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Exotic States of Matter Made in Space

Article by Dr. Amira Val Baker, astrophysicist, Resonance Science Foundation Research Scientist

The infamous exotic state of matter - Bose Einstein Condensates – that allows scientists to observe the quantum world has now just been created in space!

In the normal world atoms are separate systems with clearly defined boundaries, however at temperatures nearing absolute zero all those boundary conditions come down and the individual atomic systems coalesce into one. This exotic state of matter is known as a Bose Einstein Condensate (BEC) and was named after physicists Satyendra Nath Bose and Albert Einstein whose work on groups of photons and bosonic atoms led to its prediction in 1924.

BECs are extremely interesting, as now you have an agglomeration of atoms coalesced into one entity such that it can be described by a wave function that is normally reserved for the quantum world.

The first realization of this exotic matter came in 1995 by Eric Cornell and Carl Wiemann when a...

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High Speed Stars Confirm Relativity

Article by Dr. Amira Val Baker, Astrophysicist, Resonance Science Foundation Research Scientist

General relativity tells us that light will be affected by gravity. This so-called bending of spacetime has now just been observed in the warped light of a star orbiting the Milky Way’s very own super massive black hole (SMBH) - Sagittarius A*.

The bending of light due to the presence of a massive object - where the massive object is blocking its path and refocusing it, like a lens – is known as gravitational lensing. The light will be traveling at a constant speed along curved space – the medium or path has therefore not changed, and so no energy is lost. However, if the photon of electromagnetic radiation moves away from the curved path then energy will be lost, and the wavelength will be increased – this is known as gravitational redshift.

Utilizing infrared observations made at the Very Large Telescope in Chile, astronomers were able to follow a group of high...

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Multimessenger Astronomy

Article by Dr. Amira Val Baker, Astrophysicist, Resonance Science Foundation Research Scientist

In-direct observations of black holes are made through the detection of electromagnetic radiation emitted by the surrounding matter, and more recently through the detection of gravitational waves. Now for the first time, at an observatory 5000 feet below the Antarctic ice, astronomers have observed a black hole through the detection of neutrinos!

Neutrinos are subatomic fundamental particles, that are produced through radioactive decay – that is the spontaneous decomposition of a nucleus into a more stable configuration. These high energy particles are also weakly interacting at the electromagnetic level and are thus able to traverse vast distances across space and time, carrying information from the most distant parts of the Universe. On the other hand, the highly energetic enigmatic particles such as protons, electrons or atomic nuclei – known as cosmic rays – are...

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Habitable Water World Exoplanets

astrophysics science news Jun 29, 2018

Scientists expand the range of conditions thought to be suitable for habitability of exoplanets. A new study provides new clues indicating that an exoplanet 500 light-years away is much like Earth. Kepler-186f is the first identified Earth-sized planet outside the Solar System orbiting a star in the habitable zone. This means it's the proper distance from its host star for liquid water to pool on the surface.

The conventional way of approaching the defining categories of what can be termed a habitable planet is to compare how similar the planet is to Earth. This means that planets must occupy an orbital location around their central star where liquid water can exist—the so-called circumstellar habitable zone—they must be terrestrial bodies, not too big and not too small. However, this conservative perspective defining what can be considered a habitable planet is based on the presumption that life elsewhere in the galaxy must be like life on Earth—it also...

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The Search For Supernovae With The Re-Purposed Kepler – K2

Article by Dr. Amira Val Baker, Astrophysicist, Resonance Science Foundation Research Scientist

The latest supernovae survey reveals the crucial importance in furthering our understanding of supernovae and reaching confident conclusions as soon as possible.

The standard theory of stellar evolution results in an explosion and is revealed in a rare and beautiful astronomical event. Astronomers search for these events in the hope that they will provide greater insight into our understanding of stellar evolution. Although each supernovae event is different, specific stars will yield certain characteristics. One type of Supernovae event that is of particular interest is the type associated with a binary star system in which one of the components is a white dwarf – this is known as a Type 1a supernova. White dwarfs are extremely dense stars that have exhausted all their hydrogen and their extreme density is thus a result of them not being able to support the inward pull of gravity...

