Latest news with #astrophysics
Sustainability Times
16 hours ago
- Science
- Sustainability Times
Undeniable Signal From the Unknown: CHIME Reveals Spinning Radio Object Behaving Unlike Anything Ever Observed
IN A NUTSHELL 🌌 An international team of astronomers discovered CHIME J1634+44 , a unique radio-emitting celestial object. , a unique radio-emitting celestial object. 🌀 This object has an exceptionally slow spin period of 841 seconds and shows signs of accelerating rotation . and shows signs of . 🔭 The discovery was made using the CHIME/FRB Pulsar Survey , which monitors the sky with high sensitivity. , which monitors the sky with high sensitivity. 🧩 CHIME J1634+44 could redefine our understanding of long-period transients and challenge existing astrophysical models. In a groundbreaking discovery, astronomers have detected a mysterious radio-emitting celestial object that defies current astrophysical understanding. This revelation, brought to light by the CHIME/FRB Pulsar Survey, introduces a unique cosmic entity that could challenge and expand our comprehension of long-period radio transients. Known as CHIME J1634+44, this extraordinary object not only spins at an unusually slow pace but also exhibits a rare phenomenon of accelerating rotation. Such an object has never been observed before, making this discovery a beacon for future astronomical research and exploration. A Signal with an 841-Second Beat and a Unique Pulse Structure The enigmatic CHIME J1634+44 impresses with its remarkable spin period of 841 seconds, placing it among the slowest-rotating radio emitters ever documented. Even more intriguing is its secondary periodicity of 4,206 seconds, suggesting a possible interaction with a companion object, likely through gravitational or material dynamics. Since its discovery in October 2022, CHIME J1634+44 has been observed experiencing reactivation bursts, totaling an impressive 89 unique bursts over a span of 4.5 years. This object stands out because of its consistent emission of fully circularly polarized radio bursts, a rarity among long-period emitters. Such characteristics imply that CHIME J1634+44 might not be a typical slow-rotating pulsar but rather something more exotic. It could potentially be a magnetic white dwarf, a magnetar, or an entirely new form of celestial object. This opens up exciting possibilities for scientists to explore and understand the nature of such cosmic phenomena. 'They Built Them by the Water!': New Study Uncovers Lost Nile Branch That Once Guided the Construction of the Egyptian Pyramids A Discovery Born from High-Precision Sky Monitoring The revelation of CHIME J1634+44 was made possible by the CHIME/FRB single-pulse pulsar survey, which utilizes an advanced triggering algorithm to isolate signals within the Milky Way based on dispersion measures (DM). The researchers, as documented in their study, meticulously used the CHIME/FRB trigger criteria for all sources with a DM low enough to be considered within the Milky Way galaxy, according to both the NE2001 and the YMW16 DM models. The Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) has been pivotal in uncovering a wide array of transient radio phenomena, ranging from fast radio bursts (FRBs) to more slowly varying emitters like CHIME J1634+44. Its capability to monitor vast sections of the sky with high sensitivity and temporal resolution is ideal for detecting these elusive, low-frequency signals, making CHIME an essential tool in the study of cosmic radio transients. 'They Can See Us Even in Silence': China's New Magnetic Wake Tech Shatters Submarine Stealth in Shallow Waters Like the Taiwan Strait Acceleration in Spin Suggests Powerful Forces at Play A particularly unusual characteristic of CHIME J1634+44 is its accelerating spin, marked by a negative period derivative of approximately −9.03 seconds per second. This finding is unexpected, as known neutron stars or pulsars typically exhibit spin-down behavior due to energy loss through radiation or winds. The observed spin-up suggests either material accretion from a companion star or possibly energy injection via gravitational wave radiation. If confirmed, this would make CHIME J1634+44 the first known long-period transient to exhibit such spin behavior, challenging current theoretical models and paving the way for new insights into angular momentum transfer in extreme astrophysical systems. This discovery could significantly alter our understanding of how these cosmic entities function and evolve, providing a fresh perspective on traditional pulsar mechanics. 'They Can Dodge Anything We Throw at Them': China's Secret Algorithm Outsmarts Even America's Most Advanced Hypersonic Defenses A Key to Unraveling the Long-Period Transient Puzzle Long-period transients remain among the least understood types of radio sources. Their origins, emission mechanisms, and evolutionary pathways are largely speculative. The unique attributes of CHIME J1634+44 may hold the key to unraveling the mysteries surrounding this enigmatic class of astrophysical phenomena. The researchers emphasize the scientific potential of CHIME J1634+44, describing it as an important test bed for long-period transient emission theories. Its distinctive traits—particularly the combination of long periodicity, spin acceleration, and circular polarization—set it apart from the known neutron star and magnetar populations. If ongoing and future observations can clarify the mechanisms behind its emissions, they may help astrophysicists distinguish between competing origin models and inspire new theoretical frameworks. This discovery not only poses new questions about the nature of cosmic radio emitters but also challenges existing paradigms in astrophysics. As researchers continue to study CHIME J1634+44, they are likely to uncover insights that may redefine our understanding of the universe. What other cosmic mysteries lie hidden, waiting to be discovered through the eyes of advanced astronomical technology? This article is based on verified sources and supported by editorial technologies. Did you like it? 4.5/5 (20)
Yahoo
a day ago
- Science
- Yahoo
When will the solar system die out?
