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A ground-breaking new discovery by University of Leeds scientists could transform the way astronomers understand some of the biggest and most common stars in the Universe.

Research by PhD student Jonathan Dodd and Professor René Oudmaijer, from the University’s School of Physics and Astronomy, points to intriguing new evidence that massive Be stars — until now mainly thought to exist in double stars — could in fact be “triples.”

The remarkable discovery could revolutionise our understanding of the objects — a subset of B stars — which are considered an important “test bed” for developing theories on how stars evolve more generally.

More stable clocks could measure quantum phenomena, including the presence of dark matter.

The practice of keeping time relies on stable oscillations. In grandfather clocks, the length of a second is marked by a single swing of the pendulum. In digital watches, the vibrations of a quartz crystal mark much smaller fractions of time. And in atomic clocks, the world’s state-of-the-art timekeepers, the oscillations of a laser beam stimulate atoms to vibrate at 9.2 billion times per second. These smallest, most stable divisions of time set the timing for today’s satellite communications, GPS systems, and financial markets.

A clock’s stability depends on the noise in its environment. A slight wind can throw a pendulum’s swing out of sync. And heat can disrupt the oscillations of atoms in an atomic clock. Eliminating such environmental effects can improve a clock’s precision. But only by so much.

Similar to human teenagers, teenage galaxies are awkward, experience growth spurts and enjoy heavy metal — nickel, that is.

A Northwestern University-led team of astrophysicists has just analyzed the first results from the CECILIA (Chemical Evolution Constrained using Ionized Lines in Interstellar Aurorae) Survey, a program that uses NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to study the chemistry of distant galaxies.

According to the early results, so-called “teenage galaxies” — which formed two-to-three billion years after the Big Bang — are unusually hot and contain unexpected elements, like nickel, which are notoriously difficult to observe.

When galaxies collide, their supermassive black holes enter into a gravitational dance, gradually orbiting each other ever closer until eventually merging. We know they merge because we see the gravitational beasts that result, and we have detected the gravitational waves they emit as they inspiral. But the details of their final consummation remain a mystery. Now a new paper published on the pre-print server arXiv suggests part of that mystery can be solved with a bit of dark matter.

Just as the famous three-body problem has no general analytical solution for Newtonian gravity, the two-body problem has no general solution in general relativity. So, we have to resort to computer simulations to model how black holes orbit each other and eventually merge.

For binary black holes that are relatively widely separated, our simulations work really well, but when black holes are close to each other things get complicated. Einstein’s equations are very nonlinear, and modeling the dynamics of strongly interacting black holes is difficult.

Researchers investigate whether dark matter particles actually are produced inside a jet of standard model particles.

The existence of dark matter is a long-standing puzzle in our universe. Dark matter makes up about a quarter of our universe, yet it does not interact significantly with ordinary matter. The existence of dark matter has been confirmed by a series of astrophysical and cosmological observations, including in the stunning recent pictures from the James Webb Space Telescope. However, up to date, no experimental observation of dark matter has been reported. The existence of dark matter has been a question that high energy and astrophysicists around the world have been investigating for decades.

Advancements in Dark Matter Research.

Author: Sharika Dhakappa The Big Bang is the most widely accepted theory of how the universe originated. Most physicists believe that the tremendously large universe we observe today began as a tiny, dense point. If the evolution of the universe till today were to be depicted as a movie, the Big Bang would be the beginning of it. We do not yet know what came before the Big Bang or whether that is even a meaningful question to ask. The cosmic movie would run for 13.8 billion years which is the current age of the universe as estimated by the WMAP satellite.

Now that’s forward thinking but it’ll be a long while. But that’s science!

Nothing escapes black holes, but over the decades researchers have worked out ways to get some energy out of them. Some happen naturally, and some energy can be stolen in clever ways. Now, researchers have worked out novel approaches to use black holes as power sources, suggesting that they can be used as either batteries or nuclear reactors.

The assumption of this study is a Schwarzschild black hole – one that has no electric charge or angular momentum. So, it’s neutral and it doesn’t spin. By dropping charged particles on it, the black holes can be made to have a static electric field – and suddenly, you have the makings of a battery.

Continue reading “Black Holes Could Be Used As Batteries Or Nuclear Reactors” »

This could solve a conundrum that’s been plaguing astronomers for almost half a century.

Instead of a single Big Bang that brought the universe into existence billions of years ago, cosmologists are starting to suspect there may have been a second transformative event that could explain the vast abundance of dark matter in the universe.

As New Scientist reports, our recent glimpses into early moments of the universe, just millions of years after the Big Bang, could allow us to gain new insights into this “dark” Big Bang, which could solve a conundrum that’s been plaguing astronomers for almost half a century.

Continue reading “Scientists Say There May Have Been a Second Big Bang” »

Physicists from the Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) have been conducting research on the matter constituting the atomic nucleus utilizing the world’s three most powerful particle accelerators. Their focus has been on mapping the “primordial soup” that filled the universe in the first millionth of a second following its inception.

Intriguingly, their measurements showed that the movement of observed particles bears resemblance to the search for prey of marine predators, the patterns of climate change, and the fluctuations of stock market.

In the immediate aftermath of the Big Bang, temperatures were so extreme that atomic nuclei could not exists, nor could nucleons, their building blocks. Hence, in this first instance the universe was filled with a “primordial soup” of quarks and gluons.