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Researchers have developed a robotic feeding system that uses computer vision, machine learning and multimodal sensing to safely feed people with severe mobility limitations, including those with spinal cord injuries, cerebral palsy and multiple sclerosis.

Walking and running is notoriously difficult to recreate in robots. Now, a group of researchers has overcome some of these challenges by creating an innovative method that employs central pattern generators -- neural circuits located in the spinal cord that generate rhythmic patterns of muscle activity -- with deep reinforcement learning. The method not only imitates walking and running motions but also generates movements for frequencies where motion data is absent, enables smooth transition movements from walking to running, and allows for adapting to environments with unstable surfaces.

Walking and running is notoriously difficult to recreate in robots. Now, a group of researchers has overcome some of these challenges by creating an innovative method that employs central pattern generators -- neural circuits located in the spinal cord that generate rhythmic patterns of muscle activity -- with deep reinforcement learning. The method not only imitates walking and running motions but also generates movements for frequencies where motion data is absent, enables smooth transition movements from walking to running, and allows for adapting to environments with unstable surfaces.

The global chemical industry is a major fossil fuel consumer and climate change contributor; however, new research has identified how the sector could clean up its green credentials by getting dirty.

Scientists delve into the composition of nanocomposites for ultraviolet metasurface fabrication.

Scientists delve into the composition of nanocomposites for ultraviolet metasurface fabrication.

A recent study has discovered a novel method for detecting the first-generations stars, known as Population III (Pop III) stars, which have never been directly detected. These potential discoveries about Pop III stars hold the promise of unlocking the secrets of the universe's origin and providing a deeper understanding of the remarkable journey from the primordial cosmos to the world we inhabit today.

A recent study led to the development of a powerful epigenetic editing technology. The system unlocks the ability to precisely program chromatin modifications at any specific position in the genome, to understand their causal role in transcription regulation. This innovative approach will help to investigate the role of chromatin modifications in many biological processes, and to program desired gene activity responses, which may prove useful in disease settings.

I’m hoping that the era of campus unrest is coming to an end, and with it the  bogus claim that the protestors are engaged in civil disobedience because of an “unjust act” (Israel’s war in Gaza). Today I have two readings for you before I’m off to Amsterdam on Saturday.

In the article below in The Volokh Conspiracy by Ilya Somin (an author and professor of law at George Mason University), the author argues that there’s no parallel between pro-Palestinian protestors, on or off campus, and the civil rights protestors of the Sixties, who were breaking unjust laws—and taking the punishment.  Click below the read. I’ll post a few highlights, which are indented:

Illegal actions can indeed be justified in some situations. But the tactics used by many anti-Israel protestors fail any plausible criteria for such. The laws they are violating are not unjust. The victims of the violations are almost entirely innocent people. The violations are highly unlikely to lead to improvements in government policy. And, finally, the protestors’ objectives are themselves unjust.

Martin Luther King and many others have argued (correctly) that people have a right to disobey unjust laws. Thus, those who violated the Fugitive Slave Acts or various laws mandating racial segregation had excellent justifications for their actions. Elsewhere, I have argued that many undocumented immigrants are justified in violating immigration restrictions.

Moreover, people who violate unjust laws don’t necessarily have a duty to accept punishment for doing so. For example, members of the Underground Railroad who helped escaped slaves evade the Fugitive Slave Act had no moral obligation to turn themselves in to the authorities. Ditto for dissidents resisting oppressive dictatorships.

I suppose the difference between letting yourself get arrested (as in the Civil Rights Movement), and being morally ok with avoiding arrest is that in the latter case, as above, you can effect more moral change if you remain out there and keep violating an unjust law. At any rate, Somin says none of this applies to the anti-Israel protesters:

This argument obviously doesn’t help lawbreaking anti-Israel protestors. Laws banning campus building takeovers and encampments, and protecting the freedom of movement of students are not unjust. Even most supporters of the protestors readily recognize this in other contexts. For example, they would likely agree that pro-life activists are not justified in occupying buildings in order to try to force the university to divest from businesses that profit from abortion, or that Trump backers cannot do so to force the university to endorse claims that the 2020 election was “stolen” from Trump.

