NASA Plans to Visit the Sun

For more than 400 years, astronomers have studied the sun from afar. Now NASA has decided to go there.
“We are going to visit a living, breathing star for the first time,” says program scientist Lika Guhathakurta of NASA Headquarters. “This is an unexplored region of the solar system and the possibilities for discovery are off the charts.”

The name of the mission is Solar Probe+ (pronounced “Solar Probe plus”). It’s a heat-resistant spacecraft designed to plunge deep into the sun’s atmosphere where it can sample solar wind and magnetism first hand. Launch could happen as early as 2015. By the time the mission ends 7 years later, planners believe Solar Probe+ will solve two great mysteries of astrophysics and make many new discoveries along the way.

The probe is still in its early design phase, called “pre-phase A” at NASA headquarters, says Guhathakurta. “We have a lot of work to do, but it’s very exciting.”

Johns Hopkins’ Applied Physics Lab (APL) will design and build the spacecraft for NASA. APL already has experience sending probes toward the sun. APL’s MESSENGER spacecraft completed its first flyby of the planet Mercury in January 2008 and many of the same heat-resistant technologies will fortify Solar Probe+. (Note: The mission is called Solar Probe plus because it builds on an earlier 2005 APL design called Solar Probe.)

At closest approach, Solar Probe+ will be 7 million km or 9 solar radii from the sun. There, the spacecraft’s carbon-composite heat shield must withstand temperatures greater than 1400o C and survive blasts of radiation at levels not experienced by any previous spacecraft. Naturally, the probe is solar powered; it will get its electricity from liquid-cooled solar panels that can retract behind the heat-shield when sunlight becomes too intense. From these near distances, the Sun will appear 23 times wider than it does in the skies of Earth.

The two mysteries prompting this mission are the high temperature of the sun’s corona and the puzzling acceleration of the solar wind:

Mystery #1—the corona: If you stuck a thermometer in the surface of the sun, it would read about 6000o C. Intuition says the temperature should drop as you back away; instead, it rises. The sun’s outer atmosphere, the corona, registers more than a million degrees Celsius, hundreds of times hotter than the star below. This high temperature remains a mystery more than 60 years after it was first measured.

Mystery #2—the solar wind: The sun spews a hot, million mph wind of charged particles throughout the solar system. Planets, comets, asteroids—they all feel it. Curiously, there is no organized wind close to the sun’s surface, yet out among the planets there blows a veritable gale. Somewhere in between, some unknown agent gives the solar wind its great velocity. The question is, what?

“To solve these mysteries, Solar Probe+ will actually enter the corona,” says Guhathakurta. “That’s where the action is.”

The payload consists mainly of instruments designed to sense the environment right around the spacecraft—e.g., a magnetometer, a plasma wave sensor, a dust detector, electron and ion analyzers and so on. “In-situ measurements will tell us what we need to know to unravel the physics of coronal heating and solar wind acceleration,” she says.

Solar Probe+’s lone remote sensing instrument is the Hemispheric Imager. The “HI” for short is a telescope that will make 3D images of the sun’s corona similar to medical CAT scans. The technique, called coronal tomography, is a fundamentally new approach to solar imaging and is only possible because the photography is performed from a moving platform close to the sun, flying through coronal clouds and streamers and imaging them as it flies by and through them.

With a likely launch in May 2015, Solar Probe+ will begin its prime mission near the end of Solar Cycle 24 and finish near the predicted maximum of Solar Cycle 25 in 2022. This would allow the spacecraft to sample the corona and solar wind at many different phases of the solar cycle. It also guarantees that Solar Probe+ will experience a good number of solar storms near the end of its mission. While perilous, this is according to plan: Researchers suspect that many of the most dangerous particles produced by solar storms are energized in the corona—just where Solar Probe+ will be. Solar Probe+ may be able to observe the process in action and show researchers how to forecast Solar Energetic Particle (SEP) events that threaten the health and safety of astronauts.

Solar Probe+’s repeated plunges into the corona will be accomplished by means of Venus flybys. The spacecraft will swing by Venus seven times in six years to bend the probe’s trajectory deeper and deeper into the sun’s atmosphere. Bonus: Although Venus is not a primary target of the mission, astronomers may learn new things about the planet when the heavily-instrumented probe swings by.

“Solar Probe+ is an extraordinary mission of exploration, discovery and deep understanding,” says Guhathakurta. “We can’t wait to get started.”

Source: http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2008 … rprobe.htm

Preponderance of Positrons Points to Dark Matter

An orbiting observatory may have found the first indirect evidence of dark matter particles colliding in space and disappearing, as if in a puff of smoke.

The “smoke” in this case consists of positrons, the antimatter counterpart of electrons. The constant rain of energetic particles that bombards the Earth’s surface, known as cosmic rays, contains many more positrons than scientists expected, according to a study in Nature Wednesday.

All theories agree that dark matter must give this signal, an increasing of number of positrons,” said Piergiorgio Picozza of the University of Rome, leader of the study.

Positrons and other particles of antimatter can enter the stream of cosmic rays in three ways. One is for cosmic rays to collide with stray atoms in interstellar space, producing a shower of particles. Known as a “secondary source,” this process is similar to what happens inside particle accelerators, and scientists presumed it was where most positrons came from. Another possibility is that they are produced in the magnetic fields of pulsars, rapidly spinning stellar leftovers from supernova explosions, or microquasars, small, distant galaxies with active cores.

The third and most exciting option is the collision of dark matter particles. The top candidates for dark matter, the heavy but invisible stuff that makes up 23 percent of the universe, are weakly-interacting massive particles. Contrary to their WIMPy name, when two of these particles collide, they annihilate each other in a burst of energy and propel a cloud of matter and antimatter particles into space. The theory has been a favorite of physicists for years, but until now, no one had detected evidence of these collisions.

To measure the abundance of positrons in cosmic rays, the team used data from the instrument PAMELA (Payload for Antimatter Matter Exploration and Light-nuclei Astrophysics), which launched aboard a Russian satellite in June 2006. Unlike previous antimatter-hunting instruments, PAMELA can pinpoint not just the type of incoming particle but also its energy.

The team calculated the fraction of incoming particles that positrons at several different energies accounted for. They found that as the energy went up, so did the percentage of positrons. This upswing rules out secondary sources as the main source of positrons, and bolsters the case for dark matter.

This isn’t the first time this idea has come up. In August, the PAMELA team cautiously presented these results at two conferences in Stockholm and Philadelphia, sparking a flurry of activity in the physics world. Some enterprising physicists snapped photos of the presentation’s slides and extracted the data to analyze it themselves. In response, the PAMELA team released their data on the preprint site arXiv.org in October. More than 100 papers have come out since then, and more than half of them argue for dark matter sources.

But not so fast. The same team published a study in February saying that a similar measurement of anti-protons could be explained just from cosmic rays hitting interstellar dust, with no need for dark matter at all. “The data significantly constrain contributions from exotic sources, e.g., dark matter,” the team wrote. The physics community sighed — maybe it’s not dark matter after all.

