Koppernigk

box inside a box inside a box inside a....

Nikodem J. Poplawskim a theoretical physicist at Indiana University believes a cosmos might be found in every black hole. That's not a new idea, as there are many people speculating about universes into universes, black and white holes as gates to other realities et cetera. His stance on the matter however is a bit different.

Poplawskim calculates that at the heart of the black hole, at the singularity, torsion might become so strong it counteracts the gravity, and the singularity starts to expand again. This model gives a solution for a lot of phenomenon like the flatness and the horizon problem in cosmology.

I'not sure what the status of these ideas are as Arxiv can contain everything from peer reviewed stuff to scientific fun bunkum, but I am sure that if it's the latter, it's at least classy bunkum I'd wish I could come up with. Here's a generic explanation, and here's the Arxiv link.

From ridiculously small to ridiculously big

Neutrino are leptons, family of quarks and electrons, with very little mass and without electrical charge. That's the reason the word "neutron" is hidden in its name. They're both extremely difficult to detect and very abundant. How to measure their tiny mass?

Weird enough, here the large scale structure of the universe comes in. Because despite their insignificant mass, neutrinos are so abundant, they have a significant effect on the distribution of mass on a large scale. Well, a 3D survey of 700,000 galaxies sure is large scale. Because all neutrino leptons in the family (electrons, tau neutrinos and neutrinos) have an effect on the mass distribution, the survey only could determine the joint mass of the three. It at least gave an upper limit to the mass of the neutrino, given the fact that we know how much an electron weighs.

If you want to read more about the weight watching survey, click on this link of the American Physical Society.

A 30 to 857 GHz llook at the sky

While 125,000 people have gathered on the Museumplein in Amsterdam to follow the Dutch soccer team en route to the World Championship on a big screen, I remain at home to look at it on a small screen. And do something useful during the game. In that case I can claim to have seen the match when the Dutch win and to have done something useful when they lose (which they won't, BTW).

Koppernigk however is a daily obligation, soccer matches or not, because in the grand scheme of things, both South-Africa, Spain and the Netherlands are mere specks of subatomic proportions compared to our visible universe.

Yesterday we saw beautiful pictures of asteroid 21 lutetia, showing a surface and shape that reminded me of Phobos and Deimos, the two Martian moons. That might be another hint where those came from. Today we look at something a lot bigger: the whole sky. This is a picture of the Planck one year all sky survey.

"This multi-frequency all-sky image of the microwave sky has been composed using data from Planck covering the electromagnetic spectrum from 30 GHz to 857 GHz.

The mottled structure of the CMBR, with its tiny temperature fluctuations reflecting the primordial density variations from which today’s cosmic structure originated, is clearly visible in the high-latitude regions of the map. The central band is the plane of our Galaxy. A large portion of the image is dominated by the diffuse emission from its gas and dust. The image was derived from data collected by Planck during its first all-sky survey and comes from observations taken between August 2009 and June 2010. This image is a low- resolution version of the full data set.

To the right of the main image, below the plane of the Galaxy, is a large cloud of gas in our Galaxy. The obvious arc of light surrounding it is Barnard’s Loop – the expanding bubble of an exploded star. Planck has seen whole other galaxies. The great spiral galaxy in Andromeda, 2.2 million light-years from Earth, appears as a sliver of microwave light, released by the coldest dust in its giant body. Other, more distant, galaxies with supermassive black holes appear as single points of microwaves dotting the image. ..."

You can see a large version of this picture by clicking here.

Find the gravitation wave

" ... An international team of astronomers, including Michael Kramer from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany, has studied the behavior of natural cosmic clocks and discovered a way to potentially turn them into the best timekeepers in the universe. The scientists made their breakthrough using decade-long observations from the 249-foot (76 meters) Lovell radio telescope at the University of Manchester's Jodrell Bank Observatory in England to track the radio signals of an extreme type of star known as pulsars. This new understanding of pulsar spin-down could improve the chances to use the fastest spinning pulsars in order to make the first direct detection of ripples, known as gravitational waves, in the fabric of space-time. ... (Astronomy.com)

No time to cook your egg outside our visible universe?

