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Transferring information from one location to another without transmitting any particles or energy seems to run counter to everything we’ve learned in the history of physics.

Yet there is some solid reasoning that this ‘counterfactual communication’ might not only be plausible, but depending on how it works could reveal fundamental aspects of reality that have so far been hidden from view.

Counterfactual physics isn’t a new thing in itself, describing a way of deducing activity by an absence of something. In one sense, it’s pretty straight forward. If your dog barks at strangers, and you hear silence when the front door opens, you’ve received information that says a familiar person has entered your house in spite of the absence of sound.

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The JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES) program led to the discovery of this new galaxy dubbed JADES-GS-z14-0.

“The instruments on Webb were designed to find and understand the earliest galaxies, and in the first year of observations as part of the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES), we found many hundreds of candidate galaxies from the first 650 million years after the big bang,” said Stefano Carniani from Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, Italy.

Continue reading “300 million years post-Big Bang? Oldest-ever galaxy discovered by NASA” »

Stars that vanish from the sky may be collapsing directly into black holes without going supernova first, a new study of a bizarre binary star system suggests.

Joint research led by Michiko Fujii of the University of Tokyo demonstrates a possible formation mechanism of intermediate-mass black holes in globular clusters, star clusters that could contain tens of thousands or even millions of tightly packed stars.

Fewer miniature black holes found:

Researchers at the University of Tokyo have found that the universe contains far fewer miniature black holes than previously thought, potentially shaking up current theories about dark matter.

Using advanced quantum field theory, typically reserved for subatomic particles, they applied this understanding to the early universe. They discovered new insights into primordial black holes (PBHs), which have been a strong contender for dark matter. Upcoming observations could soon confirm their surprising findings.

After starting science operations in February, Japan-led XRISM (X-ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission) studied the monster black hole at the center of galaxy NGC4151.

“XRISM’s Resolve instrument captured a detailed spectrum of the area around the black hole,” said Brian Williams, NASA’s project scientist for the mission at the agency’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “The peaks and dips are like chemical fingerprints that can tell us what elements are present and reveal clues about the fate of matter as it nears the black hole.”

XRISM (pronounced “crism”) is led by JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) in collaboration with NASA, along with contributions from ESA (European Space Agency). It launched Sept. 6, 2023. NASA and JAXA developed Resolve, the mission’s microcalorimeter spectrometer.

Are dark matter and dark energy stable and constant? Since we don’t understand their true physical nature, we can’t be sure. But astronomers can see if they vary depending on which direction in space they look. This is a test of whether the universe is lopsided or the same everywhere (the physics term for this is isotropic). It turns out that the amount of dark matter surrounding galaxies is the same in every direction, and the strength of dark energy is also the same in every direction.

To see whether the influence of dark matter and dark energy has changed over cosmic time, astronomers look deep into space. Distant light is old light, so telescopes act as time machines, probing billions of years into the past. By measuring the redshift and brightness of distant objects, astronomers map out the expansion history of the universe. Dark matter dominated for most of that history since the Big Bang. That’s because when the universe was smaller, the gravity exerted by dark matter was stronger, while the force exerted by dark energy has stayed the same. Now is the only time in the entire history of the universe when the two entities’ influences are about equal. In the future, the effects of dark energy will increasingly dominate, and the universe will accelerate forever.

If black holes are just regions of spacetime, where the slope of spacetime is infinite at it’s center, how can black holes even move? When matter moves through spacetime, it bends the spacetime around it, but if black holes are just regions of spacetime, how can a region in spacetime bend other regions of spacetime? And another question arises. If black holes are just regions in spacetime, how can it bend the spacetime around it, so it can remain a black hole, if there is no matter to continuously bend it?

Scientists have just identified the formation processes of some of the Universe’s earliest galaxies in the turbulent era of the Cosmic Dawn.

JWST observations of the early Universe around 13.3 to 13.4 billion years ago – just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang – have revealed telltale signs of gas reservoirs being actively slurped into three newly forming and growing galaxies.

“You could say that these are the first ‘direct’ images of galaxy formation that we’ve ever seen,” says astrophysicist Kasper Elm Heintz from the Niels Bohr Institute in Denmark, who led the research.