This apparent contradiction doesn’t bother Picozza. Both results narrow down the possibilities. “There are many models,” he said. “We did not see anything for anti-protons, so those models are more or less ruled out, or they have to change something. But there remain many other models that prefer all positrons.”

Pulsars are still an equal contender. Other physicists are cautious about jumping on the dark matter solution. “It’s a very interesting find, but we don’t know yet if we need to invoke some exotic explanations,” said physicist Yousaf Butt of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. “There are certainly other prosaic explanations.”

More data from PAMELA at higher energies combined with observations from other observatories will help determine which source produces more positrons.

“Pulsars are less exotic, but still very important,” Picozza said. “If this information is interpreted in the future in terms of dark matter, we made a very, very important discovery. If it is in terms of pulsars, we did a very good experiment.”

World’s Largest Laser Ready to Fire Up

The Department of Energy’s $3.5 billion laser, designed to simulate the energy of a nuclear explosion, is ready to fire up all of its 192 beams, AP reported Tuesday.

After more than a decade, that included several delays and cost overruns (it was initially supposed to cost $700 million), the world’s most powerful laser has been certified by the DOE and is ready to begin experiments, some of which physicists hope could lead the way to fusion energy.

The National Ignition Facility, located in a building with a footprint the size of three football fields at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, was designed to help the DOE ensure the country’s aging nuclear weapons stockpile remains reliable without detonating any bombs.

But recently, Livermore Lab has been repositioning itself as a more multi-dimensional facility as funding for nuclear weapons shrinks. The stockpile stewardship mission has been downplayed while the potential for an unlimited energy source has been touted.

Over the next year, NIF will increase the power until it reaches the temperature and pressures at the center of the sun by aiming all 192 laser beams into a chamber where they will be focused simultaneously on a deuterium-tritium target the size of the tip of your little finger. This is more than 60 times the energy of any other laser.

“Now the proof is in the shooting,” NIF director Edward Moses told AP. “We’ve got to put all this together and shoot the targets. It’s the first time anyone has ever done experiments at this scale.”

Billions and Billions of Baby Stars

When Carl Sagan said there were billions and billions of stars, he wasn’t wrong. But just how many billions, we still don’t know.

Moreover, scientists would like to know how many of each size and type of star there is, and how our sun fits into the larger populations of stars in our galaxy and our universe.

To further that goal, astronomers recently used the CISCO infrared camera on the Subaru telescope in Hawaii to observe a region called W3 Main, a well known baby star factory. The new images revealed the area, located about 6,000 light years away in the constellation Cassiopeia, in unprecedented detail.

Studying star-forming regions is a good strategy for taking a census of stars, since most stars we see in these areas were formed at roughly the same time. When time is taken out of the equation, astronomers can get a better handle on how many stars of each mass range are formed, to discover which sizes are most common.

The new study of W3 Main found that very small stars, called Brown dwarfs, which have less mass than normal stars and don’t shine as brightly, are more common here than they seem to be in other regions of the galaxy. This finding suggests that the relative numbers of brown dwarfs may strongly vary across different areas of the Milky Way.

Most of the stars in W3 Main, however, are massive stars. These giant stars are visible as red lights at the left side of the image above. The bright clouds are made of ionized gas that reflects light from the shining stars nearby.

World’s biggest scientific experiment LHC (Finding the Earth)

View from the surface during lowering of the first ATLAS small wheel into the tunnel on side C of the cavern. (Claudia Marcelloni, © CERN)

A welder works on the interconnection between two of the LHC’s superconducting magnet systems, in the LHC tunnel. (Maximilien Brice, © CERN)

Transporting the ATLAS Magnet Toroid End-Cap A between building 180 to ATLAS point 1. (Claudia Marcelloni, © CERN)

View of the Computer Center during the installation of servers. (Maximilien Brice; Claudia Marcelloni, © CERN)

Aerial view of CERN and the surrounding region of Switzerland and France. Three rings are visible, the smaller (at lower right) shows the underground position of the Proton Synchrotron, the middle ring is the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) with a circumference of 7 km and the largest ring (27 km) is that of the former Large Electron and Positron collider (LEP) accelerator with part of Lake Geneva in the background. (© CERN)

View from the surface during lowering of the first ATLAS small wheel into the tunnel on side C of the cavern. (Claudia Marcelloni, © CERN)

View of the LHC cryo-magnet inside the tunnel. (Maximilien Brice, © CERN)

Assembly and installation of the ATLAS Hadronic endcap Liquid Argon Calorimeter. The ATLAS detector contains a series of ever-larger concentric cylinders around the central interaction point where the LHC’s proton beams collide. (Roy Langstaff, © CERN)

View of the CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) experiment Tracker Outer Barrel (TOB) in the cleaning room. The CMS is one of two general-purpose LHC experiments designed to explore the physics of the Terascale, the energy region where physicists believe they will find answers to the central questions at the heart of 21st-century particle physics. (Maximilien Brice, © CERN)

The Globe of Innovation in the morning. The wooden globe is a structure originally built for Switzerland’s national exhibition, Expo’02, and is 40 meters wide, 27 meters tall. (Maximilien Brice; Claudia Marcelloni, © CERN)

Assembly and installation of the ATLAS Hadronic endcap Liquid Argon Calorimeter. The ATLAS detector contains a series of ever-larger concentric cylinders around the central interaction point where the LHC’s proton beams collide. (Roy Langstaff, © CERN)

The ALICE Inner Tracking System during its transport in the experimental cavern and its insertion into the Time Projection Chamber (TPC). ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment @ CERN) will study the physics of ultrahigh-energy proton-proton and lead-lead collisions and will explore conditions in the first instants of the universe, a few microseconds after the Big Bang. (Maximilien Brice, © CERN)

Aby.T.Joseph

grandmastermind@hotmail.com

Hubble Finds Huge Ring of Dark Matter

While most astronomers have long-suspected the presence and even measured pockets of dark matter, there hasn’t been a great deal of large-scale evidence to support this mysterious type of matter’s existence. That is, until now.

In a paper published, astronomers report the finding of a huge ring of dark matter using the Hubble Space Telescope in the cluster ZwCl0024+1652, the largest to date. Their results will be published in the June 1 issue of Astrophysical Journal.

“This is the first time we have detected dark matter as having a unique structure that is different from the gas and galaxies in the cluster,” said M. James Jee, an astronomer from Johns Hopkins University, in a statement.

The ring is 2.6 million light-years across (that’s really big), and was discovered in the cluster ZwCl0024+1652, located 5 billion light-years away from Earth.

NASA will be holding a press conference at 10 am Pacific/1 pm Eastern. Additional images from the press conference will be published here.

