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The eyes of the world turned to Messier 87 earlier this month when scientists released the first ever image of a black hole. And this image from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope shows more about the giant galaxy in which the now-famous black hole resides.

The imaged black hole was truly gargantuan, with a mass equivalent to 6.5 billion times that of our Sun. And the galaxy surrounding it, Messier 87, is equally huge. Known as a supergiant elliptical galaxy, it is one of the most massive galaxies in the universe and hosts a large number of globular clusters.

The image captured by Spitzer shows the galaxy in infrared, as opposed to the radio wavelengths used to capture the black hole image. The infrared light coming from the galaxy at wavelengths of 3.6 and 4.5 microns is shown in blue and green, which is what marks the stars in the image. The areas of red are dust features which glow with a wavelength of 8.0 microns.

Continue reading “Supermassive Black Hole Resides Inside a Supermassive Galaxy” »

Yes, black holes get all of the attention. They’re mysterious, they lurk in the shows of interstellar space, they break the laws of known physics, they can trap you forever, they have a cool-sounding and easy-to-understand name. They’ve got great branding.

But some things are even weirder and scarier than black holes. And what makes them weirder and scarier is that they’re weird and scary within the known laws of physics. Which means we understand them. Which means we can explain, in great and gruesome detail, just how awful they are.

Take, for example, the neutron star.

Continue reading “Say Hello To Neutron Stars, Your Worst Nightmare” »

When it reopens in 2021, the Large Hadron collider should be able to detect rare particles with possible links to the world of dark matter and energy.

The latest measurement of the expansion rate of the Universe is in, and it has confirmed with more certainty than ever that we have a real dilly of a pickle on our hands. Once again, the result has shown that the Universe is expanding much faster than it should be based on the conditions just after the Big Bang.

The Universe’s rate of expansion is called the Hubble Constant, and it’s been incredibly tricky to pin down.

According to data from the Planck satellite that measured the cosmic microwave background (the conditions of the early Universe just 380,000 years after the Big Bang, the Hubble Constant should be 67.4 kilometres (41.9 miles) per second per megaparsec, with less than 1 percent uncertainty.

Continue reading “Astronomers Just Detected The Universe Is Expanding Much Faster Than It Should Be” »

From the point of view of nuclear theory, the decay rates of both two-neutrino and neutrinoless double electron capture can be connected to quantities called nuclear matrix elements. Such quantities contain information about nuclear structure that is extracted from nuclear models and can be applied by researchers in the field of nuclear-structure theory.

For half a century, our view of the world has been based on the standard model of particle physics. However, this view has been challenged by theories that can overcome some of the limitations of the standard model. These theories allow neutrinos to be Majorana particles (that is, they are indistinguishable from their own antiparticles) and predict the existence of weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) as the constituents of invisible ‘dark matter’ in the Universe. Majorana neutrinos mediate a type of nuclear decay called neutrinoless double-β decay, an example of which is neutrinoless double electron capture. A crucial step towards observing this decay is to detect its standard-model equivalent: two-neutrino double electron capture. In a paper in Nature, the XENON Collaboration reports the first direct observation of this process in xenon-124 nuclei, using a detector that was built to detect WIMPs.

Continue reading “Dark-matter detector observes exotic nuclear decay” »

New measurements from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope confirm that the universe is expanding roughly 9 percent faster than expected based on its trajectory observed shortly after the Big Bang, according to a new study.

The Hubble Space Telescope measurements, which were published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters on Thursday, minimize the chances that the disparity is an accident from 1 in 3,000 to only 1 in 100,000 and suggest new physics might be needed to better comprehend the cosmos, said a Johns Hopkins University press release.

Continue reading “New Hubble Measurements Confirm Universe Is Expanding at a Faster Rate” »

Deep inside a mountain in central Italy, scientists are laying a trap for dark matter. The bait? A big metal tank full of 3.5 tons (3,200 kilograms) of pure liquid xenon. This noble gas is one of the cleanest, most radiation-proof substances on Earth, making it an ideal target for capturing some of the rarest particle interactions in the universe.

It all sounds vaguely sinister; said Christian Wittweg, a doctoral candidate at the University of Münster in Germany, who has worked with the so-called Xenon collaboration for half a decade, going to work every day feels like “paying a Bond villain a visit.” So far, the mountain-dwelling researchers haven’t captured any dark matter. But they recently succeeded in detecting one of the rarest particle interactions in the universe. [11 Biggest Unanswered Questions About Dark Matter]

According to a new study published today (April 24) in the journal Nature, the team of more than 100 researchers measured, for the first time ever, the decay of a xenon-124 atom into a tellurium 124 atom through an extremely rare process called two-neutrino double electron capture. This type of radioactive decay occurs when an atom’s nucleus absorbs two electrons from its outer electron shell simultaneously, thereby releasing a double dose of the ghostly particles called neutrinos.

Continue reading “Researchers Just Measured an Atom with a Half-Life of 18 Sextillion Years” »

Negative pressure governs not only the Universe or the quantum vacuum. This phenomenon, although of a different nature, appears also in liquid crystals confined in nanopores. At the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Cracow, a method has been presented that for the first time makes it possible to estimate the amount of negative pressure in spatially limited liquid crystal systems.

At first glance, negative pressure appears to be an exotic phenomenon. In fact, it is common in nature, and what’s more, occurs on many scales. On the scale of the Universe, the cosmological constant is responsible for accelerating the expansion of spacetime. In the world of plants, attracting intermolecular forces (not: expanding thermal motions) guarantee the flow of water to the treetops of all trees taller than ten metres. On the quantum scale, the pressure of virtual particles of a false vacuum leads to the creation of an attractive force, appearing, for example, between two parallel metal plates (the famous Casimir effect).

“The fact that a negative pressure appears in liquid crystals confined in nanopores was already known. However, it was not known how to measure this pressure. Although we also cannot do this directly, we have proposed a method that allows this pressure to be reliably estimated,” says Dr. Tomasz Rozwadowski from the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IFJ PAN) in Cracow, the first author of a publication in the Journal of Molecular Liquids.

Continue reading “Liquid crystals in nanopores produce a surprisingly large negative pressure” »

Ecstadelic Media Group releases a new non-fiction book The Origins of Us: Evolutionary Emergence and The Omega Point Cosmology by Alex M. Vikoulov as a Kindle ebook (Press Release, San Francisco, CA, USA, April 22, 2019 01.00 PM PST)

The Science and Philosophy of Information book series is adapted for general audience and based on the previously published grand volume titled “ The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind’s Evolution” by digital philosopher Alex Vikoulov on the ultimate nature of reality, consciousness, the physics of time, and philosophy of mind. In this book one of the series, the author addresses some of the most flaming questions in science and philosophy: Where do we come from? What are the origins of us? What is our role in the grand scheme of things?

“# 1 Hot New Release” in Amazon charts in Cosmology and Evolution, the book starts with a story that happened almost exactly 400 years ago that has had a tremendous “butterfly” effect on us modern humans.

Continue reading “The Origins of Us: Evolutionary Emergence and The Omega Point Cosmology — A New Book That Makes You Question The Nature of Reality but Provides You with Surprising Answers | Press Release” »