Any truth to the rumour they're naming SM0313 Fletch?
Wow, anyone else see the embryo in that remnant supernova?
Spooky.
But also appropriate since we are all made up from elements generated in previous supernovae.
There is a helpful breakdown of the Hawking paper on New Scientist:
Stephen Hawking's new theory offers black hole escape
- 16:20 24 January 2014 by Jacob Aron
- For similar stories, visit the Cosmology Topic Guide
Stephen Hawking has a new mind-bending theory about black holes, the bizarre cosmic objects that cemented his reputation as the world's most famous living scientist. Rather than getting sucked into a singularity of confusion, read our explainer
What exactly is a black hole?
Good question. According to theoretical physicists, they used to be regions of space-time – the fabric that makes up the universe – that have become so dense that their huge gravity generates an event horizon, from inside which nothing, not even light, can escape. Then in 1974, Hawking added quantum mechanics to the black hole picture and sparked a row that has raged on until the present day.What's wrong with a bit of quantum?
Quantum mechanics doesn't get along with the other grand theory of physics,general relativity, making it difficult to understand situations in which both are relevant, such as black holes. Hawking applied quantum theory to black holes and realised they aren't quite black. Instead, they should emit small amounts of radiation, causing them to shrink and eventually evaporate.OK, so black holes aren't immortal. What's the problem?
The theory of Hawking radiation also suggested that when a black hole dies, it takes everything inside with it, but that is a big quantum no-no. Quantum physics says that information about matter is never destroyed, even when it falls into a black hole. Other theorists suggested solving this "information paradox" by allowing information to escape from the black hole as it evaporated. Hawking disagreed – until 30 years later, when he showed how it might be possible and was forced to concede a seven-year-old wager with another physicist.Meaning now everyone agrees about black holes?
If only. For the past 18 months the black hole community has been up in arms over a descendant of the information paradox, known as the firewall paradox. A group led by Joseph Polchinski of the University of California in Santa Barbara suggested information leaving a black hole would produce massive amounts of energy, creating a wall of fire at the event horizon that would consume anything falling in. This would break a rule of general relativity that says crossing a black hole's event horizon should be uneventful – hence the paradox.It's yet another quantum versus relativity showdown!
Indeed. Firewalls mean that one of the two theories is wrong, so physicists have been scrambling to find a compromise that doesn't produce these flaming problems. Now Hawking has waded in and says the solution is to give up the very thing that makes black holes so intriguing – the event horizon.Wait a minute… does that mean you could actually escape from a black hole?
Potentially, although you would probably need to be travelling at the speed of light. "The absence of event horizons means that there are no black holes – in the sense of regimes from which light can't escape to infinity," writes Hawking in his new paper, which he posted online earlier this week. Instead, black holes have "apparent horizons", surfaces which trap light but can also vary in shape due to quantum fluctuations, leaving the potential for light to escape.Are the two horizons really that different?
It is unclear. The idea of an apparent horizon isn't completely new, and Hawking – along with Roger Penrose of the University of Oxford – has previously used general relativity to prove that the two horizons are actually identical. In his most recent paper he is proposing that quantum mechanics might reveal them to be different.Ah, so is that the new bit?
Not quite. The main contribution of the new paper is an attempt to use these ideas to resolve the firewall paradox. Removing the event horizon also kills off the firewall. That would normally suggest that quantum information must be lost – but Hawking says that needn't be the case. He proposes that the structure of a black hole just below the horizon is chaotic, making it difficult to understand the information being released. In other words, the information is lost in the sense that it is almost impossible to interpret, but it isn't actually destroyed. "It will be like weather forecasting on Earth," he writes. "One can't predict the weather more than a few days in advance."Is he right? Is the paradox solved?
Hawking's paper is very short, just two pages of text with no calculations, making it difficult to draw any strong conclusions, but there is already some scepticism. "It is not clear what he expects the infalling observer to see," says Polchinski. "It almost sounds like he is replacing the firewall with a chaos-wall, which could be the same thing." Samuel Braunstein of the University of York, UK, who has waded into the firewall debate previously, also isn't convinced: "I don't see any evidence which really demonstrates that the thing he is talking about doesn't have a firewall."Does it matter if Hawking is right?
