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In Big Bang cosmology the cosmic microwave background is electromagnetic radiation that is a remnant from an early stage of the universe, also known as "relic radiation". The CMB is faint cosmic background radiation filling all space. It is an important source of data on the early universe because it is the oldest electromagnetic radiation in the universe, dating to the epoch of recombination when the first atoms were formed. With a traditional optical telescope, the space between stars and galaxies is completely dark. However, a sufficiently sensitive radio telescope shows a faint background noise, or glow, almost uniform, that is not associated with any star, galaxy, or other object. This glow is strongest in the microwave region of the radio spectrum. The accidental discovery of the CMB in 1965 by American radio astronomers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson was the culmination of work initiated in the 1940s, and earned the discoverers the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Dark matter is a hypothetical form of matter thought to account for approximately 85% of the matter in the universe. Dark matter is called "dark" because it does not appear to interact with the electromagnetic field, which means it does not absorb, reflect, or emit electromagnetic radiation and is, therefore, difficult to detect. Various astrophysical observations – including gravitational effects which cannot be explained by currently accepted theories of gravity unless more matter is present than can be seen – imply dark matter's presence. For this reason, most experts think that dark matter is abundant in the universe and has had a strong influence on its structure and evolution.
A supernova remnant (SNR) is the structure resulting from the explosion of a star in a supernova. The supernova remnant is bounded by an expanding shock wave, and consists of ejected material expanding from the explosion, and the interstellar material it sweeps up and shocks along the way.
Hawking radiation is thermal radiation that is theorized to be released outside a black hole's event horizon because of relativistic quantum effects. It is named after the physicist Stephen Hawking, who developed a theoretical argument for its existence in 1974. Hawking radiation is a purely kinematics effect that is generic to Lorentzian geometries containing event horizons or local apparent horizons.
A quark star is a hypothetical type of compact, exotic star, where extremely high core temperature and pressure has forced nuclear particles to form quark matter, a continuous state of matter consisting of free quarks.
In astronomy, the term compact star refers collectively to white dwarfs, neutron stars, and black holes. It would grow to include exotic stars if such hypothetical, dense bodies are confirmed to exist. All compact objects have a high mass relative to their radius, giving them a very high density, compared to ordinary atomic matter.
A strange star is a quark star made of strange quark matter. They form a subgroup under the quark star category.
The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, formerly called the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST), is a space observatory being used to perform gamma-ray astronomy observations from low Earth orbit. Its main instrument is the Large Area Telescope (LAT), with which astronomers mostly intend to perform an all-sky survey studying astrophysical and cosmological phenomena such as active galactic nuclei, pulsars, other high-energy sources and dark matter. Another instrument aboard Fermi, the Gamma-ray Burst Monitor, is being used to study gamma-ray bursts and solar flares.
Micro black holes, also called mini black holes or quantum mechanical black holes, are hypothetical tiny black holes, for which quantum mechanical effects play an important role. The concept that black holes may exist that are smaller than stellar mass was introduced in 1971 by Stephen Hawking.
In quantum field theory, a false vacuum is a hypothetical vacuum that is stable, but not in the most stable state possible. It may last for a very long time in that state, but could eventually decay to the more stable state, an event known as false vacuum decay. The most common suggestion of how such a decay might happen in our universe is called bubble nucleation – if a small region of the universe by chance reached a more stable vacuum, this "bubble" would spread.
A dark-energy star is a hypothetical compact astrophysical object, which a minority of physicists think might constitute an alternative explanation for observations of astronomical black hole candidates.
An exotic star is a hypothetical compact star composed of exotic matter, and balanced against gravitational collapse by degeneracy pressure or other quantum properties. Exotic stars include quark stars and perhaps strange stars, as well as speculative § Preon stars. Of the various types of exotic star proposed, the most well evidenced and understood is the quark star.
The gravitational wave background is a random gravitational-wave signal potentially detectable by gravitational wave detection experiments. Since the background is supposed to be statistically random, it has yet been researched only in terms of such statistical descriptors as the mean, the variance, etc.
Gravitational-wave astronomy is an emerging branch of observational astronomy which aims to use gravitational waves to collect observational data about objects such as neutron stars and black holes, events such as supernovae, and processes including those of the early universe shortly after the Big Bang.
The CMB Cold Spot or WMAP Cold Spot is a region of the sky seen in microwaves that has been found to be unusually large and cold relative to the expected properties of the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR). The "Cold Spot" is approximately 70 µK colder than the average CMB temperature, whereas the root mean square of typical temperature variations is only 18 µK. At some points, the "cold spot" is 140 µK colder than the average CMB temperature.
Primordial black hole (also abbreviated as PBH) is a hypothetical type of black hole that formed soon after the Big Bang. In the early universe, high densities and heterogeneous conditions could have led sufficiently dense regions to undergo gravitational collapse, forming black holes. Yakov Borisovich Zel'dovich and Igor Dmitriyevich Novikov in 1966 first proposed the existence of such black holes. The theory behind their origins was first studied in depth by Stephen Hawking in 1971. Since primordial black holes did not form from stellar gravitational collapse, their masses can be far below stellar mass (c. 2×1030 kg).
Conformal cyclic cosmology (CCC) is a cosmological model in the framework of general relativity and proposed by theoretical physicist Roger Penrose. In CCC, the universe iterates through infinite cycles, with the future timelike infinity of each previous iteration being identified with the Big Bang singularity of the next. Penrose popularized this theory in his 2010 book Cycles of Time: An Extraordinary New View of the Universe.
The Phoenix Cluster is a massive, Abell class type I galaxy cluster located at its namesake, southern constellation of Phoenix. It was initially detected in 2010 during a 2,500 square degree survey of the southern sky using the Sunyaev–Zel'dovich effect by the South Pole Telescope collaboration. It is one of the most massive galaxy clusters known, with the mass on the order of 2×1015M☉, and is the most luminous X-ray cluster discovered, producing more X-rays than any other known massive cluster. It is located at a comoving distance of 8.57 billion light-years from Earth. About 42 member galaxies were identified and currently listed in the SIMBAD Astronomical Database, though the real number may be as high as 1,000
Direct detection of dark matter is the science of attempting to directly measure dark matter collisions in Earth-based experiments. Modern astrophysical measurements, such as from the Cosmic Microwave Background, strongly indicate that 85% of the matter content of the universe is unaccounted for. Although the existence of dark matter is widely believed, what form it takes or its precise properties has never been determined. There are three main avenues of research to detect dark matter: attempts to make dark matter in accelerators, indirect detection of dark matter annihilation, and direct detection of dark matter in terrestrial labs. The founding principle of direct dark matter detection is that since dark matter is known to exist in the local universe, as the Earth, Solar System, and the Milky Way Galaxy carve out a path through the universe they must intercept dark matter, regardless of what form it takes.
References
- ↑ Macpherson, Alick L.; Pinfold, James L. (1994). "Fermi Ball Detection". arXiv: hep-ph/9412264 .
- ↑ Kawana, Kiyoharu; Xie, Ke-Pan (2021-05-31). "Primordial black holes from a cosmic phase transition: The collapse of Fermi-balls". arXiv: 2106.00111 .
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