Yay.

In a research laboratory deep beneath a mountain in Italy, scientists have made a new measurement of a nuclear reaction that immediately followed the Big Bang.

You like badass space stuff. So do we. Let’s nerd out over the universe together.

A large team of researchers affiliated with a host of institutions in Italy, the U.K and Hungary has carried out the most precise measurements yet of deuterium fusing with a proton to form helium-3. In their paper published in the journal Nature, the group describes their effort and how they believe it will contribute to better understanding the events that transpired during the first few minutes after the Big Bang.

Astrophysics theory suggests that the creation of deuterium was one of the first things that happened after the Big Bang. Therefore, it plays an important role in Big Bang nucleosynthesis—the reactions that happened afterward that led to the production of several of the light elements. Theorists have developed equations that show the likely series of events that occurred, but to date, it has been difficult to prove them correct without physical evidence. In this new effort, the researchers working at the Laboratory for Underground Nuclear Astrophysics in Italy have carried out experiments to simulate those first few minutes, hoping to confirm the theories.

The work was conducted deep under the thick rock cover of the Gran Sasso mountain to prevent interference from cosmic rays —it involved firing a beam of protons at a deuterium target—deuterium being a form of hydrogen with just one proton and one neutron—and then measuring the rate of fusion. But because the rate of fusion is so low, the bombardment had to be carried out many times—the team carried out their work nearly every weekend for three years.

A new study lead by GSI scientists and international colleagues investigates black-hole formation in neutron star mergers. Computer simulations show that the properties of dense nuclear matter play a crucial role, which directly links the astrophysical merger event to heavy-ion collision experiments at GSI and FAIR. These properties will be studied more precisely at the future FAIR facility. The results have now been published in Physical Review Letters. With the award of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics for the theoretical description of black holes and for the discovery of a supermassive object at the center of our galaxy, the topic currently also receives a lot of attention.

But under which conditions does a black hole actually form? This is the central question of a study lead by the GSI Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung in Darmstadt within an international collaboration. Using computer simulations, the scientists focus on a particular process to form black holes namely the merging of two neutron stars.

Neutron stars consists of highly compressed dense matter. The mass of one and a half solar masses is squeezed to the size of just a few kilometers. This corresponds to similar or even higher densities than in the inner of atomic nuclei. If two neutron stars merge, the matter is additionally compressed during the collision. This brings the merger remnant on the brink to collapse to a black hole. Black holes are the most compact objects in the universe, even light cannot escape, so these objects cannot be observed directly.

The finding marks a major breakthrough in a search of almost 20 years, carried out in particle physics labs all over the world.

To understand what a tetraquark is and why the discovery is important, we need to step back in time to 1964, when particle physics was in the midst of a revolution. Beatlemania had just exploded, the Vietnam war was raging and two young radio astronomers in New Jersey had just discovered the strongest evidence ever for the Big Bang theory.

On the other side of the U.S., at the California Institute of Technology, and on the other side of the Atlantic, at CERN in Switzerland, two particle physicists were publishing two independent papers on the same subject. Both were about how to make sense of the enormous number of new particles that had been discovered over the past two decades.

We probably think we know gravity pretty well. After all, we have more conscious experience with this fundamental force than with any of the others (electromagnetism and the weak and strong nuclear forces). But even though physicists have been studying gravity for hundreds of years, it remains a source of mystery.

In our video Why Is Gravity Different? We explore why this force is so perplexing and why it remains difficult to understand how Einstein’s general theory of relativity (which covers gravity) fits together with quantum mechanics.

Gravity is extraordinarily weak and nearly impossible to study directly at the quantum level. We cannot scrutinize it using particle accelerators like we can with the other forces, so we need other ways to get at quantum gravity.

The gravitational force in the Universe under which it has evolved from a state almost uniform at the Big Bang until now, when matter is concentrated in galaxies, stars and planets, is provided by what is termed ‘dark matter.’ But in spite of the essential role that this extra material plays, we know almost nothing about its nature, behavior and composition, which is one of the basic problems of modern physics. In a recent article in Astronomy & Astrophysics Letters, scientists at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC)/University of La Laguna (ULL) and of the National University of the North-West of the Province of Buenos Aires (Junín, Argentina) have shown that the dark matter in galaxies follows a ‘maximum entropy’ distribution, which sheds light on its nature.

Dark matter makes up 85% of the matter of the Universe, but its existence shows up only on astronomical scales. That is to say, due to its weak interaction, the net effect can only be noticed when it is present in huge quantities. As it cools down only with difficulty, the structures it forms are generally much bigger than planets and stars. As the presence of dark matter shows up only on large scales the discovery of its nature probably has to be made by astrophysical studies.

In a landmark series of calculations, physicists have proved that black holes can shed information, which seems impossible by definition. The work appears to resolve a paradox that Stephen Hawking first described five decades ago.

O,.o wut?

Cosmic Loners

The problem with the GEODE hypothesis is that the strange objects need to resemble but not act like black holes. The only way that GEODEs could expand the universe without destroying everything around them is if they were isolated in empty pockets of the cosmos. But black holes often sit smack dab in the middle of galaxies.

“This becomes a problem if you want to explain the accelerating expansion of the universe,” lead author Kevin Croker said in a press release. “If they moved like black holes, staying close to visible matter, galaxies like our own Milky Way would have been disrupted.”

The catalogue also provides information on how the black holes spin, which holds the key to understanding how the objects came to orbit each other before they merged. It shows that, in some binary systems, the two black holes have misaligned axes of rotation, which would imply that they formed separately. But many other binaries appear to have roughly aligned axes of rotation, which is what astrophysicists expect when the two black holes began their lives as a binary star system. Two schools of thought in astrophysics have each favoured one of the two scenarios, but it now appears that both were correct, Fishbach says.

Astrophysicists now have enough black-hole mergers to map their frequency over the cosmos’s history.

Only a few years ago, scientists the world over celebrated as the first-ever gravitational waves were detected—confirming a long-held scientific theory and opening up an entirely new field of research.

Now, the international research team responsible for detecting gravitational waves has announced a further 39 gravitational wave events, bringing the total number of confirmed detections to 50.

The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and Virgo Collaborations, which include researchers from the University of Portsmouth, have today published a series of papers that record events including the mergers of binary black holes, binary neutron stars and, possibly, neutron star-black holes.