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Archive for the ‘cosmology’ category: Page 137

Feb 12, 2023

Tiny black holes can compress Mount Everest into an atom size

Posted by in categories: cosmology, particle physics

These tiny black holes lose mass faster than their massive counterparts, emitting Hawking radiation until they finally evaporate.

One of the most intriguing predictions of Einstein’s general theory of relativity.

When a sufficiently massive star runs out of fuel, it explodes, and the remaining core collapses, leading to the formation of a stellar black hole (ranging from 3 to 100 solar masses).

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Feb 12, 2023

Scientists just made a wormhole to learn more about traversing space and time

Posted by in categories: cosmology, quantum physics

Wormholes are an intriguing bit that most people probably chalk up to science fiction. After all, seeing the Millennium Falcon barreling through hyperspeed in Star Wars is exciting, but there’s no way we could ever actually travel like that, right? Well, it might not actually be that impossible. According to new research, scientists were able to make a man-made wormhole using a quantum processor.

Of course, this isn’t to be misconstrued. They didn’t actually make a wormhole that someone was able to rip through space and time. Instead, they made a small, crummy wormhole on a quantum processor that could help teach us more about traversable wormhole dynamics. As such, the man-made wormhole, even if crummy, could be home to a plethora of data.

The physicists shared a paper detailing their findings on the man-made wormhole in the journal Nature. According to that paper, the “baby wormhole” was a successful attempt at observing traversable wormhole dynamics, something physicists have been trying to understand for decades. And, with scientists recently discovering a way to find wormholes in space, it could be more important than ever.

Feb 12, 2023

A hungry black hole is converting a star into a cosmic doughnut and a stellar taffy at the same time

Posted by in category: cosmology

Ali BeatrizAli Beatriz Ali BeatrizAli BeatrizPosted January 14, 2023 under Astronomy.

Astronomers have discovered a monstrous black hole with an appetite and a sweet tooth. The black hole is ripping apart an unfortunate star, stretching it like taffy and shaping the “leftovers” into a stellar donut the size of the solar system before feasting on this cosmic confectionary.

The All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae (ASAS-SN or “Assassin”) first spotted the violent incident, referred to as a tidal disruption event (TDE), via a flash of high-energy radiation. The feast is taking place at the heart of a galaxy 300 million light-years away.

Feb 11, 2023

Why Do Black Holes Twinkle? Scientists Studied 5,000 Star-Eating Behemoths to Find Out

Posted by in category: cosmology

Black holes are bizarre things, even by the standards of astronomers. Their mass is so great, it bends space around them so tightly that nothing can escape, even light itself.

And yet, despite their famous blackness, some black holes are quite visible. The gas and stars these galactic vacuums devour are sucked into a glowing disc before their one-way trip into the hole, and these discs can shine more brightly than entire galaxies.

Stranger still, these black holes twinkle. The brightness of the glowing discs can fluctuate from day to day, and nobody is entirely sure why.

Feb 11, 2023

How to make a black hole | NASA’s Michelle Thaller | Big Think

Posted by in categories: cosmology, particle physics

How to make a black hole.
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There’s more than one way to make a black hole, says NASA’s Michelle Thaller. They’re not always formed from dead stars. For example, there are teeny tiny black holes all around us, the result of high-energy cosmic rays slamming into our atmosphere with enough force to cram matter together so densely that no light can escape.

Continue reading “How to make a black hole | NASA’s Michelle Thaller | Big Think” »

Feb 11, 2023

The Universe Is Too Smooth

Posted by in category: cosmology

Results from a complex new analysis support cosmologists’ suspicions that something is missing from our understanding of the universe.

For the most part, our standard theory of cosmology fits observations like a glove. With just a handful of ingredients, scientists can explain the patchy pattern of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) — the relic radiation from the universe’s primordial age — and how the nearly uniform soup it came from transformed into the Swiss cheese of galaxy clusters and cosmic voids we see today.

But some nagging problems remain. The most touted is the Hubble tension, a discrepancy between how fast the universe appears to be expanding today and how fast it “should” be expanding, based on what we see in the early universe. But there’s another, more subtle discrepancy: Today’s universe is too smooth.

Feb 9, 2023

Weird Supernova Remnant Blows Scientists’ Minds

Posted by in category: cosmology

When dying stars explode as supernovae, they usually eject a chaotic web of dust and gas. But a new image of a supernova’s remains looks completely different — as though its central star sparked a cosmic fireworks display. It is the most unusual remnant that researchers have ever found, and could point to a rare type of supernova that astronomers have long struggled to explain.

“I have worked on supernova remnants for 30 years, and I’ve never seen anything like this,” says Robert Fesen, an astronomer at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, who imaged the remnant late last year. He reported his findings at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society on 12 January and posted them in a not-yet-peer-reviewed paper on the same day.

Feb 9, 2023

Why more and more physicists consider space and time to be “illusions”

Posted by in categories: computing, cosmology, holograms, quantum physics

O.o! If the universe is some sorta hologram then this could be a clue to our actual reality.


Last December, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded for experimental evidence of a quantum phenomenon that has been known for more than 80 years: entanglement. As envisioned by Albert Einstein and his collaborators in 1935, quantum objects can be mysteriously correlated even when separated by great distances. But as strange as the phenomenon may seem, why is such an old idea still worthy of the most prestigious award in physics?

Coincidentally, just weeks before the new Nobel laureates were honored in Stockholm, another team of respected scientists from Harvard, MIT, Caltech, Fermilab and Google reported that they ran a process on Google’s quantum computer that could be interpreted as a wormhole. Wormholes are tunnels through the universe that can function as a shortcut through space and time and are loved by science fiction fans, and although the tunnel realized in this latest experiment only exists in a two-dimensional toy universe, it could be a breakthrough for the future represent research at the forefront of physics.

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Feb 9, 2023

If wormholes exist, they might magnify light by 100,000 times

Posted by in categories: cosmology, physics

A small team of astrophysicists affiliated with several institutions in China has found evidence that suggests if wormholes are real, they might magnify light by 100,000 times. In their paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters, the group describes the theories they have developed and possible uses for them.

Prior theoretical efforts have suggested that might exist in the , described as tunnels of a sort, connecting different parts of the universe. Some in the physics community have suggested that it may be possible to traverse such tunnels, allowing for faster-than-light travel across the universe. The researchers note that prior research has shown that black holes have such a strong gravitational pull that they are able to bend light, a phenomenon known as microlensing. They then wondered if wormholes, if they exist, also exhibit microlensing.

Proving that wormholes cause microlensing would, of course, involve first proving that wormholes exist. Still, the researchers suggest that and other theories could clarify whether the idea is even possible. In their work, they discovered that it was possible to calculate how an associated with a wormhole would warp the light passing by it. They also found theoretical evidence that wormhole would be similar to black hole lensing, which, they note, would make it difficult to tell the two apart.

Feb 8, 2023

Ask Ethan: What are white holes, and do they really exist?

Posted by in category: cosmology

In General Relativity, white holes are just as mathematically plausible as black holes. Black holes are real; what about white holes?