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Dark matter is a mysterious substance composing most of the material universe, now widely thought to be some form of massive exotic particle. An intriguing alternative view is that dark matter is made of black holes formed during the first second of our universe’s existence, known as primordial black holes. Now a scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, suggests that this interpretation aligns with our knowledge of cosmic infrared and X-ray background glows and may explain the unexpectedly high masses of merging black holes detected last year.

“This study is an effort to bring together a broad set of ideas and observations to test how well they fit, and the fit is surprisingly good,” said Alexander Kashlinsky, an astrophysicist at NASA Goddard. “If this is correct, then all galaxies, including our own, are embedded within a vast sphere of black holes each about 30 times the sun’s mass.”

In 2005, Kashlinsky led a team of astronomers using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope to explore the background glow of infrared light in one part of the sky. The researchers reported excessive patchiness in the glow and concluded it was likely caused by the aggregate light of the first sources to illuminate the universe more than 13 billion years ago. Follow-up studies confirmed that this cosmic infrared background (CIB) showed similar unexpected structure in other parts of the sky.

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The Standard Models of particle physics and cosmology don’t add up to all there is. What might be the next giant leap forward?

The collapse of a trapped ultracold magnetic gas is arrested by quantum fluctuations, creating quantum droplets of superfluid atoms.

Macroscopic implosions of quantum matter waves have now been halted by quantum fluctuations. The quantum wave in question is an atomic Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC), a quantum state with thousands to tens of millions of atoms in an ultracold gas all sharing the same macroscopic wave function. Attractive atomic interactions can cause BECs to collapse in spectacular ways, in what’s been termed a “bosenova,” a lighthearted allusion to a supernova explosion [1]. Tilman Pfau and colleagues from the University of Stuttgart, Germany, have shown that for BECs made of dysprosium, whose bosonic isotopes are among the most magnetic atoms in the periodic table, long-range dipole-dipole interactions between these neutral atoms create a totally new phenomenon: the arrested collapse of a quantum magnetic fluid, called a quantum ferrofluid [2, 3]. Such a ferrofluid relies crucially on the strong dipolar interactions in the dysprosium gas.

A team of astronomers investigating “the most mysterious star in our galaxy” have launched a Kickstarter campaign, with hopes to raise $100,000 to find out “Where’s the Flux?”

Whether these Universes are similar or different to our own, whether they have the same physical laws and properties, whether they have the same fundamental constants, particles and interactions, we do not know.

And at the same time, our very best laws of nature tell us that this is reality: we are a tiny fraction of our observable Universe, which is a tiny bit of the unobservable Universe, which is just one of a tremendous number of Universes in a multiverse that’s constantly generating new ones, and has been for billions of years. And that’s the Multiverse we live in, to the best of our knowledge!

Continue reading “What is the Multiverse, and why do we think it exists?” »

Caltech theoretical physicist Sean Carroll explores what existed before the Big Bang in his new book, “The Big Picture.”

Produced by Delano Samuels and Jessica Orwig

Continue reading “The Big Bang is not the beginning of our universe — it’s actually the end of something else entirely” »

The surprising faintness of these distant “standard candles” showed us an accelerating, dark energy Universe. Could there be a different explanation?

According to statements from renowned astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, Black Holes are not the cosmic prisons we thought they were, and could actually be portals to another universe.

During a lecture at Harvard’s Sanders Theater, renowned physicist Stephen Hawking helped about Black Holes during an event which marked the inauguration of Harvard’s Black Hole Initiative wich aims to join numerous scientists and focus scientifically on Black Hole Research.

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Particles could be in a superposition of different branes, say physicists.