THE BIG BANG IS NOT THE BEGINNING OF OUR UNIVERSE — IT’S ACTUALLY THE END OF SOMETHING ELSE ENTIRELY

 

Sean Carroll is a Caltech physicist. His research includes 

theoretical and astrophysical physics, in particular cosmology, field theory 

and gravitation. He has published numerous research papers on dark matter and dark energy, 

modified gravity, violations of Lorentz invariance, extra dimensions, topological defects, 

cosmic microwave anisotropies, violation of causality, black holes and the problem of the 

cosmological constant.

It is currently focused on the origin of the universe and 

the arrow of time, including the roles of inflation, the 

child's universes and quantum gravity. In his recent Techinsider video, he 

explains what existed before the Big Bang and actually means. 

So watch and learn:

'All Systems Are Go' For SpaceX's Most Ambitious Astronaut Launch Yet. Watch Live Now

 NASA has given SpaceX the go-ahead to launch its first full crew of 4 astronauts toward the International space laboratory (ISS).

If all goes per plan, the company's Falcon 9 rocket will set forth its historic launchpad at NASA's Kennedy Space Centre in Florida on Sunday night, careen through Earth's atmosphere, and jettison a Crew Dragon spaceship into orbit with the astronauts tucked inside.

"All systems are select tonight's launch at 7:27 pm EST [0027 UTC] of Crew Dragon's first operational mission," SpaceX tweeted on Sunday morning.

You can watch live below:

After 27 hours of flying around Earth, the spaceship is scheduled to sync up with the ISS on Monday and dock to the power at 11 pm ET. 'Resilience', as astronauts named their ship, will stay for 6 months while the crew lives and works in orbit.

The planned flight would constitute NASA's longest human spaceflight ever because the US$150 billion, football field-size laboratory enters its 20th year of continuous human habitation.

"This is that the culmination of years of labor and energy from lots of individuals, and lots of your time, and that we have built I believe what I might call is one in all the safest… launch vehicles and spacecraft ever," Benji Reed, SpaceX's director of crew mission management, said during a Friday press briefing.

The Crew-1 astronauts sit inside the Crew Dragon spacecraft during training. (SpaceX/NASA)

NASA, SpaceX 'ready to go' after months of delays

The mission, called Crew-1, is that the first of six round trips that the agency has contracted from SpaceX. NASA tapped astronauts Mike Hopkins, Victor Glover, Shannon Walker, and Japanese Aerospace Agency (JAXA) astronaut Soichi Noguchi to hold out the historic flight.

In a final launch-readiness review on Friday, NASA gave SpaceX it's an official blessing for Sunday's liftoff.

The launch had been scheduled for Saturday evening, but mission managers decided to delay the flight. NASA cited "onshore winds" and "first-stage booster recovery readiness" because the reasons - the latter refers to the Falcon 9 rocket's booster, which is programmed to land itself on a ship confounded after it releases the Crew Dragon into orbit.

The booster will be reused in future launches, including crewed flights.

This is the fourth time NASA has pushed back the launch of Crew-1 because of numerous hiccups. The mission was originally scheduled to fly in late September.

"We're able to go," Norm Knight, a flight operations manager for NASA, said during the briefing.

"The journey to urge here is one in every of resilience, and it had been a tough journey with lots of stuff happening and COVID affecting the teams."

Crew Dragon Resilience and its Falcon 9 rocket, NASA's Kennedy Space Centre, November 9, 2020. (Spacex)

Final checks for the primary commercial spaceflight system

With the review complete, SpaceX will do its final preparations and keep a detailed eye on the weather. Rain, high winds, or too many puffy clouds could make conditions unsafe for launch.

The skies and seas must even be clear at potential splashdown sites across the ocean, just in case the rocket malfunctions and also the Crew Dragon should speed away.

