Showing posts with label Universe. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Universe. Show all posts
Astronomers detect mysterious radio signals from 11 billion light years away
According to the astronomers, these radio waves do not come from Earthly sources. In fact, astronomers posit that their brightness and distance promote the idea that they originate from space distances when the Universe was only half its current age.
Furthermore, astronomers posit that the burst energetics signify that they come from an intense astrophysical event associated with relativistic objects like neutron stars or black holes.
Lead author Dan Thornton, a PhD student at University of Manchester and Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, notes that the study’s results suggested some intense events involving big amounts of mass or energy as the starting point of the radio bursts.
According to Thornton, a single burst of radio emission of unidentified origin was picked up outside our own Milky Way galaxy approximately six years ago but no one had any idea what it was or if it was genuine in existence. For the last four years, astronomers have looked for more of these strange radio bursts.
In the study, astronomers discuss four more radio bursts, ending any discussion of whether or not these radio bursts are real. According to the authors, the radio bursts last for only a few milliseconds and the most distant one that they identified was approximately 11 billion light years away from Earth.
Interestingly, the discoveries also provide evidence for the theory that there should be one of these radio bursts being released every 10 seconds. According to Michael Kramer, a professor at the University of Manchester and the Max-Planck Institute Director, the radio bursts lost for only a few milliseconds, meaning that with the available technology astronomers have to be observing the right location at the right time to detect them. However, the ability to view the entire sky, all of the time, would lead to the discovery of radio bursts on a much more frequent basis.
To make their discoveries, the international research team utilized the CSIRO Parkes 64-meter radio telescope in Australia.
According to co-author Matthew Bailes, a professor at the Swinburne University of Technology, the radio bursts may originate from “magnetars.” Magnetars have the ability to give off more energy in a millisecond than our Sun gives off in 300,000 years and are the principal suspect for the mysterious radio signals.
According to the astronomers, the findings will help scientists learn more about characteristics of space between the Earth and where the bursts originated.
Ben Strappers, a professor at the University of Manchester’s School of Physics and Astronomy, posits that astronomers are still uncertain about what space is like between galaxies, but these radio signals will offer key data in their quest to learn more about the Universe.
References: [The Space Reporter]
What is God Particle?
Scientists at the CERN research centre near Geneva, Switzerland, on Wednesday unveiled their latest findings in their search for the Higgs boson, a subatomic particle key to the formation of stars, planets and eventually life after the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago.
What is Higgs Boson?
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The Higgs is the last missing piece of the Standard Model, the theory that describes the basic building blocks of the universe. The other 11 particles predicted by the model have been found and finding the Higgs would validate the model. Ruling it out or finding something more exotic would force a rethink on how the universe is put together.
Scientists believe that in the first billionth of a second after the Big Bang, the universe was a gigantic soup of particles racing around at the speed of light without any mass to speak of. It was through their interaction with the Higgs field that they gained mass and eventually formed the universe. The Higgs field is a theoretical and invisible energy field that pervades the whole cosmos. Some particles, like the photons that make up light, are not affected by it and therefore have no mass. Others find it drags on them as porridge drags on a spoon. Picture George Clooney (the particle) walking down a street with a gaggle of photographers (the Higgs field) clustered around him. An average guy on the same street (a photon) gets no attention from the paparazzi and gets on with his day. The Higgs particle is the signature of the field - an eyelash of one of the photographers. The particle is theoretical, first posited in 1964 by six physicists, including Briton Peter Higgs. The search for it only began in earnest in the 1980s, first in Fermilab's now mothballed Tevatron particle collider near Chicago and later in a similar machine at CERN, but most intensively since 2010 with the start-up of the European centre's Large Hadron Collider.
What is Standard Model?
The Standard Model is to physics what the theory of evolution is to biology. It is the best explanation physicists have of how the building blocks of the universe are put together. It describes 12 fundamental particles, governed by four basic forces.
