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Archive for the ‘cosmology’ category: Page 346

May 8, 2018

Throwing Light on Dark Matter

Posted by in category: cosmology

85% of our universe is made up of Dark Matter and scientists are still trying to figure it out.


Dark Matter has constantly eluded mankind. Did you know that first signs of dark matter were already considered way back in 1930s.

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May 7, 2018

ESA selects three new mission concepts for study

Posted by in categories: cosmology, space travel

A high-energy survey of the early Universe, an infrared observatory to study the formation of stars, planets and galaxies, and a Venus orbiter are to be considered for ESA’s fifth medium class mission in its Cosmic Vision science programme, with a planned launch date in 2032.

The three candidates, the Transient High Energy Sky and Early Universe Surveyor (Theseus), the SPace Infrared telescope for Cosmology and Astrophysics (Spica), and the EnVision mission to Venus were selected from 25 proposals put forward by the scientific community.

Theseus, Spica and EnVision will be studied in parallel and a final decision is expected in 2021.

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May 7, 2018

A spectacular destination for astronomy fans is being built in rural Norway

Posted by in categories: cosmology, military, satellites

The facility, which was originally used by the US military to spy on Soviet satellites during the Cold War, is undergoing a major overhaul to attract tourists and researchers alike. In search of inspiration, Snøhetta’s designers took astronomy classes and were captivated by the architecture of the galaxy.

“We learned about the eight shaped analemma diagram that the moon and the sun makes if you watch them from the same point over 365 days,” says Skaare. “We were especially inspired by the ‘ugly moons’ of Mars, with its funny shape,” she says referring Phobos and Deimos, the red-planet’s two lumpy satellites.

Mars’s lumpy-potato moons, in fact, inspired the shape of Solobservatoriet’s visitor cabins. Surrounding the planetarium are several imperfect-sphere rooms for stargazers who want to spend the an evening in the forest—perhaps to catch the spectacular Northern Lights. Designed to accommodate groups of two to 32, the cabins will be loosely scattered around the planetarium, by design.

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May 6, 2018

How to understand Stephen Hawking’s final paper. Or at least try

Posted by in category: cosmology

It all started with a Big Bang. But then what?

Renowned theoretical astrophysicist Stephen Hawking had been trying to answer that and other questions about the universe right up until his death. But in his final paper, submitted just eight days before he died on March 14, at age 76, Hawking and co-author Thomas Hertog proposed that the universe is actually simpler than what’s been suggested in other theories.

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May 4, 2018

Does Mystery of Quantum Physics Prove God Exists?

Posted by in categories: cosmology, general relativity, particle physics, philosophy, quantum physics, science

Ironically, my more popular posts are ones furthest from my passion and core interests. They are larks—never intended to go viral. This is about one of them…

Apart from family, I typically steer clear of religious topics. I identify with a mainstream religion, but it is completely beside the purpose of Lifeboat Foundation, and it is a personal affair.[1]

Yet, here we discuss a religious topic, after all. Let’s get started…


Question

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May 3, 2018

Stephen Hawking’s Final Theory About Our Universe Has Just Been Published, And It Will Melt Your Brain

Posted by in categories: cosmology, neuroscience, physics

Posthumous journal.


Groundbreaking physicist Stephen Hawking left us one last shimmering piece of brilliance before he died: his final paper, detailing his last theory on the origin of the Universe, co-authored with Thomas Hertog from KU Leuven.

The paper, published today in the Journal of High Energy Physics, puts forward that the Universe is far less complex than current multiverse theories suggest.

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Apr 30, 2018

Astronomers See a Pileup of 14 Separate Galaxies in the Early Universe

Posted by in category: cosmology

Looking deep into the observable Universe – and hence, back to the earliest periods of time – is an immensely fascinating thing. In so doing, astronomers are able to see the earliest galaxies in the Universe and learn more about how they evolved over time. From this, they are not only able to see how large-scale structures (like galaxies and galaxy clusters) formed, but also the role played by dark matter.

Most recently, an international team of scientists used the Atacama Large Millimeter-submillimeter Array (ALMA) to observe the Universe when it was just 1.4 billion years old. What they observed was a “protocluster”, a series of 14 galaxies located 12.4 billion light-years away that were about to merge. This would result in the formation of a massive galaxy cluster, one of the largest objects in the known Universe.

The study which described their findings, titled “A massive core for a cluster of galaxies at a redshift of 4.3”, recently appeared in the journal Nature. The study was led by Tim Miller – an astronomer from Dalhousie University, Halifax, and Yale University – and included members from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the European Southern Observatory (ESO), Canada’s National Research Council, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, and multiple universities and research institutions.

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Apr 30, 2018

This Timeline Shows The Entire History of The Universe, And Where It’s Headed

Posted by in category: cosmology

If you’re the type of person who sometimes wakes up at 3am and lies in bed trying to wrap your tiny mind around the achingly vast Universe and where it’s all headed, well, we have something for you (also, same).

This incredible (and incredibly long) infographic from 2015 just keeps going and going and going. Which makes sense, because we’re talking about the entire lifespan of the Universe, from the moment of the Big Bang to the ‘heat death’ of everything we know and love.

Created by Slovak graphic designer Martin Vargic, the Timeline of the Universe covers the past 13.8 billion years of space, and then plots out what’s likely to occur in the next 10 billion or so.

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Apr 29, 2018

Meet the Woman Who Wants to Solve the Universe’s Mysteries

Posted by in category: cosmology

Last year Kollmeier was named director of the fifth version of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, a project that aims to map the universe. The survey, which launches in 2020, will employ telescopes in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres to scan the entire sky. The telescopes will obtain spectra of bright objects in the sky, breaking up that light into component parts. “That’s where the astrophysics is,” says Kollmeier. “That tells you all the chemical abundances. That tells you all the transitions in the objects.” And that’s where she’ll begin to find answers to her questions: How do supermassive black holes grow? Can stars be used as clocks that tell us when and how a galaxy was formed?

Kollmeier didn’t get into astronomy by looking up at the stars. She meant to be a lawyer until she went to what she calls “nerd camp” and learned how to write code to classify stars. “The idea that you could interrogate the universe in this way … I felt like an explorer.” Now she’s going further than she once thought possible.

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Apr 29, 2018

Bye, black holes: white holes are even weirder

Posted by in category: cosmology

If there is a phenomenon out there that is actually more bizarre than black holes, it has to be white holes. Black holes can’t say that they might be the answer to where so much of the dark matter—and even most of the matter—in the universe is lurking.

The gravitational pull of a black hole is so insanely strong that not even light (so much for being the fastest entity in the cosmos), can defy it. Nothing can save you once you pass the grim point of no return otherwise known as the event horizon. However, Space.com observed that when Einstein predicted the existence of black holes in his theory of relativity, he also predicted the theoretical reverse of these galactic monsters. A white hole would be no threat to objects in space passing dangerously close, nothing can even enter its event horizon.

When black holes devour massive amounts of matter and energy, it is thought that everything which appears to vanish forever actually emerges from a white hole. Exactly where the victims of a black hole come out could be anywhere from another place in this universe to another universe entirely. Theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli theorized something even stranger linking the two. Black holes result from collapsed stars, but when these astral corpses die, they may actually turn into white holes.

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