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Category: cosmology – Page 48

Astronomy professor offers new theory on universe’s star formation

The universe doesn’t come with an instruction manual—but if it did, University of Missouri Assistant Professor Charles Steinhardt suspects a few pages are missing. Either the universe has been playing by different rules all along, or humanity has been reading the script wrong.

Traditionally, astronomers have grouped galaxies into two different categories: blue, which are young and actively forming stars, and red, which are older and have ceased . Now, Steinhardt is challenging the traditional understanding of galaxies by proposing a third category: red star-forming. They don’t fit neatly into the usual blue or red—instead, they’re somewhere in between.

“Red star-forming galaxies primarily produce , making them appear red despite ongoing star birth,” he said. “This theory was developed to address inconsistencies with the traditional observed ratios of black hole mass to stellar mass and the differing initial mass functions in blue and red galaxies—two problems not explainable by aging or merging alone. However, what we learned is that most of the stars we see today might have formed under different conditions than we previously believed.”

Primordial Soup Was Full of Flavors

Top quarks and antiquarks have been detected in heavy-ion collisions at the Large Hadron Collider, showing that all six quark flavors were present in the Universe’s first moments.

Quarks, the fundamental building blocks of matter, are usually confined within hadrons, such as protons and neutrons, by the strong force. But in the first moments after the big bang, quarks and gluons moved freely in an extremely hot, dense state of matter called a quark–gluon plasma (QGP) [1]. This “primordial soup” was the Universe’s first form of matter, existing for roughly 10 microseconds after the big bang, until the Universe cooled sufficiently for quarks and gluons to combine [2]. Scientists recreate and study these early-Universe conditions by smashing together ultrarelativistic heavy nuclei at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Switzerland, and similar facilities.

Researcher proposes first-time model that replaces dark energy and dark matter in explaining nature of the universe

Dr. Richard Lieu, a physics professor at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH), a part of The University of Alabama System, has published a paper in the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity that proposes a universe built on steps of multiple singularities rather than the Big Bang alone to account for the expansion of the cosmos.

The new model forgoes the need for either or dark energy as explanations for the universe’s acceleration and how structures like galaxies are generated.

The researcher’s work builds on an earlier model hypothesizing that gravity can exist without mass.

Astronomers discover doomed pair of spiraling stars on our cosmic doorstep

University of Warwick astronomers have discovered an extremely rare, high-mass, compact binary star system only ~150 light years away. These two stars are on a collision course to explode as a type 1a supernova, appearing 10 times brighter than the moon in the night sky.

Type 1a supernovae are a special class of cosmic explosion, famously used as “standard candles” to measure distances between Earth and their host galaxies. They occur when a white dwarf (the dense remnant core of a star) accumulates too much mass, is unable to withstand its own gravity, and explodes.

It has long been theoretically predicted that two orbiting white dwarfs are the cause of most type 1a supernova explosions. When in a close orbit, the heavier white dwarf of the pair gradually accumulates material from its partner, which leads to that star (or both stars) exploding.

Quantum cosmology with final states can explain the accelerated expansion of the universe

Teleology is the idea that some processes in nature are directed toward a goal or an end. Today, it is commonly asserted that teleology is a remnant of antiquated ways of thinking about causation, and that it is not compatible with modern science, because it is fundamentally untestable.

In my opinion, such claims fail to take modern physics into account. Quantum theory involves a complex notion of causation, and it can naturally incorporate final conditions. However, to work with final conditions that are not imposed by external agents, we need to move into the realm of quantum cosmology, in which the whole universe is treated as a quantum system.

With this issue in mind, I studied final conditions in quantum cosmology. I found that cosmologies with such conditions generally predict a universe with accelerated expansion. Cosmic acceleration is a well-established fact, and also one of the most puzzling features of modern cosmology.

MIND-STUFF: How William Clifford Connected Geometry, Matter, and Mind — VERSADOCO

What if the key to the universe was discovered over a century ago—and then forgotten?

In the late 19th century, a young math prodigy named William Clifford proposed a radical idea: that reality itself is woven from the same fabric as the mind. Long before Einstein, long before quantum theory, Clifford envisioned a world where matter, consciousness, and geometry are one.

His ideas were largely overlooked, seen as too speculative for the science of his time. Today, they look like the missing blueprint for a true Theory of Everything.

Is Clifford’s path one that science is only now catching up to?

Based on the original research by idb.kniganews “Clifford’s Path”

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