We May Have Just Found Evidence of a Cosmic String: a 'Crease' in The Universe

29 September 2023, By M. STARR

https://www.sciencealert.com/we-may-have-just-found-evidence-of-a-cosmic-string-a-crease-in-the-universe

A portion of the CSc-1 field, with galaxy paris indicated by white dots, and lines indicating the expected orientation of the strings.

(Safonova et al., arXiv, 2023)

A strange pair of galaxies several billion light-years away could be evidence of a hypothetical 'crease' in the Universe's fabric known as a cosmic string.

According to an analysis of the properties of the pair, the two galaxies may not be distinct objects, but a duplicate image caused by a trick of the light. And the reason the light is duplicated could be because of a scar in the space between us and the galaxy, creating a gravitational lens.

A paper describing this cosmic string candidate, led by Margarita Safonova of the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, has been accepted in the Bulletin de la Société Royale des Sciences de Liège, and is available on preprint server arXiv.

Cosmic strings are like tiny, one-dimensional wrinkles or cracks through the fields of the Universe, thought to have been created at the very dawn of time as reality stretched and then froze into place.

These two blurry blobs could be evidence of cosmic strings.

 (Safonova et al., arXiv, 2023)

These theoretical topological defects are estimated to be no wider than a proton, may extend the entire breadth of the Universe, and are thought to be incredibly dense and massive. Theory suggests that they may very well be real, but we haven't seen much physical evidence of them.

Cosmic strings are not easy to prove observationally. That's because the effects they have on the Universe can look a lot like effects that have other explanations. But there can be minute differences that point more to cosmic strings than those other explanations.

Safonova and her colleagues have identified not just one, but several, in a cosmic string candidate named CSc-1, identified in the cosmic microwave background, the leftover radiation from the birth of the Universe. However, they focused their paper on the strongest cosmic string signature, a galaxy pair named SDSSJ110429.61+233150.3, or SDSSJ110429 for short.

SDSSJ110429 could just be a normal pair of galaxies. Another explanation when we see galaxies very close together, and looking similar, is that they are duplicate images, produced by a gravitational lens.

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Space News: NASA's Hubble telescope spots 'dreamy' galaxy

 

NASA's Hubble telescope spots 'dreamy' galaxy

NASA's Hubble Space telescope spotted and photographed a beautiful, dreamy galaxy millions of light-years from Earth.

By JERUSALEM POST STAFF, SEPTEMBER 30, 2023  

https://www.jpost.com/science/article-761040     

 An image of galaxy NGC 3156, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.

(photo credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, R. Sharples)

                   

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has captured an incredible dream-like image of a galaxy 73 million light-years from Earth. 

The galaxy is known as NGC 3156 and is located in the minor equatorial constellation Sextans. It was discovered on December 13, 1784, by astronomer William Herschel. 

NGC 3156 is a lenticular galaxy, with two visible threads of dark reddish-brown dust crossing the galaxy’s disk. 

This galaxy type is named for its lens-like appearance when viewed from the side or edge-on. 

Lenticular galaxies fall somewhere between elliptical and spiral galaxies and have properties similar to both. 

What is a lenticular galaxy?

Like spirals, lenticulars have a central bulge of stars surrounded by a large disc. They often have dark dust lanes like spirals, but do not have large-scale spiral arms. 

Like ellipticals, lenticular galaxies have mostly older stars with little ongoing star formation and no significant hydrogen emission.

“Astronomers have studied NGC 3156 in many ways – from its cohort of globular clusters (roughly spherical groups of stars bound together by their gravitational attraction), to the stars being destroyed by the supermassive black hole at its heart,” NASA shared in a post on their website. 

Using data collected from the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers were able to compare stars near the galaxy’s core to those in galaxies with similarly sized black holes and found that NGC 3156 has a higher-than-average percentage of stars devoured by its supermassive black hole than its counterparts.   

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Technology News: Meta unveils new generation of mixed reality headset

 

Meta unveils new generation of mixed reality headset – but will consumer interest in VR rally?

The focus of Meta's new tech is on "mixed reality", which merges virtual life with your actual surroundings. But how will this go down with consumers?

By Martin Kimber, Sky News gaming reporter Thursday 28 September 2023 

https://news.sky.com/story/meta-unveils-new-generation-of-mixed-reality-headset-but-will-consumer-interest-in-vr-rally-12971602

                     The Quest 3 is slimmer and has better graphics, Meta claims. Pic: Meta

Meta has ramped up the race for our faces as it revealed the next generation of its wearable immersive tech products.

