Lifeboat Foundation

Physicists have long puzzled over why there is more matter in the Universe than its flipped twin, antimatter. Without this imbalance, the two types of material would have canceled out, leaving nothing but a boring glow in the vast emptiness of space.

Somehow, at some point, something changed in the way the Universe works on a fundamental level, favoring the mirrored state – or parity – of one kind of ‘stuff’ over the other.

Continue reading “Signs of a Critical Imbalance in Physics Seen in The Arrangements of Galaxies” »

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Continue reading “Can We Move PLANET EARTH Across the Universe?” »

“It’s an interesting question to ask: Are there things other than a black hole” that “will give you a hint about what new physics could look like?” added Bah. “But before you get there, you need to know how to tell whether you have a black hole or not, and to do that you have some prototype examples of things that are not black holes to be able to compare.”

Black holes are among the most fascinating and puzzling objects ever observed in our universe. These massive compact entities have so much gravitational power that nothing, not even light, can escape beyond their borders, known as the event horizon. Scientists have imaged black holes with the Event Horizon Telescope and have captured the ripples that these objects make in spacetime, which are called gravitational waves.

An international team of scientists led by Professor Abhijit Chakraborty of the Physical Research Laboratory (PRL) in Ahmedabad identified the densest alien planet, 13 times the size of Jupiter.

This is the third exoplanet identified by PRL scientists. The discovery was detailed in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics Letters.

Scientists from India, Germany, Switzerland, and the United States utilised the indigenous PRL Advanced Radial-velocity Abu-sky Search spectrograph (PARAS) at Mt. Abu’s Gurushikhar Observatory to precisely determine the planet’s mass. The exoplanet weighs 14 g/cm3.

A planetary physicist at The University of Texas at Arlington is the lead author of a study that catalogs all known planet-hosting, triple-stellar systems—those having three or more stars with planets.

Manfred Cuntz, professor of physics, led the project, titled “An Early Catalog of Planet-hosting Multiple-star Systems of Order Three and Higher.” This study provides a thorough bibliographic assessment of planet-hosting, triple-stellar systems.

It was recently published in The Astrophysical Journal Supplements Series. Co-authors include UTA alumni G.E. Luke, Matthew Millard and Lindsey Boyle, as well as Shaan D. Patel, a doctoral-bound graduate student.

After three years of upgrading and waiting, due in part to the coronavirus pandemic, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory has officially resumed its hunt for the signatures of crashing black holes and neutron stars.

“Our LIGO teams have worked through hardship during the past two-plus years to be ready for this moment, and we are indeed ready,” Caltech physicist Albert Lazzarini, the deputy director of the LIGO Laboratory, said in a news release.

Continue reading “LIGO starts its fourth round of searching for gravitational waves and black holes” »

In a ground-breaking experiment, scientists from the University of Groningen, together with colleagues from the Dutch universities of Nijmegen and Twente and the Harbin Institute of Technology (China), have discovered the existence of a superconductive state that was first predicted in 2017.

They present evidence for a special variant of the FFLO superconductive state in the journal Nature. This discovery could have significant applications, particularly in the field of superconducting electronics.

The lead author of the paper is Professor Justin Ye, who heads the Device Physics of Complex Materials group at the University of Groningen. Ye and his team have been working on the Ising superconducting state. This is a special state that can resist magnetic fields that generally destroy superconductivity, and that was described by the team in 2015.

Using various space telescopes, an international team of astronomers have observed a recently detected luminous quasar known as SMSS J114447.77–430859.3, or J1144 for short. Results of the observational campaign, available in the July 2023 edition of Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, shed more light on the properties of this source.

Quasars, or quasi-stellar objects (QSOs) are active galactic nuclei (AGN) of very high luminosity, emitting electromagnetic radiation observable in radio, infrared, visible, ultraviolet and X-ray wavelengths. They are among the brightest and most distant objects in the known universe, and serve as fundamental tools for numerous studies in astrophysics as well as cosmology. For instance, quasars have been used to investigate the large-scale structure of the universe and the era of reionization. They also improved our understanding of the dynamics of supermassive black holes and the intergalactic medium.

J1144 was detected in June 2022 at a redshift of 0.83. It has a bolometric luminosity of about 470 quattuordecillion erg/s, which makes it the most luminous quasar over the last 9 billion years of cosmic history. It is also the optically brightest (unbeamed) quasar at a redshift greater than 0.4.

For generations, physicists were sure the laws of physics were perfectly symmetric. Until they weren’t.

Symmetry is a tidy and attractive idea that falls apart in our untidy universe. Indeed, since the 1960s, some kind of broken symmetry has been required to explain why there is more matter than antimatter in the universe—why, that is, that any of this exists at all.

But pinning down the source behind this existential symmetry violation, even finding proof of it, has been impossible.