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Physicists debut a new method to detect gravitational waves with unprecedented precision, providing insights into black hole mergers.

A recent study of thousands of galaxy clusters may ease a debate about the clumpiness of cosmic matter and reinforce the standard model of cosmology.

By mapping the largest structures in the universe in X-rays, cosmologists have found striking agreement with their standard theoretical model of how the universe evolves.

Astronomers can use supercomputers to simulate the formation of galaxies from the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago to the present day. But there are a number of sources of error. An international research team, led by researchers in Lund, has spent a hundred million computer hours over eight years trying to correct these.

The last decade has seen major advances in computer simulations that can realistically calculate how galaxies form. These cosmological simulations are crucial to our understanding of where galaxies, stars, and planets come from. However, the predictions from such models are affected by limitations in the resolution of the simulations, as well as assumptions about a number of factors, such as how stars live and die and the evolution of the interstellar medium.

Collaborative Efforts Enhance Accuracy

“The first few hundred million years of the universe was a very active phase, with lots of gas clouds collapsing to form new stars,” said Dr. Tobias Looser.

When do galaxies stop forming new stars? This is what a study published today in Nature hopes to address as a team of researchers led by the Kavli Institute for Cosmology used NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to discover a 13-billion-year-old “dead” galaxy that stopped producing stars shortly after its own formation, approximately 700 million years after the Big Bang. This study holds the potential to help astronomers better understand the formation and evolution of galaxies in the early universe and the processes behind why some of these galaxies cease to form new stars.

For the study, the researchers used JWST’s powerful Near Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) instrument as part of the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES) to observe the earliest galaxies that existed approximately 700 million years after the Big Bang, or approximately 13 billion years old. Through this, the team observed what they referred to as a “dead” galaxy, meaning a galaxy that ceased producing new stars, which is a profound discovery considering the young age of the universe at the time. But the question is how did this happen?

Continue reading “Webb Telescope Discovers Ancient ‘Dead’ Galaxy: A Look Back 13 Billion Years” »

We’re still years away from seeing physical quantum computers break into the market with any scale and reliability, but don’t give up on deep tech just yet. The market for high-level quantum computer science — which applies quantum principles to manage complex computations in areas like finance and artificial intelligence — appears to be quickening its pace.

In the latest development, a startup out of San Sebastian, Spain, called Multiverse Computing has raised €25 million (or $27 million) in an equity funding round led by Columbus Venture Partners. The funding values the startup at €100 million ($108 million), and it will be used in two main areas. The startup plans to continue building out its existing business working with startups in verticals like manufacturing and finance, and it wants to forge new efforts to work more closely with AI companies building and operating large language models.

In both cases, the pitch is the same, said CEO Enrique Lizaso Olmos: “optimization.”

High-energy neutrinos are extremely rare particles that have so far proved very difficult to detect. Fluxes of these rare particles were first detected by the IceCube Collaboration back in 2013.

Recent papers featured in Physical Review D and The Astrophysical Journal Letters found that nearby supernovae, especially Galactic ones, would be promising sources of high-energy neutrinos. This has inspired new studies exploring the possibility of detecting neutrinos originating from these sources using large particle collider detectors, such as the ATLAS detector at CERN.

Researchers at Harvard University, University of Nevada and Pennsylvania State University recently demonstrated that the ATLAS detector can measure the flux of high-energy supernova neutrinos. Their new paper, published in Physical Review Letters, could inspire future efforts aimed at detecting fluxes of high-energy neutrinos.

Two teams of researchers studying a galaxy through NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope have made multiple discoveries, including spotting the most distant active supermassive black hole ever found.

The teams were studying a galaxy known as GN-z11, an “exceptionally luminous” system that was formed when our 13.8 billion-year-old universe was only about 430 million years old, making it one of the youngest ever observed, NASA said in a news release. Scientists have been trying to find out what makes the distant galaxy so bright, and in doing so discovered the far-off black hole and a gas clump that could indicate rare stars.

The black hole was found by researchers from the Cavendish Laboratory and the Kavli Institute of Cosmology at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom using the telescope’s near-infrared camera. They determined the structure was a supermassive black hole, the largest type of black hole. It’s the most distant black hole of this size ever seen.

Dr Freese has also made the case for a Dark Big Bang that could have given rise to dark matter independently of normal matter in the days after the Big Bang. The traditional model of the universe says that matter and dark matter were produced at the same time. The earliest evidence of dark matter, however, only appears later in the early evolution of the universe, when cosmic structure starts to form.

One explanation for this is that matter and dark matter did not, in fact, appear together, but that dark matter entered the universe in a second cataclysmic release of energy from the vacuum—the Dark Big Bang—as much as a month after the traditional Big Bang. The model that Dr Freese and her co-author Martin Winkler explored would explain why dark matter might be completely decoupled from traditional matter and it also naturally produces SIDM candidates. If there was such a Dark Big Bang, it would have left a clear signature—a pattern in the frequencies of the gravitational waves that hum across the universe—that could be picked up by future gravitational-wave detectors.

One of the greatest problems in modern physics is to reconcile the enormous difference between the energy carried by random fluctuations in the vacuum of space, and the dark energy driving the universe’s expansion.

Through new research published in The European Physical Journal Plus, researchers led by Enrico Calloni at the University of Naples Federico II, Italy, have unveiled a prototype for an ultra-precise beam balance instrument, which they hope could be used to measure the interaction between these vacuum fluctuations and gravitational fields. With some further improvements, the instrument could eventually enable researchers to shed new light on the enigmatic origins of dark energy.

Inside a vacuum, electromagnetic waves are constantly emerging and disappearing through random fluctuations, so that even though the space doesn’t contain any matter, it still carries a certain amount of energy. Through their research, Calloni’s team aimed to measure the influence of these fluctuations using a state-of-the-art beam balance.