But the universe is a big place and the Standard Model only explains a small part of it. Scientists have spotted a gap between what we can see and what must be out there. That gap must be filled by something we don't fully understand, which they have dubbed 'dark matter'. Galaxies are also hurtling away from each other faster than the forces we know about suggest they should. This gap is filled by 'dark energy'. This poorly understood pair are believed to make up a whopping 96 percent of the mass and energy of the cosmos.
Confirming the Standard Model, or perhaps modifying it, would be a step towards the holy grail of physics - a 'theory of everything' that encompasses dark matter, dark energy and the force of gravity, which the Standard Model also does not explain. It could also shed light on even more esoteric ideas, such as the possibility of parallel universes.
CERN spokesman James Gillies has said that just as Albert Einstein's theories enveloped and built on the work of Isaac Newton, the work being done by the thousands of physicists at CERN has the potential to do the same to Einstein's work.
What is the Large Hadron Collider?
The Large Hadron Collider is the world's biggest and most powerful particle accelerator, a 27-km (17-mile) looped pipe that sits in a tunnel 100 metres underground on the Swiss/French border. It cost 3 billion euros to build.
Two beams of protons are fired in opposite directions around it before smashing into each other to create many millions of particle collisions every second in a recreation of the conditions a fraction of a second after the Big Bang, when the Higgs field is believed to have 'switched on'.
The vast amount of data produced is examined by banks of computers. Of all the trillions of collisions, very few are just right for revealing the Higgs particle. That makes the hunt for the Higgs slow, and progress incremental.
What is the threshold for proof?
To claim a discovery, scientists have set themselves a target for certainty that they call "5 sigma". This means that there is a probability of less than one in a million that their conclusions from the data harvested from the particle accelerator are the result of a statistical fluke.
The two teams hunting for the Higgs at CERN, called Atlas and CMS, now have twice the amount of data that allowed them to claim 'tantalising glimpses' of the Higgs at the end of last year and this could push their results beyond that threshold.
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Can Asteroid 2012 DA14 impact Earth on 15 Feb '13?
A 150-foot asteroid orbiting Earth called 2012 DA14 will pass so close to Earth it will fly UNDER man-made satellites orbiting our planet.
Nasa's Impact Risk report said that the odds of the space rock actually hitting our planet are very low indeed - but on February 15 next year it will pass just 17,000 miles from Earth, closer than 'geostationary' satellites.
If an asteroid of that size hit our planet, it would cause an explosion similar to a nuclear blast.
Two astronomers from the the Observatorio Astronómico de La Sagra in Spain spotted 2012 DA14 in late February and its orbit has been calculated to be very similar to Earth’s.
Some reports suggested that on February 15 next year an impact was a possibility, but U.S astronomer Phil Plait, the creator of the Bad Astronomy blog, has ruled out an impact.
According to RT, NASA has confirmed that the 60 meter (or 197 feet) asteroid, which was spotted by Spanish stargazers in February this year, has a good chance of colliding with earth. The scientists suggest confronting this asteroid with either big guns or, more strangely, with paint. The problem with either option is that there is no time to build a spaceship for the operation. A spaceship could either shoot the asteroid down or simply crash into it – this would either break it into pieces or throw it off course.
NASA expert David Dunham suggested: “We could paint it.” The paint would change the asteroid’s ability to reflect sunlight, alter its spin and change its temperature. However, even taking the asteroid off course could be dangerous when it returns in 2056, according to Aleksandr Devaytkin the head of the observatory in Russia’s Pulkovo, as told to Izvestia in Russia recently.
The asteroid’s closest approach to earth is scheduled for 15 February 2013, when they predict that the distance between it and earth will be under 27,000 km (16,700 miles). With the asteroid zooming that low, it will be too late to do anything with it besides trying to predict its final destination and the consequences of impact. However, NASA’s David Dunham did say: “The asteroid may split into pieces entering the atmosphere. In this case, most parts of it will never reach the planet’s surface.” But theories are that if the entire asteroid did crash into the planet, the impact will be as hard as in the Tunguska blast, which in 1908 knocked down trees over a total area of 2,150 sq km (830 sq miles) in Siberia. So keep your head down and watch the skies.
