Toggle light / dark theme

Fast radio bursts are brief and brilliant explosions of radio waves emitted by extremely compact objects such as neutron stars and possibly black holes. These fleeting fireworks last for just a thousandth of a second and can carry an enormous amount of energy—enough to briefly outshine entire galaxies.

Since the first fast radio burst (FRB) was discovered in 2007, astronomers have detected thousands of FRBs, whose locations range from within our own galaxy to as far as 8 billion light-years away. Exactly how these cosmic radio flares are launched is a highly contested unknown.

Now, astronomers at MIT have pinned down the origins of at least one fast radio burst using a novel technique that could do the same for other FRBs. In their new study, appearing in the journal Nature, the team focused on FRB 20221022A—a previously discovered fast radio burst that was detected from a galaxy about 200 million light-years away.

In an article published in Physical Review Letters on Thursday, scientists carried out an innovative study testing the existence of mirror asymmetries in our universe by studying the handedness of the gravitational-wave emission from black-hole mergers detected by Advanced LIGO and Virgo.

The pillar of modern cosmology—known as the Cosmological Principle—states that, when observed at large scales, the universe is isotropic and homogeneous. This is, all observers in the universe will roughly observe the same structures regardless of where they are or where they look. As a consequence, the universe must not display a preference for stuff that rotates clock or anti-clockwise but, which is known as “mirror symmetry.”

Einstein’s theory of gravity, known as General Relativity, predicts that massive bodies can produce a type of radiation known as gravitational waves, which consist of distortions of spacetime that travel away from their sources at the speed of light. Such waves are produced in some of the most violent events in the universe, like supernovae, black-hole mergers or the big bang itself.

Explore the latest breakthroughs in science! Learn how Metal–Organic Frameworks (MOFs) are changing chemical processes and how naked singularities could unlock the secrets of the universe. Discover how these advancements reshape technology and our understanding of physics. Watch now!
Paper link: https://www.nature.com/articles/s4146

Chapters:
00:00 Introduction.
00:39 Advancements in Molecular Diffusion within Metal–Organic Frameworks (MOFs)
03:32 The Enigmatic Nature of Naked Singularities in Cosmology.
07:14 The Intersection of Molecular Diffusion and Cosmological Singularities.
09:20 Outro.
09:29 Enjoy.

MUSIC TITLE : Starlight Harmonies.
MUSIC LINK : https://pixabay.com/music/pulses-star

Visit our website for up-to-the-minute updates:

Go to https://ground.news/startalk to stay fully informed on the latest Space and Science news. Subscribe through our link for 50% off unlimited access to the Vantage plan this month.

Could you travel back in time through a wormhole? Neil deGrasse Tyson sits down with theoretical physicist and Nobel Laureate Kip Thorne to reflect on discovering gravitational waves with LIGO, the science in the movie Interstellar, black holes, and many more mysteries still yet to be answered.

Discover the origin story of the movie Interstellar on its 10th anniversary. Kip explains how science, not fiction, shaped the film’s narrative—from the colossal waves on Miller’s planet to the physics behind black hole time dilation. Discover the recipe for how to create a wormhole and how turning on a time machine could cause it to self-destruct. Plus, learn about the Casimir effect, exotic particles, and how LIGO manipulated vacuum fluctuations to bypass the uncertainty principle.

Neil and Kip dig into the origins of gravitational wave detection, tracing its roots to Joe Weber’s early experiments and Ray Weiss’s unpublished paper. Kip reflects on the decades of work required to make LIGO a success, the challenges of measuring distortions a fraction of a proton’s width, and the historic detection of gravitational waves in 2016 that confirmed Einstein’s predictions.

How do particles get mass? Neil deGrasse Tyson and comedian Chuck Nice discover squarks, sneutrinos, the Higgs boson, and whether dark matter has a particle with theoretical physicist Brian Greene.

Go to https://ground.news/startalk to stay fully informed on Space and Science news. Save 40% off through my link for unlimited access to the Vantage plan this month.

Can we finally get to the bottom of what happens when a quark falls into a black hole? Learn about the ultraviolet catastrophe, the start of quantum physics, and Max Planck quantizing packets of energy. We also discuss how Einstein won the Nobel prize for the discovery for which he is least famous.

We take a deep dive into the Higgs boson. Who’s Higgs? What’s a boson? Find out about how the Higgs field creates mass, the different quantum particles, and how quarks create protons and neutrons. Brian breaks down the theory of supersymmetry: does every particle have a counterpart? Learn about squarks, sneutrinos, and whether supersymmetry can give an answer to what dark matter is.

Researchers hypothesize a fifth force of nature that could explain the intricate relationship between dark matter and dark energy, suggesting a revolutionary expansion of the Standard Model of physics.

Could a new, fifth force of nature help answer some of the biggest mysteries about dark matter and dark energy? Scientists are actively exploring the possibility.

The Standard Model of physics is widely regarded as one of the greatest achievements in modern science. It describes the universe’s four known forces — gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces — as well as a diverse array of fundamental particles and their interactions. By many measures, it stands as one of the most successful scientific theories in history.

Cosmic Filaments: Spinning Giants in the Universe

Cosmic filaments, the universe’s largest known structures, have been discovered to rotate, challenging existing cosmological theories. Stretching hundreds of millions of light-years, these tendrils of dark matter and galaxies connect the cosmic web, funneling matter into galaxy clusters at their intersections. This groundbreaking observation reveals rotational motion on an enormous scale, previously thought impossible.

A team of international researchers has developed an innovative approach to uncover the secrets of dark matter. In a collaboration between the University of Queensland, Australia, and Germany’s metrology institute (Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt, PTB), the team used data from atomic clocks and cavity-stabilized lasers located far apart in space and time to search for forms of dark matter that would have been invisible in previous searches.

This technique will allow the researchers to detect signals from dark matter models that interact universally with all atoms, an achievement that has eluded traditional experiments.

The team analyzed data from a European network of ultra-stable lasers connected by fiber (previously reported in a 2022 article), and from the aboard GPS satellites. By comparing across vast distances, the analysis became sensitive to subtle effects of oscillating dark matter fields that would otherwise cancel out in conventional setups.

For the first time in history, scientists using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) may have uncovered evidence of dark stars, colossal celestial objects powered not by nuclear fusion but by the enigmatic annihilation of dark matter. If confirmed, these mysterious entities could rewrite our understanding of the early universe and the nature of dark matter.