Lifeboat Foundation

If black holes are just regions of spacetime, where the slope of spacetime is infinite at it’s center, how can black holes even move? When matter moves through spacetime, it bends the spacetime around it, but if black holes are just regions of spacetime, how can a region in spacetime bend other regions of spacetime? And another question arises. If black holes are just regions in spacetime, how can it bend the spacetime around it, so it can remain a black hole, if there is no matter to continuously bend it?

Scientists have just identified the formation processes of some of the Universe’s earliest galaxies in the turbulent era of the Cosmic Dawn.

JWST observations of the early Universe around 13.3 to 13.4 billion years ago – just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang – have revealed telltale signs of gas reservoirs being actively slurped into three newly forming and growing galaxies.

“You could say that these are the first ‘direct’ images of galaxy formation that we’ve ever seen,” says astrophysicist Kasper Elm Heintz from the Niels Bohr Institute in Denmark, who led the research.

Scientists “took a picture” of the Big Bang by capturing the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, which is like the afterglow of the Big Bang. They used satellites like the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) and the Planck spacecraft to measure this ancient light. These instruments detected faint microwave signals that have been traveling through space for about 13.8 billion years. By analyzing these signals, scientists created a detailed map of the early universe, showing tiny temperature fluctuations. This “picture” helps us understand the universe’s origins and how it has evolved over time. #brightside Credit: Galaxy Cluster Abell: NASA Hubble — https://flic.kr/p/2e8LH2d, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.…, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi… Cosmic Microwave: ESA and the Planck Collaboration, CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.…, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi… NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Animation is created by Bright Side.

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Continue reading “How Scientists Took a Picture of the Big Bang” »

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The rate at which the universe is currently expanding is known as the Hubble Rate. In recent years, different measurements have given different results for the Hubble rate, a discrepancy between theory and observation that’s been called the “Hubble tension”. Now, a team of astrophysicists claims the Hubble tension is gone and it’s the fault of supernovae data. Let’s have a look.

Continue reading “A Huge Cosmology Problem Might Just Have Disappeared” »

Astronomers have discovered black holes ranging from a few times the sun’s mass to tens of billions. Now a group of scientists has predicted that NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope could find a class of “featherweight” black holes that has so far eluded detection.

Today, black holes form either when a massive star collapses or when heavy objects merge. However, scientists suspect that smaller “primordial” black holes, including some with masses similar to Earth’s, could have formed in the first chaotic moments of the early universe.

“Detecting a population of Earth-mass primordial black holes would be an incredible step for both astronomy and particle physics because these objects can’t be formed by any known physical process,” said William DeRocco, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California Santa Cruz who led a study about how Roman could reveal them.

Making use of some of the most powerful telescopes on the planet, astronomers have found an ancient remnant of the Big Bang. This small piece of pure material from the early universe may provide light on the processes and motivations behind the formation of various star and galaxy types.

Using telescopes at the W. M. Keck Obervatory in Hawaii, a team of astronomers led by Fred Robert and Michael Murphy of the Swinburne University of Technology in Australia discovered a cloud of gas leftover from the Big Bang that was hiding far out in the universe. Behind the cloud, the telescope also discovered a quasar, which is an extremely bright active galactic nucleus that emits a lot of energy.

Big black holes in little galaxies, rogue black holes and other behemoths could offer clues to cosmic evolution.

UNSW quantum engineers have developed a new amplifier that could help other scientists search for elusive dark matter particles.

The universe is expanding at an accelerating rate but Einstein’s theory of General Relativity and our knowledge of particle physics predict that this shouldn’t be happening. Most cosmologists pin their hopes on Dark Energy to solve the problem. But, as Claudia de Rham argues, Einstein’s theory of gravity is incorrect over cosmic scales, her new theory of Massive Gravity limits gravity’s force in this regime, explains why acceleration is happening, and eliminates the need for Dark Energy.

You can see Claudia de Rham live, debating in ‘Dark Energy and The Universe’ alongside Priya Natarajan and Chris Lintott and ‘Faster Than Light’ with Tim Maudlin and João Magueijo at the upcoming HowTheLightGetsIn Festival on May 24th-27th in Hay-on-Wye.

This article is presented in association with Closer To Truth, an esteemed partner for the 2024 HowTheLightGetsIn Festival.