Free Republic

Dark Matter Still Missing After Many Decades ... "Big Bang theory in trouble". November 22, 2019 | Jerry Bergman All the proposed candidates for mysterious, unknown stuff have failed to materialize, putting Big Bang theory in trouble. by Jerry Bergman, PhD The cover story of the November 16-22 New Scientist announced prominently on the cover: “DARK MATTER: We still haven’t found it. Our theories are falling apart. Is it time to rethink the universe?” [1] Dan Hooper, author of the cover story, is worried, because Dark Matter theory is a necessary support for the Big Bang. Thus, the Big Bang...

A brief but extremely powerful cosmic blast from a distance galaxy has taken the record for the brightest light ever seen from Earth. It was emitted by a gamma ray burst seven billion light-years away and created more energy in a few seconds than the sun will burn in its 10 billion year lifetime. The discovery, led by researchers from Curtin University in Western Australia involved more than 300 scientists from around the world. Gamma-ray bursts are the most energetic events in the universe - the most massive since the Big Bang, says co author of the study, Dr Gemma...

============================================================================== Scientists have finally analyzed data from Voyager 2’s journey to interstellar space and discovered remarkable insight into conditions at the edge of our solar system. The spacecraft reached the interstellar boundary between our solar system and interstellar space in 2018. Voyager 1 reached the boundary in 2012. Both spacecraft were launched in 1977, and have far surpassed scientists' expectations. ============================================================================== Scientists have finally analyzed data from Voyager 2’s journey to interstellar space and discovered a number of surprising differences—plus a few strange similarities. Voyager 1 and 2 launched in August and October of 1977, respectively, and set out to...

Picture Credit: ESA and the Planck Collaboration ================================================================== New, contested research suggests our universe may actually be a closed loop instead of a vast, never-ending expanse. The theory has drawn sharp criticism from other cosmologists. Confirmation of this theory could completely unravel everything scientists know and understand about our universe. ================================================================= Imagine jetting out into the universe. You sail past Mars, Neptune, and Pluto, far out past the milky way and into the frothy nothingness of space. What might you find if you travelled far enough? Well, you might actually end up right back where you started. There's a small...

Voyager 2 has entered the interstellar medium (ISM), the region of space outside the bubble-shaped boundary produced by wind streaming outward from the sun. Voyager 2, thus, becomes the second human-made object to journey out of our sun's influence, following Voyager 1's solar exit in 2012. [R]esearchers confirm Voyager 2's passage on Nov. 5, 2018, into the ISM by noting a definitive jump in plasma density detected by an Iowa-led plasma wave instrument on the spacecraft. The marked increase in plasma density is evidence of Voyager 2 journeying from the hot, lower-density plasma characteristic of the solar wind to the...

The origin of the universe started with the Big Bang, but how the supernova explosion ignited has long been a mystery - until now. In a new paper appearing in Science Magazine, researchers detailed the mechanisms that could cause the explosion, which is key for the models that scientists use to understand the origin of the universe. "We defined the critical criteria where we can drive a flame to self-generate its own turbulence, spontaneously accelerate, and transition into detonation," says Kareem Ahmed, an assistant professor in UCF's Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and co-author of the study. ...

"Twin primes" are primes that are two steps apart from each other on that line: 3 and 5, 5 and 7, 29 and 31, 137 and 139, and so on. The twin prime conjecture states that there are infinitely many twin primes, and that you'll keep encountering them no matter how far down the number line you go. It also states that there are infinitely many twin primes, and that you'll keep encountering them no matter how far down the number line you go. It also states that there are infinitely many prime pairs with every other possible gap between...

Assembly of the Plasma Liner Experiment (PLX) at Los Alamos National Laboratory is well underway with the installation of 18 of 36 plasma guns in an ambitious approach to achieving controlled nuclear fusion (Figure 1). The plasma guns are mounted on a spherical chamber, and fire supersonic jets of ionized gas inward to compress and heat a central gas target that serves as fusion fuel. In the meantime, experiments performed with the currently installed plasma guns are providing fundamental data to create simulations of colliding plasma jets, which are crucial for understanding and developing other controlled fusion schemes. Most fusion...

The ytterbium crystal was first synthesized a year ago by scientists in China, where the government in Beijing has invested heavily in hopes of creating synthetic quantum materials with novel properties. It appears they may have now succeeded, said Mourigal, an assistant professor at Georgia Tech's School of Physics. "Imagine a state of matter where this entanglement doesn't involve two electrons but involves, three, five, 10 or 10 billion particles all in the same system," Mourigal said. "You can create a very, very exotic state of matter based on the fact that all these particles are entangled with each other....

A MYSTERIOUS supermassive black hole in a distant galaxy is spitting high energy particles after being fed by an object that has never been seen before. The baffling phenomenon has put existing theoretical models on their head, and astrophysicists are puzzled as to what is creating such a regular excretion of material from within the bowels of this supermassive black hole. According to the paper titled, 'Nine-hour X-ray quasi-periodic eruptions from a low-mass black hole galactic nucleus', the energy erupts from the black hole every nine hours and last for one hour and it's that precision which has baffled scientists.