One can argue that violating otherwise just laws is permissible in order to target people who are themselves perpetrators of injustice. For example, perhaps anti-slavery activists would have been justified in occupying the property of slaveowners in order to pressure them to free their slaves. But the main victims of campus building takeovers, encampments, and coercive restrictions on movement, are students, faculty, and others who have no meaningful responsibility for any injustices occurring in the Israel-Palestinian conflict.

Merely investing in firms with a presence in Israel is nowhere near enough to justify targeting people. The protestors themselves implicitly recognize that, since they do not use such tactics to demand divestment from businesses that operate in China, Saudi Arabia, and other countries with far worse human rights records than Israel. And, to repeat, the main victims of illegal protest activities are not university officials who control investments but students and faculty (who generally have little or no such control).

Perhaps harming innocent people could still be defended if doing so were the only way to achieve some greater good. But that argument doesn’t help the anti-Israel protestors either. It is highly unlikely their actions will lead to any improvement in either US or Israel policy. Even if some universities divest from Israel as a result (which itself is highly questionable), that isn’t going to lead to any beneficial changes in Israeli or US policy. Moreover, the protestors’ behavior is likely to damage their cause more than it aids it. Polls indicate most of the public condemns these types of actions. One survey found that 71% support calling in the police to arrest protestors who occupy buildings or block other people from using parts of the campus.

It goes on, but the point is that the people targeted by the protests, or at least those who are inconvenienced, are not those perpetrating the war. They are simply the inconvenienced and harangued students. “Well,” you could respond, “maybe the protests will change their minds, just as seeing black protestors attacked with dogs and fire hoses in Alabama brought on the Civil Rights Acts.” But that won’t fly, either, for as the article notes, most Americans not only don’t respond to the protests, but also condemn them, and favor as well calling in cops when the protests are illegal (as whey were at my school).  Finally, you could argue that the protests are meant to affect Israel by getting universities to divest from that country. But while that may have worked during the apartheid era, when I too engaged in civil disobedience, it won’t work in America. I don’t know of a single school that’s divested, and there was never a chance that the University of Chicago would divest. It never has and it never will, for our policy is to keep our investing separated from politics.

So what can the protesters do to reach their goals? They won’t like Somin’s answer:

There are many demands the protestors could make that would help Palestinians without endorsing the evil agenda of Hamas and other similar groups. Most obviously, they could demand that Hamas release its hostages and surrender. That would immediately end the war, stop the suffering of the hostages, and free Gaza Palestinians from a brutal dictatorship. In addition, it would help forestall further conflict, which would otherwise be virtually inevitable so long as Hamas remains in power (since they have promised to “repeat October 7 again and again” if given the opportunity to do so).

Short of that, they could at least demand that Hamas fighters wear uniforms (as required by the laws of war) and stop their ubiquitous tactic of using civilians as human shields.

But of course these things won’t fly, either.  Those actions would indeed help Palestinians (setting aside the fact that most Palestinians like Hamas, favoring it over the Palestinian Authority, even in the West Bank), and, further, they wouldn’t result in what the protesters really want: the end of Israel.

The second article, below, is from Tablet (click headline to read), and argues that not are most of the college protests not independent, but rely on central organizations whose funding is nearly impossible to unravel.

It’s a long piece, but centers the organization of protests on three groups; I’ve put them in bold below:

The “movement,” in turn, while it recruits from among students and other self-motivated radicals willing to put their bodies on the line, relies heavily on the funding of progressive donors and nonprofits connected to the upper reaches of the Democratic Party. Take the epicenter of the nationwide protest movement, Columbia University. According to reporting in the New York Post, the Columbia encampment was principally organized by three groups: Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), and Within Our Lifetime (WOL). Let’s take each in turn.

To see the tangled web that is the funding of these organizations, I’ll show the text for just one: Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), which is one of the main pro-Palestinian organizations on our campus, and is largely responsible for the illegal and disruptive protests we’ve had—including the one over the last week. You can see how convoluted the financial setup is, and of course that’s done on purpose to hide where the money comes from. Here’s the bit on SJP, which may have some tangential connections to antisemitism and terrorism.

