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When a black hole is actively feeding, something strange can be observed: enormously powerful jets of plasma shoot from its poles, at velocities approaching light speed.

Given the intense gravitational interactions at play, exactly how those jets form is a mystery. But now, using computer simulations, a team of physicists has hit upon an answer — particles seeming to have “negative energy” extract energy from the black hole and redirect it to the jets.

And this theory has, for the first time, united two different and seemingly irreconcilable theories about how energy can be extracted from a black hole.

Circa 2014

We propose the new dark matter particle candidate—the “black hole atom,” which is an atom with the charged black hole as an atomic nucleus and electrons in the bound internal quantum states. As a simplified model we consider the central Reissner-Nordström black hole with the electric charge neutralized by the internal electrons in bound quantum states. For the external observers these objects would look like the electrically neutral Schwarzschild black holes. We suppose the prolific production of black hole atoms under specific conditions in the early universe.

O,.o.

Black holes may not end in a crushing singularity as previously thought, but rather open up passageways into whole other universes.

Michigan State University researchers have discovered that one of the most important reactions in the universe can get a huge and unexpected boost inside exploding stars known as supernovae.

This finding also challenges ideas behind how some of the Earth’s heavy elements are made. In particular, it upends a theory explaining the planet’s unusually high amounts of some forms, or isotopes, of the elements ruthenium and molybdenum.

“It’s surprising,” said Luke Roberts, an assistant professor at the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams and the Department of Physics and Astronomy, at MSU. Roberts implemented the computer code that the team used to model the environment inside a supernova. “We certainly spent a lot of time making sure the results were correct.”

MIT grad student Chiara Salemi and Professor Lindley Winslow use the ABRACADABRA instrument to reveal insights into dark matter.

On the first floor of MIT’s Laboratory for Nuclear Science hangs an instrument called “A Broadband/Resonant Approach to Cosmic Axion Detection with an Amplifying B-field Ring Apparatus,” or ABRACADABRA for short. As the name states, ABRACADABRA’s goal is to detect axions, a hypothetical particle that may be the primary constituent of dark matter, the unseen and as-of-yet unexplained material that makes up the bulk of the universe.

A new survey of our galaxy by astronomers with VERA in Japan has shown that Earth is both moving faster and is closer to the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy than previously thought. But don’t worry, our planet is safe!

Extremely light and weakly interacting particles may play a crucial role in cosmology and in the ongoing search for dark matter. Unfortunately, however, these particles have so far proved very difficult to detect using existing high-energy colliders. Researchers worldwide have thus been trying to develop alternative technologies and methods that could enable the detection of these particles.

Over the past few years, collaborations between particle and atomic physicists working at different institutes worldwide have led to the development of a new technique that could be used to detect interactions between very light bosons and neutrons or electrons. Light bosons, in fact, should change the energy levels of electrons in atoms and ions, a change that could be detectable using the technique proposed by these teams of researchers.

Using this method, two different research groups (one at Aarhus University in Denmark and the other at Massachusetts Institute of Technology) recently performed experiments aimed at gathering hints of the existence of dark bosons, elusive particles that are among the most promising dark matter candidates or mediators to a dark sector. Their findings, published in Physical Review Letters, could have important implications for future dark matter experiments.

An antimatter laser can turn matter in the black hole into energy.

Invisible object has two companion stars visible to the naked eye.

Continue reading “Astronomers Discover Hidden Black Hole ‘Near’ Earth – Closest Ever Found to Our Solar System” »

Images from the Survey of the MAgellanic Stellar History (SMASH) reveal a striking family portrait of our galactic neighbors—the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. The images represent a portion of the second data release from the deepest, most extensive survey of the Magellanic Clouds. The observations consist of roughly 4 billion measurements of 360 million objects.

A sprawling portrait of two astronomical galactic neighbors presents a new perspective on the swirls of stars, gas, and dust making up the nearby dwarf galaxies known as the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds—a pair of dwarf satellite galaxies to our Milky Way. While this isn’t the first survey to map these nearby cosmic siblings—the Survey of the MAgellanic Stellar History (SMASH) is the most extensive survey yet.

Continue reading “Dark energy camera snaps deepest photo yet of galactic siblings” »