Credit: NASA, ESA, M.J. Jee and H. Ford (Johns Hopkins University)

Aby.T.Joseph

grandmastermind@hotmail.com

Dark Energy Could Be Einstein’s Cosmological Constant

Dark energy, which forms almost three-quarters of the universe, is the most mysterious stuff known to man. A new set of Chandra X-Ray Observatory data, however, has given scientists good information on what dark energy might actually be.

Turns out, it looks suspiciously like Einstein’s cosmological constant, a factor he added to his theory of general relativity. He once considered it his greatest blunder.

“Putting all of this data together gives us the strongest evidence yet that dark energy is the cosmological constant, or in other words, that ‘nothing weighs something,'” said lead researcher, Alexey Vikhlinin of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in a press release. “A lot more testing is needed, but so far Einstein’s theory is looking as good as ever.”

Einstein’s general relativity equations famously described the curvature of space-time as the mechanism for gravity. In the original theory, Einstein added a “cosmological constant” that acted as an expulsive force to counteract gravity. That stabilized the universe so it didn’t collapse in on itself, but Einstein abandoned the idea when further astronomical observations showed the universe was accelerating and not static, as the great physicist had thought.

For years, the cosmological constant remained just a blunder, but mounting evidence for dark energy in recent years, a mysterious expulsive force, revived interest in the idea.

Previous work on the nature of dark energy had focused on the speed at which the universe was flying apart, which requires enormous amounts of energy counteracting the contractive force of gravity. The new data from the X-Ray Chandra Observatory provides astrophysicists with another data point: Dark energy is slowing down the formation of galaxy clusters by stretching space-time. Combining the two sets of observations allows scientists to make the mysterious dark energy a little bit smaller and more well-defined.

“What’s remarkable is that these two different methods — distance and structure — are giving the same answer,” said David Spergel, a theoretical astrophysicist at Princeton University who was not involved with the new research.

Now scientists know that dark energy has remained constant through time, an important factor in figuring out the ultimate fate of the universe. Vikhlinin said it appeared that the universe won’t stop expanding anytime soon, but won’t be torn apart in what some theoretical physicists had called “The Big Rip.”

“The acceleration of the universe will proceed forever, but it will probably not be torn apart,” Vikhlinin said.

The scientists also have a pretty good idea that dark energy — responsible for these large-scale structural changes of the universe — is generated at the smallest scales we know of.

“The quantum fluctuations in the vacuum have some tiny energy,” Spergel said. “Even nothing, empty space, weighs something. And because in our universe, we’ve got a lot of nothing, it has a major effect on our evolution and causes space to expand.”

Now, scientists will focus on pinning down these energies, which, as seen in the diagram at right, drive the expansion of the universe. Vikhlinin’s co-investigator, William Forman, compared dark energy to “springs” driving matter apart at high speeds.

“We’re now confident in the existence of the springs,” said Forman, an astrophysicist at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. “Now our goal is to understand the nature of the springs.”

Image: Two images, the left taken in the optical section of the spectrum, the other taken in the X-ray. In the X-ray part of the spectrum, galaxy clusters become far more obvious /NASA. Schematic: X-Ray Chandra Observatory.

Aby.T.Joseph

grandmastermind@hotmail.com

Medium-Sized Black Hole Lurks in the M31 Galaxy

Supermassive black holes lurk at the heart of galaxies, containing the mass of millions of stars. Stellar mass black holes can contain the mass of a few suns. But astronomers have been perplexed why they haven’t been able to turn up intermediate mass black holes, containing merely hundreds or thousands of times the mass of our Sun.

Well, now they have. Astronomers using the NSF’s Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope have turned up a globular cluster in the Andromdeda Galaxy (M31) that seems to contain a black hole with the mass of 20,000 times the mass of the Sun; one of these long-sought intermediate black holes.

Researchers originally detected X-rays emitted from this globular cluster, and then did follow up observations in the radio spectrum to confirm that a high mass, compact object is inside the cluster. Although the best explanation is a black hole, it could also be a cluster of compact objects, like neutron stars and black holes. The quantity of radio emissions coming from the object fits the curve perfectly between stellar and supermassive black holes.

Aby.T.Joseph

grandmastermind@hotmail.com

Finding the Mass of Black Holes

It might sound surprising, but one of the most difficult tasks astronomers have is determining the mass of objects. It takes a binary system, where two stars or orbiting one another, to be able to make an accurate mass calculation. And determining the mass of black holes is even more difficult because they’re invisible.

But the clever astronomers have figured out a way, by measuring the location of the swirling accretion disk of material waiting to be consumed around a black hole. Since material can pile up faster than the black hole can consume it, it compresses together, heats up, and emits radiation that astronomers can detect. Researchers have discovered that there is a direct relationship between a black hole and the size of its surrounding accretion disk. Astronomers have calculated that this hot gas piles up in a location that scales up with the mass of the black hole. The more massive the black hole, the farther out the congestion occurs.

This technique has helped astronomers identify likely intermediate black holes, which contain thousand of times the mass of the Sun. Much more than a stellar mass black hole, but much less than the hundreds of millions of suns worth of mass in supermassive black holes.

Aby.T.Joseph

grandmastermind@hotmail.com

Where Would a Black Hole Lead To?

Science fiction has populated the idea that a black hole serves a portal to another world. If you could pass through, where does a black hole go? Perhaps you’ll come to some other dimension, or re-emerge from some other part of the Universe?

No, a black hole only leads to death, for you, your spaceship, and another else that’s unlucky enough to fall in.

Imagine you fell into a star like our Sun, there would be no question what would happen to you. The intense heat, gravity and pressure would kill you. If you compress more than 5x the mass of the Sun into a tight little area, you get a black hole. But the gravity, heat and pressure are all still there, just much more intense.

If you actually fell into a black hole, the tidal forces pulling at you are so extreme that the force on your feet is dramatically stronger than the force at your head. You would be stretched out and torn into pieces, and then those pieces would be torn into pieces. You would eventually be pulled into a stream of atoms, winding their way down to the surface of the black hole.

Let’s say you could survive this journey. Where does the black hole lead? No where. All of the mass of the star that came before the black hole is still there, pulling at you with all its gravity. This intense gravity would tear every molecule apart, and all the atoms. Protons and electrons would be crushed together to create neutrons, and then these would be crushed together even further into some kind of exotic form of superdense matter.

It’s even possible that the heart of a black hole is single point of infinitely small size, containing the mass of many stars. This black hole is not a portal to anywhere, it’s just a final destination.

Aby.T.Joseph

grandmastermind@hotmail.com

Death Echos of Material Destroyed Near a Black Hole

Greedy black holes can only consume so much material. The leftover matter backs up into an accretion disk surrounding the black hole. The pull of the black hole is so strong that flashes of radiation emitted from this accretion disk might need to make several orbits around the black hole before it can actually escape the gravitational pull. And these echoes might serve as a probe, allowing astronomers to understand the nature of the black hole itself.

