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Post by swamprat on Nov 11, 2019 16:35:30 GMT
Poof! Bang! Time for another headache! We May Finally Understand the Moments Before the Big Bang By Tim Childers - Live Science Contributor | Nov. 11, 2019
Physicists may have solved a decades-long mystery about how our universe came to be.
There's a hole in the story of how our universe came to be. First, the universe inflated rapidly, like a balloon. Then, everything went boom.
But how those two periods are connected has eluded physicists. Now, a new study suggests a way to link the two epochs.
In the first period, the universe grew from an almost infinitely small point to nearly an octillion (that's a 1 followed by 27 zeros) times that in size in less than a trillionth of a second. This inflation period was followed by a more gradual, but violent, period of expansion we know as the Big Bang. During the Big Bang, an incredibly hot fireball of fundamental particles — such as protons, neutrons and electrons — expanded and cooled to form the atoms, stars and galaxies we see today.
The Big Bang theory, which describes cosmic inflation, remains the most widely supported explanation of how our universe began, yet scientists are still perplexed by how these wholly different periods of expansion are connected. To solve this cosmic conundrum, a team of researchers at Kenyon College, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Netherlands' Leiden University simulated the critical transition between cosmic inflation and the Big Bang — a period they call "reheating."
"The post-inflation reheating period sets up the conditions for the Big Bang and, in some sense, puts the 'bang' in the Big Bang," David Kaiser, a professor of physics at MIT, said in a statement. "It's this bridge period where all hell breaks loose and matter behaves in anything but a simple way."
When the universe expanded in a flash of a second during cosmic inflation, all the existing matter was spread out, leaving the universe a cold and empty place, devoid of the hot soup of particles needed to ignite the Big Bang. During the reheating period, the energy propelling inflation is believed to decay into particles, said Rachel Nguyen, a doctoral student in physics at the University of Illinois and lead author of the study.
"Once those particles are produced, they bounce around and knock into each other, transferring momentum and energy," Nguyen told Live Science. "And that's what thermalizes and reheats the universe to set the initial conditions for the Big Bang."
In their model, Nguyen and her colleagues simulated the behavior of exotic forms of matter called inflatons. Scientists think these hypothetical particles, similar in nature to the Higgs boson, created the energy field that drove cosmic inflation. Their model showed that, under the right conditions, the energy of the inflatons could be redistributed efficiently to create the diversity of particles needed to reheat the universe. They published their results Oct. 24 in the journal Physical Review Letters.
A crucible for high-energy physics
"When we're studying the early universe, what we're really doing is a particle experiment at very, very high temperatures," said Tom Giblin, an associate professor of physics at Kenyon College in Ohio and co-author of the study. "The transition from the cold inflationary period to the hot period is one that should hold some key evidence as to what particles really exist at these extremely high energies."
One fundamental question that plagues physicists is how gravity behaves at the extreme energies present during inflation. In Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity, all matter is believed to be affected by gravity in the same way, where the strength of gravity is constant regardless of a particle's energy. However, because of the strange world of quantum mechanics, scientists think that, at very high energies, matter responds to gravity differently.
The team incorporated this assumption in their model by tweaking how strongly the particles interacted with gravity. They discovered that the more they increased the strength of gravity, the more efficiently the inflatons transferred energy to produce the zoo of hot matter particles found during the Big Bang.
Now, they need to find evidence to buttress their model somewhere in the universe.
"The universe holds so many secrets encoded in very complicated ways," Giblin told Live Science. "It's our job to learn about the nature of reality by coming up with a decoding device — a way to extract information from the universe. We use simulations to make predictions about what the universe should look like so that we can actually start decoding it. This reheating period should leave an imprint somewhere in the universe. We just need to find it."
But finding that imprint could be tricky. Our earliest glimpse of the universe is a bubble of radiation left over from a few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang, called the cosmic microwave background (CMB). Yet the CMB only hints at the state of the universe during those first critical seconds of birth. Physicists like Giblin hope future observations of gravitational waves will provide the final clues.
www.livescience.com/physicists-model-reheating-universe.html
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Post by gus on Nov 18, 2019 2:06:41 GMT
Wow
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Post by swamprat on Nov 18, 2019 3:02:12 GMT
THAT is intriguing! Thank you, Gus!
