Using the extinct niobium-92 atom, ETH researchers have been able to date events in the early solar system with greater precision than before. The study concludes that supernova explosions must have taken place in the birth environment of our sun.
On 21 May 2019, from a distance of 7 billion light-years away, our gravitational wave detectors were rocked by the most massive collision yet. From analysis of the signal, astronomers concluded that the detection was the result of two black holes smashing together, weighing in at 66 and 85 times the mass of the Sun respectively.
But what if it was something else? A new study offers a different interpretation of the event. It’s possible, according to an international team of astrophysicists, that the two objects were not black holes at all, but mysterious, theoretical objects called boson stars — potentially made up of elusive candidates for dark matter.
The gravitational wave event, called GW 190521, was a spectacular discovery. The object that resulted from the merger of the two objects would have been a black hole at around 142 times the mass of the Sun — within the intermediate mass range that no black hole had ever been detected before, called the black hole upper mass gap.
Researchers at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology created a black hole analogue to confirm two of Hawking’s most important predictions, that Hawking radiation arises from nothing (it’s spontaneous) and its intensity does not change over time (it’s stationary).
A new theoretical study has proposed a novel mechanism for the creation of supermassive black holes from dark matter. The international team find that rather than the conventional formation scenarios involving ‘normal’ matter, supermassive black holes could instead form directly from dark matter in high density regions in the centers of galaxies. The result has key implications for cosmology in the early Universe, and is published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
The cosmic microwave background, or CMB, is the electromagnetic echo of the Big Bang, radiation that has been traveling through space and time since the very first atoms were born 380000 years after our universe began. Mapping minuscule variations in the CMB tells scientists about how our universe came to be and what it’s made of.
To capture the ancient, cold light from the CMB, researchers use specialized telescopes equipped with ultrasensitive cameras for detecting millimeter-wavelength signals. The next-generation cameras will contain up to 100000 superconducting detectors. Fermilab scientist and University of Chicago Associate Professor Jeff McMahon and his team have developed a new type of metamaterials-based antireflection coating for the silicon lenses used in these cameras.
“There are at least half a dozen projects that would not be possible without these,” McMahon said.
The path to dark matter and other fundamental enigmas may be through a warped extra dimension, according to a new study that proposes a new theory of the universe.
A supercomputer presses the rewind button on the universe’s creation.
Cosmologists simulated 4000 versions of the universe in order to understand what its structure today tells us about its origins.
A new study of x-ray bursts from a local magnetar confirms the origin of a fast radio burst.
Every now and then there is a burst of radio light in the sky. It lasts for just milliseconds before fading. It’s known as a Fast Radio Burst (FRB), and they are difficult to observe and study. We know they are powerful bursts of energy, but we aren’t entirely sure what causes them.
The more we’ve learned about FRBs, the stranger they appear. Most occur outside our galaxy, but there are a few that seem to originate within the Milky Way. Most seem to appear at random in the sky, but a few of them are repeating FRBs. Some of them even repeat with surprising regularity. Because of this, astronomers generally think they can’t be caused by a cataclysmic event, such as the last radio burst of a neutron star as it collapses into a black hole.
Why so late, little neutrino?
Astronomers spot two highly delayed signals from two different black holes tearing apart stars in their vicinity.
Astronomers think they’ve finally detected the long-hidden, sought-after neutron star remnant at the center of the nearby Supernova 1987A.
Astronomers think they’ve detected long-hidden neutron star remnant at the central core of the nearby Supernova 1987A.