SJP, by contrast, is an outgrowth of the Islamist networks dissolved during the U.S. government’s prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation (HLF) and related charities for fundraising for Hamas. SJP is a subsidiary of an organization called American Muslims for Palestine (AMP); SJP in fact has no “formal corporate structure of its own but operates as AMP’s campus brand,” according to a lawsuit filed last week against AJP Educational Fund, the parent nonprofit of AMP. Both AMP and SJP were founded by the same man, Hatem Bazian, a Palestinian academic who formerly fundraised for KindHearts, an Islamic charity dissolved in 2012 pursuant to a settlement with the U.S. Treasury, which froze the group’s assets for fundraising for Hamas (KindHearts did not admit wrongdoing in the settlement). And several of AMP’s senior leaders are former fundraisers for HLF and related charities, according to November congressional testimony from former U.S. Treasury official Jonathan Schanzer. An ongoing federal lawsuit by the family of David Boim, an American teenager killed in a Hamas terrorist attack in 1996, goes so far as to allege that AMP is a “disguised continuance” and “legal alter-ego” of the Islamic Association for Palestine, was founded with startup money from current Hamas official Musa Abu Marzook and dissolved alongside HLF. AMP has denied it is a continuation of IAP.

Today, however, National SJP is legally a “fiscal sponsorship” of another nonprofit: a White Plains, New York, 501(c)(3) called the WESPAC Foundation. A fiscal sponsorship is a legal arrangement in which a larger nonprofit “sponsors” a smaller group, essentially lending it the sponsor’s tax-exempt status and providing back-office support in exchange for fees and influence over the sponsorship’s operations. For legal and tax purposes, the sponsor and the sponsorship are the same entity, meaning that the sponsorship is relieved of the requirement to independently disclose its donors or file a Form 990 with the IRS. This makes fiscal sponsorships a “convenient way to mask links between donors and controversial causes,” according to the Capital Research Center. Donors, in other words, can effectively use nonprofits such as WESPAC to obscure their direct connections to controversial causes.

Something of the sort appears to be happening with WESPAC. Run by the market researcher Howard Horowitz, WESPAC reveals very little about its donors, although scattered reporting and public disclosures suggest that the group is used as a pass-through between larger institutions and pro-Palestinian radicals. Since 2006, for instance, WESPAC has received more than half a million in donations from the Elias Foundation, a family foundation run by the private equity investor James Mann and his wife. WESPAC has also received smaller amounts from Grassroots International (an “environmental” group heavily funded by Thousand Currents), the Sparkplug Foundation (a far-left group funded by the Wall Street fortune of Felice and Yoram Gelman), and the Bafrayung Fund, run by Rachel Gelman, an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune. (A self-described “abolitionist,” Gelman was featured in a 2020 New York Times feature on “The Rich Kids Who Want to Tear Down Capitalism.”) In 2022, WESPAC also received $97,000 from the Tides Foundation, the grant-making arm of the Tides Nexus.

WESPAC, however, is not merely the fiscal sponsor of the Hamas-linked SJP but also the fiscal sponsor of the third group involved in organizing the Columbia protests, Within Our Lifetime (WOL), formerly known as New York City SJP. Founded by the Palestinian American lawyer Nerdeen Kiswani, a former activist with the Hunter College and CUNY chapters of SJP, WOL has emerged over the past seven months as perhaps the most notorious antisemitic group in the country, and has been banned from Facebook and Instagram for glorifying Hamas. A full list of the group’s provocations would take thousands of words, but it has been the central organizing force in the series of “Flood”-themed protests in New York City since Oct. 7, including multiple bridge and highway blockades, a November riot at Grand Central Station, the vandalism of the New York Public Library, and protests at the Rockefeller Center Christmas-tree lighting. In addition to their confrontational tactics, WOL-led protests tend to have a few other hallmarks. These include eliminationist rhetoric directed at the Jewish state—such as Arabic chants of “strike, strike, Tel Aviv”; the prominent display of Hezbollah flags and other insignia of explicitly Islamist resistance; the presence of masked Arab street muscle; and the antisemitic intimidation of counterprotesters by said masked Arab street muscle.