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Post by gus on Nov 18, 2019 10:57:15 GMT
This is a must watch
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Post by swamprat on Nov 19, 2019 0:33:00 GMT
NASA Picks SpaceX, Blue Origin and More to Join Private Moon Lander Project By Tariq Malik, Mike Wall | 5:45pm Nov. 18 | Spacefligh
NASA has recruited SpaceX's Starship, Blue Origin's Blue Moon and three other commercial lunar lander ideas to join its Artemis moon program.
Today (Nov. 18), NASA announced the selection of SpaceX, Blue Origin, Sierra Nevada Corp., Ceres Robotics and Tyvak Nano-Satellite Systems, Inc. to join its Commercial Lunar Payload Services program (CLPS). The five companies can now vie to deliver robotic payloads to the lunar surface for NASA, helping to pave the way for the return of astronauts to the moon by 2024.
"American aerospace companies of all sizes are joining the Artemis program," NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said in a statement. "Expanding the group of companies who are eligible to bid on sending payloads to the moon's surface drives innovation and reduces costs to NASA and American taxpayers. We anticipate opportunities to deliver a wide range of science and technology payloads to help make our vision for lunar exploration a reality and advance our goal of sending humans to explore Mars."
The five companies join nine others selected by CLPS in November 2018, bringing the total number of private moon lander hopefuls to 14 firms.
The newly selected five are:
• Blue Origin, Kent, Washington
• Ceres Robotics, Palo Alto, California
• Sierra Nevada Corporation, Louisville, Colorado
• SpaceX, Hawthorne, California
• Tyvak Nano-Satellite Systems Inc., Irvine, California
They include moon lander concepts of all sizes. They range from the truly massive — SpaceX's towering Starship vehicle — to land multiple rovers on the moon, to the smaller one-off probes like the boxy concept proposed by Tyvak Nano-Satellite Systems.
"The CLPS initiative was designed to leverage the expertise and innovation of private industry to get to the Moon quickly," Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA's associate administrator of the Science Mission Directorate, said in the statement. "As we build a steady cadence of deliveries, we’ll expand our ability to do new science on the lunar surface, develop new technologies, and support human exploration objectives."
Blue Origin's lander concept is based on its Blue Moon uncrewed vehicle, which the company's billionaire founder Jeff Bezos announced earlier this year.
Sierra Nevada Corp. and Ceres Robotics are developing mid-sized landers that could potentially be scaled up to larger vehicles in the future.
NASA plans to use private moon landers built by these partner companies to deliver rovers like the agency's new Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) to the moon's south pole. Other payloads could include power stations, science experiments and other lunar infrastructure.
NASA plans to spend a total of $2.6 billion on its CLPS contracts through November 2028, agency officials said. The 14 companies currently in the program can bid on NASA delivery services.
"All of them bring to the table different strengths and different ideas," Clarke said in a telecon with reporters today. "That's the intent, is to really broaden the pool — to bring on additional capabilities with new, innovative ideas so that our solution set is somewhat broader now."
In July, NASA awarded the first three contracts under the program, awarding lander missions to companies Astrobotic, Intuitive Machines and Orbit Beyond. Orbit Beyond dropped out of that contract but remains eligible to bid on future opportunities.
"Buying rides to the Moon to conduct science investigations and test new technology systems, instead of owning the delivery systems, enables NASA to do much more, sooner and for less cost, while being one of many customers on our commercial partners' landers," NASA's Steve Clarke, deputy associate administrator for exploration in the science directorate, said in the statement.
Artemis aims to put the first woman, and the next man, on the lunar surface by 2024 and to establish a long-term, sustainable human presence on and around the moon by 2028.
Such activities will help NASA develop the expertise necessary to put boots on Mars, something the agency wants to do in the 2030s, agency officials have stressed.
NASA is also looking to the private sector to develop crewed moon landers. This past May, the agency selected 11 companies to conduct studies and build prototypes. These 11 had until Nov. 1 to submit detailed proposals for the Artemis human lander, and NASA is expected to pick up to four finalists early next year.
www.space.com/nasa-picks-spacex-blue-origin-private-moon-lander-companies.html
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Post by gus on Nov 19, 2019 8:24:49 GMT
This is a must watch Under this YouTube clip there is the whole 8 interviews. The nugget of gold is that the US DOD are on a war footing in regards to UFOs and ETs. I bloody knew it.
