Clapway: universe

Showing posts with label universe. Show all posts

Sunday, September 6, 2015

Researchers have discovered the farthest and oldest #galaxy to date - nearly 13.2 billion years old. The #universe, by contrast, is 13.8 billion years old. Yay #space! - http://clapway.com/2015/09/06/farthest-and-oldest-galaxy123/

A team of researchers at Caltech has discovered the farthest and oldest galaxy to date. Published in an article on August 28, 2015 in Astrophysical Journal Letters, their findings show evidence of a newly discovered galaxy, called EGS8p7, which is more than 13.2 billion years old. The universe, in comparison, is around 13.8 billion years old.

Scientists Discover Farthest and Oldest Galaxy - Clapway

Prior to discovering EGS8p7, the research team spent years searching for the earliest objects in the universe. Their discovery was based on data collected by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and the Spitzer Space Telescope at W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii.

The Science Behind Discovering The Farthest and Oldest Galaxy

The multi-object spectrometer for infrared exploration (MOSFIRE) carried out a spectrographic analysis of the galaxy to determine its redshift. Redshift results from the Doppler effect. You’ve experienced the phenomenon – it causes a fire truck’s siren to drop in pitch as it passes. It’s different, however, with celestial objects. Rather than sound, light is being “stretched.” Instead of a drop in tone, a shift from actual color to redder wavelengths occurs.

The universe was a soup of charged particles of electrons, photons, and light (photons) after the Big Bang. Photons were dispersed by free electrons, making it impossible for the early universe to transmit light. This makes it difficult for scientists to use redshift to measure the universe’s most distant and earliest galaxies.

The Farthest and Oldest Galaxy EGS8p7: A Special Case Study

380,000 years after the Big Bang, the universe was cool enough, allowing free electrons and protons to combine. They formed into neutral hydrogen atoms, which filled the early universe, allowing for light to travel through. The first galaxies turned on and reionized the neutral gas when the universe was half-billion to a billion years old. The universe has been reionized ever since.

Clouds of neutral hydrogen atoms absorbed certain radiation emitted by young galaxies before reionization including the Lyman-alpha line, a commonly used indicator of star formation. Thus, the absorption should make observation of EGS8p7 impossible.

Adi Zitrin, a NASA Hubble Postdoctoral Scholar in Astronomy said, “If you look at the galaxies in the early universe, there is a lot of neutral hydrogen that is not transparent to this emission. We expect that most of the radiation from this galaxy would be absorbed by hydrogen in the intervening space. Yet still we see the Lyman-alpha from this galaxy.”

Researchers theorize that the process of hydrogen reionization in the case of EGS8p7 was incoherent and patchy. The discovery of the farthest and oldest galaxy has scientists reconsidering approaches to studying the universe.

Zitrin continued, “We are currently calculating more thoroughly the exact chances of finding this galaxy and seeing this emission from it, and to understand whether we need to revise the timeline of reionization, which is the major key questions to answer in understanding our universe.”

For more technology related news and reviews, check out Clapway Trends:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xizCTm2uyFg

Scientists Discover Farthest and Oldest Galaxy

Researchers have recreated #plasma that is thought to have existed during the #BigBang, when the #universe was formed. - http://clapway.com/2015/09/06/plasma-big-bang123/

Researchers at the University of Kansas, working in conjunction with an international team at the Large Hadron Collider, have managed to recreate a state of matter thought to have existed at the birth of the universe around 13.8 billion years ago. The small amount of quark-gluon plasma, dubbed “littlest liquid,” was discovered through a series of high-energy particle collisions conducted inside the supercollider’s Compact Muon Solenoid Detector, according to Science World Report.

The plasma, or QGP, is described as a “perfect liquid,” hypothesized to exist at extreme temperatures or densities most likely characteristic of the early stages of universal expansion. It can subsist for a short period of time before cooling and condensing into regular matter that forms the building blocks of life.

For some time now, physicists have been aware of the existence of QGP. In an effort to learn more about this “primordial state of matter,” experiments of a similar nature have been conducted in the past by colliding protons with lead ions. The procedure lead to the discovery of the same plasma back in 2013; however, results from the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), located in Upton, New York, now reveal that the “littlest liquid” also appears after colliding gold ions with helium-3 nuclei, reports Discovery News.

This is the first time that helium-3, a light ion, has been collided with heavy ions (in this case, gold). The successful collision reveals that quark-gluon plasma can be produced at lower energies than previously thought.

