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The Big Bang Is Not The Beginning Of Our Universe — It’s Actually The End Of Something Else Entirely

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Sean Carroll is a physicist at Caltech. His research includes theoretical physics and astrophysics, especially cosmology, field theory, and gravitation. He has published several research papers dark matter and dark energy, modified gravity, violations of Lorentz invariance, extra dimensions, topological defects, cosmic microwave background anisotropies, causality violation, black holes, and the cosmological constant problem.



He is currently focused on origin of the universe and the arrow of time, including the roles of inflation, baby universes, and quantum gravity. In his recent video by Techinsider, he explains what existed before Big Bang and it actually means. So watch and learn:

NASA Saw Something Come Out Of A Black Hole For The First Time Ever

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You don’t
have to know a whole lot about science to know that black holes normally suck
things in, not spew things out. 



But NASA detected something mighty bizarre at
the supermassive black hole Markarian 335. Two of NASA’s space telescopes,
including the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR), amazingly
observed a black hole’s corona “launched” away from the supermassive black
hole.
Then an
enormous pulse of X-ray energy spewed out. This kind of phenomena has never
been observed before.

“This is the
first time we have been able to link the launching of the corona to a flare.
This will help us comprehend how supermassive black holes power some of the
brightest objects in the cosmos.” Dan Wilkins, of Saint Mary’s University,
said.

NuSTAR’s
principal investigator, Fiona Harrison, noted that the nature of the energetic
source was “enigmatic,” but added that the capability to in fact record the
event should have provided some clues about the black hole’s size and
structure, along with (hopefully) some fresh info on how black holes work.
Fortunately for us, this black hole is still 324 million light-years away.


So, no
matter what bizarre things it was doing, it shouldn’t had any effect on our
corner of the cosmos.
While we
like to think we have a fairly good understanding of space, much of what we
count as knowledge is just theory which has yet to be disproved. So it looks
like some textbooks will need to be rewritten. And while this particular
supermassive black hole is 324 million light-years away, I’m not taking any
chances.
Source: NASA

“Attempt No Voyage Here!” Milky Way Harbors 100 Million Black Holes –‘There are Tens of Millions of these Dark Enigmatic Objects Each the Size of 30 Suns’

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The LIGO discovery, the finding of a merger of 30-solar-mass black holes made astronomers question just how common black holes of such enormous sizes are and the frequency of their mergers. Astronomers of the University of California, Irvine led by UCI chair and James Bullock, professor of physics and astronomy conducted this research.  




An artist’s conception shows two black holes in the process of merging. (LIGO / Caltech / MIT Illustration)



This research was focused on a cosmic inventory to calculate and categorize stellar-remnant black holes and found that it is highly probable that tens of millions black holes exist in the Milky Way. It is a number far higher than previously expected.
James Bullock who is also co-author of the research paper printed in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society said the following about the discovery: “We think we’re shown that there are as many as 100 million black holes in our galaxy.”
UCI’s celestial census began a bit over one and a half years who– shortly after the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or, LIGO, had detected ripples in the space-time continuum created by the collision of two black holes, each the size of thirty suns.
It has also been said by Bullock that it is a commonality for scientists to assume that most stellar-remnant black holes have a mass approximately of our sun. To have direct evidence of black holes of such monstrous proportions merge in a cataclysmic collision had some astronomers shocked.
UCI’s work was a theoretical investigation into the peculiarity of the LIGO discovery. The research, led by doctoral candidate Oliver Elbert, served as an attempt to interpret the gravitational wave detections using the lense of current knowledge of galaxy formations and to construct a framework for understanding future occurrences of this kind. 

Elbert also concluded that based on what is known about star formation in different types of galaxies, it is possible to infer when and how many black holes formed in each galaxy. Afterall, big galaxies are home for older stars, and as a result, older black holes as well.
Also, according to Manoj Kaplinghat, UCI professor of physics and astronomy and co-author of the paper highlighted in this story, the numbers of black holes of a given mass per galaxy will depend on its size. The reason for this is because larger galaxies have a plentiful amount of metal-rich stars, and smaller dwarf galaxies are dominated by large stars with a low metallicity.
The mass of black holes also varies. Stars of different sizes have different masses and so, when time comes for for them to become black holes, their masses will also vary. Another reason for the variance of masses of black holes is the amount of the mass and metallicity the star sheds in its lifespan– the stars with a lower metallicity will shed less of it over time, and so form larger black holes. The opposite applies with those with a high metallicity.

James Bullock further contributed, saying that: “We have a pretty good understanding of the overall population of stars in the universe and their mass distribution as they’re born, so we can tell how many black holes should have formed with 100 solar masses versus 10 solar masses,” Bullock said. “We were able to work out how many big black holes should exist, and it ended up being in the millions – way more than I anticipated.”