Keigo Fukumura and Demosthenes Kazanas from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center revealed their theoretical research at the Winter meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

“The light echoes come about because of the severe warping of spacetime predicted by Einstein,” said Fukumura. “If the black hole is spinning fast, it can literally drag the surrounding space, and this can produce some wild special effects.”

Black holes are surrounded by a disk of searing hot gas rotating at close to the speed of light. A black hole can only consume material so quickly, so any additional matter backs up into this accretion disk. The material in these disks can form hot spots which emit random bursts of X-rays.

When the researchers accounted for the predictions made by Einstein’s general theory of relativity, they realized that the severe warp of spacetime can actually change the path X-rays take as they escape the grasp of the black hole. The X-rays can actually be delayed, depending on the position of the black hole, the position of the flare, and Earth.

If the black hole is rotating at the most extreme speeds, photons can actually make several orbits around the black hole before escaping.

“For each X-ray burst from a hot spot, the observer will receive two or more flashes separated by a constant interval, so even a signal made up from a totally random collection of bursts from hot spots at different positions will contain an echo of itself,” says Kazanas.

Astronomers watching these flashes will have a powerful observational tool they can use to probe the nature of the black hole. The frequency of the flashes would provide astronomers with an accurate way to measure the mass of the black hole.

Aby.T.Joseph

grandmastermind@hotmail.com

The Strongest Magnetic Fields in the Universe

NASA’s first look at a lonely neutron star.
The most powerful explosions in the Universe are the mysterious gamma ray bursts, which astronomers now think are collisions between neutron stars. A new simulation has calculated that in the moments after a collision, the explosion generates a magnetic field 1000 million million times more powerful than the Earth’s magnetic field – the strongest magnetic fields in the Universe. The simulation took weeks on a supercomputer to calculate just a few milliseconds of a collision between neutron stars.

Scientists from The University of Exeter and the International University, Bremen have discovered what is thought to be the strongest magnetic field in the Universe. In a paper in the journal Science, Dr Daniel Price and Professor Stephan Rosswog show that violent collisions between neutron stars in the outer reaches of space create this field, which is 1000 million million times larger than our earth’s own magnetic field. It’s thought that these collisions could be behind some of the brightest explosions in the Universe since the Big Bang, so-called short Gamma-ray bursts.

Dr Daniel Price, of the School of Physics at The University of Exeter, said: “We have managed to simulate, for the first time, what happens to the magnetic field when neutron stars collide, and it seems possible that the magnetic field produced could be sufficient to spark the creation of Gamma-ray bursts. Gamma-ray bursts are the most powerful explosions we can detect but until recently little to nothing has been known about how they are generated. It’s thought that strong magnetic fields are essential in producing them, but until now no one has shown how fields of the required intensity could be created.”

He continues: “What really surprised us was just how fast these tremendous fields are generated – within one or two milliseconds after the stars hit each other.”

Prof Stephan Rosswog, of the International University, Bremen, Germany, adds: “Even more incredible is that the magnetic field strengths reached in the simulations are just lower limits on the strengths that may be actually be produced in nature. It has taken us months of nearly day and night programming to get this project running – just to calculate a few milliseconds of a single collision takes several weeks on a supercomputer.”

The remnants of supernovae, neutron stars are formed when massive stars run out of nuclear fuel and explode, shedding their outer layers and leaving behind a small but extremely dense core. When two neutron stars are left orbiting each other, they will spiral slowly together, resulting in these massive collisions.

Original Source: University of Exeter

Aby.T.Joseph

grandmastermind@hotmail.com

A Solution for the Black Hole Information Paradox?

One of the mysteries that has puzzled physicists has to do with black holes. When information goes into a black hole, is it completely destroyed, or is it maintained in some form? Physicist Stephen Hawking believes that black holes will evaporate over long periods of time, slowly releasing featureless particles. Whatever information went into the black hole would then be destroyed.

But new research for the University of York and Sainik School in India have developed a new experiment that might help shed light on this mystery. They found that if information at a quantum level appears to be destroyed, it’s actually hiding, and can show up somewhere else.

Instead of completely destroying the information, there would remain some kind of connection between the evaporated particles and the black hole’s internal state.

Aby.T.Joseph

grandmastermind@hotmail.com

Magnetic Fields Shape the Jets Pouring Out of Supermassive Black Holes

The cores of galaxies contain supermassive black holes, containing hundreds of millions of times the mass of Sun. As matter falls in, it chokes up, forming a super hot accretion disk around the black hole. From this extreme environment, the black hole-powered region spews out powerful jets of particles moving at the speed of light. Astronomers have recently gotten one of the best views at the innermost portion of the jet.

A team of astronomers led by Alan Marscher, of Boston University, used the National Radio Astronomy Observatory’s Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) to peer at the central region of a galaxy called BL Lacertae.

“We have gotten the clearest look yet at the innermost portion of the jet, where the particles actually are accelerated, and everything we see supports the idea that twisted, coiled magnetic fields are propelling the material outward,” said Alan Marscher, of Boston University, leader of an international research team. “This is a major advance in our understanding of a remarkable process that occurs throughout the Universe,” he added.

Here’s how the theory goes. As material falls into the supermassive black hole faster than it can consume it, an accretion disk forms. This is a flattened, rotating disk that circles the black hole. The spinning interaction with the black hole creates powerful magnetic fields that twist and form into a tightly-coiled bundle. It’s these magnetic fields that blast out particles into focused beams.

The theorists expected that the region inside the acceleration region would follow a corkscrew-shaped path inside the twisting magnetic fields. Furthermore, researchers expected that light and material would brighten when it was pointed directly towards Earth. And finally, the astronomers expected that there should be a flare when material hits a stationary shock wave called the “core” after it comes out of the acceleration region.

And that’s just what the observations show. The VLBA was used to study how a knot of material was ejected out of the black hole’s environment. As the knot moved through the stationary shock wave, it flared just as the theorists had predicted.

Aby.T.Joseph

grandmastermind@hotmail.com

What came before the Big Bang?

It seems fairly likely that there was a Big Bang. The obvious question that could be asked to challenge or define the boundaries between physics and metaphysics is: what came before the Big Bang?
Physicists define the boundaries of physics by trying to describe them theoretically and then testing that description against observation. Our observed expanding Universe is very well described by flat space, with critical density supplied mainly by dark matter and a cosmological constant, that should expand forever.
If we follow this model backwards in time to when the Universe was very hot and dense, and dominated by radiation, then we have to understand the particle physics that happens at such high densities of energy. The experimental understanding of particle physics starts to poop out after the energy scale of electroweak unification, and theoretical physicists have to reach for models of particle physics beyond the Standard Model, to Grand Unified Theories, supersymmetry, string theory and quantum cosmology.
This exploration is guided by three outstanding problems with the Big Bang cosmological model:
1. The flatness problem
2. The horizon problem
3. The magnetic monopole problem

Flatness problem

The Universe as observed today seems to enough energy density in the form of matter and cosmological constant to provide critical density and hence zero spatial curvature. The Einstein equation predicts that any deviation from flatness in an expanding Universe filled with matter or radiation only gets bigger as the Universe expands. So any tiny deviation from flatness at a much earlier time would have grown very large by now. If the deviation from flatness is very small now, it must have been immeasurably small at the start of the part of Big Bang we understand.
So why did the Big Bang start off with the deviations from flat spatial geometry being immeasurably small? This is called the flatness problem of Big Bang cosmology.
Whatever physics preceded the Big Bang left the Universe in this state. So the physics description of whatever happened before the Big Bang has to address the flatness problem.

