Astrophysics | Futurismic

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Direct evidence of dark matter detected over Antarctica?

Edward Willett @ 19-11-2008

A high-altitude balloon experiment above the Antarctic may have just seen a possible signature of the mysterious “dark matter” thought to make up 85 percent of the mass of the universe–but as yet, completely unseen and not at all completely understood. (Via Nature News.)

The experiment, the Advanced Thin Ionization Calorimeter (ATIC), spotted a surplus of high-energy electrons coming from…somewhere. This matches something the PAMELA (Payload for Antimatter Matter Exploration and Light-nuclei Astrophysics–don’t you love space-exploration acronyms?) satellite mission turned up earlier this year

Electrons at this particular energy could be the result of heavy dark-matter particles colliding, which according to Dan Hooper, a theoretical physicist at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, is “certainly the sexiest of the possibilities.”

Sexy and, to non-physicists, more than a little weird:

The exact nature of the dark-matter particles that produce electrons is uncertain, but one idea is that they may be ordinary particles that spend part of their lives in a compact extra dimension of space. Whereas the particles would appear relatively stationary to observers trapped in three spatial dimensions, they could be moving at ultra-high speeds in a fourth spatial dimension. At high speeds, they would create a gravitational force that could be felt by matter trapped in three dimensions of space-time. “It’s very wild,” Hooper says.

I’ll drink to that!

Of course, there are other possibilities. In particular, the electrons could be coming from a nearby pulsar, the fast-spinning remnants of a supernova.

How do we figure out? More experiments, of course. A new orbiting telescope called Fermi can spot electrons and positrons (though it’s designed to hunt for high-energy X-rays), and thus may confirm the data, or even pick up other high-energy particles that could be produced by dark-matter collisions.

Check back in the spring.

(Photo: NASA.)

‘Flux transfer events’ connect Earth and Sun

Tom Marcinko @ 03-11-2008

News to me:

Like giant, cosmic chutes between the Earth and sun, magnetic portals open up every eight minutes or so to connect our planet with its host star.

Once the portals open, loads of high-energy particles can travel the 93 million miles (150 million km) through the conduit during its brief opening, space scientists say.

Called a flux transfer event, or FTE, such cosmic connections not only exist but are possibly twice as common as anyone ever imagined, according to space scientists who attended the 2008 Plasma Workshop in Huntsville, Ala., last week.

“Ten years ago I was pretty sure they didn’t exist, but now the evidence is incontrovertible,” said David Sibeck, an astrophysicist at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.

There must be a use for these things, in fiction or real life…

[Image: NASA]

Gamma ray burst was aimed at Earth (!)

Tom James @ 11-09-2008

Well, not intentionally. Still check out the video:

What fun!

[via KurzweilAI.net]

Time is A One Way Street…

Arun Jiwa @ 05-06-2008

The June 2008 issue of Scientific American sets out to answer a very perplexing question:

Why does time only move forward?

To find the answer, according to Sci-Am and Mr. Sean M. Carroll, we have to start looking at a very unlikely place:

To account for it, we have to delve into the prehistory of the universe, to a time before the big bang. Our universe may be part of a much larger multiverse, which as a whole is time-symmetric. Time may run backward in other universes.

The article is filled with high-end physics and a bit of science jargon, but Mr. Caroll puts uses neat little analogies to explain difficult concepts:

The asymmetry of time, the arrow that points from past to future, plays an unmistakable role in our everyday lives: it accounts for why we cannot turn an omelet into an egg, why ice cubes never spontaneously unmelt in a glass of water, and why we remember the past but not the future. And the origin of the asymmetry we experience can be traced…back to the orderliness of the universe near the big bang. Every time you break an egg, you are doing observational cosmology.

All in all, it’s a very interesting article and well worth a read. Some of the concepts used in the article are highly science fictional and are prime idea fodder for stories about multiverses and time travel. In fact, for those who’ve read River of Gods, may recognize the inspiration for ideas in that novel presented in this article. [image by gadl]

Black Holes in the sky, Black Holes in the internet

Tomas Martin @ 10-04-2008

Three black holes interact in complex ways A mix of two stories about completely different types of Black Holes today. First, researchers at the Rochester Institute of Technology found that interactions between three black holes should produce gravitational waves that detectors like LISA or LIGO could detect within the next ten years. Gravitational Waves are ‘ripples’ in Space-Time caused by massive objects and events and could tell us a great deal about the big bang.

Another kind of black hole in the news is the ‘internet black hole’. Researchers for the Hubble internet project found distinct pathways on the internet where data was lost for unexplainable reasons. The project, which you can see the results of at their website, was intentionally named after the famous astronomer and telescope. The researchers say they are performing ‘internet astronomy’, looking for events in the cosmos of data that is the internet.

[image by M Campanelli/L Carlos/Y Zlochower/H-P Bischof, that plus space story via New Scientist, internet story via TG Daily]