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Nasa With the recent release of fascinating images coming out of the James Webb Telescope, there’s been a renewed public interest in deep space. In a new post, NASA Exoplanet, the branch responsible for searching for potential life-bearing worlds beyond our solar system, released the “actual sound” of a black hole. “The misconception that there is no sound in space originates because most space is a vacuum, providing no way for sound waves to travel,” NASA Exoplanets writes in the tweet. “A galaxy cluster has so much gas that we’ve picked up actual sound. Here it’s amplified, and mixed with...

Newton’s Theory of Gravity explains most large-scale events fairly well. ... However, the theory is not foolproof. Einstein’s theories of general and special relativity, for example, explained data that Newton’s theory couldn’t. Scientists still use Newton’s theory because it works in the overwhelming majority of cases and has much simpler equations. Dark matter was proposed as a way to reconcile Newtonian physics with the data. But what if, instead of reconciliation, a modified theory is needed.... Mordehai Milgrom...developed a theory of gravity (called Modified Newtonian Dynamics or “Mond” for short) in 1982 that postulates gravity functions differently when it becomes...

I first wrote about the topic of "Dark Matter" back in 2009, but it was scrubbed from the files of the Chico Enterprise Record Newspaper I wrote for and lost to history, after I was unceremoniously let me go. Well, I just found it in a file I was going through which someone sent me a few years ago. I lost the email address of the person, since I changed internet companies, even at that the person who sent not to me preferred to remain anonymous. Anyway, I updated this article with some new information and this is what I...

The supermassive blackhole at the center of SgrA*. (EHT Collaboration) =================================================================== Four and a half billion years ago, our pale blue dot was born in the rubble left over from the birth of a star. Since then, we've been locked in a cosmic dance; Earth whirls around the Sun; and the Sun whirls around the galactic center, the dark, mysterious heart of the Milky Way. Contained in that dark heart, around which the entire galaxy revolves, is a supermassive black hole named Sagittarius A*, clocking in at around 4.3 million times the mass of the Sun. We've been able to...

Supermassive Black Hole Spewing Out Jets An artist’s conception of a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy. Credit: Image courtesy of ESA/AOES Medialab ************************************************************************************** Update: Meet Sagittarius A* – Astronomers Reveal First Image of the Black Hole at the Heart of the Milky Way Today (May 12, 2022) at 9:00 a.m. EDT (6:00 a.m. PDT, 15:00 CEST) The European Southern Observatory (ESO) and the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project will hold a press conference to present new Milky Way results from the EHT. The ESO Director General will deliver the opening words. EHT Project Director Huib Jan...

Artist’s impression of GNz7q (ESA/Hubble, N. Bartmann) A first-of-its-kind 'missing link' object detected in the early Universe may solve the mystery of the oldest supermassive black holes in existence, scientists say. The discovery of GNz7q, a black hole dating back to just 750 million years after the Big Bang, aligns with theoretical predictions of what an 'ancestor' to supermassive black holes might look like – and while it's something we've never seen before, there could be many more like it. "It's unlikely that discovering GNz7q … was just 'dumb luck'," says astronomer Gabriel Brammer from the University of Copenhagen in...

<p>At the heart of every black hole sits a problem. As they sizzle away into nothingness over the eons, they take with them a small piece of the Universe. Which, quite frankly, just isn't in the rule book.</p><p>It's a paradox the late Stephen Hawking left us with as a part of his revolutionary work on these monstrous objects, inspiring researchers to tinker with potential solutions for the better part of half a century.</p>

In 2020 a team led by European Southern Observatory (ESO) astronomers reported the closest black hole to Earth, located just 1000 light-years away in the HR 6819 system. But the results of their study were contested by other researchers, including by an international team based at KU Leuven, Belgium. In a paper published today, these two teams have united to report that there is in fact no black hole in HR 6819, which is instead a “vampire” two-star system in a rare and short-lived stage of its evolution. The original study on HR 6819 received significant attention from both the...

The supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, Sagittarius A*, keeps releasing random bursts of radiation on a daily basis and no one can figure out what is causing it. These bursts ranged from tens to hundreds of times brighter than the normal signals sent out by the supermassive black hole at the heart of our galaxy, but they don't appear to follow a discernable pattern. The data from 2006 to 2008 show high levels of gamma-ray activity, followed by a rapid four-year-long drop, after which activity shot back up, starting in 2012. There could be any...

Explanation: Is our universe haunted? It might look that way on this dark matter map. The gravity of unseen dark matter is the leading explanation for why galaxies rotate so fast, why galaxies orbit clusters so fast, why gravitational lenses so strongly deflect light, and why visible matter is distributed as it is both in the local universe and on the cosmic microwave background. The featured image from the American Museum of Natural History's Hayden Planetarium Space Show Dark Universe highlights one example of how pervasive dark matter might haunt our universe. In this frame from a detailed computer simulation,...