As of Sunday morning, the Air Force's 45th Weather Squadron projected a 50 percent chance of poor weather delaying launch. NASA and SpaceX are because of the meeting for a weather briefing around 3 pm ET, during which they'll plan to prolong or try again some days later, on Wednesday night.

Technical issues could abort the mission at the last moment. That happened to a Falcon 9 launch on October 2: Just some seconds before liftoff an automatic flight computer shut everything down.

It clad that lacquer from a corrosion-resistance treatment had clogged a little borehole on a safety valve for one amongst the engines. this might have resulted in an excessive amount of fuel entering the engines at the incorrect time, caused an uncontrolled explosion, and damaged the engines, almost like a car backfiring - though with far more power and potential consequences.

SpaceX says it's examined the whole rocket for Crew-1 to create sure no small crevices were clogged with lacquer.

Saturday's launch is that the fruit of a decade-long effort to revive NASA's human spaceflight abilities, which have lain dormant since the Space Shuttles were retired in 2011. Through the Commercial Crew Program, NASA funded the event of the Crew Dragon to fulfill its requirements for flying astronauts.

On Tuesday the agency finally awarded SpaceX its human-spaceflight certification, making the Crew Dragon and Falcon 9 the primary commercial launch system to receive the designation.

"Thank you to NASA for his or her continued support of SpaceX and partnership in achieving this goal," Elon Musk, SpaceX founder and CEO, said during a statement on the certification.

"This may be a great honor that inspires confidence in our endeavor to return to the moon, travel Mars, and ultimately help humanity become multi-planetary."

Nerves 'pile on' as launch approaches

SpaceX proved its ability to securely fly humans and return them to Earth with an illustration flight, called Demo-2, that launched this summer.

That mission launched NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken within the world's first commercial human spaceflight. the boys spent two months on the ISS before climbing into the Crew Dragon, screaming through Earth's atmosphere, and parachuting into the Gulf of Mexico.

Bob Behnken (left) and Doug Hurley wish their families goodnight from inside the Crew Dragon capsule, May 30, 2020. (SpaceX)

The Crew-1 astronauts are on the brink of whether the identical ordeal, with a full-length ISS shift of half a year.

"The nerves start to essentially pile on as you catch up with to launch," Hopkins told reporters in an exceedingly invoke Monday.

But the astronauts are busy with final preparations at NASA's facilities in the foreland, Florida. They completed a dry run on Thursday, putting on their spacesuits, driving bent on the launchpad, and boarding the Crew Dragon to practice for launch day.

"I think that helps keep the nerves down a bit bit," Hopkins said of the week's preparations. "Because you're just reasonably going like clockwork through the procedure and therefore the timeline."

Michael Lopez-Alegria, a retired astronaut who's flown to space fourfold and is slated to command SpaceX's first all-private flight next year for Axiom Space, said he had "no concerns" about the crew or ship earlier than launch.

"I became inured, almost, to SpaceX launches," Lopez-Alegria told Business Insider.

"They just still make incredible things look routine… But our mission, AX-1 one goes flying with the identical capsule that's visiting get on Crew-1. So we'll be definitely taking note and wishing the crew and teams from NASA and SpaceX all the simplest."

The Leonid Meteor Shower Peaks on Monday Night, Here's What to Expect

We witnessed a tremendous astronomical spectacle within the early morning skies over the Kuwaiti desert in November 1998. That year, the Leonid meteors placed on a spectacular display, topping an estimated 1,000 meteors per hour near sunrise.

In most years, however, the Lion whimpers with some paltry meteors per hour, but once every 33 years more or less, the mighty Leonids can roar with a tremendous display reaching storm level proportions.

Prospects for the 2020 Leonids

Unfortunately, 2020 isn't projected to be such a year, but it is often worth keeping a watch out during the first morning hours in mid-November. The 2020 peak for the Leonids is anticipated to arrive on Tuesday, November 17th, at around ~4:00 GMT (UT) or 11:00 PM EST (on the 16th).