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Post by swamprat on Nov 24, 2019 16:27:41 GMT
How come I've always been told the NOTHING can travel faster than the speed of light?! Oh, wait! That's still true in a vacuum! Epic cosmic explosion detected via faster-than-light particles Posted by Deborah Byrd in SPACE | November 24, 2019
Space-based observatories detected a violent explosion in a galaxy billions of light-years away. It became the brightest source of high-energy cosmic gamma rays seen so far. Specialized Earth-based telescopes detected it via faster-than-light particles cascading through Earth’s atmosphere.
Specialized telescopes – like H.E.S.S. in Namibia and MAGIC in the Canary Islands – detect the bluish Cherenkov light in Earth’s atmosphere, generated by faster-than-light particles, caused by cosmic gamma rays. Image via DESY Science Communication Lab.
On January 14, 2019, two NASA space observatories – Swift and Fermi – detected a burst of gamma rays from a source billions of light-years away. (The source of the burst is located about 4.5 billion light-years away in the direction of the constellation Fornax.) That’s not unusual in and of itself; these space telescopes detect gamma ray bursts about once daily, routinely sending automatic alerts to other gamma-ray observatories around the world. But this burst – labeled GRB 190114C – was different. It became the most powerful yet detected by a specialized telescope on Earth’s surface, where scientists registered the highest energy gamma rays ever measured from a gamma ray burst, reaching about 100 billion times as much energy as visible light. The MAGIC telescope in the Canary Islands was able to point to the region of origin so quickly that it began observing the event within only 57 seconds of the space-based observations. Its scientists presented their observations last week (November 20, 2019) in two independent studies in the peer-reviewed journal Nature.
In the same issue of Nature, scientists presented a study of an earlier gamma ray burst – labeled GRB 180720B – not as strong but also detected on the ground via the H.E.S.S. telescope in Namibia on July 20, 2018.
These two ground-based detections – from January 2019 and July 2018 – are the first detections of gamma-ray bursts with ground-based gamma-ray telescopes. They come after many years of trying to catch such events.
The power of these cosmic explosions is mind-boggling. But their detection is fascinating as well. The ground-based H.E.S.S. and MAGIC telescopes didn’t detect the gamma rays directly. They detected their effect on Earth’s atmosphere, via faster-than-light particles known as Cherenkov radiation. The Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY) – a national research center in Germany that operates particle accelerators and that also plays a role in operating both H.E.S.S. and MAGIC – explained in a statement:
When an energetic cosmic gamma ray hits Earth’s atmosphere, it shatters molecules and atoms. This process creates an avalanche of particles called an air shower. The shower particles are so energetic that they move faster through the air than light – although not faster than light in a vacuum, which according to Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity is the absolute upper speed limit. The result is a bluish glow, a kind of optical counterpart to the supersonic bang. This Cherenkov light, named after its discoverer, can be observed by Cherenkov telescopes such as those of the H.E.S.S. and MAGIC observatories …
Gamma-ray bursts – called GRBs by scientists – are sudden, short bursts of gamma radiation from the cosmos. They were discovered by chance at the end of the 1960s by satellites used to monitor compliance with the nuclear test ban on Earth. These bursts are thought to originate from colliding neutron stars or supernova explosions. David Berge, head of gamma-ray astronomy at DESY, said:
"Gamma-ray bursts are the most powerful explosions known in the universe and typically release more energy in just a few seconds than our sun during its entire lifetime – they can shine through almost the entire visible universe."
Since the 1960s, astronomers have been studying gamma-ray bursts with satellites. Earth’s atmosphere absorbs gamma rays; Earth-based telescopes can’t detect cosmic gamma rays directly. Telescopes like H.E.S.S. and MAGIC are designed to detect a faint blue glow in the atmosphere – Cherenkov light – induced by cosmic gamma rays.
The detection of these two recent gamma ray bursts by these ground-based observatories was a culmination of years of effort by astronomers.
What are gamma ray bursts? They are cosmic explosions, with radiation up to a trillion times the energy of visible light. This illustration shows the set-up for the most common type of gamma ray burst. The core of a massive star (left) has collapsed and formed a black hole. This “engine” drives a jet of particles that moves through the collapsing star and out into space at nearly the speed of light. The prompt emission, which typically lasts a minute or less, may arise from the jet’s interaction with gas near the newborn black hole and from collisions between shells of fast-moving gas within the jet (internal shock waves). The afterglow emission occurs as the leading edge of the jet sweeps up its surroundings (creating an external shock wave) and emits radiation across the spectrum for some time — months to years, in the case of radio and visible light, and many hours at the highest gamma-ray energies yet observed. These far exceed 100 billion electron volts (GeV) for two recent GRBs. Image via NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/ICRAR.