Horizon problem

The cosmic microwave background is the cooled remains of the radiation density from the radiation-dominated phase of the Big Bang. Observations of the cosmic microwave background show that it is amazingly smooth in all directions, in other words, it is highly isotropic thermal radiation. The temperature of this thermal radiation is 2.73° Kelvin. The variations observed in this temperature across the night sky are very tiny.
Radiation can only be so uniform if the photons have been mixed around a lot, or thermalized, through particle collisions. However, this presents a problem for the Big Bang model. Particle collisions cannot move information faster than the speed of light. But in the expanding Universe that we appear to live in, photons moving at the speed of light cannot get from one side of the Universe to the other in time to account for this observed isotropy in the thermal radiation. The horizon size represents the distance a photon can travel as the Universe expands.
The horizon size of our Universe today is too small for the isotropy in the cosmic microwave background to have evolved naturally by thermalization. So that’s the horizon problem.

Magnetic monopole problem

Normally, as we observe on Earth, magnets only come with two poles, North and South. If one cuts a magnet in half, the result will not be one magnet with only a North pole and one magnet with only a South pole. The result will be two magnets, each of which has its own North and South poles.
A magnetic monopole would be a magnet with only one pole. But magnetic monopoles have never been seen? Why not?
This is different from electric charge, where we can separate an arrangement of positive and negative electric charges so that only positive charge is in one collection and only negative charge is in another.
Particle theories like Grand Unified Theories and superstring theory predict magnetic monopoles should exist, and relativity tells us that the Big Bang should have produced a lot of them, enough to make one hundred billion times the observed energy density of our Universe.
But so far, physicists have been unable to find even one.
So that’s a third motivation to go beyond the Big Bang model to look for an explanation of what could have happened when the Universe was very hot and

Aby.T.Joseph

grandmastermind@hotmail.com

very small.

The Universe As Magic Roundabout

The Universe As Magic Roundabout

Ever feel like you’ve been there, done that, and that the life you’re living seems strangely familiar? Maybe a psychic has told you that you were once a great king or queen, or, at the very least, their eunuch. Perhaps a neurologist has told you that the déjà vu that you’re experiencing is just a trick of the mind. But while these explanations may appeal to either the spiritually or scientifically inclined, physicist Peter Lynds argues that there may be a much grander account that explains the repetitiveness of life: a cyclic universe. In this, the first part of two articles, we look at what Lynds considers to be both vital and overlooked cosmological questions regarding the origin and mechanics of a cyclic universe.

Of course, referring to past lives and déjà vu is being a tad flippant in regard to Lynds’ new paper on a cyclic universe, “On A Finite Universe With No Beginning Or End,” as these areas, he explains, are really the philosophical fallout – determinism, free will, and life after death – of his new theory. In a nutshell, the model of the universe that Lynds is proposing, similar to others before him, is that the universe is in fact closed and subject to an infinite cycle of big bangs and big crunches. However, the difference between Lynds’ theory and those that have gone before it is that in Lynds’ model the big bang is no more the beginning of the universe than the big crunch is its end. Lynds explains, as suggested by paper’s title, that while the universe is finite, there is no arrow of time; there is no past or present, and that in neither a big crunch nor big bang is a singularity ever reached.

Lynds’ latest cosmological rumination follows a previous paper he wrote on time, and it’s sure to spark up just as much controversy. In his, Lynds argued, in effect, that time doesn’t really exist. That is to say, there are no discrete measurements of time that can be observed in nature, and that our concepts of it are dependent upon the relative motions of mass and energy. His latest effort continues along these lines, arguing that our linear concept of time – firmly established with the introduction of the Christian calendar – has, effectively, blinkered us from the possibility of a cyclic universe. At this point, Lynds’ critics are sure to be thinking that he’s up to his old tricks again, but he introduces some very solid arguments, employing no less than the second law of thermodynamics to support his claims.

Lynds’ paper opens with a paradox raised by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, who pondered two competing, yet similarly contradictory theories of the universe. Kant was faced with either a universe that stretched back infinitely through time, where there would be an infinite period of time before any event (a procrastinator’s dream), or, of a universe that did have a beginning, but which has an equally dissatisfying outcome, as it begs the question of what came before the “beginning,” ad infinitum. Lynds explains that the genius of Kant’s paradox is yet to be properly realized, as through proper investigation it should tell us something about our most fundamental assumptions regarding time, cause and cosmology. To this end, Lynds’ model attempts to address the rather curly issue of where the universe came from, and the problems associated with both a finite and infinite universe through his model of a cyclic universe.

Casting an eye over previous attempts at explaining the mechanics of a cyclic universe, Lynds turned to Stephen Hawking. Lynds relates how Hawking once discussed how the second law of thermodynamics might affect the future of a contracting universe (towards a big crunch). The second law of thermodynamics is one of those rock-solid physical laws, the big gun that a scientist may use to quell the pseudo-scientific flights of fancy held by the reality challenged. As Lynds explains, the law states that “heat can never pass spontaneously, or of itself, from a hot to hotter body. Hot flows to cold.” This means two things: that the one-way direction of energy transference involved in natural processes is irreversible, and that the entropy of an isolated system will increase with time.

Initially, Hawking concluded that if the universe did begin to contract then the thermodynamic “arrow of time,” as it is often called (erroneously, according to Lynds), would also reverse. “Everything would go into the reverse of the way we experience things today: light would travel back to the stars, and broken eggs on the floor would miraculously put themselves back together again,” says Lynds. Philip K. Dick, of Blade Runner fame, once wrote about a similar situation in his novel Counter-Clock World, where many of the consequences of time reversal – such as dead relatives and feces taking up, er, previously held positions in your life (to be honest, I’m not sure which would be worse) – seem quite unpalatable. Hawking stated that such a reversal would mean that hot would flow to hotter, and that entropy would need to decrease because, as Lynds explains, “the universe would have to return to a symmetrical state of low entropy and high order at a big crunch.” Thankfully, the unfolding of such an unsavory scenario is unlikely due to a number of impossible situations that would arise, not least of which being that it would require that entropy decrease and thus break the second law of thermodynamics. As Lynds points out, Hawking called this “his greatest mistake.”

