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Now, however, astronomers Fan Zou and W. Niel Brandt, both of Penn State University, have led a team that connected the two mechanisms of black-hole growth from observations and simulations. The results may provide some answers at last.

Related: NASA telescope spots ‘cosmic fireworks’ and faint echos from the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole

Continue reading “12 billion years of black hole history, revealed through X-rays and simulations” »

The Universe’s history, from cosmic inflation to the Big Bang to the present, is known. But whether it’s infinite or not is still a mystery.

Observational astronomy shows that newly discovered young stellar objects (YSOs) in the immediate vicinity of the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A located in the center of our galaxy behave differently than expected. They describe similar orbits to already known young evolved stars and are arranged in a particular pattern around the supermassive black hole.

Are points of infinite curvature, where general relativity breaks down, always hidden inside black holes? An audacious attempt to find out is shedding light on the mystery of quantum gravity.

By Thomas Lewton

The study is based on several intriguing coincidences. First, observations show that there is about the same amount of ordinary and dark matter, which exceeds baryonic by about five times. And secondly, neutrons and protons have almost the same mass, which allows them to form stable atoms — this is a random but stable property of the quantum world, because otherwise our universe would not be home to any of the atoms that make up stars, planets and ourselves.

In fact, the theory suggests that there may be a parallel universe like ours in which neutrons and protons do not have such convenient symmetry in mass. In this world, there is a “soup” of subatomic particles that interact little, which explains why dark matter does not seem to clump together.

It is important to note that this is just one more of many hypotheses that try to explain the mystery of dark matter – an annoying and lingering unknown in our understanding of the universe.

Quantum field theory techniques are employed to compute the conservative scattering dynamics of a pair of black holes to the fifth order in Newton’s constant.

Scientists may be one step closer to unraveling one of the universe’s greatest mysteries. Their recent calculations suggest that neutron stars could play a crucial role in shedding light on the mysterious dark matter.

In a paper published in The Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, physicists from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Dark Matter Particle Physics, led by the University of Melbourne, calculated that energy transferred when dark matter particles collide and annihilate inside cold dead neutron stars can heat the stars up very quickly.

It was previously thought that this energy transfer could take a very long time, in some cases, longer than the age of the universe itself, rendering this heating irrelevant.

This is the question of the origin of our Universe. Every star, every galaxy and every planet we see came from the Big Bang. But what was before it?

Is dark matter primordial black holes? If so, could we find them using Apollo-era technology on the moon?
A new paper suggests the answer may be yes to both. I interviewed David Kaiser, one of the paper’s co-authors, former student of inflationary cosmology pioneer Alan Guth, and now Professor of Physics and Professor of the History of Science at MIT.
For the preprint of the full paper:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2310.16877
and other press about the paper.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n…
https://news.mit.edu/2024/exotic-blac…
And some other related papers:
https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract…
https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.02168
https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.17217
a timeline is below.
00:00 introduction.
00:57 primordial black holes.
3:05 particle dark matter and modified gravity.
6:33 LIGO and EHT
11:03 window of opportunity.
15:16 observaitonal signatures.
20:30 Apollo era tech.
25:19 Star Wars.
25:54 the future.