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Category: cosmology – Page 434

When scientists spotted this pair of black holes, it was a rare chance to observe black holes in the process of colliding. Soon, however, as they looked closer, scientists were consumed with a brand new question: Uh, hey, what’s that blinking light?

The light isn’t coming from the pair of colliding black holes (named PG 1302-102) 3.5 billion light years away from us, it’s coming from the turbulence around them. What that doesn’t explain, though, is why the light “flashes” rhythmically—regularly brightening, then dimming. So researchers Daniel D’Orazio, Zoltan Haiman, and David Schiminovich at Columbia University built a simulation of the pair and have now come up with an explanation for just what we’re seeing.

It’s the orbit of the black holes.

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As a follow-up to Shailesh Prasad’s thought provoking video (just below this article), I offer two equally impressive visualizations of the scope and magnificence of our universe. These videos are the epitome of a teachable moment. And it’s fun, too!

Check out this simple, one-button interactive Scale of the Universe by Cary Huang. Simply pull a slider left or right to zoom in or out. It covers the Universe from 1027 meters down to 10-35 meters (from the entire universe to the Plank length and quantum foam).

Charles and Ray Eames
Charles and Ray Eames

Unlike the classic film by Charles & Ray Eames (more about that later), the zoom doesn’t really take viewers closer or further away. Rather, it compares relative size by allowing users navigate by magnitudes (a circle indicates each power-of-ten).

Nikon, the camera and optics maker, created an alternate spin on this idea with more user control (identify and study objects used to illustrate size–and jump directly to any magnitude along the size continuum). Instead of panning in and out, the Nikon presentation crawls familiar objects along the horizontal axis. Interestingly, they end at modest lower limit of 10-15 meters, rather than attempting to illustrate quarks, charm and quantum foam.

Time Dialation-sIn 1968, Charles & Ray Eames were already famous as sculptors, architects and designers of modern furniture. That’s when they created Powers of 10, one of the most popular educational films of all time. Just 9 minutes long, it was intended as a “rough sketch” in an effort to attract an animation partner to add visual punch. 9 years after the original film was released, IBM collaborated with the designers and the film was re-released with improved special effects. Both versions are included on the commercial DVD. I prefer the original rough sketch.

Eames Lounge Chair
Eames Lounge Chair

In the original film, two clocks sit outside the main frame. As we »
accelerate away from earth (covering 10X as much distance every ten seconds), the clocks track relative time from a traveler’s frame of reference –vs– a person on earth.

You can view the 1977 re-release (Be sure to raise quality to 480p). Interestingly, IBM has also posted a user-controlled, Zoomable version.

I can’t find the original film on the web. But I own it. Write to me if you want me to “loan” it to you via a web link.

Philip Raymond is Co-Chair of The Cryptocurrency Standards
Association. This article originally appeared at A Wild Duck.

For those who missed this.

By all counts, Earth is on a one way trip to oblivion. Our aging Sun will see to that. Within 500 to 900 million years from now, photosynthesis and plant life on Earth will reach a death-spiral tipping point as the Sun continues its normal expansion and increases in luminosity over time.

Trouble is, researchers are still unsure about all the grisly endgame details, and their models of such slow motion horrors are hard to test. But a team of researchers now say that finding and observing nearby aging Earth-analogues, undergoing the ravages of their own expanding sun-like stars, will help Earth scientists understand how the stellar evolution of our own sun will affect life here on Earth.

“[Within] 500 million years figure most plants become extinct, although some could potentially last up to 900 million years from now by employing more carbon-efficient photosynthetic pathways,” Jack O’Malley-James, an astrobiologist at the University of St. Andrews in the U.K. told Forbes. “At this point the biosphere as we know it on Earth will be dramatically different, but not necessarily completely dead.”.

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Black holes are known to have many strange properties, such as that they allow nothing—not even light—to escape after falling in. A lesser known but equally bizarre property is that black holes appear to “know” what happens in the future in order to form in the first place. However, this strange property arises from the way in which black holes are defined, which has motivated some physicists to explore alternative definitions.

They reported a new area law in general relativity that is based on an interpretation of black holes as curved geometric objects called “holographic screens.”

“The so-called teleology of the black hole event horizon is an artifact of the way in which physicists define an event horizon: the event horizon is defined with respect to infinite future elapsed time, so by definition it ‘knows’ about the entire fate of the universe,” Engelhardt told Phys.org. “In general relativity, the black hole event horizon cannot be observed by any physical observer in finite time, and there isn’t a sense in which the black hole as an entity knows about future infinity. It is simply a convenient way of describing black holes.”

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Great news. It’ll be fascinating to see what they discover.

In the distant reaches of the Universe, exploding stars and supermassive black holes are bending the very fabric of spacetime. It’s hard to wrap our brains around such tremendous forces, but we may be able to quantify them, in the form of gravitational waves. A new European Space Agency mission marks humanity’s first bold attempt to do so in outer space.

