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Category: cosmology

Humans have figured out how to send spacecraft into the deep reaches of the solar system, but it will take major advances in spaceflight before we can hop over to other star systems or traverse the Milky Way. In the meantime, though, it doesn’t hurt to think about cool ways we might one day be able to accomplish that dream.

Enter: the “halo drive,” a concept that proposes leveraging the power of black holes and other gravitationally powerful phenomena to accelerate future spacecraft to near-light speeds.

Conceived by David Kipping, an astronomer at Columbia University, the halo drive involves shooting lasers at objects such as black holes or neutron stars in order to get a speed boost when the light beam boomerangs back to its starting point.

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Astronomers observed a ghostly pulsar, a superdense, rapidly spinning neutron star exploded from a supernova 10,000 years ago, racing through space at nearly 2.5 million miles an hour—so fast it could travel the distance between Earth and the Moon in just 6 minutes. The discovery was made using NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and the National Science Foundation’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA).

The pulsar lies about 53 light-years from the center of a supernova remnant called CTB 1. Its rapid motion through interstellar gas results in shock waves that produce the tail of magnetic energy and accelerated particles detected at radio wavelengths using the VLA. The tail extends 13 light-years and clearly points back to the center of CTB 1.

This one, dubbed PSR J0002+6216 (J0002 for short), sports a radio-emitting tail pointing directly toward the expanding debris of a recent supernova explosion. “Thanks to its narrow dart-like tail and a fortuitous viewing angle, we can trace this pulsar straight back to its birthplace,” said Frank Schinzel, a scientist at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in Socorro, New Mexico. “Further study of this object will help us better understand how these explosions are able to ‘kick’ neutron stars to such high speed.”

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This fuzzy orb of light is a giant elliptical galaxy filled with an incredible 200 billion stars. Unlike spiral galaxies, which have a well-defined structure and boast picturesque spiral arms, elliptical galaxies appear fairly smooth and featureless. This is likely why this galaxy, named Messier 49, was discovered by French astronomer Charles Messier in 1771. At a distance of 56 million light-years, and measuring 157,000 light-years across, M49 was the first member of the Virgo Cluster of galaxies to be discovered, and it is more luminous than any other galaxy at its distance or nearer.

Elliptical galaxies tend to contain a larger portion of older stars than spiral galaxies and also lack young blue stars. Messier 49 itself is very yellow, which indicates that the stars within it are mostly older and redder than the Sun. In fact, the last major episode of star formation was about six billion years ago — before the Sun was even born!

Messier 49 is also rich in globular clusters; it hosts about 6000, a number that dwarfs the 150 found in and around the Milky Way. On average, these clusters are 10 billion years old. Messier 49 is also known to host a supermassive black hole at its centre with the mass of more than 500 million Suns, identifiable by the X-rays pouring out from the heart of the galaxy (as this Hubble image comprises infrared observations, these X-rays are not visible here).

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Over 200 experts worked on developing the new radio telescope, which is exploring space in a entirely new way.

  • According to an Astronomy & Astrophysics press release, astronomers from 18 countries have discovered hundreds of thousands of previously unknown galaxies.
  • Over 200 experts worked on developing the new radio telescope, which will explore space in a entirely new way.
  • The telescope’s capabilities may also allow the researchers to delve further into the behaviour of black holes.

According to preliminary findings in a study published in Astronomy & Astrophysics, scientists have recently discovered hidden galaxies in our universe — and they’ve found hundreds of thousands of them.

Together, over 200 experts across 18 different countries have developed a new radio telescope that will explore space in a completely new way.

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A team of international astronomers have been hunting for ancient, supermassive black holes — and they’ve hit the motherlode.

Lurking in the distant corners of space are 83 monster black holes that can teach us about the early days of the cosmos.

    by

  • Jackson Ryan

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But no other new particles have materialized at the LHC, leaving open many mysteries about the universe that the Standard Model doesn’t address. A debate has ensued over whether to build an even more enormous successor to the LHC — a proposed machine 100 kilometers in circumference, possibly in Switzerland or China — to continue the search for new physics.

Physicists say there’s much we can still learn from the Higgs boson itself. What’s known is that the particle’s existence confirms a 55-year-old theory about the origin of mass in the universe. Its discovery won the 2013 Nobel Prize for Peter Higgs and François Englert, two of six theorists who proposed this mass-generating mechanism in the 1960s. The mechanism involves a field permeating all of space. The Higgs particle is a ripple, or quantum fluctuation, in this Higgs field. Because quantum mechanics tangles up the particles and fields of nature, the presence of the Higgs field spills over into other quantum fields; it’s this coupling that gives their associated particles mass.

But physicists understand little about the omnipresent Higgs field, or the fateful moment in the early universe when it suddenly shifted from having zero value everywhere (or in other words, not existing) into its current, uniformly valued state. That shift, or “symmetry-breaking” event, instantly rendered quarks, electrons and many other fundamental particles massive, which led them to form atoms and all the other structures seen in the cosmos.

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