"The way that we deal with time is central to a major current schism in physics. Under classic Newtonian physics and also quantum mechanics – time is absolute, a universal metronome allowing you determine whether events occur simultaneously or in sequence. Under Einstein's physics, time is not absolute – simultaneity and sequence depend on who's looking. For Einstein, the speed of light (in a vacuum) is constant and time changes in whatever way is required to keep the speed of light constant from all frames of reference.

Under general relativity (GR) you are able to experience living for three score and ten years regardless of where you are or how fast you’re moving, but other folk might measure that duration quite differently. But even under GR, we need to consider whether time only has meaning for sub-light speed consciousnesses such as us. Were a photon to have consciousness, it may not experience time – and, from its perspective, would cross the apparent 100,000 light year diameter of the Milky Way in an instant. Of course, that gets you wondering whether space is real either. Hmm… ..." (Universe Today)

A matter of better dark matter understanding

"According to the most precise cosmological models to date, dark energy is a mysterious repulsive "force" that makes up the majority of the total energy contained within the universe. And yet, we have no idea what it actually IS. The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Supernova Cosmology Project is helping us get a bit closer to the answer.

Type Ia supernovae (that's "type one aye") occur when a white dwarf star gobbles up too much mass from its less massive companion star and detonates, creating a massive explosion that can outshine a whole galaxy. An explosion occurs when the white dwarf hits a specific mass, so we know how bright these explosions should be. ..." (Discovery)

Why empty space gives us a headache

"One of the most intriguing things in cosmology is empty space – that apparent spatial emptiness that didn’t obviously exist before the Big Bang. Although classical physics would have it that energy may neither be created or destroyed, it's certainly the case that empty space is being created in abundance as the universe expands.

This empty space is something you can move through, although moving is something you can only do over time, so we should really talk about it being space-time. There was no time before the Big Bang expansion also created space – and from there the two have always gone together as a package. ... (Universe Today)

Inside a black whole

I like this guy. His name is Nikodem Poplawski and he has a theory about the universe and its place in the greater scheme of things. That's enough to make me drooling. Go to Universe Today and read the simpletons entry. Below the article you can find a link to the version for the die hards. Good luck.

Missing traveling light

"Astronomers have long known that in many surveys of the very distant Universe, a large fraction of the total intrinsic light was not being observed. Now, thanks to an extremely deep survey using two of the four giant 8.2-metre telescopes that make up ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) and a unique custom-built filter, astronomers have determined that a large fraction of galaxies whose light took 10 billion years to reach us have gone undiscovered. The survey also helped uncover some of the faintest galaxies ever found at this early stage of the Universe. ..." (ESO)

LHC creates black hole, sucks Earth in, Moon follows

No. At CERN, they didn't create a black hole. It didn't suck in the Earth and everything around it (including the Moon). But they did achieve some important first results:

"... "We did it! The first high-energy collisions were achieved at 13.06 today at all four points of the LHC ring. Collisions occurred after a few attempts at injecting and ramping beams in the morning.

Before the collisions, there was a mixture of excitement, expectation, fear and apprehension in the CERN Control Centre. Nobody had ever attempted to make two proton beams collide at 3.5 TeV before. Only Nature produces collisions like this routinely, in the processes that yield cosmic radiation, but in a way that makes it very difficult to extract meaningful data. ..." (CERN)

Einstein was at least for 3.5 billion light years right

"An analysis of more than 70,000 galaxies by University of California, Berkeley, University of Zurich and Princeton University physicists demonstrates that the universe -- at least up to a distance of 3.5 billion light years from Earth -- plays by the rules set out 95 years ago by Albert Einstein in his General Theory of Relativity.

By calculating the clustering of these galaxies, which stretch nearly one-third of the way to the edge of the universe, and analyzing their velocities and distortion from intervening material, the researchers have shown that Einstein's theory explains the nearby universe better than alternative theories of gravity.