In his model, Lynds manages to account for, or perhaps dodge, the irreversible, asymmetric nature of the second law of thermodynamics in a rather novel way. Lynds reasons that if all other physical laws other than the second law are reversible, or symmetric, then when the universe is faced with a situation where entropy may have to decrease instead of increase; “the order of events would simply reverse so that events took place in the direction in which entropy was still increasing,” says Lynds. “In relation to the big crunch, this would mean that at the point where the second law would have been breached, any future events in this direction (where entropy would be decreasing) would reverse.”

These second law restrictions would also mean that instead of a big crunch singularity occurring, events would instantly proceed from where this singularity would have taken place had events not reversed. Lynds explains that following from this: “The universe would expand from where the big crunch singularity would have been had events not reversed (i.e. the big crunch reversed), and with events going in this direction, entropy would still be increasing, no singularity would be encountered, and no laws of physics would be contravened. They would all still hold.”

Aby.T.Joseph

grandmastermind@hotmail.com

Rocket Crashes

Aby.T.Joseph

grandmastermind@hotmail.com

Craft “Ready” To Map Outer Solar System

Craft “Ready” To Map Outer Solar System

The first NASA sat­el­lite to im­age and map the dy­nam­ic in­ter­ac­tions at the out­er so­lar sys­tem—where a hot wind from the Sun hits cold out­er space—is ready for launch Oct. 19, agen­cy of­fi­cials say.

The two-year mis­sion is to beg­in from the Kwa­ja­lein At­oll, a part of the Mar­shall Is­lands in the Pa­cif­ic Ocean.

Artist’s con­cept of a mo­ment in the com­plex and un­u­su­al launch se­quence for IBEX. The plan is to put the craft in­to an ex­treme­ly high or­bit us­ing a rock­et known as Peg­a­sus. This will de­liv­er IBEX to an al­ti­tude of about 120 miles. IBEX would then use an in­ter­nal hy­dra­zine fu­el sys­tem over sev­er­al or­bits go to to about 4,400 miles up.

Called the In­ter­stel­lar Bound­a­ry Ex­plor­er or IBEX, the craft is to or­bit un­usu­ally far above Earth to in­ves­t­i­gate and cap­ture im­ages of pro­cesses at the far­thest reaches of the so­lar sys­tem. Known as the in­ter­stel­lar bound­a­ry, this is where the so­lar sys­tem meets in­ter­stel­lar space.

This bound­a­ry shields Earth “from the vast ma­jor­ity of dan­ger­ous ga­lac­tic cos­mic rays, which oth­er­wise would pen­e­trate in­to Earth’s or­bit and make hu­man space­flight much more dan­ger­ous,” said IBEX prin­ci­pal in­ves­ti­ga­tor Da­vid J. Mc­Co­mas, of the South­west Re­search In­sti­tute in San An­to­nio, Tex­as.

The out­er so­lar sys­tem be­gan to be re­vealed when the Voy­ag­er 1 and Voy­ag­er 2 space­crafts left the in­ner so­lar sys­tem and head­ed to­ward the in­ter­stel­lar bound­a­ry.

These crafts “are mak­ing fas­ci­nat­ing ob­serva­t­ions of the lo­cal con­di­tions at two points be­yond the ter­mina­t­ion shock that show to­tally un­ex­pected re­sults and chal­lenge many of our no­tions,” said Mc­Co­mas.

The ter­mina­t­ion shock is where the so­lar wind, the tor­rent of high-energy par­t­i­cles cast out­ward from the sun, slows down as it hits the gas and dust float­ing in the gal­axy.

Oth­er space­craft have con­tin­ued the ex­plora­t­ion of the in­ter­stel­lar bound­a­ry. Re­cent­ly, a pair of the agen­cy’s sun-focused sat­el­lites, the So­lar Ter­res­tri­al Rela­t­ions Ob­serv­a­to­ry mis­sion, de­tected a higher-energy ver­sion of the par­t­i­cles IBEX will ob­serve in the he­lio­sphere. The he­lio­sphere is an ar­ea that con­tains the so­lar wind. It stretches from the sun to a dis­tance sev­er­al times the or­bit of Plu­to.

Im­ages from the new craft are ex­pected to let sci­en­tists un­der­stand the glob­al in­ter­ac­tion be­tween our sun and the gal­axy for the first time. IBEX has two sensors that collect particles. The sat­el­lite would spin as it or­bits Earth so that over six months, each sen­sor col­lects par­ti­cles from every part of the sky. This al­lows the crea­tion of an all-sky map every six months.

“What makes the IBEX mis­sion un­ique is that it has an ex­tra kick dur­ing launch” to push it in­to a high or­bit, said Wil­lis Jen­kins, pro­gram ex­ec­u­tive for the craft at NASA Head­quar­ters in Wash­ing­ton. “An ex­tra sol­id-state mo­tor pushes the space­craft fur­ther out of low-Earth or­bit where the Peg­a­sus launch ve­hi­cle leaves it.”

Source: http://www.world-science.net/othernews/081006_ibex

Aby.T.Joseph

grandmastermind@hotmail.com

Particle Smasher May Reveal Extra Dimensions

Particle Smasher May Reveal Extra Dimensions

When the world’s most pow­er­ful par­t­i­cle smash­er starts up this sum­mer, ex­ot­ic new par­t­i­cles may of­fer a glimpse of the ex­ist­ence and shapes of ex­tra di­men­sions, says a group of phys­i­cists.

Ex­tra di­men­sions are a pre­dic­tion of string the­o­ry, a mod­el of the un­iverse pop­u­lar among some sci­en­tists that de­scribes na­ture’s fun­da­men­tal par­t­i­cles as ti­ny vi­brat­ing threads of en­er­gy.

Engineers check the electronics at the Large Hadron Collider (Image courtesy CERN)

String the­o­ry of­fers rel­a­tively sim­ple ex­plana­t­ions for dis­par­ate phe­nom­e­na and claims to re­veal hid­den un­­i­ties among na­ture’s forc­es. But math­e­mat­ic­ally, it all works out only if you add six or sev­en ex­tra di­men­sions of space in­to the equa­t­ions, be­yond the three fa­mil­iar ones.

Ex­plain­ing the ap­par­ent in­vis­i­bil­ity of these di­men­sions be­yond, the­o­rists say they’re curled up in­to ti­ny spaces.

In a new stu­dy, re­search­ers say the tell­tale sig­na­tures of a new class of sub­a­tom­ic par­t­i­cles could help test these ide­as and dis­tin­guish be­tween pos­si­ble shapes of the di­men­sions.

Much as a mu­si­cal in­stru­men­t’s shape de­ter­mines its sound, the shape of these di­men­sions de­ter­mines the prop­er­ties and be­hav­ior of our vi­sible un­iverse—with its three space di­men­sions plus one time di­men­sion, said phys­i­cist Gary Shiu of the Uni­vers­ity of Wis­con­sin-Mad­is­on.

