Archive for the ‘cosmology’ category: Page 244
Feb 6, 2021
Astronomers Can Predict When a Galaxy’s Star Formation Ends Based on the Shape and Size of its Disk
Posted by Genevieve Klien in categories: business, cosmology
Eventually, galaxies stop making new stars. But why did some stop so much sooner than others? Hint: black holes play a role.
A galaxy’s main business is star formation. And when they’re young, like youth everywhere, they keep themselves busy with it. But galaxies age, evolve, and experience a slow-down in their rate of star formation. Eventually, galaxies cease forming new stars altogether, and astronomers call that quenching. They’ve been studying quenching for decades, yet much about it remains a mystery.
A new study based on the IllustrisTNG simulations has found a link between a galaxy’s quenching and its stellar size.
Feb 5, 2021
Scientists narrow down the ‘weight’ of dark matter trillions of trillions of times
Posted by Genevieve Klien in categories: cosmology, materials
Scientists are finally figuring out how much dark matter — the almost imperceptible material said to tug on everything, yet emit no light — really weighs.
Jan 31, 2021
How Palomar’s Big Eye Telescope Forever Changed Astronomy
Posted by Bruce Dorminey in category: cosmology
Astronomy owes George Ellery Hale and the Palomar Observatory a great debt of gratitude for persevering with the construction of a telescope that forever changed cosmology.
Jan 28, 2021
BASE Antimatter Experiment opens up new possibilities in the search for cold dark matter
Posted by Quinn Sena in categories: cosmology, particle physics
BASE opens up new possibilities in the search for cold dark matter.
The Baryon Antibaryon Symmetry Experiment (BASE) at CERN’s Antimatter Factory has set new limits on how easily axion-like particles in a narrow mass range around 2.97 neV can turn into photons, the particles of light. BASE’s new result, published by Physical Review Letters, describes this pioneering method and opens up new experimental possibilities in the search for cold dark matter.
Jan 26, 2021
Astronomers Have Discovered a Star That Survived Being Swallowed by a Black Hole
Posted by Magaly Santiago in categories: cosmology, materials
I don’t think that star is the same after that one night stand.
When black holes swallow down massive amounts of matter from the space around them, they’re not exactly subtle about it. They belch out tremendous flares of X-rays, generated by the material heating to intense temperatures as it’s sucked towards the black hole, so bright we can detect them from Earth.
This is normal black hole behaviour. What isn’t normal is for those X-ray flares to spew forth with clockwork regularity, a puzzling behaviour reported in 2019 from a supermassive black hole at the centre of a galaxy 250 million light-years away. Every nine hours, boom — X-ray flare.
Jan 26, 2021
The ‘X17’ particle: Scientists may have discovered the fifth force of nature
Posted by Prem Vijaywargi in categories: cosmology, particle physics
A new paper suggests that the mysterious X17 subatomic particle is indicative of a fifth force of nature.
Jan 25, 2021
Wormholes may be lurking in the universe — and new studies are proposing ways of finding them
Posted by Jeffery Pacheco in categories: cosmology, information science, physics
Very interesting.
Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity profoundly changed our thinking about fundamental concepts in physics, such as space and time. But it also left us with some deep mysteries. One was black holes, which were only unequivocally detected over the past few years. Another was “wormholes” – bridges connecting different points in spacetime, in theory providing shortcuts for space travellers.
Jan 24, 2021
‘Spooky action at a distance’ could create a nearly perfect clock
Posted by Quinn Sena in categories: cosmology, physics
Physicists imagine a day when they will be able to design a clock that’s so precise, it can detect dark matter.
Jan 23, 2021
Physicists Spotted the Ghosts of Black Holes from Another Universe
Posted by Quinn Sena in categories: cosmology, physics
Circa 2018 o.o!
We are not living in the first universe. There were other universes, in other eons, before ours, a group of physicists has said. Like ours, these universes were full of black holes. And we can detect traces of those long-dead black holes in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) — the radioactive remnant of our universe’s violent birth.
At least, that’s the somewhat eccentric view of the group of theorists, including the prominent Oxford University mathematical physicist Roger Penrose (also an important Stephen Hawking collaborator). Penrose and his acolytes argue for a modified version of the Big Bang.
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