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Category: cosmology – Page 8

Astronomers tallying up all the normal matter—stars, galaxies and gas—in the universe today have come up embarrassingly short of the total matter produced in the Big Bang 13.6 billion years ago. In fact, more than half of normal matter—half of the 15% of the universe’s matter that is not dark matter—cannot be accounted for in the glowing stars and gas we see.

New measurements, however, seem to have found this missing matter in the form of very diffuse and invisible ionized hydrogen gas, which forms a halo around galaxies and is more puffed out and extensive than astronomers thought.

The findings not only relieve a conflict between astronomical observations and the best, proven model of the evolution of the universe since the Big Bang, they also suggest that the massive black holes at the centers of galaxies are more active than previously thought, fountaining gas much farther from the than expected—about five times farther, the team found.

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Using the unique infrared sensitivity of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, researchers can examine ancient galaxies to probe secrets of the early universe. Now, an international team of astronomers has identified bright hydrogen emission from a galaxy in an unexpectedly early time in the universe’s history. The surprise finding is challenging researchers to explain how this light could have pierced the thick fog of neutral hydrogen that filled space at that time.

The Webb telescope discovered the incredibly distant galaxy JADES-GS-z13-1, observed to exist just 330 million years after the big bang, in images taken by Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) as part of the James Webb Space Telescope Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES). Researchers used the galaxy’s brightness in different infrared filters to estimate its redshift, which measures a galaxy’s distance from Earth based on how its light has been stretched out during its journey through expanding space.

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Here in this video today we will explore something that has been demanded by viewers of the channel for quite sometime, the Xeelee rings, one of the largest megastructures in fiction. We first have to take a look at the universe we are discussing about. So, The Xeelee Sequence is a series of science fiction novels and short stories by British author Stephen Baxter, exploring the grand scale of the universe from the Big Bang to its ultimate end. The series follows humanity’s evolution over billions of years, its conflicts with alien species, and the mysterious, hyper-advanced Xeelee, who are engaged in a cosmic war against the enigmatic dark matter entities known as the Photino Birds. The books blend hard science fiction with cosmic wonder, delving into themes of time travel, black hole physics, alternate universes, and the limits of human potential. Major works in the series include \.

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How did complex systems emerge from chaos? Physicist Sean Carroll explains.

Up next, The Universe in 90 minutes: Time, free will, God, & more ► https://youtu.be/tM4sLmt1Ui8

How did life on Earth originate? Scientists still aren’t sure, and this remains one of the world’s most fascinating and mind-boggling mysteries.

One way of approaching the question is to think generally about how complex systems emerge from chaos. Since the 1800s, scientists have known that entropy is always increasing, with everything in our Universe trending toward disorder over time.

A more nuanced understanding of entropy is helping today’s scientists make progress on the question of the origin of life, as Sean Carroll explains in this Big Think video.

Read the video transcript ► https://bigthink.com/series/great-question/entropy-origin-of-life/

Continue reading “The physics of entropy and the origin of life | Sean Carroll” | >

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A note from Lawrence:

I’m excited to announce the third episode of our new series, What’s New in Science, co-hosted by Sabine Hossenfelder. Once again, Sabine and I each brought a few recent science stories to the table, and we took turns introducing them before diving into thoughtful discussions. It’s a format that continues to spark engaging exchanges, and based on the feedback we’ve received, it’s resonating well with listeners.

This time, we covered a wide range of intriguing topics. We began with the latest buzz from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument suggesting that dark energy might be changing over time. I remain skeptical, but the possibility alone is worth a closer look. We followed that with results from the Euclid space telescope, which has already identified nearly 500 strong gravitational lensing candidates—an impressive yield from just the early data.

Continue reading “What’s New In Science with Sabine | Dark Energy, Quantum Computing, Pyramid Mysteries, and More!” | >

That’s the question raised by physicist Dr. Richard Lieu at The University of Alabama in Huntsville. In a paper published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Lieu offers a theory that could challenge one of the biggest assumptions in astrophysics. His idea: gravity can exist without any mass at all.

The study explores a different solution to the same equations that normally describe gravity—both in Newtonian theory and in general relativity. These equations link mass with the gravitational force it creates. Lieu focused on what’s known as the Poisson equation, a simplified form of Einstein’s field equations used for describing gravity in weaker fields, like those around galaxies.

This equation typically has one well-known solution: gravity that weakens with distance, created by mass. But there’s another, lesser-known solution that’s often ignored. It can also create an attractive force but doesn’t come from any actual matter.

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Scientists have uncovered the strongest evidence yet for the existence of elusive intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs), long thought to be the missing link between stellar-mass and supermassive black holes. By tracking a hypervelocity star, J0731+3717, that appears to have been ejected from the

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What can astronomers learn from observing black holes that suddenly wake up? This is what a recent study published in Nature Astronomy hopes to address as an international team of researchers investigated what a black hole looks like when it goes active and starts accumulating matter in its environment. This study has the potential to help researchers better understand the peculiar nature of black holes, which remains one of the most intriguing and mysterious objects in the universe.

For the study, the researchers observed a black hole residing at the center of SDSS1335+0728, which is located approximately 300 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Virgo. This study builds on observations first made in 2019 of activity of this particular black hole, which was nicknamed “Ansky”, and has since been designated as an active galactic nucleus. But new observations made in 2024 revealed Ansky was emitting X-ray bursts regularly, and the astronomers pounced at the chance to observe a black hole waking up, so to speak.

“This rare event provides an opportunity for astronomers to observe a black hole’s behavior in real time, using X-ray space telescopes XMM-Newton and NASA’s NICER, Chandra and Swift,” said Dr. Lorena Hernández-García, who is a researcher at Valparaiso University in Chile and lead author of the study. “This phenomenon is known as a quasiperiodic eruption, or QPEs are short-lived flaring events. And this is the first time we have observed such an event in a black hole that seems to be waking up.”

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Researchers from the University of Waterloo have proposed a new method to measure the Hubble constant that could help resolve one of modern cosmology’s pressing puzzles: the Hubble tension.

The study published in Physical Review Letters aims to resolve the Hubble tension, a discrepancy between the value of the Hubble constant (H0) from the local (distance ladder) method and the (CMB) method.

Phys.org spoke to the first author of the study, Dr. Alex Krolewski, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Waterloo.

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