“The shape of the di­men­sions is cru­cial be­cause, in string the­o­ry, the way the string vi­brates de­ter­mines the pat­tern of par­t­i­cle mass­es and the forc­es that we feel,” said Shu, lead au­thor of a pa­per on the sub­ject in the Jan. 25 is­sue of the re­search jour­nal Phys­i­cal Re­view Let­ters.

Pin­ning down that shape should fur­ther our un­der­stand­ing and pre­dic­tions of our four-di­men­sion­al world, Shiu added. “There are myr­i­ad pos­si­bil­i­ties for the shapes of the ex­tra di­men­sions out there. It would be use­ful to know a way to dis­tin­guish one from an­oth­er and per­haps use ex­pe­ri­men­tal da­ta to nar­row down” the pos­si­bil­i­ties.

Such ex­pe­ri­men­tal ev­i­dence could ap­pear in da­ta from a new par­t­i­cle ac­cel­er­a­tor, the Large Had­ron Col­lider, Shiu con­tin­ued. It’s sched­uled to beg­in op­er­at­ing lat­er this year near Ge­ne­va.

An ac­cel­er­a­tor smashes atom­ic nu­clei head-on at nearly the speed of light, cre­at­ing new, en­er­get­ic and very un­sta­ble par­t­i­cles. These quickly dis­in­te­grate or “de­cay” in­to show­ers of de­tect­a­ble, lower-en­er­gy ones. Char­ac­ter­is­tic pat­terns of de­cay serve as fin­ger­prints of the fleet­ing ex­ot­ic par­t­i­cles and, pos­si­bly, the shape of the un­seen di­men­sions, Shiu ex­plained.

With col­leagues at his school and the Un­ivers­ity of California-Berke­ley, Shiu pro­poses in the new study that the sig­na­ture pat­terns from par­t­i­cles called Kaluza-Klein (KK) gravi­tons can dis­tin­guish among dif­fer­ent pro­posed “ge­ome­tries” for ex­tra di­men­sions.

How? Shiu com­pares the ef­fect to a dark room where pat­terns of sound res­o­nat­ing off the walls can re­veal the room’s shape. Sim­i­lar­ly, KK gravi­tons are sen­si­tive to the ex­tra-di­men­sion­al shape and, through their be­hav­ior and de­cay, may re­veal clues to that, he ar­gued. The new study shows that in sim­ula­t­ions, even small ge­o­met­ric varia­t­ions lead to vis­i­ble dif­fer­ences in KK grav­i­ton sig­na­tures, said Bret Un­der­wood, a col­league at Shi­u’s uni­vers­ity.

Based on this, Shiu said, “At least in prin­ci­ple, one may be able to use ex­pe­ri­men­tal da­ta to test and con­strain the ge­om­e­try of our un­iverse.” Last year, Shiu and Un­der­wood re­ported that clues to di­men­sion­al ge­ome­tries might al­so be vis­i­ble in pat­terns of radia­t­ion left over from the Big Bang. The new work com­ple­ments the pre­vi­ous ap­proach, they say.

“The more hints we get, the bet­ter idea we have about the un­der­ly­ing physics,” said Shiu. Added Un­der­wood, “If the cos­mol­o­gy and par­t­i­cle phys­ics da­ta agree, it’s an in­dica­t­ion we’re on the right track.”

Source: http://www.world-science.net/othernews/080201_dimensions.htm

Aby.T.Joseph

grandmastermind@hotmail.com

Big Bang Theory – The Premise

The Big Bang theory is an effort to explain what happened at the very beginning of our universe. Discoveries in astronomy and physics have shown beyond a reasonable doubt that our universe did in fact have a beginning. Prior to that moment there was nothing; during and after that moment there was something: our universe. The big bang theory is an effort to explain what happened during and after that moment.According to the standard theory, our universe sprang into existence as “singularity” around 13.7 billion years ago. What is a “singularity” and where does it come from?

Well, to be honest, we don’t know for sure. Singularities are zones which defy our current understanding of physics. They are thought to exist at the core of “black holes.” Black holes are areas of intense gravitational pressure. The pressure is thought to be so intense that finite matter is actually squished into infinite density (a mathematical concept which truly boggles the mind). These zones of infinite density are called “singularities.” Our universe is thought to have begun as an infinitesimally small, infinitely hot, infinitely dense, something – a singularity. Where did it come from? We don’t know. Why did it appear? We don’t know.

After its initial appearance, it apparently inflated (the “Big Bang”), expanded and cooled, going from very, very small and very, very hot, to the size and temperature of our current universe. It continues to expand and cool to this day and we are inside of it: incredible creatures living on a unique planet, circling a beautiful star clustered together with several hundred billion other stars in a galaxy soaring through the cosmos, all of which is inside of an expanding universe that began as an infinitesimal singularity which appeared out of nowhere for reasons unknown. This is the Big Bang theory.

Big Bang Theory – Common Misconceptions
There are many misconceptions surrounding the Big Bang theory. For example, we tend to imagine a giant explosion. Experts however say that there was no explosion; there was (and continues to be) an expansion. Rather than imagining a balloon popping and releasing its contents, imagine a balloon expanding: an infinitesimally small balloon expanding to the size of our current universe.

Another misconception is that we tend to image the singularity as a little fireball appearing somewhere in space. According to the many experts however, space didn’t exist prior to the Big Bang. Back in the late ’60s and early ’70s, when men first walked upon the moon, “three British astrophysicists, Steven Hawking, George Ellis, and Roger Penrose turned their attention to the Theory of Relativity and its implications regarding our notions of time. In 1968 and 1970, they published papers in which they extended Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity to include measurements of time and space.^{1, 2} According to their calculations, time and space had a finite beginning that corresponded to the origin of matter and energy.”³ The singularity didn’t appear in space; rather, space began inside of the singularity. Prior to the singularity, nothing existed, not space, time, matter, or energy – nothing. So where and in what did the singularity appear if not in space? We don’t know. We don’t know where it came from, why it’s here, or even where it is. All we really know is that we are inside of it and at one time it didn’t exist and neither did we.

Big Bang Theory – Evidence for the Theory
What are the major evidences which support the Big Bang theory?

• First of all, we are reasonably certain that the universe had a beginning.
• Second, galaxies appear to be moving away from us at speeds proportional to their distance. This is called “Hubble’s Law,” named after Edwin Hubble (1889-1953) who discovered this phenomenon in 1929. This observation supports the expansion of the universe and suggests that the universe was once compacted.
• Third, if the universe was initially very, very hot as the Big Bang suggests, we should be able to find some remnant of this heat. In 1965, Radioastronomers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson discovered a 2.725 degree Kelvin (-454.765 degree Fahrenheit, -270.425 degree Celsius) Cosmic Microwave Background radiation (CMB) which pervades the observable universe. This is thought to be the remnant which scientists were looking for. Penzias and Wilson shared in the 1978 Nobel Prize for Physics for their discovery.
• Finally, the abundance of the “light elements” Hydrogen and Helium found in the observable universe are thought to support the Big Bang model of origins.

