Cosmology – Lifeboat News: The Blog

Jun 12
2023

The Cosmic Connectome: Our Universe is a Giant Brain, According to Scientists

A new research at the intersection of cosmology and neurobiology implies that diverse physical processes lead to similar levels of complexity and self-organization present in structures of scales.

An astrophysicist at the University of Bologna and a neurosurgeon at the University of Verona compared the network of neuronal cells in the human brain with the cosmic network of galaxies and found astounding similarities.

In their paper ‘The quantitative comparison between the neuronal network and the cosmic web’ published in Frontiers in Physics, Franco Vazza, astrophysicist at the University of Bologna, and Alberto Feletti, neurosurgeon at the University of Verona, investigated the similarities between two of the most complex systems in existence: the cosmic web of galactic superclusters and the network of neuronal cells in the human brain.

Jun 12
2023

NASA’s Webb Proves Galaxies Transformed the Early Universe

Cave divers equipped with brilliant headlamps often explore cavities in rock less than a mile beneath our feet. It’s easy to be wholly unaware of these cave systems – even if you sit in a meadow above them – because the rock between you and the spelunkers prevents light from their headlamps from disturbing the idyllic afternoon.

Apply this vision to the conditions in the early universe, but switch from a focus on rock to gas. Only a few hundred million years after the big bang, the cosmos was brimming with opaque hydrogen gas that trapped light at some wavelengths from stars and galaxies. Over the first billion years, the gas became fully transparent – allowing the light to travel freely. Researchers have long sought definitive evidence to explain this flip.

New data from the James Webb Space Telescope recently pinpointed the answer using a set of galaxies that existed when the universe was only 900 million years old. Stars in these galaxies emitted enough light to ionize and heat the gas around them, forming huge, transparent “bubbles.” Eventually, those bubbles met and merged, leading to today’s clear and expansive views.

Jun 11
2023

Stephen Hawking’s most famous prediction could mean that everything in the universe is doomed to evaporate, new study says

A new theory has radically revised Stephen Hawking’s 1974 theory of black holes to predict that all objects with mass may eventually disappear.

Jun 11
2023

Largest explosion since the Big Bang was powered by a bizarre energy jet unlike any other

The enormous gamma-ray burst, called the Brightest Of All Time (or BOAT), may be powered by its strange jet structure, scientists say.

Jun 10
2023

Dark matter atoms may form shadowy galaxies with rapid star formation

Dark matter, the invisible material that makes up the vast majority of the universe’s mass, may collect itself to form atoms, a new simulation shows.

Those “dark atoms” might radically alter the evolution of galaxies and the formation of stars, giving astronomers a new opportunity to understand this mysterious substance.

Jun 10
2023

A telescope accidentally captured the brightest supernova ever seen

Cokada/iStock.

This is according to a report by Ars Technica published on Friday.

Jun 8
2023

“It’s a Black hole!” James Webb Telescope Discovers 45,000+ Galaxies at the Edge of the Universe!

“The Universe Came From a Black Hole” String Theory Founder Reveals James Webb Telescope’s New Image. Deep within dense star clusters, something extraordinary dwells: Stars. But these, are no ordinary stars, but colossal celestial beings, known as supermassive stars. And now, their existence has been unveiled by the piercing gaze of the James Webb Space Telescope.

According to the standard model of cosmology, after the universe came out of the big bang, it took between 500 million to 1 billion years for the first stars to form. That however, is changing.

We are not just finding single stars, but clusters of them in the early universe and that, has the whole scientific community stunned.

#space #jameswebbspacetelescope #nasa.

0:00 Stars in Globular Clusters.
2:24 The Abundance Anomalies.
3:55 Most Ancient and Distant Galaxies.

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Jun 8
2023

Olaf Stapledon’s Cosmology of Peace

In his science fiction classic Star Maker, he imagines a way to overcome fascism on a galactic scale.

Jun 8
2023

Quantum simulation of Hawking radiation and curved spacetime with a superconducting on-chip black hole

Recently, the theory of Hawking radiation of a black hole has been tested in several analogue platforms. Shi et al. report a fermionic-lattice model realization of an analogue black hole using a chain of superconducting transmon qubits with tuneable couplers and show the stimulated Hawking radiation.

Jun 8
2023

A Huge Black-Hole just turned its whole magnetic field around

Black holes, cosmic power stations, fuel the luminosity of quasars and active galactic nuclei (AGNs) through their intricate interaction of matter, gravity, and magnetic forces. Despite black holes themselves not possessing a magnetic field, the surrounding dense plasma in the accretion disc does. As this plasma orbits the black hole, its charged particles generate an electric current and consequently a magnetic field.

This magnetic field, assumed to be stable due to the unvarying plasma flow, caused scientists to scratch their heads when they found evidence of its directional change. Such a phenomenon, known as a magnetic reversal, is akin to an imaginary pole of a magnet switching from north to south or vice versa. While not uncommon in stars, and even witnessed in the Sun’s 11-year sunspot cycle or Earth’s infrequent magnetic shifts, such an event was thought improbable for supermassive black holes.

In 2018, a computer-aided sky survey detected a startling transformation in a galaxy 239 million light-years away named 1ES 1927+654, which had suddenly become a hundredfold brighter. Swift Observatory soon reported x-ray and ultraviolet light emissions from this region. Initial speculations suggested a tidal disruption event caused by a star venturing too close to the galaxy’s central supermassive black hole, disrupting gas flow into the accretion disc, as the reason for this unusual luminosity.