If black holes are how he describes, it could lead to a better understanding of quantum mechanics and general relativity. "We might learn some new physics, which may have real implications about the non-trivial structure of the universe," says Braunstein. But he also points out that we might not.Does Hawking mind being wrong?
Everyone hates being wrong – and Hawking is human. On his 70th birthday, he told New Scientist that he regards his idea that information was destroyed by black holes, which later turned out to be wrong, as his "biggest blunder" – in science, at least.New Scientist is in the process of contacting Stephen Hawking for comment on his latest paper.
Journal reference: arxiv.org/abs/1401.5761
From http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24937-stephen-hawkings-new-theory-offers-black-hole-escape.htm
Hawking with another U turn. No surprise here, he has done it before and he will probably do it again, if / when it becomes convenient to do so.
Hawking with another U turn. No surprise here, he has done it before and he will probably do it again, if / when it becomes convenient to do so.
You mean adjusting his beliefs in the face of new evidence and ideas?
Hawking with another U turn. No surprise here, he has done it before and he will probably do it again, if / when it becomes convenient to do so.
You mean adjusting his beliefs in the face of new evidence and ideas?
Exactly. This is not some sort of political debate. He has analysed the available data to the best of his ability and has decided that his previous conclusions were wrong, and has said so.
Belief is a valid word in this context, but perhaps not the most appropriate one to use. Opinion, perhaps. Belief smacks too much of faith.You mean adjusting his beliefs in the face of new evidence and ideas?Hawking with another U turn. No surprise here, he has done it before and he will probably do it again, if / when it becomes convenient to do so.
There is a helpful breakdown of the Hawking paper on New Scientist:
Stephen Hawking's new theory offers black hole escape
- 16:20 24 January 2014 by Jacob Aron
- For similar stories, visit the Cosmology Topic Guide
Stephen Hawking has a new mind-bending theory about black holes, the bizarre cosmic objects that cemented his reputation as the world's most famous living scientist. Rather than getting sucked into a singularity of confusion, read our explainer
What exactly is a black hole?
Good question. According to theoretical physicists, they used to be regions of space-time – the fabric that makes up the universe – that have become so dense that their huge gravity generates an event horizon, from inside which nothing, not even light, can escape. Then in 1974, Hawking added quantum mechanics to the black hole picture and sparked a row that has raged on until the present day.What's wrong with a bit of quantum?
Quantum mechanics doesn't get along with the other grand theory of physics,general relativity, making it difficult to understand situations in which both are relevant, such as black holes. Hawking applied quantum theory to black holes and realised they aren't quite black. Instead, they should emit small amounts of radiation, causing them to shrink and eventually evaporate.OK, so black holes aren't immortal. What's the problem?
The theory of Hawking radiation also suggested that when a black hole dies, it takes everything inside with it, but that is a big quantum no-no. Quantum physics says that information about matter is never destroyed, even when it falls into a black hole. Other theorists suggested solving this "information paradox" by allowing information to escape from the black hole as it evaporated. Hawking disagreed – until 30 years later, when he showed how it might be possible and was forced to concede a seven-year-old wager with another physicist.Meaning now everyone agrees about black holes?
If only. For the past 18 months the black hole community has been up in arms over a descendant of the information paradox, known as the firewall paradox. A group led by Joseph Polchinski of the University of California in Santa Barbara suggested information leaving a black hole would produce massive amounts of energy, creating a wall of fire at the event horizon that would consume anything falling in. This would break a rule of general relativity that says crossing a black hole's event horizon should be uneventful – hence the paradox.It's yet another quantum versus relativity showdown!
Indeed. Firewalls mean that one of the two theories is wrong, so physicists have been scrambling to find a compromise that doesn't produce these flaming problems. Now Hawking has waded in and says the solution is to give up the very thing that makes black holes so intriguing – the event horizon.Wait a minute… does that mean you could actually escape from a black hole?
Potentially, although you would probably need to be travelling at the speed of light. "The absence of event horizons means that there are no black holes – in the sense of regimes from which light can't escape to infinity," writes Hawking in his new paper, which he posted online earlier this week. Instead, black holes have "apparent horizons", surfaces which trap light but can also vary in shape due to quantum fluctuations, leaving the potential for light to escape.Are the two horizons really that different?
