Lifeboat Foundation

While axions are not currently a proposed direct explanation for dark matter, they could’ve set the stage for the creation of dark matter in the early stages of our universe.

Scientists are undeniably excited by this third possibility, though they’re also urging restraint due to the other potential explanations.

“I’m trying to be calm here, but it’s hard not to be hyperbolic,” Neal Weiner, a particle theorist at New York University, who was not involved in the research, told The New York Times. “If this is real, calling it a game changer would be an understatement.”

There are galaxies shaped like jellyfish, galaxies that consume other galaxies, and galaxies that seem to lack the dark matter that pervades the rest of the universe. Here are the strangest galaxies in the universe.

“Our standard model of cosmology is based on an isotropic universe, one that is the same, statistically, in all directions,” says astrophysicist John Webb at the University of New South Wales about the universal constant which appears inconstant at the outer fringes of the cosmos, it occurs in only one direction…” That standard model itself is built upon Einstein’s theory of gravity, which itself explicitly assumes constancy of the laws of Nature. If such fundamental principles turn out to be only good approximations, the doors are open to some very exciting, new ideas in physics.”

Those looking forward to a day when science’s Grand Unifying Theory of Everything could be worn on a t-shirt may have to wait a little longer as astrophysicists continue to find hints that one of the cosmological constants is not so constant after all.

Continue reading “‘The Inconstant Universe’ --Weird Findings Point to a New Physics” »

Astronomers have used NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory to record material blasting away from the site of an exploded star at speeds faster than 20 million miles per hour. This is about 25,000 times faster than the speed of sound on Earth.

Kepler’s supernova remnant is the debris from a detonated star that is located about 20,000 light years away from Earth in our Milky Way galaxy. In 1604 early astronomers, including Johannes Kepler who became the object’s namesake, saw the supernova explosion that destroyed the star.

Continue reading “Kepler’s supernova remnant: Debris from stellar explosion not slowed after 400 years” »

Aug. 18 (UPI) — New research suggests harmful cosmic rays from a nearby supernova might have caused the extinction events that form the boundary between the Devonian-Carboniferous periods.

Around 360 million years ago, a lengthy period of biodiversity declines culminated in a series of extinction events that saw 19 percent of all families and 50 percent of all genera disappear.

Scientists have previously unearthed a diversity of Late Devonian plant spores that show evidence of being burnt by ultraviolet light, signs of a prolonged ozone-depletion event.

Astrophysical detectives point to a cosmic supernova explosion or explosions to explain ancient extinction events here on Earth.

Circa 2017

Imagine you took all sunlight that hits our planet at any given moment, and focussed it on one (unfortunate) piece of Earth the size of a thumbnail. Now times that blistering intensity by 100, and you’re beginning to understand the insanity of the world’s most powerful X-ray laser.

In a surprise result, scientists have focussed the full intensity of this laser onto a single molecule, and the aftermath has given rise to a phenomenon no one’s ever seen before — a molecular ‘black hole’, which consumes anything in its path.

Continue reading “The World’s Most Powerful X-Ray Laser Just Gave Rise to a ‘Molecular Black Hole’” »

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Astronomers have seen what appears to the first light ever detected from a black hole merger.

When two black holes spiral around each other and ultimately collide, they send out ripples in space and time called gravitational waves. Because black holes do not give off light, these events are not expected to shine with any light waves, or electromagnetic radiation. Graduate Center, CUNY astrophysicists K. E. Saavik Ford and Barry McKernan have posited ways in which a black hole merger might explode with light. Now, for the first time, astronomers have seen evidence of one of these light-producing scenarios. Their findings are available in the current issues of Physical Review Letters.

A team consisting of scientists from The Graduate Center, CUNY; Caltech’s Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF); Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC); and The American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) spotted what appears to be a flare of light from a pair of coalescing black holes. The event (called S190521g) was first identified by the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) and the European Virgo detector on May 21, 2019. As the black holes merged, jiggling space and time, they sent out gravitational waves. Shortly thereafter, scientists at ZTF — which is located at the Palomar Observatory near San Diego — reviewed their recordings of the same the event and spotted what may be a flare of light coming from the coalescing black holes.

Continue reading “Black hole collision may have exploded with light” »

It seems a fusion shield could survive a supernova explosion.

“That’s what makes this white dwarf unique — it did undergo nuclear burning, but stopped before it got to iron,” Gänsicke told Space.com.

“This star is unique because it has all the key features of a white dwarf but it has this very high velocity and unusual abundances that make no sense when combined with its low mass,” Boris Gänsicke, physics professor at the University of Warwick, UK, and lead author of a paper about the research published the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, said in a statement.

Continue reading “This Star Appears to Have Survived a Supernova” »