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Category: cosmology – Page 75

Hubble takes closest-ever look at a quasar

Astronomers have used the unique capabilities of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to peer closer than ever into the throat of an energetic monster black hole powering a quasar. A quasar is a galactic center that glows brightly as the black hole consumes material in its immediate surroundings.

The new Hubble views of the environment around the quasar show a lot of “weird things,” according to Bin Ren of the Côte d’Azur Observatory and Université Côte d’Azur in Nice, France. “We’ve got a few blobs of different sizes, and a mysterious L-shaped filamentary structure. This is all within 16,000 light-years of the black hole.”

Some of the objects could be small satellite galaxies around the black hole, and so they could offer the materials that will accrete onto the central super massive black hole, powering the bright lighthouse.

Dynamic tracking technique can reduce noise in gravitational-wave detectors to peer deeper into the cosmos

Researchers have shown that optical spring tracking is a promising way to improve the signal clarity of gravitational-wave detectors. The advance could one day allow scientists to see farther into the universe and provide more information about how black holes and neutron stars behave as they merge.

Large-scale interferometers such as the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (aLIGO) detect subtle distortions in spacetime, known as , generated by distant cosmic events. By allowing scientists to study phenomena that do not emit light, gravitational wave measurements have opened a new window for understanding extreme astrophysical events, the nature of gravity and the origins of the universe.

“Quantum noise has become a limiting noise source when measuring gravitational waves,” said Scott M. Aronson, a member of the research team from Louisiana State University. “By tuning the system to respond at a desired frequency, we show that you can reduce this noise by using an optical spring to track a signal coming from a compact binary system. In the future, this binary system could be two orbiting each other—within our galaxy or beyond.”

Create your own universe

Year 2006 face_with_colon_three

One of the good things about being God is that there’s not much competition. From time immemorial, no one else has boasted the skills necessary to create a universe. Now that’s about to change. “People are becoming more powerful,” says Andrei Linde, a cosmologist based at Stanford University in California. “Maybe it’s time we redefine God as something more sophisticated than just the creator of the universe.”

Linde was prompted to make this wry observation by the news that a glittering prize is within physicists’ reach. For decades, particle accelerators have been racking up an impressive list of achievements, including creating antimatter and exotic particles never seen in nature. The next generation of these giant colliders will provide the hunting ground for the elusive Higgs boson, thought to be the source of all mass. These machines might even create mini black holes. Mighty as those discoveries and creations are, however, they pale into insignificance beside what Nobuyuki Sakai and his colleagues at Yamagata University in Japan have now put on the table. They have discovered how to use a particle accelerator to create a whole new universe.

Large radio jet discovered in quasar J1601+3102

An international team of astronomers has observed an extremely radio-loud quasar known as J1601+3102. As a result, they found that the quasar hosts a large extended radio jet. The discovery is reported in a research paper published Nov. 25 on the arXiv preprint server.

Quasars, or quasi-stellar objects (QSOs), are (AGN) of very high luminosity powered by (SMBHs), emitting observable in radio, infrared, visible, ultraviolet and X-ray wavelengths. They are among the brightest and most distant objects in the known universe, and serve as fundamental tools for numerous studies in astrophysics as well as cosmology.

J1601+3102 is an extremely radio-loud quasar at a redshift of 4.9, discovered in 2022. It has a radio flux at a level of 69 mJy, bolometric luminosity of about 26 quattuordecillion erg/s and a steep spectral index.

The mass of 10 million suns is moving dangerously close to Earth in the form of mysterious dark matter

Astrophysicists have recently made a groundbreaking discovery that is sending shockwaves through the scientific community: an immense cluster of dark matter, equivalent to the mass of 10 million suns, is moving closer to our solar system. The mysterious nature of this phenomenon and its potential consequences for Earth have sparked concern and a flurry of research efforts to understand what this means for humanity and the universe itself.

Dark matter — one of the grand enigmas of astrophysics; yet there is no radiation-emission, absorption, reflection-of light. It does make stars and galaxies rotate a lot faster than they ever did before. The only clues scientists have about what 27% of its quantity is in the cosmos versus only 5% by ordinary matter are of itself.

Explained astrophysicist Dr. Lydia Harmon: “Dark matter is like the scaffolding of the universe, holding the galaxies together. Without it, the cosmic structure as we know it wouldn’t exist. But the idea of such a massive concentration headed toward us raises unprecedented questions.”

In His Final Years, Stephen Hawking Thought the Universe Could Be a Hologram

Thus, when one looks back in time, say by looking at light from a distant galaxy that has traveled billions of years to reach us, this is akin to “zooming out” on the hologram and making its details fuzzier in the process. This zooming out can continue until all the details of the hologram disappear altogether, which in the model of the universe suggested by Hawking and Hertog, would be the origin of time at the Big Bang.

“The crux of our hypothesis is that when you go back in time, to this earliest, violent, unimaginably complicated phase of the universe, in that phase you find a deeper level of evolution, a level in which even the laws of physics co-evolve with the universe that is taking shape,” Hertog said. “And the consequence is that if you push everything even further backward, into the Big Bang, so to speak, even the laws of physics disappear.”

Dark Energy May Be Evolving, Transforming Our View of the Universe

The DESI collaboration’s latest research supports the standard model of gravity and hints at evolving dark energy, based on a detailed analysis of data from millions of galaxies and quasars. These results contribute significantly to understanding the accelerated expansion of the universe.

A physicist from the University of Texas at Dallas, alongside an international team of researchers in the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) collaboration, is conducting a multiyear mission to tackle one of astrophysics’ biggest mysteries: Why is the universe’s expansion accelerating?

Scientists have proposed competing theories to explain this phenomenon. One theory suggests that dark energy, an unknown force, is driving galaxies apart. Another theory posits that gravity—the force that binds objects together in local systems like our solar system—behaves differently on vast cosmic scales and may need to be revised to account for the accelerating expansion.

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