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Archive for the ‘cosmology’ category: Page 351

Mar 27, 2018

Rare Type of Supernova Extinguishes Star at Unprecedented Speed

Posted by in categories: cosmology, materials

Supernovae produce some of the most powerful explosions in the cosmos, expelling a doomed star’s contents at velocities reaching 10 percent the speed of light. It usually takes a few weeks or months for a supernova to fade into nothingness, but astronomers have now documented a record-setting case in which a star was extinguished in just a few days.

They’re called Fast-Evolving Luminous Transients (FELTs), an exotic type of supernova discovered only a few years ago. As the name implies, these supernovae develop quickly, they’re very bright, and then they disappear. Unlike more “conventional” supernovae, such as Type Ia supernovae, the duration of these explosions can be measured in days rather than weeks or months. These celestial events are rare, and only a handful of FELTs have ever been documented.

The perplexing thing about FELTs, however, isn’t so much that they’re short lived—it’s that they’re also very bright. Scientists have subsequently theorized that they’re the glowing remnant of a gamma-ray burst (a massive explosion produced by a collapsing star that gives birth to a black hole), a supernova fueled by a magnetar (a neutron star with a powerful magnetic field), or a failed Type Ia supernova (in which a white dwarf star sucks up material from a nearby star, eventually causing it to explode). New research published today in Nature Astronomy suggests it’s none of the above.

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Mar 24, 2018

The travelling speed camera

Posted by in categories: cosmology, electronics

The ULTRACAM has been a staple in ESO for almost 16 years. This high-speed camera is able to do 500 photographs per second in three different wavelengths and, since 2002 has been operating at the William Herschel Telescope at La Palma (Canary Islands, Spain), the New Technology Telescope at La Silla (Chile) (where this picture was taken) and, most recently, at the Very Large Telescope at Paranal (Chile) and the Thai National Telescope at Chiang Mai (Thailand).

Some of its past targets have included: the study of black holes, “hot-Jupiters” or variable stars.

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Mar 23, 2018

Bioquark Inc. — Evolution of the New SuperHuman — Ira Pastor

Posted by in categories: alien life, bioengineering, business, cosmology, DNA, genetics, health, life extension, transhumanism

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Mar 22, 2018

Transhumanism VS Christianity (Full Exclusive Interview)

Posted by in categories: cosmology, transhumanism

Just Out: I did an hour long interview with Josh Peck of Into the Multiverse on Skywatch TV. Josh is a Christian #libertarian and this interview covers a variety of subjects including the compatibility of #Christianity & #Transhumanism, as well as my CA Governor run:


http://skywatchtv.com PLEASE SUBSCRIBE AND SHARE! Here is the full exclusive interview of Zoltan Istvan by Josh Peck on the topic of transhumanism vs Christianity.

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Mar 22, 2018

Black Hole Echoes Would Reveal Break With Einstein’s Theory

Posted by in categories: cosmology, physics

Gravitational waves have opened up new ways to test the properties of black holes — and Einstein’s theory of gravity along with them.

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Mar 20, 2018

New material capable of detecting dark matter, scientists say

Posted by in categories: cosmology, particle physics

March 20 (UPI) — Scientists believe a new material, known as a scintillator, will expand the search for dark matter.

New analysis suggests the scintillator material is sensitive to dark matter particles with less mass than a proton, which should allow scientists to look for dark matter among a previously unexplored mass range.

Weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs, describe dark matter particles with a mass greater than that of a proton. Scientists have tried to directly detect WIMPs using a variety of strategies, but with no success.

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Mar 18, 2018

We’ll Never Know For Sure How Everything Began

Posted by in categories: cosmology, singularity

Roughly 13.8 billion years ago, the Universe as we know it expanded from an infinitely hot and dense singularity in space and time, first in a furious torrent of rapid cosmic inflation for a fraction of a second, and then in the more calm manner we see today – gradual, yet accelerating expansion fueled by dark energy.

This fleetingly describes the Big Bang model of cosmology, the most successful theoretical explanation for our grand Universe. Backed by boatloads of observational evidence, we can be very sure of its veracity. Caltech astrophysicist Sean Caroll even described the Big Bang as “100 percent true.”

But that percentage of surety dwindles to nothing when discussing the singularity that supposedly started it all. Where did it come from? What came before it? What caused it to “bang” in such a big way? As Carroll admitted, this singularity and its accompanying “bang” are essentially stand-ins for what we don’t – and currently can’t – actually know.

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Mar 18, 2018

Stephen Hawking submitted a final scientific paper 2 weeks before he died — and it could lead to the discovery of a parallel universe

Posted by in category: cosmology

A paper submitted for publication just two weeks ago could prove the “multiverse” theory which Hawking loved.

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Mar 16, 2018

To Understand the Universe, Physicists Are Building Their Own

Posted by in categories: cosmology, quantum physics

Silke Weinfurtner is trying to build the universe from scratch. In a physics lab at the University of Nottingham—close to the Sherwood forest of legendary English outlaw Robin Hood—she and her colleagues will work with a huge superconducting coil magnet, 1 meter across. Inside, there’s a small pool of liquid, whose gentle ripples stand to mimic the matter fluctuations that gave rise to the structures we observe in the cosmos.

Weinfurtner isn’t an evil genius hell-bent on creating a world of her own to rule. She just wants to understand the origins of the one we already have.

The Big Bang is by far the most popular model of our universe’s beginnings, but even its fans disagree about how it happened. The theory depends on the existence of a hypothetical quantum field that stretched the universe ultra-rapidly and uniformly in all directions, expanding it by a huge factor in a fraction of a second: a process dubbed inflation. But that inflation or the field responsible for it—the inflaton—is impossible to prove directly. Which is why Weinfurtner wants to mimic it in a lab.

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Mar 15, 2018

Synopsis: Cosmic Voids Under Pressure

Posted by in category: cosmology

An analysis of distortions in the cosmic microwave background reveals information about the gas inside large voids in space.

Galaxies tend to be the standouts in astronomy. But researchers are finding there is plenty to learn from studying cosmic voids—swaths of mostly empty space, hundreds of millions of light years across. The temperature and pressure of the gas in voids could, for example, provide clues to how energy cycles through the cosmos. David Alonso, of the University of Oxford in the UK, and colleagues have now taken one of the first steps toward determining these gas properties by analyzing how the gas distorts light from the early Universe.

The cosmic microwave background (CMB) is the first light released into the cosmos, roughly 380,000 years after the big bang. Intergalactic gas boosts the energy of photons from the CMB, and this distortion is a powerful probe of the gas in galaxy clusters. But no one has yet used it to study voids. Alonso’s team combined maps of the CMB with images of 774 cosmic voids. The researchers then deduced the properties of the gas within each void by comparing the measured energy of the CMB photons to models of the electron pressure in voids.

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