The headline announcement: a successor in the Meta Quest series, the Meta Quest 3, and a follow-up to its Ray-Ban Stories smart glasses.

Facebook's parent company claims the Quest 3 is 40% slimmer than its predecessor and boasts better graphics hardware.

But the main focus this year is on "mixed reality" - an experience that marries up the virtual and real-life surroundings.

I was invited by Meta to try out the new model ahead of release to see whether it manages to keep pace with its numerous rivals in an increasingly competitive market.

A new headstrap made the device feel slightly lighter than the previous model, and I didn't experience the Quest 2's interminable issue of fogging - when the lenses would steam up from my breathing - causing me to either repeatedly wipe the display, or hold my breath for uncomfortable periods of time.

The Quest 3 immediately began scanning the room's walls, floors and objects automatically, a task you previously had to arduously perform manually.

New features and alien games

Once the machine had a good idea of where everything was in the room, Meta demonstrated various apps and games to showcase the mixed reality element.

One game saw aliens crash through your ceiling, blurring the line between reality and game.

Another immersed you in a virtual, abandoned space station, entirely leaving behind the artificial living room Meta had constructed for us.

As someone who doesn't spend much time in the metaverse, it took some getting used to, and after taking it off and returning to reality, I did feel a bit like a drunk sailor on the high seas.

Image:The headset comes with remote controls. Pic: Meta

The developers have cannibalised much of the tech found in their premium Pro model which retails for £1,499.99.

The Quest 3 starts at £499.99 and sports some of the Pro's biggest hits - such as an enhanced display and the ability to select menu options with just your fingers.

Prohibitive manufacturing costs mean that the Pro's eye-tracking is not included, and the controllers don't include rechargeable lithium-ion batteries like you'd find on a PlayStation or Xbox controller.

Accessibility appears to have been a priority for Meta this year, both in cost-efficiency, and user-friendliness.

The new hand-tracking feature makes navigating menus more convenient for when those controllers are out of reach - or when you've run out of double A batteries.

The finger-tracking isn't as precise as using a controller, and sometimes my finger would select the wrong button or resize the window - but it worked most of the time.

What's the Metaverse for?

The price is arguably competitive when set against its competitors such as the HTC Vive Pro 2 (£1,399) or the PSVR2 (£529.99), for example.

One unavoidable question mark, however, still hangs over Meta's VR project like the sword of Damocles - the purpose of the 'Metaverse' itself.

Image:The Meta headset is lighter than previous models. Pic: Meta

Meta has invested over $36bn (£29.5bn) in research and development in the Metaverse so far, to seemingly little benefit.

For comparison, Apple spent just over $150m (£123m) in R&D to invent the iPhone.

When asked whether that $36bn could have been better spent on researching AI, a Meta spokesperson told Sky News: "We do spend an awful lot of money on AI, we have been working on AI for over a decade, so I think it's hard to quantify in that way."

Following Meta's announcement of a new chatbot coming to its Messenger app, the spokesperson said they were confident they were keeping pace in the AI arms race against Microsoft and Google: "I think we're just doing different things… we're pretty comfortable with how we're progressing."

Alongside the Quest 3, Meta has also updated its Ray-Ban Stories smart glasses.

These do not project images, but capture them.

Two tiny cameras buried in the chassis of a pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses record the world around you without you even having to take your phone out.

The last generation of smart glasses was not a roaring success, with one report published only last month suggesting 90% of customers stopped using theirs shortly after purchase.

Sunglasses for Instagram

Image:The sunglasses come with a camera. Pic: Meta

So will the improved cameras, microphones and built-in speakers be enough to make these an attractive proposition for content creators?

With the Instagram generation firmly in mind, the specs now only shoot in portrait mode, without the option of landscape.

As someone who works in traditional TV news, I found it a shame to lose the landscape feature, but the logic behind the change makes sense.

Serial Instagrammers will appreciate the change, but whether the general public will or not remains to be seen.

The built-in speakers situated in the glasses' temples offered good-quality Bluetooth music playback, though more bass-heavy tracks suffered once the volume was turned up to maximum.

The protective charging case looks indistinguishable from the norm, with a light on the front to tell you when they're at maximum charge.

But if you're in the 10% of men worldwide who suffer from red/green colour blindness like me, you'll likely struggle to differentiate the orange and green indicators.

The ultimate aim for Meta is to marry up the display technology behind the Quest and the camera capability of the Stories.

Mark Zuckerberg has already proclaimed his aim to one day ship a pair of smart glasses that does both - but that still feels several generations away.

For now, Meta has injected a healthy and vital dose of competition into the market, and however vague the concept of the Metaverse may remain, that will drive progress.

