2,029 families and 9,110 people are being moved to install FAST: the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope. The telescope is being installed in Guizhou, one of China's poorest provinces.
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When NASA wants to control the Mars Rover, they boot up a video game that combines high-tech software, virtual reality, and 3D glasses.
This way, researchers can "walk" on Mars through virtual reality images, marking the waypoints of their path, and uploading the maps they make.
From there, the Mars Curiosity rover drives, takes photos, and picks up surface samples — essentially reproducing the driver's virtual movements on the real-life surface of Mars.
The technology is a solution to NASA's problem of distance. Mars is more than 100 miles away, so it takes around 30 minutes for the signals to get there and back to Earth. Plotting the Rover's course with virtual reality prevents a $2.5 billion device from falling off an unseen ledge.
During a recent tour of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, spokesperson Mark Razze explained more on how the entire process works.
It starts with JPL's Deep Space Network, a platform of antennas it has stationed in Goldstone, California, Madrid, Spain, and Canberra, Australia. Placing dishes around the Earth allows scientists to "talk" with its robotic spacecraft 24 hours a day.
They developed the Rover Sequencing and Visualization Program (RSVP) for the first rover sent to Mars in 1997, giving drivers an incredibly detailed 3D map of the Martian surface. All this imagery produces a spitting image of what an astronaut would see if he or she were standing on Mars.
The maps have only gotten better, especially with the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft sending back plenty of photos.
For the most part, all drivers have to do is look around and plan a route.
While Curiosity probably won't be driving off any cliffs, it could still get stuck or run into some rocks the driver didn't see in the virtual world. Fortunately, Razze says it has hazard avoidance software built in.
This short video explains the concept a little further:
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For the first time, astronomers have detected the atmospheric makeup of a 'super-Earth' – the most common type of planet in our galaxy.
Found in other solar systems, these exoplanets have a mass larger than Earth's, but are significantly smaller than the gas giants found in our Solar System, such as Jupiter and Saturn.
The super-Earth in question is called 55 Cancri e, which orbits the star 55 Cancri, located some 40 light-years away from Earth.
55 Cancri e qualifies as a super-Earth with a mass of about 8 Earth-masses, and thanks to a new study, we now know that its atmosphere contains hydrogen and helium, but no water vapor.
In itself, those elements might not sound like a huge discovery, but when you consider that astronomers have been able to gauge the atmospheric composition of a planet that's a staggering 40 light-years away, it's pretty break-taking.
To put it in perspective, 1 light-year is more than 9 trillion kilometers (or about 6 trillion miles), so we're talking very, very far away.
To analyze 55 Cancri e's atmosphere, a team of scientists led by the University College London (UCL) in the UK used data gathered with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, and its Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3), which measures ultraviolet and visible light (UVIS) and near infrared (NIR) light.
"This is a very exciting result because it's the first time that we have been able to find the spectral fingerprints that show the gases present in the atmosphere of a super-Earth,"said one of the researchers, Angelos Tsiaras. "The observations of 55 Cancri e's atmosphere suggest that the planet has managed to cling on to a significant amount of hydrogen and helium from the nebula from which it originally formed."
While the WFC3 instrument has been used previously to probe the atmosphere of other super-Earths, it's never found any of these spectral fingerprints, which is what makes the discovery of hydrogen and helium in 55 Cancri e so exciting.
"This result gives a first insight into the atmosphere of a super-Earth,"said one of the team, Giovanna Tinetti. "We now have clues as to what the planet is currently like and how it might have formed and evolved, and this has important implications for 55 Cancri e and other super-Earths."
In addition to the distinction of being the first super-Earth with an atmosphere detected by humans, what makes 55 Cancri e so remarkable is its extreme proximity to its parent star. As implied by the artist's impression of the exoplanet above, this tight orbit means that a whole year on 55 Cancri e lasts for only 18 hours, and surface temperatures are thought to get as high as 2,000 degrees Celsius (3,632 degrees Fahrenheit).
But that's not the only reason to cross this super-Earth off your travel itinerary. Hints of hydrogen cyanide in the Hubble data suggest what could be a carbon-rich atmosphere, and one highly toxic to humans.