With the UCI researchers seeking to determine how frequent the occurrences of black holes are in pairs, especially their merges and the time required for such a process. They also wondered whether the 30-solar-mass black holes that were detected by LIGO were formed billions of years ago and simply took an enormous amount of time or  born within the last 100 million years and merged soon after. This research study has shed light on subsequent phenomena.
Kaplinghat said the following about the research: “We show that only 0.1 to 1 percent of the black holes formed have to merge to explain what LIGO saw. Of course, the black holes have to get close enough to merge in a reasonable time, which is an open problem.

Head researcher Elbert reported that he expects a multitude of gravitational wave detections that will aid astronomers in discerning whether or not black holes collide in giant galaxies a majority of the time. Such a finding, he said, would reveal an important element of the physics that drive them to coalesce. Kaplinghat also contributes the following to the discussion, saying that this finding is very close, relatively speaking, and that: “if the current ideas about stellar evolution are correct, then our calculations indicate that mergers of even 50-solar-mass black holes will be detected in a few years.”

The Most Important Spacecraft Ever Launched — And Could Be The Last Evidence Of Humanity’s Existence

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Almost 1 billion years from this moment, the sun will enter its dying phase and blow off its outer atmosphere, eating our minute planet in hot plasma. Fortunately, our galaxy will be left with NASA’s twin Voyager spacecraft to remember us as a sign of existence of humans.

The two nuclear-powered spacecraft started their mission 40 years ago and became the first and only machines to take close-up photos of Uranus and Neptune, the planets’ moons and rings, and some other objects in the outer solar system.


The Voyagers are also carrying a golden record of sounds, images, and other info about existence of life on Earth — a simple human collection that aliens might one day discover and decode.
The mission is now comprehensive in an extraordinary PBS documentary called “The Farthest“, which premiered on August 23 and re-aired on September 13 at 10 p.m. ET.
Brad Smith, a Voyager imaging scientist, said in the movie “Fifty years from now, Voyager will be the science project of the 20th century,”

Here’s why many scientists and engineers not only hail Voyager as the farthest, fastest, and longest-lived space mission, but also one of humanity’s greatest endeavors.

‘The More I Look At The Universe, The More I’m Convinced There’s No God’, Says Degrasse Tyson

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Neil deGrasse Tyson is known for his excellent research as an astrophysicist, publishing several works on both science and spirituality. While he openly claims to be agnostic, putting most of his faith in the universe, a recent interview may be evidence that he is losing his faith entirely.
‘The more I look at the universe, the more I’m convinced there’s no God’


During an interview on CBS Sunday Morning, Neil deGrasse Tyson continued his discussion on faith and the universe. While he normally shies away from the concept of God, he was a little more direct than usual. The interviewer asked Tyson directly if he believes in a “creator” or God, to which he replied, “The more I look at the universe, the less convinced I am that there is something benevolent going on.”

Tyson has a very scientific mind that looks for evidence-based answers when it comes to spirituality. During the breaking interview, Tyson mentioned a wide range of natural disasters that could make life downright miserable for some people. Hurricanes, earthquakes, volcanoes, and diseases can make life on Earth incredibly hard to deal with.
While this may seem like a man denouncing his faith, it couldn’t be farther from the truth. Tyson is simply pointing out that there is no evidence of a creator. He later mentions that should science find this evidence, it isn’t an issue. This is simply where science stands as of now.
Tyson goes on to explain that religions are referred to as faiths because they often lack scientific evidence to back them up. This doesn’t mean that they are wrong, just that a person is trusting a philosophy or concept to be right. If the religion had solid proof of a benevolent God, they would be called “evidence” rather than “faith.” Instead of looking to stories for answers, Tyson is encouraging people to look for the scientific evidence in the world around them.

Solar System 2.0! Scientists have Discovered a Planetary System Similar To Ours

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NASA’s flying observatory, the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, SOFIA, lately finished a comprehensive study of a neighboring planetary system. The studies confirmed that this close planetary system has a design strangely similar to that of our solar system.

Situated 10.5 light-years away in the southern hemisphere of the constellation Eridanus, the star Epsilon Eridani, eps Eri for short, is the near most planetary system around a star alike to the early sun. It is a crucial place to study how planets form around stars like our sun.


With the fresh SOFIA images, Kate Su of the University of Arizona and her research group were able to locate this insanely similar solar system.

This study has been issued in the Astronomical Journal on April 25, 2017.

Su said: “The high spatial resolution of SOFIA combined with the unique wavelength coverage and impressive dynamic range of the FORCAST camera allowed us to resolve the warm emission around eps Eri, confirming the model that located the warm material near the Jovian planet’s orbit. 

Furthermore, a planetary mass object is needed to stop the sheet of dust from the outer zone, similar to Neptune’s role in our solar system. It really is impressive how eps Eri, a much younger version of our solar system, is put together like ours.”

You can read more about this discovery here.

