt explains what it would take to harness a black hole and the potential risks of the process.

The Big Bang origin of the universe may sound incredible, but there’s solid evidence backing up the bold claim.

Eerie similarities unite vastly different scientific ideas in sometimes utterly surprising ways. One of these similarities may have allowed scientists to recreate the expanding universe—on a countertop.

Researchers accomplished their feat using Bose-Einstein condensates, which are collections of certain atoms held to the near coldest-possible temperatures. Bose-Einstein condensates let scientists see teeny quantum mechanical effects on a much larger scale, and have been used to do lots and lots of wild physics. These scientists hope they can use its quirks to model the behavior of the far grander cosmos.

“It’s hard to test theories of cosmology,” study author Gretchen Campbell, from the University of Maryland’s Joint Quantum Institute, told Gizmodo. “Maybe we can actually find a way to study some cosmological models on the laboratory scale.”

Continue reading “Ultra-Cold Atoms Recreate the Expanding Universe in Tabletop Experiment” »