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Category: cosmology – Page 78

Ever since its discovery, dark matter has remained invisible to scientists despite the launch of multiple ultra-sensitive particle detector experiments around the world over several decades.

Now, physicists at the Department of Energy’s (DOE) SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory are proposing a new way to look for using quantum devices, which might be naturally tuned to detect what researchers call thermalized dark matter.

Most dark matter experiments hunt for galactic dark matter, which rockets into Earth directly from space, but another kind might have been hanging around Earth for years, said SLAC physicist Rebecca Leane, who was an author of the new study.

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To understand the relationship between the science fiction genre and the Many-Worlds Interpretation, let’s turn to two men – a scientist and a writer. The scientist is Hugh Everett III (1930−1982), a physicist who developed the notion of parallel universes based on an original interpretation of quantum mechanics. He proposed that a pre-formulated theory should be the basis of scientific measurement, quite the opposite of the traditional scientific process in which measurement preceded and determined the theory. But quantum particles do not behave normally, so quantum phenomena and their atomic dynamics cannot be measured by the Newtonian mechanics traditionally applied to the universe.

When Hugh Everett published “Relative State Formulation of Quantum Mechanics” in the Reviews of Modern Physics scientific journal (Volume 29, Issue 3, July — September 1957), his theory that there are many worlds existing in parallel at the same space and time as our own sounded like fantasy fiction to a skeptical scientific world.

While scientists scoffed for more than a decade after Everett published his theory, someone else entered the scene. His name was Philip K. Dick, a scruffy beatnik writer who tramped around Berkeley (California) looking for ways to describe this alternative reality – the one hiding behind our visible reality.

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The results suggest a deeper investigation of Sgr A* may uncover hitherto undiscovered features.

The polarization of light and neat and strong magnetic fields of Sgr A*, and the fact that they closely resemble that of M87*, may indicate that our central black hole has been hiding a secret from us until now.

“We expect strong and ordered magnetic fields to be directly linked to the launching of jets as we observed for M87*,” Issaoun explained. “Since Sgr A*, with no observed jet, seems to have a very similar geometry, perhaps there is also a jet lurking in Sgr A* waiting to be observed, which would be super exciting!”

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At the heart of a far-off galaxy, a supermassive black hole appears to have had a case of the hiccups. Astronomers from MIT, Italy, the Czech Republic, and elsewhere have found that a previously quiet black hole, which sits at the center of a galaxy about 800 million light years away, has suddenly erupted, giving off plumes of gas every 8.5 days before settling back to its normal, quiet state.

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“Along with Sgr A* having a strikingly similar polarization structure to that seen in the much larger and more powerful M87* black hole, we’ve learned that strong and ordered magnetic fields are critical to how black holes interact with the gas and matter around them,” said Dr. Sara Issaoun.

A recent study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters discusses the most recent image of the supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A* (Sgr A•, which is located approximately 27,000 light-years from Earth at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. These new images that were obtained by Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration are the first to identify the magnetic field lines of Sgr A* and comes after EHT first obtained images of Sgr A* in 2022. This study, which consists of more than 150 co-authors, holds the potential to help astronomers better understand the compositions of supermassive black holes throughout the universe.

For the study, the collaborative team of researchers used EHT to measure polarized light emitted by Sgr A*, which not only revealed the magnetic field lines for the first time, but also gained valuable insight into the properties and behavior of the magnetic field, as well. This study comes after astronomers previously identified the supergiant elliptical galaxy, M87*, was emitting powerful jets at nearly the speed of light after astronomers had discovered it also had large magnetic field lines. Therefore, researchers hope this recent study could produce the same long-term result.

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A new investigation into an obscure class of galaxies known as Compact Symmetric Objects, or CSOs, has revealed that these objects are not entirely what they seem. CSOs are active galaxies that host supermassive black holes at their cores. Out of these monstrous black holes spring two jets traveling in opposite directions at nearly the speed of light. But in comparison to other galaxies that boast fierce jets, these jets do not extend out to great distances—they are much more compact.

For many decades, astronomers suspected that CSOs were simply young and that their jets would eventually travel out to greater distances. Now, reporting in three different papers in The Astrophysical Journal, a Caltech-led team of researchers has concluded that CSOs are not young but rather lead relatively short lives.

“These CSOs are not young,” explains Anthony (Tony) Readhead, the Robinson Professor of Astronomy, Emeritus, who led the investigation. “You wouldn’t call a 12-year-old dog young even though it has lived a shorter life than an adult human. These objects are a all of their own that live and die out in thousands of years rather than the millions of years that are common in with bigger jets.”

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