macmankev

Scientists are close to making a discovery that Einstein thought impossible but will vindicate his theories | Guardian

These cosmic emanations are thought to be hurled across space when stars start throwing their weight around – for example when they collapse into black holes or when pairs of super-dense neutron stars start to spin closer and closer to each other. These processes put massive strains on the fabric of space-time, pushing and stretching it so that ripples of gravitational energy radiate across the universe.

At least, that is the theory. To date, no one has actually detected a gravitational wave. The Ruthe laboratory, a joint UK-German project known as Geo600, has been built to overcome this failure and to show these disruptions in space-time do exist, thus proving that Albert Einstein was absolutely right – and utterly wrong – about gravity.

It is a startling paradox. Harald Lück, a scientist at Geo600, explained: “In his general theory of relativity, Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves, which he said would be set off by highly energetic events objects like supernovae or neutron star collisions. However, he also predicted we would never be able to observe these waves because they would be too weak to be detected by the time they reached Earth. We intend to prove him right in the first instance and wrong in the second.”

Reblogged from kateoplis April 15th, 2012 at 4:11 pm 215 notes #science #physics #gravitational waves

Professor Brian Cox: A Night with the Stars in its entirety.

December 26th, 2011 at 5:49 pm 52 notes #brian cox #a night with the stars #science #physics #quantum physics

(via hannahisdead)

Reblogged from toothpastefordinner.com October 10th, 2011 at 5:53 pm 16 notes #Toothpaste For Dinner #Physics #accurate

What happens when you hold an extended slinky vertically then release the top? Watch and find out.

September 28th, 2011 at 11:07 pm 12 notes #physics #science #slinky #cool science

invaderxan:

Bottom quarks.

Reblogged from invaderxan August 3rd, 2011 at 9:52 am 34 notes #physics

The High Water Mark of American Science

In the 1980s the Department of Energy started to design what would have been the biggest science experiment in the world, the Superconducting Super Collider. Waxahachie, Texas was all set to host a particle accelerator that would have dwarfed Switzerland’s Large Hadron Collider, today’s reigning champ. Construction began in 1991, then was abruptly canceled in 1993.

The SSC was designed to collide protons and anti-protons at energies of 40 TeV, today the LHC can only ever hope to reach 14 TeV. The LHC has tunnels 17 miles in circumference; the SSC would have been more than 54 miles.

Congress pulled the plug in 1993 for a couple reasons. The projected budget swelled from about $4.4 billion to $12 billion. Political support for the project had always been shaky, and it essentially came down to whether Congress wanted to fund the International Space Station, or the SSC. The ISS won out.

Today the old SSC site sits rusting away. No one wants to buy the derelict buildings, so they are slowly rotting into the Texas prairie. Workers had drilled over 14 miles of tunnels underground.

[Click through for more pictures.]

Reblogged from physicscentral.com March 31st, 2011 at 8:41 pm 4 notes #science #super conducting super collider #physics #abandoned structures

$unknownskywalker: Scientists glimpse universe before the Big Bang Oxford University physicist Roger Penrose and Vahe Gurzadyan from the Yerevan Physics Institute in Armenia have found an effect in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) that allows them to “see through” the Big Bang into what came before, roughly 14 billion years ago. The CMB temperature has anisotropies: tiny random fluctuations that occurred in the fraction of a second after the Big Bang when the inflation started. These tiny fluctuations made the radiation nearly uniform, and are thought to have grown into the large-scale structures we see today. However, Penrose and Gurzadyan have now discovered concentric circles within the CMB in which the temperature variation is much lower than expected, implying that CMB anisotropies are not completely random. They think that these circles stem from collisions between supermassive black holes that released considerably huge isotropic bursts of energy. The strange part is that the scientists calculated that some of the larger of these nearly isotropic circles must have occurred before the time of the Big Bang. The discovery suggest that there could have been many Big Bang events. The CMB circles support the possibility that we live in a cyclic universe, in which the end of one “aeon” (or universe) triggers another Big Bang that starts another aeon (another universe), and the process repeats indefinitely. The black hole encounters that caused the circles likely occurred within the later stages of the aeon right before ours. Cyclic cosmology models provide a better explanation than the inflationary theory of why there was such low entropy at the beginning of the universe, which was essential for making complex matter possible: when a universe expands to its full extent, black holes will evaporate and all the information they contain will vanish, removing entropy from the universe and allowing the beginning of another. The scientists will do further work to confirm their existence of these little circles and see which models can best explain them. But even if the circles really do stem from sources in a pre-Big Bang era, cyclic cosmology may not offer the best explanation for them. Among its challenges, cyclic cosmology still needs to explain the vast shift of scale between aeons, as well as why it requires all particles to lose their mass at some point in the future. Image: Black hole encounters would have repeated themselves several times, with the center of each event remaining at almost exactly the same point in the CMB sky, even when occurring in different aeons. The huge amounts of energy released would appear as spherical, low-variance radiation bursts in the CMB. • Source: PhysOrg.com/physicsworld.com • The paper is available at http://arxiv.org/abs/1011.3706$

unknownskywalker:

Scientists glimpse universe before the Big Bang

Oxford University physicist Roger Penrose and Vahe Gurzadyan from the Yerevan Physics Institute in Armenia have found an effect in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) that allows them to “see through” the Big Bang into what came before, roughly 14 billion years ago.

The CMB temperature has anisotropies: tiny random fluctuations that occurred in the fraction of a second after the Big Bang when the inflation started. These tiny fluctuations made the radiation nearly uniform, and are thought to have grown into the large-scale structures we see today.