I know that people are trying to untangle this financial skein right now, and good luck to them.  But it’s clear from the similarities of strategy (given in the article) and even of equipment, that these protests are more than just copycat demonstrations or individual decisions of college groups: they appear to be coordinated by large and well-funded agencies.

The Red Planet launches large bursts of plasma into space from its upper atmosphere, much like the sun’s coronal mass ejections, despite not having a global magnetic field

Non-medicinal products in your medicine are there for a reason.

The post Binders, fillers and more? What’s all that other stuff in my medicine? first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

Today we have some bird photos by ecologist Susan Harrison. Her captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.  (And send in yours.)

Dry Tortugas and the perils of migration

The Dry Tortugas are the westernmost of the Florida Keys, lying just over 100 miles from the mainland. These tiny sandy islands, or cays, are uninhabited by people but essential to bird life.  They support  breeding colonies of some unusual seabirds, and they are the North American landfall for many spring-migrating songbirds.

Dry Tortugas National Park was created to protect these birds, and human visitors can go to only one island:  Garden Cay, which supports Fort Jefferson, a huge crumbling installation begun in 1846 and abandoned in 1906.  The fort saw use as a Civil War prison, a quarantine, and a coaling station, but its war-worn look is an illusion.  Somehow the engineers of the day did not realize that iron fittings exposed to salt water would expand and tear apart its brick walls.

Fort Jefferson:

Wandering about the fort’s grounds in late April, avian migrants are seen resting in the shrubby Seagrape (Coccoloba uvifera) and Buttonwood (Conocarpus erectus) trees and drinking at the tiny brick birdbath that provides the only water for many miles around.

Palm Warbler, Setophaga palmarum:

Cape May Warbler, Setophaga tigrinum:

Blackpoll Warbler, Setophaga striata:

Ovenbird, Seiurus atrocapilla:

Yellow-billed Cuckoo, Coccyzus americanus:

Purple Gallinule, Porphyrio martinca:

The fort is hardly a safe refuge for these tired flyers, however.  Bird-eating raptors circle the grounds constantly and we saw several luckless songbirds get caught.

Merlin, Falco columbarius:

Sharp-shinned Hawk, Accipiter striatus:

Antillean Short-eared Owl, Asio flammeus domingensis, a Caribbean subspecies:

Lastly, here are three bird species that within the US are only seen in southernmost Florida; I saw the first one on Garden Cay and all of them in Key West.

Grey Kingbird, Tyrannus dominicensis:

Short-tailed Hawk, Buteo brachyurus:

White-crested Pigeon, Patagioenas leucocephala:

For decades, cosmologists have been fighting over the Hubble constant, a number that represents the expansion rate of the universe – it may have finally been pinned down

A couple of days ago, I noted a chance of auroras (a.k.a. northern and southern lights) this week. That chance just went up again, with a series of solar flares and coronal mass ejections. The chance of auroras being visible well away from their usual latitudes is pretty high in the 36-48 hour range… meaning the evening of May 10th into the morning of May 11th in both Europe (with the best chances) and in the US and Canada.

Keep in mind that timing and aurora strength are hard to predict, so no prediction is guaranteed; it could come to nothing, or the auroras could show up somewhat earlier and be stronger than expected.

Meanwhile, the SciComm 2 conference continues at the Perimeter Institute. As part of it, experimental particle physicist Clara Nellist gave a public talk to an enthusiastic audience last night, reviewing the LHC experiments and their achievements. You can find it on YouTube if you’d like to watch it.

