Lifeboat Foundation

The image and the data behind it may help astronomers solve a dusty dilemma.

The first observation of collider neutrinos at the LHC paves the way for exploring new physics scenarios.

Although neutrinos are produced abundantly in collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), until now no neutrinos produced in such a way had been detected. Within just nine months of the start of LHC Run 3 and the beginning of its measurement campaign, the FASER collaboration changed this picture by announcing its first observation of collider neutrinos at this year’s electroweak session of the Rencontres de Moriond. In particular, FASER observed muon neutrinos and candidate events of electron neutrinos. “Our statistical significance is roughly 16 sigma, far exceeding 5 sigma, the threshold for a discovery in particle physics,” explains FASER’s co-spokesperson Jamie Boyd.

In addition to its observation of neutrinos at a particle collider, FASER presented results on searches for dark photons. With a null result, the collaboration was able to set limits on previously unexplored parameter space and began to exclude regions motivated by dark matter. FASER aims to collect up to ten times more data over the coming years, allowing more searches and neutrino measurements.

To say that the formation of the earliest galaxies a few hundred million years after the Big Bang was a momentous occasion is an understatement. Since astronomers first proposed they were their own “island universes” a century ago, the line of galaxies we have been able to detect has been pushed further and further away and further and further back into the history of the universe—all the way back to the first era of the emergence of galaxies.

This week, a new candidate for the earliest galaxy — and the earliest to be confirmed spectroscopically — has been identified, dubbed JADES-GS-Z13-0. It formed just 320 million years after the Big Bang, when the intergalactic medium was still made up of murky, neutral hydrogen. A pair of studies published this week in Nature give a peek at not just the most distant galaxy yet discovered, but the processes that have shaped matter in the Universe ever since.

The four distant galaxies were discovered as part of a collaboration between two teams using two different instruments on JWST. Beginning in the early 2000s, the Great Observatories Origins Deep Surveyor (GOODS) used the Hubble and Spitzer Space Telescopes along with the Chandra and Newton X-ray Observatories and various ground-based telescopes to image two sections of the sky as deeply as possible.

This could be some sorta civilization moving itself in space.

The Hubble Space Telescope has spotted a runaway supermassive black hole racing through space followed by a tail of infant stars 200,000 light-years long.

Unique object appeared to be scratches on Hubble images A “runaway” black hole shooting through the universe is like nothing ever seen, scientists have said. The object first appeared as “scratches” on images from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. But scientists now believe that it is a black hole, thrown out of its home galaxy and tearing through the cosmos, leaving a trail of stars in its wake.

Simulating a wormhole has long been a goal in quantum physics. But current quantum computers don’t have enough qubits to teleport particles.

Once confined to the pages of science fiction, they are said to create shortcuts for long journeys across the universe.

Scientists have found they may magnify light by a factor of 100,000 — which is key to finding the strange tunnels.

Albert Einstein predicted their existence more than a century ago in his theory of general relativity.

A synthetic analog of a black hole could tell us a thing or two about an elusive radiation theoretically emitted by the real thing.

Using a chain of atoms in single-file to simulate the event horizon of a black hole, a team of physicists observed the equivalent of what we call Hawking radiation – particles born from disturbances in the quantum fluctuations caused by the black hole’s break in spacetime.

This, they say, could help resolve the tension between two currently irreconcilable frameworks for describing the Universe: the general theory of relativity, which describes the behavior of gravity as a continuous field known as spacetime; and quantum mechanics, which describes the behavior of discrete particles using the mathematics of probability.

Black holes are found throughout our universe. However, astronomers have discovered two new black holes close to Earth that have raised some eyebrows. While discovering black holes near Earth isn’t unusual, these two holes are much further from their stars than expected.

This has presented some questions for astronomers because it differs from how these binary systems are usually set up. Normally, when a black hole and a star share a system, they are known as binary systems, and the black hole usually eats away at the star.

That eating of the star is what makes the black holes much easier to spot, as they give off high-energy readings. However, black holes like these found close to Earth that are further from their star are “dark,” not creating high bursts of energy because they aren’t eating away at their star.