However, Penrose and Gurzadyan have now discovered concentric circles within the CMB in which the temperature variation is much lower than expected, implying that CMB anisotropies are not completely random. They think that these circles stem from collisions between supermassive black holes that released considerably huge isotropic bursts of energy. The strange part is that the scientists calculated that some of the larger of these nearly isotropic circles must have occurred before the time of the Big Bang.

The discovery suggest that there could have been many Big Bang events. The CMB circles support the possibility that we live in a cyclic universe, in which the end of one “aeon” (or universe) triggers another Big Bang that starts another aeon (another universe), and the process repeats indefinitely. The black hole encounters that caused the circles likely occurred within the later stages of the aeon right before ours.

Cyclic cosmology models provide a better explanation than the inflationary theory of why there was such low entropy at the beginning of the universe, which was essential for making complex matter possible: when a universe expands to its full extent, black holes will evaporate and all the information they contain will vanish, removing entropy from the universe and allowing the beginning of another.

The scientists will do further work to confirm their existence of these little circles and see which models can best explain them. But even if the circles really do stem from sources in a pre-Big Bang era, cyclic cosmology may not offer the best explanation for them. Among its challenges, cyclic cosmology still needs to explain the vast shift of scale between aeons, as well as why it requires all particles to lose their mass at some point in the future.

Image: Black hole encounters would have repeated themselves several times, with the center of each event remaining at almost exactly the same point in the CMB sky, even when occurring in different aeons. The huge amounts of energy released would appear as spherical, low-variance radiation bursts in the CMB.

• Source: PhysOrg.com/physicsworld.com • The paper is available at http://arxiv.org/abs/1011.3706

Reblogged from unknownskywalker November 23rd, 2010 at 7:39 pm 41 notes #science #physics #big bang

unknownskywalker:

Black holes break up during star collapse

Black holes form when the gravitational field in a region of space is strong enough to prevent light escaping. The best known examples occur when stars run out of fuel and can no longer generate the heat needed to support their mass. If the star is big enough, the resultant collapse generates gravitational fields so strong that nothing can escape.

But how exactly does such a collapse occur? The conventional view is that the collapse occurs symmetrically, like a shrinking balloon. But that’s really only because this is the simplest situation to explore mathematically. Include any small perturbations in the calculations that change the symmetry and the mathematics of general relativity immediately becomes unmanageable.

Unless you have a supercomputer to help. Fortunately, this kind of computing power is becoming more common and Burkhard Zink at Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching and a few buddies have put it to good use. They’ve simulated what happens to a collapsing, rotating star which is radially oscillating like a bell. That’s a reasonable enough scenario for a collapsing star in the real universe.

Astrophysicists have long known that such a star immediately becomes unstable but exactly what happens to it has eluded them. With the help of some useful astrophysical computing code called Cactus, Zink and pals have found out. They say the star breaks into two or more self-gravitating parts that each develop their own event horizons. In other words, the star fragments into several black holes as it collapses.

What’s interesting about this is that the black hole fragments begin to spiral in towards each other and this ought to generate a unique gravitational wave signature that the next generation of detectors may well be able to pick up. So we may find out sooner rather than later whether these guys are right.

• Source: Technology Review • The paper is available at http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0501080

Reblogged from unknownskywalker November 17th, 2010 at 9:24 pm 57 notes #science #physics #astrophysics #black holes

scienceisbeauty:

Baryons are particles made of three quarks. The particles can exist in a ground state (J=1/2) and an excited state (J=3/2). The CDF experiment discovered the positively charged Sigma-sub-b and the negatively charged Sigma-sub-b in both spin configurations. The graphic shows the various three-quark combinations with J=3/2 that are possible using the three lightest quarks—up, down and strange—and the bottom quark. Past experiments discovered all of the baryons made of light quarks. The CDF discovery is the first observation of baryons with one bottom quark and spin J=3/2. Theory predicts four more such particles to exist. There are additional baryons involving the charm quark, which are not shown. The top quark, discovered at Fermilab in 1995, is too short-lived to become part of a baryon.

Source: Experimenters at Fermilab discover exotic relatives of protons and neutrons: photos and graphics, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory

(via invaderxan)

Reblogged from scienceisbeauty November 9th, 2010 at 8:01 am 52 notes #science #physics

unknownskywalker:

Extragalactic Space Balls

For the first time, the Spitzer Space Telescope has detected little spheres of carbon, called buckyballs, in a galaxy beyond our Milky Way galaxy. The space balls were detected in a dying star, called a planetary nebula, within the nearby galaxy, the Small Magellanic Cloud. What’s more, huge quantities were found — the equivalent in mass to 15 of our moons.

An infrared photo of the Small Magellanic Cloud taken by Spitzer is shown here in this artist’s illustration, with two callouts. The middle callout shows a magnified view of an example of a planetary nebula, and the right callout shows an even further magnified depiction of buckyballs, which consist of 60 carbon atoms arranged like soccer balls.

In July 2010, astronomers reported using Spitzer to find the first confirmed proof of buckyballs. Since then, Spitzer has detected the molecules again in our own galaxy — as well as in the Small Magellanic Cloud.

• Read the full story at NASA JPL • See also: Spitzer/Caltech

When I read “huge quantities were found — the equivalent in mass to 15 of our moons.” my jaw dropped. How fucking cool is that?

Reblogged from unknownskywalker October 27th, 2010 at 9:27 pm 38 notes #space #science #physics #buckyballs