Mar 5, 2023
Ask Ethan: Did our Universe really arise from nothing?
Posted by Dan Breeden in category: cosmology
The Big Bang was hot, dense, uniform, and filled with matter and energy. Before that? There was nothing. Here’s how that’s possible.
The Big Bang was hot, dense, uniform, and filled with matter and energy. Before that? There was nothing. Here’s how that’s possible.
All things physical are information-theoretic in origin and this is a participatory universe… Observer-participancy gives rise to information.
An international team of researchers stumbled upon an exploding supernova in a distant spiral galaxy, using data from the first year of interstellar observation by the James Webb Space Telescope.
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST or Webb) is an orbiting infrared observatory that will complement and extend the discoveries of the Hubble Space Telescope. It covers longer wavelengths of light, with greatly improved sensitivity, allowing it to see inside dust clouds where stars and planetary systems are forming today as well as looking further back in time to observe the first galaxies that formed in the early universe.
Julian Barbour, physicist, talks the illusion of time, the origin of the universe, and what is reality. He also discusses his newest book, “The Janus Point: A New Theory of Time,” which makes the radical argument that the growth of order drives the passage of time — and shapes the destiny of the universe.
Read “The Janus Point”: https://www.basicbooks.com/titles/julian-barbour/the-janus-point/9780465095469/
Julian Barbour’s Website: http://www.platonia.com/
Continue reading “Julian Barbour on Time, the Universe, and Reality | Closer To Truth Chats” »
Right now, in the center of our galaxy, an enormous black hole is stretching an object apart like it were taffy. And scientists currently have a rare view, and images, of this extreme cosmic event playing out. A thick cloud of gas and dust dubbed “X7” is rapidly approaching the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A*.
The Big Bang is the name we have given to the moment at which the Universe began. While the idea is well known, it is often badly misunderstood. Even people with a good grasp of science have misconceptions about it. For instance, a common question is, “Where did the Big Bang happen?” And the answer to that question is a surprising one. So, let’s dive into it and try to understand where the misunderstanding arises.
When people are told of the Big Bang, they are commonly told that “all of the mass of the universe was packed into a point with zero volume called a singularity.” The singularity then “exploded,” expanding and cooling and eventually resulting in the Universe we see today. People draw from their own experience and analogize the Big Bang with something like a firecracker or a grenade — an object that sits in a location, then explodes, dispersing debris into existing space. This is a completely natural and reasonable mental image. It is also completely wrong.
Continue reading “Where is the center of the Universe? Here, there, and everywhere” »
Researchers from the University of Oxford have contributed to a major international study which has captured a rare and fascinating space phenomenon: binary star systems. The study, “A shared accretion instability for black holes and neutron stars,” has been published in Nature.
Scientists have long been intrigued by X-ray binary star systems, where two stars orbit around each other with one of the two stars being either a black hole or a neutron star. Both black holes and neutron stars are created in supernova explosions and are very dense—giving them a massive gravitational pull. This makes them capable of capturing the outer layers of the normal star that orbits around it in the binary system, seen as a rotating disk of matter (mimicking a whirlpool) around the black hole/neutron star.
According to theoretical calculations, these rotating disks should show a dynamic instability: about once an hour, the inner parts of the disk rapidly fall onto the black hole/neutron star, after which these inner regions re-fill and the process repeats. Up to now, this violent and extreme process had only been directly observed once, in a black hole binary system. For the first time, it has now been seen in a neutron star binary system, called Swift J1858.6–0814. This discovery demonstrates that this instability is a general property of these disks (and not caused by the presence of a black hole).
Claim your SPECIAL OFFER for MagellanTV here: https://try.magellantv.com/arvinash Start your free trial TODAY so you can watch The Most Powerful Black Holes in the Universe” about the extremes of time and space, and the rest of MagellanTV’s science collection: https://www.magellantv.com/watch/the-most-powerful-black-hol…niverse-4k.
REFERENCES
The Tempest by Peter Cawdron: https://tinyurl.com/2ep4uzvs.
Inside Black Holes: https://youtu.be/iUr8Obv_DeA
How Black Holes form: https://youtu.be/7xCgnMqIgPI
How Stable orbits form around Black Holes: https://tinyurl.com/2klz9mfd.
Continue reading “Black Holes Are Even Weirder Than You Thought!” »
The supernova is so old that it is believed to have been described in a passage of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet.”
A group of scientists has shed new light on a star that exploded in a supernova more than 450 years ago, blasting particles out into space at close to the speed of light.
Now, astronomers have used NASA’s Imaging X-ray Polarimetry to study the incredibly long-lasting aftereffects of the supernova called Tycho.
Continue reading “NASA sheds light on a massive supernova dating back to Middle Ages” »