As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.

theory

SPACE: What If Black Holes Aren’t Black – Or Holes?

by
black holes - deposit photos

Black holes, those gravitational monsters so named because no light can escape their clutches, are by far the most mysterious objects in the universe. But a new theory proposes that black holes may not be black at all. According to a new study, these black holes may instead be dark stars home to exotic physics at their core. This mysterious new physics may cause these dark stars to emit a strange type of radiation; that radiation could in turn explain all the mysterious dark matter in the universe, which tugs on everything but emits no light. Dark Stars Thanks to … Read more

Is Abiogenesis a Thing?

by
cell - pixabay

Scientists suspect that the complex life that slithers and crawls through every nook and cranny on Earth emerged from a random shuffling of non-living matter that ultimately spit out the building blocks of life.  Even so, the details to support the idea are lacking.  But researchers recently got creative in figuring out the probability of life actually emerging spontaneously from such inorganic matter — a process called abiogenesis. In the study, Tomonori Totani, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Tokyo, modeled the microscopic world of molecules across the epic scale of the entire universe to see if abiogenesis … Read more

So… ‘Oumuamua Wasn’t Built By Aliens?

by
'Oumuamua

Our solar system’s first known interstellar visitor may have a very violent origin story. The mysterious object ‘Oumuamua, which was spotted zooming through the inner solar system in October 2017, is probably a fragment of a larger body that was torn apart by gravitational forces during a close flyby of its native star, a new study suggests. This “tidal fragmentation scenario not only provides a way to form one single ‘Oumuamua but also accounts for the vast population of asteroid-like interstellar objects,” lead author Yun Zhang, of the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said in a … Read more

FACT CHECK: Corona Virus Did Not Come From Outer Space

by
Asteroid - pixabay

No, the new coronavirus didn’t come from outer space. We promise. With the coronavirus pandemic continuing to spread around the globe, people are panicked, and they’re looking for answers and explanations. One wild theory that has made its way around the web is that the virus came from space. Spoiler alert: The virus did not come from space. Recently, Chandra Wickramasinghe, known for his work in astronomy and astrobiology, spread the idea that the virus was living on a comet and a piece of that space rock may have fallen to Earth during a brief fireball event over China in … Read more

SCIENCE All About Schrödinger’s cat

by
Schrödinger's Cat - Pixabay

The thought experiment known as Schrödinger’s cat is one of the most famous, and misunderstood, concepts in quantum mechanics. By thinking deeply about it, researchers have come to spectacular insights about physical reality. Who came up with Schrödinger’s cat? The Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who helped found the discipline of quantum mechanics, first conceived of his feline conundrum in 1935 as a commentary on problems originally posed by the luminary Albert Einstein, according to an article in Quanta Magazine. While developing their new understanding of the subatomic realm, most of Einstein and Schrödinger’s colleagues had realized that quantum entities exhibited … Read more

Spacetime Ripples Could Explain Why Universe Exists

by

A new study may help answer one of the universe’s biggest mysteries: Why is there more matter than antimatter? That answer, in turn, could explain why everything from atoms to black holes exists. Billions of years ago, soon after the Big Bang, cosmic inflation stretched the tiny seed of our universe and transformed energy into matter. Physicists think inflation initially created the same amount of matter and antimatter, which annihilate each other on contact. But then something happened that tipped the scales in favor of matter, allowing everything we can see and touch to come into existence — and a … Read more

SCIENCE: Could Quantum Cognition Explain Human Behavior?

by
artificial intelligence - pixabay

The same fundamental platform that allows Schrödinger’s cat to be both alive and dead, and also means two particles can “speak to each other” even across a galaxy’s distance, could help to explain perhaps the most mysterious phenomena: human behavior. Quantum physics and human psychology may seem completely unrelated, but some scientists think the two fields overlap in interesting ways. Both disciplines attempt to predict how unruly systems might behave in the future. The difference is that one field aims to understand the fundamental nature of physical particles, while the other attempts to explain human nature — along with its … Read more

SPACE: Did Our Solar System Have a Cosmic Gatekeeper?

by

The rocky planets closest to the sun are made up of very different materials than the gas giants in the outer solar system. That’s because billions of years ago, our baby solar system was divided in two by a cosmic gatekeeper that prevented materials in the inner and outer regions from mixing. It turns out that gatekeeper was a ring of dust and gas, according to a new study. The fence, or “Great Divide,” a term coined by the authors, is now mostly empty space just inside Jupiter’s orbit. About two decades ago, chemists realized that the building blocks of … Read more

SPACE: Is the Universe Filled With Cobwebs?

by
web in space - pixabay

What if I told you that our universe was flooded with hundreds of kinds of nearly invisible particles and that, long ago, these particles formed a network of universe-spanning strings? It sounds both trippy and awesome, but it’s actually a prediction of string theory, our best (but frustratingly incomplete) attempt at a theory of everything. These bizarre, albeit hypothetical, little particles are known as axions, and if they can be found, that would mean we all live in a vast “axiverse.” The best part of this theory is that it’s not just some physicist’s armchair hypothesis, with no possibility of … Read more

SPACE: Are There Cracks in the Universe?

by
cracks - pixabay

There might be cracks in space-time, but humanity’s telescopes can’t see them. The cracks, if they exist, are old — remnants of a time shortly after the Big Bang when the universe had just shifted from a hotter, more alien state to the cooler, more familiar one we see today. That great cool-down, what physicists call a “phase transition,” started earlier in some places than others, the theory goes. Bubbles of cooler universe formed and spread, blooming across space until they met other bubbles. Eventually, all of space transitioned, and the old universe disappeared. But that old, high-energy state might … Read more