Lifeboat Foundation

“While there have been published doubts raised about the accuracy of some of this CMB data, taken at face value it appears we may not have the right understanding, and it changes how big the Hubble constant should be today,” Riess said at the time.

“This surprising finding may be an important clue to understanding those mysterious parts of the universe that make up 95% of everything and don’t emit light, such as dark energy, dark matter and dark radiation.” Given its breadth and scope, astronomers around the world have taken the findings of Riess and his colleagues very seriously. After all, in 2011 Riess had shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for the initial discovery that the universe wasn’t just expanding, but that the rate at which it was doing so was also increasing.

Erik Verlinde of the University of Amsterdam has spent much of his time since 2010 attempting to develop a totally new theory of gravity, one that explains such observations without the need to invoke the likes of dark matter and dark energy. This resulted in his theory of emergent gravity, so-called because gravity is not a fundamental force after all, but an emergent phenomenon, similar to temperature emerging from the movement of particles.

We can consider white holes and black holes to be the two sides of the same coin. A perfect pair of antonyms. White holes first found their place, like many others, in Einstein’s theory of relativity. But it was left just there until theorists began pondering over its existence quite recently.

What is a white hole?

Insight, a white hole looks exactly like a black hole. It has mass, probably a ring of dust and gas around it. But the similarities end there. According to Carlo Ravelli, a theoretical physicist at the Centre de Physique Theorique in France, “It’s only in the moment when things come out that you can say, ‘ah, this is a white hole,”.

There can be other kinds of black holes that trap other physical phenomena, like sound waves, and these kinds of black holes, known as sonic black holes, might be critical to understanding their light-consuming counterparts in the wider universe.

Most important of all, what can sonic black holes tell us about one of modern physics’ most contentious debates, the so-called Information Paradox? A recent study attempted to find out, and its results seem to make the problem more complicated, not less.

ESA’s Euclid mission has reached a new milestone in its development with successful testing of the telescope and instruments showing that it can operate and achieve the required performance in the extreme environment of space.

Euclid will study dark energy and dark matter. Whilst these cannot be seen directly by any telescope, their presence and influence can be inferred by observing the large scale distribution of galaxies in the universe.

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Riz Virk, the author of the new book The Simulated Multiverse, talks with GamesBeat’s Dean Takahashi about sci-fi and reality.

Unprecedent measurements confirm galaxies idle when they run out of cold gas.

New research, published in Nature and led by the University of Massachusetts Amherst, has just answered one of the fundamental questions about our universe: Why did some of the oldest, most massive galaxies go quiescent early in their formation? The answer, we now know, is because they ran out of cold gas.

The most massive galaxies in our universe formed incredibly early, just after the Big Bang.

Last year, physicists reported that an experimental dark matter detector picked up a strange signal that could hint at new physics, with several suspects highlighted. Now, Cambridge scientists have proposed an answer that wasn’t considered at the time – the experiment may have picked up the first direct detection of dark energy, the mysterious force that’s accelerating the expansion of the universe.

Although it’s thought to outnumber regular matter five to one, dark matter remains elusive. It doesn’t interact with light and seems to mostly make itself known through gravitational influence on cosmic scales, like stars, galaxies and galaxy clusters. But once in a while, a dark matter particle might bump into a regular matter particle in a way that we could detect, with the right equipment.

XENON1T was one version of that equipment. Running in Italy between 2016 and 2,018 the experiment was essentially a big tank full of liquid xenon, kept deep underground. The idea was that if a dark matter particle zipped through the tank, it would excite the xenon atoms to produce a flash of light and free electrons, which a suite of sensors can detect.

Thu, Sep 30 at 4 PM PDT.

Black holes are cosmic objects so small and dense that nothing, not even light, can escape their gravitational pull. Until recently, no one had ever seen what a black hole actually looked like. Einstein’s theories predict that a distant observer should see a ring of light encircling the black hole, which forms when radiation emitted by infalling hot gas is lensed by the extreme gravity near the event horizon. The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) is a global array of radio dishes, linked together by a network of atomic clocks to form an Earth-sized virtual telescope that can resolve the nearest supermassive black holes where this ring feature may be measured. On April 10th, 2,019 the EHT project reported success: we imaged a black hole, and saw the predicted strong gravitational lensing that confirms the theory of General Relativity at the boundary of a black hole. This talk will cover how this was accomplished, details of the first results, as well as future directions that will enable real-time black hole movies.

About Dr. Shep Doeleman:

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“Having invented the gods, perhaps we can turn into them.”
–Alan Harrington, The Immortalist.

Continue reading “THEOGENESIS: Transdimensional Propagation & Universal Expansion” »