The Moon could be a waxing crescent just two days after new at this time, ideal for meteor watching. This also favors the longitude of Europe and Africa at dawn, another plus. The 2020 Zenithal Hourly Rate (ZHR) is predicted to hit a moderate 15-20 meteors per hour.

The source of the Leonid meteors is periodic comet 55P/Tempel-Tuttle, which is on a 33-year orbit around the Sun. the subsequent major peak for the Leonids is anticipated for the first 2030s around 2032-33, though circumstances this point around may convince be but favorable.

The orbit of Comet 55P/Tempel-Tuttle. (NASA/JPL)

It's worth noting that within the late 1990s we were seeing enhanced rates over several years leading up to 1998, so what we see from the Leonids within the coming decade could also be indicative of what we would be sure, come 2032.

The Leonids are one of the foremost notorious meteor storm producers. On the morning of 13 November 1833, residents of the US Eastern Seaboard awoke to a very terrifying sight, because the sky looked as if it would be awash with meteors, falling like rain.

1889 depiction of the 1833 Leonids, based on a first-hand account. (Adolf Vollmy/Public Domain)

Keep in mind, nobody truly knew what meteors actually were until the late 19th century, or how they were associated with the dust trails laid down by comets. In fact, the 1833 Leonids are cited as contributing to several of the religious fundamentalist revivals of the 1830s within the US… they were that influential.

Will the Leonids 'ramp up' within the coming decade? confine mind, the quoted zenithal hourly rate (ZHR) for a given shower is that the number you'd see with optimal conditions, under a dark, moonless sky with the radiant directly overhead… most folks will see considerably less.

Many neophyte observers get excited about the hype leading up to a meteor stream, only to be frustrated by the truth of seeing few if any meteors under light-polluted skies.

Be patient, and draw a decent dark sky site for best results. Tracing a meteor trail back to the 'Sickle of Leo' asterism identifies its membership as a Leonid… otherwise, the meteor is also a background sporadic, or a member of another shower.

Its meteor trails appears to originate from the Leo constellation. (Stellarium)

In November, the Taurids are active, and therefore the December Geminids are spooling up. For best results, watch within the early morning hours, when the world is meeting the Leonid atmospheric phenomenon head-on.

In recent years, the Leonids have produced an observed peak of 29 (2019), 24 (2018), and 20 (2017) meteors per hour.

Observing a meteor stream is as simple as bundling up, laying back, watching, and waiting. We value more highly to look about 45 degrees off to 1 side of the radiant for a shower to work out meteors in profile, though honestly, they'll appear anywhere within the sky.

If you're observing with an exponent, make sure to look at in opposite directions, to double your sky coverage. Also, make sure to stay a group of binoculars handy, as a superb fireball can often leave a lingering smoke train which will remain visible for over a second roughly.

You can also 'hear' meteors, or more accurately, the ionized reflection crackling in their wake along vacant swaths of the FM radio dial. You hear an analogous phenomenon along with the FM band during an intense lightning storm. Very occasionally, the radio reflections off of a meteor passage might even briefly bring a foreign station into focus.

But are you able to actually hear meteors? this can be a real and protracted phenomenon reported over the years by observers… as a child, I remember hearing a definite 'hiss' accompanying an excellent Perseid.

Now, meteors are just dust grains burning up high within the atmosphere, aloof from the bottom and unable to hold sound to the viewer… plus, unlike the clap of thunder you hear several seconds after you see a flash of lightning, the effect seems to be instantaneous.

The culprit appears to be what's called electrophonic sound, a neighborhood current induction founded off of nearby telephone wires, aluminum siding, and even damp dewy grass surrounding the observer during the passage of a meteor.

Imaging meteors is additionally a simple affair: a tripod-mounted DSLR camera with a wide-lens covering a decent swath of sky will do the trick. Use the manual 'bulb' setting to require a series of 1-3 minute exposures, and see what turns up.