Believers In Mysterious Planet Nibiru Await Earth's End!!
The waxing obsession with Nibiru, which conspiracy theorists say is a planet swinging in from the outskirts of our solar system that is going to crash into Earth and wipe out humanity in 2012 — or, in some opinions, 2011 — shows that an astonishing number of people "are watching YouTube videos and visiting slick websites with nothing in their skeptical thinking," in the words of David Morrison, a planetary astronomer at NASA Ames Research Center and senior scientist at the NASA Astrobiology Institute.Morrison estimates that there are 2 million websites discussing the impending Nibiru-Earth collision. He receives, on average, five email inquiries about Nibiru every day.
"At least a once a week I get a message from a young person — as young as 11 — who says they are ill and/or contemplating suicide because of the coming doomsday," Morrison told.
What's the origin of this mass panic about Nibiru, which astronomers say doesn't exist?
A suspect origin
The idea that doomsday will result from a planetary collision was first proposed in 1995 by Nancy Lieder, a self-described "contactee." Lieder claims she has the ability to receive messages through an implant in her brain from aliens in the Zeta Reticuli star system. On her website, ZetaTalk, she stated that she was chosen to warn mankind of an impending planetary collision which would wipe out humanity in May 2003. (When no such cataclysmic event occurred, Lieder's followers chose 2012 as the new date for the Nibiru collision, which coincides neatly with other doomsday prophecies focused on the ending of the Mayan calendar.)
Lieder originally called the bringer of doom "Planet X," and later connected it to a planet that was hypothesized to exist by a writer named Zecharia Sitchin in his book "The 12th Planet”. According to Sitchin (1920-2010), the ancient Sumerians wrote about a giant planet called Nibiru — the "twelfth planet" in the solar system, after the other planets (including Pluto), the sun and moon — which has an oblong orbit that swings near Earth every 3,600 years. Humans actually evolved on Nibiru, he said, and colonized this planet during a previous flyby.
Missing planet
he biggest missing link in the doomsday prophecy is Nibiru itself. Because no giant, rogue planet has been found in the outer solar system to play the role of Nibiru, some conspiracy theorists have decided that a small comet called Elenin, which will pass nearest Earth in October 2011, is actually Nibiru. Even then, though, scientists say Elenin will come no closer than 100 times farther than the distance from Earth to the moon.
"The fact is that these folks are constantly changing their story," Morrison said. "For some, Nibiru is no longer the Sumerian god or planet that is supposed to be returning to Earth in late 2012. It has become a catchword for almost any cosmic catastrophe."
Internet rumors about Elenin began spreading earlier this year. Its approach to Earth was blamed for shifting the Earth's axis by 3 degrees in February, precipitating the Chile earthquake, then shifting the pole even more to trigger the Japan quake in March. "Ignoring plate tectonics as the cause of earthquakes, they suggest that the comet exerted strong gravitational or electromagnetic effects on our planet," Morrison said.
Conspiracy theorists began speculating that the comet is Nibiru in disguise — a planet or even an enormous brown dwarf star (A failed star).
In fact, Elenin is a textbook comet; it has visible "coma," or nucleus, and a long tail made of vaporizing ice.
If it were a brown dwarf, "it would not have a coma or tail, because the gas cannot escape from an object with substantial gravity. In addition, if it were massive we would be seeing its gravitational influence on the orbits of the planets, especially Mars and Earth, but there is no change in these orbits," Morrison wrote. "Finally, if it were a brown dwarf it would have been easily detected in various previous astronomical surveys, including the recent WISE infrared mission, even when it was still in the outer solar system," he wrote.
The fact that the comet isn't headed our way is overlooked by most conspiracy theorists, while others say its path is going to change. "Some websites suggest that the comet is accompanied by a giant UFO, which controls its orbit," Morrison said.
7 Biggest Holes on Earth's Surface
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