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Note: I’m posting this in Philosophy because it highlights a point I’ve long made: There is NO EMPTINESS in space, not even in black holes. They are filled with super-powerful forms of Qi that dissolve ordinary physical matter. Emptiness is a n illusory idea promoted by mis-translations or mis-interpretations of Buddhists texts (generally). The fact revealed here that Black Holes are essentially SOUND WAVES, here converted into an image of light, means that the Taoist notion of Wuji is best translated as UN-knowable, not as “emptiness” or “void”. This is a hugely important distinction in establishing teh materialiitty of both the Qi Field and its birthed form, NATURE. – Michael
First image of a Black Hole
By SETH BORENSTEIN | Wed, April 10, 2019
WASHINGTON (AP) — Scientists on Wednesday revealed the first image ever made of a black hole, depicting a fiery orange and black ring of gravity-twisted light swirling around the edge of the abyss.
Assembling data gathered by eight radio telescopes around the world, astronomers captured a picture of the hot, shadowy lip of a supermassive black hole, the light-sucking monsters of the universe theorized by Einstein more than a century ago and confirmed by observations for decades. It is along this edge that light bends around itself in a cosmic funhouse effect.
“We have seen what we thought was unseeable. We have seen and taken a picture of a black hole. Here it is,” said Sheperd Doeleman of Harvard.
University of Waterloo physicist Avery Broderick, a co-discoverer, declared: “Science fiction has become science fact.”
In fact, Jessica Dempsey, a co-discoverer and deputy director of the East Asian Observatory in Hawaii, said the fiery circle reminded her of the flaming Eye of Sauron from the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy.
Unlike smaller black holes that come from collapsed stars, supermassive black holes are mysterious in origin. Situated at the center of most galaxies, including ours, they are so dense that nothing, not even light, can escape their gravitational pull. This one’s “event horizon” — the precipice, or point of no return, where light and matter begin to fall inexorably into the hole — is as big as our entire solar system.
Three years ago, scientists using an extraordinarily sensitive observing system heard the sound of two much smaller black holes merging to create a gravitational wave, as Albert Einstein predicted. The new image, published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters and announced around the world, adds light to that sound.
Outside scientists suggested the achievement could be worthy of a Nobel Prize, just like the gravitational wave discovery.
While much of the matter around a black hole falls into a death spiral, never to be seen again, the new image captures gas and dust that is lucky to be circling just far enough to be safe and to be seen millions of years later on Earth.
Taken over four days when astronomers had “to have the perfect weather all across the world and literally all the stars had to align,” the image helps confirm Einstein’s general relativity theory, Dempsey said. Einstein a century ago even predicted the symmetrical shape that scientists just found, she said.
The measurements were taken at a wavelength the human eye cannot see, so the astronomers added color to the image, choosing gold and orange because the light is so hot.
What the image shows is gas heated to millions of degrees by the friction of ever-stronger gravity. That gravity creates a funhouse effect where you see light from both behind the black hole and behind you as the light curves and circles around the black hole itself.
The project cost $50 million to $60 million, with $26 million of that coming from the National Science Foundation.
Johns Hopkins astrophysicist Ethan Vishniac, who was not part of the discovery team but edits the journal where the research was published, pronounced the image “an amazing technical achievement” that “gives us a glimpse of gravity in its most extreme manifestation.”
He added: “Pictures from computer simulations can be very pretty, but there’s literally nothing like a picture of the real universe, however fuzzy and monochromatic.”
“It’s just seriously cool,” said John Kormendy, a University of Texas astronomer who wasn’t part of the discovery team. “To see the stuff going down the tubes, so to speak, to see it firsthand. The mystique of black holes in the community is very substantial. That mystique is going to be made more real.”
Myth says a black hole would rip you apart, but scientists said this one is so big, and thus rotates so slowly, that someone could fall into it and not be torn to pieces. But the person would never be heard from again.
Black holes are “like the walls of a prison. Once you cross it, you will never be able to get out and you will never be able to communicate,” said astronomer Avi Loeb, who is director of the Black Hole Initiative at Harvard but was not involved in the discovery.
The black hole depicted in the image is about 6 billion times the mass of our sun and is in a galaxy called M87 that is about 53 million light years from Earth. One light year is 5.9 trillion miles, or 9.5 trillion kilometers.
The telescope data was gathered by the Event Horizon Telescope two years ago. Completing the image was an enormous undertaking, involving about 200 scientists, supercomputers and hundreds of terabytes of data delivered worldwide by plane.
“We’ve been hunting this for a long time,” Dempsey said. “We’ve been getting closer and closer with better technology.”
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Travel through wormholes is possible, but slow
by American Institute of Physics
https://phys.org/news/2019-04-wormholes.html
A Harvard physicist has shown that wormholes can exist: tunnels in curved space-time, connecting two distant places, through which travel is possible.
But don’t pack your bags for a trip to other side of the galaxy yet; although it’s theoretically possible, it’s not useful for humans to travel through, said the author of the study, Daniel Jafferis, from Harvard University, written in collaboration with Ping Gao, also from Harvard and Aron Wall from Stanford University.
“It takes longer to get through these wormholes than to go directly, so they are not very useful for space travel,” Jafferis said. He will present his findings at the 2019 American Physical Society April Meeting in Denver.
Despite his pessimism for pan-galactic travel, he said that finding a way to construct a wormhole through which light could travel was a boost in the quest to develop a theory of quantum gravity.
