Latest Exotic matter Stories
Our universe is a mess — a colossal "cosmic web" of galaxies strung into filaments and tendrils that are millions or billions of light-years long. Although this web's basic structure is resolved, astronomers say understanding it in more detail requires new observatories, better computing and a lot of luck. "When you look into a large telescope, the reality of the cosmic web hits you in the face because you can see how galaxies are organized," said...
GREENBELT, Md. - New observations from Suzaku, a joint Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and NASA X-ray observatory, have challenged scientists' conventional understanding of white dwarfs. Observers had believed white dwarfs were inert stellar corpses that slowly cool and fade away, but the new data tell a completely different story.At least one white dwarf, known as AE Aquarii, emits pulses of high-energy (hard) X-rays as it whirls around on its axis. "We're seeing behavior...
British poet William Blake once wrote that a world was contained in a grain of sand. Physicists have done one better, finding a surprising link between streams of flowing sand grains and the birth of the universe. A new study in the latest issue of the journal Physical Review Letters finds that flowing sand grains show liquid-like behavior also witnessed in particle-collider experiments that simulate our universe's first moments. "Nature plays the tricks...
Astronomers using XMM-Newton and Suzaku have seen Einstein's predicted distortion of space-time and pioneered a ground-breaking technique for determining the properties of neutron stars.ESA's XMM-Newton and the JAXA/NASA Suzaku X-ray observatories have been used to see the distortion of space-time around three neutron stars. These objects contain the densest observable matter in the Universe.Neutron stars cram more than a Sun's worth of material into a city-sized sphere. This means that a cup...
LOS ANGELES -- In deep underground laboratories around the globe, a high-tech race is on to spot dark matter, the invisible cosmic glue that's believed to keep galaxies from spinning apart.Whoever discovers the nature of dark matter would solve one of modern science's greatest mysteries and be a shoo-in for the Nobel Prize. Yet it's more than just a brainy exercise. Deciphering dark matter - along with a better understanding of another mysterious force called dark energy - could help reveal...
Astronomers now have a new "eye" for determining the distance to certain mysterious bodies in and around our Milky Way galaxy. By taking advantage of the unique position of NASA's Spitzer's Space Telescope millions of miles from Earth, and a depth-perceiving trick called parallax, they were able to pin down the most probable location of one such object. The findings will ultimately help astronomers better understand the different components of our galaxy. "Forty years ago a...
Cambridge, MA - Astronomers have found the lowest mass white dwarf known in our galaxy: a Saturn-sized ball of helium containing only about one-fifth the mass of the Sun. In addition, they have spotted the source of the white dwarf's radical weight-loss plan. An unseen companion, likely another white dwarf, has sucked away much of the tiny white dwarf's material, leaving it a shadow of its former self. "This star is bizarre," said Warren Brown of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for...
A decade-long mystery has been solved using data from ESA's X-ray observatory XMM-Newton. The brightest member of the so-called 'magnificent seven' has been found to pulsate with a period of seven seconds.The discovery casts some doubt on the recent interpretation that this object is a highly exotic celestial object known as a quark star. The magnificent seven is a collection of young neutron stars. Neutron stars are the dead hearts of once massive stars. They contain about 1.4 times the mass...
Astronomers have found a new class of objects in space: a neutron star orbiting inside a cocoon of cold gas and/or dust that hides a bloated supergiant star. In a strange twist of fate, these objects may be tremendously luminous, but the enshrouding cocoon absorbs almost all their emission, making them nearly invisible to telescopes on Earth until now. These findings were presented on Feb. 5, 2007 by Dr. Sylvain Chaty of the University Paris 7 and Service d'Astrophysique, CEA, France, at the...
By Scott Malone BOSTON (Reuters) - A team of U.S. scientists has found the first direct evidence of the existence of "dark matter," a little-understood substance with a huge influence on gravity, the team's leader said on Tuesday. Scientists still do not know what exactly dark matter is, but have theorized it must exist to account for the amount of gravity needed to hold the universe together. They estimate that the substance accounts for 80 to 90 percent of the matter in the universe....
Latest Exotic matter Reference Libraries
WIMP -- In astronomy, WIMPs, or weakly interacting massive particles, figure into one explanation of the dark matter problem. The particles are called "weakly interacting" because they seem not to have much interaction with normal matter (electrons, protons, and neutrons) other than gravitational attraction (thus "massive"). Assuming that there are Weakly Interacting Massive Particles, these particles would then fall out of equilibrium with the universe when they are non-relativistic....
White Dwarf -- A white dwarf is a a star supported by electron degeneracy. A star like our Sun will become a white dwarf when it has exhausted its nuclear fuel. Near the end of its nuclear burning stage, such a star goes through a red giant phase and then expels most of its outer material (creating a planetary nebula) until only the hot (T > 100,000 K) core remains, which then settles down to become a young white dwarf. A typical white dwarf is half as massive as the Sun, yet only...
Supernova -- A supernova is a star that increases its brightness drastically within a matter of days, making it appear as if a "new" star was born (hence "nova"). The "super" prefix distinguishes it from a mere nova, which also involves a star increasing in brightness, though to a lesser extent and through a much different mechanism. Astronomers have classified supernovae in several classes, according to the lines of different elements that appear in their spectra. The first...
Strange Matter -- Strange matter (also known as quark matter) is an ultra-dense phase of matter that is theorized to form inside particularly massive neutron stars (which are then known as "strange stars" or "quark stars"). It's theorized that when neutronium is put under sufficient pressure due to the gravitation of a large neutron star, the individual neutrons break down and their constituent quarks form strange matter. Strange matter is composed of strange quarks bound to each...
Massive Compact Halo Object (MACHO) -- Massive compact halo objects, or MACHOs, are a type of astronomical body proposed as one possible explanation for the presence of dark matter in galactic halos. A MACHO is a small chunk of normal baryonic matter, far smaller than a star, which drifts through interstellar space unassociated with any solar system. Since MACHOs would not emit any light of their own, they would be very hard to detect. Recent work has suggested that MACHOs are not...
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