According to Berndt Mueller, Associate Laboratory Director for Nuclear and Particle Physics at Brookhaven, “Physicists initially thought that only the nuclei of large atoms such as gold would have enough matter and energy to set free the quark and gluon building blocks that make up protons and neutrons. But the flow patterns detected by RHIC’s PHENIX (Pioneering High Energy Nuclear Interaction eXperiment) collaboration in collisions of helium-3 nuclei with gold ions now confirm that these smaller particles are creating tiny samples of perfect liquid QGP.”

The results of the experiment yield important data for scientists seeking to understand the atmospheric conditions that were present during the Big Bang. The study is published in APS Physics.

What’s all this talk about the Big Bang, space and plasma? Learn more about space with Space Scouts Summer Adventure:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdcU4nKKV2E

Plasma Present During The Big Bang Is Recreated

Wednesday, September 2, 2015

Ever heard of the #Godparticle? Or #HiggsBoson, as it is also known as? Particle physicists have been trying to figure out for decades how the #universe was created, something that many people in other fields have admittedly been curious about for a while, too. - http://clapway.com/2015/09/02/god-particle123/

Ever heard of the God particle? Ever wondered why they call it that? Particle physicists have been trying to figure out for decades how the universe was created, something that many people in other fields have admittedly been curious about for a while, too.

The Large Hadron Collider and the Higgs Boson

In 2008, the Large Hadron Collider was inaugurated by the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, on the Franco-Swiss border, in a tunnel some 574 feet underground. It boasts a circumference of 17 miles, making it “the world’s largest and most powerful particle collider, the largest, most complex experimental facility ever built, and the largest single machine in the world.” The purpose of the LHC is to allow particle physicists to test different theories of matter, the most mysterious of which is, of course, how and why matter exists at all.

As early as the 1960s, scientists hypothesized the existence of something called the Higgs boson, named after Peter Higgs on the team of physicists responsible for the idea. The Higgs boson is what scientists have (somewhat controversially) nicknamed “the God particle,” because the theory suggests that this particle is what makes matter, well, matter. It represents a sort of missing puzzle piece in the Standard Model of particle physics that, if proved, might explain a lot of other things about matter, including questions about how gravity acts on particles.

The existence of the Higgs boson basically remained a big question mark until early 2013, when CERN physicists announced the discovery of an extremely “Higgslike” particle, found using the LHC. Extremely Higgslike. It behaves, at least, the way a God particle should behave, and it made the hypothetical model look pretty possible.

But the findings were still preliminary, and CERN has spent the last two and a half years trying to nail down more specifics of the so-called God particle. The Large Hadron Collider works by smashing particles (the smallest units or building blocks of matter, smaller than atoms and theoretically indivisible, like protons or electrons) into atoms at speeds close to the speed of light, thereby breaking the atom apart in a way that allows scientists to better study the fundamental properties of the matter in question. For all the size of the LHC, these experiments are very small, and very fast.

Getting Closer to the Truth About The God Particle

This year, thanks to a $150 million upgrade, CERN was able to increase the collision speed in the LHC by 5 meters per second, which may not sound like much. But when you’re increasing from 299,792,449 meters per second to 299,792,454 meters per second, it makes quite the difference, especially because the Higgs boson particle decays pretty much immediately after it appears.

According to CERN spokesperson Tiziano Camporesi, the increased precision means physicists are now “in a good position to look at the Higgs boson from every possible angle.”

Scientists believe that the Large Hadron Collider is basically capable now of simulating conditions close to those at the inception of the universe…which is awesome, but, according to Stephen Hawking, it might also explode the whole universe (here’s how to check). Looks like they don’t call it the God particle for nothing.

If you love space, check out the Space Scouts Summer Adventure:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdcU4nKKV2E

Scientists Getting Closer to the God Particle

Tuesday, September 1, 2015

The world"s largest digital #camera weighs three tons and will allow astronomers to peer into #space and the #universe. - http://clapway.com/2015/09/01/worlds-largest-digital-camera-universe123/

The world’s largest digital camera, built for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), will soon help astronomers peer deeper into the universe. The 3.2 pixel device, weighing roughly three tons, was recently approved by the U.S. Department of Energy and will be used to collect “several million gigabytes of data every year,” according to PC World.

The World’s Largest digital camera COMES TO LIFE

To bring the idea to life, the U.S. government is providing the necessary funds for its construction. The National Science Foundation (NSF) will also give monetary aid to create the site facilities and the accompanying database system.

