The science behind RHCs liver thread

Here’s when the universe’s first stars may have been born
Radio observations put the ‘cosmic dawn’ 180 million years after the Big Bang
BY
EMILY CONOVER
1:00PM, FEBRUARY 28, 2018

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TOTALLY LIT The first stars in the universe switched on by 180 million years after the Big Bang, radio observations indicate. Ultraviolet light from early, blueish stars (illustrated) interacted with hydrogen gas, causing it to absorb background radiation, and creating a signature scientists have now detected.

For the first time, scientists may have detected hints of the universe’s primordial sunrise, when the first twinkles of starlight appeared in the cosmos.

Stars began illuminating the heavens by about 180 million years after the universe was born, researchers report in the March 1 Nature. This “cosmic dawn” left its mark on the hydrogen gasthat surrounded the stars (SN: 6/8/02, p. 362). Now, a radio antenna has reportedly picked up that resulting signature.

“It’s a tremendously exciting result. It’s the first time we’ve possibly had a glimpse of this era of cosmic history,” says observational cosmologist H. Cynthia Chiang of the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa, who was not involved in the research.

The oldest galaxies seen directly with telescopes sent their starlight from significantly later: several hundreds of millions of years after the Big Bang, which occurred about 13.8 billion years ago. The new observation used a technique, over a decade in the making, that relies on probing the hydrogen gas that filled the early universe. That approach holds promise for the future of cosmology: More advanced measurements may eventually reveal details of the early universe throughout its most difficult-to-observe eras.

But experts say the result needs additional confirmation, in particular because the signature doesn’t fully agree with theoretical predictions. The signal — a dip in the intensity of radio waves across certain frequencies — was more than twice as strong as expected.

The unexpectedly large observed signal suggests that the hydrogen gas was colder than predicted. If confirmed, this observation might hint at a new phenomenon taking place in the early universe. One possibility, suggested in a companion paper in Nature by theoretical astrophysicist Rennan Barkana of Tel Aviv University, is that the hydrogen was cooled due to new types of interactions between the hydrogen and particles of dark matter, a mysterious substance that makes up most of the matter in the universe.

If the interpretation is correct, “it’s quite possible that this is worth two Nobel Prizes,” says theoretical astrophysicist Avi Loeb of Harvard University, who was not involved with the work. One prize could be given for detecting the signature of the cosmic dawn, and another for the dark matter implications. But Loeb expresses reservations about the result: “What makes me a bit nervous is the fact that the [signal] that they see doesn't look like what we expected.”

To increase scientists’ confidence, the result must be verified by other experiments and additional tests, says theoretical cosmologist Matias Zaldarriaga of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. Several other efforts to detect the signal are already under way.

Experimental cosmologist Judd Bowman of Arizona State University in Tempe and colleagues teased out their evidence for the first stars from the impact the light had on hydrogen gas. “We don’t see the starlight itself. We see indirectly the effect that the starlight would have had” on the cosmic environment, says Bowman, a collaborator on the Experiment to Detect the Global Epoch of Reionization Signature, EDGES, which detected the stars’ traces.

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TURN THE TABLES Detecting the signature of the first stars required a radio antenna about the size of a table (shown), located in western Australia, far from artificial sources of radio waves.
BRETT HISCOCK AND LOU PULS/CSIRO AUSTRALIA
Collapsing out of dense pockets of hydrogen gas early in the universe’s history, the first stars flickered on, emitting ultraviolet light that interacted with the surrounding hydrogen. The starlight altered the proportion of hydrogen atoms found in different energy levels. That change caused the gas to absorb light of a particular wavelength, about 21 centimeters, from the cosmic microwave background — the glow left over from around 380,000 years after the Big Bang (SN: 3/21/15, p. 7). A distinctive dip in the intensity of the light at that wavelength appeared as a result.

Over time, that light’s wavelength was stretched to several meters by the expansion of the universe, before being detected on Earth as radio waves. Observing the amount of stretching that had taken place in the light allowed the researchers to pinpoint how long after the Big Bang the light was absorbed, revealing when the first stars turned on.

Still, detecting the faint dip was a challenge: Other cosmic sources, such as the Milky Way, emit radio waves at much higher levels, which must be accounted for. And to avoid interference from sources on Earth — like FM radio stations — Bowman and colleagues set up their table-sized antenna far from civilization, at the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory in the western Australian outback.

Scientists hope to use similar techniques with future, more advanced instruments to map out where in the sky stars first started forming, and to reveal other periods early in the universe’s history. “This is really the first step in what’s going to become a new and exciting field,” Bowman says.

 

Latest and best photo of Pluto.

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Can see the eye of Cthulhu in the bottom left.

 

^^Proper nerd this lad

 

that is a beauty. ive not seen one of pluto like this before.

 

this one's pretty clear

 

brilliant

 

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Increase of natural and human emitted CO2 is 0.01125% added to the atmosphere since 1750, and humans didn't start really putting it out until 1940 and thereafter.
so about 0.002% maybe is what we added since then to the total atmosphere, as human emissions are only about 3 to 5% of total CO2 yearly emission on the planet with oceans and soil being the major ones adding C14.

Believing this is causing all sorts of doom and "tipping points" and floods storms and drought, is more or less the same as believing in magic

 

I know a planet-sized monument to the
Great One when I see it (and will thus
avoiding being torn to shreds - for a while -
by his earthly holocaust ) .

 

Wha?

 

wtf, you're not a nerd!? Now I've seen it all

 

What's it about?

