Lifeboat Foundation

Our model of the Universe, dominated by dark matter and dark energy, explains almost everything we see. Almost. Here’s what remains.

The word ‘universe’ once described everything that exists. But as our horizons have expanded, many scientists have begun to consider what’s beyond our own cosmos, and…

At the heart of merging galaxies is the closest pairing of supermassive black holes ever found that will eventually collide and create a larger black hole.

Half a mile-deep lab is shielded with 100 tons of steel.

A gold mine located over half a mile (one km) underground in Victoria, Australia, has been converted into the Stawell Underground Physics Laboratory to study dark matter, a press release from Australia’s Nuclear Science and Technology Organization (ANSTO) said.

Scientists believe that dark matter, the invisible substance largely unknown to mankind, makes up 85 percent of our universe’s mass. To know more about it, scientists have been building dark matter detectors, and one of the “most sensitive” detectors delivered some significant results last month.

Continue reading “New underground lab to shed light on dark matter” »

A gold mine located over half a mile (one km) underground in Victoria, Australia, has been converted into the Stawell Underground Physics Laboratory to study dark matter, a press release from Australia’s Nuclear Science and Technology Organization (ANSTO) said.

Scientists believe that dark matter, the invisible substance largely unknown to mankind, makes up 85 percent of our universe’s mass. To know more about it, scientists have been building dark matter detectors, and one of the “most sensitive” detectors delivered some significant results last month.

The oscillations in binary neutron stars before they merge could have big implications for the insights scientists can glean from gravitational wave detection.

Researchers at the University of Birmingham have demonstrated the way in which these unique vibrations, caused by the interactions between the two stars’ tidal fields as they get close together, affect gravitational-wave observations. The study is published in Physical Review Letters.

Taking these movements into account could make a huge difference to our understanding of the data taken by the Advanced LIGO and Virgo instruments, set up to detect gravitational waves —ripples in time and space—produced by the merging of black holes and neutron stars.

You don’t have to know a whole lot about science to know that black holes normally suck things in, not spew things out. But NASA detected something mighty bizarre at the supermassive black hole Markarian 335. Two of NASA’s space telescopes, including the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR), amazingly observed a black hole’s corona “launched” away from the supermassive black hole.

Then an enormous pulse of X-ray energy spewed out. This kind of phenomena has never been observed before.

To all who see them, the new images of space taken by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) are awe-inspiring.

Physicist Eric J. Lerner gets to the point:

Why are JWST images causing panic among cosmologists? And the predictions of which theory do they contradict? The papers don’t really speak. The truth that is not reported in these documents is that the hypothesis that the JWST images blatantly and repeatedly contradict the Big Bang Hypothesis is that the universe began 14 billion years ago in an incredibly hot, dense state and has since the pore is expanding. Since this hypothesis has been defended for decades as an indisputable truth by the vast majority of cosmological theorists, the new data cause these theorists to panic. “Now I’m lying awake at 3 a.m.,” says Alison Kirkpatrick, an astronomer at the University of Kansas at Lawrence, “and wondering if I did everything wrong.”