Posted on by Paul M. Sutter

Is Anything Absolute with Relativity?

Researchers crunched Einstein's theory of general relativity on the Columbia supercomputer at the NASA Ames Research Center to create a three-dimensional simulation of merging black holes. Image Credit: Henze, NASA

The theory of relativity is at once simple and elegant but also maddeningly nonintuitive. There’s no need to get into the full guts and glory of that theory here, but there is one feature of Einstein’s work that takes center stage, and would eventually lead him into a complete reshaping of Newton’s gravity, altering our very conceptions of the fabric of the universe.

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Posted on by Paul M. Sutter

Magnetar Glitches, Fast Radio Bursts, And…Asteroids???

A massive flare ejected from a magnetar.

Recently astronomers have been able to associate two seemingly unrelated phenomena: an explosive event known as a fast radio burst and the change in speed of a spinning magnetar. And now new research suggests that the cause of both of these is the destruction of an asteroid by a magnetar.

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Posted on by Paul M. Sutter

Dynamical Dark Energy Might Explain Strange 21-cm Signal

An artist's representation of what the first stars to light up the universe might have looked like in the Cosmic Dawn -- when early stars and galaxies were coming together. Image Credit: NASA/WMAP Science Team
An artist's representation of what the first stars to light up the universe might have looked like in the Cosmic Dawn -- when early stars and galaxies were coming together. Image Credit: NASA/WMAP Science Team

Dark energy may evolve in time, and it may even connect through a new force of nature with dark matter. And a researcher believes that we may have already seen evidence for this.

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Posted on by Paul M. Sutter

The Best Particle Collider in the World? The Sun

A look inside ALICE at the Large Hadron Collider. ALICE is one of the LHC's four particle detectors. Image: CERN/LHC
A look inside ALICE at the Large Hadron Collider. ALICE is one of the LHC's four particle detectors. Image: CERN/LHC

Recently astronomers caught a strange mystery: extremely high-energy particles spitting out of the surface of the Sun when it was relatively calm. Now a team of theorists have proposed a simple solution to the mystery. We just have to look a little bit under the surface.

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Posted on by Paul M. Sutter

The Hidden Benefits of Large Science Projects

Ten areas in the sky were selected as “deep fields” that the Dark Energy Camera imaged several times during the survey, providing a glimpse of distant galaxies and helping determine their 3D distribution in the cosmos. Credit: NSF/DES/NOIRLab/DOE/FNAL/AURA/University of Alaska Anchorage/

Large astronomical projects like the Dark Energy Survey and the James Webb Space Telescope provide innumerable benefits to society, like technological spin-offs, national prestige, and a way to satisfy our common human curiosity.

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Posted on by Paul M. Sutter

Without Ozone, the Earth Might Get a Lot Colder

Clouds trace out the islands of the Caribbean Sea in this photo taken by an astronaut from inside the Cupola on the International Space Station. Credit NASA/NASA Earth Observatory.

The evolution of Earth’s climate contains many components. And new research has shown just how critical the ozone layer is to the surface temperature of the Earth. Without an ozone layer, our planet would be 3.5 Kelvin cooler.

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Posted on by Paul M. Sutter

Meet Annie Jump Cannon, the “Harvard Computer” that Brought Order Out of Chaos

These Hubble Space Telescope images showcase two of the 19 galaxies analyzed in a project to improve the precision of the universe's expansion rate, a value known as the Hubble constant. The color-composite images show NGC 3972 (left) and NGC 1015 (right), located 65 million light-years and 118 million light-years, respectively, from Earth. The yellow circles in each galaxy represent the locations of pulsating stars called Cepheid variables. Credits: NASA, ESA, A. Riess (STScI/JHU)

In the early 20th century our understanding of stars was a complete and total disaster. It took the genius of Annie Jump Cannon, who was hired as a human computer, to create some order out of the chaos.

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Posted on by Paul M. Sutter

Why Didn’t the Big Bang Collapse in a Giant Black Hole?

This is an artist’s impression of a black hole drifting through our Milky Way galaxy. The black hole is the crushed remnant of a massive star that exploded as a supernova. The surviving core is several times the mass of our Sun. The black hole traps light because of its intense gravitational field. The black hole distorts the space around it, which warps images of background stars lined up almost directly behind it. This gravitational "lensing" effect offers the only telltale evidence for the existence of lone black holes wandering our galaxy, of which there may be a population of 100 million. The Hubble Space Telescope goes hunting for these black holes by looking for distortion in starlight as the black holes drift in front of background stars. Credit: ESA

Despite the enormous densities, the early universe didn’t collapse into a black hole because, simply put, there was nothing to collapse into.

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