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Speculative Wormhole Echoes Could Revolutionize Astrophysics

astrophysics science news Jun 11, 2018
by Resonance Science Foundation

The scientific collaborations LIGO and Virgo have detected gravitational waves from the fusion of two black holes, inaugurating a new era in the study of the cosmos. But what if those ripples of space-time were not produced by black holes, but by other exotic objects? A team of European physicists suggest an alternative—wormholes that can be traversed to appear in another universe.

Scientists have deduced the existence of black holes from a multitude of experiments, theoretical models and indirect observations such as the recent LIGO detections, which are believed to originate from the collision of two of these dark gravitational monsters.

But there is a problem with black holes—they present an edge, called an event horizon, from which nothing can escape. This is in conflict with quantum mechanics, whose postulates ensure that information is always preserved, not lost.

One of the theoretical ways to deal with this conflict...

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Saturn’s Rings Reveal Sought After Spin Rate

astrophysics science news Jun 05, 2018
Image by NASA's Cassini spacecraft

The rotation speed – spin rate – of Saturn was previously found through observations of its magnetic field. Now, scientists have determined the spin rate through ripples in its rings!

NASA's twin voyager probes, launched over 40 years ago, observed the swirling magnetic field of Saturn, from which it was able to deduce a rotation period for the magnetic field and conclude a spin rate of 10 hours and 40 minutes. During this mission, in the 1980’s, the ring system was observed in great detail revealing the gravitational effects of Saturn’s moons on the rock and ice particles in the rings. When the particles and moons orbit at simple ratios of each other, the particles are periodically kicked by the moons. These kicks, known as orbital resonance, can launch waves that propagate away from the planet – with some anomalous “backwards” waves.

Detailed observations of these waves have been made, since 2000,...

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Back to the Future as Researchers Invent Real-Life Flux Capacitor

The "Back to the Future" time machine runs on an imaginary flux capacitor but could the movie invention become reality?

In the popular movie franchise Back to the Future, an eccentric scientist creates a time machine that runs on a flux capacitor.

Now a group of actual physicists from Australia (RMIT University, University of Queensland) and Switzerland (ETH Zurich) have proposed a similar device that can break time-reversal symmetry.

While their flux capacitor doesn’t enable time travel, it’s a critical step in future technologies like the quantum computer and could lead to better electronics for mobile phones and wifi.

The research, published in Physical Review Letters, proposes a new generation of electronic circulators - devices that control the direction in which microwave signals move.

RMIT’s Professor Jared Cole said the device proposed in the research was built from a superconductor, in which electricity can flow without electrical...

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Astrophysics Gets Turned On Its Head: Black Holes Come First

Article by William Brown and Dr. Amira Val Baker, Resonance Science Foundation Research Scientists
Supermassive black holes observed for the first time at the earliest epoch of star and galaxy formation are indicating that black holes form first and guide the later accretion and structuring of stars and galaxies

For decades physicist Nassim Haramein has been expounding a controversial idea in astrophysics—that structures from elementary particles to galaxies and the universe itself are the result of infinitely curved spacetime geometries, popularly known as black holes. In essence, this means that all the stuff we think of as material, physical objects in fact only appear substantive because of the geometry and torque of spacetime in these regions. As Charles Misner and John Wheeler stated it:

There is nothing in the world except empty curved space. Matter, charge, electromagnetism, and other fields are only manifestations of the bending of space. Physics is...

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Cosmic Dawn Could Now Be in Sight

Article by Dr. Amira Val Baker, Resonance Science Foundation Astrophysicist

Cosmic dawn, the epoch given to the point in time when the first ever stars formed, may now just be in sight.

To look back in time to when the first ever stars formed in the Universe, we need ever more powerful telescopes to be able to detect the faintest of light. This electromagnetic radiation, that has travelled billions of light years across the universe, is stretched towards the red end of the spectrum – its wavelength is said to be red-shifted. A measurement of this redshift can tell us how far this light has travelled and thus what epoch in time it came from.

A team of scientists led by Takuya Hashimoto, from Osaka Sangyo University in Japan, have just observed the gravitationally lensed galaxy, MACS149-JDI, and confirmed it to be one of the farthest objects from Earth. Utilizing the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA) and the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large...

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