“The real import of this work is in its relation to the black hole information problem and the connections between gravity and quantum mechanics,” Jafferis said.
The new theory was inspired when Jafferis began thinking about two black holesthat were entangled on a quantum level, as formulated in the ER=EPR correspondence by Juan Maldacena from the Institute for Advanced Study and Lenny Susskind from Stanford. Although this means the direct connection between the black holes is shorter than the wormhole connection—and therefore the wormhole travel is not a shortcut—the theory gives new insights into quantum mechanics.
“From the outside perspective, travel through the wormhole is equivalent to quantum teleportation using entangled black holes,” Jafferis said.
Jafferis based his theory on a setup first devised by Einstein and Rosen in 1935, consisting of a connection between two black holes (the term wormhole was coined in 1957). Because the wormhole is traversable, Jafferis said, it was a special case in which information could be extracted from a black hole.
“It gives a causal probe of regions that would otherwise have been behind a horizon, a window to the experience of an observer inside a spacetime, that is accessible from the outside,” said Jafferis.
To date, a major stumbling block in formulating traversable wormholes has been the need for negative energy, which seemed to be inconsistent with quantum gravity. However, Jafferis has overcome this using quantum field theory tools, calculating quantum effects similar to the Casimir effect.
“I think it will teach us deep things about the gauge/gravity correspondence, quantum gravity, and even perhaps a new way to formulate quantum mechanics,” Jafferis said.
Śūnyatā (Sanskrit: शून्यता, translit. śūnyatā; Pali: suññatā) – pronounced in English as /ʃuːnˈjɑː.tɑː/ (shoon-ya-ta), translated most often as emptiness and sometimes voidness is a Buddhist concept which has multiple meanings depending on its doctrinal context. It is either an ontological feature of reality, a meditative state, or a phenomenological analysis of experience.
-https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%9A%C5%ABnyat%C4%81-
ER=EPR is a conjecture in physics stating that entangled particles are connected by a wormhole (or Einstein–Rosen bridge) and may be a basis for unifying general relativity and quantum mechanics into a theory of everything.
-https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ER%3DEPR-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPtSBLpyBu4
The Boötes void (or The Great Nothing) is an enormous, approximately spherical region of space, containing very few galaxies. It is located in the vicinity of the constellation Boötes, hence its name. Its center is located at approximately right ascension 14h 50m and declination 46°.
-https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bo%C3%B6tes_void-
The Eridanus Supervoid is a large supervoid (an area of the universe devoid of galaxies) discovered as of 2007. At a diameter of about one billion light years it is the second largest known void, superseded only by the Giant Void in Canes Venatici. It was discovered by linking a “cold spot” in the cosmic microwave background to an absence of radio galaxies in data of the United States National Radio Astronomy Observatory’s Very Large Array Sky Survey. There is some speculation that the void may be due to quantum entanglement between our universe and another.
-https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eridanus_(constellation)#Supervoid-
Lab-based dark energy experiment narrows search options for elusive force
by Hayley Dunning, Imperial College London
https://phys.org/news/2019-08-lab-based-dark-energy-narrows-options.html
An experiment to test a popular theory of dark energy has found no evidence of new forces, placing strong constraints on related theories.
Dark energy is the name given to an unknown force that is causing the universe to expand at an accelerating rate.
Some physicists propose dark energy is a ‘fifth’ force that acts on matter, beyond the four already known—gravitational, electromagnetic, and the strong and weak nuclear forces.
However, researchers think this fifth force may be ‘screened’ or ‘hidden’ for large objects like planets or weights on Earth, making it difficult to detect.
Now, researchers at Imperial College London and the University of Nottingham have tested the possibility that this fifth force is acting on single atoms, and found no evidence for it in their most recent experiment.
This could rule out popular theories of dark energy that modify the theory of gravity, and leaves fewer places to search for the elusive fifth force.
The experiment, performed at Imperial College London and analyzed by theorists at the University of Nottingham, is reported today in Physical Review Letters.
Professor Ed Copeland, from the Centre for Astronomy & Particle Physics at the University of Nottingham, said: “This experiment, connecting atomic physics and cosmology, has allowed us to rule out a wide class of models that have been proposed to explain the nature of dark energy, and will enable us to constrain many more dark energy models.”‘
The experiment tested theories of dark energy that propose the fifth force is comparatively weaker when there is more matter around—the opposite of how gravity behaves.
This would mean it is strong in a vacuum like space, but is weak when there is lots of matter around. Therefore, experiments using two large weights would mean the force becomes too weak to measure.
The researchers instead tested a larger weight with an incredibly small weight—a single atom—where the force should have been observed if it exists.
The team used an atom interferometer to test whether there were any extra forces that could be the fifth force acting on an atom. A marble-sized sphere of metal was placed in a vacuum chamber and atoms were allowed to free-fall inside the chamber.
The theory is, if there is a fifth force acting between the sphere and atom, the atom’s path will deviate slightly as it passes by the sphere, causing a change in the path of the falling atom. However, no such force was found.
Professor Ed Hinds, from the Department of Physics at Imperial, said: “It is very exciting to be able to discover something about the evolution of the universe using a table-top experiment in a London basement.”
More information: D. O. Sabulsky et al. Experiment to Detect Dark Energy Forces Using Atom Interferometry, Physical Review Letters (2019). DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.123.061102Journal information: Physical Review Letters
Provided by Imperial College London
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