Be sure to require a series of test exposures first, to urge the balance of shutter speed/f-ratio/and ISO exposure good versus the local sky conditions. take care to carefully examine the shots afterward… nearly every meteor we've caught on camera was missed during oculus observing.

 I like to use a distant intervalometer to automate the method by setting the camera to record a series of 3-minute exposures, freeing me up to easily sit back and watch the show. Also, keep an additional set of camera batteries handy, preferably during a warm pocket; long exposures and cold November temperatures can drain camera batteries in a very hurry.

Finally, remember to stay a count of what number of meteors you see, and report your observations to the International Meteor Organization. Amateur visual and radio observations of meteor showers all contribute to our efforts to grasp how particular meteor showers evolve, and should even uncover new meteor streams.

Sure, the sky won't come ablaze with a Leonid meteor storm in 2020, but it is often worth waiting for the stray streaks from the Sickle this coming week and marveling at what is.

Success! SpaceX Just Launched 4 Astronauts Into Orbit in Historic NASA Mission

 

Four astronauts have successfully launched on the SpaceX Crew Dragon "Resilience" to the International artificial satellite on Sunday, the primary of what the US hopes are many routine missions following a successful test flight in late spring.

Three Americans - Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover, and Shannon Walker - and Japan's Soichi Noguchi blasted off at 7:27 pm (0027 UTC Monday) from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, thus ending almost a decade of international reliance on Russia for rides on its Soyuz rockets.

US President-elect Joe Biden hailed the launch on Twitter as a "testament to the facility of science and what we are able to accomplish by harnessing our innovation, ingenuity, and determination," while President Donald Trump called it "great."

Vice President Mike Pence, who attended the launch together with his wife Karen, called it a "new era in human space exploration in America."

The Pences joined NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine and his wife Michelle to observe the launch, clapping because the rocket lifted off.

The capsule successfully separated from the second stage of the rocket and, in step with a SpaceX team member speaking over the radio, had achieved "nominal orbit insertion."

That means the capsule is currently on the correct trajectory to achieve the ISS.

The crew will dock at their destination at around 11:00 pm Monday night (0400 UTC Tuesday), joining two Russians and one American on board the station, and stay for 6 months.

In May, SpaceX completed an illustration mission showing it could take astronauts to the ISS and produce them back safely, a landmark development allowing the US to start traveling to the satellite under its own power yet again.

The Crew Dragon earlier in the week became the primary spacecraft to be certified by NASA since the spacecraft nearly 40 years ago.

It is a capsule, similar in shape to the spacecraft that preceded spacecraft, and its launch vehicle could be a reusable SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

At the tip of its missions, the Crew Dragon deploys parachutes then splashes down in the water, even as within the Apollo era.

NASA turned to SpaceX and Boeing after shuttering the checkered spacecraft program in 2011, which failed in its main objectives of constructing spaceflight affordable and safe.

The agency will have spent quite $8 billion on the Commercial Crew program by 2024, with the hope that the private sector can make sure of NASA's needs in "low Earth orbit" so it's freed up to specialize in return missions to the Moon and so on to Mars.

SpaceX, founded by Elon Musk in 2002, has leapfrogged its much older rival Boeing, whose program has floundered after a failed test of its uncrewed Starliner last year.

But SpaceX's success won't mean the US will stop hitching rides with Russia altogether, said Bridenstine.

"We want to possess an exchange of seats where American astronauts can fly Russian Soyuz rockets and Russian cosmonauts can wing commercial crew vehicles," he said, explaining it absolutely was necessary just in case either program was down for a period of your time.

The reality, however, is that space ties between the US and Russia - one among the few bright spots in their bilateral relations - have frayed in recent years, and far remains uncertain.

Russia has said it won't be a partner within the Artemis program to return to the Moon in 2024, claiming the NASA-led mission is simply too US-centric.

