Lifeboat Foundation

Did you need another existential risk to keep you up at night? Probably not, but here it is anyway: galaxy quakes. We’ve known about ‘em for years, and we hadn’t a clue what causes them—until now.

The culprit, unveiled today at the 227th meeting of the American Astronomical Society, is about as weird as you’d expect. Astronomers now believe that ripples in gas around the edge of the Milky Way are the result of a dwarf galaxy filled with dark matter ramming up against us several hundred million years ago.

Sukanya Chakrabarti of the Rochester Institute of Technology reached that bizarre conclusion by measuring the speed of three bright stars, called Cepheid variables, at the Gemini Observatory in Chile. These stars, which are suspected to hail from a larger population that entered our Milky Way during the Great Galactic Quaking of 300 million B.C., are all speeding away from us at about 450,000 mph.

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A very well done essay by Frank Wilczek about axions, their motivations, their candidacy for dark matter job, and their experimental status.

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Last year August, Stephen Hawking announced he had been working with Malcom Perry and Andrew Strominger on a solution to the black hole information loss problem, and they were closing in on a solution. But little was explained other than that this solution rests on a symmetry group by name of supertranslations.

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Interstellar is one of the best sci-fi movies of the last decade, imagining a post-apocalyptic human population that needs to be saved from a dying Earth. A nearby black hole has the answers to humanity’s problems, and the brilliant script tells us we can enter a black hole and then use it to transcend space and time. In the film, the black hole also leaks out information that can save us, and it is captured by a complex computer as it’s being entered. That might seem implausible, but since we don’t know a lot about how black holes work, we can certainly accept such an outlandish proposition in the context of the movie.

In real life, however, physicists are trying to figure out how to access the secrets of a black hole. And it looks like some researchers have a theory to retrieve information from it, though it’s not quite as exciting as the complex bookcase that Interstellar proposes.

DON’T MISS: The biggest ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ plot holes explained

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Interesting, but older…

Two separate research groups, one of which is from MIT, have presented evidence that wormholes — tunnels that may allow us to travel through time and space — are “powered” by quantum entanglement. Furthermore, one of the research groups also postulates the reverse — that quantum entangled particles are connected by miniature wormholes.

A wormhole, or Einstein-Rosen bridge to give its formal name, is a hypothetical feature of spacetime that exists in four dimensions, and somehow connects to another wormhole that’s located elsewhere in both space and time. The theory, essentially, is that a wormhole is a tunnel that isn’t restricted by the normal limitations of 3D Cartesian space and the speed of light, allowing you to travel from one point in space and time, to another point in space and time — theoretically allowing you to traverse huge portions of the universe, and travel in time.

Continue reading “Wormholes are just quantum entangled black holes, says new research” »

Physicists think they’ve come up with a way to learn a bit about the interior of a black hole — an impossible procedure that shows the insanity of studying the heart of a singularity.

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Is it possible that our universe is but one of many, with laws that mean nothing in the “pocket universes” that co-exist all around, and through, us? Robert Lawrence Kuhn explores the multiverse with the help of the world’s leading experts on these theori.

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Older, but interesting idea—

Warp drive and stargate wormholes could be used for time travel to the past. That’s the surprising conclusion that controversial theoretical physicist and author Dr. Jack Sarfatti has reached from his research into dark energy and dark matter.

Hubble image of dark matter ring in galaxy cluster

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Star = Blown.

Mind = Blown.

Astronomer witness the first-ever predicted supernova explosion. The event will allow scientists to test their models of dark matter distribution within the galaxy.

Continue reading “Hubble Captures Image of First-Ever Predicted Exploding Star” »