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Category: cosmology

Physicists have come up with a new way to predict what lies beyond the event horizon of a black hole, and it could give us a more accurate idea of their mysterious internal structures.

Thanks to the first — and now second — direct observation of gravitational waves emanating from what scientists think are black hole mergers, we’re starting to get our first real evidence that black holes do actually exist in reality, not just theory.

But even if we can prove they really do physically exist, there’s no getting around the fact that, thanks to their enormous gravitational pull, black holes swallow up anything that falls beyond their event horizon.

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When an astronomical observatory detected two black holes colliding in deep space, scientists celebrated confirmation of Einstein’s prediction of gravitational waves. A team of astrophysicists wondered something else: Had the experiment found the “dark matter” that makes up most of the mass of the universe?

The eight scientists from the Johns Hopkins Henry A. Rowland Department of Physics and Astronomy had already started making calculations when the discovery by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) was announced in February. Their results, published recently in Physical Review Letters, unfold as a hypothesis suggesting a solution for an abiding mystery in astrophysics.

“We consider the possibility that the black hole binary detected by LIGO may be a signature of dark matter,” wrote the scientists in their summary, referring to the black hole pair as a “binary.” What follows are five pages of annotated mathematical equations showing how the researchers considered the mass of the two objects LIGO detected as a point of departure, suggesting that these objects could be part of the mysterious substance known to make up about 85 percent of the mass of the universe.

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Scientists have seen two black holes crash into each other and merge for the second time, proving Albert Einstein was right and showing the first observation was no fluke.

Ultra-sensitive instruments called the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) detected the ripple in gravitational waves that came across space and time to Earth last December, the team reported Wednesday.

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LIGO detects gravitational waves for the second time, from another pair of merging black holes. This time they were smaller and provided a longer-duration signal of their final moments. Two events within four months suggests that such detections will soon be giving astronomers a wealth of new information about previously invisible events in the Universe.

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According to Einstein’s theory of general relativity (GR), black holes are ferocious beasts able to swallow and destroy everything within their reach. Their strong gravitational pull deforms the space-time causal structure in such a way that nothing can get out of them once their event horizon is crossed. The fate of those incautious observers curious enough to cross this border is to suffer a painful spaghettification process due to the strong tidal forces before being destroyed at the center of the black hole.

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For those who missed my 2014 review of E.O. Wilson’s book, “The Meaning of Human Existence.”

With a title as audacious as “The Meaning of Human Existence,” even a casual reader couldn’t be faulted for expecting a veritable Rosetta Stone to the cosmos and life as we know it. But in his latest book, Edward O. Wilson offers no philosophically-satisfying answers to this age-old “existence” question. And maybe that’s his point.

After all, the ability to ponder our own existence is at once a blessing and a curse. Neither sharks nor swallows seem to worry about too much more than their next meal. Yet in fifteen chapters, Wilson — a renowned biologist, naturalist, author and Harvard University professor emeritus, strips humanity of its soul.

Wilson is steadfastly averse to spiritual intangibles; somewhat skeptical about ever fully understanding consciousness, yet overly sanguine about cosmology’s progress in understanding the nature of the universe. He also spends a significant portion of the book trashing organized religion in ways that — in this atheistic age at least — seem both arbitrary and predictable.

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The opportunity for intellectual freedom is what drew Anna Ijjas to the Princeton Center for Theoretical Science. As an associate research scholar, Ijjas studies basic questions about the universe’s origin and future. “PCTS provided an environment that encouraged me to question established paradigms and pursue unexplored possibilities,” said Ijjas, who is Princeton’s John A. Wheeler Postdoctoral Fellow in cosmology and astroparticle physics. “Independence and creativity are real values at the center.”

Those values were on display at a conference in May to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the center, which trains early-career researchers and provides a place where theoretical scientists — defined as those who use mathematics to study the natural world — can tackle the biggest questions in science, from the search for dark matter to global climate simulations to theories of quantum gravity.

“The range of topics presented at the PCTS@ten conference demonstrates that we’ve reached the goal we set 10 years ago, which is to develop a new breed of theorists with a much broader view of science than they would normally get from typical postdoctoral training,” said Paul Steinhardt, Princeton’s Albert Einstein Professor in Science and the center’s director since 2007.

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A black hole may carry “soft hair,” low-energy quantum excitations that release information when the black hole evaporates.

Four decades ago, Stephen Hawking proposed that black holes could destroy information—a conclusion that is incompatible with standard laws of quantum physics. This idea started a controversy known as the “black hole information problem” that even now has not been resolved. A new study by Hawking himself and Malcom Perry, both at the University of Cambridge, and by Andrew Strominger at Harvard University shows that some of the assumptions that led to the information problem might be wrong [1]. Their results do not completely solve the problem, but point to a promising research direction that might lead to its long-awaited solution.

According to Einstein’s general theory of relativity, stationary black holes are completely determined by just three observable parameters: their mass, charge, and angular momentum. Almost none of the information about what fell into the black hole is visible from the outside. Physicist John Wheeler described this idea by saying that “black holes have no hair.”

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