Dmitry Rogozin, the top of Russia's space agency has also repeatedly mocked SpaceX's technology, and this summer announced Roscosmos would build rockets that surpass Musk's.

He told a state agency he was unimpressed with the Crew Dragon's water landing, calling it "rather rough" and saying his agency was developing a methane rocket which will be reusable 100 times.

But the actual fact that a national space agency feels moved to match itself to an organization is arguably a validation of NASA's public-private strategy.

SpaceX's emergence has also deprived the Roscosmos of a valuable income stream.

The cost of round-trips on Russian rockets had been rising and stood at around $85 million per astronaut, per estimates last year.

Presidential transitions are always a difficult time for NASA, and therefore the ascension of Joe Biden in January is predicted to be no different.

The agency has yet to receive from Congress the tens of billions of dollars needed to finalize the Artemis program.

Bridenstine has announced that he will step down, so as to let the new president set his own goals for space exploration.

So far, Biden has not commented on the 2024 timeline.

Democratic party documents say they support NASA's Moon and Mars aspirations, but also emphasize elevating the agency's Earth sciences division to higher understand how global climate change has effects on our planet.

New Hydrogel Wound Treatment Activates Immune System to Reduce Scars

 Scientists have developed a brand new hydrogel ready to quickly heal animal wounds while minimizing scarring, with the immune system's help. It could potentially work as an upgrade to our body's injury-healing abilities.

The microporous annealed particle (MAP) gel had previously shown promise as a structure designed to support tissue growth and speed up wound healing. Here, the MAP gel was modified to trigger a specific response too.

So far, the research has only checked out wound healing in mice, but it could potentially help people with burns, cuts, diabetic ulcers, and other styles of wounds that will otherwise leave damaged, scarred skin behind.

A repaired wound with hair follicles shown in green. (Duke University)

"This study shows us that activating the system is often accustomed to tilt the balance of wound healing from tissue destruction and scar formation to tissue repair and skin regeneration," says biomedical engineer Tatiana Segura, from Duke University.

Scar tissue is made as a part of a rapid reaction to injury by the body: it reduces pain and limits the prospect of infection. However, the regrown skin isn't complete, lacking sweat glands and hair follicles, and it is also more liable to future injury.

Having already used MAP gels as how of organizing cells to repair wounds faster, here the team tried to stay the biological scaffold in situ for extended by flipping the peptide structure of a specific chemical linker within the gel therefore the body wouldn't see it as being familiar and – in theory – make it tougher to interrupt down.

"Previously we'd seen that because the wound began to heal, the MAP gel began to lose porosity, which limited how the tissue could grow through the structure," says biomedical engineer Don Griffin from the University of Virginia.

"We hypothesized that slowing down the degradation rate of the MAP scaffold would prevent the pores from closing and supply additional support to the tissue because it grows, which might improve the tissue's quality."

However, in experiments on mice, the team's attempts to prolong the lifetime of the scaffold by making it more alien to the body had the alternative effect: the gel had almost entirely disappeared from the wound site by the time it had healed.

The peptide structure flip did trigger a unique reaction, but from the more specialized adaptive system – it uses different kinds of cells and a more regenerative reaction to try and do its work.

The antibodies and macrophage cells that were triggered during this case were better ready to remove traces of the hydrogel, moreover as repairing skin in a very way that was more just like the original skin (including hair follicles).

This process still must be adapted for the organic structure, of course, but we share plenty of the repair mechanisms with other mammals, and also the scientists are hopeful that a modified version of their hydrogel could eventually be accustomed repair wounds faster and more naturally – and maybe even contribute to vaccine development.

"I am excited about the chance of designing materials that will directly interact with the system to support tissue regeneration," says Segura. "This may be a new approach for us."

Astronomers discovered that the shadow of the m87 black hole wobbles

The Event Horizon Telescope is an array of telescopes that uses a method called Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) to make a virtual radio reflector with a dish diameter just like the scale of Earth. 