"If the presence of hydrogen cyanide and other molecules is confirmed in a few years time by the next generation of infrared telescopes, it would support the theory that this planet is indeed carbon rich and a very exotic place,"said researcher Jonathan Tennyson. "Although hydrogen cyanide, or prussic acid, is highly poisonous, so it is perhaps not a planet I would like to live on!"
The findings will be published in the Astrophysical Journal.
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NOW WATCH: Scientists just discovered 883 galaxies that have been hiding in plain sight
You may have heard that physicists recently made an announcement that could prove to be the most important discovery of the century: the first detection of gravitational waves generated from two colliding black holes.
There's little doubt as to whether the Norwegian Nobel Committee— who is responsible for nominating some of the most prestigious prizes in science — will recognize the achievement with a Nobel Prize in Physics.
The bigger questions are when will the committee award the prize and to whom? After all, the team who made the discovery is a giant international collaboration of more than 1,000 people, but the Nobel Prize in Physics is only awarded to a maximum of three individuals each year.
After talking with a few experts, Business Insider learned of three front-runners for the prize. There could also be an impending deadline that the Nobel committee should not overlook regarding the health of one of the likely candidates.
On Feb. 11, physicists with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) broadcasted live to the world that they had detected gravitational waves for the first time, which opens a new way to study the universe.
"I think that most of the community would agree that the three pioneers of what became LIGO would be Rainer Weiss, Kip Thorne, and Ronald Drever," the head of one of LIGO's observatories in Hanford, Washington, Fred Raab, told Business Insider.
Weiss— who is a professor at MIT's Department of Physics — and Drever — now retired — are both experimentalists who made significant contributions to the concept, design, funding, and eventual construction of LIGO.
On the other hand, Thorne is a theorist, and the Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics at CalTech. Together with his students, Thorne conducted much of the work on what the detection of a gravitational wave would actually look like and how to identify that signal within the data.
In the end, a detection was only possible with the seamless collaboration between experimentalists, who conduct the experiments, and theorists, who envision what should come out of those experiments.
The director of the Center for Gravitational Wave Astronomy, Mario Diaz, agrees with Raab that these three brilliant minds are the clear favorites for a Nobel Prize. There's just one problem:
"The big problem with Ronald Drever is that he's very ill," Diaz said. "Unfortunately his current illness prevents him from been able to enjoy these results.”
Drever, age 85, suffers from dementia and is currently living in a care home in Scotland, his home country. If he is to be awarded for his pivotal contributions, the Nobel committee needs to act sooner and not later — because after these three front runners, it could be difficult to choose who is more deserving of the prize compared to others.
"Once you go past those three, it gets very very hard," Raab said. "There were a lot of people who made seminal contributions. This is the whole problem with picking individuals, at least in this case."
Also, Raab asks another important question that others have echoed in recent years: Why does the Nobel Prize Committee continue to only recognize individuals for achievements that cost the efforts of hundreds, or even thousands, of people?
The 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics, for example, was awarded to two individuals who pioneered the research into what led to the 2012 discovery of a Higgs boson. But the collaborative team actually responsible for the discovery consisted of over 5,000 researchers.
In this case, the LIGO collaboration is no different, according to astrophysicist David Tsang, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Maryland who focuses on gravitational waves and was not part of the LIGO collaboration. Tsang is also a regular member on the popular podcast "The Titanium Physicists Podcast."
"It's easily worth the Nobel Prize. The only question really, I think, is whether or not the Nobel Committee will change their long standing tradition of only granting to three individuals and see if they will open it to a collaboration," Tsang told Business Insider. "I doubt they will, but I think it would be very appropriate."
Tsang actually wagered, and lost, a bottle of wine by betting that LIGO's detection was merely one of the regular fake injections to test the machinery, and not the real deal.
"While Rainer Weiss, Kip Thorne, and Ronald Drever certainly started and led the collaboration in the early days, it quickly got out of their hands, alone, and the amount of people that worked on LIGO is staggering."
Whether or not this trio will win a Nobel Prize in Physics this year, next year, or ten years from now is unclear.
