Documenting the Coming Singularity

Showing posts with label astrophysics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label astrophysics. Show all posts

Monday, February 12, 2018

The Hunt is on for the Dark Photon!

Sounds like something from Alice in Wonderland, but it's true.

Ryan F. Mandelbaum on Gizmodo


It appears that the Universe is full of dark matter—around six times more of it than there is regular matter. It has obvious visible effects, like the way it bends light from distant galaxies. Despite dedicated searches, no signs of a dark matter particle explaining these effects have turned up.

Perhaps instead physicists will be able to find some dark force, a portal into the dark world. Such a “dark photon” would be dark matter’s equivalent of a photon, the way that dark matter particles interact with one another. Scientists are searching for such a particle. It hasn’t turned up yet, based on new results from the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland. But the search isn’t over—and a lot of physicists are really excited about it.

“LHCb had to work really hard to get to this mass range,” Caterina Doglioni, a researcher at Lund University who was not involved in the study, told Gizmodo. “The way they did it is quite cool. They reinvented the data taking of LHC experiments”

Physicists have been using plenty of methods such as big vats of liquid xenon to try and find dark matter particles directly, and still have no leads. Dark photons would take dark matter’s story deeper, and imply that there’s a dark universe governed by dark forces.

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Tuesday, January 23, 2018

Giant Sun's Surface Imaged for the First Time Ever!

Check out this first-ever image of the surface of a giant star outside our solar system!

Daily Galaxy

"This is the first time that we have such a giant star that is unambiguously imaged with that level of details," said Fabien Baron, assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Georgia State University. "The reason is there's a limit to the details we can see based on the size of the telescope used for the observations. An international team of astronomers has produced the first detailed images of the surface of a giant star, named π1Gruis, outside our solar system, revealing a nearly circular, dust-free atmosphere with complex areas of moving material, known as convection cells or granules, according to a recent study.
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Saturday, January 20, 2018

Black Hole POV?

Ever wonder what you'd see if you happened to plunge into a black hole? I mean like the kind that squats like a dark nemesis at the center of our galaxy. In this article, one of my favorite science writers tells us:


by Ethan Siegel on Forbes.com

Black holes are some of the most perplexing objects in the entire Universe. Objects so dense, where gravitation is so strong, that nothing, not even light, can ever escape from it. Many physical black holes have been identified, from stellar-mass scale ones in our own galaxy to supermassive ones at the centers of the majority of galaxies, many millions or even billions of times the mass of our Sun. The key property surrounding the event horizon, that light can never escape from within it, sets up a boundary in space: once you cross it, you're doomed to hit the central singularity. But what would you see as you fell in? Would the lights stay on, or would the Universe go dark? At last, physics has deciphered the answer, and it's gorgeous.

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Sunday, January 14, 2018

Will We Soon Actually See a Black Hole Through a Telescope?

On Vox By Brian Resnick

Impossibly dense, deep, and powerful, black holes reveal the limits of physics. Nothing can escape one, not even light.

Even though black holes excite the imagination like few other concepts in science, the truth is that no astronomer has actually seen one. We’ve “heard” them, so to speak, as scientists have recorded the gravitational waves (literal ripples in spacetime) emanating from black holes that collided with one another billions of years ago.

But any photo you’ve seen of a dark mass warping spacetime … well, that’s just an illustration. Like this one:


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