Lifeboat Foundation

Next time you eat a blueberry (or chocolate chip) muffin consider what happened to the blueberries in the batter as it was baked. The blueberries started off all squished together, but as the muffin expanded they started to move away from each other. If you could sit on one blueberry you would see all the others moving away from you, but the same would be true for any blueberry you chose. In this sense galaxies are a lot like blueberries.

Since the Big Bang, the universe has been expanding. The strange fact is that there is no single place from which the universe is expanding, but rather all galaxies are (on average) moving away from all the others. From our perspective in the Milky Way galaxy, it seems as though most galaxies are moving away from us – as if we are the centre of our muffin-like universe. But it would look exactly the same from any other galaxy – everything is moving away from everything else.

To make matters even more confusing, new observations suggest that the rate of this expansion in the universe may be different depending on how far away you look back in time. This new data, published in the Astrophysical Journal, indicates that it may time to revise our understanding of the cosmos.

A study challenged the evidence for the mysterious antigravitational force known as dark energy. Then cosmologists shot back.

Teams have looked for a “fifth force” in the universe within the Earth’s mantle, ultra-vacuum chambers, and in hypothetical particles such as “X17.” Finding it could help explain mysteries around dark matter and dark energy.

A physicist from RUDN University has proposed a new theoretical model for the interaction of spinor and gravitational fields. He considered the evolution of the universe within one of the variants of the widespread Bianchi cosmological model. In this case, a change in the calculated field parameters led to changes in the evolution of the universe under consideration. Upon reaching certain values, it began to shrink down to the Big Bang. The article was published in the journal The European Physical Journal Plus.

The spinor field is characterized by its behavior in interaction with gravitational fields. Dr. Bijan Saha of RUDN University focused on the study of a nonlinear spinor field. With its help, he explained the accelerated expansion of the universe. The study of a spinor field with a non-minimal coupling made it possible to describe not only the expansion of the universe, but also its subsequent contraction and the resulting Big Bang within the framework of the standard Bianchi cosmological model.

The basic calculations performed by Bijan Saha allow moving away from the isotropic model of the Friedman-Robertson-Walker universe (FRW) that is most often used. According to this traditional model, the properties of the universe are independent of the direction in which they are considered. The physicist has put forward an alternative: an anisotropic model in which such dependence exists. On the one hand, the “classical” isotropic model describes the evolution of the modern universe with great precision. On the other hand, there are theoretical arguments and observational data that lead to the conclusion that an anisotropic phase existed in the distant past.

Sean Carroll is a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology. He specialises in quantum mechanics, gravitation, cosmology, statistical mechanics and foundations of physics. His latest book is Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime (2019). He lives in Los Angeles.

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Astronomers discover a black hole that shouldn’t exist.

If you were to travel back in time to kill your grandparents — let’s ignore the ‘why’ here, for the sake of argument — you would never have been born. Which means there was nobody to kill your grandparents. Which means you were actually born after all, which… hold up, what’s going on here?!

These kinds of brain-breaking paradoxes have been puzzling us forever, inspiring stories ranging from “Back to the Future” to “Hot Tub Time Machine.”

Now, New Scientist reports that physicists Barak Shoshany and Jacob Hauser from the Perimeter Institute in Canada have come up with an apparent solution to these types of paradoxes that requires a very large — but not necessarily infinite — number of parallel universes.

Scientists thought the case of the cosmic rays’ source was closed, but new evidence cracks it wide open again.

Our home galaxy has a new, super-precise mass measurement: about 890 billion times the mass of our sun. That’s 3.9 tredecillion lbs. (1.8 tredecillion kilograms), a tredecillion being a 1 with 42 zeros after it, or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. That amounts to about 6 billion billion billion elephants, 296 quadrillion Earth masses or 135 times the mass of the supermassive black hole in the image released back in April.

Measuring the Milky Way’s mass presents some unusual difficulties, because we live in it. There’s no way to stick galaxies on scales, so researchers typically “weigh” galaxies by tracing the movements of stars inside the galaxies, which can reveal how the galaxy’s gravity is influencing those stars. But while anyone with a reasonably good telescope can spot the full Andromeda galaxy, most of the body of the Milky Way is hidden from us.