Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: cosmology – Page 89

One of the greatest mysteries of science could be one step closer to being solved

Around 80% of the universe’s matter is dark, meaning it is invisible. Despite being imperceptible, dark matter constantly streams through us at a rate of trillions of particles per second. We know it exists due to its gravitational effects, yet direct detection has remained elusive.

Researchers from Lancaster University, the University of Oxford, and Royal Holloway, University of London, are leveraging cutting-edge quantum technologies to build the most sensitive dark matter detectors to date. Their project, titled “A Quantum View of the Invisible Universe,” is featured at the Royal Society’s Summer Science Exhibition. Related research is also published in the Journal of Low Temperature Physics

The team includes Dr. Michael Thompson, Professor Edward Laird, Dr. Dmitry Zmeev, and Dr. Samuli Autti from Lancaster, Professor Jocelyn Monroe from Oxford, and Professor Andrew Casey from RHUL.

Sean Carroll — Physics of Consciousness

Sign up for a free Closer To Truth account to receive special members-only benefits: https://closertotruth.com/

How to explain our inner awareness that is at once most common and most mysterious? Traditional explanations focus at the level of neuron and neuronal circuits in the brain. But little real progress has motivated some to look much deeper, into the laws of physics — information theory, quantum mechanics, even postulating new laws of physics.

Watch more videos on consciousness as all physical: https://shorturl.at/PKpOk.

Sean Carroll is Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University and fractal faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. His research focuses on fundamental physics and cosmology.

Closer To Truth, hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn and directed by Peter Getzels, presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.

Huge neutrino detector sees first hints of particles from exploding stars

Kamiokande-II saw the first supernova neutrinos from the famous SN 1987A.

Every few seconds, somewhere in the observable Universe, a massive star collapses and unleashes a supernova explosion. Japan’s Super-Kamiokande observatory might now be collecting a steady trickle of neutrinos from those cataclysms, physicists say — amounting to a few detections a year.

These tiny subatomic particles are central to understanding what goes on inside a supernova: because they zip out of the star’s collapsing core and across space, they can provide information about any potentially new physics that occur under extreme conditions.

At last month’s Neutrino 2024 conference in Milan, Italy, Masayuki Harada, a physicist at the University of Tokyo, revealed that the first hints of supernova neutrinos seem to be emerging from the cacophony of particles that the Super-Kamiokande detector collects every day from other sources, such as cosmic rays hitting the atmosphere and nuclear fusion in the Sun’s core. The result “indicates that we started observing a signal”, says Masayuki Nakahata, a physicist at the University of Tokyo and spokesperson for the experiment, which is commonly referred to as Super-K. But Nakahata cautions that the supporting data — collected over 956 days of observation — are still very weak.

Putting Black Holes Inside Stuff | Dead Planets Society Podcast

Primordial black holes are tiny versions of the big beasts you typically think of. They’re so small, they could easily fit inside stuff, like a planet, or a star… or a person. So, needless to say, this has piqued the curiosity of our Dead Planeteers.

Leah and Chelsea want to know, can you put primordial black holes inside things and what happens if you do?

Black hole astronomer Allison Kirkpatrick at the University of Kansas is back to help them figure this one out. And it turns out, despite being very small, these black holes are incredibly heavy, so ingesting and/or hugging them seems firmly off the cards — much to Chelsea’s displeasure.

Dead Planets Society is a podcast that takes outlandish ideas about how to tinker with the cosmos – from punching a hole in a planet to unifying the asteroid belt – and subjects them to the laws of physics to see how they fare.

Your hosts are Leah Crane and Chelsea Whyte.

If you have a cosmic object you’d like to figure out how to destroy, email the team at [email protected]. It may just feature in a later episode.

Continue reading “Putting Black Holes Inside Stuff | Dead Planets Society Podcast” | >

Using Black Holes to Traverse the Universe with Dr. David Kipping

The Halo Drive, using a laser to gain fuel free relativistic propulsion from a black hole. By shooting a laser close to the event horizon of a black hole, Dr. David Kipping’s conceptual star drive could lead to traveling across the milky way from one black hole to another as well as techno signatures from advanced civilizations that might already be using this intergalactic relay system.

The halo drive: • the halo drive.

Cool Worlds — YouTube: / @coolworldslab.

Cool Worlds:
http://coolworlds.astro.columbia.edu/

Kipping, David (2018), \

Dark Matter Dynamics: Exploring the Strange Milky Way Satellite, Crater 2

Crater 2, a large, dim satellite galaxy, exhibits properties that challenge traditional cold dark matter theories. The SIDM theory provides a better explanation, suggesting dark matter interactions that reduce density and increase galaxy size, matching observations.

Crater 2, located approximately 380,000 light years from Earth, is one of the largest satellite galaxies of the Milky Way. Extremely cold and with slow-moving stars, Crater 2 has low surface brightness. How this galaxy originated remains unclear.

Challenges in Understanding Crater 2.