Lifeboat Foundation

In the new, free-for-all era of dark matter research, the controversial idea that dark matter is concentrated in thin disks is being rescued from scientific oblivion.

A new research paper published in Physical Review Letters has brought forward a significant new understanding of general relativity laws, and has found some strange physics taking place inside black holes. Specifically, that the direction of time could be reversed within them. Several physical procedures are perfectly symmetric in time. Take a pendulum for instance. If someone shows you a video of a pendulum swinging, you cannot differentiate if the video is actually moving forward or backward. But some processes are not symmetric at all. We can tell that a pendulum will ultimately slow because of friction and we know that it was triggered at some point, so we can give a temporal direction to physics. The directionality of time and our view of it was called the “Arrow of Time” by British astronomer Arthur Eddington, and it has been connected to the entropy of the cosmos.

Our understanding of cosmology might need a little tweaking.

Strange light in space could prove to be earth-shattering.

If you believe the creations of science fiction, black holes serve as gateways to other worlds, either distant parts of this universe or other universes entirely. But the reality might be more complicated than that. And outside of the sci-fi realm, dropping into a black hole is a bad idea.

Even so, it turns out that people who enter a black hole would have at least a slight chance of escaping, either back into their own world or to some exotic place. This is because black holes actually bend space itself, and so could bring points that are ordinarily distant from each other much closer together.

An oft-used analogy is the bending of a piece of paper. If you draw a line on the paper, it follows the paper’s shape and the line’s length is unchanged by bending the paper. But if you go through the paper, the end points of the line are much closer to one another. Understanding this requires diving into Einstein’s theory of relativity as applied to gravity. [5 Reasons We May Live in a Multiverse].

Continue reading “Can black holes transport you to other worlds?” »

Australia did it again! They have developed a chip for the nano-manipulation of light which establishes the NextGen of Optical Storage and processing.

An Australian research team has created a breakthrough chip for the nano-manipulation of light, paving the way for next gen optical technologies and enabling deeper understanding of black holes.

Led by Professor Min Gu at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, the team designed an integrated nanophotonic chip that can achieve unparalleled levels of control over the angular momentum (AM) of light.

Continue reading “From IT to black holes: Nano-control of light pioneers new paths” »

A near-record supermassive black hole discovered in a sparse area of the local universe indicates that these monster objects — this one equal to 17 billion suns — may be more common than once thought, according to University of California, Berkeley, astronomers.

Until now, the biggest supermassive black holes — those with masses around 10 billion times that of our sun — have been found at the cores of very large galaxies in regions loaded with other large galaxies. The current record holder, discovered in the Coma Cluster by the UC Berkeley team in 2011, tips the scale at 21 billion solar masses and is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records.

The newly discovered black hole is in a galaxy, NGC 1600, in the opposite part of the sky from the Coma Cluster in a relative desert, said the leader of the discovery team, Chung-Pei Ma, a UC Berkeley professor of astronomy and head of the MASSIVE Survey, a study of the most massive galaxies and black holes in the local universe with the goal of understanding how they form and grow supermassive.

Continue reading “Supermassive black holes may be lurking everywhere in the universe” »

Multiple teams finally have the material they need to repeat an enigmatic experiment.

By Davide Castelvecchi, Nature magazine on April 5, 2016.