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Category: cosmology – Page 366

What exactly would it take to create our very own Swartzchild Kugelblitz?

Could a Dyson Sphere Harness the Full Power of the Sun? — https://youtu.be/jOHMQbffrt4

Kugelblitz! Powering a Starship With a Black Hole
https://www.space.com/24306-interstellar-flight-black-hole-power.html
“Interstellar flight certainly ranks among the most daunting challenges ever postulated by human civilization. The distances to even the closest stars are so stupendous that constructing even a scale model of interstellar distance is impractical. For instance, if on such a model the separation of the Earth and sun is 1 inch (2.5 centimeters), the nearest star to our solar system (Proxima Centauri) would be 4.3 miles (6.9 kilometers) away!”

Kugelblitz Black Holes: Lasers & Doom
https://futurism.com/kugelblitz-black-holes-lasers-doom
“A kugelblitz black hole could theoretically be created by aiming lasers vastly more powerful than anything we have today at a single point. Logically, one could assume that turning off the lasers would ‘turn off’ the black hole? Well, that’s not quite right”

What is a Dyson sphere?

A Dyson sphere harvests the energy of stars


“In recent years, astronomers explored that possibility with a bizarre star, known to astronomers as KIC 8462852 – more popularly called Tabby’s Star for its discoverer Tabetha Boyajian. This star’s strange light was originally thought to indicate a possible Dyson sphere. That idea has been discarded, but, in 2018, other possibilities emerged, such as that of using the Gaia mission to search for Dyson spheres.“
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Hot off the press…

Barnes & Noble Press releases a new non-fiction book The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind’s Evolution by Alex M. Vikoulov as Hardcover (Press Release, San Francisco, CA, USA, March 22, 2019 11.00 AM PST)

Named “The Book of the Year” by futurists and academics alike, “# 1 Hot New Release” in Amazon charts in Physics of Time, Phenomenology, and Phenomenological Philosophy, the book has now been released by Barnes & Noble Press as hardcover in addition to ebook and paperback released earlier this year. In one volume, the author covers it all: from quantum physics to your experiential reality, from the Big Bang to the Omega Point, from the ‘flow state’ to psychedelics, from ‘Lucy’ to the looming AI Singularity, from natural algorithms to the operating system of your mind, from geo-engineering to nanotechnology, from anti-aging to immortality technologies, from oligopoly capitalism to Star-Trekonomics, from the Matrix to Universal Mind, from Homo sapiens to Holo syntellectus.

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WASHINGTON: The annual Templeton Prize, which recognizes outstanding contributions to “affirming life’s spiritual dimension,” was awarded Tuesday to Brazilian Marcelo Gleiser-a theoretical physicist dedicated to demonstrating science and religion are not enemies. A physics and astronomy professor whose specializations include cosmology, 60-year-old Gleiser was born in Rio de Janeiro, and has been in the United States since 1986. An agnostic, he doesn’t believe in God-but refuses to write off the possibility of God’s existence completely.

“Atheism is inconsistent with the scientific method,” Gleiser said Monday from Dartmouth College, the New Hampshire university where he has taught since 1991. “Atheism is a belief in non-belief. So you categorically deny something you have no evidence against.” “I’ll keep an open mind because I understand that human knowledge is limited,” he added. The prize is funded by the John Templeton Foundation-a philanthropic organization named after the American Presbyterian who made his fortune on Wall Street, and who set on “seeking proofs of divine agency in every branch of science”, as The Economist put it.

Gleiser joins Desmond Tutu, the Dalai Lama and dissident Soviet author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn as recipients of the prize, first awarded in 1973. At £1.1 million, the prize money well surpasses that of the Nobels. The physicist focuses on making complex subjects accessible. He has written on climate change, Einstein, hurricanes, black holes, the human conscience-tracing the links between the sciences and the humanities, including philosophy.

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Many stars sedately tread the measure of the galaxies they inhabit, slowly orbiting the galactic core. Not a star called PSR J0002+6216, though. PSR J0002+6216, astronomers have discovered, is rocketing through the Milky Way at absolutely breakneck speeds.

To be precise, it’s travelling at 1,130 kilometres per second (700 miles per second). That could take it from Earth to the Moon in 6 minutes. It’s one of the fastest stars we’ve ever seen.