In the period between 2009-2013, M87* (the supermassive region within the galaxy M87) was observed with prototype EHT telescopes, at four different sites. Eventually, the whole EHT array came into operation in 2017, with seven telescopes located in five locations around the Earth.

Although the observations from 2009-2013 contained much less data than those from 2017 (lacking the capacity to supply an image of the part at that time in time), the EHT team was able to identify changes within the appearance of M87* between 2009 and 2017 using statistical models.

The researchers concluded that the diameter of the black hole's shadow remains in step with the predictions of Einstein's general theory of relativity for black holes of 6.5 billion solar masses. But they also found something unexpected: the crescent-shaped ring of hot plasma around M87* wobbles! it's the primary time astronomers have glimpsed the dynamic accretion structure so near the event horizon of a region, where gravity is extreme.

Snapshots of the looks of M87 *, obtained with images and geometrical models and also the EHT array between 2009 and 2017. The diameter of the rings is that the same, but the situation of the brilliant side varies. - (Image Credit: M. Wielgus, D. Pesce & the EHT Collaboration)

One of the researchers, Sara Issaoun, stated in a very NOVA handout that in applying the knowledge gained from the 2017 observations to older data, they found that the ring's size remained identical while the radiation from the gas around it changed over the years.

Professor of Theoretical High Energy Astrophysics at the University of Amsterdam, Sera Markoff, supplemented this statement by explaining that the brightness of the spot within the ring is depending on the properties of gas surrounding the part, but also on its 'spin' and their relative orientations. The research team has already been able to discard several theoretical models for accretion, allowing scientists to check the laws of gravity around black holes more adequately.

If you're curious about a more detailed outlay of the study on M87*, make sure to test out the paper listed below this text. The EHT astronomers now possess a wealth of information on the dynamics of black holes. The team is currently analyzing 2018 data, which involved an extra telescope (in Greenland). In 2021, the array are going to be expanded even further with two additional telescopes!

gigantic, dark galaxies probably don't exist after all

After re-analyzing existing Hubble data, astronomers have determined that the extremely faint galaxy Dragonfly 44 has far fewer star clusters in its surrounding substance halo than reported previously

Because the number of globular clusters could be a good indicator for the number of matter, this so-called ultra-diffuse galaxy presumably is a standard dwarf galaxy, with the corresponding amount of matter, instead of a galaxy of Milky Way-like proportions that will consist almost entirely of substance as previously thought.

The research that preceded this adjustment, led by Groningen Ph.D. candidate Teymoor Saifollahi, has been accepted for publication in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

In 2015, astronomers at Yale led by Dutch astronomer Pieter van Dokkum found several extremely faint galaxies within the Coma Cluster (a group of thousands of galaxies 300 million light-years from Earth within the constellation Haar of Berenice). The strange thing about these galaxies was that they occasionally looked as if it would be more massive than our galaxy while producing 100 to 1000 times less light.

After more accurately measuring the mass of the biggest galaxies, they were found to possess an amount of substance that's considered to be normal in dwarf galaxies. However, the biggest galaxy, Dragonfly 44 (DF44), remained an exception. The research group used different methods to work out the matter in DF44 in 2016 and 2017 and located an amount up to that of the Milky Way. this may mean that DF44 was made of 99.99% matter, while only one-hundredth of a percent of its mass came from visible stars. The team reached this conclusion supported the number of globular clusters around the galaxy, which determines the dimensions of the matter halo.

In a new study, astronomers counted the number of globular clusters around DF44 more accurately and came to a far lower number. The new numbers implied a way lower mass and ten times less matter in DF44, an amount appreciate other dwarf galaxies.

Saifollahi stated that dragonfly44 was an outsider of these years that might not be explained with existing models for star formation. Nor could it's produced in cosmological simulations. Now we all know that the result was wrong which DF44 may be a typical dwarf galaxy. it's likely that each one ultra-diffuse galaxy is like this.