 

Knotted structures called skyrmions seem to mimic ball lightning
A new type of skyrmion simulates linked magnetic fields that may hold glowing orbs together, too
BY
EMILY CONOVER
2:00PM, MARCH 2, 2018

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GREAT BALL OF FIRE Scientists created a knotted structure called a skyrmion (illustrated) that mimics the magnetic fields described in a proposed theory of ball lightning, electrical orbs sometimes observed during thunderstorms.

SPONSOR MESSAGE
The physics behind a weird electrical phenomenon — glowing orbs of lightning — may be mimicked by something even stranger. A magnetic structure proposed for the natural oddity known as ball lightning makes an appearance in a newfound variety of a knotlike entity called a skyrmion, a team of scientists reports.

Typically observed during thunderstorms, ball lightning is poorly understood. Anecdotal reports describe eerily glowing spheres that float through the air for several seconds before fading (SN: 2/9/02, p. 87). That’s much longer than standard lightning strikes, which last tens of microseconds, and researchers are still struggling to explain how the fireballs persist.

One theory, proposed in the 1990s, suggests that ball lightning is a plasma held together by magnetic fields arranged in rings that link together into a knot. “Because it’s linked up in this tight way, it can’t really fall apart,” says physicist David Hall of Amherst College in Massachusetts. “That could provide a reason why ball lightning survives as long as it does.”

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LINKED UP Simulated magnetic fields produced by a 3-D skyrmion are arranged into linked rings (illustrated). The arrangement matches that of the magnetic fields proposed to explain ball lightning.
D. HALL
Now, Hall and colleagues have created an analog of such linked magnetic fields in a seemingly unrelated type of knotted structure, a skyrmion. Found in a variety of substances — from thin films of magnetic materials to liquid crystals — skyrmions are a kind of disturbance within matter (SN: 2/17/18, p. 18). The objects can move like independent particles, shifting from place to place within a material while maintaining their knotted configuration (SN: 10/18/14, p. 22). And like a tight knot in a thread, skyrmions are difficult to undo, making them relatively stable structures.
Hall and colleagues created their skyrmion in a state of matter called a Bose-Einstein condensate, composed of atoms cooled to a temperature so low that they all take on the same quantum state and begin acting as if they are one unified entity (SN: 10/13/01, p. 230). The atoms that make up the Bose-Einstein condensate each have a quantum property called spin, which makes them behave like tiny magnets.

When the scientists switched on a specially designed magnetic field, the spins arranged into a twisting structure of loops, knotting up into a configuration known as a Shankar skyrmion. That arrangement was predicted theoretically about 40 years ago, but not seen in the real world until now. While skyrmions found in thin magnetic materials are two-dimensional whirls, the new skyrmion is a 3-D beast, the researchers report March 2 in Science Advances.

Within the condensate, the spins produced something analogous to a magnetic field: The condensate behaved as if it were a charged particle being pushed around by a magnetic field when in reality no such magnetic field existed. Like the skyrmion itself, the scientists realized, the imitation magnetic field was knotted, and it matched the interlinked rings of magnetic fields proposed for ball lightning.

Eventually, studying 3-D knotted magnetic fields like those potentially present in ball lightning might help scientists devise better ways to control plasmas within future fusion reactors for generating power, the researchers suggest.

The creation of knotted structures in Bose-Einstein condensates is in its infancy, and such efforts are “very welcomed” says physicist Egor Babaev of KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, who was not involved with the research. “People are just starting to scratch the surface of these objects.”

 

Your Dad, note the eye and the Pluto pic (non Disney one) "planet-sized monument"

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Google moves toward quantum supremacy with 72-qubit computer
IBM and Intel recently debuted similarly sized chips
BY
EMILY CONOVER
5:17PM, MARCH 5, 2018

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QUANTUM UPGRADE Google’s 72-qubit quantum chip (shown) could become the first to perform a calculation impossible for traditional computers.

ERIK LUCERO

LOS ANGELES — Quantum computers are bulking up.

Researchers from Google are testing a quantum computer with 72 quantum bits, or qubits, scientists reported March 5 at a meeting of the American Physical Society — a big step up from the company’s previous nine-qubit chip.

The team hopes to use the larger quantum chip to demonstrate quantum supremacy for the first time, performing a calculation that is impossible with traditional computers (SN: 7/8/17, p. 28), Google physicist Julian Kelly reported.

Achieving quantum supremacy requires a computer of more than 50 qubits, but scientists are still struggling to control so many finicky quantum entities at once. Unlike standard bits that take on a value of 0 or 1, a qubit can be 0, 1 or a mashup of the two, thanks to a quantum quirk known as superposition.

Nicknamed Bristlecone because its qubits are arranged in a pattern resembling a pinecone’s scales, the computer is now being put through its paces. “We’re just starting testing,” says physicist John Martinis of Google and the University of California, Santa Barbara. “From what we know so far, we’re very optimistic.” The quantum supremacy demonstration could come within a few months if everything works well, Martinis says.

Google is one of several companies working to make quantum computers a reality. IBM announced it was testing a 50-qubit quantum computer in November 2017 (SN Online: 11/10/17), and Intel announced a 49-qubit test chip in January.

 

Interesting but Quantum it is absolutely not. Seeing as quantum computing utterly failed to actually deliver quantum computing, they just kept the name, for what is not even remotely quantum computing.

There is no such thing as a " Quantum computer"
If there was, you'd never need to "beef it up"

 

No decidable calculation is impossible for a computer.
The issue is how long does the calculation take, and
how much compute resource is required to achieve it.

So what is the "impossible" calculation then ??

 

divide by zero?

 

one that is beyond our ability to calculate and validate.
How long is an irrelevant caveat, if it takes 1000 years we have to wait 1000 years to see if the calculation is even right and something didn't go wrong on year 400 due to a glitch or fault in the hardware