Lifeboat Foundation

Eventually, galaxies stop making new stars. But why did some stop so much sooner than others? Hint: black holes play a role.

A galaxy’s main business is star formation. And when they’re young, like youth everywhere, they keep themselves busy with it. But galaxies age, evolve, and experience a slow-down in their rate of star formation. Eventually, galaxies cease forming new stars altogether, and astronomers call that quenching. They’ve been studying quenching for decades, yet much about it remains a mystery.

A new study based on the IllustrisTNG simulations has found a link between a galaxy’s quenching and its stellar size.

Continue reading “Astronomers Can Predict When a Galaxy’s Star Formation Ends Based on the Shape and Size of its Disk” »

Scientists are finally figuring out how much dark matter — the almost imperceptible material said to tug on everything, yet emit no light — really weighs.

Astronomy owes George Ellery Hale and the Palomar Observatory a great debt of gratitude for persevering with the construction of a telescope that forever changed cosmology.

BASE opens up new possibilities in the search for cold dark matter.

The Baryon Antibaryon Symmetry Experiment (BASE) at CERN’s Antimatter Factory has set new limits on how easily axion-like particles in a narrow mass range around 2.97 neV can turn into photons, the particles of light. BASE’s new result, published by Physical Review Letters, describes this pioneering method and opens up new experimental possibilities in the search for cold dark matter.

Continue reading “BASE Antimatter Experiment opens up new possibilities in the search for cold dark matter” »

I don’t think that star is the same after that one night stand.

When black holes swallow down massive amounts of matter from the space around them, they’re not exactly subtle about it. They belch out tremendous flares of X-rays, generated by the material heating to intense temperatures as it’s sucked towards the black hole, so bright we can detect them from Earth.

This is normal black hole behaviour. What isn’t normal is for those X-ray flares to spew forth with clockwork regularity, a puzzling behaviour reported in 2019 from a supermassive black hole at the centre of a galaxy 250 million light-years away. Every nine hours, boom — X-ray flare.

Continue reading “Astronomers Have Discovered a Star That Survived Being Swallowed by a Black Hole” »

A new paper suggests that the mysterious X17 subatomic particle is indicative of a fifth force of nature.

Very interesting.

Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity profoundly changed our thinking about fundamental concepts in physics, such as space and time. But it also left us with some deep mysteries. One was black holes, which were only unequivocally detected over the past few years. Another was “wormholes” – bridges connecting different points in spacetime, in theory providing shortcuts for space travellers.

Continue reading “Wormholes may be lurking in the universe — and new studies are proposing ways of finding them” »

Physicists imagine a day when they will be able to design a clock that’s so precise, it can detect dark matter.

Circa 2018 o.o!

We are not living in the first universe. There were other universes, in other eons, before ours, a group of physicists has said. Like ours, these universes were full of black holes. And we can detect traces of those long-dead black holes in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) — the radioactive remnant of our universe’s violent birth.

At least, that’s the somewhat eccentric view of the group of theorists, including the prominent Oxford University mathematical physicist Roger Penrose (also an important Stephen Hawking collaborator). Penrose and his acolytes argue for a modified version of the Big Bang.

Continue reading “Physicists Spotted the Ghosts of Black Holes from Another Universe” »