Lifeboat Foundation

Dark matter makes up about 27% of the matter and energy budget in the universe, but scientists do not know much about it. They do know that it is cold, meaning that the particles that make up dark matter are slow-moving. It is also difficult to detect dark matter directly because it does not interact with light. However, scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) have discovered a way to use quantum computers to look for dark matter.

Aaron Chou, a senior scientist at Fermilab, works on detecting dark matter through quantum science. As part of DOE’s Office of High Energy Physics QuantISED program, he has developed a way to use qubits, the main component of quantum computing.

Performing computation using quantum-mechanical phenomena such as superposition and entanglement.

The effects of solar activity are predicted to reach the Earth’s atmosphere by December 8.

The earth is all set to experience another set of solar flares, which is estimated to reach our atmosphere by December 8. After a relatively calmer period of solar activity, we are about to experience a high-velocity gush of solar winds and minor geomagnetic storms. The intensity of the storm expected is classified as G1, the least intense solar storm.

Images taken of the sun on December 4 by Eduardo Schaberger Poupeau, an astrophotographer, revealed five significant sunspots and two filaments of magnetism facing Earth.

Continue reading “A hyperactive sunspot to result in solar flares” »

Ultralight dark matter has wavelike properties that could affect the operation of the clocks.

For decades, scientists have been trying to wrap their heads around the dark matter, which makes up an estimated 85 percent of the mass in the universe. Despite experimental efforts running for decades, researchers have only been able to observe the essence, not quite detect it.

Now, a new study published in Nature Astronomy on December 5 revealed that an atomic clock on-board a spacecraft inside the inner depths of the solar system could search for ultralight dark matter. The latter has wavelike properties that could affect the operation of the clocks.

It’s not only the gravity from galaxies in a cluster that reveal dark matter, but the ejected, intracluster stars actually trace it out.

The James Webb Space Telescope has finally made its first dark matter observations, and the results could lead us to new physics. They have questioned our understanding of dark matter and the large-scale structure-formation of the Universe. Dark matter is one of the most mysterious entities in the cosmos. Our best cosmological models show that 27% of the observable Universe is made of dark matter. We can’t see it, but its existence can be inferred because of its effect on surrounding baryonic matter. The true nature of dark matter is still one of the biggest mysteries in cosmology. The most successful cosmological model to date, the lambda cold dark matter or the LCDM model, makes a critical prediction regarding dark matter. It says that cold dark matter played an important role to form the large-scale structures we observe today.

So far, we did not have the technology to test this prediction. But the James Webb Space Telescope opened the windows to the first billion years and the last unexplored era in the history of the Universe. The super-early galaxies discovered by Webb in its Early Release Science program provided an opportunity to test the predictions made by the LCDM model. And when astronomers did that, the results were completely unexpected. So what do these primordial galaxies discovered by Webb tell us? What did Webb find in its first dark matter observations? Finally, and most importantly, how can these results change the course of cosmology?

Continue reading “Latest Webb Results Could Literally Break All Cosmology” »

Earlier this year, scientists discovered that a “jet,” created by a very distant supermassive black hole, sent an accumulation of various space matter rocketing directly toward Earth. Scientists haven’t expressed any need for concern about the jet. However, they are intrigued by the sheer brightness of it and the vast distance between it and Earth.

Universe to go through a cosmic Poincare Recurrence? In other words, can the universe repeats itself? Will the same history happen again at some distant future? If the universe is closed and isolated, which indicates that it’s probably qualified for experiencing a Poincare Recurrence in cosmic scale, will the entire history of our universe happen for an infinite number of times? If cosmic Poincare Recurrence can take place, does it mean that the entropy of the entire universe will decrease at some point? Isn’t that the violation of the second law of thermodynamics?

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Sources:
(K. Ropotenko) The Poincar´e recurrence time for the de Sitter space with dynamical chaos.
https://arxiv.org/abs/0712.

Continue reading “Post Eternity Part 1: The Universe Repeats Itself” »

There’s a lot we still don’t know about dark matter – that mysterious, invisible mass that could make up as much as 85 percent of everything around us – but a new paper outlines a rather unusual hypothesis about the very creation of the stuff.

Researchers at Uppsala University have formulated a new model for our universe to solve the mystery of dark energy. The study proposes a new way to assemble a dark energy cosmos where our universe rides on an expanding bubble in an extra dimension. In a study, Swedish physicists pointed out the existence of another dimension in the universe we live in. Scientists propose that our universe exists within an expanding bubble in an extra dimension. Studying the cosmos in the last 20 years has shown that the cosmos is constantly expanding. Additionally, the speed of its expansion increases.

The conventional explanation for this goes through a type of energy (dark energy), which permeates everything and “pushes” the universe to expand more and faster. In physical cosmology and astronomy, dark energy is a still-unknown form of energy that is hypothesized to permeate all of space, tending to accelerate the expansion of the cosmos The mysterious dark energy poses more questions than answers, functioning as a cosmic wildcard in some explanations of theoretical physics.

Researchers from the University of Uppsala have proposed a new concept. This includes another dimension and other universes to avoid this problem. In their study, published in the journal Physical Review Letters, physicists from Uppsala University argue that our universe is “mounted” on a bubble that expands in an additional dimension. Our entire universe fits on the edge of the expanding bubble. All matter in our cosmos corresponds to the endpoints of strings that extend into the extra dimension. The researchers also show that expanding bubbles of this kind can be created within the string theory framework.