The deadline for this year's submissions was Feb. 1. And since the LIGO collaboration did not publish the results of their discovery until Feb. 11, they might have missed their chance for the 2016 award, Raab said.
In the end, however, it's not about receiving a Nobel, Raab said.
"The award of the Nobel Prize is kind of a secondary thing," he said. "Their [he means whomever is awarded] satisfaction that they get is not from the prize. The satisfaction they get is from having done something that history will show is a momentous discovery. They really have opened something that people will remember 100 years from now as one of the major accomplishments in science."
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NOW WATCH: Scientists just discovered 883 galaxies that have been hiding in plain sight
In case you missed it, we heard the universe wiggle last week.
Einstein predicted back in 1916 that it's possible for anything with mass to ripple spacetime — basically, expand and relax like a speedboat's wake as it accelerates across a lake. He called these ripples "gravitational waves" and when the most precise measurement ever taken by human beings sensed them, it was a huge freaking deal.
But all this kerfuffle in the astrophysics world got Scott Aaronson, a theoretical computer scientist at MIT, wondering: What would it take to actually feel a gravitational wave?
Aaronson posted some back-of-the-envelope calculations on his blog, Shtetl Optimized, which is very popular, or at least in two-advanced-degrees-and-counting corners of the internet.
Every object with mass creates gravitational waves, but they are so faint (or, as Aaronson puts it, the universe's Sleep Number is so high) that most are imperceptible from any distance. It took a collision of two black holes 1.3 billion light years away to trip the world's most sensitive sensor.
Aaronson used that collision as a benchmark:
By now, we all know some of the basic parameters here: a merger of two black holes, ~1.3 billion light-years away, weighing ~36 and ~29 solar masses respectively, which (when they merged) gave off 3 solar masses’ worth of energy in the form of gravitational waves—in those brief 0.2 seconds, radiating more watts of power than all the stars in the observable universe combined. By the time the waves reached earth, they were only stretching and compressing space by 1 part in 4×1021—thus, changing the lengths of the 4-kilometer arms of LIGO by 10-18 meters (1/1000 the diameter of a proton). But this was detected, in possibly the highest-precision measurement ever made.
In other words, the enormous power of two black holes colliding is undetectable in your body from over a billion light years away.
But what about, say, the distance from the Earth to the Sun?
It turns out gravitational waves dissipate very fast, at a rate proportional to their distance from their source. (You can find the technical details here if you're curious and physics-literate.)
So, if you were as far from the black hole collision as you are right now from the sun, Aaronson found the gravitational waves would distort your body by about 50 nanometers — nowhere near enough to feel. (He repeatedly notes these calculations are very rough.)
Next he checked for a distance of 3,000 miles, or about how far New York City is from Los Angeles. That would distort your body by about a millimeter. "Would you feel that?" he writes. "Not sure."
There wouldn't be even a centimeter of distortion in your body until you were 300 miles away — at which point you'd certainly have other problems. Like being ripped to shreds by the gravity of two merging black holes.
Here's Aaronson's takeaway from all of this:
People often say that the message of general relativity is that matter bends spacetime “as if it were a mattress.” But they should add that the reason it took so long for humans to notice this, is that it’s a really friggin’ firm mattress, one that you need to bounce up and down on unbelievably hard before it quivers, and would probably never want to sleep on.
He ends his take by reiterating that he's not an astrophysicist (author's note: he is very, very smart), and inviting more knowledgeable scientists to critique his calculations.
"Public humiliation, I’ve found, is a very fast and effective way to learn an unfamiliar field."
You can find Aaronson's original blog post here.
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NOW WATCH: Here's what gravitational waves are and why they matter
It's a bold new era in science.
Physicists have finally detected ripples in the fabric of spacetime, called gravitational waves, which Albert Einstein predicted the existence of 100 years ago.
The waves came from two black holes colliding together about 1.3 billion light-years from Earth, and a giant experiment called LIGO detected them.
But that's just the first of many more discoveries that gravitational waves could bring us.
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NOW WATCH: Watch the groundbreaking announcement confirming Albert Einstein's wildest prediction
When I was young, the only planets we knew about were the ones in our own solar system.