Last month I wrote about Havana Syndrome, the claim that a number of American and Canadian diplomats and military personnel were the targets of some sort of directed energy weapon attack causing symptoms of headache, disorientation, nausea, and sometimes associated with an auditory sensation. The point of the article was to do a plausibility analysis, based on what information I could find. I concluded:

“So far it seems that the objective evidence favors the “mass delusion” hypothesis. This is similar to “sick building syndrome” and other health incidents where a chance cluster of symptoms leads to widespread reporting which is followed by confirmation bias and the background noise of stress and symptoms focusing on the alleged syndrome. This explanation, at least, cannot be ruled out by current evidence.”

But I also thought we could not rule out (“rule out” is a strong position) that some of the initial cases may have been a genuine external attack. Part of my point was to caution skeptics about landing prematurely on a skeptical narrative and then biasing any further analysis toward that narrative. Sometimes information is messy, and there are legitimate points on more than one side. Don’t use bad arguments even to defend legitimate skeptical positions.

Specifically, I wondered if Havana Syndrome were more like some prior mass delusions, where there was a core of genuine cases. The Pokemon seizure panic of the 1990s is a good example –  most of the cases were some form of mass delusion, but about 10% were actually photosensitive seizures in susceptible individuals. So, how do we distinguish between 100% mass delusion and just mostly mass delusion? Arguments and evidence that some of the cases were not compatible with external attack or were clearly some form of hypervigilance, anxiety, or delusion do not make the distinction.

The strongest case against the external attack hypothesis that I could find was the fact that the American intelligence agencies investigated reports of Havana Syndrome and found no evidence to suggest external attack. I reject any notion of a coverup, which makes no sense, and is just being dismissive of the evidence. But could they have missed evidence of a covert foreign operation? I don’t know – but as I said, the more time that goes by, the less likely this becomes.

Another line of argument focuses on the alleged weapons themselves, either some form of sonic device or a directed microwave weapon. I don’t think it’s fair to entirely dismiss this technology as implausible. Directed microwave weapons in particular are feasible. We had working prototypes 20 years ago and stopped development mainly due to ethical reasons, but there is no reason to think that Russia and China also stopped. But do they fit the details of Havana Syndrome?

The reason I am writing again about this topic is because I just did an extensive interview with Robert Bartholomew, who has spent years investigating Havana Syndrome. He filled in some important gaps for me. Part of this interview will be on this week’s SGU episode and the entire hour-long interview will be available for SGU members. He provided a lot of information, but there are two pieces of information in particular that seem most devastating to the external attack hypothesis.

The first involves so-called “patient zero” of Havana Syndrome, a CIA officer who was the first to report the sudden onset of symptoms like headache, nausea, and disorientation. The first case is critical – if it is potentially a legitimate external attack, then that could explain triggering a mass delusion. But if the first case is likely not external attack, then it is far more likely that the entire syndrome is mass delusion. It would be a strange coincidence if the first false case triggered belief in a syndrome that later turned out to be real.

According to Bartholomew, who has direct information from interviews, the first case is extremely questionable. It occurred on the background of frequent harassment of US diplomats by the Cuban government, so there was already high anxiety that they were being targeted. When patient zero developed symptoms, he became convinced it was an external attack because they were accompanied by a sound – a sound that he recorded. Analysis of that sound concluded that he was just hearing the mating call of a local cricket species.

Patient zero, however, was convinced he was the victim of an attack, and then aggressively began promoting this idea, and warning all of his colleagues to be on the lookout for similar symptoms. This, predictably, led to a cluster of reports of symptoms. This, in turn, lead to the US state department putting out a notice to all US personnel stationed abroad to also be on the lookout for similar symptoms – a notice that would have gone to literally millions of people. This is a great way to generate a mass delusion.

Therefore, what we have is not just mass delusion as a diagnosis of exclusion, a plausible explanation in the absence of evidence for another cause. Bartholomew lays out a convincing affirmative case for a mass delusion, linking it back to patient zero and everything that flowed from them.

The second piece of information I found compelling was part of the intelligence investigation. The main argument against a directed microwave attack is not that such technology is impossible, but rather that use of such a device would have necessarily produced certain effects that were absent. A microwave beam would heat up any electronic or metal objects in the path, and would have likely caused noticeable heating of any tissue that was targeted. It would also likely have interfered with WiFi. None of this was reported, and is not part of the syndrome.

