Lifeboat Foundation

Scientists using observations from NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory have discovered, for the first time, the signal from a pair of monster black holes disrupting a cloud of gas in the center of a galaxy.

“It’s a very weird event, called AT 2021hdr, that keeps recurring every few months,” said Lorena Hernández-García, an astrophysicist at the Millennium Institute of Astrophysics, the Millennium Nucleus on Transversal Research and Technology to Explore Supermassive Black Holes, and University of Valparaíso in Chile. “We think that a gas cloud engulfed the black holes. As they orbit each other, the black holes interact with the cloud, perturbing and consuming its gas. This produces an oscillating pattern in the light from the system.”

A paper about AT 2021hdr, led by Hernández-García, was published Nov. 13 in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

Astronomers have unveiled the most detailed map of the gravitational wave background to date, using pulsar timing arrays and the extraordinary sensitivity of the MeerKAT radio telescope. In my new co-author paper, we find potential tantalising hints of a “hot spot” in the gravitational wave map.

DeepMind, Google’s AI research org, has unveiled a model that can generate an “endless” variety of playable 3D worlds.

Called Genie 2, the model — the successor to DeepMind’s Genie, which was released earlier this year — can generate an interactive, real-time scene from a single image and text description (e.g. “A cute humanoid robot in the woods”). In this way, it’s similar to models under development by Fei-Fei Li’s company, World Labs, and Israeli startup Decart.

DeepMind claims that Genie 2 can generate a “vast diversity of rich 3D worlds,” including worlds in which users can take actions like jumping and swimming by using a mouse or keyboard. Trained on videos, the model’s able to simulate object interactions, animations, lighting, physics, reflections, and the behavior of “NPCs.”

An international team of astronomers has observed an extremely radio-loud quasar known as J1601+3102. As a result, they found that the quasar hosts a large extended radio jet. The discovery is reported in a research paper published Nov. 25 on the arXiv preprint server.

Quasars, or quasi-stellar objects (QSOs), are active galactic nuclei (AGN) of very high luminosity powered by supermassive black holes (SMBHs), emitting electromagnetic radiation observable in radio, infrared, visible, ultraviolet and X-ray wavelengths. They are among the brightest and most distant objects in the known universe, and serve as fundamental tools for numerous studies in astrophysics as well as cosmology.

J1601+3102 is an extremely radio-loud quasar at a redshift of 4.9, discovered in 2022. It has a radio flux at a level of 69 mJy, bolometric luminosity of about 26 quattuordecillion erg/s and a steep spectral index.

“Kepler-51e has an orbit slightly larger than Venus and is just inside the star’s habitable zone, so a lot more could be going on beyond that distance if we take the time to look,” said Dr. Jessica Libby-Roberts.

How many exoplanets are in the cosmos and what can they tell us about planetary formation and evolution? This is what a recent study published in The Astronomical Journal hopes to address as an international team of more than 50 researchers announced the discovery of Kepler-51e, which is the fourth planet residing in the Kepler-51 system. This discovery holds the potential to expand our knowledge of exoplanets, specifically regarding their formation and evolution, as Kepler-51e challenges previous notions about low-density exoplanets, also called “puff planets” or “Super-Puffs”

“Super puff planets are very unusual in that they have very low mass and low density,” said Dr. Jessica Libby-Roberts, who is a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at Penn State University and second author of the study. “The three previously known planets that orbit the star, Kepler-51, are about the size of Saturn but only a few times the mass of Earth, resulting in a density like cotton candy.”

Continue reading “Astronomers Find New Planet in Kepler-51 System, Challenging Models of ‘Super-Puffs’” »

There’s a common popular science demonstration involving “soap boats,” in which liquid soap poured onto the surface of water creates a propulsive flow driven by gradients in surface tension. But it doesn’t last very long since the soapy surfactants rapidly saturate the water surface, eliminating that surface tension. Using ethanol to create similar “cocktail boats” can significantly extend the effect because the alcohol evaporates rather than saturating the water.

That simple classroom demonstration could also be used to propel tiny robotic devices across liquid surfaces to carry out various environmental or industrial tasks, according to a preprint posted to the physics arXiv. The authors also exploited the so-called “Cheerios effect” as a means of self-assembly to create clusters of tiny ethanol-powered robots.

As previously reported, those who love their Cheerios for breakfast are well acquainted with how those last few tasty little “O” s tend to clump together in the bowl: either drifting to the center or to the outer edges. The “Cheerios effect is found throughout nature, such as in grains of pollen (or, alternatively, mosquito eggs or beetles) floating on top of a pond; small coins floating in a bowl of water; or fire ants clumping together to form life-saving rafts during floods. A 2005 paper in the American Journal of Physics outlined the underlying physics, identifying the culprit as a combination of buoyancy, surface tension, and the so-called ” meniscus effect.”

The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Volume I: https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/I_toc.html.

“In this chapter, we shall discuss one of the most far-reaching generalizations of the human mind. While we are admiring the human mind, we should take some time off to stand in awe of a nature that could follow with such completeness and generality such an elegantly simple principle as the law of gravitation. What is this law of gravitation? ”

Astrophysicists have recently made a groundbreaking discovery that is sending shockwaves through the scientific community: an immense cluster of dark matter, equivalent to the mass of 10 million suns, is moving closer to our solar system. The mysterious nature of this phenomenon and its potential consequences for Earth have sparked concern and a flurry of research efforts to understand what this means for humanity and the universe itself.

Dark matter — one of the grand enigmas of astrophysics; yet there is no radiation-emission, absorption, reflection-of light. It does make stars and galaxies rotate a lot faster than they ever did before. The only clues scientists have about what 27% of its quantity is in the cosmos versus only 5% by ordinary matter are of itself.

Explained astrophysicist Dr. Lydia Harmon: “Dark matter is like the scaffolding of the universe, holding the galaxies together. Without it, the cosmic structure as we know it wouldn’t exist. But the idea of such a massive concentration headed toward us raises unprecedented questions.”

Thus, when one looks back in time, say by looking at light from a distant galaxy that has traveled billions of years to reach us, this is akin to “zooming out” on the hologram and making its details fuzzier in the process. This zooming out can continue until all the details of the hologram disappear altogether, which in the model of the universe suggested by Hawking and Hertog, would be the origin of time at the Big Bang.

“The crux of our hypothesis is that when you go back in time, to this earliest, violent, unimaginably complicated phase of the universe, in that phase you find a deeper level of evolution, a level in which even the laws of physics co-evolve with the universe that is taking shape,” Hertog said. “And the consequence is that if you push everything even further backward, into the Big Bang, so to speak, even the laws of physics disappear.”