Astronomers presumed that many of the other stars in the night sky had planets too, but this was sheer speculation.
We could never know for sure, the thinking went, because such planets were ridiculously small and faint. To ever see or study them seemed a complete impossibility.
“Extrasolar planets,” or “exoplanets,” were a staple of science fiction, but not of professional astrophysics.
It’s hard to believe that there was once such a simple time.
The first definitive detection of an exoplanet was in 1991, identified by the tiny wobbles experienced by the parent star as its exoplanet swung around it.
Since then, the field has exploded.
There are now around 1,600 confirmed exoplanets, with almost 4,000 other known candidates. There are exoplanets smaller than Mercury, and others many times bigger than Jupiter. Their orbits around their parent stars range from a few hours to hundreds of years.
And the ones we know about are just a tiny fraction of the approximately 100 billion exoplanets we now believe are spread throughout our Milky Way galaxy.
But while the golden age of exoplanets has barely begun, an exciting additional chapter is also taking shape: the hunt for exomoons.
An exomoon is a moon orbiting a planet, which in turn is orbiting another star.
You may not have ever heard of exomoons before now. But if you’re a fan of films such as “Avatar,” “Return of the Jedi” or “Prometheus,” this should be familiar territory: in all three cases, most of the action takes place on an exomoon.
But what about real life? How many exomoons do we know of? At the moment, zero.
But the race is on to find the real-life analogs of Endor and Pandora.
You might think searching for tiny rocks orbiting distant planets around faint stars hundreds or thousands of light years away is the ultimate example of an obscure academic pursuit. But exomoons are poised to become a big deal.
The whole reason exoplanets are exciting is that they’re a path to answering one of the grandest questions of all: “Are we alone?” As we find more and more exoplanets, we eagerly ask whether life could exist there, and whether this planet is anything like Earth. However, so far we’ve yet to find an exact match to Earth, nor can we yet really know for sure whether any exoplanet, Earth-like or otherwise, hosts life.
There are several reasons why exomoons, these little distant worlds, may be the key to finding life elsewhere in the universe.
First, there’s the stark reality that life on Earth may not have happened at all without the starring role played by our own moon.
The Earth’s axis is tilted by 23.5 degrees relative to its motion around the sun. This tilt gives us seasons, and because this tilt is relatively small, seasons on Earth are mild: most places never get impossibly hot or unbearably cold. One thing that has been crucial for life is that this tilt has stayed the same for very long periods: for millions of years, the angle of tilt has varied by only a couple of degrees.
What has kept the Earth so steady? The gravity of our moon.
In contrast, Mars only has two tiny moons, which have negligible gravity. Without a stabilizing influence, Mars has gradually tumbled back and forth, its tilt ranging between 0 and 60 degrees over millions of years. Extreme changes in climate have resulted. Any Martian life that ever existed would have found the need to continually adapt very challenging.
Without our moon, the Earth, too, would likely have been subject to chaotic climate conditions, rather than the relative certainty of the seasons that stretches back deep into the fossil record.
The gravity of the moon also produces the Earth’s tides. Billions of years ago, the ebb and flow of the oceans produced an alternating cycle of high and low salt content on ancient rocky shores. This recurring cycle could have enabled the unique chemical processes needed to generate the first DNA-like molecules.
Meanwhile, we shouldn’t be discouraged by the fact that most exoplanets found so far are bloated gaseous beasts, with hostile environments unlikely to support life as we know it. What we don’t know yet, crucially, is whether these exoplanets have moons. This prospect is exciting, because exomoons are expected to be smaller rocky or icy bodies, possibly hosting oceans and atmospheres.
This is hardly speculation: Titan (a moon of Saturn) has a thick atmosphere even denser than Earth’s, while underground oceans are thought to exist on Enceladus (another moon of Saturn) and on Europa and Ganymede (both moons of Jupiter). Thus, if there is any other life out there somewhere, it may well not be found on a distant planet, but on a distant moon.
