Former Area 51 Employee Gets Drunk in Vegas and Tells the Truth

Saturn always appears calm. Even stately. But a closer look reveals a lot going on. We usually associate storms and gas giants with Jupiter, which has prominent horizontal storm bands and, of course, the Great Red Spot. But Saturn is also a very active and stormy planet.

Thanks to the OPAL program, we know that a large hexagonal storm in the planet’s north polar region has disappeared. And smaller storms come and go frequently. Smaller storms come and go all the time. The planet’s storm bands, which are mostly ammonia ice at the top, are also changing subtly.

However, some features have persisted.

Cassini discovered the hexagonal storm at Saturn’s north pole, and it is still present. In fact, that feature was discovered by the Voyager 1 spacecraft in 1981.

Our Universe may be perfectly nested inside a black hole that is part of a larger Universe, like a cosmic Russian doll. In turn, all of the black holes discovered so far in our Universe—from microscopic to supermassive—could be ultimate portals to alternate realities.

According to a mind-bending new theory, a black hole is actually a wormhole—a tunnel between Universes. According to the theory, the matter attracted by the black hole does not collapse into a single point as predicted, but rather gushes out a "white hole" at the other end of the black one.

Nikodem Poplawski of Indiana University presents new mathematical models of the spiraling motion of matter falling into a black hole in a paper published in the journal Physics Letters B. His equations indicate that such wormholes are viable alternatives to the "space-time singularities" predicted by Albert Einstein to exist at the centers of black holes.

The matter that black holes absorb and appear to destroy is actually expelled and becomes the building blocks for galaxies, stars, and planets in another reality, according to the new equations.

According to Poplawski

, the concept of black holes as wormholes could explain certain mysteries in modern cosmology. According to the big bang theory, the universe began as a singularity. However, scientists do not have a convincing explanation for how such a singularity could have formed in the first place.

If our universe was birthed by a white hole instead of a singularity, Poplawski said, "it would solve this problem of black hole singularities and also the big bang singularity." Wormholes might also explain gamma ray bursts, the second most powerful explosions in the universe after the big bang. Gamma ray bursts occur at the fringes of the known universe. They appear to be associated with supernovae, or star explosions, in faraway galaxies, but their exact sources are a mystery.

Poplawski proposes

that the bursts are matter discharges from other universes. The matter, he claims, may be escaping into our universe via supermassive black holes—wormholes—at the centers of those galaxies, though how this is possible is unclear.

"It’s a crazy idea, but who knows?" he says. Poplawski’s theory can be tested in at least one way: some of our universe’s black holes rotate, and if our universe was born inside a similarly rotating black hole, our universe should have inherited the parent object’s rotation. Poplawski believes that if future experiments show that our universe appears to rotate in a specific direction, it will be indirect evidence supporting his wormhole theory.

According to physicists

, the wormhole theory may also help explain why certain features of our Universe deviate from what theory predicts.

According to the standard physics model, the curvature of the universe should have increased over time after the big bang, so that now—13.7 billion years later—we appear to be sitting on the surface of a closed, spherical universe. However, observations show that the universe appears to be flat in all directions. Furthermore, data on light from the very early universe show that everything was a fairly uniform temperature just after the big bang.

That would imply that the most distant objects we see on opposite horizons of the universe were once close enough to interact and reach equilibrium, much like molecules of gas in a sealed chamber.

Again, observations do not match predictions because the objects that are the furthest apart in the known universe are so far apart that the time it would take to travel between them at the speed of light would be longer than the age of the universe.

According to inflation

, shortly after the universe was created, it experienced a rapid growth spurt during which space itself expanded at faster-than-light speeds. In a fraction of a second, the universe expanded from the size of an atom to astronomical proportions. The universe therefore appears flat, because the sphere we’re sitting on is extremely large from our viewpoint—just as the sphere of Earth seems flat to someone standing in a field. Inflation also explains how objects so far away from each other might have once been close enough to interact.