This fall, the ESA’s LISA Pathfinder will be blasted into space on a course for the L1 Lagrange point. Situated nearly a million miles from Earth, it’ll begin pilot-testing fundamental technologies for the detection of elusive gravitational waves. The miniature science observatory bid farewell to the public this week, on display at a test centre in Ottobrunn, Germany for the last time before its long journey.

A New Mission Will Search for Ripples in Spacetime

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Brace yourselves: winter is coming. And by winter I mean the slow heat-death of the Universe, and by brace yourselves I mean don’t get terribly concerned because the process will take a very, very, very long time. (But still, it’s coming.)

Based on findings from the Galaxy and Mass Assembly (GAMA) project, which used seven of the world’s most powerful telescopes to observe the sky in a wide array of electromagnetic wavelengths, the energy output of the nearby Universe (currently estimated to be ~13.82 billion years old) is currently half of what it was “only” 2 billion years ago — and it’s still decreasing.

“The Universe has basically plonked itself down on the sofa, pulled up a blanket and is about to nod off for an eternal doze,” said Professor Simon Driver from the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) in Western Australia, head of the nearly 100-member international research team.

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  • The universe radiates only half as much energy as 2 billion years ago
  • New findings establish cosmos’ decline with unprecedented precision


From CNN—The universe came in with the biggest bang ever. But now, with a drooping fizzle, it is in its swan song. The conclusion of a new astronomical study pulls no punches on this: “The Universe is slowly dying,” it reads.

Astronomers have believed as much for years, but the new findings establish the cosmos’ decline with unprecedented precision. An international team of 100 scientists used data from the world’s most powerful telescopes — based on land and in space — to study energy coming from more than 200,000 galaxies in a large sliver of the observable universe. [Full story below or at CNN.com]…

Based on those observations, they have confirmed the cosmos is radiating only half as much energy as it was 2 billion years ago. The astronomers published their study on Monday on the website of the European Southern Observatory.

Analysis across many wavelengths shows the universe's electromagnetic energy output is dropping.The team checked the energy across a broad spectrum of lightwaves and other electromagnetic radiation and says it is fading through all wavelengths, from ultraviolet to far infrared.

Analysis across many wavelengths shows the universe’s electromagnetic energy output is dropping.

‘A cold, dark and desolate place’

At the ripe old age of nearly 13.8 billion years, the universe has arrived in its sunset years.

“The universe has basically sat down on the sofa, pulled up a blanket and is about to nod off for an eternal doze,” said astronomer Simon Driver, who led the team.

Death does not mean the universe will go away. It will still be there, but its stars and all else that produces light and stellar fire will fizzle out.

“It will just grow old forever, slowly converting less and less mass into energy as billions of years pass by until eventually, it will become a cold, dark and desolate place, where all of the lights go out,” said astronomer Luke Davies.

But don’t cry for the universe anytime soon. Astrophysicists say this will take trillions of years.

This map shows the light from 380,000 years after the Big Bang in our universe, called the cosmic microwave background, detected by the Planck mission with the greatest precision yet.
First light – 380,000 years after the Big Bang, this light is the cosmic microwave
background. It was detected by the Planck mission with the greatest precision yet.
[See all 6 photos in the series above in the original article]

Bursting with energy

Go all the way back to its birth, and you find a vast contrast. In an infinitesimal fraction of a second, our entire cosmos blasted into existence in the Big Bang.

And the totality of the energy and mass in the universe originates from that moment, astronomers say.

Since that natal explosion, the cosmos has generated other sources of brilliant radiation — most notably stars — by converting some of the mass into energy when extreme gravity causes matter to burst into nuclear fusion.

But the universe is speckled by radiance from seething gas clouds, supernovas and, most spectacularly, the discs of hot matter that rotate around black holes to form quasars, which can be as bright as whole galaxies.

“While most of the energy sloshing around in the universe arose in the aftermath of the Big Bang, additional energy is constantly being generated by stars as they fuse elements like hydrogen and helium together,” Driver said.

Some of the most breathtaking images in the night sky come from quasars. This artist's rendering displays the quasar's luminance, which is brighter than a billion suns. The beam is matter being shot into space.

Fizzling into space

The size and number of those sources of radiation so boggle the mind that it might be hard to imagine that the entirety of that vividness appears to be fading, as its energy flies off through space.

“This new energy is either absorbed by dust as it travels through the host galaxy, or escapes into intergalactic space and travels until it hits something, such as another star, a planet, or, very occasionally, a telescope mirror,” Driver said.

His team observed it from seven of the world’s mammoth telescopes spread out between Australia, the United States, Chile and Earth’s orbit. Many of the instruments specialize in receiving certain wavelengths of light and other electromagnetic waves.

Compiling the data from the collective wavelengths gives the scientists a more complete picture from across a broad spectrum of energy.

Their findings on the universe’s energy slump were part of the larger Galaxy And Mass Assembly, or GAMA, project to study how galaxies are formed. It has mapped out the position of 4 million galaxies so far.