One major implication of the new study is that the existence of dark matter is the most likely explanation for the observation that galaxies and galaxy clusters move as if under the influence of some unseen mass, in addition to the stars astronomers observe.

"The nice thing about going to the cosmological scale is that we can test any full, alternative theory of gravity, because it should predict the things we observe," said co-author Uros Seljak, a professor of physics and of astronomy at UC Berkeley, a faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and a professor of physics at the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the University of Zurich. "Those alternative theories that do not require dark matter fail these tests." ... " (ScienceDaily)

Rimmer was as real as Lister after all

As you can understand, these are subjects that I love. Cosmology, the universe as a hologram and much much more:

"The physics blogosphere is buzzing about a new paper by cosmologist Craig Hogan -- the subject of a long feature by Ron Cowen in Science News -- proposing that our universe is a hologram, made up of pixels of spacetime. The so-called holographic principle has been around since the 1990s: it basically holds that the 2D surface area enclosing a 3D volume of spacetime pretty much encodes all the information contained within that volume -- just like a standard hologram. .." (Discovery)

(Don't get the title? Go here)

What is time?

"One way to get noticed as a scientist is to tackle a really difficult problem. Physicist Sean Carroll has become a bit of a rock star in geek circles by attempting to answer an age-old question no scientist has been able to fully explain: What is time?

Here at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, where he gave a presentation on the arrow of time, scientists stopped him in the hallway to tell him what big fans they were of his work.

Carroll sat down with Wired.com on Feb. 19 at AAAS to explain his theories and why Marty McFly’s adventure could never exist in the real world, where time only goes forward and never back. ..." (Wired)

The universe was once young - and hot

"Talk about hot and heavy. Scientists have taken the temperature of a minuscule glob of dense, hot matter formed in the grisly aftermath of collisions between gold atoms traveling near the speed of light. The material reaches an estimated 4 trillion degrees Celsius, about 250,000 times hotter than the sun’s interior, and higher than any temperature ever reached in a laboratory, researchers reported February 15 at a meeting of the American Physical Society.

The measurements, which will be published in an upcoming Physical Review Letters, provide a more detailed description of the superhot, superdense soup of matter called quark-gluon plasma, which may mimic the conditions of the infant universe, the researchers say. Other studies of the soup hint that discrete pockets of the matter break special kinds of symmetry. ... " (ScienceNews)

The universe is getting old

"University of Arizona (UA) astronomers have helped solve a mystery surrounding the birth of stars in galaxies that has long puzzled scientists.

"We have known for more than a decade that in the early universe — 3 to 5 billion years after the Big Bang or 9 to 11 billion years before today — galaxies churned out new stars at a much faster rate than they do now," said Michael Cooper, at the UA's Steward Observatory. ..." (Astronomy.com)

BBC: To infinity and beyond

BBC's Horizon aired "To infinity and beyond". Great for people who are interested in the mathematical concept of infinity - great for people who are wondering about the universe around us. The six parts are now posted on Youtube and you can find them here:

see playlist

The big pictures

I like them. This is another one: A New 3-D Map of the Interstellar Gas Within 300 Parsecs from the Sun.
Read more on ScienceNow by clicking on the link.

NGC 3021 by HST

It's Sunday so it's time for just a beautiful picture: NGC 3021 by HST. Enjoy. If I only were a space traveler.

(More info here. It's not even about NGC 3021, but about dark matter and the Hubble Constant)

Almost ready for 14TeV

"The Large Hadron Collider is going to skip medium-energy proton collisions, jumping straight to its maximum energy in 2013, after it finishes collecting lower-energy data and has its circuitry upgraded.

The particle accelerator, located outside Geneva, Switzerland, has recovered from its 2008 accident. And in 2009 it broke the world record for particle collision energy when its two oppositely directed proton beams each reached 1.18 TeV, for a total energy of 2.36 TeV. ..." (NewScientist)

The universe: closer to the edge?

"Australian researchers have measured the amount of entropy that exists now in the Universe. They found that the Universe has much less energy available than had been previously measured. Are they right? Is the Universe aging faster? ..." (ITWIre)