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Antimatter embraces Earth, falling downward like normal matter: Study reveals gravity's effect on matter's elusive twin

Sept. 27, 2023, by U. of California - Berkeley

https://phys.org/news/2023-09-antimatter-embraces-earth-falling-downward.html

This graphic shows antihydrogen atoms falling and annihilating inside a magnetic trap, part of the ALPHA-g experiment at CERN to measure the effect of gravity on antimatter. 

Credit: U.S. National Science Foundation

For those still holding out hope that antimatter levitates rather than falls in a gravitational field, like normal matter, the results of a new experiment are a dose of cold reality.

Physicists studying antihydrogen—an anti-proton paired with an antielectron, or positron—have conclusively shown that gravity pulls it downward and does not push it upward.

At least for antimatter, antigravity doesn't exist.

The experimental results have been reported in the Sept. 28 issue of the journal Nature by a team representing the Antihydrogen Laser Physics Apparatus (ALPHA) collaboration at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland.

The gravitational acceleration of antimatter that the team comes up with is close to that for normal matter on Earth: 1 g, or 9.8 meters per second per second (32 feet per second per second). More precisely, it was found to be within about 25% (one standard deviation) of normal gravity.

"It surely accelerates downwards, and it's within about one standard deviation of accelerating at the normal rate," said Joel Fajans, a UC Berkeley professor of physics who, with colleague Jonathan Wurtele, a theoretician, first proposed the experiment more than a decade ago. "The bottom line is that there's no free lunch, and we're not going to be able to levitate using antimatter."

The result will not surprise most physicists. Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity, though conceived before antimatter was discovered in 1932, treats all matter identically, implying that antimatter and matter respond the same to gravitational forces. All normal matter, such as protons, neutrons and electrons, have anti-particles that bear the opposite electrical charge and, when they encounter their normal matter counterpart, annihilate completely.

"The opposite result would have had big implications; it would be inconsistent with the weak equivalence principle of Einstein's general theory of relativity," said Wurtele, UC Berkeley professor of physics. "This experiment is the first time that a direct measurement of the force of gravity on neutral antimatter has been made. It's another step in developing the field of neutral antimatter science."

Fajans noted that no physical theory actually predicts that gravity should be repulsive for antimatter. Some physicists claim that, if it were, you could create a perpetual motion machine, which is theoretically impossible.

Nevertheless, the idea that antimatter and matter might be affected differently by gravity was enticing because it could potentially explain some cosmic conundrums. For example, it could have led to the spatial separation of matter and antimatter in the early universe, explaining why we see only a small amount of antimatter in the universe around us. Most theories predict that equal amounts of matter and antimatter should have been produced during the Big Bang that birthed the universe.

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Technology News: World's most powerful laser to be built in UK and will be 'million, billion, billion' times brighter than the sun

 

World's most powerful laser to be built in UK and will be 'million, billion, billion' times brighter than the sun

The Vulcan 20-20 will help scientists working on nuclear fusion, understanding plasma, new renewable energy sources and studying electromagnetic fields.

By Chris Lockyer, Sky News, Wednesday 27 September 2023 

https://news.sky.com/story/worlds-most-powerful-laser-to-be-built-in-uk-and-will-be-million-billion-billion-times-brighter-than-the-sun-12970854

A laser at the Central Laser Facility in 2009. File pic: Stephen Kill/STFC

The world's most powerful laser will be built in Oxfordshire, thanks to £85m in new funding for the technology.

Scientists are aiming to develop the technology which will be a "million, billion, billion times brighter than the brightest sunlight" in the world.

It is thought the technology will have practical applications in nuclear fusion, renewable energy and batteries.

The most powerful laser currently at the Central Laser Facility in Oxfordshire is the Vulcan, which is used in plasma physics.

The Vulcan 20-20 will have a 20-fold increase in power with eight additional beams, making it the strongest laser in the world.

A single pulse from the laser will deliver more power than the entire National Grid, in a blast lasting a trillionth of a second on a minuscule target.

Construction of the laser will take six years to complete, creating a number of jobs in the science sector, as well as for designers, engineers and technicians.

Professor Mark Thomson, executive chair of the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), which provided the funding, said: "The Central Laser Facility has been a driving force behind discoveries that have advanced our understanding of diverse areas from the fundamental properties of matter under extreme conditions to the formation of stars and planets."

Professor John Collier, director of the Central Laser Facility, added: "Vulcan has been the flagship laser at CLF for many years, and widely recognised internationally as a pioneering facility.

"Over the past 40 years, it has made important contributions to plasma physics research and hundreds of PhD students have been trained at the facility.