This Truly Amazing 3-Minute Animation Will Change Your Perception Of Time

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Everybody knows that Earth is old, but it’s quite hard to put into perception just how old it is. In the end, what does 4.5 billion years *actually* mean? How do you even grasp that amount of time with our short-term human brains? Well, Business Insider has finally done a pretty unbelievable job of it in this 3-minute simulation, by showing the timeline of Earth if time was the distance from Los Angeles to New York. And, oh boy, our world-view will never ever be the same.
Image Credit: Business Insider


13 Facts About Time That Will Hurt Your Brain

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  1. Passage of time is faster for your face than for your feet (supposing you’re standing up). Einstein’s theory of relativity states that the nearer you are to the center of the Earth, the slower time passes – and this has been already measured. For an instance, at the top of Mount Everest, a year would be about 15 microseconds shorter than at sea level.
  2. A second isn’t what just you consider it is. Technically, it’s not defined as 1/60th of a minute, but as “the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation consistent to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom”.
  3. When the dinosaurs ruled the Earth, there were nearly 370 days in a year. The Earth’s rotation is getting slower because the moon’s gravity is acting as a drag, so days are getting lengthier, by about 1.7 milliseconds per century.
  4. This one is good. On Mercury, a day is two years long.
  5. The least standard scientific amount of time is the “Planck time”. It only takes you about five hundred and fifty thousand trillion trillion trillion Planck times to blink one time, rapidly.


  6. There’s nothing as “now” according to physics. Space and time are like fluid, affected by gravity and even your speed. Albert Einstein put it like this: “For us physicists, the distinction between past, present and future is only an illusion, however persistent.”
  7. Since light takes time to reach us, whatever we see is in the past. The sun you can see in the sky is 8 minutes and 20 seconds old. The light from our nearby star, Proxima Centauri, is about 4 years old.
  8. New experiences certainly do appear to be longer in the memory than familiar ones. It’s known as the “oddball effect”, and it appears to be why time feels like it’s going faster as you get older – since more stuff is familiar to you.
  9. The most precise clock ever constructed is the strontium clock, which is precise to within a second over 15 billion years.
  10. The oldest acknowledged thing in the universe is a galaxy called z8_GND_5296. It’s 13.1 billion years old – only 700 million years younger than the cosmos itself.
  11. The cause behind why clocks show the same time across entire countries is that it makes train timetables easier to run. Till the 19th century, towns set their clocks by the local time or noon, so clocks in Bristol would be 11 minutes behind London. That destined people kept missing their trains, so railway firms began using standard, London-based UK time, initiating with the Great Western Railway in 1840.
  12. Time might be crunching to a pause. Distant galaxies seem to be moving faster than close ones, signifying that the cosmos is accelerating as it expands. The normal theory to clarify that is a mysterious force in the cosmos known as “dark energy”. But a Spanish physicist has suggested an alternative prospect that the further-away, older galaxies only appear to be moving faster because in the past, time was faster. If he’s correct, in a few billion years, “everything will be frozen, like a photo of one instant, endlessly”.

  1. Next week, your watch will be one second behind. The fact that the Earth’s spin is gradually decelerating, and consequently the days are getting much longer, means that our 24-hour day is very to some extent off. Every so frequently, the International Earth Rotation Service, the body which standardizes astronomical time, has to add a second – called a “leap second” – to the clock to retain things consistent. The recent leap second was on June 30, 2015.

The Biggest Diamond Ever Found In Space!

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Deep down in the Pattern of Centarus lies a star about 50 light years far from the Earth. This star is so distinctive that astrophysicists nicknamed it “Lucy.” 


Lucy, also identified as V886Centauri and BPM 37093, is just a white dwarf star. As many of you might know, a white dwarf is the hot residue left behind when a star consumes all of its nuclear fuel and expires. It is made generally of carbon and oxygen and encircled by a thin layer of hydrogen and helium gases. 





In 1992 it was learned that Lucy pulsates as an outcome of its core temperature reducing below 12,000 degrees Fahrenheit (6,600 Celsius). And in 1995 researchers decided to use Lucy for a testing. They needed to see what she was made of. The experiment was to custom the pulsation of the star to understand if the crystallization concept was accurate. The procedure that was used is termed as “Asteroseismology” or “Stellar Seismology,” which usages the star’s frequency spectra to conclude what the structure of the star is. Basically, it is the similar way that geologists study the interior of the Earth through earthquakes.
Lucy is also the bigger diamond ever found. Researchers had found that about 90% of Lucy’s mass must crystallized, and since Lucy’s inner core is mostly made of Carbon, it can only mean one thing. At 10 billion trillion trillion carats, not merely is this diamond ever…it squeezes the last diamond to grip the record. It is speculated that our Sun will one day go over the same stage. After it explodes its external shell and turn into a white dwarf, it also will crystallize and live out its end of days in remarkable form, celebrating its own Diamond Jubilee.
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