Lifeboat Foundation

Since the 1960s there has been plenty of evidence to support the existence of dark matter through astrophysical and cosmological observations, and at this point we’re very confident that it exists. The question remains, though: what is dark matter actually made of?

Throughout the decades there have been many candidates for dark matter, such as weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs), neutrinos, and primordial black holes. Candidates like WIMPs were originally theorized because they have properties that address issues in other parts of physics. Another candidate that could answer some thorny physics questions is called the axion.

Axions were originally theorized as a solution to a particle physics question known as the Strong CP Problem, but physicists also realized that axions could be produced in a way that would satisfy requirements for them to be dark matter. These are the particles that the DMRadio experiments search for.

A combined team of physicists from the University of Sussex and the National Physical Laboratory, both in the U.K., has been designing experiments to identify ultra-light dark matter particles. In their paper published in the open-access New Journal of Physics, the group describes how they are attempting to use the high precision of atomic clocks to detect ultra-light dark matter particle “kicks” that would lead to time variations and, in so doing, would show evidence of dark matter.

Currently, dark matter is not something that has been shown to exist—instead it is more of a placeholder that has been created to explain observations of deviations from the Standard Model of physics—like certain gravitational effects on galaxies. Since its development as a theory back in the early 1930s, physicists around the world have been developing theories and experiments to prove that it exists.

Sadly, despite a lot of time and effort, no such proof has been found. In this new effort, the team in the U.K. is working on a novel way to add credence to dark matter theories—using atomic clocks to detect ultra-light dark matter particles.

By analyzing the data from the Dark Energy Camera Legacy Survey (DECaLS), astronomers from the Christ University in Bangalore, India, have serendipitously discovered a new ring galaxy, which received designation DES J024008.08–551047.5 and may belong to the rare class of polar ring galaxies. The finding was reported in a paper published August 29 on the pre-print server arXiv.

The so-called polar ring galaxies (PRGs) are systems composed of an S0-like galaxy and a polar ring, which remain separate for billions of years. In general, these outer polar rings, composed of gas and stars, are aligned roughly in a perpendicular orientation with respect to the major axis of the central host galaxy.

However, although more than 400 PRG candidates have been discovered to date, only dozens of them have been confirmed as real polar ring galaxies by follow-up spectroscopic observations.

An active supermassive black hole is one of the greatest wonders in the cosmos.

A dense, invisible object that can be billions of times the mass of our Sun is surrounded by a vast, churning disk and torus of material, blazing with light as it swirls down onto the black hole center. But how big do these structures grow?

Continue reading “For The First Time, The Roiling Mass Circling a Monster Black Hole Has Been Measured” »

Wobbly jets blasting out from active galaxies are ‘smoking gun’ evidence for supermassive black hole binary systems that elude astronomers, a new study reports.

Astronomers have observed the outer edge of a disk of matter surrounding a feeding supermassive black hole for the first time.

These observations could help scientists better measure the structures that surround these cosmic monsters, understand how black holes feed on those structures and put together how this feeding influences the evolution of galaxies that house such phenomena.

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has captured an image of this iconic supernova with a keyhole in its center.

Einstein’s theory of relativity say black holes are ‘bald’, but a new tweak to his research may give the mysterious objects their long-sought ‘hair.’

Astronomers may have discovered the first evidence of heavy black hole “seeds” in the early universe.

These so-called seeds could help explain how some supermassive black holes with masses equivalent to millions, or even billions, times that of the sun could have grown quickly enough to exist less than 1 billion years after the Big Bang.

Potentially, heavy black hole seeds are black holes with masses around 40 million time that of our sun. They are believed to form from the direct collapse of a massive cloud of gas, unlike your typical black hole that’s born when a massive star reaches the end of its life and collapses under its own gravity. Galaxies theorized to host such heavy black hole seeds are referred to as Outsize Black Hole Galaxies (OBGs).