One reason the result could be achieved was that – when space-based observatories detect a gamma ray burst – they quickly alert the entire observational community. In the case of the January 2019 gamma ray bust, more than 20 different telescopes were able to obtain a deeper look at the burst’s source. DESY said:
"This allowed [them] to pinpoint the details of the physical mechanism responsible for the highest-energy emission, as described in the second paper led by the MAGIC collaboration. Follow-up observations placed GRB 190114C at a distance of more than four billion light-years. This means, its light travelled more than four billion years to us, or about a third of the current age of the universe.
GRB 180720B, at a distance of six billion light years even further away, could still be detected in gamma rays at energies between 100 and 440 billion electron volts long after the initial blast."
DESY theorist Andrew Taylor, who contributed to the H.E.S.S. analysis, commented:
"The detection came quite unexpected, as gamma-ray bursts are fading fast, leaving behind an afterglow which can be seen for hours to days across many wavelengths from radio to X-rays, but had never been detected in very-high-energy gamma rays before.
This success is also due to an improved follow-up strategy in which we also concentrate on observations at later times after the actual star collapse."
Bottom line: On January 14, 2019, space-based observatories detected a violent explosion in a galaxy billions of light-years away. GRB 190114C became the brightest source of high-energy cosmic gamma rays seen so far. The MAGIC telescope in the Canary Islands was able to detect it via faster-than-light Cherenkov radiation cascading through Earth’s atmosphere. This observation – combined with a similar observation of another gamma ray burst, GRB 180720B, from July 2018 – were the successful culmination of years of effort by astronomers.
earthsky.org/space/jan-14-2019-gamma-ray-burst-brightest-so-far
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Post by gus on Nov 29, 2019 0:50:08 GMT
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Post by swamprat on Nov 29, 2019 17:48:16 GMT
Giant black hole 'should not even exist,' stunned scientists say By James Rogers | Fox News | Nov. 29, 2019
Scientists have discovered a huge black hole that is challenging long-held assumptions about the cosmic bodies in the Milky Way.
Stellar black holes are formed by the collapse of massive stars. The mass of an individual stellar black hole in our galaxy has long been estimated to be no more than 20 times that of the Sun, according to researchers.
Now, however, an international team of scientists led by Prof. Liu Jifeng of the National Astronomical Observatory of China of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC), has discovered a monster stellar black hole with a mass 70 times greater than the Sun.
"Black holes of such mass should not even exist in our Galaxy, according to most of the current models of stellar evolution," said Prof. Liu, in a statement.
Artist's impression of LB-1. (Yu Jingchuan, Beijing Planetarium, 2019)
"We thought that very massive stars with the chemical composition typical of our Galaxy must shed most of their gas in powerful stellar winds, as they approach the end of their life,” Liu added. “Therefore, they should not leave behind such a massive remnant. LB-1 is twice as massive as what we thought possible. Now theorists will have to take up the challenge of explaining its formation."
The black hole, named LB-1, is 15,000 light-years away. A light-year, which measures distance in space, equals 6 trillion miles.
A paper on the discovery has been published in the journal Nature.
Researchers made the discovery using China’s Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope (LAMOST). The telescope looks for stars that orbit an invisible object, pulled by its gravity, according to the scientists. Previously, stellar black holes could only be discovered by identifying X-ray emissions created when they devoured gas from a companion star.
After the black hole was spotted using LAMOST, the Gran Telescopio Canarias in Spain and the Keck I telescope in the U.S. were used to establish its physical parameters.
In the statement, experts note that the discovery of LB-1” fits nicely” with another breakthrough in astrophysics – the detection of ripples in space-time caused by black hole collisions in distant galaxies. The ripples have been identified by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in the U.S. and the Virgo gravitational wave detector in Italy.
