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Category: physics – Page 270

Last observed in 2015, the black hole is spewing out ‘wobbly’ plasma jets that move so fast they change orientation within minutes.

Some 8,000 light-years from Earth in the Cygnus constellation (“The Swan”), a small black hole weighing just nine times the mass of Earth’s sun is gobbling up a sun-like star. The black hole and its stellar victim are locked together in what astronomers call a binary system and orbit each other once every 6.5 days – with spectacular effects, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) is reporting.

While the black hole may be relatively tiny as far as these celestial objects go – for instance, the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way galaxy, known as Sagittarius A*, is 4 million times more massive than the sun, per a previous report from The Inquisitr – it does pack a pretty mean punch. Dubbed V404 Cygni, the black hole is continuously siphoning material from its stellar companion, slowly consuming the unfortunate star.

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Using newly refined analysis methods, scientists have discovered that a North Korean nuclear bomb test last fall set off aftershocks over a period of eight months. The shocks, which occurred on a previously unmapped nearby fault, are a window into both the physics of nuclear explosions, and how natural earthquakes can be triggered. The findings are described in two papers just published online in the journal Seismological Research Letters.

The September 3, 2017 underground test was North Korea’s sixth, and by far largest yet, yielding some 250 kilotons, or about 17 times the size of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. Many experts believe the device was a hydrogen bomb—if true, a significant advance from cruder atomic devices the regime previously exploded. The explosion itself produced a magnitude 6.3 earthquake. This was followed 8.5 minutes later by a magnitude 4 quake, apparently created when an area above the test site on the country’s Mt. Mantap collapsed into an underground cavity occupied by the bomb.

The test and collapse were picked up by seismometers around the world and widely reported at the time. But later, without fanfare, seismic stations run by China, South Korea and the United States picked up 10 smaller shocks, all apparently scattered within 5 or 10 kilometers around the test site. The first two came on Sept. 23, 2017; the most recent was April 22, 2018. Scientists assumed the bomb had shaken up the earth, and it was taking a while to settle back down. “It’s not likely that there would be so many events in that small area over a small period of time,” said the lead author of one of the studies, Won-Young Kim, a seismologist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. “These are probably triggered due to the explosion.”

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Yes, black holes get all of the attention. They’re mysterious, they lurk in the shows of interstellar space, they break the laws of known physics, they can trap you forever, they have a cool-sounding and easy-to-understand name. They’ve got great branding.

But some things are even weirder and scarier than black holes. And what makes them weirder and scarier is that they’re weird and scary within the known laws of physics. Which means we understand them. Which means we can explain, in great and gruesome detail, just how awful they are.

Take, for example, the neutron star.

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New measurements from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope confirm that the universe is expanding roughly 9 percent faster than expected based on its trajectory observed shortly after the Big Bang, according to a new study.

The Hubble Space Telescope measurements, which were published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters on Thursday, minimize the chances that the disparity is an accident from 1 in 3,000 to only 1 in 100,000 and suggest new physics might be needed to better comprehend the cosmos, said a Johns Hopkins University press release.

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Ecstadelic Media Group releases a new non-fiction book The Origins of Us: Evolutionary Emergence and The Omega Point Cosmology by Alex M. Vikoulov as a Kindle ebook (Press Release, San Francisco, CA, USA, April 22, 2019 01.00 PM PST)

The Science and Philosophy of Information book series is adapted for general audience and based on the previously published grand volume titled “ The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind’s Evolution” by digital philosopher Alex Vikoulov on the ultimate nature of reality, consciousness, the physics of time, and philosophy of mind. In this book one of the series, the author addresses some of the most flaming questions in science and philosophy: Where do we come from? What are the origins of us? What is our role in the grand scheme of things?

“# 1 Hot New Release” in Amazon charts in Cosmology and Evolution, the book starts with a story that happened almost exactly 400 years ago that has had a tremendous “butterfly” effect on us modern humans.


Physicists at the University of Zurich have developed an amazingly simple device that allows heat to flow temporarily from a cold to a warm object without an external power supply. Intriguingly, the process initially appears to contradict the fundamental laws of physics.

If you put a teapot of boiling water on the kitchen table, it will gradually cool down. However, its is not expected to fall below that of the table. It is precisely this everyday experience that illustrates one of the fundamental laws of physics—the second law of thermodynamics—which states that the entropy of a closed natural system must increase over time. Or, more simply put: Heat can flow by itself only from a warmer to a colder object, and not the other way round.

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There’s something about the meandering streak of lightning that implies random chaos. Yet bolts from the blue not only hit the same places with regularity, but successive discharges often reuse the exact same channel.

It’s never been entirely clear how the path laid down by one bolt sticks around for repeat performances, but new research has discovered lingering pockets of charge in the wake of a single lightning strike, which could provide a map for more to follow.

An international team of physicists collected an unprecedented level of detail on radio waves emitted by lightning to determine why the charged pockets of air setting out lightning’s path behave the way they do.

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The news we had finally found ripples in space-time reverberated around the world in 2015. Now it seems they might have been an illusion.

LIGO’s detectorsEnrico Sacchetti

THERE was never much doubt that we would observe gravitational waves sooner or later. This rhythmic squeezing and stretching of space and time is a natural consequence of one of science’s most well-established theories, Einstein’s general relativity. So when we built a machine capable of observing the waves, it seemed that it would be only a matter of time before a detection.

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