And boy, is it spectacular — zooming away from the expanding cloud of a recent supernova explosion, leaving a trail behind after it punched through the explosion’s outer shell of debris.

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“Space has been expanding since the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago,” said Harold “Sunny” White, head of NASA’s Eagleworks Laboratories: Advanced Propulsion. “And we know that when you look at some of the cosmology models, there were early periods of the universe where there was explosive inflation, where two points would’ve went receding away from each other at very rapid speeds. Nature can do it. So the question is, can we do it?”

There have been hints the past few years that NASA may be on the path to discovering warp bubbles that could make the local universe accessible for human exploration. NASA scientists may be close announcing they may have broken the speed of light. According to state-of-the art theory, a warp drive could cut the travel time between stars from tens of thousands of years to weeks or months. They say they have found a way to configure the hypothetical negative energy matter so that the warping could be accomplished with a mass equivalent to the Voyager spacecraft.

“What this does is it moves the idea from the category of completely impossible to maybe plausible,” said White in a talk at NASA’s Ames Research Center in 2014. “It doesn’t say anything about feasible. And so, unfortunately, that point usually gets missed a lot.”

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Why do we exist? This is arguably the most profound question there is and one that may seem completely outside the scope of particle physics.

But our new experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider has taken us a step closer to figuring it out.

To understand why, let’s go back in time some 13.8 billion years to the Big Bang. This event produced equal amounts of the matter you are made of and something called antimatter.

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Humans have figured out how to send spacecraft into the deep reaches of the solar system, but it will take major advances in spaceflight before we can hop over to other star systems or traverse the Milky Way. In the meantime, though, it doesn’t hurt to think about cool ways we might one day be able to accomplish that dream.

Enter: the “halo drive,” a concept that proposes leveraging the power of black holes and other gravitationally powerful phenomena to accelerate future spacecraft to near-light speeds.

Conceived by David Kipping, an astronomer at Columbia University, the halo drive involves shooting lasers at objects such as black holes or neutron stars in order to get a speed boost when the light beam boomerangs back to its starting point.

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Astronomers observed a ghostly pulsar, a superdense, rapidly spinning neutron star exploded from a supernova 10,000 years ago, racing through space at nearly 2.5 million miles an hour—so fast it could travel the distance between Earth and the Moon in just 6 minutes. The discovery was made using NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and the National Science Foundation’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA).

The pulsar lies about 53 light-years from the center of a supernova remnant called CTB 1. Its rapid motion through interstellar gas results in shock waves that produce the tail of magnetic energy and accelerated particles detected at radio wavelengths using the VLA. The tail extends 13 light-years and clearly points back to the center of CTB 1.

This one, dubbed PSR J0002+6216 (J0002 for short), sports a radio-emitting tail pointing directly toward the expanding debris of a recent supernova explosion. “Thanks to its narrow dart-like tail and a fortuitous viewing angle, we can trace this pulsar straight back to its birthplace,” said Frank Schinzel, a scientist at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in Socorro, New Mexico. “Further study of this object will help us better understand how these explosions are able to ‘kick’ neutron stars to such high speed.”

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This fuzzy orb of light is a giant elliptical galaxy filled with an incredible 200 billion stars. Unlike spiral galaxies, which have a well-defined structure and boast picturesque spiral arms, elliptical galaxies appear fairly smooth and featureless. This is likely why this galaxy, named Messier 49, was discovered by French astronomer Charles Messier in 1771. At a distance of 56 million light-years, and measuring 157,000 light-years across, M49 was the first member of the Virgo Cluster of galaxies to be discovered, and it is more luminous than any other galaxy at its distance or nearer.

Elliptical galaxies tend to contain a larger portion of older stars than spiral galaxies and also lack young blue stars. Messier 49 itself is very yellow, which indicates that the stars within it are mostly older and redder than the Sun. In fact, the last major episode of star formation was about six billion years ago — before the Sun was even born!

Messier 49 is also rich in globular clusters; it hosts about 6000, a number that dwarfs the 150 found in and around the Milky Way. On average, these clusters are 10 billion years old. Messier 49 is also known to host a supermassive black hole at its centre with the mass of more than 500 million Suns, identifiable by the X-rays pouring out from the heart of the galaxy (as this Hubble image comprises infrared observations, these X-rays are not visible here).

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