It is unclear. The idea of an apparent horizon isn't completely new, and Hawking – along with Roger Penrose of the University of Oxford – has previously used general relativity to prove that the two horizons are actually identical. In his most recent paper he is proposing that quantum mechanics might reveal them to be different.Ah, so is that the new bit?
Not quite. The main contribution of the new paper is an attempt to use these ideas to resolve the firewall paradox. Removing the event horizon also kills off the firewall. That would normally suggest that quantum information must be lost – but Hawking says that needn't be the case. He proposes that the structure of a black hole just below the horizon is chaotic, making it difficult to understand the information being released. In other words, the information is lost in the sense that it is almost impossible to interpret, but it isn't actually destroyed. "It will be like weather forecasting on Earth," he writes. "One can't predict the weather more than a few days in advance."Is he right? Is the paradox solved?
Hawking's paper is very short, just two pages of text with no calculations, making it difficult to draw any strong conclusions, but there is already some scepticism. "It is not clear what he expects the infalling observer to see," says Polchinski. "It almost sounds like he is replacing the firewall with a chaos-wall, which could be the same thing." Samuel Braunstein of the University of York, UK, who has waded into the firewall debate previously, also isn't convinced: "I don't see any evidence which really demonstrates that the thing he is talking about doesn't have a firewall."Does it matter if Hawking is right?
If black holes are how he describes, it could lead to a better understanding of quantum mechanics and general relativity. "We might learn some new physics, which may have real implications about the non-trivial structure of the universe," says Braunstein. But he also points out that we might not.Does Hawking mind being wrong?
Everyone hates being wrong – and Hawking is human. On his 70th birthday, he told New Scientist that he regards his idea that information was destroyed by black holes, which later turned out to be wrong, as his "biggest blunder" – in science, at least.New Scientist is in the process of contacting Stephen Hawking for comment on his latest paper.
Journal reference: arxiv.org/abs/1401.5761
From http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24937-stephen-hawkings-new-theory-offers-black-hole-escape.htm
Hawking with another U turn.
Well he can't exactly pirouette, take a backward step, or a great leap, if you hadn't already noticed.
Hawking with another U turn. No surprise here, he has done it before and he will probably do it again, if / when it becomes convenient to do so.
wow so much WRONG.
One of the things I love about astronomy is the delightfully ludicrous scale of things. Even that article about the oldest star found. " just 200 million years after the big bang". Lmfao, yep just a teensy little 200 million years or so. 200 million years takes earth back to the beginning of the Jurrasic stage, with T-rex still in the future.
There is a supernova currently going in Ursa Major ( unfortunately not visible in Melbourne). It actually happened 12 million years ago, lol. Every star in the sky (except maybe our own sun) is not actually where we think they are visually. A lot may not exist anymore. But we will see them for millions of years even so.
It’s mindboggling, really, just in terms of the size, let alone what happens within it. I can accept the infinite in something like the value of pi. It never quite divides evenly? Ok. But the notion that something real - space, the universe - is infinite (and yet apparently "flat " in shape, wtf?) and also possibly accompanied by an infinite number of alternative universes?!! Yeah, nah, I can’t get my head around how that works.
One of the things I love about astronomy is the delightfully ludicrous scale of things. Even that article about the oldest star found. " just 200 million years after the big bang". Lmfao, yep just a teensy little 200 million years or so. 200 million years takes earth back to the beginning of the Jurrasic stage, with T-rex still in the future. There is a supernova currently going in Ursa Major ( unfortunately not visible in Melbourne). It actually happened 12 million years ago, lol. Every star in the sky (except maybe our own sun) is not actually where we think they are visually. A lot may not exist anymore. But we will see them for millions of years even so. It's mindboggling, really, just in terms of the size, let alone what happens within it. I can accept the infinite in something like the value of pi. It never quite divides evenly? Ok. But the notion that something real - space, the universe - is infinite (and yet apparently "flat " in shape, wtf?) and also possibly accompanied by an infinite number of alternative universes?!! Yeah, nah, I can't get my head around how that works.
Conversely, that helps me understand (kinda) how the space time continuum "bends".
Far better than some ■■■■■■■■ with a sheet of A4!
