Category Astronomy/Space

Resolving the Black Hole ‘Fuzzball or Wormhole’ debate

Study adds more certainty to theory involving information paradox. Black holes really are giant fuzzballs, a new study says.

The study attempts to put to rest the debate over Stephen Hawking’s famous information paradox, the problem created by Hawking’s conclusion that any data that enters a black hole can never leave. This conclusion accorded with the laws of thermodynamics, but opposed the fundamental laws of quantum mechanics.

“What we found from string theory is that all the mass of a black hole is not getting sucked in to the center,” said Samir Mathur, lead author of the study and professor of physics at The Ohio State University...

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Astronomers find Mysterious Dusty Object Orbiting a Star

An optical/near-infrared image of the sky around the TESS Input Catalog (TIC) object TIC 400799224 (the crosshair marks the location of the object, and the width of the field of view is given in arcminutes). Astronomers have concluded that the mysterious periodic variations in the light from this object are caused by an orbiting body that periodically emits clouds of dust that occult the star. Credit: Powell et al., 2021

The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, TESS, was launched in 2018 with the goal of discovering small planets around the sun’s nearest neighbor stars. TESS has so far discovered 172 confirmed exoplanets and compiled a list of 4703 candidate exoplanets...

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Liquid-Metal Experiment provides Insight into the Heating Mechanism of the Sun’s Corona

A plasma ejection during a solar flare. Immediately after the eruption, cascades of magnetic loops form over the eruption area as the magnetic fields attempt to reorganize. Credit: NASA/SDO and the AIA, EVE, and HMI science teams.

Why the sun’s corona reaches temperatures of several million degrees Celsius is one of the great mysteries of solar physics. A “hot” trail to explain this effect leads to a region of the solar atmosphere just below the corona, where sound waves and certain plasma waves travel at the same speed...

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Plasma Lensing discovered in Black Widow Pulsar

The upper panel shows the total intensity of pulse emission vs. pulsar spin and orbital phase
s with the sub-integration of 1 s of PSR J1720-0533. Enlargements of the ingress and egress of the pulsar are shown in the middle left and middle right panels, respectively. The bottom panels show the pulse flux density variations near the eclipse. (Image by XAO)

Using the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST), a research team led by Dr. Wang Shuangqiang from the Xinjiang Astronomical Observatory (XAO) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences discovered plasma lensing phenomenon in a black widow pulsar PSR J1720-0533.

Black widow pulsar systems have a low-mass companion star in a compact orbit with a millisecond pulsar...

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