Big Bang Theory – The Only Plausible Theory?
Is the standard Big Bang theory the only model consistent with these evidences? No, it’s just the most popular one. Internationally renown Astrophysicist George F. R. Ellis explains: “People need to be aware that there is a range of models that could explain the observations….For instance, I can construct you a spherically symmetrical universe with Earth at its center, and you cannot disprove it based on observations….You can only exclude it on philosophical grounds. In my view there is absolutely nothing wrong in that. What I want to bring into the open is the fact that we are using philosophical criteria in choosing our models. A lot of cosmology tries to hide that.”⁴In 2003, Physicist Robert Gentry proposed an attractive alternative to the standard theory, an alternative which also accounts for the evidences listed above.⁵ Dr. Gentry claims that the standard Big Bang model is founded upon a faulty paradigm (the Friedmann-lemaitre expanding-spacetime paradigm) which he claims is inconsistent with the empirical data. He chooses instead to base his model on Einstein’s static-spacetime paradigm which he claims is the “genuine cosmic Rosetta.” Gentry has published several papers outlining what he considers to be serious flaws in the standard Big Bang model.⁶ Other high-profile dissenters include Nobel laureate Dr. Hannes Alfvén, Professor Geoffrey Burbidge, Dr. Halton Arp, and the renowned British astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle, who is accredited with first coining the term “the Big Bang” during a BBC radio broadcast in 1950.

Big Bang Theory – What About God?
Any discussion of the Big Bang theory would be incomplete without asking the question, what about God? This is because cosmogony (the study of the origin of the universe) is an area where science and theology meet. Creation was a supernatural event. That is, it took place outside of the natural realm. This fact begs the question: is there anything else which exists outside of the natural realm? Specifically, is there a master Architect out there? We know that this universe had a beginning. Was God the “First Cause”? We won’t attempt to answer that question in this short article. We just ask the question: Does God exist?

Theory of Relativity – A Brief History

Theory of Relativity – A Brief History

The Theory of Relativity, proposed by the Jewish physicist Albert Einstein (1879-1955) in the early part of the 20th century, is one of the most significant scientific advances of our time. Although the concept of relativity was not introduced by Einstein, his major contribution was the recognition that the speed of light in a vacuum is constant and an absolute physical boundary for motion. This does not have a major impact on a person’s day-to-day life since we travel at speeds much slower than light speed. For objects travelling near light speed, however, the theory of relativity states that objects will move slower and shorten in length from the point of view of an observer on Earth. Einstein also derived the famous equation, E = mc², which reveals the equivalence of mass and energy.

When Einstein applied his theory to gravitational fields, he derived the “curved space-time continuum” which depicts the dimensions of space and time as a two-dimensional surface where massive objects create valleys and dips in the surface. This aspect of relativity explained the phenomena of light bending around the sun, predicted black holes as well as the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMB) — a discovery rendering fundamental anomalies in the classic Steady-State hypothesis. For his work on relativity, the photoelectric effect and blackbody radiation, Einstein received the Nobel Prize in 1921.

Theory of Relativity – The Basics
Physicists usually dichotomize the Theory of Relativity into two parts.

• The first is the Special Theory of Relativity, which essentially deals with the question of whether rest and motion are relative or absolute, and with the consequences of Einstein’s conjecture that they are relative.
• The second is the General Theory of Relativity, which primarily applies to particles as they accelerate, particularly due to gravitation, and acts as a radical revision of Newton’s theory, predicting important new results for fast-moving and/or very massive bodies. The General Theory of Relativity correctly reproduces all validated predictions of Newton’s theory, but expands on our understanding of some of the key principles. Newtonian physics had previously hypothesised that gravity operated through empty space, but the theory lacked explanatory power as far as how the distance and mass of a given object could be transmitted through space. General relativity irons out this paradox, for it shows that objects continue to move in a straight line in space-time, but we observe the motion as acceleration because of the curved nature of space-time.

Einstein’s theories of both special and general relativity have been confirmed to be accurate to a very high degree over recent years, and the data has been shown to corroborate many key predictions; the most famous being the solar eclipse of 1919 bearing testimony that the light of stars is indeed deflected by the sun as the light passes near the sun on its way to earth. The total solar eclipse allowed astronomers to — for the first time — analyse starlight near the edge of the sun, which had been previously inaccessible to observers due to the intense brightness of the sun. It also predicted the rate at which two neutron stars orbiting one another will move toward each other. When this phenomenon was first documented, general relativity proved itself accurate to better than a trillionth of a percent precision, thus making it one of the best confirmed principles in all of physics.

Applying the principle of general relativity to our cosmos reveals that it is not static. Edwin Hubble (1889-1953) demonstrated in 1928 that the Universe is expanding, showing beyond reasonable doubt that the Universe sprang into being a finite time ago. The most common contemporary interpretation of this expansion is that this began to exist from the moment of the Big Bang some 13.7 billion years ago. However this is not the only plausible cosmological model which exists in academia, and many creation physicists such as Russell Humphreys and John Hartnett have devised models operating with a biblical framework, which — to date — have withstood the test of criticism from the most vehement of opponents.

Theory of Relativity – A Testament to Creation
Using the observed cosmic expansion conjunctively with the general theory of relativity, we can infer from the data that the further back into time one looks, the universe ought to diminish in size accordingly. However, this cannot be extrapolated indefinitely. The universe’s expansion helps us to appreciate the direction in which time flows. This is referred to as the Cosmological arrow of time, and implies that the future is — by definition — the direction towards which the universe increases in size. The expansion of the universe also gives rise to the second law of thermodynamics, which states that the overall entropy (or disorder) in the Universe can only increase with time because the amount of energy available for work deteriorates with time. If the universe was eternal, therefore, the amount of usable energy available for work would have already been exhausted. Hence it follows that at one point the entropy value was at absolute 0 (most ordered state at the moment of creation) and the entropy has been increasing ever since — that is, the universe at one point was fully “wound up” and has been winding down ever since. This has profound theological implications, for it shows that time itself is necessarily finite. If the universe were eternal, the thermal energy in the universe would have been evenly distributed throughout the cosmos, leaving each region of the cosmos at uniform temperature (at very close to absolute 0), rendering no further work possible.

The General Theory of Relativity demonstrates that time is linked, or related, to matter and space, and thus the dimensions of time, space, and matter constitute what we would call a continuum. They must come into being at precisely the same instant. Time itself cannot exist in the absence of matter and space. From this, we can infer that the uncaused first cause must exist outside of the four dimensions of space and time, and possess eternal, personal, and intelligent qualities in order to possess the capabilities of intentionally space, matter — and indeed even time itself — into being.

Moreover, the very physical nature of time and space also suggest a Creator, for infinity and eternity must necessarily exist from a logical perspective. The existence of time implies eternity (as time has a beginning and an end), and the existence of space implies infinity. The very concepts of infinity and eternity infer a Creator because they find their very state of being in God, who transcends both and simply is.