The hunt is on. While exomoons are too faint to see directly, astronomers are deploying ingenious indirect techniques in their searches. Those moons are assuredly out there by the billions – and soon we will find them. It won’t be too much longer before these tiny worlds help us answer huge questions.
Bryan Gaensler, Director, Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics, University of Toronto. This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
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NOW WATCH: Scientists just discovered 883 galaxies that have been hiding in plain sight
Ever wonder why no one can legally own the Moon? Or why it's illegal to test nuclear weapons in space? It's all because of a series of space laws that began with the Outer Space Treaty back in 1967.
Since then, the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs has continued to lay down the law for humanity's final frontier, ensuring it remains a peaceful regime for intrepid explorers — and not space outlaws.
Here are the five primary agreements and some of the regulations that go with them:
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NOW WATCH: Scientists just discovered 883 galaxies that have been hiding in plain sight
Last week marked the historic announcement of the first detection of gravitational waves.
A big press conference was held, and physicists around the world celebrated.
The discovery was even compared to Galileo looking through a telescope for the first time.
So why all the fanfare? Why are gravitational waves such a huge deal?
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Astronomers observe the universe across the electromagnetic spectrum, from X-ray and ultraviolet through optical and down to radio frequencies. Emission in each of these frequency ranges provides different information and thus a different perspective on our astronomical points of interest.
For example, we know that there are millions of stars clustered toward the center of our Galaxy which emit mostly at optical wavelengths, but there is also a lot of dust near the Galactic center as well. So to study those dust-enshrouded stars, astronomers must observe them at either infrared wavelengths (where the dust emits) or radio wavelengths (which can penetrate through the dust more effectively than shorter optical wavelengths). All of these wavelengths offer a unique perspective on the universe, but they are all the same kind of light, electromagnetic radiation, and so behave in similar, understood ways.
Gravitational waves are an entirely new phenomenon different from anything on the electromagnetic spectrum. In 1915, Albert Einstein proposed a radically different way of looking at gravity with his theory of general relativity. Rather than thinking of gravity as a force pushing and pulling massive objects in different directions, he described gravity as being manifested in a curvature of spacetime. In other words, the space (and time) around a massive object is curved, which then dictates how passing objects can move through that space.
This may sound crazy, but we can actually observe many of the effects predicted by Einstein’s theory. For example, general relativity informs us that time passes more slowly by an ever so small margin down here on Earth than it does for GPS satellites in orbit, an effect known as time dilation, a result of the curvature of spacetime. Without adjusting for this small time difference in our satellite communications, we would never get to where we are trying to go.
A consequence of the general relativity framework is that when objects accelerate through this warping of spacetime, they produce ripples known as gravitational waves. These waves propagate through space, compressing it in one direction and stretching it in another.
The frequencies predicted for these fluctuations are within the human hearing range. We can hear gravitational waves and already scientists and artists have teamed up to explore other artistic interpretations of their sound.
So why did it take 100 years to detect them? These ripples are tiny, on order of a thousandth of the size of a proton nucleus, so we need a pretty violent event to occur to produce enough of them for us to detect. We also need, of course, a very sensitive detector.
To detect such tiny distortions in spacetime, physicists use a technique called laser interferometry. A focused beam of light is sent in different directions to bounce back and forth between two sets of mirrors before being sent to a detector. If a gravitational wave passes by the interferometer during all of this bouncing, the distance between the mirrors will change ever so slightly and this change will translate to a difference in the two signals as measured by the detector.
Not only is the signal from gravitational waves incredibly weak, there is also a significant amount of competing noise attempting to drown it out. To increase the detectability of such a signal against the background noise, the path the laser travels must be a long one. The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), the instrument that made the historic detection, is four kilometers long on each side. The detectors are further suspended in the air in hopes of isolating the slightly faster wiggles due to gravitational waves from terrestrial interference.
To further fight back against false detections, LIGO has not one but two detectors: one in Hanford, Washington and the other in Livingston, Louisiana. Detecting the same signal at both, widely separated locations would mean that signal was likely not a local one. And that is exactly what happened on September 14, 2015—a signal with the precise characteristics predicted for gravitational waves was observed at both detectors only milliseconds apart.
