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Archive for the ‘cosmology’ category: Page 293

Mar 18, 2020

Research team discovers path to razor-sharp black hole images

Posted by in category: cosmology

Last April, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) sparked international excitement when it unveiled the first image of a black hole. Today, a team of researchers have published new calculations that predict a striking and intricate substructure within black hole images from extreme gravitational light bending.

“The image of a black hole actually contains a nested series of rings,” explains Michael Johnson of the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard and Smithsonian (CfA). “Each successive ring has about the same diameter but becomes increasingly sharper because its light orbited the black hole more times before reaching the observer. With the current EHT image, we’ve caught just a glimpse of the full complexity that should emerge in the image of any black hole.”

Because black holes trap any photons that cross their event horizon, they cast a shadow on their bright surrounding emission from hot infalling gas. A “photon ring” encircles this shadow, produced from light that is concentrated by the strong gravity near the black hole. This photon ring carries the fingerprint of the black hole—its size and shape encode the mass and rotation or “spin” of the black hole. With the EHT images, black hole researchers have a new tool to study these extraordinary objects.

Mar 15, 2020

Researchers find gravitational wave candidates from binary black hole mergers in public LIGO/Virgo data

Posted by in categories: cosmology, physics

Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute; AEI) in Hannover together with international colleagues have published their second Open Gravitational-wave Catalog (2-OGC). They used improved search methods to dig deeper into publicly available data from LIGO’s and Virgo’s first and second observation runs. Apart from confirming the ten known binary black hole mergers and one binary neutron star merger, they also identify four promising black hole merger candidates, which were missed by initial LIGO/Virgo analyses. These results demonstrate the value of searches in public LIGO/Virgo data by research groups independent of the LIGO/Virgo collaborations. The research team also makes available its complete catalogue in addition to detailed analysis of more than a dozen possible binary black hole mergers.

“We incorporate cutting edge methods,” says Alexander Nitz, a staff scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute) in Hannover, who led the international research team. “Our improvements enable discovering fainter binary black hole mergers: the four additional signals show that this works!”

The results were published in The Astrophysical Journal today.

Mar 14, 2020

Ancient Supermassive Black Hole Has Its Particle Beam Aimed Right at Earth

Posted by in categories: cosmology, particle physics

Maybe could use a higgs field to deflect it or aim it away or use a higgs laser to destroy the black hole.


Astronomers have discovered the existence of a supermassive black hole that looks to be the oldest and most distant of its kind we’ve ever encountered – and it just happens to be aiming its bright particle beam directly at Earth.

The newly found supermassive black hole – called PSO J030947.49+271757.31 – is the most distant blazar ever observed, researchers say. That conclusion is based on the wavelength signature of the object’s redshift, a phenomenon scientists can use to measure the distance of light-emitting sources in space.

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Mar 13, 2020

Slime Mold Simulations Map Dark Matter Holding Universe Together

Posted by in categories: biological, cosmology, evolution

The behavior of one of nature’s humblest creatures is helping astronomers probe the largest structures in the universe.

The single-cell organism, known as slime mold (Physarum polycephalum), builds complex filamentary networks in search of food, finding near-optimal pathways to connect different locations. In shaping the universe, gravity builds a vast cobweb structure of filaments tying galaxies and clusters of galaxies together along faint bridges hundreds of millions of light-years long. There is an uncanny resemblance between the two networks: one crafted by biological evolution, and the other by the primordial force of gravity.

The cosmic web is the large-scale backbone of the cosmos, consisting primarily of the mysterious substance known as dark matter and laced with gas, upon which galaxies are built. Dark matter cannot be seen, but it makes up the bulk of the universe’s material. The existence of a web-like structure to the universe was first hinted at in the 1985 Redshift Survey conducted at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Since those studies, the grand scale of this filamentary structure has grown in subsequent sky surveys. The filaments form the boundaries between large voids in the universe.

