Brandon Q. Morris's Blog, page 21

Dark matter: on the trail of the Zʹ boson

Almost 1000 physicists from 26 countries have committed themselves to one collective task: using the Belle-2 experiment to search for signs of a new model of physics, a model that might explain, among other things, dark matter. This phenomenon, whose existence has been observed many times already, has stubbornly refused to be explained using the current standard model of physics. In the Belle-2 experiment, researchers collide electrons with their antiparticles, positrons (identical mass, but...

The Sun as a lens: A new method for taking high-resolution photographs of exoplanets

The universe is damn large and, in comparison, everything that exists inside it is extremely small. Sometimes, astronomers are lucky and get some help in their observations of, for example, an individual star in a far-away galaxy: help delivered by the gravity of other massive objects, which refract and amplify the light of even-more distant objects like a lens. The effect is called a gravitational lens.

This effect, however, has one big disadvantage: we cant intentionally create a...

Can the special theory of relativity explain the strangeness of quantum physics?

Physics has had a problem for some time. Its basic theories, the General and Special Theories of Relativity and theories of quantum physics, have proven correct in many cases. But they dont fit together in extreme cases, like in black holes or the big bang, where you would need to use both relativity and quantum physics, the math doesnt work out. Quantum physics appears to be the more fundamental theory, so scientists have assumed that the theory of relativity would need to be modified to...

There’s life, even hundreds of meters below the ocean floor

On Earth, theres life everywhere well, almost everywhere, one exception being the geothermal fields in the Ethiopian region of Dallol. Researchers have detected at least primitive bacteria almost everywhere: on the highest mountains, in hydrothermal vents, in corrosive lakes, and even deep in the oceans. Scientists have even found traces of life hundreds of meters below the bottom of the sea, as reported in an article in the magazine, Communications Biology.

In their research, the scientists...

50,000 solar masses – and that’s just a midsize black hole

Astronomers have been looking for medium-sized black holes for a long time. Youve probably heard about the giant black holes at the center of galaxies and those that start with the mass of one star as a result of a supernova. But as small black holes, like from a supernova, gradually grown into giants, they must pass through intermediate stages sometime. The only problem is that these midsize black holes are not very easy to find.

The Hubble Space Telescope has now delivered some important...

Review: eVscope, the telescope for amateur astronomers who want to stay warm and cozy

I built my first telescope myself when I was around ten years old. I built it using an optics kit that I got after burning a finger while trying to solder something in an electronics kit (yes, back in the good old days, some toys actually had parts that could burn down your house or at least melt solder). The Moon always appeared upside down in that telescope, which always struck me as odd. After all, my binoculars showed everything right side up. I had the suspicion that the grown-ups were...

Triple system made from brown dwarfs discovered

Brown dwarfs are celestial objects that were a little bit too small to develop into proper stars. That doesnt mean that they cant be hot under some circumstances, fusion reactions can still take place inside them just like in our Sun, only at a smaller extent or with different initial products, such as deuterium instead of hydrogen. For astronomers, they are very interesting, because they might offer any planets orbiting them even better chances of life than for larger red dwarfs, which,...

Axions to the rescue?

The neutron is, as suggested by its name, electrically neutral. Nevertheless, it still contains electrical charges. More specifically, it is made up of one up quark (charge: 2/3 of an electron charge e) and two down quarks (charge: -1/3 e each). In total, 2/3 + 2*(-1/3) equals exactly 0. But the neutron is not one-dimensional. It has a diameter of at least 1.7 * 10-15 meters, and when three components have to be spread out over any distance, even with an overall zero charge, some difference...

Today’s forecast: cloudy with a 100% chance of iron rain in the evening

The exoplanet, WASP-76b, about 640 light-years from Earth, orbits its host star, WASP-76, once every approximately 1.8 days at the relatively small distance of only 0.03 astronomical units (AU). The Earth, in contrast, is at a distance of 1 AU from the Sun. The star, WASP-76, is somewhat larger and hotter than the Sun, but that doesnt make much of a difference for the planet orbiting around it. At such a small distance, the planet would be damn hot no matter how big the star was. The planet,...

Hexaquark d*(2380): a new candidate for dark matter

One of the biggest mysteries of our universe is what is dark matter made of. Its existence is suggested by several astronomical observations, among them peculiarities in the rotation of galaxies. Dark matter would have to make up at least 63% of all matter in the universe and to date, physicists have no idea about its exact nature.

All that is clear is that dark matter interacts with normal matter only via gravity. These could be, among other things, so-called WIMPs (Weakly Interacting...