Does the Universe have a Rest Frame?

Experiment aims at resolving divergence between special relativity and standard model of cosmology

Physics is sometimes closer to philosophy when it comes to understanding the universe. Donald Chang from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, China, attempts to elucidate whether the universe has a resting frame. The results have recently been published in EPJ Plus.

To answer this tricky question, he has developed an experiment to precisely evaluate particle mass. This is designed to test the special theory of relativity that assumes the absence of a rest frame, otherwise it would be possible to determine which inertial frame is stationary and which frame is moving. This assumption, however, appears to diverge from the standard model of cosmology, which assumes that what we see as a vacuum is not an empty space. The assumption is that the energy of our universe comes from the quantum fluctuation in the vacuum.

In a famous experiment conducted by Michelson and Morley in the late 19th century, the propagation of light was proved to be independent of the movement of the laboratory system. Einstein, his Special Theory of Relativity, inferred that the physical laws governing the propagation of light are equivalent in all inertial frames -- this was later extended to all physics laws not just optics.



In this study, the author set out to precisely measure the masses of two charged particles moving in opposite directions. The conventional thinking assumes that the inertial frame applies equally to both particles. If that's the case, no detectable mass difference between these two particles is likely to arise. However, if the contrary is true, and there is a rest frame in the universe, the author expects to see mass difference that is dependent on the orientation of the laboratory frame. This proposed experiment partially inspired by the Michelson and Morley experiments can be conducted using existing experimental techniques. For simplicity, an electron can be used as the charged particle in the experiment.

Story Source: Material provided by Springer
Journal Reference: Donald C. Chang. Is there a resting frame in the universe? A proposed experimental test based on a precise measurement of particle mass.

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Scientists reach Back in Time to Discover some of the most Power-packed Galaxies

In the heart of an active galaxy, matter falling toward a supermassive black hole generates jets of particles traveling near the speed of light.Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio

When the universe was young, a supermassive black hole heaved out a jet of particle-infused energy that raced through space at nearly the speed of light. Billions of years later, scientists has identified this black hole and four others similar to it that range in age from 1.4 billion to 1.9 billion years old.

When the universe was young, a supermassive black hole -- bloated to the bursting point with stupendous power -- heaved out a jet of particle-infused energy that raced through the vastness of space at nearly the speed of light.

Billions of years later, a trio of Clemson University scientists, led by College of Science astrophysicist Marco Ajello, has identified this black hole and four others similar to it that range in age from 1.4 billion to 1.9 billion years old. These objects emit copious gamma rays, light of the highest energy, that are billions of times more energetic than light that is visible to the human eye.

The previously known earliest gamma-ray blazars -- a type of galaxy whose intense emission is powered by extremely powerful relativistic jets launched by monstrous black holes -- were more than 2 billion years old. Currently, the universe is estimated to be approximately 14 billion years old.



"The discovery of these supermassive black holes, which launch jets that emit more energy in one second than our sun will produce in its entire lifetime, was the culmination of a yearlong research project," said Ajello, who has spent much of his career studying the evolution of distant galaxies. "Our next step is to increase our understanding of the mechanisms involved in the formation, development and activities of these amazing objects, which are the most powerful accelerators in the universe. We can't even come close to replicating such massive outputs of energy in our laboratories. The complexities we're attempting to unravel seem almost as mysterious as the black holes themselves."

Ajello conducted his research in conjunction with Clemson post-doc Vaidehi Paliya and Ph.D candidate Lea Marcotulli. The trio worked closely with the Fermi-Large Area Telescope collaboration, which is an international team of scientists that includes Roopesh Ojha, an astronomer at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland; and Dario Gasparrini of the Italian Space Agency.

The Clemson team's breakthroughs were made possible by recently juiced-up software on NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Telescope. The refurbished software significantly boosted the orbiting telescope's sensitivity to a level that made these latest discoveries possible.



"People are calling it the cheapest refurbishment in history," Ajello said. "Normally, for the Hubble Space Telescope, NASA had to send someone up to space to physically make these kinds of improvements. But in this case, they were able to do it remotely from an Earth-bound location. And of equal importance, the improvements were retroactive, which meant that the previous six years of data were also entirely reprocessed. This helped provide us with the information we needed to complete the first step of our research and also to strive onward in the learning process."

Using Fermi data, Ajello and Paliya began with a catalog of 1.4 million quasars, which are
galaxies that harbor at their centers active supermassive black holes. Over the course of a year, they narrowed their search to 1,100 objects. Of these, five were finally determined to be newly discovered gamma-ray blazars that were the farthest away -- and youngest -- ever identified.

