Hard Science Fiction by Brandon Q. Morris
X(3872): A mysterious particle from the early days of the universe Astrophysics
Jan 26 2022

X(3872): A mysterious particle from the early days of the universe

At the very beginning of the universe, it was still very, very hot. At that time, matter did not consist of the particles we know today, such as protons or neutrons. If it becomes too hot for these particles (generally called hadrons), they start to boil and decompose into their components, like water becomes steam. For this it must be at least 1.7 trillion Kelvin (3 trillion Fahrenheit) hot, the so-called Hagedorn temperature. The particles which then float in the soup, the plasma, are on the one hand quarks, on the other hand gluons. The gluons are normally the…
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How a false vacuum could lead to the destruction of the universe Astrophysics
Jan 21 2022

How a false vacuum could lead to the destruction of the universe

When physicists at CERN discovered the Higgs boson in 2012 with the help of the Large Hadron Collider, they not only confirmed the last important building block of the Standard Model of elementary particle physics, which explains how particles acquire their mass (through the Higgs field, through which they move as through a viscous mass). In the process, they also measured the weight of the Higgs particle, which is 125GeV (giga-electron volts). And this is not just a number: It means that our universe is very likely in a metastable state, i.e. a state that is stable only at…
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Mimas has an ocean under the surface too Enceladus
Jan 20 2022

Mimas has an ocean under the surface too

Saturn's moons Enceladus and Titan have one, as do Jupiter's moons Ganymede, Callisto and Europa and the dwarf planet Pluto: a liquid ocean beneath their icy surfaces. Perhaps the same is true of Saturn's moon Mimas, as a Southwest Research Institute scientist suspects. Dr. Alyssa Rhoden, a specialist in the geophysics of icy satellites, actually set out to prove that Saturn's tiny, innermost moon is a frozen, inert satellite. Instead, she found evidence that the moon also has a liquid inner ocean. One of the most fundamental discoveries of the past 25 years in planetary science is that worlds…
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How many black holes are there in the universe? Astrophysics
Jan 19 2022

How many black holes are there in the universe?

A lot. If a star is heavy enough (i.e., it is still at least 2.5 solar masses after its supernova), then it continues to collapse until a black hole forms. Such stellar-sized black holes have been forming for quite some time, and more and more are forming. How many are there already? This intriguing question has been addressed by Alex Sicilia, a PhD student under the supervision of Prof. Andrea Lapi and Dr. Lumen Boco of Italy's Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati. In a first paper just published in the Astrophysical Journal, the authors studied the demography of…
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Earth cools faster Life
Jan 16 2022

Earth cools faster

Earth is hot: up to 3500 degrees Celsius (6300 °F) in the mantle, 5000 degrees Celsius (9000 °F) in the outer core and 6000 °C (10,800 °F) in the (solid) inner core. This brings us some advantages. Not only us, but all life on Earth. There is, for example, the magnetic field, which is fueled by iron currents in the outer core and protects us from cosmic radiation. But also plate tectonics, which not only gives us mountains, volcanoes and earthquakes, but has also favored the emergence of complex life forms. If it stops at some point, erosion will…
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New candidate for exomoon discovered Space
Jan 13 2022

New candidate for exomoon discovered

Almost all planets in our solar system - and even some dwarf planets - are orbited by moons. In other star systems, however, astronomers have not yet been able to definitively confirm a single moon. Is it because there are no moons there? Certainly not - our observational technology simply isn't ready yet. But an article published in Nature Astronomy now introduces at least one new candidate for an exomoon. If confirmed as an exomoon, Kepler-1708 b-i - which is 2.6 times larger than Earth - could provide a missing piece of the puzzle for understanding the formation and…
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What does a black hole look like from the inside? Astrophysics
Jan 11 2022

What does a black hole look like from the inside?

A black hole is an amazing phenomenon. It is invisible because it does not even allow light to escape. Nevertheless, it can be imaged. It concentrates mass in a very small part of space - so small that the conventional laws of physics lose their meaning. Nevertheless, physicists are getting closer and closer to its secrets. One of them is what a black hole looks like inside. Black, it is clear, is not there. Quite the opposite. Inside, all the mass and energy that cannot escape the event horizon are concentrated. If one could see in a black hole,…
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Why we don’t stick to the ground with our bellies – or why our earth is not a super earth Astrophysics
Jan 9 2022

Why we don’t stick to the ground with our bellies – or why our earth is not a super earth

During the search for exoplanets astronomers notice again and again that our solar system seems to be clearly out of the way. There are neither "hot Jupiters" (gas giants in the proximity of the central star) nor super earths (rock worlds with more than three times earth mass). At first it was thought that this could be due to the way of searching. The techniques used work particularly well with celestial bodies that are very large and orbit close to their star. In the meantime, however, the list of exoplanets is clearly in four digits, and super-Earths are still…
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