Lifeboat Foundation

Gravitationally speaking, the universe is a noisy place. A hodgepodge of gravitational waves from unknown sources streams unpredictably around space, including possibly from the early universe.

Scientists have been looking for signs of these early cosmological gravitational waves, and a team of physicists have now shown that such waves should have a distinct signature due to the behavior of quarks and gluons as the universe cools. Such a finding would have a decisive impact on which models best describe the universe almost immediately after the Big Bang. The study is published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

Scientists first found direct evidence for gravitational waves in 2015 at the LIGO gravitational wave interferometers in the US. These are singular (albeit tiny amplitude) waves from a particular source, such as the merger of two black holes, which wash past Earth. Such waves cause the 4-km perpendicular arms of the interferometers to change length by miniscule (but different) amounts, the difference detected by changes in the resulting interference pattern as laser beams travel back and forth in the detector’s arms.

When cosmic inflation came to an end, the hot Big Bang ensued as a result. If our cosmic vacuum state decays, could it all happen again?

Using the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT), astronomers have characterized a bright quasar, finding it to be not only the brightest of its kind but also the most luminous object ever observed. Quasars are the bright cores of distant galaxies, and supermassive black holes power them.

The black hole in this record-breaking quasar is growing in mass by the equivalent of one sun per day, making it the fastest-growing black hole to date.

The black holes powering quasars collect matter from their surroundings in an energetic process that emits vast amounts of light. So much so that quasars are some of the brightest objects in our sky, meaning even distant ones are visible from Earth. Generally, the most luminous quasars indicate the fastest-growing supermassive black holes.

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has spotted a rare and “extremely red” supermassive black hole lurking in one of the most ancient corners of the universe.

Astronomers suggest the vermilion black hole was the result of an expanding universe just 700 million years following the Big Bang, as detailed in a paper published this month in the journal Nature. Its colors are likely due to a thick layer of dust blocking much of its light, they posit.

While the cosmic monster was technically first discovered last year, researchers have now found that it’s far more massive than any other object of its kind in the area, making it a highly unusual find that could rewrite the way we understand how supermassive black holes grow relative to their host galaxies.

A team of researchers have claimed to have recently detected a telltale signature of stimulated Hawking radiation from a post-merger black hole. If the researchers’ analysis of gravitational wave data is correct, then they may have found the first evidence of Planck-scale quantum structure at the event horizon of a black hole (quantum horizons). The key signature of a non-classical horizon is an echo signal in the gravitational waves that are detected after the primary merger event of a binary black hole system. The evidence is tentative, but nevertheless tantalizing. Such research is pivotal to advancing our understanding of quantum effects in strong gravity, where novel aspects of the theory of quantum gravity may be hard at work, as exemplified in the remarkable research The Origin of Mass and the Nature of Gravity, in which physicist Nassim Haramein with his colleagues Dr. Olivier Alirol and Dr. Cyprien Guermonprez have demonstrated that the mass-energy of Hawking radiation from a baryonic-scale mini black hole exactly produces the observed rest-mass energy of the proton, demonstrating that the proton rest-mass is the result of quantum vacuum fluctuations of the electromagnetic field in strongly curved spacetime. The analysis of gravitational wave data for an echo signature, the smoking gun of quantum horizons and Hawking radiation, in conjunction with recent observation of Unruh radiation from accelerating electrons, is a significant confirmation of quantum gravitational predictions of unified physics, which we see in solutions like that of Haramein et al. are the solution to understanding the source of mass and force originating from quantum vacuum fluctuations in curved spacetime. It is a major advancement because Unruh-Hawking radiation can no longer be said to be “only theoretical”

In this article, realistic quantitative estimation of dark matter and dark energy considered as informational phenomena have been computed, thereby explaining certain anomalies and effects within the universe. Moreover, by the same conceptual approach, the cosmological constant problem has been reduced by almost 120 orders of magnitude in the prediction of the vacuum energy from a quantum point of view. We argue that dark matter is an informational field with finite and quantifiable negative mass, distinct from the conventional fields of matter of quantum field theory and associated with the number of bits of information in the observable universe, while dark energy is negative energy, calculated as the energy associated with dark matter.

Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers have discovered an “extremely red” supermassive black hole growing in the shadowy, early universe.

The red hue of the supermassive black hole, seen as it was around 700 million years after the Big Bang, is the result of the expanding universe. As the universe balloons outward in all directions, light traveling toward us gets “redshifted,” and the redshifted light in this case indicates a cloak of thick gas and dust shrouding the black hole.

In a new study, scientists have mapped magnetic fields in galaxy clusters, revealing the impact of galactic mergers on magnetic-field structures and challenging previous assumptions about the efficiency of turbulent dynamo processes in the amplification of these fields.

Galaxy clusters are large, gravitationally bound systems containing numerous galaxies, hot gas, and dark matter. They represent some of the most massive structures in the universe. These clusters can consist of hundreds to thousands of galaxies, bound together by gravity, and are embedded in vast halos of hot gas called the intracluster medium (ICM).

ICM, consisting mainly of ionized hydrogen and helium, is held together by the gravitational pull of the cluster itself. Magnetic fields in large-scale structures, like galaxy clusters, play pivotal roles in shaping astrophysical processes. They influence the ICM, impact galaxy formation and evolution, contribute to cosmic ray transport, participate in cosmic magnetization, and serve as tracers of large-scale structure evolution.

We are always making strides to unravel the mysteries of our universe. Now, a small observatory nestled in the Andes mountains of northern Chile has provided a snapshot of the cosmos in space. This one is clearer than we imagined.

The U.S. National Science Foundation Cosmology Large Angular Scale Surveyor (CLASS), spearheaded by astrophysicists from Johns Hopkins University, mapped a whopping 75 percent of the sky.