If we combine the results of the intelligence agency investigations with the strong case for a mass delusion leading back to patient zero, that really is left as the only plausible explanation. Of course, negative conclusions – that there were no external attacks – are always difficult. We cannot rule out, for example, that an alien spacecraft has ever visited the Earth, only that there is no definitive evidence that they have, and there is a strong positive case to make for the conclusion that the UFO phenomenon is a psychocultural one.

My original point, however, stands. When dealing with claims that are not paranormal, do not break the laws of physics, and are not literally impossible, we have to be careful not to overstate the skeptical case, or to endorse arguments that are weak just because they support the skeptical narrative. Also, having plausible alternate explanations, like mass delusion, is useful but not definitive in itself. The “explanation of exclusion” may be correct, and may be the most likely answer, but always comes with a question mark. Far better is when there is positive evidence for an alternate explanation.

In the case of Havana Syndrome, it is satisfying to conclude that the skeptical answer, that it is almost certainly entirely a mass delusion, is the best current answer.

The post Havana Syndrome Revisited first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.

We are generally as reluctant to contact a long-lost friend as we are to talk to a stranger, but scientists have come up with an approach so it's easier to make the first move

Researchers lay out the need for design safety protocols that prevent the emerging 'digital afterlife industry' causing social and psychological harm.

A new robotic hand can withstand being smashed by pistons or walloped with a hammer. It was designed to survive the trial-and-error interactions required to train AI robots

The quantum principle of superposition – the idea of particles being in multiple places at once – could help make quantum batteries that charge within minutes

When astrophysicists observe the cosmos, they see different types of black holes. They range from gargantuan supermassive black holes with billions of solar masses to difficult-to-find intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs) all the way down to smaller stellar-mass black holes.

But there may be another class of these objects: primordial black holes (PBHs) that formed in the very early Universe. If they exist, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope should be able to spot them.

Stellar-mass black holes form when massive stars explode as supernovae. SMBHs grow over time by merging with other black holes. How IMBHs form is still unclear, but it could involve mergers between stellar-mass black holes or multiple stellar collisions in dense star clusters.

Primordial black holes, if they exist, didn’t have any of these mechanisms available to them.

“If we find them, it will shake up the field of theoretical physics.”

William DeRocco, postdoctoral researcher, University of California Santa Cruz. Artist’s impression of merging binary black holes. When they merge, they emit gravitational waves that observatories like LIGO can detect. Image Credit: LIGO/A. Simonnet.

Nobody knows if primordial black holes exist. They’re theoretical. No physical process we know of can form them. But the early Universe was much different.

New research published in Physical Review D shows how the upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Telescope could detect these primordial Earth-mass objects. It’s titled “Revealing terrestrial-mass primordial black holes with the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.” The lead author is William DeRocco, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California Santa Cruz.

via GIPHY

“Detecting a population of Earth-mass primordial black holes would be an incredible step for both astronomy and particle physics because these objects can’t be formed by any known physical process,” lead author DeRocco said. “If we find them, it will shake up the field of theoretical physics.”

In the modern Universe, only stars with at least eight stellar masses can become black holes. Less massive stars will become neutron stars or white dwarfs. (The Sun will become a white dwarf.)

But things were different in the early Universe. During a period of rapid inflation, space expanded faster than the speed of light. In these unusual conditions, dense areas could have collapsed into PBHs. The scale of these objects is remarkably small. They would be the size of Earth or smaller and have event horizons about as wide as a coin.

PBHs could’ve formed when overdense regions in the inflationary or early radiation-dominated universe collapsed. Image Credit: By Gema White – https://www.slideserve.com/gema/primordial-black-hole-formation-in-an-axion-like-curvaton-model slide 19. Cropped to remove all elements of original authorship.Based on Kawasaki, Masahiro (2013-03-18). “Primordial black hole formation from an axionlike curvaton model.” Physical Review D 87 (6): 063519. DOI:10.1103/PhysRevD.87.063519., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=131103715

The least massive of these ones would’ve disappeared due to evaporation. That’s what Stephen Hawking figured out. But some, the ones as massive as Earth, could’ve survived.