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Our solar system has been around for 4.6 billion years. While that sounds like a long time, it's just a blip in the 13.8 billion-year story of the universe. And one day, the solar system will cease to exist. But when will the solar system end? And how will it die out? The answers to those questions depend on how we define the death of the solar system. The solar system consists of eight planets, several dwarf planets, hundreds of moons, and billions of asteroids, comets and meteoroids. The exact boundaries of the solar system are subject to debate, but there are three main candidates: the Kuiper Belt, a region of icy objects beyond Neptune; the heliopause, where the sun's magnetic field ends; and the Oort cloud, a theoretical icy cloud lying beyond both the Kuiper Belt and the heliosphere. And, of course, at the center of it all, the sun is keeping it all together with its immense gravity. Like all stars, the sun will eventually die. Right now, it creates heat and light by transforming hydrogen into helium in its core through a process called nuclear fusion. The sun will continue to burn hydrogen for approximately another 5 billion years, said Fred Adams, a theoretical astrophysicist at the University of Michigan. But once that hydrogen fuel runs out, the sun will become more and more unstable. Its core will collapse, its surface will expand, and it will transform into a cool, bloated red giant that will engulf Mercury and then Venus. Sign up for our newsletter Sign up for our weekly Life's Little Mysteries newsletter to get the latest mysteries before they appear online. While our planet might be at the border of the red giant's surface, Adams said, chances are, it will get sucked into the red giant, too. By this point, though, humans will have been long gone. Mars will likely survive the red giant, and the outer planets are all safely outside of the red giant's reach. The Oort cloud will also be destabilized, Stern said, and the heliosphere will shrink down. Related: When will the universe die? About a billion years later, the sun will shrink to the size of Earth and transform into a white dwarf — a dim, extremely dense core of its former self. The solar system will become a freezing, desolate place. "From a habitability standpoint, that's kind of the end of the solar system," Alan Stern, a planetary scientist and principal investigator of NASA's New Horizons mission, told Live Science. Although the sun's death marks the end of the solar system as we know it, it doesn't necessarily mean its total demise. "A strict, nerdy answer is that the solar system will never end due to the sun's evolution" or the death of the sun, Stern said. Even when the sun is a burnt out cinder, he said, many objects — including giant planets like Jupiter — will continue to orbit it. Even further into the future, Adams said, the likelihood of rare events increases. Without the sun's gravitational force, the solar system will become increasingly chaotic as the gravitational balance of the solar system shifts. The risk of collisions, passing stars or supernovas coming too close to the solar system and then tearing apart its celestial bodies and space rocks will also be magnified. RELATED MYSTERIES —Did light exist at the beginning of the universe? —Could a black hole devour the universe? —How long can an asteroid 'survive'? "We're not just waiting until the universe is twice as old. We're waiting till it's a billion times older, a trillion times older, and a quadrillion times older," he explained. "If you wait, those enormous time scales and rare events start to add up. It's like, it's rare for you to win the lottery, but if you play a billion times, your chances will go up." Even if the solar system is spared a catastrophic collision, it won't last forever. Some scientists also think the protons that make up our universe will decay. The phenomenon has never been observed, but theoretical experiments have placed the proton's lifetime past 1034 years, and that number might be pushed back even further as experiments into their longevity keep running. Solar system quiz: How well do you know our cosmic neighborhood? Solve the daily Crossword
CBC
2 days ago
- Science
- CBC
Manitoba researchers part of team working to unravel mystery of largest black hole merger ever detected
