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+4 +1
Scientists Say the Universe Itself May Be "Pixelated"
Here’s a brain teaser for you: scientists are suggesting spacetime may be made out of individual “spacetime pixels,” instead of being smooth and continuous like it seems. Rana Adhikari, a professor of physics at Caltech, suggested in a new press blurb that these pixels would be “so small that if you were to enlarge things so that it becomes the size of a grain of sand, then atoms would be as large as galaxies.”
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+16 +2
Those aren't stars – they're black holes
An international team of astronomers just released a remarkable map of the night sky without a single star, but which is instead filled with 25,000 supermassive black holes. We know what you're thinking. How is that possible if black holes don't radiate light, you silly gooses? That's only half right though. The black hole itself is more or less invisible, but if it's munching on a star or some other object, the tidal forces of its gravity will tear it apart and create a flattened accretion disk around it.
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+29 +1
Astronomers Discover a Strange Galaxy Without Dark Matter
THREE YEARS AGO, Filippo Fraternali and his colleagues spotted a half dozen mysteriously diffuse galaxies, which looked like sprawling cities of stars and gas. But unlike almost every other galaxy ever seen—including our own Milky Way—they didn’t seem to be enshrouded in huge masses of dark matter, which would normally hold those stellar metropolises together with their gravity. The scientists picked one to zoom in on, a modest-sized galaxy about 250,000 light-years away, and they pointed the 27 radio telescope antennas of the Very Large Array in New Mexico at it.
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+15 +2
Death star: In cosmic first, scientists observe red supergiant just before it explodes
It's much easier for scientists to see the messy aftermath of stellar explosions than to watch the prelude to the drama. But finally, astronomers managed to observe a red giant star just as it "went supernova," as exploding stars are called. Using a telescope in Hawaii, a team of scientists gathered observations of a red supergiant star in summer 2020. Lo and behold, in September, that very same star died in a supernova dubbed (SN) 2020tlf — an explosion that team members called "one of the most intriguing" supernovas of its type.
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+19 +2
How do black holes swallow stars?
I wake up to a chime from my smartphone. Bleary-eyed, I check it — and jolt awake upon seeing an automated email from the MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa. The subject line reads: “AT 2018xxx 2hr has been completed.” The message tells me that while I was sleeping, MeerKAT observed a target for two hours and, after some initial image processing, the observation is now ready for me in the archives. All that remains for me, half a world away in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to do is go online and download it.
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+20 +3
This is What it Looks Like When a Black Hole Snacks on a Star
Analyzing observations of an X-ray flare and fitting the data with theoretical models, UArizona astronomers documented a fatal encounter between an unlucky star and an intermediate-mass black hole.
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+13 +2
Have we detected dark energy? Scientists say it's a possibility
A new study, led by researchers at the University of Cambridge and reported in the journal Physical Review D, suggests that some unexplained results from the XENON1T experiment in Italy may have been caused by dark energy, and not the dark matter the experiment was designed to detect.
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+14 +2
Black holes found to exert a pressure on their environment
Physicists at the University of Sussex have discovered that black holes exert a pressure on their environment, in a scientific first. In 1974 Stephen Hawking made the seminal discovery that black holes emit thermal radiation. Previous to that, black holes were believed to be inert, the final stages of a dying heavy star.
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+13 +3
How stars live and die: Kepler captures rare supernova blast
When NASA’s Kepler telescope looked into space, it was also looking back in time. Locked into a heliocentric orbit, Kepler was set to gradually trail the Earth giving the telescope a unique view of the universe.
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+3 +1
This Comparison Video Helps You Understand Exactly How Big Black Holes Are
Black holes are essentially the end of the universe. They are the end of space and time as we know it. NASA describes them more plainly, noting that they are a place where an incomprehensible amount of matter meets, and where gravity pulls so much that even light cannot get out. Because no light can get out, black holes (obviously) cannot be seen. In order to see and study them, scientists need special space telescopes with distinct tools, such as radar technologies, to spot them via their emissions.
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+16 +2
Can we explain dark matter by adding more dimensions to the universe?
Dark matter could be even weirder than anyone thought, say cosmologists who are suggesting this mysterious substance could interact with itself in a higher dimensional universe.
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+20 +4
The First Observational Confirmation Of One The Predictions About Black Holes Made By Stephen Hawking
Gravitational wave astronomy has just given us another amazing gift: the first observational confirmation of one of Stephen Hawking's predictions about black holes. An analysis of the very first gravitational wave detection made back in 2015, GW150914, has confirmed Hawking's area theorem. It states that, under classical physics, the area of the event horizon of a black hole can only grow larger - never smaller.
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+14 +2
Wormhole Tunnels in Spacetime May Be Possible, New Research Suggests
In the early days of research on black holes, before they even had that name, physicists did not yet know if these bizarre objects existed in the real world. They might have been a quirk of the complicated math used in the then still young general theory of relativity, which describes gravity. Over the years, though, evidence has accumulated that black holes are very real and even exist right here in our galaxy.
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+18 +3
Watch a black hole tear a star to bits in epic new animation
The awesome spectacle of a black hole ripping a star to shreds can be seen in this striking new visualization from the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY), a particle accelerator lab in Hamburg, Germany. Such events are known as stellar tidal disruptors, and they are fairly rare, occurring just once every 10,000 years in a typical galaxy, according to NASA. Stars are typically flung toward a ravenous black hole after interacting gravitationally with another star or massive object...
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+2 +1
Could Dark Matter Stars Exist?
Most of the universe is made up of dark matter, so could it form into stars and galaxies like regular matter? #space #darkmatter #galaxies #stars
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+26 +5
First black hole ever detected is even more massive than first thought
The first black hole that humanity ever discovered is much more massive than previously thought, according to new research. The galactic X-ray source, later named Cygnus X-1, was discovered in 1965, when a pair of Geiger counters were carried on board a sub-orbital rocket launched from New Mexico.
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+18 +3
Newly discovered galaxy 'defies understanding', say astronomers
Scientists found a galaxy dating back to the early years of the universe, but appearing to be billions of years too old for that.
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+11 +2
Scientists Have Proposed a New Particle That Is a Portal to a 5th Dimension
The path to dark matter and other fundamental enigmas may be through a warped extra dimension, according to a new study that proposes a new theory of the universe.
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Wormholes may be lurking in the universe — and new studies are proposing ways of finding them
Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity profoundly changed our thinking about fundamental concepts in physics, such as space and time. But it also left us with some deep mysteries. One was black holes, which were only unequivocally detected over the past few years. Another was “wormholes” – bridges connecting different points in spacetime, in theory providing shortcuts for space travellers.
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+16 +1
Let This Harvard Professor Convince You That Aliens Exist
A Harvard astrophysicist thinks a mysterious object that swung by our solar system in 2017 was from an extraterrestrial civilization.
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