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Archive for the ‘cosmology’ category: Page 157

Feb 5, 2021

Scientists narrow down the ‘weight’ of dark matter trillions of trillions of times

Posted by in categories: cosmology, materials

Scientists are finally figuring out how much dark matter — the almost imperceptible material said to tug on everything, yet emit no light — really weighs.

Jan 31, 2021

How Palomar’s Big Eye Telescope Forever Changed Astronomy

Posted by in category: cosmology

Astronomy owes George Ellery Hale and the Palomar Observatory a great debt of gratitude for persevering with the construction of a telescope that forever changed cosmology.

Jan 28, 2021

BASE Antimatter Experiment opens up new possibilities in the search for cold dark matter

Posted by in categories: cosmology, particle physics

BASE opens up new possibilities in the search for cold dark matter.

The Baryon Antibaryon Symmetry Experiment (BASE) at CERN’s Antimatter Factory has set new limits on how easily axion-like particles in a narrow mass range around 2.97 neV can turn into photons, the particles of light. BASE’s new result, published by Physical Review Letters, describes this pioneering method and opens up new experimental possibilities in the search for cold dark matter.

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Jan 26, 2021

Astronomers Have Discovered a Star That Survived Being Swallowed by a Black Hole

Posted by in categories: cosmology, materials

I don’t think that star is the same after that one night stand.


When black holes swallow down massive amounts of matter from the space around them, they’re not exactly subtle about it. They belch out tremendous flares of X-rays, generated by the material heating to intense temperatures as it’s sucked towards the black hole, so bright we can detect them from Earth.

This is normal black hole behaviour. What isn’t normal is for those X-ray flares to spew forth with clockwork regularity, a puzzling behaviour reported in 2019 from a supermassive black hole at the centre of a galaxy 250 million light-years away. Every nine hours, boom — X-ray flare.

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Jan 26, 2021

The ‘X17’ particle: Scientists may have discovered the fifth force of nature

Posted by in categories: cosmology, particle physics

A new paper suggests that the mysterious X17 subatomic particle is indicative of a fifth force of nature.

Jan 25, 2021

Wormholes may be lurking in the universe — and new studies are proposing ways of finding them

Posted by in categories: cosmology, information science, physics

Very interesting.


Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity profoundly changed our thinking about fundamental concepts in physics, such as space and time. But it also left us with some deep mysteries. One was black holes, which were only unequivocally detected over the past few years. Another was “wormholes” – bridges connecting different points in spacetime, in theory providing shortcuts for space travellers.

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Jan 24, 2021

‘Spooky action at a distance’ could create a nearly perfect clock

Posted by in categories: cosmology, physics

Physicists imagine a day when they will be able to design a clock that’s so precise, it can detect dark matter.

Jan 23, 2021

Physicists Spotted the Ghosts of Black Holes from Another Universe

Posted by in categories: cosmology, physics

Circa 2018 o.o!


We are not living in the first universe. There were other universes, in other eons, before ours, a group of physicists has said. Like ours, these universes were full of black holes. And we can detect traces of those long-dead black holes in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) — the radioactive remnant of our universe’s violent birth.

At least, that’s the somewhat eccentric view of the group of theorists, including the prominent Oxford University mathematical physicist Roger Penrose (also an important Stephen Hawking collaborator). Penrose and his acolytes argue for a modified version of the Big Bang.

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Jan 21, 2021

Researchers discover the earliest supermassive black hole and quasar in the universe

Posted by in category: cosmology

Nearly every galaxy hosts a monster at its center—a supermassive black hole millions to billions times the size of the Sun. While there’s still much to learn about these objects, many scientists believe they are crucial to the formation and structure of galaxies. What’s more, some of these black holes are particularly active, whipping up stars, dust and gas into glowing accretion disks emitting powerful radiation into the cosmos as they consume matter around them. These quasars are some of the most distant objects that astronomers can see, and there is now a new record for the farthest one ever observed.

A team of scientists, led by former UC Santa Barbara postdoctoral scholar Feige Wang and including Professor Joe Hennawi and current postdoc Riccardo Nanni, announced the discovery of J0313-1806, the most distant quasar discovered to date. Seen as it would have appeared more than 13 billion years ago, this fully formed distant quasar is also the earliest yet discovered, providing astronomers insight into the formation of massive galaxies in the early universe. The team’s findings were released at the January 2021 meeting of the American Astronomical Society and published in Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Quasars are the most energetic objects in the universe. They occur when gas in the superheated accretion disk around a supermassive black hole is inexorably drawn inwards, shedding energy across the electromagnetic spectrum. This releases enormous amounts of electromagnetic radiation, with the most massive examples easily outshining entire galaxies.

Jan 21, 2021

Astronomers spotted a rare galaxy shutting down star formation

Posted by in category: cosmology

A distant galaxy harbors an active black hole and active star formation at the same time – an unusual coincidence.