<Click on image for larger version> Stephen Hawking came up with the idea of black hole evaporation. He theorized that black holes slowly shrink as radiation escapes. The slow leak of what’s now known as Hawking radiation would, over time, cause the black hole to simply evaporate. This infographic shows the estimated lifetimes and event horizon –– the point past which infalling objects can’t escape a black hole’s gravitational grip –– diameters for black holes of various small masses. Image Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

Even though they’re theoretical, there are some evidential hints of their presence. Those hints come from gravitational microlensing.

Two efforts have used microlensing to study objects in the Universe. One is OGLE, the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment. Another is MOA, Microlensing Observations in Astrophysics. OGLE found 17 isolated Earth-mass objects in space.

Planet OGLE-2012-BLG-0950Lb was detected through gravitational microlensing, a phenomenon that acts as Nature’s magnifying glass. CREDIT: LCO/D. BENNETT

These objects could be PBHs, or they could be rogue planets. Unfortunately, it’s very difficult to differentiate on an individual basis. But since theory predicts the masses and the abundance of rogue planets, that could provide a way for the Roman Telescope to tell them apart from PBHs.

“There’s no way to tell between Earth-mass black holes and rogue planets on a case-by-case basis,” DeRocco said. “Roman will be extremely powerful in differentiating between the two statistically.”

In their research, the authors explain it more fully. “The key point is that though PBH and FFP events cannot be discriminated on an event-by-event basis, the two populations can be distinguished by the statistical distribution of their event durations.” Scientists think that Roman will find 10 times as many objects in this mass range than ground-based efforts like OGLE and MOA.

Artist’s impression of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, named after NASA’s first Chief of Astronomy. When launched later this decade, the telescope should make a significant contribution to the study of FFPs and will hopefully detect PBHs. Credits: NASA

Finding primordial black holes would create a big upheaval.

“It would affect everything from galaxy formation to the universe’s dark matter content to cosmic history,” said Kailash Sahu, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. Sahu wasn’t involved in the research but understands the impact the results would have. “Confirming their identities will be hard work and astronomers will need a lot of convincing, but it would be well worth it.”

If the Roman Space Telescope can find the black holes and confirm them, it could be a defining moment in astronomical history. The discovery would be strong evidence in favour of a period of rapid inflation in the early Universe, an epoch that so far is unproven. Physicists think there must have been a period like this as it helps explain so much else about the Universe.

More excitingly, these primordial black holes could comprise a percentage of dark matter. A small percentage, but a massive improvement over our current understanding of what dark matter is. Scientists keep looking for things like WIMPs (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles) and other particles that could be dark matter, but they never find them.

“The nature of dark matter remains one of the most pressing open questions in fundamental physics. While multiple lines of compelling evidence indicate its existence, its microphysical nature remains unknown,” the authors explain.

The elegant thing about the Roman and PBHs is that it won’t require a special effort to find them. The Roman will already search for planets. “Roman’s Galactic Bulge Time Domain Survey is expected
to observe hundreds of low-mass microlensing events, enabling a robust statistical characterization
of this population,” the authors write in their paper.

via GIPHY

Each space telescope we launch is a new window into some aspect of the Universe. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope sure will be. “Though its Galactic Bulge Time Domain Survey targets bound and unbound exoplanets, we have shown that it will have unprecedented sensitivity to physics beyond the Standard Model as well,” DeRocco and his co-researchers write in their paper. That’s because it can “probe the fraction of dark matter composed of primordial black holes,” they write.

“This is an exciting example of something extra scientists could do with data Roman is already going to get as it searches for planets,” Sahu said. “And the results are interesting whether or not scientists find evidence that Earth-mass black holes exist. It would strengthen our understanding of the universe in either case.”

And who doesn’t want a stronger understanding of the Universe?

The post Roman Space Telescope Will Be Hunting For Primordial Black Holes appeared first on Universe Today.