Lifeboat Foundation

Observing the secrets of the universe’s “Dark Ages” will require capturing ultra-long radio wavelengths—and we can’t do that on Earth.

The universe is constantly beaming its history to us. For instance: Information about what happened long, long ago, contained in the long-length radio waves that are ubiquitous throughout the universe, likely hold the details about how the first stars and black holes were formed. There’s a problem, though. Because of our atmosphere and noisy radio signals generated by modern society, we can’t read them from Earth.

That’s why NASA is in the early stages of planning what it would take to build an automated research telescope on the far side of the moon. One of the most ambitious proposals would build the Lunar Crater Radio Telescope, the largest (by a lot) filled-aperture radio telescope dish in the universe. Another duo of projects, called FarSide and FarView, would connect a vast array of antennas—eventually over 100000, many built on the moon itself and made out of its surface material—to pick up the signals. The projects are all part of NASA’s Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program, which awards innovators and entrepreneurs with funding to advance radical ideas in hopes of creating breakthrough aerospace concepts. While they are still hypothetical, and years away from reality, the findings from these projects could reshape our cosmological model of the universe.

Continue reading “NASA Might Put a Huge Telescope on the Far Side of the Moon” »

A team of astronomers might have discovered a “Giant Arc” of galaxies in deep space that would challenge our understanding of cosmology.

Dark matter may self-interact through a continuum of low-mass states. This happens if dark matter couples to a strongly-coupled nearly-conformal hidden sector. This type of theory is holographically described by brane-localized dark matter interacting with bulk fields in a slice of 5D anti-de Sitter space. The long-range potential in this scenario depends on a non-integer power of the spatial separation, in contrast to the Yukawa potential generated by the exchange of a single 4D mediator. The resulting self-interaction cross section scales like a non-integer power of velocity. We identify the Born, classical and resonant regimes and investigate them using state-of-the-art numerical methods. We demonstrate the viability of our continuum-mediated framework to address the astrophysical small-scale structure anomalies. Investigating the continuum-mediated Sommerfeld enhancement, we demonstrate that a pattern of resonances can occur depending on the non-integer power. We conclude that continuum mediators introduce novel power-law scalings which open new possibilities for dark matter self-interaction phenomenology.

A preprint version of the article is available at ArXiv.

Featureless “cost functions” prevent quantum machine learning algorithms from reconstructing scrambled information.

At the heart of almost every sufficiently massive galaxy there is a black hole whose gravitational field, although very intense, affects only a small region around the center of the galaxy. Even though these objects are thousands of millions of times smaller than their host galaxies, our current view is that the Universe can be understood only if the evolution of galaxies is regulated by the activity of these black holes, because without them the observed properties of the galaxies cannot be explained.

Theoretical predictions suggest that as these black holes grow they generate sufficient energy to heat up and drive out the gas within galaxies to great distances. Observing and describing the mechanism by which this energy interacts with galaxies and modifies their evolution is therefore a basic question in present day Astrophysics.

With this aim in mind, a study led by Ignacio Martín Navarro, a researcher at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), has gone a step further and has tried to see whether the matter and energy emitted from around these black holes can alter the evolution, not only of the host galaxy, but also of the satellite galaxies around it, at even greater distances. To do this, the team has used the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which allowed them to analyze the properties of the galaxies in thousands of groups and clusters. The conclusions of this study, started during Navarro’s stay at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, are published today in Nature magazine.

Dubbed “the Giant Arc,” the purported structure is much larger than expected in a cosmos where matter is thought to be evenly distributed.

A ball of gas around the Milky Way’s black hole has sparked a new debate. Could it be a massive puff of dark matter?

The orbit of S2 and its stellar companions indicated that they were circling around a massive object, about 4 million times the mass of the Sun. Although astronomers could not directly see the object, they knew it could only be one thing.

Continue reading “Scientists debate the existence of the Milky Ways supermassive black hole” »

Is the physical universe independent from us, or is it created by our minds, as suggested by scientist Robert Lanza?

When a massive star dies, first there is a supernova explosion. Then, what’s left over becomes either a black hole or a neutron star.

That neutron star is the densest celestial body that astronomers can observe, with a mass about 1.4 times the size of the sun. However, there is still little known about these impressive objects. Now, a Florida State University researcher has published a piece^[1] in Physical Review Letters arguing that new measurements related to the neutron skin of a lead nucleus may require scientists to rethink theories regarding the overall size of neutron stars.