According to Engadget, the camera will be able to photograph patches of the sky 40 times the size of the moon. If that isn’t impressive enough, its advanced technology will also allow the camera to pick up more light than any other optical telescope currently in existence (as it should be able to do since it weighs about as much as a small car); in fact, the camera is so strong that viewing a single photograph from it will require the combined efforts of 1,500 high-definition televisions.

Over the period a decade, it will serve as a useful tool for astronomers looking to gather information about the early universe. According to the DOE’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, the telescope will detect more galaxies than there are people on the Earth. With it, researchers hope to obtain a clearer understanding of how the galaxy was formed and the properties of dark matter or dark energy.

What’s next? THE FUTURE OF THE World’s Largest digital camera

In the meantime, the SLAC will begin to build the camera, as well as a database that will hold the 6 million gigabytes of data gathered by the device per year. The first test runs should begin in 2019 and by 2022, it will start photographing the southern night sky in Chile. Until then, the SLAC has a lot of work cut out for it. As PC World mentions, the construction of the camera will require efforts from various institutions across the globe.

“We now have a busy agenda for the remainder of 2015 and 2016,” stated LSST Director Steven Kahn. “Development of the telescope on the mountain is nicely underway. The contracts for fabrication of the telescope mount and the dome enclosure have been awarded and the distributors are at full steam.”

The World’s Largest digital camera gives us a glance at the inner workings of the universe. Learn more about it with Space Scouts Summer Adventure:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdcU4nKKV2E

World"s Largest Digital Camera Sees The Deep Universe

Thursday, July 30, 2015

The #Aurora #LightShow outside of our #atmosphere. - http://clapway.com/2015/07/30/auroras-the-light-show-beyond-our-line-of-sight/

Perhaps what one thinks of when they hear the word Aurora is the fairytale of Sleeping Beauty from the animated film by Disney. But rest assured, this is not about princesses or fairy tales…at least not that kind of fairytale.

The Light Show on Earth

For the more scientifically-inclined individual, you probably think of the aurora that occurs on Earth; the Northern Lights. Indeed, the Northern Lights are a fantastic light show for everyone to enjoy, given the chance to travel up near the Arctic Circle.

Some Insight to the Auroras

If you are wondering how such spectacles occur, you only have to understand that the aurora light show is made up of energy and particles that are triggered during solar storms. The oxygen and nitrogen in our atmosphere then release the light we see in the Northern and Southern Lights.

However, ever curious about the nature of things, scientists began to wonder if seeing such light show phenomena could occur outside our solar system under observation. This is why recent news has been in a furor about the light show that is proving to be so much brighter than the one here on Earth, the size of Jupiter basically.

Our Understanding of the Universe has expanded a little more

A study that was published today in the Nature journal but received back in August 2014, nearly a year ago, talks about the findings. The object of interest, LSR J18535+3529, was suggested to be a brown dwarf based on the impressions of it being too heavy for a planet but too light for a star. The black sheep of the universe so to speak, as it’s not quite one or the other but is rather unique. However, that doesn’t stop brown dwarfs being awesome as one of the authors of the study, Gregg Hallinan of CalTech says when scientists discovered that the nonconformist brown dwarf emitted radio waves usually seen in stars.

Given what we already know about auroras on our planet, the team of scientists hazarded a guess and thought that perhaps brown dwarfs could also have their own light show. So given the difference of atmospheres between Earth and the dwarfs, the color of the light show changed, was redder, and had some ultraviolet and infrared lights as well.

Thus far, the furthest known auroras had come from Jupiter and were the brightest.

With this new research, the auroras from the brown dwarf are significantly massive and brighter given its middle occupancy between planet and star. More research will uncover more information about the light show phenomenon.

Make your own light with Sun Lifelight:

Auroras: The Light Show beyond Our Line of Sight

Wednesday, July 22, 2015

#Space lovers -- The fun doesn"t stop regarding and at #Pluto! - http://clapway.com/2015/07/22/party-on-pluto-5-cool-things-to-do-at-such-a-planet/

There’s a party on Pluto and everyone is invited! Grab your winter coat and let’s shoot off to the icy planet for some cold, shivering fun. Since Pluto is extremely relevant right now, here are 5 cool things to do on Pluto (if it were livable):
Party on Pluto- 5 Cool Things to Do - Clapway