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Using AI and ALMA data, scientists create a groundbreaking 3D video of flares around our galaxy’s central black hole, offering new insights into its dynamic environment.

Scientists believe the environment immediately surrounding a black hole is tumultuous, featuring hot magnetized gas that spirals in a disk at tremendous speeds and temperatures. Astronomical observations show that within such a disk, mysterious flares occur up to several times a day, temporarily brightening and then fading away. Now a team led by Caltech scientists has used telescope data and an artificial intelligence (AI) computer-vision technique to recover the first three-dimensional video showing what such flares could look like around Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*, pronounced sadge-ay-star), the supermassive black hole at the heart of our own Milky Way galaxy.

Continue reading “Peering Into the Abyss: AI and Physics Unite to Unveil a Black Hole Flare in 3D” »

More than 97% of the stars in our Galaxy will end their lives with a whimper—slowly cooling as stellar remnants known as white dwarfs. The cooling of white dwarfs follows a pattern that was thought to be so predictable that the temperatures of white dwarfs are used to determine the age of surrounding stars. New findings, however, indicate this pattern may need revision [1]. Predictions made by Antoine Bédard of the University of Warwick, UK, and his colleagues now indicate that some white dwarfs may undergo a process that “reinvigorates” the stars, significantly slowing down the cooling process. That change could alter the calculated ages of white dwarfs by billions of years.

When a small star (one with a mass 8 times or less that of the Sun) runs out of nuclear fuel, it sheds its outer layers to form a planetary nebula. The core of the star then collapses into a white dwarf. Producing no heat, white dwarfs spend their existences radiating their remaining energy into space, cooling and solidifying from the inside out. Or so astrophysicists thought.

In 2019, this model was disrupted by astronomers analyzing data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission. The researchers identified a previously unknown population of white dwarfs within the Milky Way with anomalous properties [2]. As stars age, their velocities increase with respect to nearby stars because of repeated gravitational interactions with those stars. The newly identified white dwarfs, dubbed the Q branch, have much higher average velocities than models indicate they should have based on their temperatures, a finding that suggests that the Q-branch white dwarfs are older than previously thought. Some process is slowing down the cooling.

I found this on NewsBreak: New models of Big Bang show that visible universe and invisible dark matter co-evolved.

Physicists have long theorized that our universe may not be limited to what we can see. By observing gravitational forces on other galaxies, they’ve hypothesized the existence of “dark matter,” which would be invisible to conventional forms of observation.

I found this on NewsBreak: A new physics paper suggests that we may all be living in the ultimate 4X strategy game after all.

My money’s on the universe being like Civ 6, with its borked-n-bonkers AI.

An international team of astronomers and astrophysicists has confirmed the first known observance of a tidally locked super-Earth exoplanet. In their paper published in The Astrophysical Journal, the group describes the unique approach they took to confirm that the exoplanet LHS3844b is tidally locked and what the finding suggests about other planets in the galaxy.

Prior research has led astronomers to believe that some exoplanets are tidally locked, with one side that always faces the star they revolve around, but they have been unable until now to prove it. In this new effort, the research team picked a likely candidate and used a unique approach to study its attributes to ascertain its motion.

Prior research has shown that several moons in our solar system, including the one circling Earth, are tidally locked, always facing the planet they orbit. In this situation, their rotation period matches their orbital period—the result is a moon that always shows the same side to its planet. For this reason, the Earth’s moon has what has commonly been described as a “dark side”—the side we never see. Tidal locking is due to gravitational forces between a moon and its planet—or a planet and its star.

But not in the Einstein/Newtonian Lambda-cold-dark-matter model

This post is based on the research paper by Mazurenko, Banik, Kroupa & Haslbauer (2023, MNRAS). Sergij Mazurenko is an undergraduate physics student at the University of Bonn, and Indranil Banik was an Alexander-von-Humboldt Fellow with us until recently and is currently at the University of St. Andrews. Moritz Haslbauer is a finishing PhD student at the University of Bonn who has been contributing to The Dark Matter Crisis (DMC). The press release from the University of Bonn on this matter can be read here (and from Charles University in Prague here) and a description can also be found in The Conversation.

Three years after introducing its second-generation “neuromorphic” computer chip, Intel on Wednesday announced the company has assembled 1,152 of the parts into a single, parallel-processing system called Hala Point, in partnership with the US Department of Energy’s Sandia National Laboratories.

The Hala Point system’s 1,152 Loihi 2 chips enable a total of 1.15 billion artificial neurons, Intel said, “and 128 billion synapses distributed over 140,544 neuromorphic processing cores.” That is an increase from the previous Intel multi-chip Loihi system, debuted in 2020, called Pohoiki Springs, which used just 768 Loihi 1 chips.

Sandia Labs intends to use the system for what it calls “brain-scale computing research,” to solve problems in areas of device physics, computer architecture, computer science, and informatics.

A veteran NASA scientist says his company has tested a propellantless propulsion drive technology that produced one Earth gravity of thrust.

Superconductivity continues to revolutionize technology in so many ways. While some technological advances rely on finding ways to encourage zero-resistance currents at warmer temperatures, engineers are also considering better ways of fine-controlling the super-efficient flow of electrons.

Unfortunately, many processes that would work just fine for run-of-the-mill electronics, such as the application of external magnetic fields, risk interfering with the properties that make superconductors so efficient.

An international team of scientists has succeeded in confining an exotic state of superconductivity that’s controlled by strong magnetism rather than disrupted by it.