Famous theoretical physicist and author Kip Thorne described the event that produced the detected gravitational waves as a "violent storm in the fabric of space and time".
Around 1.3 billion years ago, when multicellular life was just beginning here on Earth, two black holes orbiting each other began to close in on one another. As these dense objects got closer, they began to accelerate to nearly half the speed of light in the presence of their shared strong gravitational field - the perfect mix for producing gravitational waves.
From fitting the waveform of the gravitational wave detection and comparing it to simulations done with a supercomputer, astronomers can tell that the two black holes were originally 29 and 36 times the mass of our Sun. They merged to form a 62 solar mass black hole which means that an amount three times the mass of our Sun was emitted away as energy in the form of gravitational waves, all in the 20 milliseconds it took for the collision to happen! That’s a power output of 50 times greater than all of the power put out by all of the stars in the universe put together.
Before this first detection, astronomers were not even sure that mergers between black holes existed, and now the details of this particular event are known to a high degree of certainty.
Right now, Russia is making plans to launch missiles into space. The target: A large asteroid named 99942 Apophis, which is scheduled to pass close to — but not impact— Earth in the years 2029, 2036, and 2068.
The idea is to eventually build a network of missiles that could destroy — at a moment's notice — oncoming asteroids or comets between 65 to 165 feet wide, reported the Russian state-owned news agency TASS.
While a space rock 165 feet across wouldn't be enough to wipe out all life on Earth, it could cause catastrophic damage if it were to land in a populated city.
The Chelyabinsk meteor, for example, that exploded over Russia in 2013 was about 65 feet wide. The explosion and resulting shockwave sent 1,500 people to the hospital and damaged 7,200 buildings across six cities.
What's so scary about the Chelyabinsk meteor is that — despite a growing interest in detecting and cataloging life-threatening space rocks — no one knew it was coming until the moment the fireball burst into view:
But what if Russia had known the meteor was going to strike? There's a likely chance that they couldn't have done anything to stop it.
"Most rockets work on boiling fuel. Their fueling begins 10 days before the launch and, therefore, they are unfit for destroying meteorites similar to the Chelyabinsk meteorite in diameter, which are detected several hours before coming close to the Earth," Sabit Saitgarayev, the leading researcher at Makeyev Rocket Design Bureau, told TASS.
To prevent a future event similar to the Chelyabinsk meteor, Saitgarayev wants to use Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs), which stand fueled and ready to fire at a moment's notice.
ICBMs are the type of missiles that the US and USSR had pointed toward each other during the Cold War. While ICBMs are designed to carry nuclear warheads, they can also theoretically launch chemical or biological weapons.
Saitgarayev did not specify what type of explosive device the missiles would launch with them into space — whether it be a nuclear device or something else.
Before Russia can start firing their ICBMs at asteroids and comets, however, Saitgarayev says that the missiles need an upgrade, which TASS reports will cost "several million US dollars and the authorities’ permission."
After all, under the regulations set by the Outer Space Treaty, it's illegal to detonate weapons in space — for better or worse.
More unsettling, is that Russia is asking for millions of dollars for a project that has little immediate use. Impacts like that Chelyabinsk meteor are rare — and impacts from even larger objects, like 165 feet across, are extremely rare.
The last time a meteor the size of Chelyabinsk struck Earth was in 1908. At that rate, we shouldn't expect to see another event like this until the next century. Russia might be better off funding its struggling space program than investing in a missile system that could be well out of date by the time it's ready for use.
Plus, firing explosives at an asteroid isn't the best idea for preventing an impact:
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NOW WATCH: This is why no one can legally own the Moon
If you thought regular black holes were about as weird and mysterious as space gets, think again, because for the first time, physicists have successfully simulated what would happen to black holes in a five-dimensional world, and the way they behave could threaten our fundamental understanding of how the Universe works.
The simulation has suggested that if our Universe is made up of five or more dimensions — something that scientists have struggled to confirm or disprove — Einstein's general theory of relativity, the foundation of modern physics, would be wrong.
In other words, five-dimensional black holes would contain gravity so intense, the laws of physics as we know them would fall apart.
