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Category: cosmology

Scientists Simulated The Big Bang’s Aftermath, And Found The Universe Was Like Soup

Immediately after the Big Bang boomed, the Universe was a trillion-degree ‘soup’ of unimaginably dense plasma. In a breakthrough experiment, researchers have found the first evidence that this exotic primordial goo did actually slosh and swirl like soup.

In slightly more scientific terms, this gooey soup is called quark-gluon plasma, or QGP. It was the first and hottest liquid ever to exist. Predictions suggest it blazed a billion times hotter than the surface of the Sun for a few millionths of a second before it expanded, cooled, and coalesced into atoms.

As detailed in a recent study, a team of physicists from MIT and CERN recreated heavy-ion collisions like those that created the QGP to explore its properties. For example, when a quark flows through the plasma, does it recoil and splash like a cohesive liquid, or does it scatter randomly like a collection of particles?

Using Blender In Real-World Cosmology Research

We recently shared the story of Blender’s role in the adult animated series Il Baracchino, and now, a fascinating new article by Ph.D. student MohammadHossein Jamshidi showcases how he applied Geometry Nodes in his cosmology research.

Cosmology is the study of the universe and its fundamental nature. MohammadHossein Jamshidi, from Shahid Beheshti University in Iran, has also worked as an animation engineer in the game industry since 2012. His initial inspiration to apply Blender to scientific work came from the creative projects of Seanterelle, which led him to experiment with using Geometry Nodes for cosmological computations.

In the article, he shares several ideas and techniques for using Blender in his research, and he believes that these approaches could be applied to other areas of science as well. All the files featured are freely available on this GitHub repository.

The persistence of gravitational wave memory

Neutron stars are ultra-dense remnants of massive stars that collapsed after supernova explosions and are made up mostly of subatomic particles with no electric charge (i.e., neutrons). When two neutron stars collide, they are predicted to produce gravitational waves, ripples in the fabric of spacetime that travel at the speed of light.

Gravitational waves typically take the form of oscillations, periodically and temporarily influencing the universe’s underlying fabric (i.e., spacetime). However, general relativity suggests that for some cosmological events, in addition to the oscillatory displacement of test masses (as produced by the passage of a gravitational wave train), there exists a final permanent displacement of them via a phenomenon referred to as “gravitational wave memory.”

Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Academy of Athens, the University of Valencia and Montclair State University recently carried out a study exploring the gravitational wave memory effects that would arise from neutron star mergers.

“Cosmic Volcano” Erupts Again: Black Hole Awakens After 100 Million Years

A restarted black hole in J1007+3540 reveals how episodic jet activity and cluster pressure sculpt giant radio galaxies. Astronomers have captured one of the clearest views yet of a black hole returning to life, in a vast radio galaxy where activity stretches nearly one million light-years across

Galen Strawson on Panpsychism

Is there something that it is like to be an electron? That sounds implausible. Yet Galen Strawson believes this is the best explanation of how things are.

Specifically, Galen offers his view on physicalistic panpsychism (though there are non-physicalistic panpsychisms as well). He argues something like this, it seems to me:

First, Galen assumes (very plausibly) that experiential phenomena are real phenomena, opposed to illusory. Now:

1. If radical emergentism is true, then experiential phenomena emerges from wholly and utterly non-experiential phenomena.
2. But experiential phenomena cannot emerge from wholly and utterly non-experiential pheneomena.
3. So radical emergentism is false. [1, 2]
4. If radical emergentism is false, then experiential phenomena must already exist in some sense and to some extent as a feature of physical stuff to give rise to experiential phenomena in an intelligible way.
5. So experiential phenomena must already exist in some sense and to some extent as a feature of physical stuff to give rise to experiential phenomena in an intelligible way. [3, 4]

In other words, consciousness has been a feature of the universe since the Big Bang.

For sustained and scholarly treatment of panpsychism, see Galen Strawson’s paper, \.

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How fast is the universe expanding? Supernova could provide the answer

That the universe is expanding has been known for almost a hundred years now, but how fast? The exact rate of that expansion remains hotly debated, even challenging the standard model of cosmology. A research team at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), the Ludwig Maximilians University (LMU) and the Max Planck Institutes, MPA and MPE, has now imaged and modeled an exceptionally rare supernova that could provide a new, independent way to measure how fast the universe is expanding. The studies are published on the arXiv preprint server.

The supernova is a rare superluminous stellar explosion, 10 billion light-years away, and far brighter than typical supernovae. It is also special in another way: the single supernova appears five times in the night sky, like cosmic fireworks, due to a phenomenon known as gravitational lensing.

Two foreground galaxies bend the supernova’s light as it travels toward Earth, forcing it to take different paths. Because these paths have slightly different lengths, the light arrives at different times. By measuring the time delays between the multiple copies of the supernova, researchers can determine the universe’s present-day expansion rate, known as the Hubble constant.

Could a recently reported high-energy neutrino event be explained by an exploding primordial black hole?

The KM3NeT collaboration is a large research group involved in the operation of a neutrino telescope network in the deep Mediterranean Sea, with the aim of detecting high-energy neutrino events. These are rare and fleeting high-energy interactions between neutrinos, particles with an extremely low mass that are sometimes referred to as “ghost particles.”

Recently, the KM3NeT collaboration reported an extremely high-energy neutrino event, which carried an energy of approximately 220 PeV (peta-electron volts). This is one of the most energetic events recorded to date and its cosmological origin has not yet been identified.

Researchers at Universidade de São Paulo and Universidad Autónoma de Madrid carried out a theoretical study exploring one proposed explanation for this remarkable neutrino event, namely that it originated from the explosion of a primordial black hole near Earth.

Araish spiral galaxy observations uncover a 26,700-light-year radio jet

An international team of astronomers has performed multi-wavelength observations of the nearby Araish galaxy to investigate the origin of its radio emission. As a result, they detected an extended radio jet of this galaxy. The finding was reported February 11 on the arXiv pre-print server.

Observations show that powerful radio jets are commonly observed in elliptical galaxies or massive quasars. However, their presence in spiral galaxies is relatively rare. These systems, known as spiral double radio-source associated with galactic nuclei (DRAGNs), are therefore unique galaxies where classical disk morphology coexists with large-scale radio jets.

Amaterasu Particle That Broke Physics Has Finally Been Explained

A mysterious, extremely energetic particle, known as the Amaterasu particle, was detected coming from a distant region of space, and scientists have proposed explanations for its origin, potentially tracing it back to a starburst galaxy like Messier 82 ##

## Questions to inspire discussion.

Understanding Ultra-High Energy Cosmic Rays.

🔬 Q: What makes the Amaterasu particle exceptionally powerful? A: The Amaterasu particle detected in Utah in 2021 carries energy 40 million times higher than anything produced on Earth, equivalent to a baseball traveling at 100 km/h compressed into a single subatomic particle, making it one of the most energetic particles ever detected.

Solving the Origin Mystery.

🎯 Q: Where did scientists determine the Amaterasu particle actually originated? A: A 2026 study by Max Planck Institute scientists using approximate Bayesian computation and 3D magnetic field simulations traced the particle’s origin to a starburst galaxy like Messier 82, located 12 million light-years away, rather than the initially suspected local void with only six known galaxies.

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