Lifeboat Foundation

While black hole collisions produce almost no signature other than gravitational waves, the collision of neutron stars can be — and was — observed up and down the electromagnetic spectrum. “When neutron stars collide, all hell breaks loose,” said Frans Pretorius, a Princeton physics professor. “They start producing a tremendous amount of visible light, and also gamma rays, X-rays, radio waves…”

Princeton researchers have been studying neutron stars and their astronomical signatures for decades.

A group of astronomers from the universities of Groningen, Naples and Bonn has developed a method that finds gravitational lenses in enormous piles of observations. The method is based on the same artificial intelligence algorithm that Google, Facebook and Tesla have been using in the last years. The researchers published their method and 56 new gravitational lens candidates in the November issue of Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

When a galaxy is hidden behind another galaxy, we can sometimes see the hidden one around the front system. This phenomenon is called a gravitational lens, because it emerges from Einstein’s general relativity theory which says that mass can bend light. Astronomers search for gravitational lenses because they help in the research of dark matter.

The hunt for gravitational lenses is painstaking. Astronomers have to sort thousands of images. They are assisted by enthusiastic volunteers around the world. So far, the search was more or less in line with the availability of new images. But thanks to new observations with special telescopes that reflect large sections of the sky, millions of images are added. Humans cannot keep up with that pace.

Continue reading “Artificial intelligence finds 56 new gravitational lens candidates” »

Physicists theorize that a new “traversable” kind of wormhole could resolve a baffling paradox and rescue information that falls into black holes.

Although it might not be observable, if our current theories of physics are correct, the multiverse must exist.

Pioneered by Erik Verlinde, the idea is that gravity emerges from a more fundamental phenomenon in the Universe, and that phenomenon is entropy.

“Sound waves emerge from molecular interactions; atoms emerge from quarks, gluons and electrons and the strong and electromagnetic interactions; planetary systems emerge from gravitation in General Relativity. But in the idea of entropic gravity — as well as some other scenarios (like qbits) — gravitation or even space and time themselves might emerge from other entities in a similar fashion. There are well-known, close relationships between the equations that govern thermodynamics and the ones that govern gravitation. It’s known that the laws of thermodynamics emerge from the more fundamental field of statistical mechanics, but is there something out there more fundamental from which gravity emerges? That’s the idea of entropic gravity.”

Continue reading “Are Space, Time, And Gravity All Just Illusions?” »

Scholarly paper on building a time machine:

“Quantum teleportation through time-shifted AdS wormholes.

(Submitted on 30 Aug 2017)

Continue reading “Quantum teleportation through time-shifted AdS wormholes” »

Supernovae are an explosion of a massive supergiant star which may shine with the brightness of 10 billion suns! The study of these phenomena has unlocked mysteries about black holes, the origin of metals such as gold and the dynamic of the universe. Supernovae are rare — the last supernova seen in our galaxy was recorded in 1604, according to NASA. However, the Universe is large and astronomers estimated that one of the Milky Way’s massive stars explodes about every 50 years on average [1].

Two possibilities.

(Via Hashem Al-Ghaili)

Scientists are considering whether the mysterious “force” accelerating the universe’s expansion changes with time.

Of late there’s been some scientific ado over a small but notable conflict in measurements of the universe’s expansion rate. The present rate, called the Hubble constant or H0 (pronounced “H-naught”), connects the redshift in an object’s spectra to its physical distance. It also tells us the universe’s age and size, as well as the density required to make the universe geometrically flat.