Lifeboat Foundation

Similar to human teenagers, teenage galaxies are awkward, experience growth spurts and enjoy heavy metal — nickel, that is.

A Northwestern University-led team of astrophysicists has just analyzed the first results from the CECILIA (Chemical Evolution Constrained using Ionized Lines in Interstellar Aurorae) Survey, a program that uses NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to study the chemistry of distant galaxies.

According to the early results, so-called “teenage galaxies” — which formed two-to-three billion years after the Big Bang — are unusually hot and contain unexpected elements, like nickel, which are notoriously difficult to observe.

When galaxies collide, their supermassive black holes enter into a gravitational dance, gradually orbiting each other ever closer until eventually merging. We know they merge because we see the gravitational beasts that result, and we have detected the gravitational waves they emit as they inspiral. But the details of their final consummation remain a mystery. Now a new paper published on the pre-print server arXiv suggests part of that mystery can be solved with a bit of dark matter.

Just as the famous three-body problem has no general analytical solution for Newtonian gravity, the two-body problem has no general solution in general relativity. So, we have to resort to computer simulations to model how black holes orbit each other and eventually merge.

For binary black holes that are relatively widely separated, our simulations work really well, but when black holes are close to each other things get complicated. Einstein’s equations are very nonlinear, and modeling the dynamics of strongly interacting black holes is difficult.

Researchers investigate whether dark matter particles actually are produced inside a jet of standard model particles.

The existence of dark matter is a long-standing puzzle in our universe. Dark matter makes up about a quarter of our universe, yet it does not interact significantly with ordinary matter. The existence of dark matter has been confirmed by a series of astrophysical and cosmological observations, including in the stunning recent pictures from the James Webb Space Telescope. However, up to date, no experimental observation of dark matter has been reported. The existence of dark matter has been a question that high energy and astrophysicists around the world have been investigating for decades.

Advancements in Dark Matter Research.

Author: Sharika Dhakappa The Big Bang is the most widely accepted theory of how the universe originated. Most physicists believe that the tremendously large universe we observe today began as a tiny, dense point. If the evolution of the universe till today were to be depicted as a movie, the Big Bang would be the beginning of it. We do not yet know what came before the Big Bang or whether that is even a meaningful question to ask. The cosmic movie would run for 13.8 billion years which is the current age of the universe as estimated by the WMAP satellite.

Now that’s forward thinking but it’ll be a long while. But that’s science!

Nothing escapes black holes, but over the decades researchers have worked out ways to get some energy out of them. Some happen naturally, and some energy can be stolen in clever ways. Now, researchers have worked out novel approaches to use black holes as power sources, suggesting that they can be used as either batteries or nuclear reactors.

The assumption of this study is a Schwarzschild black hole – one that has no electric charge or angular momentum. So, it’s neutral and it doesn’t spin. By dropping charged particles on it, the black holes can be made to have a static electric field – and suddenly, you have the makings of a battery.

Continue reading “Black Holes Could Be Used As Batteries Or Nuclear Reactors” »

This could solve a conundrum that’s been plaguing astronomers for almost half a century.

Instead of a single Big Bang that brought the universe into existence billions of years ago, cosmologists are starting to suspect there may have been a second transformative event that could explain the vast abundance of dark matter in the universe.

As New Scientist reports, our recent glimpses into early moments of the universe, just millions of years after the Big Bang, could allow us to gain new insights into this “dark” Big Bang, which could solve a conundrum that’s been plaguing astronomers for almost half a century.

Continue reading “Scientists Say There May Have Been a Second Big Bang” »

Physicists from the Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) have been conducting research on the matter constituting the atomic nucleus utilizing the world’s three most powerful particle accelerators. Their focus has been on mapping the “primordial soup” that filled the universe in the first millionth of a second following its inception.

Intriguingly, their measurements showed that the movement of observed particles bears resemblance to the search for prey of marine predators, the patterns of climate change, and the fluctuations of stock market.

In the immediate aftermath of the Big Bang, temperatures were so extreme that atomic nuclei could not exists, nor could nucleons, their building blocks. Hence, in this first instance the universe was filled with a “primordial soup” of quarks and gluons.

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) recently used its powerful Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) to peer into the very center of our Milky Way Galaxy, revealing stunning details in a star-forming region known as Sagittarius C (Sgr C) like never before, which includes approximately 500,000 in this single image. Sgr C is located approximately 300 light-years from the exact center of the Milky Way known as Sagittarius A*, which is a supermassive black hole. For context, the Milky Way is approximately 105,000 light-years across, so Sgr C being only 300 light-years from the center of the Milky Way is extremely close.

“The galactic center is a crowded, tumultuous place. There are turbulent, magnetized gas clouds that are forming stars, which then impact the surrounding gas with their outflowing winds, jets, and radiation,” said Dr. Rubén Fedriani, who is a Juan de la Cierva Postdoctoral Fellow at the Instituto Astrofísica de Andalucía in Spain and a co-investigator of the project. “Webb has provided us with a ton of data on this extreme environment, and we are just starting to dig into it.”

With a gravitational field so strong that not even light can escape its grip, black holes are probably the most interesting and bizarre objects in the universe.

Due to their extreme properties, a theoretical description of these celestial bodies is impossible within the framework of Newton’s classical theory of gravity. It requires the use of general relativity, the theory proposed by Einstein in 1915, which treats gravitational fields as deformations in the fabric of space-time.

Black holes are usually formed from the collapse of massive stars during their final stage of evolution. Therefore, when a black hole is born, its mass does not exceed a few dozen solar masses.