One of the things I love about astronomy is the delightfully ludicrous scale of things. Even that article about the oldest star found. " just 200 million years after the big bang". Lmfao, yep just a teensy little 200 million years or so. 200 million years takes earth back to the beginning of the Jurrasic stage, with T-rex still in the future. There is a supernova currently going in Ursa Major ( unfortunately not visible in Melbourne). It actually happened 12 million years ago, lol. Every star in the sky (except maybe our own sun) is not actually where we think they are visually. A lot may not exist anymore. But we will see them for millions of years even so. It's mindboggling, really, just in terms of the size, let alone what happens within it. I can accept the infinite in something like the value of pi. It never quite divides evenly? Ok. But the notion that something real - space, the universe - is infinite (and yet apparently "flat " in shape, wtf?) and also possibly accompanied by an infinite number of alternative universes?!! Yeah, nah, I can't get my head around how that works.
This may give you why its such a big deal that that star formed only 200My after the big bang.
And this site gives a great visualisation of the size of the universe.
That's my Twitter pic
One of the things I love about astronomy is the delightfully ludicrous scale of things. Even that article about the oldest star found. " just 200 million years after the big bang". Lmfao, yep just a teensy little 200 million years or so. 200 million years takes earth back to the beginning of the Jurrasic stage, with T-rex still in the future. There is a supernova currently going in Ursa Major ( unfortunately not visible in Melbourne). It actually happened 12 million years ago, lol. Every star in the sky (except maybe our own sun) is not actually where we think they are visually. A lot may not exist anymore. But we will see them for millions of years even so. It's mindboggling, really, just in terms of the size, let alone what happens within it. I can accept the infinite in something like the value of pi. It never quite divides evenly? Ok. But the notion that something real - space, the universe - is infinite (and yet apparently "flat " in shape, wtf?) and also possibly accompanied by an infinite number of alternative universes?!! Yeah, nah, I can't get my head around how that works.
This may give you why its such a big deal that that star formed only 200My after the big bang.
And this site gives a great visualisation of the size of the universe.
As does this one
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LE2v3sUzTH4
Butterfly wings under an electron microscope. The bit with the liquid on the wings and the timelapse is very cool.
I ■■■■■■■ love science.
Suppose it's a science of sorts.
SCIENCE
This Is How They Load Nuclear Cruise Missiles On A B-52 Stratofortress
When I first saw this photo I immediately thought “what the hell is thing?†Then Attila Nagy told me about it: it‘s a nuclear armed AGM-86B cruise missile. Three of them, in fact, being loaded on a B-52 Stratofortress.
It‘s hard to tell because you are looking at the butt of this 1.3-tonne nuclear shark, which is 6.3 metres long and has a wingspan of 3.7 metres.
The image was just taken at the Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota during “a large-scale inspection for all base operationsâ€. You will be happy to know that “for the Nuclear Surety Inspection portion, the 91st Missile Wing and the 5th Bomb Wing received a rating of satisfactory. The 91st MW completed the Nuclear Operations Readiness Inspection with an excellent rating.â€
If this turns out to be true, it's amazing news. Combined with confirmation of the existence of Higgs Boson last year, and it's been a pretty significant 12 months.
Stuart Clark
The Guardian
There is intense speculation among cosmologists that a US team is on the verge of confirming they have detected "primordial gravitational waves" – an echo of the big bang in which the universe came into existence 14bn years ago.
Rumours have been rife in the physics community about an announcement due on Monday from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. If there is evidence for gravitational waves, it would be a landmark discovery that would change the face of cosmology and particle physics.
Gravitational waves are the last untested prediction of Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. They are minuscule ripples in the fabric of the universe that carry energy across space, somewhat similar to waves crossing an ocean. Convincing evidence of their discovery would almost certainly lead to a Nobel prize.
"If they do announce primordial gravitational waves on Monday, I will take a huge amount of convincing," said Hiranya Peiris, a cosmologist from University College London. "But if they do have a robust detection … Jesus, wow! I'll be taking next week off."
The discovery of gravitational waves from the big bang would offer scientists their first glimpse of how the universe was born.
The signal is rumoured to have been found by a specialised telescope called Bicep (Background Imaging oc Cosmic Extragalactic Polarisation) at the south pole. It scans the sky at microwave frequencies, where it picks up the fossil energy from the big bang.
