A massive maelstrom that raged in the universe’s youth could help scientists better understand how galaxies and their central black holes interact.
Most, if not all, galaxies harbor a supermassive black hole at their core. Our own Milky Way has one, for example — a behemoth known as Sagittarius A*, which is about as massive as 4.3 million suns.
Learning the results sparked a moment of joyous celebration, Park says: high fives to everyone.
“This is some of the first experimental evidence of the formation of these collisionless shocks,” says plasma physicist Francisco Suzuki-Vidal of Imperial College London, who was not involved in the study. “This is something that has been really hard to reproduce in the laboratory.”
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Filaments of dark matter and galaxies, which can stretch millions of light-years, might help astronomers figure out the origins of cosmic spin.
It is hard for humans to wrap their heads around the fact that there are galaxies so far away that the light coming from them can be warped in a way that they actually experience a type of time delay. But that is exactly what is happening with extreme forms of gravitational lensing, such as those that give us the beautiful images of Einstein rings. In fact, the time dilation around some of these galaxies can be so extreme that the light from a single event, such as a supernova, can actually show up on Earth at dramatically different times. That is exactly what a team led by Dr. Steven Rodney at the University of South Carolina and Dr. Gabriel Brammer of the University of Copenhagen has found. Except three copies of this supernova have already appeared – and the team thinks it will show up again one more time, 20 years from now.
Finding such a supernova is important not just for its mind bending qualities – it also helps to settle an important debate in the cosmological community. The rate of expansion of the universe has outpaced the rate expected when calculated from the cosmic microwave background radiation. Most commonly, this cosmological conundrum is solved by invoking “dark energy” – a shadowy force that is supposedly responsible for increasing the acceleration rate. But scientists don’t actually know what dark energy is, and to figure it out they need a better model of the physics of the early universe.
One way to get that better model is to find an event that is actively being distorted through a gravitational lens. Importantly – the same event must show up at two separate, distinct times in order to provide input to a calculation about the ratio of the distance between the galaxy doing the lensing and the background galaxy that was the source of the event.
Scientists are one step closer to solving general relativity’s biggest problem.
To do this, scientists used a new kind of observatory called LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory) that is fine-tuned to hunt for small disturbances in the fabric of spacetime caused by cosmic collisions, like black hole or neutron star mergers.
But this is only just the beginning of what LIGO can do, a team of international researchers reports in a new study published Thursday in the journal Science. Using new techniques to quantum cool LIGO’s mirrors, the team says that LIGO may soon also help them understand the quantum states of human-sized objects instead of just subatomic particles.
Peer long enough into the heavens, and the Universe starts to resemble a city at night. Galaxies take on characteristics of streetlamps cluttering up neighborhoods of dark matter, linked by highways of gas that run along the shores of intergalactic nothingness.
This map of the Universe was preordained, laid out in the tiniest of shivers of quantum physics moments after the Big Bang launched into an expansion of space and time some 13.8 billion years ago.
Yet exactly what those fluctuations were, and how they set in motion the physics that would see atoms pool into the massive cosmic structures we see today is still far from clear.
One of my favorite science fiction authors is/was Isaac Asimov (should we use the past tense since he is no longer with us, or the present tense because we still enjoy his writings?). In many ways Asimov was a futurist, but — like all who attempt to foretell what is to come — he occasionally managed to miss the mark.
Take his classic Foundation Trilogy, for example (before he added the two prequels and two sequels). On the one hand we have a Galactic Empire that spans the Milky Way with millions of inhabited worlds and quadrillions of people. Also, we have mighty space vessels equipped with hyperdrives that can convey people from one side of the galaxy to the other while they are still young enough to enjoy the experience.
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We live in the Milky Way Galaxy, which is a collection of stars, gas, dust, and a supermassive black hole at it’s very center. Our Galaxy is a spiral galaxy, which are rotating structures that are flat (disk-like) like a DVD when looked upon edge-on. There is also a bulge in the middle that consists of mostly old stars. When you look at a spiral galaxy face-on, you can see beautiful spiral arms where stars are being born. Our solar system is in the Orion arm, and we are about 25000 light years (2.5 × 1017 miles) from the very center of the Galaxy.
Schematic of the milky way credit: oglethorpe university.
New observations of young stellar object Elias 2–27 confirm gravitational instabilities and planet-forming disk mass as key to formation of giant planets.
A team of scientists using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) to study the young star Elias 2–27 have confirmed that gravitational instabilities play a key role in planet formation, and have for the first time directly measured the mass of protoplanetary disks using gas velocity data, potentially unlocking one of the mysteries of planet formation. The results of the research are published today (June 17, 2021) in two papers in The Astrophysical Journal.
Protoplanetary disks — planet-forming disks made of gas and dust that surround newly formed young stars — are known to scientists as the birthplace of planets. The exact process of planet formation, however, has remained a mystery. The new research, led by Teresa Paneque-Carreño — a recent graduate of the Universidad de Chile and PhD student at the University of Leiden and the European Southern Observatory, and the primary author on the first of the two papers — focuses on unlocking the mystery of planet formation.
For those not in the loop, the Kardashev Scale is a system of measurement invented by Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kardashev in 1964. It quantifies how advanced a civilization is according to how much energy they’re able to harness.
Type 1 civilizations have harnessed 100% of the accessible energy of their own planet. Type 2 has harnessed 100% of the accessible energy in their solar system. Type 3 has harnessed 100% of the accessible energy in their galaxy. There is no official Type 4 but it is conceivable that eventually a civilization could harness 100% of the accessible energy in the universe, and Type 5, which has harnessed all the accessible energy in the multiverse.
That’s some heavy stuff, well beyond the scope of this article. The public’s focus on near term manned spaceflight efforts these days belies a problem with our priorities. Grand, ambitious projects like settling the Moon and Mars grab our attention, while there’s still much left to be done on Earth.
