Black Hole Physicists Annoy Me So Much. They Could Literally Say Anything About What Happens In A Black

Black hole physicists annoy me so much. They could literally say anything about what happens in a black hole and there is no good way of proving otherwise. They literally just play around with maths and make stuff up. "if you go through the ring singularity, you might come out elsewhere" "where?" "idk" like get a real job Paul

WHAT IS A NEUTRINO??

Blog#123

Wednesday, September 15th, 2021

Welcome back,

Neutrinos are elusive subatomic particles created in a wide variety of nuclear processes. Their name, which means “little neutral one,” refers to the fact that they carry no electrical charge. Of the four fundamental forces in the universe, neutrinos only interact with two — gravity and the weak force, which is responsible for the radioactive decay of atoms. Having nearly no mass, they zip through the cosmos at almost the speed of light.

Countless neutrinos came into existence fractions of a second after the Big Bang. And new neutrinos are created all the time: in the nuclear hearts of stars, in particle accelerators and atomic reactors on Earth, during the explosive collapse of supernovas and when radioactive elements decay. This means that there are, on average, 1 billion times more neutrinos than protons in the universe, according to physicist Karsten Heeger of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.

Despite their ubiquity, neutrinos largely remain a mystery to physicists because the particles are so tough to catch. Neutrinos stream through most matter as if they were light rays going through a transparent window, scarcely interacting with everything else in existence. Approximately 100 billion neutrinos are passing through every square centimeter of your body at this moment, though you won’t feel a thing.

Neutrinos were first posited as the answer to a scientific enigma. In the late 19th century, researchers were puzzling over a phenomenon known as beta decay, in which the nucleus inside an atom spontaneously emits an electron. Beta decay seemed to violate two fundamental physical laws: conservation of energy and conservation of momentum. In beta decay, the final configuration of particles seemed to have slightly too little energy, and the proton was standing still rather than being knocked in the opposite direction of the electron. It wasn’t until 1930 that physicist Wolfgang Pauli proposed the idea that an extra particle might be flying out of the nucleus, carrying with it the missing energy and momentum.

“I have done a terrible thing. I have postulated a particle that cannot be detected,“ Pauli said to a friend, referring to the fact that his hypothesized neutrino was so ghostly that it would barely interact with anything and would have little to no mass.

More than a quarter century later, physicists Clyde Cowan and Frederick Reines built a neutrino detector and placed it outside the nuclear reactor at the atomic Savannah River power plant in South Carolina. Their experiment managed to snag a few of the hundreds of trillions of neutrinos that were flying from the reactor, and Cowan and Reines proudly sent Pauli a telegram to inform him of their confirmation. Reines would go on to win the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1995 — by which time, Cowan had died.

But since then, neutrinos have continually defied scientists’ expectations.

The sun produces colossal numbers of neutrinos that bombard the Earth. In the mid-20th century, researchers built detectors to search for these neutrinos, but their experiments kept showing a discrepancy, detecting only about one-third of the neutrinos that had been predicted. Either something was wrong with astronomers’ models of the sun, or something strange was going on.

Physicists eventually realized that neutrinos likely come in three different flavors, or types. The ordinary neutrino is called the electron neutrino, but two other flavors also exist: a muon neutrino and a tau neutrino.

As they pass through the distance between the sun and our planet, neutrinos are oscillating between these three types, which is why those early experiments — which had only been designed to search for one flavor — kept missing two-thirds of their total number.

But only particles that have mass can undergo this oscillation, contradicting earlier ideas that neutrinos were massless. While scientists still don’t know the exact masses of all three neutrinos, experiments have determined that the heaviest of them must be at least 0.0000059 times smaller than the mass of the electron.

SOURCE: www.livescience.com

COMING UP!!

(Saturday, September 18th , 2021)

“DO WE LIVE IN A FALSE VACUUM??”

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astrophysics-georg

2 years ago

Space! ft. NASA

It was a big year in our part of the cosmos. We’ve invited our friends at @nasa to recap all the stunning scientific advances that gave us a deeper glimpse into the galaxy around us this year.

JWST Showed Us Space with New Eyes

In July 2022, we saw the first full-color images and data from the largest and most powerful space observatory ever made: the James Webb Space Telescope. This landscape of “mountains” and “valleys” is speckled with glittering stars, and called the Cosmic Cliffs. It’s the edge of the star-birthing Carina Nebula. Usually, the early phases of star formation are difficult to capture, but the infrared Webb can peer through cosmic dust thanks to its extreme sensitivity, spatial resolution, and imaging capability.

Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI

Artemis I Flew Us Beyond the Moon

NASA’s most powerful rocket, the Space Launch System (SLS), lifted off for the first time on November 16, 2022, launching the Orion spacecraft on a journey around the Moon. Orion has now traveled farther from Earth than any other spacecraft designed to carry humans to deep space and safely return them to Earth. The Artemis I mission is the first part of a new era of deep space exploration. The program is designed to take astronauts back to the Moon and eventually on to Mars.

Credit: NASA

This One’s for the Dinosaurs

NASA’s DART mission successfully redirected an asteroid—the first time humanity has ever changed the orbit of a celestial object in space. On Sept. 26, 2022, the vending-machine-size spacecraft slammed into the stadium-size asteroid Dimorphos, slightly shortening its orbit around its much larger companion asteroid Didymos. Neither asteroid posed a threat to Earth before or after the test. The objective was to test this “planetary defense” technique, should an asteroid ever pose a threat. Note: there are no known asteroid threats to Earth for at least the next 100 years, but NASA is keeping an eye on the skies, just in case.