The Great Dark Cosmic Side Coincidence [Earthlit Moon: Dorst/Druckmüller] One of the biggest mysteries — and wonders — in the known Universe flies over our heads every day. Or night, to be more precise. Although often quoted polls suggest some people are still in the Middle Ages, most do know that planets are more or less spherical and revolve around the Sun. Now, then why does we always see the same Moon? One of the first images of the far side of the Moon, captured on 1959 The simple answer is that the Moon’s rotation period coincides with its orbital one, which in turn means that the time it takes for the Moon to turn around itself is the same as it takes for it to fly around Earth. Science does have an answer for it, and it involves the most traditional of the forces. All this heat doesn’t come from nothing, and it effectively decelerates the rotation period, exactly the one that determines the frequency of the tides. Neat, huh? The Great Cosmic Coincidence This “mystery” can also be noted every day by looking at the sky.
Enigma: Black Holes Glow with a Hot Ring of Light Stephen Hawkings great discovery was that the mysterious regions in space we call black holes radiate heat through quantum effects. Hawking has said that "black holes are not really black after all: they glow like a hot body, and the smaller they are, the more they glow." Hawking's famous theory says that the temperature of a black hole varies inversely to its mass. The mathematician Louis Crane proposed a scifi-like scenario back in 1994 that billions of years in the future, after all the stars have burned out, that small black holes could be created to generate heat and guarantee survival of the species. Confirming Hawking's theory, Tim Johannsen and Dimitrios Psaltis at the University of Arizona in Tucson calculate that black holes ought to be surrounded by a ring of light that comes from photons that have become trapped in a circular orbit about the black hole, just outside the event horizon, which are then scattered by gas and dust falling into the hole.
Could the Universe Be A Giant Quantum Computer? MIT scientist Seth Lloyd proposes that information is a quantifiable physical value, as much as mass or motion -that any physical system--a river, you, the universe--is a quantum mechanical computer. Lloyd has calculated that "a computer made up of all the energy in the entire known universe (that is, within the visible “horizon” of forty-two billion light-years) can store about 1092 bits of information and can perform 10105 computations/second." The universe itself is a quantum computer, he says, and it has made a mind-boggling 10122 computations since the Big Bang (for that part of the universe within the “horizon”). In Year Million: Science at the Far Edge of Knowledge, Leading and up-and-coming scientists and science writers cast their minds one million years into the future to imagine the fate of the human and/or extraterrestrial galaxy. Lloyd has proposed that a black hole could serve as a quantum computer and data storage bank. Jason McManus via Year Million Science
10 Strange Things About The Universe Space The universe can be a very strange place. While groundbreaking ideas such as quantum theory, relativity and even the Earth going around the Sun might be commonly accepted now, science still continues to show that the universe contains things you might find it difficult to believe, and even more difficult to get your head around. Theoretically, the lowest temperature that can be achieved is absolute zero, exactly ?273.15°C, where the motion of all particles stops completely. However, you can never actually cool something to this temperature because, in quantum mechanics, every particle has a minimum energy, called “zero-point energy,” which you cannot get below. One of the properties of a negative-energy vacuum is that light actually travels faster in it than it does in a normal vacuum, something that may one day allow people to travel faster than the speed of light in a kind of negative-energy vacuum bubble. Relativity of Simultaneity Antimatter Retrocausality
January 6, 2011 - Fermi's Large Area Telescope Sees Surprising Flares in Crab Nebula Menlo Park, Calif.—The Crab Nebula, one of our best-known and most stable neighbors in the winter sky, is shocking scientists with its propensity for fireworks—gamma-ray flares set off by the most energetic particles ever traced to a specific astronomical object. The discovery, reported today by scientists working with two orbiting telescopes, is leading researchers to rethink their ideas of how cosmic particles are accelerated. "We were dumbfounded," said Roger Blandford, who directs the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, jointly located at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University. "It's an emblematic object," he said. Blandford was part of a KIPAC team led by scientists Rolf Buehler and Stefan Funk that used observations from the Large Area Telescope, one of two primary instruments aboard NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, to confirm one flare and discover another.
Epic Discovery: Ancient Light from a Massive Black Hole Reveals New, Unknown History of Universe Cambridge University astronomers have discovered the 'missing link' in the evolution of the universe following the Big Bang, it was claimed today. For years scientists have known nothing about the 'dark ages' of space - a period between the Big Bang 13.7billion years ago and the creation of the first stars. But newly captured light emitted from a massive black hole has allowed scientists to peer into this unknown portion of the history of the universe. Astronomers discovered remnants of the first stars and evidence of the aftermath of an exploding star, which was a staggering 25 times larger than the sun. Professor Max Pettini, of Cambridge's Institute of Astronomy, believes the discovery of these gases could help reveal the origins of the universe. "We have effectively been able to peer into the Dark Ages using the light emitted from a quasar. The Daily Galaxy via thedailymail.com/uk
So Close, yet So Far | Physical Review Focus +Enlarge image Todd Mason, Mason Productions Inc./LSST Corp. Observations of cosmic microwaves from 380,000 years after the big bang have been essential to modern cosmology, but cosmic neutrinos should carry information on the state of the universe when it was less than a second old. Just after the big bang, the universe was a hot, seething soup of elementary particles constantly interacting with one another. The cosmic microwave background (CMB) is made of photons, particles that stopped interacting much later, when protons and electrons first combined to form neutral atoms, when the universe was 380,000 years old. But photons are massless, whereas neutrinos have a tiny amount of mass, which makes them travel more slowly than light. What they found surprised them: even though the relic neutrinos have been traveling for far longer than the CMB, their slower speed means they’ve covered much less distance. –Michelangelo D'Agostino
An Ancient Subatomic Signature Extends Across the Universe: Relic Particles 10 Billion Light-Years in Length Discovered An ancient subatomic signature extends across the universe. It seems that some subatomic particles, invisible and untouchable effects of the very creation of reality, might exist simultaneously across all of space. "Relic" neutrinos, like the relic photons that make up the cosmic microwave background, are leftovers from the hot, dense early universe that prevailed 13.7 billion years ago. But over the lifetime of the cosmos, these relic neutrinos have been stretched out by the expansion of the universe, enlarging the range in which each neutrino can exist. Of course there's a little bit of physics involved when you talk about particles pouring out of the beginning of time. "We're talking maybe up to roughly ten billion light-years" for each neutrino, said study co-author George Fuller of the University of California, San Diego. The second part of this crash-course in cosmologically relevant physics is quantum theory.
Dark energy DOES exist and it's increasingly driving our universe apart, scientists claim By Daily Mail Reporter Updated: 17:14 GMT, 20 May 2011 Dark energy is driving our universe apart at accelerating speeds, according to a five-year survey of 200,000 galaxies, stretching back seven billion years in cosmic time. The study offers new support for the favoured theory of how dark energy works - as a constant force, uniformly affecting the universe and propelling its runaway expansion. Its findings are based on results from Nasa's space-based Galaxy Evolution Explorer and the Anglo-Australian Telescope on Siding Spring Mountain in Australia. Scientists measured the separations between pairs of galaxies and observed that dark energy (represented by purple grid) is a smooth, uniform force that dominates over the effects of gravity (green grid) But they contradict an alternate theory, where gravity, not dark energy, is the force pushing space apart. 'The results tell us that dark energy is a cosmological constant, as Einstein proposed.