Credit: NASA/APL/SwRI and NASA/JPL-Caltech
The cosmic microwave background (CMB) is the earliest glow of radiation present in the universe that apparently dates back to the time when the universe came into being. Similar to this radiation, there is another glow that is lesser heard of and that corresponds to the light emitted in the visible region of the electromagnetic spectrum, mainly by all astrophysical sources outside the milky way. This radiation encompassing the universe is termed the cosmic optical background (COB). From a technical standpoint, the COB is an ensemble of photons, strictly in the visible spectrum, over the volume of the observable universe. One can infer a significant amount of information about galaxies, stellar clusters, etc from the COB. Furthermore, the phenomena involving mass accretion by black holes associated with the galactic and stellar systems also count within reach...
Image credit: Shutterstock
Many compact gravitational objects in the cosmos such as black holes, naked singularities, and wormholes, can only be detected by their shadows’ signatures. Distinguishing their different natures through their shadows is a difficult task because many times their shadows are very similar. Therefore, we can’t rely exclusively on this information to discern unambiguously the specific spacetime geometries from the objects.
For instance, the radio images obtained from the Event Horizon Telescope to directly observe the accretion disks of the supermassive black holes in the galactic centers, are hard to interpret since the information about their gravitational field is coupled non-linearly to the magneto-hydrodynamics of the system.
The main feature analyzed in such images, is their intensity profile. An interesting approach to constrain further the space time geometry, is to...
Credit: Zosia Rostomian
Cosmic inflation is a theory governing the dynamics of the early universe, moments after the grand cosmic event called the Big Bang. MIT physicist Alan Guth was the first one to propose the inflationary theory in the early 1980s however, it was later advanced by other influential physicists like Andrei Linde and Paul Steinhardt [1-3]. The theory mainly deals with the exponential expansion of space and subsequently the large-scale structure formation in the universe during its evolutionary stages. It is also suggested by the theory that the epoch of inflation lasted from 10−36 seconds to sometime between 10−33 and 10−32 seconds after the Big Bang. But in order to articulate the events following the Big Bang admirably, one needs to have a full-fledged quantum theory of gravity, which is yet a substantial challenge for physicists.
So far,...
With its mid-infrared instrument (MIRI), the James Webb Space Telescope captured the star WR140 surrounded by strange concentric shells that gradually fade away.. (Image credit: NASA/ESA /CSA /Ryan Lau /JWST ERS Team /Judy Schmidt)
An image taken by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) in July 2022 showing a star named Wolf-Rayet 140 (WR 140) surrounded by regular ripple-like circles that gradually fade away, was released on Twitter by scientist Judy Schmidt. Star WR140 is in the Cygnus constellation and resides around 5,600 light-years from Earth. The image ignited a torrent of comments, making astronomers and astrophysicists scratch their heads over this unexplained observation.
Wolf-Rayet stars are rare, only 600 have been found, and they’re very short-lived, generating powerful winds that push huge amounts of gas and dust into space, while loosing most of their mass in the process. In this...
A lot of information about the large-scale nature of the universe can be derived from detailed analysis of its ubiquitous thermal electromagnetic field, called the cosmic microwave background (CMB), for instance analysis of suppressed fluctuations at large wavelengths reveals a closed geometry of the universe— a torus-type geometry as we described in the RSF article A New Signature of a Multiply Connected Universe [1].
Inhomogeneities attributed to quantum fluctuations during the inflationary period are amplified across large-scale universal structure, and when inflation ends, they become density fluctuations and cause the differences in temperature observed in the CMB. Its an intriguing signal to study because it reveals an epoch when atomistic and cosmological structure where one-and-the same, and quantum behaviors that typify nature evolves into large-scale structural features of the universe. (Credit...
By biophysicist William Brown, research scientist at RSF
In 2019 we reported on the first interstellar visitor to our solar system and the interesting proposal by Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb that it could be a possible technosignature of extraterrestrial engineering. Loeb proposed this hypothesis to answer many of the anomalous observables of the interstellar visitor, named 'Oumuamua, such as its oscillating reflectivity— indicating that its profile is changing from a large area to a smaller one, so that it is either flat like a solar sail, or long and thin like a cigar shape and tumbling— the lack of any outgassing as it passed by the Sun, and its anomalous trajectory whereby it accelerated as it left the gravitational well of the Sun and our solar system.
Loeb further expounds that the sudden acceleration and deviation of 'Oumuamua from its expected orbit appeared to be the result of radiation pressure, which is precisely how solar sails achieve propulsion....
The Universe Organizes in a Galactic Neuromorphic Network
The Quantitative Comparison Between the Neuronal Network and the Cosmic Web
A key observation in the science of a unified physics of reality is that the universe appears to follow a self-organizational patterning utilizing properties of holography and fractals. These two features of organizational structure in the universe are so ubiquitous that us researchers at the Resonance Science Foundation often refer to “holofractogramic physics” to simultaneously describe an organizational system that is both holographic and fractal in nature. This refers to two properties of universal organization that seem to be primary: holographic ordering of information—in which any subunit of a system contains information about the whole— and fractal ordering of structure.
What does “fractal ordering of...
Just as particles at the very small scale are governed by the strange laws of the quantum world, light can behave weird when placed in the proper conditions. The most intriguing is the case of liquid light that we had addressed in a former article entitled “Liquid light at room temperature”, where light interacts with matter, or more precisely, photons interact with electron-hole pairs – called excitons – in a semiconductor. These excitons impose a dipole moment, which combined with the dipole of the electromagnetic field, couples strongly the excitons and the photons. The result is a polariton, considered a quasiparticle, composed of half-light and half matter which behaves as a Bose Einstein condensate or superfluid even at room temperature. A superfluid behaves like a fluid with zero viscosity. Zero viscosity is equivalent to perpetual...
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...
Image by Samuel Velasco/Quanta Magazine
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...
50% Complete
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.