A group of Manitoba researchers were involved behind the scenes of an international effort that this week revealed how two massive black holes careened into one — happily, billions of light years from Earth. University of Manitoba astrophysicist Samar Safi-Harb, the Canada Research Chair in Extreme Astrophysics, and her team are collaborators on the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA program, which on Monday published evidence of what Safi-Harb says is "the most massive binary black hole detected to date." Another surprise from the detection, originally made in November 2023, was the breakneck speed at which each black hole was spinning at the time they crashed together — "close to the maximum possible [speed] allowed by theory," said Safi-Harb, who is also a professor of physics and astronomy at the Winnipeg-based U of M. "So not just they are massive, they're spinning like crazy — 400,000 times the Earth's rotation speed." Her team wasn't directly involved in this detection, but they're part of the community of thousands of researchers globally involved in LIGO — the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, which operates detectors in Washington state and Louisiana. The team includes U of M postdoctoral fellow Nathan Steinle, who specializes in gravitational wave astrophysics and modelling the collision of black holes, while postdoc Labani Mallick works on electromagnetic observations of black holes. Safi-Harb's PhD student, Neil Doerksen, is focused on improving the sensitivity of detectors used in gravitational wave detection technology, and PhD student Lucas da Conceição works on detection of neutron star gravitational waves. Studying wild extremes All five research wild extremes — extreme temperatures, extreme gravity, extreme magnetic fields exhibited by astrophysical systems. Those just happen to be associated with the deaths of stars — which Safi-Harb is fascinated by because of what they can tell us about where everything comes from. Stellar explosions lead to the creation of some of the heaviest elements in the universe: the calcium in your bones. That gold engagement ring your grandmother left you. The platinum in the catalytic converter stolen from your buddy's sedan. It all came from a beautiful kaboom in the vacuum of space. The more commonly understood way black holes are born is the collapse when a massive star reaches the end of its life. Its stellar corpse morphs into this mysterious, incredibly dense pack of matter, with gravity so intense not even light can escape. That basically makes black holes invisible to conventional light-based telescopes, which is why traditional studies have homed in on the indirect effects black holes have on their surroundings. X-ray telescopes allow scientists to, for example, infer the presence of a black hole by studying the gravitational effects they exert on nearby stars, or by finding materials like gas and dust that forms in disks around black holes. But when it comes to hunting for black hole collisions, different tools are needed. LIGO is designed to look for gravitational wave signatures first predicted to exist by Albert Einstein over a century ago. Einstein's general theory of relativity postulated that these waves rippling through space-time are produced by the motion of accelerating objects. Big, big ones. "If you throw a rock or a stone into a lake, you observe those ripples," said Safi-Harb. "When you have a black hole, it is so dense that it causes these ripples in space-time." If two black holes orbit one another and get closer and closer, they accelerate, "and that leads to really strong gravitational waves," she said. Einstein's prediction remained rooted in the theoretical realm until a decade ago, when scientists managed to observe gravitational waves for the first time through LIGO. Scientists now know of 300 black hole collisions, said Safi-Harb. The latest, dubbed GW231123, is the most massive yet. Scientists detect gravitational waves for 1st time 9 years ago Einstein theory proven more than 100 years later The original pair of black holes had masses 100 and 140 times greater than our sun, and the end product of the merge is in the range of 225 solar masses. That sounds massive, and it is, but on the spectrum of black holes it may fall somewhere in the middle. There are three classes of black holes, including those in our cosmic backyard, known as stellar mass black holes. They can be in the order of 10 to 60 times the mass of our sun. Then there are the supermassive black holes. They reside at the centres of galaxies and can be millions to billions of times more massive than our sun. Some even have names — the dark heart of our Milky Way galaxy is known as Sagittarius A. And evidence has emerged in recent years of the third class — intermediate mass black holes — that may fall between hundreds to thousands of solar masses, like GW231123 and the parent black holes that made it. The fact the parents, and GW231123, all fall into the in-between-zone is exciting — but also a bit of a head-scratcher. "These masses are believed to be 'forbidden,' or not expected to happen, because standard stellar evolution does not predict such black hole formation," said Safi-Harb. It may be that each of those parent black holes were born from mergers of even smaller black holes, said Safi-Harb. "What this discovery is teaching us is that we know that some smaller black holes can make bigger black holes, and maybe bigger black holes collide to make even bigger black holes, and if these are in dense environments, they can make things like our galaxy," she said.
