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A new map of dark matter all over the universe could reveal things scientists don’t know about dark energy.

Primordial black holes that formed early in the universe’s history could shed light on how exactly the universe formed.

Today, an international group of researchers, including Carnegie Mellon University’s Rachel Mandelbaum, released the deepest wide field map of the three-dimensional distribution of matter in the universe ever made and increased the precision of constraints for dark energy with the Hyper Suprime-Cam survey (HSC).

How did early black holes grow so quickly? A new study sheds some light on that by observing matter entering a black hole at 30% of the speed of light.

The building blocks of matter in our universe were formed in the first 10 microseconds of its existence, according to the currently accepted scientific picture. After the Big Bang about 13.7 billion years ago, matter consisted mainly of quarks and gluons, two types of elementary particles whose interactions are governed by quantum chromodynamics (QCD), the theory of strong interaction. In the early universe, these particles moved nearly freely in a quark-gluon plasma. Then, in a phase transition, they combined and formed hadrons, among them the building blocks of atomic nuclei, protons and neutrons.

In the current issue of Nature, an international team of scientists has presented an analysis of a series of experiments at major particle accelerators that sheds light on the nature of this transition. The scientists determined with precision the transition temperature and obtained new insights into the mechanism of cooling and freeze-out of the quark-gluon plasma into the current constituents of matter such as protons, neutrons and atomic nuclei. The team of researchers consists of scientists from the GSI Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung in Darmstadt, and from the universities of Heidelberg and Münster (Germany), and Wroclaw (Poland).

A central result: The record-breaking high-energy experiments with the ALICE detector at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the research center CERN produced matter in which particles and antiparticles coexisted in equal amounts, similar to the conditions in the early universe. The team has confirmed via analysis of the experimental data theoretical predictions that the phase transition between quark-gluon plasma and hadronic matter takes place at the temperature of 156 MeV, 120,000 times higher than that in the interior of the sun.

Continue reading “New observations to understand the phase transition in quantum chromodynamics” »

Space is filled with bizarre signals that we scramble to put meaning to — and now, researchers have detected yet another mysterious signal. This one emanated from near a neutron star, and for the first time, it’s infrared.

So, what’s nearby that could have created the weird signal? Scientists have a few ideas.

When a star reaches the end of its life, it typically undergoes a supernova explosion— the star collapses, and if it has enough mass, it will form a black hole. But if the star isn’t massive enough, it will form a neutron star. [Supernova Photos: Great Images of Star Explosions].

Researchers from Indiana University and the California Institute of Technology say the new simulations could help us better understand major astrophysical phenomena, such as gravitational waves.

‘The strength of the neutron star crust, especially the bottom of the crust, is relevant to a large number of astrophysics problems, but isn’t well understood,’ says Matthew Caplan, a postdoctoral research fellow at McGill University.

Continue reading “Incredible strength of ‘nuclear pasta’ revealed in new simulations” »

How do you know where anything is in space? Sure, you can say, “Oh, that star, it’s the one in the middle of the Big Dipper,” but that’s not very useful in an era of incredible telescopes peeping at galaxies billions of light-years away. On January 1, 2019, scientists will adopt the newest, internationally standardized frame of reference to help locate things in space.

The third edition of the International Celestial Reference Frame, or ICRF-3, is the most up-to-date version of the International Astronomy Union’s standardized reference frame. Imagine the universe as a graph from geometry—scientists need a place to put the origin and axes.

Machine learning supports 20-year-old theory of bizarre electron behaviour in high-temperature superconductor.