Lifeboat Foundation

Gravitational wave detectors have opened a new window to the universe by measuring the ripples in spacetime produced by colliding black holes and neutron stars, but they are ultimately limited by quantum fluctuations induced by light reflecting off of mirrors. LSU Ph.D. physics alumnus Jonathan Cripe and his team of LSU researchers have conducted a new experiment with scientists from Caltech and Thorlabs to explore a way to cancel this quantum backaction and improve detector sensitivity.

In a new paper in Physical Review X, the investigators present a method for removing quantum backaction in a simplified system using a mirror the size of a human hair and show the motion of the mirror is reduced in agreement with theoretical predictions. The research was supported by the National Science Foundation.

Despite using 40-kilogram mirrors for detecting passing gravitational waves, quantum fluctuations of light disturb the position of the mirrors when the light is reflected. As gravitational wave detectors continue to grow more sensitive with incremental upgrades, this quantum backaction will become a fundamental limit to the detectors’ sensitivity, hampering their ability to extract astrophysical information from gravitational waves.

Last year, for the first time, the world gazed in collective wonder at an actual direct image of a black hole’s shadow.

Now, looking back at earlier, more rudimentary images, scientists have found evidence that the ring around M87 has a wobble that makes it look as though it’s glittering.

Continue reading “The Giant Black Hole We Imaged For The First Time Now Appears to Be… Glittering” »

Researchers have confirmed rumors of a black hole collision that challenges our ideas about how black holes form.

Does human consciousness exist separate from matter, or is it embodied in the body –a critical player in anything that has to do with mind? “We are not thinking machines that feel; rather, we are feeling machines that think.” answers neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, who pioneered the field of embodied consciousness –the bodily origins of our sense of self. “We may smile and the dog may wag the tail, but in essence,” he says. “we have a set program and those programs are similar across individuals in the species. There is no such thing as a disembodied mind.”

Consciousness is considered by leading scientists as the central unsolved mystery of the 21st Century: “I have a much easier time imagining how we understand the Big Bang than I have imagining how we can understand consciousness,” says Edward Witten, theoretical physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey who has been compared to Isaac Newton and Einstein about the phenomena that has been described as assuming the role spacetime did before Einstein invented his theory of relativity.

Some scientists have asked how can we be sure that the source of consciousness lies within our bodies at all? One popular, if mystical, idea, writes astrophysicist Paul Davies in The Demon in the Machine, “is that flashes of mathematical inspiration can occur by the mathematician’s mind somehow ‘breaking through’ into a Platonic realm of mathematical forms and relationships that not only lies beyond the brain but beyond space and time altogether.”

Ira Pastor, ideaXme life sciences ambassador and founder of Bioquark interviews Dr Vitaly Vanchurin, PhD, Associate Professor, Theoretical Physics and Cosmology, Swenson College of Science and Engineering, at the University of Minnesota (UMN).

Dr Vanchurin’s big questions and the tools we need to answer them:

Continue reading “Big Questions: The Multiverse, Cosmological Neural Networks and ‘Space Noodles’” »

It prevents galaxies from flying apart.

Two experiments hunting for a whisper of a particle that prevents whole galaxies from flying apart recently published some contradictory results. One came up empty handed, while the other gives us every reason to keep on searching.

Dark bosons are dark matter candidates based on force-carrying particles that don’t really pack much force.

Resting on the tail of the Great Bear in the constellation of Ursa Major, lies NGC 5585, a spiral galaxy that is more than it appears.

The many stars, and dust and gas clouds that make up NGC 5585, shown here in this Hubble image, contribute only a small fraction of the total mass of the galaxy. As in many galaxies, this discrepancy can be explained by the abundant yet seemingly invisible presence of dark matter.

Continue reading “Dark Matter Surplus Captured by Hubble” »

We recently observed the strongest magnetic field ever recorded in the Universe. The record-breaking field was discovered at the surface of a neutron star called GRO J1008-57 with a magnetic field strength of approximately 1 BILLION Tesla. For comparison, the Earth’s magnetic field clocks in at about 1/20,000 of a Tesla – tens of trillions of times weaker than you’d experience on this neutron star…and that is a good thing for your general health and wellbeing.

Neutron stars are the “dead cores” of once massive stars which have ended their lives as supernova. These stars exhausted their supply of hydrogen fuel in their core and a power balance between the internal energy of the star surging outward, and the star’s own massive gravity crushing inward, is cataclysmically unbalanced – gravity wins. The star collapses in on itself. The outer layers fall onto the core crushing it into the densest object we know of in the Universe – a neutron star. Even atoms are crushed. Negatively charged electrons are forced into the atomic nuclei meeting their positive proton counterparts creating more neutrons. When the core can be crushed no further, the outer remaining material of the star rebounds back into space in a massive explosion – a supernova.

Two experiments hunting for a whisper of a particle that prevents whole galaxies from flying apart recently published some contradictory results. One came up empty handed, while the other gives us every reason to keep on searching.

Dark bosons are dark matter candidates based on force-carrying particles that don’t really pack much force.

Unlike the bosons we’re more familiar with, such as the photons that bind molecules and the gluons that hold atomic nuclei together, an exchange of dark bosons would barely affect their immediate surroundings.