Lifeboat Foundation

But after a few billion years, something fishy begins to occur. Instead of approaching zero, the expansion rate starts to decrease at a slower rate than one would expect, and a distant galaxy’s recession speed doesn’t drop in the same fashion anymore. Once the Universe reaches an age that’s 7.8 billion years after the Big Bang, things start to get weird: these distant galaxies stop slowing down in their recession entirely, and appear to “coast” in the sense that they move away from us at a constant speed from moment-to-moment, as though the expansion had stopped decelerating.

And then, as the Universe continues to age, the recession speeds no longer remain constant, nor do they go back to decreasing. Instead, these distant galaxies appear to recede from us (and one another) more and more quickly. It’s as though some effect is causing the expansion to neither decelerate nor remain constant, but to actually increase and accelerate!

Black holes are powerful gravitational engines. So you might imagine that there must be a way to extract energy from them given the chance, and you’d be right.

Certainly, we could tap into all the heat and kinetic energy of a black hole’s accretion disk and jets, but even if all you had was a black hole in empty space, you could still extract energy from a trick known as the Penrose process.

First proposed by Roger Penrose in 1971, it is a way to extract rotational energy from a black hole. It uses an effect known as frame dragging, where a rotating body twists nearby space in such a way that an object falling toward the body is dragged slightly along the path of rotation.

“The memory requirements for PRIYA simulations are so big you cannot put them on anything other than a supercomputer,” Bird said.

TACC awarded Bird a Leadership Resource Allocation on the Frontera supercomputer. Additionally, analysis computations were performed using the resources of the UC Riverside High-Performance Computer Cluster.

The PRIYA simulations on Frontera are some of the largest cosmological simulations yet made, needing over 100,000 core-hours to simulate a system of 3072³ (about 29 billion) particles in a ‘box’ 120 megaparsecs on edge, or about 3.91 million light-years across. PRIYA simulations consumed over 600,000 node hours on Frontera.

MIT physicists have discovered a surprising twist in the Milky Way’s rotation curve that challenges our understanding of dark matter. By tracking the speed of stars across the galaxy, they’ve uncovered a potential deficit of dark matter at the galactic core.

Traditionally, astronomers believed that dark matter was responsible for the galaxy’s rotation. Still, the new analysis raises the possibility that the Milky Way’s gravitational center may be lighter in mass than previously thought.

Ancient ideas about the Universe describe matter as constantly ebbing and flowing, positioning nature as the ultimate recycler.

The new black hole image offers further confirmation for Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity.

In this article, we argue that we can explain quantum stabilization of Morris-Thorne traversable wormholes through quantum mechanics. We suggest that the utilization of dark matter and dark energy, conceptualized as negative mass and negative energy tied to the universe’s information content, can stabilize these wormholes. This approach diverges from the original Morris-Thorne model by incorporating quantum effects, offering a credible and adequate source of the exotic matter needed to prevent wormhole collapse. We reassess the wormholes’ stability and information content considering the new calculated revised vacuum energy based on the mass of bit of information. This new calculation makes the wormholes more viable within our universe’s limits.

The presence of supermassive black holes in the earliest epochs of the universe has scientists stumped — but repeated explosions from tiny black holes may offer an explanation.

Astronomers are using it to peer back to near “cosmic dawn,” a time when the first stars and galaxies were forming. And JWST is showing that these early galaxies are different than astronomers had anticipated, in a plethora of ways: Some are settling into shapes we didn’t think were possible so early after the Big Bang. Others are unexpectedly large.

And recent research shows that even the black holes in the early universe were odd — they’re way bigger than they should be, relative to the mass of the galaxy around them. Unexpectedly, JWST is spotting mammoth black holes anchoring relatively small galaxies.