New research suggests magnetars are produced by the deaths of massive stars that were formed by stellar mergers. Photo ESO/L. Calçada Oct. 10 (UPI) -- With the help of computer simulations, scientists have come up with an explanation for the formation of the strongest magnets in the universe, magnetars. Models suggest stellar mergers can produce strong magnetic fields. When the magnetic star produced by a merger dies, a magnetar can form. Magnetars are neutron stars -- collapsed stellar cores -- with extremely powerful magnetic fields. The sun features an outer layer of convective activity that produces strong magnetic fields, but...

I just won a bet I made in 2002 with physicist Michio Kaku. I bet him $1,000 that “by 2020, no one will have won a Nobel Prize for work on superstring theory, membrane theory, or some other unified theory describing all the forces of nature.” This year’s Nobel Prize in Physics, which recognized solid work in cosmology (yay Jim Peebles!) and astronomy, was Kaku’s last chance to win before 2020. Kaku and I made the bet under the auspices of Long Bets, a “public arena for enjoyably competitive predictions, of interest to society, with philanthropic money at stake.” Long...

In the cold wilderness of space, galaxies huddle together around the campfires of stars and the assuring pull of supermassive black holes. Between these cozy clusters of galaxies, where empty space stretches on for millions of light-years all around, a faint highway of gas bridges the darkness. This gassy, intergalactic network is known in cosmological models as the cosmic web. Made of long filaments of hydrogen left over from the Big Bang, the web is thought to contain most (more than 60%) of the gas in the universe and to directly feed all of the star-producing regions in space. At...

Albert Einstein received the Nobel Prize for explaining the photoelectric effect: in its most intuitive form, a single atom is irradiated with light. According to Einstein, light consists of particles (photons) that transfer only quantized energy to the electron of the atom. If the photon’s energy is sufficient, it knocks the electrons out of the atom. But what happens to the photon’s momentum in this process? Physicists at Goethe University are now able to answer this question. To do so, they developed and constructed and new spectrometer with previously unattainable resolution. Doctoral student Alexander Hartung became a father twice during...

But now a pair of scientists suggests that some black holes may not be black holes at all. Instead, they may be weird objects chock-full of dark energy — the mysterious force thought to be pushing at the bounds of the universe, causing it to expand at an ever-increasing rate. Croker and Joel Weiner, a professor emeritus in mathematics at the same university, were looking at Friedmann's equations, which are simplified from Einstein's theory of general relativity.... Physicists use Friedmann's equations to describe the expansion of the universe, in part because the math is simpler than in Einstein's body of...

Primordial black holes (PBHs) are old and relatively small black holes that emerged soon after the Big Bang. They are thought to have been formed as a result of density fluctuations in the very early universe. It is believed that PBHs with the lowest mass have likely evaporated. However, those with larger masses may still exist, evaporating at the present epoch—even though they have been never directly observed. Astronomers Jakub Scholtz of Durham University and James Unwin of University of Illinois at Chicago, assume that PBHs could reside even closer to us than we think. In a recently published paper,...

Warp drive is one of the many futuristic ideas proposed in Star Trek, allowing for faster-than-light travel across the galaxy. Einstein's Theory of Relativity prevents anything from moving faster than light. In 1994, a theoretical physicist proposed a workaround: creating a bubble within space-time that would twist distances, allowing anything within the bubble to travel long distances. Many think it makes theoretical sense, but is practically unworkable. An undergrad at the University of Alabama wants to restart the conversation, and he's focused on how much energy such a bubble would need. Star Trek's science fiction has been intermingled with...

Here’s what quantum supremacy does—and doesn’t—mean for computing And no, super-powerful computers are not about to take over by Martin Giles Sep 24, 2019 Google Google has reportedly demonstrated for the first time that a quantum computer is capable of performing a task beyond the reach of even the most powerful conventional supercomputer in any practical time frame—a milestone known in the world of computing as “quantum supremacy.”The ominous-sounding term, which was coined by theoretical physicist John Preskill in 2012, evokes an image of Darth Vader–like machines lording it over other computers. And the news has already produced some outlandish...

The KATRIN discovery stems from direct, high-precision measurements of how a rare type of electron-neutrino pair share energy. This approach is the same as neutrino mass experiments from the 1990s and early 2000s...both of which set the previous upper limit of the mass at 2 eV. The heart of the KATRIN experiment is the source that generates electron-neutrino pairs: gaseous tritium, a highly radioactive isotope of hydrogen. As the tritium nucleus undergoes radioactive decay, it emits a pair of particles: one electron and one neutrino, both sharing 18,560 eV of energy. KATRIN scientists cannot directly measure the neutrinos, but they...

The universe is looking younger every day, it seems. New calculations suggest the universe could be a couple billion years younger than scientists now estimate, and even younger than suggested by two other calculations published this year that trimmed hundreds of millions of years from the age of the cosmos. The huge swings in scientists' estimates — even this new calculation could be off by billions of years — reflect different approaches to the tricky problem of figuring the universe's real age.