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^{By Dr. Inés Urdaneta / Physicist at Resonance Science Foundation}

Just a couple of years ago, astronomers and astrophysicists were baffled by the observation of a synchronized behavior in galaxies, which can not be explained by their individual gravitational fields. Such was the case of a study lead by Joon Hyeop Lee, an astronomer at the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute, and published in The Astrophysical Journal in October 2018, reporting hundreds of galaxies rotating in sync with the motions of galaxies that were tens of millions of light years away.

Given the fact that from our known theories, in principle it would be impossible that galaxies separated by megaparsecs (millions of light years) could directly interact with each other, their interaction happens across distances that are too large to be explained by their gravitational force. It is then speculated that some unacknowledged force must be acting.

This discovery came after the...

^{By Dr. Inés Urdaneta / Physicist at Resonance Science Foundation}

The most spread worldview on the origin of our Universe, is that of the big explosion, commonly known as the Big Bang (BB). We have asked ourselves what happens right after, at the first instants of the universe… the most accepted view among cosmologists is that of an exponential expansion, called the inflation theory.

The BB theory results from doing a backward-in-time evolution to the universes' expansion. If it is expanding as time moves forward, this implies the universe was smaller, denser and hotter in the distant past. The BB theory predicts that the early universe was much denser and extremely hot, about 273 million degrees above absolute zero, too hot for atoms to exist, only free electrons and hydrogen nuclei – protons and neutrons- where present.  After cooling during the expansion, these nuclei and electrons combined to compose the first light atom, the Hydrogen (H). It is now known...

^{By Dr. Inés Urdaneta / Physicist at Resonance Science Foundation}

Recently awarded the Nobel prize for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity, Sir Roger Penrose had earlier developed a theory known as “conformal cyclic cosmology“ (CCC) which posits that the universe iterates through infinite cycles, from one aeon to the next, such that the universe became uniform before rather than after the Big Bang. Each cycle starts out from a singularity before expanding and generating clumps of matter, which eventually gets sucked up by supermassive black holes, which over the very long term disappear by continuously emitting Hawking radiation. This process restores uniformity and sets the stage for the next Big Bang. In CCC, the future time-like infinity of each previous iteration being identified with the Big Bang singularity of the next. Penrose popularized this theory in his 2010 book Cycles of Time: An...

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

By Dr. Inés Urdaneta, Resonance Science Foundation Research Scientist

In 1969, Roger Penrose proposed a method to extract rotational energy of a rotating black hole, and suggested that an advanced civilization could achieve it by lowering and then releasing a mass from a structure that is co-rotating with the black hole. The process would occur in the region just outside the event horizon, called the ergosphere, where frame-dragging is at its strongest, being able to tear apart an object; one part would enter the event horizon while the remaining one would be accelerated outwards with an additional impulse given by the rotational energy of the black hole. The excess energy calculated by Penrose was estimated to be 21 percent more than the incoming energy.

The process is brilliantly explained in this video:

Inspired by Penrose’s idea, Yakov Zel’dovich predicted in 1971 that quantum fluctuations and classical electromagnetic...

by Dr. Amira Val Baker, Resonance Science Research Scientist

An astrophysical system has just demonstrated frame dragging for the first time.

The dragging of space time by a rotating mass, otherwise known as frame-dragging, was predicted by Einstein’s general relativity. Einstein postulated that not only does a mass curve spacetime, but it will also drag local spacetime into motion around itself as it rotates, much like the air in a tornado. The amount of drag is thus directly proportional to the spin.

A few years later, in 1918, Austrian physicists Josef Lense and Hans Thirring predicted that the dragging of spacetime due to a rotating celestial body – frame-dragging – would force a nearby orbiting body into precession. That is, the closer you are to the rotating body, the more you are pulled around with it – which for another rotating body forces its axis of rotation to continuously change direction with the changing pull along the orbit. This effect is now...

By William Brown, Resonance Science Foundation Research Scientist

When looking back into the deep past of the Universe, which means looking out over vast cosmological distances of space, there are observed a peculiar set of galaxies emitting a tremendous amount of energy. These early galaxies, known variously as quasars, blazars, radio galaxies and radio-loud quasars, are all bodies classified as active galactic nuclei. These objects are some of the most energetic phenomena in the universe, if the name blazar was not at all evident of this fact. Active galactic nuclei represent a confirmation of physicist Nassim Haramein’s prediction that black holes are the spacetime structure that forms the seed around which galaxies and stars form. Indeed, it is now widely understood that the early formation of galaxies, producing active galactic nuclei, are in fact due to the action of supermassive black holes – black holes in upwards of a million to a billion solar masses.

The...

by Dr. Amira Val Baker, Resonance Science Foundation Astrophysicist

A new study challenges the cosmological model and suggests that the universe is not expanding at an accelerated rate.

The standard model of cosmology assumes that the universe is isotropic with no preferred direction and no preferred frame of reference; that is, we are not special and our position in the universe is not from a privileged vantage point. Within this framework, observational data led us to the conclusion that 70% of the universe is expanding at an accelerated rate, and this accelerating force is due to an unknown form of energy known as ‘dark energy’. This so-called ‘dark energy’ is now thought to be due to quantum fluctuations of the vacuum energy.

However, a new study by a team of European scientists explored these ideas further. They wanted to see what would happen when they measure the deceleration parameter – the measurement of cosmic acceleration – from our...

by Dr. Amira Val Baker, Resonance Science Foundation Astrophysicist

Generally thought to be the point of no return, our very own black hole seems to have ejected a star at hyper velocity.

In something known as the Hills mechanism – which occurs in binary star systems when they are disrupted by a super massive black hole – the stars are pulled apart and left to continue on their separate journeys. The closest star is pulled into an orbit around the black hole while the other is ejected at extremely high velocity. However, although this was proposed in 1988 by astronomer Jack Hills, it has never been confirmed.

Now, a worldwide team of scientists led by Ting Li have observed what they believe to be the first example of such a mechanism.

The team utilised data from the 3.9 metre Anglo-Australian Telescope as part of the Southern Stellar Stream Spectroscopic Survey – a survey that aims to map the kinematics and chemistry of long, dense regions of stars, known as...

by Dr. Amira Val Baker, Resonance Science Foundation Astrophysicist

The information paradox may finally be resolved with the help of the holographic theory – but this time on a fractal scale.

Ever since Hawking predicted the thermal emission of black holes and their subsequent evaporation, the question arose as to where this information goes. In the context of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics – which states that the information about a system is entirely encoded in its wave function – information is always conserved. Thus, any loss in information, like that predicted by Hawking and his evaporating black holes, would violate quantum theory. This problem is known as the information paradox.

To resolve this paradox, physicists have been actively looking for a mechanism to explain how the information of the infalling particles re-emerges in the outgoing radiation. To begin, they need to determine the entropy of the Hawking radiation.

Assuming the...

 Image: The cosmic microwave background as seen by the European Space Agency’s Planck satellite. Credit: ESA and the Planck Collaboration

^{By Dr. Inés Urdaneta / Physicist at Resonance Science Foundation}

The photo above is quite common among astronomers and astrophysicists. It depicts what is known as the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the very ancient light coming from the beginnings of our universe. It is supposed to be the leftovers of the grand explosion birthing our Universe, called the Big Bang.

When analyzing the expansion of the universe, astrophysicists imagined that the expansion could be rewinded, just like a film, and that this backward movement would show the collapse into a singularity. Together with the astronomical observations of the CMB radiation, they concluded that the universe had to be flat. But recent observations with better precision are showing a different picture. An anomaly in data from the best-ever measurement of the CMB is offering...