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Category: cosmology – Page 52

The eROSITA survey detected more than 170 million X-ray photons in just 6 months.

Astronomers have created the largest and most detailed X-ray map of the universe, revealing more than 900,000 deep-space objects. This map was produced using data from the eROSITA All-Sky Survey, an ambitious mission that scanned the sky between December 2019 and June 2020, detecting more than 170 million X-ray photons. These findings, including over 700,000 supermassive black holes, galaxy clusters, and other exotic objects, mark a significant leap forward in X-ray astronomy.

The eROSITA Mission The eROSITA X-ray telescope, managed by the Max Planck Society, aimed to capture a complete X-ray survey of the sky. Over six months, the survey gathered an unprecedented amount of data, identifying nearly 900,000 distinct celestial objects. This figure exceeds the number of sources detected by NASA’s Chandra and the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton X-ray telescopes over the past 25 years combined.

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SCATTERED THROUGHOUT THE UNIVERSE are ravenous black holes that pull gas, dust, light and even other black holes into their maw, never to be seen again. Like a riptide pulling swimmers out to sea, the gravity inside a black hole pulls matter past a point of no return, called the event horizon, and condenses it so tightly that physics as we know it begins to break down, creating a “singularity.” It’s this singularity, in particular, that troubles physicists because it throws their most important theories about the universe into question.

That’s why theoretical physicist Nikodem Poplawski, Ph.D., asked a big question back in 2010: what if black holes don’t contain a singularity at all? Instead, Poplawski’s theory suggests, the center of a black hole could contain a pathway into another universe. Weirder yet, his theory predicts that this may be how our own universe was created.

A paper describing this work, titled “Radial motion into an Einstein–Rosen bridge,” was published 14 years ago in the journal Physics Letters B. While the theory captured attention at the time, this topic is still rather niche among physicists. Many researchers have either moved on, or have never heard of the idea to begin with.

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Electromagnetic radiation of extremely high energies is produced not only in the jets launched from active nuclei of distant galaxies, but also in jet-launching objects lying within the Milky Way, called microquasars. This latest finding by scientists from the international High-Altitude Water Cherenkov Gamma-Ray Observatory (HAWC) radically changes the previous understanding of the mechanisms responsible for the formation of ultra-high-energy and in practice marks a revolution in its further study.

Since the discovery of cosmic radiation by Victor Hess in 1912, astronomers have believed that the celestial bodies responsible in our galaxy for the acceleration of these particles up to the highest energies are the remains of gigantic supernova explosions, called supernova remnants.

However, a different picture comes from the latest data from the HAWC observatory: The sources of radiation of extremely high energies turn out to be microquasars. Astrophysicists from the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IFJ PAN) in Cracow played a key role in the discovery.

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While these findings, published in Physical Review Letters, did not lead to the observation of signals associated with these hypothetical dark matter particles, they established a new technique to search for axions using a tunable optical cavity.

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Our very own Milky Way could host a huge bridge in space-time. At least, that’s what the authors of a recent study have suggested. According to the group, teamwork between Indian, Italian, North American scientists and scientists from other countries at the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA) in Italy.

The central disk of Milky Way may host the necessary dark matter to support the formation and nourishment of a “stable and controllable” tunnel to a distant section of space-time –known as a wormhole. The group’s study was issued in the November 2014 issue of Annals of Physics. A pre-print of this research paper is also available at arxiv.org.

Wormholes (also known as Einstein-Rosen Bridge) were first theorized by Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen in 1935. Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen suggested their idea as a way to get around the notion of black hole singularities.

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Research suggests dark matter may not exist, and the universe’s age is approximately 27 billion years, according to a recent study on Earth.com

The universe has always held mysteries that spark our curiosity. As we currently understand it, the fabric of the universe comprises three primary components: ‘normal matter,’ ‘dark energy,’ and ‘dark matter.’ However, new research is turning this established model on its head.

Enter Rajendra Gupta, a seasoned physics professor who isn’t afraid to question the status quo. With years of research under his belt, Gupta is shaking up our understanding of the universe.

Gupta, based at the University of Ottawa, conducted a study that suggests we might not need dark matter or dark energy to explain the workings of the universe. This bold claim is turning heads in the scientific community.

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