Physicists discovered rotating black holes might serve as portals for hyperspace travel. Here’s what would happen if you travel through a black hole.
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Category: cosmology – Page 361
This fuzzy orb of light is a giant elliptical galaxy filled with an incredible 200 billion stars. Unlike spiral galaxies, which have a well-defined structure and boast picturesque spiral arms, elliptical galaxies appear fairly smooth and featureless. This is likely why this galaxy, named Messier 49, was discovered by French astronomer Charles Messier in 1771. At a distance of 56 million light-years, and measuring 157,000 light-years across, M49 was the first member of the Virgo Cluster of galaxies to be discovered, and it is more luminous than any other galaxy at its distance or nearer.
Elliptical galaxies tend to contain a larger portion of older stars than spiral galaxies and also lack young blue stars. Messier 49 itself is very yellow, which indicates that the stars within it are mostly older and redder than the Sun. In fact, the last major episode of star formation was about six billion years ago — before the Sun was even born!
Messier 49 is also rich in globular clusters; it hosts about 6000, a number that dwarfs the 150 found in and around the Milky Way. On average, these clusters are 10 billion years old. Messier 49 is also known to host a supermassive black hole at its centre with the mass of more than 500 million Suns, identifiable by the X-rays pouring out from the heart of the galaxy (as this Hubble image comprises infrared observations, these X-rays are not visible here).
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Over 200 experts worked on developing the new radio telescope, which is exploring space in a entirely new way.
- According to an Astronomy & Astrophysics press release, astronomers from 18 countries have discovered hundreds of thousands of previously unknown galaxies.
- Over 200 experts worked on developing the new radio telescope, which will explore space in a entirely new way.
- The telescope’s capabilities may also allow the researchers to delve further into the behaviour of black holes.
According to preliminary findings in a study published in Astronomy & Astrophysics, scientists have recently discovered hidden galaxies in our universe — and they’ve found hundreds of thousands of them.
Together, over 200 experts across 18 different countries have developed a new radio telescope that will explore space in a completely new way.
A team of international astronomers have been hunting for ancient, supermassive black holes — and they’ve hit the motherlode.
Lurking in the distant corners of space are 83 monster black holes that can teach us about the early days of the cosmos.
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Jackson Ryan
But no other new particles have materialized at the LHC, leaving open many mysteries about the universe that the Standard Model doesn’t address. A debate has ensued over whether to build an even more enormous successor to the LHC — a proposed machine 100 kilometers in circumference, possibly in Switzerland or China — to continue the search for new physics.
Physicists say there’s much we can still learn from the Higgs boson itself. What’s known is that the particle’s existence confirms a 55-year-old theory about the origin of mass in the universe. Its discovery won the 2013 Nobel Prize for Peter Higgs and François Englert, two of six theorists who proposed this mass-generating mechanism in the 1960s. The mechanism involves a field permeating all of space. The Higgs particle is a ripple, or quantum fluctuation, in this Higgs field. Because quantum mechanics tangles up the particles and fields of nature, the presence of the Higgs field spills over into other quantum fields; it’s this coupling that gives their associated particles mass.
But physicists understand little about the omnipresent Higgs field, or the fateful moment in the early universe when it suddenly shifted from having zero value everywhere (or in other words, not existing) into its current, uniformly valued state. That shift, or “symmetry-breaking” event, instantly rendered quarks, electrons and many other fundamental particles massive, which led them to form atoms and all the other structures seen in the cosmos.
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The concept of antimatter has delighted sci-fi fans for years, but it also poses a real question for physicists. Mathematically speaking, it makes sense that for every type of particle in our universe there exists a corresponding antiparticle which is the same but with the opposite charge — so to correspond with the electron, for example, there should be an antielectron, also known as a positron. When antimatter and matter come into contact, they both destroy each other in a flash of energy.
When the Big Bang happened, it should have created equal amounts of both matter and antimatter. And yet matter is everywhere and there is hardly any antimatter in our universe today. Why is that?
A new experiment from CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, has been tackling the question by looking at how matter and antimatter could react differently to Earth’s gravitational field. Physicists think that antimatter could fall at a different rate than matter, which would help to explain why it is less prevalent. But in order to test this, they need to create antimatter particles such as positronium atoms. These are pairs of one electron and one positron, but they only live for a fraction of a second — 142 nanoseconds to be exact — so there isn’t enough time to perform experiments on them.
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