"After using our filters and other devices, we were left with about 1,100 sources. And then we did the diagnostics for all of these and were able to narrow them down to 25 to 30 sources," Paliya said. "But we still had to confirm that what we had detected was scientifically authentic. So we performed a number of other simulations and were able to derive properties such as black hole mass and jet power. Ultimately, we confirmed that these five sources were guaranteed to be gamma-ray blazars, with the farthest one being about 1.4 billion years old from the beginning of time."



Marcotulli, who joined Ajello's group as a Ph.D student in 2016, has been studying the blazars' mechanisms by using images and data delivered from another orbiting NASA telescope, the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR). At first, Marcotulli's role was to understand the emission mechanism of gamma-ray blazars closer to us. Now she is turning her attention toward the most distant objects in a quest to understand what makes them so powerful.

"We're trying to understand the full spectrum of the energy distribution of these objects by using physical models," Marcotulli said. "We are currently able to model what's happening far more accurately than previously devised, and eventually we'll be able to better understand what processes are occurring in the jets and which particles are radiating all the energy that we see. Are they electrons? or protons? How are they interacting with surrounding photons? All these parameters are not fully understood right now. But every day we are deepening our understanding."



All galaxies have black holes at their centers -- some actively feeding on the matter surrounding them, others lying relatively dormant. Our own galaxy has at its center a super-sized black hole that is currently dormant. Ajello said that only one of every 10 black holes in today's universe are active. But when the universe was much younger, it was closer to a 50-50 ratio.

The supermassive black holes at the center of the five newly discovered blazar galaxies are among the largest types of black holes ever observed, on the order of hundreds of thousands to billions of times the mass of our own sun. And their accompanying accretion disks -- rotating swirls of matter that orbit the black holes -- emit more than two trillion times the energy output of our sun.

One of the most surprising elements of Ajello's research is how quickly -- by cosmic measures -- these supersized black holes must have grown in only 1.4 billion years. In terms of our current knowledge of how black holes grow, 1.4 billion years is barely enough time for a black hole to reach the mass of the ones discovered by Ajello's team.

"How did these incomprehensibly enormous and energy-laden black holes form so quickly?" Ajello said. "Is it because one black hole ate a lot all the time for a very long time? Or maybe because it bumped into other black holes and merged into one? To be honest, we have no observations supporting either argument. There are mechanisms at work that we have yet to unravel. Puzzles that we have yet to solve. When we do eventually solve them, we will learn amazing things about how the universe was born, how it grew into what it has become, and what the distant future might hold as the universe continues to progress toward old age."
Source: Materials provided by Clemson University

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The Universe's largest supernova: a spinning, star eating black hole

By: Alexandria Addesso

According to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), a supernova is defined as one of the largest explosions that take place in space, in particular the explosion of a star. A supernova usually manifests when there is a change in the core, or center, of a star.

The brightest supernova ever recorded, and actually categorized as a super-luminous supernova, was the explosion of an extremely massive star at the end of its life. It was named ASASSN-15lh. ASASSN-15 lhn, was first observed in 2015 by the All Sky Automated Survey for Super-Novae (ASAS-SN). It was twice as bright as the previous record holder, and at its peak was 20 times brighter than the total light output of the entire Milky Way.



"We observed the source for 10 months following the event and have concluded that the explanation is unlikely to lie with an extraordinarily bright supernova,” said Giorgos Leloudas the leader of the team that observed the event at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. “Our results indicate that the event was probably caused by a rapidly spinning supermassive black hole as it destroyed a low-mass star."
After a series of further observations, it was discovered that the massive explosion took place about 4 billion light-years from Earth in a distant galaxy. It is believed that the star that the black hole consumed in order to produce such a massive explosion was its solar system's biggest star, comparable to our own sun. Since then rays have been observed traveling from the black hole towards us at the speed of light. These rays are forming a disc of gas around the black hole as it converts gravitational energy into electromagnetic radiation, producing a bright source of light visible on multiple wavelengths.



"Incredibly, this source is still producing X-rays and may remain bright enough for Swift to observe into next year," said David Burrows, the lead scientist of the team utilizing NASA's Swift satellite to monitor the massive black hole as well as a professor of astronomy at Penn State University. "It behaves unlike anything we've seen before."

Could such an explosion happen in our solar system with our own sun? This is a question scientists and inquiring minds are still trying to figure out.

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Parallel Worlds

By: Alexandria Addesso

Parallel worlds and alternate universes have long been a loved theme of interest in Twilight Zone episodes and science fiction movies and literature. Like much other science fiction subject matter, parallel worlds actually do have some scientific data behind it, although many are still very skeptical.

"The idea of parallel universes in quantum mechanics has been around since 1957," said physicist at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia, Howard Wiseman, who was also part of the team of physicists that came up with the ‘Many-Worlds Interpretation’ (MWI).