But, even if inflation is real, astronomers have always struggled to explain what caused it. This is where the new wormhole theory comes into play. Some theories of inflation, according to Poplawski, claim that the event was caused by "exotic matter," a hypothetical substance that differs from normal matter in part because it is repelled rather than attracted by gravity. According to Poplawski’s equations, such exotic matter could have been created when some of the first massive stars collapsed and became wormholes.

"There may be some relationship between the exotic matter that forms wormholes and the exotic matter that triggered inflation," he said.

The new model

isn’t the first to propose that other universes exist inside black holes. Damien Easson, a theoretical physicist at Arizona State University, has made the speculation in previous studies.

"What is new here is an actual wormhole solution in general relativity that acts as the passage from the exterior black hole to the new interior universe.In our paper, we just speculated that such a solution could exist, but Poplawski has found an actual solution," said Easson, referring to Poplawski’s equations (who was not involved in the new study). Nevertheless, the idea is still very speculative,

For the first time, astronomers witnessed a massive star explode in a fiery supernova — and the spectacle was even more explosive than the researchers had anticipated.

According to a new study published in the Astrophysical Journal, scientists began watching the doomed star, a red supergiant named SN 2020tlf and located about 120 million light-years from Earth, more than 100 days before its final, violent collapse. During that time, the researchers witnessed the star erupt with bright flashes of light as massive globs of gas exploded from its surface.

These pre-supernova fireworks surprised the researchers because earlier observations of red supergiants on the verge of exploding showed no signs of violent emissions, they said.

"This is a breakthrough in our understanding of what massive stars do moments before they die," lead study author Wynn Jacobson-Galán, a research fellow at the University of California, Berkeley said in a statement. "For the first time, we watched a red supergiant star explode!"

When big stars go boom

In terms of volume, red supergiants are the largest stars in the universe, measuring hundreds or even thousands of times the radius of the sun. (Despite their bulk, red supergiants are not the brightest or most massive stars in the universe.)

These massive stars, like our sun, generate energy through nuclear fusion of elements in their cores. Red supergiants, on the other hand, can create much heavier elements than the hydrogen and helium that our sun burns. As supergiants burn more massive elements, their cores heat up and become more pressurized. Ultimately, by the time they start fusing iron and nickel, these stars run out of energy, their cores collapse and they eject their gassy outer atmospheres into space in a violent type II supernova explosion.

Scientists have spotted red supergiants

before they go supernova and analysed the aftermath of these cosmic explosions, but they have never witnessed the entire process in real time until now.

The new study’s authors began studying SN 2020tlf in the summer of 2020, when the star flashed with dazzling flashes of radiation, which they later interpreted as gas erupting off the star’s surface. The researchers tracked the irritable star for 130 days using two telescopes in Hawaii: the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy Pan-STARRS1 telescope and the W. M. Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea. Finally, at the conclusion of that time, the star exploded.

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James Webb is currently having issues with its MIRI instrument. The problem is caused by increased friction in one of MIRI’s mechanisms when operating in the Medium-Resolution Spectroscopy (MRS) mode. The observatory is otherwise in good condition, but the team has decided to stop MRS observations until they find a solution.

The Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI)

onboard JWST is one of the most important instruments. It enables the telescope to see in the 5 to 27 micrometer wavelength range. There are four modes on the instrument: imaging, medium-resolution spectroscopy, low-resolution spectroscopy, and coronagraphy.

On August 24, while preparing for observations using MIRI’s medium-resolution spectroscopy mode (MRS), the team discovered a grating wheel problem. Its purpose is to distinguish between short, medium, and long wavelengths. Its function is to select between short, medium, and long wavelengths. The telescope detected increased friction in the mechanism during the setup process leading to scientific observation, which caused the problem.

Here’s an inside view of the MIRI instrument in spectroscopy mode:

Following preliminary health checks, an anomaly review board was formed on September 6 to determine the best course of action. As a result, JWST has paused MRS observations using MIRI until an adequate solution is found. MIRI’s three remaining modes are still operational. Other instruments are unaffected as well.

Prior Issues with James Webb

It is not the first time James Webb has encountered problems since its launch in December 2021. A larger-than-expected micrometeoroid previously struck one of JWST’s mirror segments. The team detected enough damage, but the quality of observations continues to exceed original expectations.