"This remarkable result along with the LIGO-Virgo detections of binary black hole collisions during the past four years really points towards a renaissance in our understanding of black hole astrophysics," said LIGO Director Prof. David Reitze of the University of Florida, in the statement.
www.foxnews.com/science/giant-black-hole-should-not-even-exist
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Post by Deleted on Dec 8, 2019 17:07:18 GMT
Up late chewing on some ideas which started out with this clip. So it go me thinking how much power is in a lighting bolt? 1.21 gigawatts Are glowing UFO using 1.21 gigawatts? So my next question was what can 1.21 gigawatts do? I asked the Great Good Google and this came up. It could charge the DeLorean LOL anyway this link came up. www.buzzfeed.com/10 jet engines or a nuclear reactor! Thats when it came to me with UFO landing sights have left traces of radiation on the ground. Wow! ok that's a lot of power. Then it got me thinking Element 115 from Bob Lazer description. Element 115 is stable and was created on a molecular to create anti gravity. That lead me to think what if some UFOs are made on the Quantum level? I found this. Could we be seeing ETs traveling the universe on large scale quantum tunnelling? Imagine for a sec you're looking up facing West watching heat lightning. You witness an object in a Westward direction skimming through the clouds. It is spinning,highly energetic, glowing bluish white, and round. On the right side is a jagged spike like feature protruding from it. That feature is constantly facing North... You dismiss it as " oh well", probably ball lightning. Cliff Edit to add : I swear to God I couldn't make this xxxx up if I tried ! On another note I finally am (currently in the middle of the series) watching "Unidentified" and have realized I live in a hot spot (or did). No surprise !
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Post by HAL on Dec 8, 2019 20:48:52 GMT
..We May Finally Understand the Moments Before the Big Bang
By Tim Childers - Live Science Contributor | Nov. 11, 2019..
I was given to understand there was no moment before the Big Bang. If there was nothing there for a moment to happen in, how could there have been one ?
HAL
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Post by jmceiver on Dec 8, 2019 23:46:23 GMT
Right on point, Hal. I bet the poster MEANT to say "after" the haha big bang.
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Post by gus on Dec 12, 2019 23:15:11 GMT
I agree with you Cliff it looks like a type of Ball Lighting
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Post by gus on Dec 12, 2019 23:18:36 GMT
Right on point, Hal. I bet the poster MEANT to say "after" the haha big bang. Could the big bang be created by 2 universes smashing into each other?
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Post by swamprat on Dec 19, 2019 2:16:05 GMT
Unexplained lights could be extraterrestrials' 'interstellar communication lasers,' experts say Published Dec. 18, 2019 | FOX News
LOS ANGELES (FOXNews) - If the truth is out there, it might be one we can't yet explain.
Researchers are having trouble explaining how to identify the number of flickering lights that have been observed over the past several decades. A new study published in the Astronomical Journal suggested they could be from a technologically advanced civilization using "interstellar communication lasers."
“The implications of finding such objects extend from traditional astrophysics fields to the more exotic searches for evidence of technologically advanced civilizations,” the authors wrote in the study's abstract.
However, the most likely cause is from some unexplained natural source, perhaps a vanishing star.
"Finding an actually vanishing star -- or a star that appears out of nowhere! -- would be a precious discovery and certainly would include new astrophysics beyond the one we know of today," said project leader Beatriz Villarroel in a statement.
A source visible in an old plate (left, seen as the bright source at the centre of the square) has disappeared in a later plate (right). From Villarroel et al. (2019). (Credit: Villarroel et al. (2019)
"But we are clear that none of these events have shown any direct signs of being ETI," the study's co-author, Martin López Corredoira, added. "We believe that they are natural, if somewhat extreme, astrophysical sources."
These vanishing objects are known as "red transients" and Beatriz Villarroel said there have been more than 100 of these disappearing stars discovered. In total, there are 150,000 examples of these unexplained lights that have been discovered over the past several decades.
If the objects are a “failed supernovae,” (when a star implodes into a black hole) or signs of a technologically advanced civilization, researchers need more help with the project, known as Vanishing and Appearing Sources during a Century of Observations (VASCO), as just 15 percent of these objects have been "thoroughly investigated," according to the New York Post.
The researchers are hoping the scientific community will be able to help them explain these phenomena.
"We hope to get help from the community to look through the images as a part of a citizen science project," said one of the study's co-authors, Lars Mattsson. "We are looking at ways to do that right now and that will be something we will be able to talk more about at a later date."
www.fox10phoenix.com/news/unexplained-lights-could-be-extraterrestrials-interstellar-communication-lasers-experts-say
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