Lifeboat Foundation

Euclid is ESA’s mission to shed light on dark matter and dark energy, but teams at the Agency’s mission control centre in Darmstadt, Germany, are also in the dark. A series of problems have befallen the mission in pre-launch simulations.

Currently about halfway through the Euclid simulations campaign, the key focus in the Main Control Room is the Launch and Early Orbit Phase (LEOP) and spacecraft commissioning.

These are the two most critical moments in a mission’s life; as it wakes up after the rigours of launch, makes its first manoeuvres towards its target destination and as its instruments are commissioned.

Even space and time if it’s quantum.

What will be the ultimate fate of our universe? There are a number of theories and possibilities, but at present the most likely scenario seems to be that the universe will continue to expand, most mass will eventually find its way into a black hole, and those black holes will slowly evaporate into Hawking Radiation, resulting in what is called the “heat death” of the universe. Don’t worry, this will likely take 1.7×10¹⁰⁶ years, so we got some time.

But what about objects, like stellar remnants, that are not black holes? Will the ultimate fate of the universe still contain some neutron stars and cold white dwarfs that managed to never get sucked up by a black hole? To answer this question we have to back up a bit and talk about Hawking Radiation.

Continue reading “Everything Will Evaporate” »

An international team of astrophysicists has discovered hundreds of mysterious structures in the centre of the Milky Way.

The one-dimensional cosmic threads are made up of hundreds of horizontal or radial filaments, slender, elongated bodies of luminous gas that potentially originated a few million years ago — and seem to be pointing the direction of the black hole.

“I was actually stunned when I saw these. We had to do a lot of work to establish that we weren’t fooling ourselves,” added Yusef-Zadeh, who’s also a member of the Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics.

Joscha Bach is a cognitive scientist focusing on cognitive architectures, consciousness, models of mental representation, emotion, motivation and sociality.

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Continue reading “Joscha Bach: Time, Simulation Hypothesis, & Existence” »

Some of the most violent cosmic collisions occur silently in the vacuum of space, but with the right instrumental ears, we can still hear it happen. Here’s how.

A recently discovered formation of galaxies spanning 3.3 billion light-years is one of the largest known structures in the universe, contradicting some of the most fundamental beliefs of astronomers about the cosmos. The Giant Arc is composed of galaxies, galaxy clusters, and a significant amount of gas and dust. It is located 9.2 billion light-years away and covers approximately one-fifteenth of the visible universe.

The discovery was “fortuitous,” according to Alexia Lopez, a doctoral candidate in cosmology at the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan) in the United Kingdom. Lopez was creating maps of the night sky using light from around 120,000 quasars, which are the bright centres of galaxies where supermassive black holes consume matter and generate energy.

By measuring magnesium’s imprints, Lopez could calculate the distance to the intervening gas and dust, as well as the composition of the substance. The quasars were used as “spotlights in a dark room,” illuminating the intervening matter, according to Lopez. A structure began to emerge in the middle of the cosmic maps, a massive arc that was an indication of the Giant Arc.

If I were a brilliant physicist, I would have written this.

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Continue reading “I don’t believe in free will. This is why” »

The quantum fluctuations that pervade empty space spontaneously give birth to pairs of particles and antiparticles. Ordinarily, these pairs annihilate so promptly that their existence is virtual. But a powerful field can pull a pair’s members apart for long enough that their existence becomes real. In 1951 Julian Schwinger calculated how strong an electric field needs to be to beget electron–positron pairs. Now Michael Wondrak and his colleagues of Radboud University in the Netherlands have proposed that particle pairs can be brought into existence by the immense gravitational tidal forces around a black hole [1].

Wondrak and his colleagues considered all the paths a pair of virtual particles could take during their brief existence. If the vacuum is stable, all pairs that are created are also destroyed. But a strong field destabilizes the vacuum, makes some paths more likely than others, and leads to a deficit of pairs that recombine. The deficit is balanced by a net outflow of real particles, which, in the case of a black hole’s gravitational field, leads to the black hole’s eventual evaporation.

The theorists’ approach is sufficiently general that it could reproduce not only Schwinger’s effect but also Stephen Hawking’s 1974 proposal that if a particle–antiparticle pair springs into virtual existence near a black hole’s event horizon, one member could fall in while the other escapes. What’s more, the researchers found that Hawking’s effect is a special case of a more general phenomenon. Pulling virtual particles into existence depends only on the stretching of spacetime wrought by a curved gravitational field and does not require an event horizon as Hawking originally suggested. One intriguing implication is that a neutron star, whose Schwarzschild radius lies beneath the stellar surface, can also beget particle pairs and decay.

They are known as ultra-fast outflows (UFOs), powerful space winds emitted by the supermassive black holes (SMBHs) at the center of active galactic nuclei (AGNs) – aka. “quasars.” These winds (with a fun name!) move close to the speed of light (relativistic speeds) and regulate the behavior of SMBHs during their active phase.

These gas emissions are believed to fuel the process of star formation in galaxies but are not yet well understood. Astronomers are interested in learning more about them to improve our understanding of what governs galactic evolution.

This is the purpose of the SUper massive Black hole Winds in the x-rAYS (SUBWAYS) project, an international research effort dedicated to studying quasars using the ESA’s XMM-Newton space telescope.