For decades, cosmologists have thought that the signature of primordial gravitational waves could be imprinted on this radiation. "It's been called the Holy Grail of cosmology," says Peiris, "It would be a real major, major, major discovery."
Martin Hendry at the University of Glasgow works on several projects designed to directly detect gravitational waves. "If Bicep have made a detection," he says, "it's clear that this new window on the universe is really opening up."
According to theory, the primordial gravitational waves will tell us about the first, infinitessimal moment of the universe's history. Cosmologists believe that 10-34 seconds after the big bang (a decimal point followed by 33 zeros and a one) the universe was driven to expand hugely.
Known as inflation, the theory was dreamed up to explain why the universe is so remarkably uniform from place to place. But it has always lacked some credibility because no one can find a convincing physical explanation for why it happened.
Now researchers may be forced to redouble their efforts. "The primordial gravitational waves have long been thought to be the smoking gun of inflation. It's as close to a proof of that theory as you are going to get," says Peiris. This is because cosmologists believe only inflation can amplify the primordial gravitational waves into a detectable signal.
"If a detection has been made, it is extraordinarily exciting. This is the real big tick-box that we have been waiting for. It will tell us something incredibly fundamental about what was happening when the universe was 10-34 seconds old," said Prof Andrew Jaffe, a cosmologist from Imperial College, London, who works on another telescope involved in the search called Polarbear.
But extracting that signal is fearsomely tricky. The microwaves that carry it must cross the whole universe before arriving at Earth. During the journey, they are distorted by intervening clusters of galaxies.
"It's like looking at the universe through bubbled glass," said Duncan Hanson of McGill University in Montreal, Canada, who works on the South Pole Telescope, a rival that sits next to Bicep.
He said the distortion must be removed in a convincing way before anyone can claim to have made the detection. The prize for doing that, however, would be the pinnacle of a scientific career. "The Nobel Prize would be for the detection of the primordial gravitational waves."
"Yeah, I would give them a prize," said Jaffe.
The announcement will be made on Monday at 4pm GMT.
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/mar/14/gravitational-waves-big-bang-universe-bicep
MARCH 17, 2014A SCIENTIFIC BREAKTHROUGH LETS US SEE TO THE BEGINNING OF TIMEPOSTED BY LAWRENCE KRAUSS
At rare moments in scientific history, a new window on the universe opens up that changes everything. Today was quite possibly such a day. At a press conference on Monday morning at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, a team of scientists operating a sensitive microwave telescope at the South Pole announced the discovery of polarization distortions in the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation, which is the observable afterglow of the Big Bang. The distortions appear to be due to the presence of gravitational waves, which would date back to almost the beginning of time.
This observation, made possible by the fact that gravitational waves can travel unimpeded through the universe, takes us to 10-35 seconds after the Big Bang. By comparison, the Cosmic Microwave Background—which, until today, was the earliest direct signal we had of the Big Bang—was created when the universe was already three hundred thousand years old.
If the discovery announced this morning holds up, it will allow us to peer back to the very beginning of time—a million billion billion billion billion billion times closer to the Big Bang than any previous direct observation—and will allow us to explore the fundamental forces of nature on a scale ten thousand billion times smaller than can be probed at the Large Hadron Collider, the world‘s largest particle accelerator. Moreover, it will allow us to test some of the most ambitious theoretical speculations about the origin of our observed universe that have ever been made by humans—speculations that may first appear to verge on metaphysics. It might seem like an esoteric finding, so far removed from everyday life as to be of almost no interest. But, if confirmed, it will have increased our empirical window on the origins of the universe by a margin comparable to the amount it has grown in all of the rest of human history. Where this may lead, no one knows, but it should be cause for great excitement.
Even for someone who has been thinking about these possibilities for the past thirty-five years, the truth can sometimes seem stranger than fiction. In 1979, a young particle physicist named Alan Guth proposed what seemed like an outrageous possibility, which he called Inflation: that new physics, involving a large extrapolation from what could then be observed, might imply that the universe expanded in size by over thirty orders of magnitude in a tiny fraction of a second after the Big Bang, increasing in size by a greater amount in that instance than it has in the fourteen billion years since.
