Lifeboat Foundation

Blazars are some of the brightest objects in the cosmos. They are composed of a supermassive black hole.

A black hole is a place in space where the gravitational field is so strong that not even light can escape it. Astronomers classify black holes into three categories by size: miniature, stellar, and supermassive black holes. Miniature black holes could have a mass smaller than our Sun and supermassive black holes could have a mass equivalent to billions of our Sun.

A group of researchers at Sofia University has found evidence that suggests the reason that a wormhole has never been observed is that they appear almost identical to black holes.

In their paper published in the journal Physical Review D Petya Nedkova, Galin Gyulchev, Stoytcho Yazadjiev and Valentin Delijski describe studying theoretical linear polarization from an accretion disk that would be situated around a class of static traversable wormholes and compared the findings to images of black holes.

For many years, scientists and science fiction writers have considered the theoretical possibility of a wormhole. Such an object, theory suggests, would take the form of a tunnel of sorts that connects two different parts of the universe. Moving through the tunnel would allow for travel to distant destinations in ways not available to spaceships incapable of moving faster than the speed of light —by taking a shortcut.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgLo4gmEraU

Lee Smolin is a theoretical physicist, co-inventor of loop quantum gravity, and a contributor of many interesting ideas to cosmology, quantum field theory, the foundations of quantum mechanics, theoretical biology, and the philosophy of science. He is the author of several books including one that critiques the state of physics and string theory called The Trouble with Physics, and his latest book, Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution: The Search for What Lies Beyond the Quantum.

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Continue reading “Lee Smolin: Quantum Gravity and Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution” »

By using a chain of atoms to simulate a black hole’s event horizon, researchers have shown that Hawking radiation may exist just as the late physicist described. Scientists have created a lab-grown black hole analog to test one of Stephen Hawking’s most famous theories — and it behaves just how he predicted.

Black holes continue to be equal parts terrifying and fascinating.

An underrated NASA telescope reveals the mechanics behind some supermassive black holes’ relativistic jets.

Astronomers at Caltech have used a machine learning algorithm to classify 1,000 supernovae completely autonomously. The algorithm was applied to data captured by the Zwicky Transient Facility, or ZTF, a sky survey instrument based at Caltech’s Palomar Observatory.

“We needed a helping hand, and we knew that once we trained our computers to do the job, they would take a big load off our backs,” says Christoffer Fremling, a staff astronomer at Caltech and the mastermind behind the new algorithm, dubbed SNIascore. “SNIascore classified its first supernova in April 2021, and, a year and a half later, we are hitting a nice milestone of 1,000 supernovae.”

Continue reading “Machine learning tools autonomously classify 1,000 supernovae” »

NASA’s Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer allowed scientists to probe a distant blazar, shedding new light on the cosmic giants.

Scientists made observations of bright, shining jets of particles shooting out of a supermassive black hole and they published their findings in a paper in Nature.

Investigating a blazar with state-of-the-art instruments.

Continue reading “Scientists observe bright jets of light shooting from black hole like never before” »

By simulating an event horizon to test a Stephen Hawking theory, scientists created a lab-grown black hole, which started glowing.

Astronomers have discovered a tiny black hole relatively near to Earth. It has been dubbed ‘The Unicorn‘and has a mass around three times that of the Sun. The smallest black holes to have previously been discovered are at least six times the mass of the Sun, so the newly found one could fall into a new category.

But do not be fooled by its small size – it still has a gravitational pull which can consume anything around it.

The black hole was discovered by researchers at the Ohio State University, which said it was “hiding in plain sight”.