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Category: physics – Page 50

NASA and SpaceX Set To Unlock the Universe’s Secrets With SPHEREx Launch in Early 2025

NASAs SPHEREx observatory will lend insight into what happened after the Big Bang, measure the glow of galaxies near and far, and search the Milky Way for building blocks of life.

NASA and SpaceX are planning to launch the SPHEREx astrophysics observatory in late February 2025. SPHEREx, which stands for Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization, and Ices Explorer, will lift off aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.

Roughly the size of a subcompact car, SPHEREx will enter a polar orbit around Earth. From there, it will map the entire sky in 3D by capturing images in every direction, similar to scanning the inside of a globe. The resulting map will feature hundreds of millions of stars and galaxies, displayed in 102 distinct colors, each representing a unique wavelength of light.

ORCs in space! Astronomers find another vast odd radio circle in ‘completely unexpected discovery’

The newly found ORC, designated ORC J0219–0505, was discovered in data from the MIGHTEE survey conducted by the MeerKAT radio telescope located in the Meerkat National Park in the Northern Cape of South Africa. The 371,600 light-year-wide ORC seems to be associated with the elliptical galaxy WISEA J021912.43–050501.8. It has features that seem to set it apart from other ORCs, including the fact that it appears fainter and that details of its structure reveal it leans to one side.

“Odd Radio Circles: Circles of radio emission found around distant galaxies that we still don’t understand,” lead researcher and Western Sydney University astronomer Ray Norris told Space.com. “It’s a completely unexpected discovery, not predicted by the physics we already know, and therefore revealing a gap in our knowledge.

So we hope these will tell us something new about how galaxies form and interact.

Scientists Discover Radio-Like Communication in Ancient Bacteria

Cyanobacteria use an AM radio-like principle to coordinate cell division with circadian rhythms, encoding information through pulse amplitude modulation.

Cyanobacteria, an ancient group of photosynthetic bacteria, have been discovered to regulate their genes using the same physics principle used in AM radio transmission.

New research published in Current Biology has found that cyanobacteria use variations in the amplitude (strength) of a pulse to convey information in single cells. The finding sheds light on how biological rhythms work together to regulate cellular processes.

Disproving the Fine-tuned Universe Theory

Sean Michael Carroll (born 5 October 1966) is a cosmologist and Physics professor specializing in dark energy and general relativity. He is a research professor in the Department of Physics at the California Institute of Technology. He has been a contributor to the physics blog Cosmic Variance, and has published in scientific journals and magazines such as Nature, Seed, Sky \& Telescope, and New Scientist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sean_M…

Other videos related to challenging or debunking the fine tuning argument

• Video.

A Rebuttal to the Fine-Tuning Argument.
• A Rebuttal to the Fine-Tuning Argument.

Scientists say the universe is constantly vibrating. What’s causing it?

Scientists in Australia have gathered evidence that our universe is constantly vibrating. They used the largest gravitational wave detector to confirm the earlier reports that there is an ongoing rumble which is likely caused by black holes at the centre of galaxies colliding with each other.

The detector looked at several rapidly spinning neutron stars across the galaxy and discovered that the gravitational wave background might be louder than previously thought, The Conversation reported.

The study carried out by Matthew Miles, Swinburne University of Technology and Rowina Nathan, Monash University, was published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

This Theory of Everything Actually Makes a Prediction: New Physics in Black Holes

Learn science, computer science, and mathematics in the easiest and most engaging way possible with Brilliant! First 30 days are free and 20% off the annual premium subscription when you use our link ➜ https://brilliant.org/sabine.

Mathematician Stephen Wolfram has attempted to develop a theory of everything using hypergraphs, which are essentially sets of graphs that can describe space-time. Recently, another mathematician named Jonathan Gorard has used hypergraphs to describe what happens if a black hole accretes matter. He claims that evidence for hypergraphs should be observable in the energy that is emitted during the accretion. Big if true, as they say. Let’s take a look.

Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.

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NASA’s Swift Studies Gas-Churning Monster Black Holes

Scientists using observations from NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory have discovered, for the first time, the signal from a pair of monster black holes disrupting a cloud of gas in the center of a galaxy.

“It’s a very weird event, called AT 2021hdr, that keeps recurring every few months,” said Lorena Hernández-García, an astrophysicist at the Millennium Institute of Astrophysics, the Millennium Nucleus on Transversal Research and Technology to Explore Supermassive Black Holes, and University of Valparaíso in Chile. “We think that a gas cloud engulfed the black holes. As they orbit each other, the black holes interact with the cloud, perturbing and consuming its gas. This produces an oscillating pattern in the light from the system.”

A paper about AT 2021hdr, led by Hernández-García, was published Nov. 13 in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

DeepMind’s Genie 2 can generate interactive worlds that look like video games

DeepMind, Google’s AI research org, has unveiled a model that can generate an “endless” variety of playable 3D worlds.

Called Genie 2, the model — the successor to DeepMind’s Genie, which was released earlier this year — can generate an interactive, real-time scene from a single image and text description (e.g. “A cute humanoid robot in the woods”). In this way, it’s similar to models under development by Fei-Fei Li’s company, World Labs, and Israeli startup Decart.

DeepMind claims that Genie 2 can generate a “vast diversity of rich 3D worlds,” including worlds in which users can take actions like jumping and swimming by using a mouse or keyboard. Trained on videos, the model’s able to simulate object interactions, animations, lighting, physics, reflections, and the behavior of “NPCs.”

Large radio jet discovered in quasar J1601+3102

An international team of astronomers has observed an extremely radio-loud quasar known as J1601+3102. As a result, they found that the quasar hosts a large extended radio jet. The discovery is reported in a research paper published Nov. 25 on the arXiv preprint server.

Quasars, or quasi-stellar objects (QSOs), are (AGN) of very high luminosity powered by (SMBHs), emitting observable in radio, infrared, visible, ultraviolet and X-ray wavelengths. They are among the brightest and most distant objects in the known universe, and serve as fundamental tools for numerous studies in astrophysics as well as cosmology.

J1601+3102 is an extremely radio-loud quasar at a redshift of 4.9, discovered in 2022. It has a radio flux at a level of 69 mJy, bolometric luminosity of about 26 quattuordecillion erg/s and a steep spectral index.