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Hunting for lightweight dark matter particles requires detectors with much lower signal thresholds than traditional experiments. This requirement has prompted novel detection techniques, including probing the faint interactions that occur between sub-MeV particles and electrons. In a 180-hour-long experiment, Yonit Hochberg of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and her colleagues demonstrate a device that distinguishes hypothetical sub-MeV dark matter from background noise with record sensitivity [1]. Their experiment places the strongest constraints yet on interactions between lightweight dark matter and regular matter.

Hochberg and her colleagues etched an array of nanowires in a 7-nm-thick tungsten-silicide film to produce a superconducting nanowire single-photon detector, a sensor that is sensitive to extremely small energy inputs. When energy above some threshold is deposited on a superconducting nanowire, the wire briefly becomes a regular conductor, resulting in a voltage pulse.

The team circulated a fixed current through their device and sealed it in a light-tight box for 180 hours. They counted four voltage pulses, each corresponding to a deposited energy of at least 0.73 eV. Absent any other detectable energy source, these dark counts could be attributed to cosmic-ray-generated muons or high-energy particles excited by radioactive decay.

A massive blast of light considered extremely rare and is believed to have been triggered by the collision of stars with a black hole that hit the Earth recently and which could help change our understanding of the universe, scientists revealed.

The event called a gamma-ray burst (GRB), which lasted for only 50 seconds, came from a nearby galaxy in December 2021. These blasts are considered to be the most powerful explosions in the universe.

Earlier, it was believed that GRBs only resulted from the destruction of massive stars, but astronomers now believe that it can come from the combination of two neutron stars.

Black holes are known as the most terrifying, mysterious, and fascinating objects in the Universe. Eternally hungry, they eat everything in their path and are constantly expanding. But how small and how big can a black hole be? Unlike stars and planets, black holes have no size restrictions. They grow when they eat the matter around them. Does it mean that they can be not only super large but super small? Let’s find out!

#brightside.

Continue reading “How Strong Would Be a Black Hole the Size of a Coin” »

Clues to a black hole’s origins can be found in the way it spins. This is especially true for binaries, in which two black holes circle close together before merging. The spin and tilt of the respective black holes just before they merge can reveal whether the invisible giants arose from a quiet galactic disk or a more dynamic cluster of stars.

Astronomers are hoping to tease out which of these origin stories is more likely by analyzing the 69 confirmed binaries detected to date. But a new study finds that for now, the current catalog of binaries is not enough to reveal anything fundamental about how black holes form.

In a study appearing today in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, MIT physicists show that when all the known binaries and their spins are worked into models of black hole formation, the conclusions can look very different, depending on the particular model used to interpret the data.

For decades, astronomers and physicists have been trying to solve one of the deepest mysteries about the cosmos: An estimated 85% of its mass is missing. Numerous astronomical observations indicate that the visible mass in the universe is not nearly enough to hold galaxies together and account for how matter clumps. Some kind of invisible, unknown type of subatomic particle, dubbed dark matter, must provide the extra gravitational glue.

In underground laboratories and at particle accelerators, scientists have been searching for this dark matter with no success for more than 30 years. Researchers at NIST are now exploring new ways to search for the invisible particles. In one study, a prototype for a much larger experiment, researchers have used state-of-the-art superconducting detectors to hunt for dark matter.

Continue reading “In new studies, researchers explore novel ways to hunt dark matter” »

James Webb Telescope’s Latest Captures.

Welcome Back To Theory Of Science!
The James Webb Space Telescope is the largest, most powerful space telescope ever built. It will allow scientists to look at what our universe was like about 200 million years after the Big Bang. The telescope will be able to capture images of some of the first galaxies ever formed. It will also be able to observe objects in our solar system from Mars outward, look inside dust clouds to see where new stars and planets are forming and examine the atmospheres of planets orbiting other stars. The Webb telescope is as tall as a 3-story building and as long as a tennis court! It is so big that it has to fold origami-style to fit inside the rocket to launch. The telescope will unfold, sunshield first, once in space The James Webb Space Telescope sees the universe in light that is invisible to human eyes. This light is called infrared radiation, and we can feel it as heat. Firefighters use infrared cameras to see and rescue people through the smoke in a fire. The James Webb Space Telescope will use its infrared cameras to see through dust in our universe. Stars and planets form inside those dust clouds, so peeking inside could lead to exciting new discoveries! It will also be able to see objects (like the first galaxies) that are so far away that the expansion of the universe has made their light shift from visible to infrared! in this video, we are looking into James Webb Telescope’s Latest Captures.

Continue reading “James Webb Telescope’s Latest Discoveries” »

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The Universe is immense. Does it have an edge out beyond the Cosmological Event Horizon? Or in time, before the Big Bang? Or in higher dimensions like Hyperspace?

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In the future humanity may build enormous structures, feats of mega-engineering that may rival planets or even be of greater scope. This episode catalogs roughly 100 major types of Megastructure, from those that are cities in space to those that rival galaxies.

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A year ago, astronomers discovered a powerful gamma-ray burst (GRB) lasting nearly two minutes, dubbed GRB 211211A. Now, that unusual event is upending the long-standing assumption that longer GRBs are the distinctive signature of a massive star going supernova. Instead, two independent teams of scientists identified the source as a so-called “kilonova,” triggered by the merger of two neutron stars, according to a new paper published in the journal Nature. Because neutron star mergers were assumed to only produce short GRBs, the discovery of a hybrid event involving a kilonova with a long GRB is quite surprising.

“This detection breaks our standard idea of gamma-ray bursts,” said co-author Eve Chase, a postdoc at Los Alamos National Laboratory. “We can no longer assume that all short-duration bursts come from neutron-star mergers, while long-duration bursts come from supernovae. We now realize that gamma-ray bursts are much harder to classify. This detection pushes our understanding of gamma-ray bursts to the limits.”

As we’ve reported previously, gamma-ray bursts are extremely high-energy explosions in distant galaxies lasting between mere milliseconds to several hours. The first gamma-ray bursts were observed in the late 1960s, thanks to the launching of the Vela satellites by the US. They were meant to detect telltale gamma-ray signatures of nuclear weapons tests in the wake of the 1963 Nuclear Test Ban Treaty with the Soviet Union. The US feared that the Soviets were conducting secret nuclear tests, violating the treaty. In July 1967, two of those satellites picked up a flash of gamma radiation that was clearly not the signature of a nuclear weapons test.