Lifeboat Foundation

Author: Sharika Dhakappa The Big Bang is the most widely accepted theory of how the universe originated. Most physicists believe that the tremendously large universe we observe today began as a tiny, dense point. If the evolution of the universe till today were to be depicted as a movie, the Big Bang would be the beginning of it. We do not yet know what came before the Big Bang or whether that is even a meaningful question to ask. The cosmic movie would run for 13.8 billion years which is the current age of the universe as estimated by the WMAP satellite.

Now that’s forward thinking but it’ll be a long while. But that’s science!

Nothing escapes black holes, but over the decades researchers have worked out ways to get some energy out of them. Some happen naturally, and some energy can be stolen in clever ways. Now, researchers have worked out novel approaches to use black holes as power sources, suggesting that they can be used as either batteries or nuclear reactors.

The assumption of this study is a Schwarzschild black hole – one that has no electric charge or angular momentum. So, it’s neutral and it doesn’t spin. By dropping charged particles on it, the black holes can be made to have a static electric field – and suddenly, you have the makings of a battery.

Continue reading “Black Holes Could Be Used As Batteries Or Nuclear Reactors” »

This could solve a conundrum that’s been plaguing astronomers for almost half a century.

Instead of a single Big Bang that brought the universe into existence billions of years ago, cosmologists are starting to suspect there may have been a second transformative event that could explain the vast abundance of dark matter in the universe.

As New Scientist reports, our recent glimpses into early moments of the universe, just millions of years after the Big Bang, could allow us to gain new insights into this “dark” Big Bang, which could solve a conundrum that’s been plaguing astronomers for almost half a century.

Continue reading “Scientists Say There May Have Been a Second Big Bang” »

Physicists from the Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) have been conducting research on the matter constituting the atomic nucleus utilizing the world’s three most powerful particle accelerators. Their focus has been on mapping the “primordial soup” that filled the universe in the first millionth of a second following its inception.

Intriguingly, their measurements showed that the movement of observed particles bears resemblance to the search for prey of marine predators, the patterns of climate change, and the fluctuations of stock market.

In the immediate aftermath of the Big Bang, temperatures were so extreme that atomic nuclei could not exists, nor could nucleons, their building blocks. Hence, in this first instance the universe was filled with a “primordial soup” of quarks and gluons.

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) recently used its powerful Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) to peer into the very center of our Milky Way Galaxy, revealing stunning details in a star-forming region known as Sagittarius C (Sgr C) like never before, which includes approximately 500,000 in this single image. Sgr C is located approximately 300 light-years from the exact center of the Milky Way known as Sagittarius A*, which is a supermassive black hole. For context, the Milky Way is approximately 105,000 light-years across, so Sgr C being only 300 light-years from the center of the Milky Way is extremely close.

“The galactic center is a crowded, tumultuous place. There are turbulent, magnetized gas clouds that are forming stars, which then impact the surrounding gas with their outflowing winds, jets, and radiation,” said Dr. Rubén Fedriani, who is a Juan de la Cierva Postdoctoral Fellow at the Instituto Astrofísica de Andalucía in Spain and a co-investigator of the project. “Webb has provided us with a ton of data on this extreme environment, and we are just starting to dig into it.”

With a gravitational field so strong that not even light can escape its grip, black holes are probably the most interesting and bizarre objects in the universe.

Due to their extreme properties, a theoretical description of these celestial bodies is impossible within the framework of Newton’s classical theory of gravity. It requires the use of general relativity, the theory proposed by Einstein in 1915, which treats gravitational fields as deformations in the fabric of space-time.

Black holes are usually formed from the collapse of massive stars during their final stage of evolution. Therefore, when a black hole is born, its mass does not exceed a few dozen solar masses.

In this video, we will explain a new paper that suggests that there was a second big bang, or a “Dark Big Bang”, that created different kinds of dark matter particles, some of which could be very massive. We will explain how this hypothesis could solve two of the biggest mysteries in cosmology: the origin of the universe and the nature of dark matter. We will also explain how this hypothesis could be tested by future experiments, such as gravitational wave detectors and gamma-ray telescopes. The paper offers a new perspective on the history and structure of the universe, and challenges some of the assumptions and predictions of the standard cosmological model. The paper also opens new possibilities for exploring and understanding the dark sector of the universe, which could reveal new physics and phenomena. So, stay tuned and get ready to explore the dark side of the big bang.

Chapters:
00:00 Introduction.
02:00 The Dark Big Bang.
03:55 The Origin of the Universe.
06:22 The Nature of Dark Matter.
08:27 Outro.
09:03 Enjoy.

Continue reading “Two Big Bangs, One Universe: A New Study That Challenges the Standard Cosmological Model” »

An innovative experiment flying aboard NASA’s Psyche mission just hit its first major milestone by successfully carrying out the most distant demonstration of laser communications. The tech demo could one day help NASA missions probe deeper into space and uncover more discoveries about the origin of the universe.

Launched in mid-October, Psyche is currently en route to catch humanity’s first glimpse of a metal asteroid between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. The spacecraft will spend the next six years traveling about 2.2 billion miles (3.6 billion kilometers) to reach its namesake, located in the outer part of the main asteroid belt.

Along for the ride is the Deep Space Optical Communications technology demonstration, or DSOC, which is carrying out a mission of its own during the first two years of the journey.

A groundbreaking study by University of Leeds scientists proposes that Be stars are part of triple star systems, not binary systems as previously thought. This finding, derived from Gaia satellite data, challenges conventional star formation theories and could impact our knowledge of black holes, neutron stars, and gravitational waves.

Gravitational waves are distortions or ripples in the fabric of space and time. They were first detected in 2015 by the Advanced LIGO detectors and are produced by catastrophic events such as colliding black holes, supernovae, or merging neutron stars.