Everyone knows that the universe began about 14 billion years ago after the Big Bang happened. It turns out, ‘everyone’ might be wrong.
The black hole record books have just been rewritten.
A black hole about 10 times more massive than our sun lurks just 1,560 light-years from Earth, a new study reports. That’s about twice as close as the previous proximity champ.
A joint NASA/Italian space mission has put its sunglasses on to observe polarized X-ray light from a corona of hot gas around the Cygnus X-1 black hole.
Black holes have properties characteristic of quantum particles, a new study reveals, suggesting that the puzzling cosmic objects can be at the same time small and big, heavy and light, or dead and alive, just like the legendary Schrödinger’s cat.
The new study, based on computer modeling, aimed to find the elusive connection between the mind-boggling time-warping physics of supermassive objects such as black holes and the principles guiding the behavior of the tiniest subatomic particles.
New observations could explain why star formation declines over time.
And with the help of citizen scientists, a team of astronomers recently discovered a unique black hole in a galaxy roughly one billion light-years away that’s hurling a relativistic jet at another galaxy.
The research was conducted by a team led by Ananda Hota, a researcher with the UM-DAE Centre for Excellence in Basic Sciences. The paper that describes their findings was published on October 12th in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Letters.
Continue reading “Scientists may have solved a massive galaxy mystery” »
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In the previous episode we saw how civilizations might not simply survive after all the stars in the Universe had died, but might indeed thrive far better during the Black Hole Era of the Universe. Today, we will go beyond even the Dark Era to examine the concepts or Iron Star Civilizations, Boltzmann Brains, Reversible Computing, and even reversing Entropy itself.
Continue reading “Civilizations at the End of Time: Iron Stars” »
HOW did our universe begin? This is among the most profound questions of all, and you would be forgiven for thinking it is impossible to answer. But Laura Mersini-Houghton says she has cracked it. A cosmologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, she was born and raised under communist dictatorship in Albania, where her father was considered ideologically opposed to the regime and exiled. She later won a Fulbright scholarship to study in the US, forging a career in cosmology in which she has tackled the origins of the universe – and made an extraordinary proposal.
Mersini-Houghton’s big idea is that the universe in its earliest moments can be understood as a quantum wave function – a mathematical description of a haze of possibilities – that gave rise to many diverse universes as well as our own. She has also made predictions about how other universes would leave an imprint upon our own. Those ideas have been controversial, with some physicists arguing that her predictions are invalid. But Mersini-Houghton argues that they have been confirmed by observations of the radiation left over from the big bang, known as the cosmic microwave background.
A proposed study of dwarf galaxies could give insight into whether dark matter particles interact with each other.
The observations could not be explained by Newton’s law of universal gravitation. An alternative theory of gravity might provide the answer. Astrophysicists observed mysterious behavior in star clusters that could lead to a rewrite of fundamental principles of the theory of gravity and even disprove the existence of dark matter, a press release explains.
The new findings challenge existing preconceptions based on widely-accepted principles from Newton’s law of universal gravitation, which explain the large-scale structure and movements of the universe.
An analysis of more than two decades’ worth of supernova explosions convincingly boosts modern cosmological theories and reinvigorates efforts to answer fundamental questions.
A powerful new analysis has been performed by astrophysicists that places the most precise limits ever on the composition and evolution of the universe. With this analysis, dubbed Pantheon+, cosmologists find themselves at a crossroads.
Pantheon+ convincingly finds that the cosmos is made up of about two-thirds dark energy and one-third matter — predominantly in the form of dark matter — and is expanding at an accelerating pace over the last several billion years. However, Pantheon+ also cements a major disagreement over the pace of that expansion that has yet to be solved.
