If you look at our Solar System, you’ll notice something particularly overwhelming about it: the Sun dominates everything. In terms of light, the Sun far outshines everything else. The planets, moons, asteroids and comets can only reflect the light originating from the Sun itself, not generate their own. (At least, not visible light.) In terms of its gravitational influence, the Sun determines the orbits of the planets, asteroids, comets and everything else, with only the extraordinarily close-orbiting moons and rings of other worlds dominated by their gravity, rather than the Sun’s. And in terms of mass, the Sun totals 99.8% of everything in the Solar System, with Jupiter making up about 0.1%
In a world of conspiracy theories and Internet rumors, it’s a wonder no one has ever called black holes a hoax. Most people don’t doubt the truth of black holes, but the invisibility part does rankle astronomers, who prefer things they can see and measure. Well bad news, science folks, black holes aren’t about to pop into view any time soon.
WE MUST be missing something. The universe is expanding 9 per cent faster than it should be. Either our best measurements are wrong, or a glimmer of new physics is peeking through the cracks of modern cosmology. “We’ve given these young cosmologists a great toy, and they’re trying to break it. Maybe they have.“ If that’s the case, some lightweight, near-light-speed particles may be missing from our picture of the universe shortly after the big bang. But we might be in luck. Particle physicists have already spent over a decade chasing something that fits the bill: ghostly neutrinos unlike the three already known. For a cosmological quandary, the issue isn’t that complicated: two ways of measuring
By definition, black holes are objects that have so much matter concentrated in a single point that nothing - not even light - can escape from within a certain region of space around them. This was a feature of Newtonian gravity; it’s a feature of Einstein’s General Relativity; and when we have a full quantum theory of gravitation, we fully expect this will be a feature of that, too. When a massive enough star dies and its core collapses down, past the stage of atoms, past nuclei, past neutrons and past individual, free quarks, a funny catastrophe happens: even something moving at the speed of light can’t escape from this region of space. You’ve created a black hole, and over the next trillions upon trillions of years, all it will do is grow, eating whatever falls inside its event horizon.
One of these tools is the European Space Agency's Planck space observatory, which maps the universe's cosmic microwave background. It's thanks to the Planck's instrumentation that we have this new image. If we could see it, it would be wider than 200 full moons when viewed from Earth.
Late last year, when most people were getting ready for the holidays, physicists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) machine at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, made a startling announcement: Their two massive detectors had identified a small bump in the data with an energy level of about 750 GeV. This level is about six times larger than the energy associated with the Higgs particle. (To go from energy to mass divide the energy by the square of the speed of light.) For comparison, the mass of a proton, the particle that makes the nuclei of all atoms in nature, is about 1 GeV. The Higgs is heavy - and this new bump, if associated with a new particle, would be really heavy.
A physical object could potentially pass through a wormhole at the centre of a black hole to another part of the universe, a team of theoretical physicists has said. While the object - be it a chair, a scientist, or a spacecraft - would be changed as it travelled beyond the event horizon (the edge of a black hole), it could technically remain as a physical object and be pulled through the theoretical wormhole. Traditionally, at the centre of a black hole lies a singularity.
Now, I don't want to make this sound like it'd be simple. You'd have to start finding and designing various fantastically clever ways to create these dark photons, and experiments to use them, but at least you'd know where to start. How exactly is your team trying to find dark photons with the DarkLight experiment? So, this is pretty cool. We're using one of the most intense electron beams every created by humans. With that beam we're going to send a stream of electrons through a vacuum into hydrogen gas. We'll then watch for a quite rare event with fantastically precise detectors. A tiny fraction of the time we send electrons into this hydrogen gas, something really remarkable happens. One
It’s a new record. Physicists have trapped 219 beryllium ions in strong electronic and magnetic fields and entangled their quantum properties with lasers. With some further tweaks, these charged particles could carry out quantum calculations that ordinary computers can’t handle. Quantum entanglement is the “spooky” phenomenon that links up particles’ quantum states even across vast distances, meaning that you can’t measure one without affecting the other. Earlier experiments entangled 100,000 photons and 3000 neutral atoms. But this one has entangled ten times more ions than ever before. It’s an important milestone, because you’d need this many entangled ions to solve quantum mechanics problems
This is the first time a black hole has been seen eating such a refreshing meal: Scientists previously had only observed black holes eating slow, steady meals of hot gas shed by the spiraling galaxies they call home. Now we have evidence of a quick, spontaneous meal of cold (minus-200 degrees Fahrenheit and below), clumpy (yum) gas, formed as hot gas between the galaxies cools and condenses like a rain cloud. Observations of the binging black hole, which sits in a galaxy cluster about 1 billion light years away, were published Wednesday in Nature. “The simple model of black hole accretion consists of a black hole surrounded by a sphere of hot gas, and that gas accretes smoothly onto the black hole, and everything’s simple, mathematically,” co-author Michael McDonald, assistant professor of physics in MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, said in a statement.
Scientists have a found a quick way - but not a cheap one - to turn heat-trapping carbon dioxide gas into harmless rock. Experts say the results of a two-year, $10 million experiment called CarbFix , conducted about one-third of a mile (540 meters) deep in the rocks of Iceland, offer new hope for an effective weapon to help fight man-made global warming. When an international team of scientists pumped a carbon dioxide and water mix into underground basalt rocks, basic chemistry took over.
Black holes and wormholes are the ultimate fodder for science fiction. Need to travel through time? No problem! Build a wormhole. Want to see a different universe? Dive into a black hole! Though these imaginings are often far-fetched and, let's face it, likely impossible, most are based on real theoretical physics ideas and, in new research focused on the nature of space-time inside a black hole, theorists have come up with a possible means of zipping around time and space... though it certainly wouldn't be comfortable. A black hole is as gravitationally extreme as it can get. Throw together enough matter in the same place and its mutual gravity will crush everything down to a single point until