Category Astronomy/Space

Galaxy UGC 7321 is surrounded by hydrogen gas, and as this gas is irradiated with UV radiation, it emits a diffuse red glow through a process known as fluorescence. This image shows the light emitted by stars inside the galaxy, surrounded by a red ring that represents the fluorescent emission induced by the UV radiation. Credit: M. Fumagalli/T. Theuns/S. Berry

Astronomers have developed a way to detect the UV background of the Universe, which could help explain why there are so few small galaxies in the cosmos. UV radiation is invisible but shows up as visible red light when it interacts with gas. An international team led by Durham University, UK, has now found a way to measure it using instruments on Earth...

Portals can allow the exploration of the dark sector with the Standard Model particles Portals mix or connect the dark sector particles with the Standard Model particles. Through the portals it is possible to explore the dark sector particles using the Standard Model particles. The portals play a basic and critical role in the study of the dark sector particles both theoretically and experimentally. Credit: Image courtesy of Institute for Basic Science

Once upon a time, the Universe was just a hot soup of particles. In those days, together with visible particles, other particles to us hidden or dark might have formed. Billions of years later scientists catalogued 17 types of visible particles, with the most recent one being the Higgs boson, creating the ‘Standard Model’...

Scientists have discovered that a sphere of cold helium atoms (in green) — interacting with a surrounding larger container of the same kind of atoms (in blue) — follows a bizarre rule of physics, called an entanglement area law, also observed in black holes. This discovery points to a “deeper reality,” says University of Vermont physicist Adrian Del Maestro and may be a step toward using superfluid helium as the fuel of a new generation of ultra-fast quantum computers. Credit: Adrian Del Maestro/Nature Physics

A team has discovered that a law controlling the bizarre behavior of black holes out in space – is also true for cold helium atoms that can be studied in laboratories. “It’s called an entanglement area law,” says Adrian Del Maestro, a physicist at the University of Vermont...

This is a quasar growing under intense accretion streams.
Credit: Los Alamos National Laboratory

A new computer simulation helps explain the existence of puzzling supermassive black holes observed in the early universe. The simulation is based on a computer code used to understand the coupling of radiation and certain materials. “Supermassive black holes have a speed limit that governs how fast and how large they can grow,” said Joseph Smidt of the Theoretical Design Division at Los Alamos National Laboratory, “The relatively recent discovery of supermassive black holes in the early

development of the universe raised a fundamental question, how did they get so big so fast?”

Using computer codes developed at Los Alamos for modeling the interaction of matter and radiation related to the Lab’s...