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Category: physics – Page 86

Are we surrounded by dark energy? A spacecraft tetrad will look for it

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Most astrophysicists believe that 95% of the universe is dark stuff — dark matter and dark energy. We can’t see, feel, or hear it, but it’s supposedly all around us. NASA scientists recently proposed a new experiment to test what is going on with the dark stuff in our vicinity. The want to use four small spacecraft flying around the solar system in a tetrahedron formation to look for variations from Einstein’s theory of gravity. Let’s have a look.

Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.02096v1

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00:00 What.
03:45 How

Time Stops at the Speed of Light. What Does that Mean?

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You might have heard that according to Einstein’s theories of special and general relativity time doesn’t pass for light, or that time actually stops for light. Can this possibly be correct? In this video, I will look at what the maths says and discuss what it means.

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#science #physics

Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, Ph.D. — Science And Technology For Emerging National Security Threats

Science And Technology For Emerging National Security Threats — Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, Ph.D. — Nonlinear Solutions LLC — Fmr. Director, All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), United States Department of Defense.

Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, Ph.D. is Owner of Nonlinear Solutions LLC., an advisory group that provides strategic scientific and intelligence consulting services, with a focus on emerging science and technology trends, to clients in both the defense and intelligence communities.

Dr. Kirkpatrick recently retired from federal Senior Service in December 2023 and prior to his current responsibilities he answered to the Deputy Secretary of Defense to stand-up and lead the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO — https://www.aaro.mil/) in early 2022, leading the U.S. government’s efforts to address Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) using a rigorous scientific framework and a data-driven approach.

Dr. Kirkpatrick attended University of Georgia as an undergraduate, to study physics, where he also did his Ph.D. work in nonlinear and nonequilibrium phonon dynamics of rare earth doped fluoride crystals, and currently serves as an adjunct professor at UGA.

Dr. Kirkpatrick began his career in Defense and Intelligence related science and technology immediately out of graduate school. After receiving his Ph.D. in Physics in 1995, he subsequently took a postdoctoral position at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, investigating laser-induced molecular vibrations of high explosives under an AFOSR program. In 1996, he was offered a National Research Council Fellowship at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Washington D.C. investigating novel solid-state lasers for the Department of the Navy. In 1997, he was recruited by the Air Force Research Laboratory to build an Ultrafast Laser Physics Lab to investigate nonlinear optics, novel ultrafast spectroscopic methods, and nonlinear micro/nano-fabrication techniques for the Air Force.

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Peering Into the Abyss: AI and Physics Unite to Unveil a Black Hole Flare in 3D

Using AI and ALMA data, scientists create a groundbreaking 3D video of flares around our galaxy’s central black hole, offering new insights into its dynamic environment.

Scientists believe the environment immediately surrounding a black hole is tumultuous, featuring hot magnetized gas that spirals in a disk at tremendous speeds and temperatures. Astronomical observations show that within such a disk, mysterious flares occur up to several times a day, temporarily brightening and then fading away. Now a team led by Caltech scientists has used telescope data and an artificial intelligence (AI) computer-vision technique to recover the first three-dimensional video showing what such flares could look like around Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*, pronounced sadge-ay-star), the supermassive black hole at the heart of our own Milky Way galaxy.

The 3D flare structure features two bright, compact features located about 75 million kilometers (or half the distance between Earth and the Sun) from the center of the black hole. It is based on data collected by the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile over a period of 100 minutes directly after an eruption seen in X-ray data on April 11, 2017.

Some White Dwarfs Might be Older than Previously Thought

More than 97% of the stars in our Galaxy will end their lives with a whimper—slowly cooling as stellar remnants known as white dwarfs. The cooling of white dwarfs follows a pattern that was thought to be so predictable that the temperatures of white dwarfs are used to determine the age of surrounding stars. New findings, however, indicate this pattern may need revision [1]. Predictions made by Antoine Bédard of the University of Warwick, UK, and his colleagues now indicate that some white dwarfs may undergo a process that “reinvigorates” the stars, significantly slowing down the cooling process. That change could alter the calculated ages of white dwarfs by billions of years.

When a small star (one with a mass 8 times or less that of the Sun) runs out of nuclear fuel, it sheds its outer layers to form a planetary nebula. The core of the star then collapses into a white dwarf. Producing no heat, white dwarfs spend their existences radiating their remaining energy into space, cooling and solidifying from the inside out. Or so astrophysicists thought.

In 2019, this model was disrupted by astronomers analyzing data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission. The researchers identified a previously unknown population of white dwarfs within the Milky Way with anomalous properties [2]. As stars age, their velocities increase with respect to nearby stars because of repeated gravitational interactions with those stars. The newly identified white dwarfs, dubbed the Q branch, have much higher average velocities than models indicate they should have based on their temperatures, a finding that suggests that the Q-branch white dwarfs are older than previously thought. Some process is slowing down the cooling.

New models of Big Bang show that visible universe and invisible dark matter co-evolved

I found this on NewsBreak: New models of Big Bang show that visible universe and invisible dark matter co-evolved.

Physicists have long theorized that our universe may not be limited to what we can see. By observing gravitational forces on other galaxies, they’ve hypothesized the existence of “dark matter,” which would be invisible to conventional forms of observation.

First Tidally Locked Super-Earth Exoplanet Confirmed

An international team of astronomers and astrophysicists has confirmed the first known observance of a tidally locked super-Earth exoplanet. In their paper published in The Astrophysical Journal, the group describes the unique approach they took to confirm that the exoplanet LHS3844b is tidally locked and what the finding suggests about other planets in the galaxy.

Prior research has led astronomers to believe that some exoplanets are tidally locked, with one side that always faces the star they revolve around, but they have been unable until now to prove it. In this new effort, the research team picked a likely candidate and used a unique approach to study its attributes to ascertain its motion.

Prior research has shown that several moons in our solar system, including the one circling Earth, are tidally locked, always facing the planet they orbit. In this situation, their rotation period matches their orbital period—the result is a moon that always shows the same side to its planet. For this reason, the Earth’s moon has what has commonly been described as a “dark side”—the side we never see. Tidal locking is due to gravitational forces between a moon and its planet—or a planet and its star.

The Hubble Tension is solved

But not in the Einstein/Newtonian Lambda-cold-dark-matter model

This post is based on the research paper by Mazurenko, Banik, Kroupa & Haslbauer (2023, MNRAS). Sergij Mazurenko is an undergraduate physics student at the University of Bonn, and Indranil Banik was an Alexander-von-Humboldt Fellow with us until recently and is currently at the University of St. Andrews. Moritz Haslbauer is a finishing PhD student at the University of Bonn who has been contributing to The Dark Matter Crisis (DMC). The press release from the University of Bonn on this matter can be read here (and from Charles University in Prague here) and a description can also be found in The Conversation.