Mar 10, 2020

Solved: The mystery of the expansion of the universe

Posted by in categories: cosmology, physics

The Earth, solar system, the entire Milky Way and the few thousand galaxies closest to us move in a vast “bubble” that is 250 million light years in diameter, where the average density of matter is half as high as for the rest of the universe. This is the hypothesis advanced by a theoretical physicist from the University of Geneva (UNIGE) to solve a conundrum that has been splitting the scientific community for a decade: At what speed is the universe expanding? Until now, at least two independent calculation methods have arrived at two values that are different by about 10% with a deviation that is statistically irreconcilable. This new approach, which is set out in the journal Physics Letters B, erases this divergence without making use of any “new physics.”

The has been expanding since the Big Bang occurred 13.8 billion years ago—a proposition first made by the Belgian canon and physicist Georges Lemaître (1894−1966), and first demonstrated by Edwin Hubble (1889−1953). The American astronomer discovered in 1929 that every galaxy is pulling away from us, and that the most distant galaxies are moving the most quickly. This suggests that there was a time in the past when all the galaxies were located at the same spot, a time that can only correspond to the Big Bang. This research gave rise to the Hubble-Lemaître law, including the Hubble constant (H0), which denotes the universe’s rate of expansion. The best H0 estimates currently lie around 70 (km/s)/Mpc (meaning that the universe is expanding 70 kilometers a second more quickly every 3.26 million light years). The problem is that there are two conflicting methods of calculation.

Mar 9, 2020

Type VII

Posted by in categories: cosmology, futurism

A type V II or K7 civilization would travel, transcend and ultimately oversee or ‘’be’’ the Omniverse which is the collection of every single universe, multiverse, megaverse, paraverse, dimension (alternate or pocket) and realm. Everything is in the Omniverse, and there is only one Omniverse.

It is likely that such power would come from an individual rather than a civilization, as the civilization would have transcended and merged into a single mind that would encompass all thoughts and all timelines, thus being omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient. This is the Creator: a god above all gods, responsible for all of existence, past and future.

Retrieved from “https://kardashev.fandom.com/wiki/Type_VII?oldid=787”.

Mar 7, 2020

Researchers create portable black hole

Posted by in categories: cosmology, physics, transportation

Essentially from a disposal device to even warp drive hoverboards to even like gravity field control to even like hovering spaceships.


Physicists have created a black hole for light that can fit in your coat pocket. Their device, which measures just 22 centimetres across, can suck up microwave light and convert it into heat.

The hole is the latest clever device to use ‘metamaterials’, specially engineered materials that can bend light in unusual ways. Previously, scientists have used such metamaterials to build ‘invisibility carpets’ and super-clear lenses. This latest black hole was made by Qiang Chen and Tie Jun Cui of Southeast University in Nanjing, China, and is described in a paper on the preprint server ArXiv1.

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Mar 7, 2020

Physicists have narrowed the mass range for hypothetical dark matter axions

Posted by in categories: cosmology, particle physics

In two new studies, scientists search for axions within new mass ranges but the particles remain elusive.

Mar 6, 2020

Scientists think they’ve finally figured out dark matter

Posted by in categories: cosmology, particle physics

When astronomers gaze into space they can see many different things. Galaxies, stars, and even black holes can be spotted from our place here on Earth. However, one of the most abundant types of matter in the universe can’t actually be seen at all, or at least we’ve yet to invent the means to do so.

Dark matter may account for over three-quarters of all matter in the universe, but it can’t be observed directly. Instead, scientists have to infer its existence based on how other objects in the cosmos react to its gravity. But what is it, and will we ever be able to explain its origins? A new study by researchers at the University of York attempts to do just that, offering a potential explanation for what dark matter really is.

The researchers say that the secret of dark matter may rest in a type of particle called a d-star hexaquark. As SciTechDaily notes, it’s a particle made up of six quarks, which are the tiny bits that make up protons and neutrons, but because of their arrangement in a d-star, they are more versatile.

Mar 6, 2020

Did this newfound particle form the universe’s dark matter?

Posted by in categories: cosmology, particle physics

Researchers think that a newly identified subatomic particle may have formed the universe’s dark matter right after the Big Bang, approximately 13.8 billion years ago.

While scientists have determined that up to 80% of the matter in the universe could be dark matter, our understanding of what the mysterious substance might be is still lacking, as no one has ever directly observed it.