A detailed look at the gamma-ray sky. Credit: NASA/DOE/Fermi LAT Collaboration Star-forming galaxies are responsible for creating gamma-rays that until now had not been associated with a known origin. Star-forming galaxies are responsible for creating gamma-rays that until now had not been associated with a known origin, researchers from The Australian National University (ANU) have confirmed. Lead author Dr. Matt Roth, from the ANU Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics, said until now it has been unclear what created gamma-rays — one of the most energetic forms of light in the Universe — that appear in patches of seemingly ’empty...

Using a technique called pendellösung interferometry, a team of physicists...have used neutron beams to probe the crystal structure of silicon at the highest precision yet achieved... This has revealed previously unrecognized properties in silicon, a material crucial to technology; more detailed information about the properties of the neutron; and placed important constraints on the fifth force, if it exists. In a perfect silicon crystal, sheets of atoms in the lattice are arranged in planes that repeat in spacing and orientation. Bouncing the beam precisely off these planes can cause the neutrons to diverge in their routes through the lattice, generating...

The galactic plane, seen through infrared eyes. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA) ______________________________________________________________________________________ There are many kinds of stars out there in the big, wide Universe. We have a whole system for categorizing them according to temperature, size, and brightness. Even so, a recently discovered object is suggesting that we're far from knowing everything. It's been nicknamed 'The Accident', and it's a type of object called a brown dwarf, also known as failed stars. But it's unlike any brown dwarf we've ever seen before, with a confusing spectrum – suggesting that it may be nearly as old as the Universe. Since all of the...

Physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have linked together, or “entangled,” the mechanical motion and electronic properties of a tiny blue crystal, giving it a quantum edge in measuring electric fields with record sensitivity that may enhance understanding of the universe. The quantum sensor consists of 150 beryllium ions (electrically charged atoms) confined in a magnetic field, so they self-arrange into a flat 2D crystal just 200 millionths of a meter in diameter. Quantum sensors such as this have the potential to detect signals from dark matter — a mysterious substance that might turn out to...

Something huge and invisible is making nearby stars vanish, scientists propose Suns that have gone missing may have been torn away by a dark matter monster An invisible cosmic behemoth might be tearing apart the closest star cluster to the Sun, leaving one side of the cluster eerily dark and devoid of stars, according to a new study. The culprit may be a dark matter substructure, a relic that contains the mass of 10 million Suns and is made of a mysterious non-luminous substance. The possible presence of this “Galactic lump” was detected in a new map that charts out...

A person falling into a black hole and being stretched while approaching the black hole’s horizon. Credit: Leo Rodriguez and Shanshan Rodriguez, CC BY-ND =================================================================== To solve the mysteries of black holes, a human should just venture into one. However, there is a rather complicated catch: A human can do this only if the respective black hole is supermassive and isolated, and if the person entering the black hole does not expect to report the findings to anyone in the entire universe. We are both physicists who study black holes, albeit from a very safe distance. Black holes are among...

Polarized view of the black hole in M87. The lines mark the orientation of polarization, which is related to the magnetic field around the shadow of the black hole. Credit: EHT Collaboration ===================================================================== Wits University astrophysicists are the only two scientists on African continent that contributed to the study. The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration, a multinational team of over 300 scientists including two astrophysicists from the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits University), has revealed a new view of the massive object at the center of the M87 galaxy: how it looks in polarized light. This is the first time...

The new explosion, illustrated here, is bluer than an ordinary supernova and more than 100 times as bright. SAKKMESTERKE / Science Source =================================================================== A supernova-like explosion dubbed the Camel appears to be the result of a newborn black hole eating a star from the inside out. ================================================================ In 2018, astronomers were shocked to find a bizarre explosion in a galaxy 200 million light-years away. It wasn’t like any normal supernova seen before — it was both briefer and brighter. The event was given an official designation, AT2018cow, but soon went by a more jovial nickname: the Cow. The short-lived event...

Observations of galactic rotation curves give one of the strongest lines of evidence pointing towards the existence of dark matter, a non-baryonic form of matter that makes up an estimated 85% of the matter in the observable Universe. Current assessments of galactic rotation curves are based upon a framework of Newtonian accounts of gravity, a new article suggests that if this is substituted with a general relativity-based model, the need to recourse to dark matter is relieved, replaced by the effects of gravitomagnetism.

Joshua Adam Schulte, who worked for a CIA group that designs computer code to spy on foreign adversaries, is believed to have provided the agency’s top-secret information to WikiLeaks, federal prosecutors acknowledged in a hearing in January. The anti-secrecy group published the code under the label “Vault 7” in March 2017. It was one of the most significant and potentially damaging leaks in the CIA’s history, exposing secret cyberweapons and spying techniques that might be used against the United States, according to current and former intelligence officials.