"In the well-known ‘Many-Worlds Interpretation’, each universe branches into a bunch of new universes every time a quantum measurement is made. All possibilities are therefore realized – in some universes the dinosaur-killing asteroid missed Earth. In others, Australia was colonized by the Portuguese."



Yet despite what the name of the name of the MWI seems to suggest, these other worlds and universes have absolutely no proven effect on our own. Thus leaving skeptical physicists all the more doubting, while many parallel world theories often get ridiculed or put on the back burner by many mainstream scientists, the String Theory is a way to make sense of multiple dimensions mathematically. The String Theory states that within the theoretical framework of the theory, point-like particles of particle physics are replaced by one-dimensional objects called strings and describes how these strings circulate through space and interact with each other.

Superstring theory goes a step farther and attempts to explain all of the particles and fundamental forces of nature in one theory by modelling them as vibrations of tiny supersymmetric strings. For mathematical consistency, both theories require extra dimensions of space-time. The String Theory suggests that space-time is 26-dimensional, while superstring theory is 10-dimensional.

"You almost can't avoid having some version of the multiverse in your studies if you push deeply enough in the mathematical descriptions of the physical universe," said physicist Brian Greene who authored the book The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos.



"There are many of us thinking of one version of parallel universe theory or another. If it's all a lot of nonsense, then it's a lot of wasted effort going into this far-out idea. But if this idea is correct, it is a fantastic upheaval in our understanding."

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Are we alone in the Universe? SETI Institute Calls for New Tools in Search for Extraterrestrials

The SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute’s Director of Research proposed a broader, multidisciplinary approach to the SETI search, beyond radio and optical modalities, in an article published in the journal Astrobiology. “Are we alone in the universe?” is the provocative question that inspires the scientific search for life beyond Earth. Today, we know definitively of only one planet that hosts life, and that is Earth. How can we find life, and in particular, intelligent life beyond our world?

Advances in planetary and space sciences, astrobiology, and life and cognitive sciences, combined with developments in communication theory, binaural computing, machine learning, and big data analysis, create new opportunities to explore the probabilistic nature of alien life. Brought together in a multidisciplinary approach, they have the potential to support an integrated and expanded Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), a search that includes looking for life as we do not know it. This approach will augment the odds of detecting a signal by broadening our understanding of the evolutionary and systemic components in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI), provide more targets for radio and optical SETI, and identify new ways of decoding and coding messages using universal markers.

The Kepler mission and ground-based observatories have revealed thousands of exoplanets in small sectors of our galaxy alone, thus providing powerful evidence that our solar system is not an exception but simply one out of countless others in the Universe. What remains unanswered, however, is whether life—simple or complex—exists beyond Earth.


For nearly 20 years, astrobiology has brought a multidisciplinary vision to this quest through three fundamental science questions: (1) How does life begin and evolve? (2) Does life exist elsewhere in the Universe? (3) What is the future of life on Earth and beyond? In the 2008 version of its roadmap, astrobiology proposed a global approach to these questions through a broad research program with the goals to understand the formation and evolution of habitable planets, to explore and characterize the evolution of planetary environments favorable to life's development in the Solar System and beyond, and to find methods to detect the signatures of life on early Earth and other worlds.

Thirty-five years before the creation of astrobiology, a very similar intellectual approach had been articulated by Frank Drake in the “Drake equation” but with a different intent. The Drake equation provided a probabilistic model to estimate the number of actively communicating extraterrestrial civilizations in the Milky Way, and was formulated around a technological imperative (radio astronomy) and a philosophical question: Are we alone?

Decades of perspective on both astrobiology and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) show how the former has blossomed into a dynamic and self-regenerating field that continues to create new research areas with time, whereas funding struggles (Garber, 1999) have left the latter starved of young researchers and in search of both a long-term vision and a development program. A more foundational reason may be that, from the outset, SETI is an all-or-nothing venture where finding a signal would be a world-changing discovery, while astrobiology is associated with related fields of inquiry in which incremental progress is always being made.



Yet in the same way astrobiology approaches the understanding of life in the Universe, SETI carries in its quest fundamental and unique questions that are central to the understanding of who, what, and where intelligent life is, and how to find it. While Are we alone? Is their philosophical and popular expression, their scientific formulation can be expressed in these questions: How abundant and diverse is intelligent life in the Universe? How does intelligent life communicate? How can we detect it? If understanding life is the thread woven through the astrobiology roadmap, understanding how intelligent life interacts with its environment and communicates information is central to SETI.

Source: SETI Institute

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The Music in the Universe

Is the Universe behaving like an instrument? Does a connection exist between jazz and physics?