There's a lot to wrap your head around here, so let's start with the black holes themselves.
In a five-dimensional universe, physicists have hypothesized that black holes are more like very thin rings rather than holes, and as they evolve, they can give rise to a series of 'bulges' that become thinner and thinner over time, and eventually break off to form mini black holes elsewhere.
These ring-shaped black holes (or 'black rings') were first proposed in 2002, but until now, no one’s been able to successfully simulate their evolution. This has been made possible thanks to the COSMOS supercomputer at the University of Cambridge in the UK - the largest shared-memory computer in Europe that can perform 38.6 trillion calculations per second.
The problem with five-dimensional black holes is that they’re thought to consist of 'ultragravity rings', where gravity is so intense, it gives rise to a state known as naked singularity. Naked singularity is an event so strange, no one really knows what would occur, except that the laws of general relativity would no longer apply.
Einstein’s general theory of relativity is based on how we think gravity governs the behavior of the Universe. We know that matter in the Universe warps the surrounding fabric of spacetime, and this warping effect is what we refer to as gravity. Since it was first proposed 100 years ago, general relativity has passed every test - everything we observe in the Universe follows its stipulations, but singularity can pose some problems.
In a four-dimensional universe (where the fourth dimension is time), singularity is thought to be the point of a black hole where gravity is at its most intense - the center - and this is surrounded by the event horizon at the black hole's edge.
"As long as singularities stay hidden behind an event horizon, they do not cause trouble and general relativity holds - the 'cosmic censorship conjecture' says that this is always the case,"says theoretical physicist Markus Kunesch from the University of Cambridge. "As long as the cosmic censorship conjecture is valid, we can safely predict the future outside of black holes."
But what if singularity could exist outside a black hole's event horizon? When Physicists have hypothesized that in five or more dimensions, if an object that has collapsed to an infinite density - singularity - is not bound by an event horizon, it becomes naked singularity, and things would get so crazy in and around that object, we'd need to completely rethink our understanding of how physics works. The whole thing just makes me really nervous.
"If naked singularities exist, general relativity breaks down,"said one of the team, Saran Tunyasuvunakool. "And if general relativity breaks down, it would throw everything upside down, because it would no longer have any predictive power - it could no longer be considered as a standalone theory to explain the Universe."
If our Universe only has four dimensions, everything is cool, and ring-shaped black holes and naked singularity are not a thing. But physicists have proposed that our Universe could be made up of as many as 11 dimensions. The problem is that because humans can only perceive three, the only way we can possibly confirm the existence of more dimensions is through high-energy experiments such as the Large Hadron Collider.
Kunesch and his team say they've just about hit the limits of what their supercomputer can simulate, but would like to figure out what it is about four-dimensional universes that make naked singularity impossible, and general relativity correct. "If cosmic censorship doesn't hold in higher dimensions, then maybe we need to look at what's so special about a four-dimensional universe that means it does hold," says Tunyasuvunakool.
The study has been published in Physical Review Letters, and for more on those 11 dimensions, here's theoretical physicist, Michio Kaku:
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NOW WATCH: A nearby black hole is doing something unexpected in the midst of a cataclysmic galaxy collision
Aliens could be out there. We simply don't know it yet.
Part of the reason we're still pretty clueless is because our technology is still in its infancy.
But scientists and engineers are rapidly ramping up the tools we'll need to answer one of humanity's most compelling questions: Are we alone?
Here are six ways scientists plan to delve into this mystery in the recent and coming years.
LEARN MORE: The 12 most compelling scientific findings that suggest aliens are real
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Read more about why we should send humans to Mars here.
Learn more about NASA's upcoming mission to Europa here.
Read about what the former director of the Center for SETI Research at the SETI Institute, Jill Tarter thinks about aliens here.
CSA astronaut Chris Hadfield explains the reason why food has little to no taste initially in space. Hadfield returned to Earth in May 2013.
Produced by Emmanuel Ocbazghi
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From the man in the moon to Greek gods among the stars, humans have long been discovering familiar forms in the heavens.
There's a word for this phenomenon of seeing patterns that don't exist: pareidolia. And it's all psychological.
