GoKawiil
Tech News
A new scientific analysis finds that even extremely massive primordial black holes cannot account for the universe's dark matter. Researchers examined the theory that dark matter could consist of black holes formed shortly after the Big Bang and concluded the evidence does not support it as an explanation.
Researchers at the Center for Astrophysics, a Harvard-Smithsonian collaboration, published the Lumina Project in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, modeling the first 2 billion years of cosmic history across a cube about 1.5 billion light-years wide. The simulation was run on Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Frontier supercomputer using roughly 15,000 of its 37,000 GPUs, surpassing the 2022 Thesan simulation in both scale and timespan covered.
Researchers are floating a new theory to explain an unusually energetic particle detected striking Earth in 2023, suggesting it could have originated from hypothetical cosmic strings—theoretical defects left over from the early universe. The idea is offered as one possible explanation for an event that has so far defied conventional astrophysical accounts.
New research examining stellar activity finds that outbursts resembling the Sun's coronal mass ejections and flares are uncommon among similar stars. Researchers compared magnetic and rotational characteristics across many stars to explain why the Sun's behavior may be more of an exception than the norm.
Astronomers revisited a gravitational-wave detection that appeared to show an unusually massive black hole merger, one that seemed to defy current models of stellar evolution. New analysis suggests the signal may have been distorted by gravitational lensing, an intervening massive object bending and magnifying the waves, making the black holes appear far larger than they actually are.
Physicists at the Sanford Underground Research Facility in South Dakota detected an anomalous energy signature inside a liquid xenon tank, caused by something striking a xenon nucleus and making it recoil. Researchers cannot yet identify the source of the collision, but they say it could represent the strongest physical evidence yet for dark matter, potentially a Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP) passing through Earth.
NASA is inviting people to sign up online for a personal 'pixel' from the first images captured by the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. Each participant provides an email address, which is limited to one pixel per address, and later receives a printable certificate showing their assigned pixel number.
NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launched Sunday atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket, about eight months earlier than planned. The spacecraft separated successfully and is now heading toward the Sun-Earth L2 point, roughly 1 million miles away, where it will settle into a stable orbit alongside Earth over the next three months.
Researchers led by Foschi and colleagues, publishing in Nature, developed an artificial-intelligence algorithm called kine that reconstructs continuous, movie-like views of relativistic plasma jets from black holes using sparse observational data. These jets, which blast material at over 98% of the speed of light, have historically been studied only through isolated snapshots, making it hard to trace their evolution over time.
NASA plans to launch the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope as early as August 30 from Kennedy Space Center. The observatory matches Hubble's resolution but offers a field of view about 100 times larger, enabling it to map vast regions of sky to study dark matter and dark energy over a five-year primary mission. Scientists also expect it to detect as many as 200,000 new exoplanets, far surpassing the roughly 6,300 confirmed so far.