Guth‘s work was designed to address what were then seemingly irreconcilable problems with the standard Big Bang model, which did not offer any explanation for why the observable universe is so incredibly uniform on large scales, and how it has continued to expand for so long without collapsing once again. Inflation, crudely put, explains how the universe is likely to have grown shortly after the Big Bang, to bridge the gap between our hypothesis about the origins of the universe and the universe we observe today.
But the hallmark of great theory is its ability to predict future discoveries, not merely explain previous ones. Within a few years, Guth and a host of others demonstrated that quantum-mechanical effects during this very early period immediately after the Big Bang could have generated primordial variations in matter and radiation that resulted, owing to gravity, in the formation of all observed cosmic structures, including our earth, our galaxy, and all observable galaxies. Moreover, the special characteristics of these “primordial lumpsâ€â€”produced when the size of the universe was smaller than a single atom—might be tested if we were able to probe out to the farthest reaches of the known universe.
In 1992, the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite reported observations of the so-called Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation—the afterglow of the Big Bang generated when the universe was only three hundred thousand years old—that allowed just such measurements to be performed. Evidence of primordial lumps was discovered—leading to a Nobel Prize—and the stage was set for subsequent experiments, which verified that Guth‘s Inflation theory was at least consistent with observation.
However, consistency is not enough in science. After all, different models of Inflation could have produced results consistent with many different observations. So one needed a much more robust and unambiguous prediction to really confirm these ideas.
Remarkably, one such prediction arose. If gravity is also subject to quantum mechanics, then it was shown that, during Inflation, quantum fluctuations in gravity would be produced, and would appear today as gravitational waves—ripples in the fabric of space and time. Gravitational waves are incredibly difficult to detect directly: we have built huge detectors, here on Earth, that are so sensitive that they can detect a force that changes the length of a two-mile-long detector by an amount smaller than a single proton. So far, however, no signal has been observed.
But the universe is a far bigger detector. The same Cosmic Microwave Background that gave us an image of primordial structures might also be distorted by gravitational waves with wavelengths as large as the size of the observable universe. In 1992, right after the COBE discovery, a student of mine and I were sufficiently excited to claim that if Inflation occurred at an energy scale only slightly larger than where we think three of the four forces of nature might be unified—the so-called Grand Unified Scale—gravitational waves might even have produced the entire observedCOBE signal.
This turned out not to be the case. But on Monday, nature may have revealed a more exciting possibility. A more sensitive probe of the microwave background—one that measures how the light generated at the time the C.M.B. was created might be “polarized,†as space is alternatively compressed and stretched by gravitational waves—apparently sees precisely the signal expected from Inflation. Moreover, the amplitude of the effect is indeed more or less expected if the scale of Inflation is the scale expected for Grand Unification.
If it turns out to be confirmed by other experiments, think about what this discovery implies for our ability to explore the universe (besides the other remarkable implications for physics): when we use light to look out at the distant universe, we can only see back as far as three hundred thousand years after the Big Bang, when the universe cooled sufficiently to become transparent to light. But gravitational waves interact so weakly that even waves produced less than 10-35seconds after the Big Bang can move through space unimpeded, giving us a window on the universe at essentially the beginning of time.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and the current result is in some tension with earlier claimed upper limits from other experiments, so we will need to wait for the results of a host of other experiments currently operating that can check this result.
For some people, the possibility that the laws of physics might illuminate even the creation of our own universe, without the need for supernatural intervention or any demonstration of purpose, is truly terrifying. But Monday‘s announcement heralds the possible beginning of a new era, where even such cosmic existential questions are becoming accessible to experiment.
Lawrence M. Krauss is a theoretical physicist and director of the Origins Project at Arizona State University. His most recent book is “A Universe From Nothing: Why There is Something Rather than Nothing.â€
Photograph: Steffen Richter/Harvard University
BANG!
BANG!
No, no, no. It was more like
BANG!
Andrei Linde Receives News About Gravitational Wave Breakthrough
Read more at http://www.iflscience.com/physics/andrei-linde-receives-news-about-gravitational-wave-breakthrough#aQ6KYlmLXvU8ilDU.99
http://youtu.be/ZlfIVEy_YOA