"It is timely for Vulcan to undergo its next major upgrade, making it ready to serve a new generation of scientists, ensuring the UK retains its leadership role in this field."

Image:The Vulcan laser - which currently holds the title of the world's most powerful. Pic: Fisher Studios

The current Vulcan project helped map how COVID infects and damages cells during the pandemic, as well as developing new techniques for security screening in airports.

The current Vulcan project helped map how COVID infects and damages cells during the pandemic, as well as developing new techniques for security screening in airports.

Science minister George Freeman said: "Re-establishing Britain as home to the world's most powerful laser is an exciting opportunity to explore the unexplored in astronomy and physics, stride towards new clean energy sources for the good of our planet and much more

"By investing £85m to give our research community the edge in leading crucial scientific discoveries, we are also delivering hundreds of highly skilled jobs in science and engineering that boost the UK science sector and grow our economy."

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Defense News: Northrop wins $705 million contract for F-35 air-to-ground weapon

 

Northrop wins $705 million contract for F-35 air-to-ground weapon

By Stephen Losey, Defense News, Sep 26, 2023

https://www.defensenews.com/air/2023/09/26/northrop-wins-705-million-contract-for-f-35-air-to-ground-weapon/

The Air Force has awarded Northrop Grumman a $705 million contract to develop and test a stand-in attack weapon for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter that would hit enemy air defenses on the ground. An F-35A Lightning II is shown here releasing an AIM-120 AMRAAM missile during a live-fire test over an Air Force range in the Gulf of Mexico on June 12, 2018. (Air Force)

WASHINGTON — The Air Force awarded Northrop Grumman a $705 million contract to develop and test a high-speed air-to-ground weapon known as a stand-in attack weapon that the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter could wield to destroy enemy targets.

Northrop said Monday that its work on the second phase of the weapon, which is also referred to as SiAW, will take place over the next 36 months in Northridge, California, and the company’s missile integration facility at Allegany Ballistics Laboratory in West Virginia.

US Air Force taps Northrop Grumman for stand-in attack weapon(SiAW) development for F-35 Lightning

The work will include further development of the weapon, platform integration, and completing a flight test program so the SiAW can be rapidly prototyped and quickly sent to the field, the company said. A guided vehicle flight test will wrap up the first part of this second phase, and the second part will conclude with three more flight tests and the delivery prototype missiles and test assets.

The Air Force wants this weapon to reach initial operational capability by 2026.

Northrop was one of three companies, including Lockheed Martin and L3Harris, that in May 2022 each received $2 million contracts from the Air Force for the first phase of developing the SiAW.

The Air Force wants this weapon to strike enemy air defense targets on the ground that could be rapidly moved, such as integrated air defense systems, ballistic missile launchers, land-attack and anti-ship cruise missile launchers, GPS jammers, and anti-satellite systems.

An F-35 would likely carry the stand-in attack weapon, shown here in a rendering from Northrop Grumman, in its internal weapons bay, and not mounted on the exterior. This would help avoid compromising the fighter's stealth capabilities as it penetrates enemy territory. (Northrop Grumman)

A stand-in weapon has a shorter range than standoff weapons, so an F-35 would likely fire the SiAW close to the target after penetrating enemy airspace. A standoff weapon is meant to be fired from further away, beyond the reach of enemy defenses.

The Air Force in recent years has sought to update its aircraft and arsenals to be able to fight in a contested environment against an advanced enemy such as China, and away from the two decades of war in the Middle East which largely took place in uncontested airspace. The service’s work to develop a missile targeting enemy air defenses is another sign of that shift.

Northrop said it will build the SiAW using open architecture, which will allow its subsystems to be quickly upgraded with new capabilities.

A Northrop official told Defense News in June 2022 that the F-35 would have to carry the SiAW within its internal weapons bay to avoid compromising the jet’s stealth capabilities. This would rule out carrying the weapon on an external mount, he said. And he said it is unlikely that the F-22, which has a smaller internal bay, would have enough room to carry the SiAW.

The SiAW program is heavily focused on digital engineering and design, and is the first time the Air Force has had a fully digital weapons acquisition and development program.

“With our expert digital engineering capabilities, this next-generation missile represents an adaptable, affordable way for the Department of Defense to buy and modernize weapons,” Susan Bruce, Northrop’s vice president for advanced weapons, said in the company’s statement.

Northrop said last year that it planned to use its experience from creating the Advanced Anti-Radiation Guided Missile-Extended Range, or AARGM-ER, for the Navy and integrating it onto the F-35 as it develops the SiAW.

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