While this mind trick may have served some evolutionary purpose, like helping us recognize mountain lions in the bush, it also leads to some pretty crazy interpretations.
Here, we offer some of the best examples of pareidolia with help from humanity's most powerful telescopes.
CHECK OUT: Something strange happens in our brains when we see the man in the Moon
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When Jill Tarter, co-founder of the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute, devoted her life to the search for aliens in the early '80s, she was part of a hopeful minority amid a collective of skeptics.
As the years pressed on, however, scientists made two key discoveries that changed everything:
"There have been two phenomenal game changers during my career," Tarter told Business Insider. "[The discovery of] extremophiles and exoplanets. And they both inspired to make the universe appear, perhaps, more bio-friendly than when I was a graduate student."
Tarter is one of the world's leading experts on the search for ET, and while you might not know her by name, she has a rather large reputation. Namely, her work throughout the '80s and '90s as the director of the Center for SETI Research caught the attention of the late astronomer Carl Sagan, who drew strongly from Tarter's life for the main character in his sci-fi book "Contact." The book was later adapted into the 1997 film where actress Jodie Foster basically plays Tarter.
"Extremophiles and exoplanets make this question — 'Is there life, and indeed, is there intelligent life out there?' — far more possible, and exciting, and timely," she said.
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Extremophiles are a class of bacteria that — as their name implies — survive under extreme environments, such as hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the Pacific.
Down there, no sunlight penetrates and pressures swell to over 200 times greater than on the surface.
Adding to that, vents spew intoxicating, sulfurous black smoke into broiling waters that are between 660 to 750 degrees Fahrenheit.
Despite these horrendous conditions, hydrothermal vents host entire ecosystems of extremophiles, some of which are super-simple life-forms, which some scientists suspect could be close descendants of the first single-celled life on Earth, and thus, where life began.
"Microbes are now getting the respect they deserve," Tarter said. "Evolution has allowed them to make themselves adapt to the most amazing conditions."
While these conditions are abnormal by Earth's standards, planetary scientists have found evidence to suggest that hydrothermal vents are common within our solar system.
In 2015, for example, scientists announced that they had detected sulfur-rich compounds in Saturn's E rings. This ring is special because it's made up of material spat out by Saturn's tiny, water-rich moon, Enceladus.
The amount and type of compounds they found convinced scientists that there's likely a collection of these potentially life-spawning hydrothermal vents at the bottoms of Enceladus' underground ocean.
Could there be life down there? That is a serious question that planetary scientists and astrobiologists are considering — something they would have never done 30 years ago.
The prospect of discovering microbes on Enceladus is exciting, but it's not what gets Tarter pumped for the future — that goes to the hunt for intelligent beings, like us, living on a twin Earth floating off in space in some distant planetary system.
When the first exoplanet was discovered in 1992, it opened the door to an entire new field of astronomy. Since then, astronomers have discovered nearly 2,000 exoplanets and suspect there could be billions more.
"When I started this, we had nine planets in our solar system," Tarter said. "But we now know that there are more planets out there than stars, and this is a profound conclusion that's come only in the last decade."
At first, technology was only sensitive to spotting extremely large exoplanets — many times greater than Jupiter. But as the field grew, technology improved, making it possible to point out smaller, more Earth like planets that could have the right conditions for life to develop, thrive, and eventually evolve into intelligent beings.
Just last year, for example, scientists reported the discovery of the most Earth-like planet, located 1400 light-years from Earth. The scientists estimated that the planet had been around for about 6 billion years — plenty of time for life to arise and grow.
"There's potentially a lot more habitable real estate out there than when I began," Tarter said. "And so I think we should explore it."
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Right now, NASA's Curiosity Mars rover is doing something exciting: shoveling sand.
In December, the rover reached a new territory called Bagnold Dunes, which is rich with one of Mars' most iconic landscapes: dunes.
The Bagnold Dunes are on the northwestern flank of Mount Sharp, a mountain at the center of Gale Crater.
Now, the rover is scooping up samples of the grains and offering an unprecedented view and examination of what they're made of.
Check out some of the amazing pictures Curiosity is sending back:
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