Lifeboat Foundation

A star wiggling oddly around in space may be the signpost to one of the most sought-after objects in the galaxy.

Some 5,825 light-years from Earth, a red giant star has been spotted moving as though in a slow orbital dance with a binary companion. The problem? There’s absolutely no light coming from the place where the binary companion should be.

It gets more interesting. Based on the behavior of the red giant, astronomers led by Song Wang of the Chinese Academy of Sciences have determined that the mass of the invisible object is just 3.6 times the mass of the Sun. There’s only one thing it could be: a black hole, one with a petite size that’s smack bang in the middle of a mysterious void in the data known as the lower mass gap.

Nobel Laureate Roger Penrose joins Brian Greene to explore some of his most iconic insights into the nature of time, black holes, and cosmological evolution.

Moderator: Brian Greene.
Participant: Sir Roger Penrose.

Continue reading “Roger Penrose: Time, Black Holes, and the Cosmos” »

The Dark Matter is built with incredibly complex technology. “Raxial Thrust” is a new term coined to describe the way the Dark Matter engine works. “Raxial” is a portmanteau of “radial” and “axial”. Typically, electric motors use one or the other. Radial motors have the magnetic coils of the electric motor perpendicular to the axis of its rotation. Axial motors are built with flux parallel to the rotation. Both have advantages and disadvantages.

Radial are typically easier to build and maintain, but axial are smaller and can create more power by weight and volume. Koenigsegg has figured out a way to do both in one motor. Since they do not have to show us the inside of their Dark Matter, we don’t exactly understand how they’ve done this, but clearly, it is effective in generating power and torque. Despite this, the motor does not actually revolve at a very high rate. The website shows a max RPM of 8,500.

Koenigsegg makes use of its own battery packs. It doesn’t build the cells from the ground up, but it creates the system that actually delivers the power to the car. For the Gemera, it has created batteries that have dielectric oil (an insulator that will prevent unwanted electrical reactions) funneled directly into them as a cooling system. Most batteries on EVs now use airflow systems directly attached to the battery to cool them, but Koenigsegg has gone for a liquid approach instead. If it’s effective, it may become a more widespread approach to battery cooling technology.

An asteroid-mass primordial black hole flying near a planet could perturb the planet’s orbit by a detectable amount.

Gravitational-wave signals from black hole mergers could reveal the presence of “gravitational atoms”—black holes surrounded by clouds of axions or other light bosons.

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar famously stated that black holes are “the most perfect macroscopic objects there are in the Universe: The only elements in their construction are our concepts of space and time.” His observation relates to the fact that astrophysical black holes, as described by the Kerr spacetime, can be characterized by just two parameters: mass and spin. However, things might get more complex. Theorists have predicted that if a bosonic field interacts with a Kerr black hole, perturbations in the field can grow to form a cloud around the black hole, creating a “gravitational atom,” in which the bosons surrounding the black hole behave somewhat like the electrons surrounding an atomic nucleus [1] (Fig. 1). What’s more, if such a gravitational atom is part of a binary involving a second black hole, excitations and ionization processes akin to those occurring in hydrogen atoms may affect how the black hole binary evolves.

In 1971, English mathematical physicist and Nobel-prize winner Roger Penrose proposed how energy could be extracted from a rotating black hole. He argued that this could be done by building a harness around the black hole’s accretion disk, where infalling matter is accelerated to close to the speed of light, triggering the release of energy in multiple wavelengths.

Since then, multiple researchers have suggested that advanced civilizations could use this method (the Penrose Process) to power their civilization and that this represents a technosignature we should be on the lookout for.

Examples include John M. Smart’s Transcension Hypothesis, a proposed resolution to the Fermi Paradox where he suggested advanced intelligence may migrate to the region surrounding black holes to take advantage of the energy available.

Even though the strange behaviour we observe in the quantum realm isn’t part of our daily lives, simulations suggest it is likely our reality could be one of the many worlds in a quantum multiverse.

By Karmela Padavic-Callaghan

In a paper published in Physical Review Letters this week, physicists from Amsterdam and Copenhagen argue that close observations of merging black hole pairs may unveil information about potential new particles. The research combines several new discoveries made by UvA scientists over the past six years.

Some recent dark matter experiments have begun employing levitated optomechanical systems. Kilian et al. explored how levitated large-mass sensors and dark matter research intersect.

Levitated sensors are quantum technology platforms that use magnetic fields, electric fields, or light to levitate and manipulate particles, which become very sensitive to weak forces. These sensors are especially well suited for detecting candidates in regimes where current large-scale experiments suffer limitations, such as ultralight and certain hidden-sector candidates.

The authors discussed how these advantages make levitated sensors, including optically trapped silica nanoparticles, magnetically trapped ferromagnets, and levitated superconducting particles, ideal for detecting different dark matter candidates.