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Category: cosmology – Page 269

Dark Matter: Is a Revolution Coming to Physics?

What is dark matter? Does it even exist, or do we just need an adjustment to our theory of gravity?

What is dark matter? It has never been observed, yet scientists estimate that it makes up 85% of the matter in the universe. The short answer is that no one knows what dark matter is. More than a century ago, Lord Kelvin offered it as an explanation for the velocity of stars in our own galaxy. Decades later, Swedish astronomer Knut Lundmark noted that the universe must contain much more matter than we can observe. Scientists since the 1960s and ’70s have been trying to figure out what this mysterious substance is, using ever-more complicated technology. However, a growing number of physicists suspect that the answer may be that there is no such thing as dark matter at all.

Scientists can observe far-away matter in a number of ways. Equipment such as the famous Hubble telescope measures visible light while other technology, such as radio telescopes, measures non-visible phenomena. Scientists often spend years gathering data and then proceed to analyze it to make the most sense of what they are seeing.

Success! First Results From World’s Most Sensitive Dark Matter Detector

Berkeley Lab Researchers Record Successful Startup of LUX-ZEPLIN Dark Matter Detector at Sanford Underground Research Facility

An innovative and uniquely sensitive dark matter detector – the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) experiment – has passed a check-out phase of startup operations and delivered first results. LZ is located deep below the Black Hills of South Dakota in the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF) and is led by the DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab).

The take-home message from this successful startup: “We’re ready and everything’s looking good,” said Berkeley Lab senior physicist and past LZ spokesperson Kevin Lesko. “It’s a complex detector with many parts to it and they are all functioning well within expectations,” he said.

This IoT device notifies you before an Earth-obliterating supernova

Would you like a warning before the world ends?

Well, it’s now possible. Extraluminal is an Internet of Things (IoT) device that will notify you an hour before the Earth is about to be destroyed by a supernova.

A supernova refers to “the cataclysmic explosion of a massive star at the end of its life. It can emit more energy in a few seconds than our sun will radiate in its lifetime of billions of years.”

The 2022 Oppenheimer Lecture: The Quantum Origins of Gravity

It was once thought that gravity and quantum mechanics were inconsistent with one another. Instead, we are discovering that they are so closely connected that one can almost say they are the same thing. Professor Susskind will explain how this view came into being over the last two decades, and illustrate how a number of gravitational phenomena have their roots in the ordinary principles of quantum mechanics.

Leonard Susskind is an American physicist, who is a professor of theoretical physics at Stanford University, and founding director of the Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics. His research interests include string theory, quantum field theory, quantum statistical mechanics, and quantum cosmology.

Dark matter behavior may conflict with our best theory of the universe

New research shows a direct interaction between dark matter particles and those that make up ordinary matter.

A new paper, published in the *Astronomy and Astrophysics* journal, discovered unexpected characteristics for the elusive dark matter that likely goes against our best theory of the universe — the Lambda-Cold Dark Matter model.

What is dark matter?

James Webb breaks its own record for the most distant galaxy ever observed

We’re only days into James Webb’s scientific operations, and the giant infrared observatory has already broken its own record for the most distant galaxy ever observed.

Last week, a team unearthed an observation of a galaxy that existed 400 million years after the Big Bang. This week, a new analysis revealed a galaxy a mere 235 million years after the Big Bang. It is located 35 billion light-years away from Earth.

James Webb peers further into the universe than ever before

The researchers behind the new discovery, from the University of Edinburgh, compiled a catalog of early galaxies observed by Webb to investigate the luminosity function of galaxies that formed shortly after the Big Bang. They hadn’t actually planned to observe the most distant galaxy known to humans, so the new finding was a happy accident.

Amazing James Webb image looks like a wormhole

Early data from the James Webb Space Telescope is already starting to come in, with exciting finds like views of Jupiter and a potential sighting of the most distant galaxy ever observed. But there’s a lot more Webb data being shared, and much of it is publicly available through the Space Telescope Science Institute’s MAST archive. That means enterprising astronomers are already digging through James Webb data to perform their own analyses, and have created some amazing visuals.

Gabriel Brammer, an associate professor at the University of Copenhagen, composed and shared this incredible and faintly terrifying image on Twitter. It shows the galaxy Messier 74, captured in the mid-infrared range by Webb’s MIRI instrument as part of the PHANGS-JWST project.

“Let’s just see what JWST observed yesterday …” Brammer wrote on Twitter. Then, echoing all of our sentiments, “Oh, good god.”

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