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Category: cosmology – Page 285

I don’t think that star is the same after that one night stand.

When black holes swallow down massive amounts of matter from the space around them, they’re not exactly subtle about it. They belch out tremendous flares of X-rays, generated by the material heating to intense temperatures as it’s sucked towards the black hole, so bright we can detect them from Earth.

This is normal black hole behaviour. What isn’t normal is for those X-ray flares to spew forth with clockwork regularity, a puzzling behaviour reported in 2019 from a supermassive black hole at the centre of a galaxy 250 million light-years away. Every nine hours, boom — X-ray flare.

After careful study, astronomer Andrew King of the University of Leicester in the UK identified a potential cause — a dead star that’s endured its brush with a black hole, trapped on a nine-hour, elliptical orbit around it. Every close pass, or periastron, the black hole slurps up more of the star’s material.

Continue reading “Astronomers Have Discovered a Star That Survived Being Swallowed by a Black Hole” | >

Very interesting.

Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity profoundly changed our thinking about fundamental concepts in physics, such as space and time. But it also left us with some deep mysteries. One was black holes, which were only unequivocally detected over the past few years. Another was “wormholes” – bridges connecting different points in spacetime, in theory providing shortcuts for space travellers.

Wormholes are still in the realm of the imagination. But some scientists think we will soon be able to find them, too. Over the past few months, several new studies have suggested intriguing ways forward.

Continue reading “Wormholes may be lurking in the universe — and new studies are proposing ways of finding them” | >

Circa 2018 o.o!

We are not living in the first universe. There were other universes, in other eons, before ours, a group of physicists has said. Like ours, these universes were full of black holes. And we can detect traces of those long-dead black holes in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) — the radioactive remnant of our universe’s violent birth.

At least, that’s the somewhat eccentric view of the group of theorists, including the prominent Oxford University mathematical physicist Roger Penrose (also an important Stephen Hawking collaborator). Penrose and his acolytes argue for a modified version of the Big Bang.

In Penrose and similarly-inclined physicists’ history of space and time (which they call conformal cyclic cosmology, or CCC), universes bubble up, expand and die in sequence, with black holes from each leaving traces in the universes that follow. And in a new paper released Aug. 6 in the preprint journal arXiv— apparent evidence for Hawking points in the CMB sky — Penrose, along with State University of New York Maritime College mathematician Daniel An and University of Warsaw theoretical physicist Krzysztof Meissner, argued that those traces are visible in existing data from the CMB.

Continue reading “Physicists Spotted the Ghosts of Black Holes from Another Universe” | >

Nearly every galaxy hosts a monster at its center—a supermassive black hole millions to billions times the size of the Sun. While there’s still much to learn about these objects, many scientists believe they are crucial to the formation and structure of galaxies. What’s more, some of these black holes are particularly active, whipping up stars, dust and gas into glowing accretion disks emitting powerful radiation into the cosmos as they consume matter around them. These quasars are some of the most distant objects that astronomers can see, and there is now a new record for the farthest one ever observed.

A team of scientists, led by former UC Santa Barbara postdoctoral scholar Feige Wang and including Professor Joe Hennawi and current postdoc Riccardo Nanni, announced the discovery of J0313-1806, the most distant quasar discovered to date. Seen as it would have appeared more than 13 billion years ago, this fully formed distant quasar is also the earliest yet discovered, providing astronomers insight into the formation of massive galaxies in the early universe. The team’s findings were released at the January 2021 meeting of the American Astronomical Society and published in Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Quasars are the most energetic objects in the universe. They occur when gas in the superheated accretion disk around a supermassive black hole is inexorably drawn inwards, shedding energy across the electromagnetic spectrum. This releases enormous amounts of electromagnetic radiation, with the most massive examples easily outshining entire galaxies.

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The Man Said That His Country Has Been In Existence For 1000 Years And Was A Little Puzzled Why His Country Was Called Andorra On The Map.

It was July 1954 when a smartly dressed man arrives at Haneda Airport in Tokyo, Japan. Much like other passengers, he makes his way to customs. But whatever happened from this point onwards have left all puzzled and concerned. When questioned by the customs officers, the mysterious passenger said he was from Taured, also referred to as Taured Mystery. The mystery man claimed that it was the third time he was visiting Japan from his country. But, to the surprise of officers, they couldn’t find any country named Taured. The primary language of the man, described as Caucasian looking with a beard, was French. However, she was purportedly speaking Japanese and many other languages as well.

Officers were perplexed because they had never heard about any such country. The passport of the man was issued by of course the Taured. The passport looked authentic but the place was not recognized.

Location of Taured.
The man was then given a map and asked to point out his country. He immediately man pointed to the area occupied by the Principality of Andorra is at the border of France and Spain. The man said that his country has been in existence for 1000 years and was a little puzzled why his country was called Andorra on the map. The man argued with the customs officers for long and refused to give in.

What Is The Mystery All About?

Continue reading “Taured Mystery: The Man Who Vanished As Mysteriously As He Came” | >

Part of the Divine Mind, and so we are.

The most recent observations at both quantum and cosmological scales are casting serious doubts on our current models. For instance, at quantum scale, the latest electronic hydrogen proton radius measurement resulted in a much smaller radius than the one predicted by the standard model of particles physics, which now is off by 4%. At cosmological scale, the amount of observations regarding black holes and galactic formation heading in the direction of a radically different cosmological model, is overwhelming. Black holes have shown being much older than their hosting galaxies, galactic formation is much younger than our models estimates, and there is evidence of at least 64 black holes aligned with respect to their axis of rotation, suggesting the presence of a large scale spatial coherence in angular momentum that is impossible to predict with our current models. Under such scenario, it should not fall as a surprise the absence of a better alternative to unify quantum theory and relativity, and thus connect the very small to the very big, than the idea that the universe is actually a neural network. And for this reason, a theory of everything would be based on it.


As explained in Targemann’s interview to Vanchurin on Futurism, the work of Vanchurin, proposes that we live in a huge neural network that governs everything around us.

“it’s a possibility that the entire universe on its most fundamental level is a neural network… With this respect it could be considered as a proposal for the theory of everything, and as such it should be easy to prove it wrong”. Vitaly Vanchurin The idea was born when he was studying deep machine learning. He wrote the book “Towards a theory of machine learning”, in order to apply the methods of statistical mechanics to study the behavior of neural networks, and he saw that in certain limits the learning (or training) dynamics of neural networks is very similar to the quantum dynamics. So, he decided to explore the idea that the physical world is a neural network.

Continue reading “Is the Physical World a Neural Network?” | >