Lifeboat Foundation

There is no “blanket of stars.” The night sky we all see has infinite depth. From Earth at night with naked eyes we mostly see the stars of our own galaxy, the Milky Way, but beyond is the entire universe. Using powerful telescopes it can be navigated and known. All you need is a map—and they keep getting better.

This week saw the release of the largest two-dimensional map of the sky ever made. It comes from the tenth data release from the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys, a six-year survey of nearly half the sky using telescopes at Kitt Peak in Arizona and the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile.

The Legacy Surveys— which can be explored online —is designed to create the most comprehensive map of the sky possible to help astronomers understand how the universe has expanded over the last 12 billion years. That’s critical to understanding “dark energy,” an unknown force that appears to be accelerating the universe’s expansion.

A group of physicists may have discovered that black holes are actually made of and not only that but they may be responsible for the expansion of the universe itself.

Links to the research findings:
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/acb704
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/acac2e

Scientists have proposed a way that the universe could stop expanding, ending in a ‘Big Crunch’ that resets space and time as we know it.

Recently an international collaboration of astronomers released the most accurate map yet of all the matter in the universe, to help to understand dark matter, and now this is being joined by the largest two-dimensional map of the entire sky, which can help in the study of dark energy. A data release from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) Legacy Imaging Survey shared the results from six years of scanning almost half of the sky, totaling one petabyte of data from three different telescopes.

The reason that such large-scale data is required to study dark energy and dark matter is that these can only be detected due to their effects on ordinary matter — so researchers need to look at many galaxies to track how these otherwise unseen forces are adding mass or affecting the interaction between galaxies. This particular map was created to help scientists identify 40 million target galaxies which will be studied as part of the DESI Spectroscopic Survey.

To make the map as comprehensive as possible, the researchers included data taken in the near-infrared wavelength as well as the visible light wavelength. That is important as the light from distant galaxies appears redshifted, or shifted toward the red end of the spectrum, due to the expansion of the universe. “The addition of near-infrared wavelength data to the Legacy Survey will allow us to better calculate the redshifts of distant galaxies, or the amount of time it took light from those galaxies to reach Earth,” explained one of the researchers, Alfredo Zenteno of NSF’s NOIRLab, in a statement.

An exploration of the concept of wormholes, new developments regarding them and how they might be useful for communication.

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Continue reading “The Strange Possibilities of Wormholes” »

Astronomers from the University of Texas and the University of Arizona have discovered a rapidly growing black hole in one of the most extreme galaxies known in the very early universe. The discovery of the galaxy and the black hole at its center provides new clues on the formation of the very first supermassive black holes. The new work is published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Using observations taken with the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA), a radio observatory sited in Chile, the team have determined that the galaxy, named COS-87259, containing this new supermassive black hole is very extreme, forming stars at a rate 1,000 times that of our own Milky Way and containing over a billion solar masses worth of interstellar dust. The galaxy shines bright from both this intense burst of star formation and the growing supermassive black hole at its center.

The black hole is considered to be a new type of primordial black hole—one heavily enshrouded by cosmic “dust,” causing nearly all of its light to be emitted in the mid-infrared range of the electromagnetic spectrum. The researchers have also found that this growing supermassive black hole (frequently referred to as an active galactic nucleus) is generating a strong jet of material moving at near light speed through the host galaxy.

A new study shows that extreme black holes could break the famous “no-hair” theorem, and in a way that we could detect.

The James Webb Space Telescope has made a shocking discovery. According to a new paper published in the journal Nature, astronomers have discovered enormous distant galaxies that some say shouldn’t exist. These enormous galaxies are believed to be some of the early galaxies that formed after the Big Bang, and their discovery by Webb has left many scratching their heads in confusion.

Astronomers have discovered a “runaway” black hole, potentially the first observational evidence that supermassive black holes can be ejected from their host galaxies. Astronomers have spotted a runaway supermassive black hole, seemingly ejected from its home galaxy and racing through space with a chain of stars trailing in its wake.