Brian Koberlein, Author at Universe Today

March 12, 2021March 12, 2021 by Brian Koberlein

Alcubierre Gives us an Update on his Ideas About Warp Drives

The Enterprise using warp drive, as seen in Star Trek Beyond. Credit: Paramount Pictures

If you want a galaxy-spanning science fiction epic, you’re going to need faster than light travel. The alternative is taking decades or centuries to reach an alien star system, which isn’t nearly as much fun. So, you start with some wild scientific idea, add a bit of technobabble, and poof! Quam Celerrime ad Astra. Everything from wormholes to hyperspace has been used in sci-fi, but perhaps the best known FTL trope is warp drive.

March 11, 2021March 11, 2021 by Brian Koberlein

What's the Connection Between Stellar-Mass Black Holes and Dark Matter?

Artist view of a black hole in the middle of solar system. Credit: Petr Kratochvil/PublicDomainPictures CC0

Imagine you are a neutron star. You’re happily floating in space, too old to fuse nuclei in your core anymore, but the quantum pressure of your neutrons and quarks easily keeps you from collapsing under your own weight. You look forward to a long stellar retirement of gradually cooling down. Then one day you are struck by a tiny black hole. This black hole only has the mass of an asteroid, but it causes you to become unstable. Gravity crushes you as the black hole consumes you from the inside out. Before you know it, you’ve become a black hole.

March 6, 2021March 6, 2021 by Brian Koberlein

Almost all High-Energy Neutrinos Come From Quasars

The IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the South Pole. It detected neutrinos and helped astronomers trace them to blazars. Credit: Emanuel Jacobi/NSF.

Buried under the ice at the South Pole is a neutrino observatory called IceCube. Every now and then IceCube will detect a particularly high-energy neutrino from space. Some of them are so high energy we aren’t entirely sure what causes them. But a new article points to quasars as the culprit.

March 1, 2021March 1, 2021 by Brian Koberlein

An Exotic Explanation for the Most Extreme Gravitational Wave Detected so far

Illustration of a merger of two boson stars. Credit: Nicolás Sanchis-Gual and Rocío García Souto

In May of 2019, the gravitational wave observatories LIGO and Virgo detected the merger of two black holes. One had a mass of 85 Suns, while the other was 66 solar masses. The event was named GW190521 and was the largest merger yet observed. It produced a 142 solar mass black hole, making it the first gravitational wave observation of an intermediate mass black hole. But the event also raised several questions.

February 26, 2021February 26, 2021 by Brian Koberlein

One Type of Fast Radio Bursts… Solved?

An artist’s view of Insight-HXMT observing a magnetar. Credit: Chinese Academy of Sciences

Every now and then there is a burst of radio light in the sky. It lasts for just milliseconds before fading. It’s known as a Fast Radio Burst (FRB), and they are difficult to observe and study. We know they are powerful bursts of energy, but we aren’t entirely sure what causes them.

February 24, 2021February 24, 2021 by Brian Koberlein

Cygnus X-1 was the First Black Hole Ever Found. New Measurements Show it's Much More Massive Than Previously Believed

An artist’s impression of the Cygnus X-1 system. Credit: International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research

In 1964 two Aerobee suborbital rockets were launched with the goal of mapping x-ray sources in the sky. Each rocket contained a directed Geiger counter, so that as the rocket rotated at the peak of its trajectory to measure the direction of x-ray sources. The project discovered eight x-ray sources, including a particularly bright one in the constellation Cygnus. It became known as Cygnus X-1.

Cygnus X-1 as imaged by a balloon bourne telescope. Credit: NASA/Marshall Space Flight Center

February 23, 2021February 23, 2021 by Brian Koberlein

A map of 25,000 Supermassive Black Holes Across the Universe

First results of the LOFAR LBA Sky Survey. Credit: LOFAR

The Low-Frequency Array (LOFAR) is a different kind of radio telescope. Although radio light has the longest wavelengths and lowest frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum, much of radio astronomy has focused on the higher frequency end. Observatories such as ALMA study radio light at frequencies of hundreds of Gigahertz, and the VLA studies the fifty Gigahertz range, LOFAR captures radio signals below 250 Megahertz, which is in the range of the lowest radio frequencies that can be seen from Earth.

February 19, 2021February 19, 2021 by Brian Koberlein

A new Approach Could Tease out the Connection Between Gravity and Quantum Mechanics

In physics, there are two main ways to model the universe. The first is the classical way. Classical models such as Newton’s laws of motion and Einstein’s theory of relativity assume that the properties of an object such as its position and motion are absolute. There are practical limits to how accurately we can measure an object’s path through space and time, but that’s on us. Nature knows their motion with infinite precision. Quantum models such as atomic physics assume that objects are governed by interactions. These interactions are probabilistic and indefinite. Even if we constrain an interaction to limited outcomes, we can never know the motion of an object with infinite precision, because nature doesn’t allow it.

February 15, 2021February 15, 2021 by Brian Koberlein

A Cluster of Black Holes Found Inside a Globular Cluster of Stars

This image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows the central region of the rich globular star cluster NGC 3201 in the southern constellation of Vela (The Sails). A star that has been found to be orbiting a black hole with four times the mass of the Sun is indicated with blue circle. Credit: ESA/NASA

Black holes come in at least two sizes: small and large. Small black holes are formed from stars. When a large star reaches the end of its life, it typically ends in a supernova. The remnant core then collapses under its own weight, forming a black hole or neutron star. Small stellar-mass black holes are typically tens of solar masses. Large black holes lurk in the centers of galaxies. These supermassive black holes can be millions or billions of solar masses. They formed during the early universe and triggered the formation and evolution of galaxies around them.

February 11, 2021February 11, 2021 by Brian Koberlein

It's Starting to Look Like Super-Earths Really are Just Great big Terrestrial Planets

Artists’s impression of the rocky super-Earth HD 85512 b. Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser

We’ve learned a thing or two about exoplanets in the past several years. One of the more surprising discoveries is that our solar system is rather unusual. The Sun’s worlds are easily divided into small rocky planets and large gas giants. Exoplanets are much more diverse, both in size and composition.