Yahoo
6 days ago
- Science
- Yahoo
Mercury Retrograde Begins Soon—Here's What That Actually Means
Starting July 17, Mercury will be retrograde until August 10. During these three and a half weeks, many people expect life to go haywire—phones will break, contracts will fall through, you'll accidentally hit "Reply All" on a company-wide email. Mercury retrograde is blamed for all kinds of problems, but what is actually happening with this planet, and should you be worried? We talked to Jackie Faherty, an astrophysicist, and Susan Miller, an astrologer, to break down the science and the Faherty, PhD, senior research scientist and senior education manager at the American Museum of Natural History Susan Miller, creator of the Astrology Zone website and the apps Astrology Zone Horoscopes and Moonlight PhasesRetrograde means "backward," and during Mercury retrograde, the planet appears be moving backward in the sky. Typically, like the other planets in our solar system, Mercury moves west to east. If you were to make note of Mercury's position in the sky every evening, it would seem to be journeying a little more eastward night after night. Three or four times a year, however, it follows an east-to-west path for about three weeks, appearing to move backward. That's Mercury 14 to April 6 July 17 to August 10 November 9 to November 29All the other planets go retrograde too, though less frequently than Mercury—between once a year and once every two years. Also, the farther away a planet is from the sun, the longer the retrograde period lasts (Neptune, the most distant planet, stays retrograde for over five months). That backward movement is an optical illusion, Faherty says. "Imagine the planets are on a racetrack around the sun," she explains. "We're all moving, but we're moving at different speeds. The closer you are to the sun, the faster you go around the track." Mercury, the closest planet to the sun, moves faster than Earth. It orbits the sun in 88 days, as opposed to our 365. So about every four months, "Mercury laps us on the track, and that makes it appear to shift direction," Faherty says. "It's just a trick of perspective." Venus, the second planet from the sun, passes us every 18 months, which is when it goes retrograde (lasting about 40 days each time). As for the outer planets—Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune—they move more slowly than Earth does, and about once a year or (in the case of Mars) every two years, we pass one of them. That's when they appear to move backward. None of it has any deeper meaning, Fahery says. "The planets are just going around the sun, and we're looking up at the sky and seeing a visual projection of it. That's it. It's a misunderstanding to think that the location of Mercury is going to change your day." Modern-day astrologers understand that the planets aren't actually moving backward, but they still believe that the apparent motion of the planets affects us. In the world of astrology—much of which is based on Greek myth—the planets rule different areas of life. When they're retrograde, it means they're in a resting state and not in control of their domain, Miller says. As a result, those areas of life fall out of whack for humans. "We're used to getting the planets' help, but when they're retrograde, we make mistakes," she says. "Mercury is the planet of communication and travel," Miller says, explaining that anything related to these areas can get messed up during Mercury retrograde. "You shouldn't sign contracts or accept a new job or a new apartment, for example. Sometimes you have to because you can't stop your life, but keep your antenna up and ask a lot of questions." In addition to Mercury retrograde, "we feel Venus and Mars retrogrades strongly because they orbit close to Earth," Miller says. Venus rules love, beauty, and affection, according to astrology. "Don't make dramatic changes to your appearance during Venus retrograde," Miller says. Mars, which retrogrades every two years for 8 to 11 weeks, "is the energy planet. He's the gas you put in the car to make it go. When he retrogrades, everything seems to take longer and require more money." Venus next retrogrades from October 3 to November 13, 2026, and Mars retrogrades from January 10 to April 1, 2027. Miller has all the dates through 2050 on her website. There's no scientific reason to believe the planets alter the course of our lives. "Astrology does not take into account any fundamental law of physics," Faherty says, noting that astrology developed thousands of years ago, before people knew that the sun was the center of our solar system and the planets revolved around it. Mercury retrograde—or any planet appearing to move backward—would have seemed like a mysterious and even mystical phenomenon back then. "At this point, we know so much, the principle of retrograde motion is completely outdated," she adds. Also, psychologists warn about confirmation bias: the tendency to interpret information in a way that aligns with our worldview. So if you expect Mercury retrograde to affect you, you might start noticing a lot of communication- and travel-related problems over the next few weeks. But keep in mind that those are very broad categories, and issues that fall under those umbrellas are likely to occur at any time. It's just life! A 2024 Pew Research Center survey found that almost 30% of U.S. adults believe in astrology, but most of those people engage with it for fun and don't make major decisions based on it. That seems like a wise approach to Mercury retrograde—we can enjoy the myth and storytelling around it without taking it too seriously. Read the original article on Real Simple
ABC News
14-07-2025
- Science
- ABC News
‘Truly magnificent': Scientists pick up biggest ever merger of two massive black holes in space
Scientists have picked up the biggest ever merger of two massive black holes in Space. It happened on the far edges of our galaxy - a violent collision... producing an extremely large black hole - about 225 times the mass of our Sun. Laura Tchilinguirian spoke with Astrophysicist Dr Sara Webb from Swinburne University of Technology.
