Lifeboat Foundation

It’s the end of the road for the protons this year after a magnificent performance from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). On Friday, the final beams of the 2017 proton run circulated in the LHC. The run ended, as it does every year, with a round up of the luminosity performance, the indicator by which the effectiveness of a collider is measured and on which the operators keep a constant eye.

The LHC has far exceeded its target for 2017. It has provided its two major experiments, ATLAS and CMS, with 50 inverse femtobarns of data, i.e. 5 billion million million collisions. The inverse femtobarn (fb-1) is the unit used to measure integrated luminosity, or the cumulative number of potential collisions over a given period.

This result is all the more remarkable because the machine experts had to overcome a serious setback. A vacuum problem in the beam pipe of a magnet cell limited the number of bunches that could circulate in the machine. Several teams were brought in to find a solution. Notably, the arrangement of the bunches in the beams was changed. After a few weeks, luminosity started to increase again.

Black holes – everyone knows that they exist, but nobody really knows what they are exactly.

A lot of laws of physics seem to be ignored or omitted when it comes to black holes, so there always seems to be a missing link when it comes to understanding how they work.

BLACK HOLE Vs WHITE HOLE

While black hole collisions produce almost no signature other than gravitational waves, the collision of neutron stars can be — and was — observed up and down the electromagnetic spectrum. “When neutron stars collide, all hell breaks loose,” said Frans Pretorius, a Princeton physics professor. “They start producing a tremendous amount of visible light, and also gamma rays, X-rays, radio waves…”

Princeton researchers have been studying neutron stars and their astronomical signatures for decades.

The core of a neutron star is such an extreme environment that physicists can’t agree on what happens inside. But a new space-based experiment — and a few more colliding neutron stars — should reveal whether neutrons themselves break down.

A supermassive dark opening isn’t the best place to live. Notwithstanding, there are physicists who think about existence existing in such outrageous spots and likely effectively occupied by some most progressive races – super outsiders. “Insides of super gigantic dark openings might be occupied by cutting edge human advancements living on planets with the third-kind circles,” Russian cosmologist Vyacheslav I. Dokuchaev at Moscow’s Institute for Nuclear Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences writes in his paper distributed in Cornell University’s online diary arXiv. “We could live inside a super gigantic dark gap in the long run… yet super-outsiders may have effectively outsmarted us,” claims Dokuchaev. His dubious hypothesis did not depend on sci-fi yet on Einstein’s speculations.

Physicists theorize that a new “traversable” kind of wormhole could resolve a baffling paradox and rescue information that falls into black holes.

The fifth observation of gravitational waves (GW) marks the beginning of a new era in astronomy. On August 17, 2017, the LIGO and VIRGO collaborations detected neutron stars merging for the first time and immediately alerted observatories around the world. In a matter of minutes the event had been located, another first for GW astronomy, and telescopes around the world begun studying it almost immediately.

The event observed, called GW170817, was produced in galaxy NGC 4993, located 130 million light-years from Earth. The gravitational signal was the strongest ever observed, lasting over 100 seconds, and it emitted a gamma-ray burst (GRBs), providing the first piece of evidence that GRBs are produced by neutron star collisions. It also provided the strongest evidence yet that neutron star mergers are responsible for the creation of the heaviest elements in the universe, like gold and platinum.

The importance of this observation cannot be understated. We are witnessing Galileo pointing the telescope up, or Henrietta Swann Leavitt working out the relation that will be used to measure cosmic distances. This observation brings a completely new dimension to astronomy. The seven papers published in Nature, Nature Astronomy, and Astrophysical Journal Letter are also record-breakers. They have over 45,000 authors – around 35 percent of all active astronomers in the world – who worked at the over 70 observatories that helped to make this discovery.

Continue reading “In A Historic Discovery, A Neutron Star Merger Has Been Observed For The Very First Time” »

Although it might not be observable, if our current theories of physics are correct, the multiverse must exist.

I don’t feel any different being 77 years old, though I know I’m not going to be here forever. On a day-to-day basis, I still write papers, solve physics problems and interact with other physicists. I may be the only one in the world that doesn’t know that I’m senile, but I continue to contribute to physics. The principle thing is that I am still having fun.

The next act: Life stories | A taste for life.