In a recent book published by Dr. Stephon Alexander, he manifests that “the structure of the universe is a result of a pattern of vibration, and the universe is behaving like an instrument”. Dr. Alexander explores the modern cosmology, presenting a compelling case for vibration and resonance being at the heart of the physical structure we find around us, from the smallest particle of matter to the largest cluster of galaxies.

A professor of physics at Dartmouth College and a lifelong student of jazz, Dr. Alexander has taken on “the challenge to find an isomorphism between jazz and cosmology”. Establishing this analogy is a fascinating prospect and a tall order. Although Dr. Alexander doesn’t succeed in uncovering a profound connection between jazz and physics, or proving that they share a common shape, his report on the state of research into the structure and history of the universe — his own academic field — makes for compelling reading, as does his life story.

The son of working-class immigrants to New York from Trinidad, he was considered “slow” as a child. However, he steadfastly became glued to an inspiration sparked during a school trip to the American Museum of Natural History as an 8-year-old. There he saw a photograph of Albert Einstein posing in front of a wall of equations. Against considerable odds, he went on to get a Ph.D. in physics, and he says he was one of only three black doctoral students in physics at the time in the United States. Eventually, Dr. Alexander received tenure at Dartmouth as an associate professor of physics and astronomy. While at Dartmouth , he pursued his passion for jazz saxophone and improvisation.



Some of Dr. Alexander’s analogies to jazz feel natural. In a chapter on quantum physics, he likens the physicist Richard Feynman’s conception of the motion of a quantum particle to the way a jazz improviser may aim for a target note during a solo. In both instances, he says, all possible paths to the destination are considered before one is settled on. Later, at a jazz club, the saxophonist Mark Turner says to Dr. Alexander, “When I’m in the middle of a solo, whenever I am most certain of the next note I have to play, the more possibilities open up for the notes that follow.” This is analogous in Dr. Alexander’s eyes to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which states that the more one knows about the position of a quantum particle, the less one can know about where it’s going.

“Science does not need mysticism and mysticism does not need science, but man needs both,” Fritjof Capra wrote in his 1975 best seller, “The Tao of Physics,” which explores parallels between quantum physics and Eastern mysticism. The question that can be asked of that book and “The Jazz of Physics” is whether each subject really illuminates the other, and whether the analogy adds up to more than the sum of its parts.

Do we understand Feynman diagrams or the Uncertainty Principle any better for having seen them through the lens of improvisation? Do we better understand jazz for having compared it to quantum physics? Not really. And these are the analogies that work best. Many others feel strained, like Dr. Alexander’s idea that John Coltrane “incredibly, correctly realized that cosmic expansion is a form of antigravity,” which rests on the titles that Coltrane chose for his late-period albums, among them “Cosmic Music” and “Stellar Regions.”



Deep down, the book feels like an attempt by Dr. Alexander to understand how his passions for physics and jazz can coexist so intensely. It also elucidates that thinking deeply about music has helped him to think freely, and led him to some of his best academic research. But the connection is above all personal.

Dr. Alexander valiantly if laboriously takes us through the full history of physics, from Pythagoras to Einstein. But it is in the later chapters investigating the forefront of cosmological inquiry that his book really comes to life, even if this has little to do with jazz. Still, you are left with the feeling of having had some basic concepts overexplained while some tantalizing, speculative ones — like the left- or right-handed spin of gravitational waves, which he says interact with matter and antimatter differently and could explain the emergence of matter in the early universe — are merely touched on.

The art of analogy is a difficult one, especially when it’s being sustained for the duration of a book. In juggling, if the path of each ball from the throw to the catch is just right, the crossing of the balls in the air can create magic. But fumble one and the whole performance suffers. Dr. Alexander fumbles to often here because his writing about music is plagued by factual errors. A few examples: When a string tuned to the note C “is divided into one quarter of its length, we get an F note,” he writes, when in fact we would get a C, two octaves up.

Subsequently, in an analysis of a mandala drawn by Coltrane for Yusef Lateef, he says that in a reading of the diagram, “we get C, C-sharp, E, F and F-sharp, which is an all-interval tetrachord,” when a tetrachord has only four notes, and the all-interval tetrachord, which is asymmetric, couldn’t logically be outlined in Coltrane’s entirely symmetric drawing. A diagram purporting to show the “fivefold symmetry of the C major pentatonic scale” incorrectly implies that the interval between C and G is the same as that between E and C.



Considering Dr. Alexander’s scientific bent, it’s surprising that it is in the technical aspects of music that he falters. His more poetic ideas about music can be powerful, like his speculation “that the reason why music has the ability to move us so deeply is that it is an auditory allusion to our basic connection to the universe.” This not only feels true; it is what musicians live for.

Source: DAN TEPFER, The New York Time

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