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For experiments that require ultra-precise measurements and control over atoms -- think two-photon atomic clocks, cold-atom interferometer sensors and quantum gates -- lasers are the technology of choice, the more spectrally pure (emitting a single color/frequency), the better. Conventional lab-scale laser technology currently achieves this ultra low-noise, stable light via bulky, costly tabletop systems designed to generate, harness and emit photons within a narrow spectral range.

Solid phase manufacturing can create new custom metal alloys through an innovative process called solid phase alloying, researchers report.

Household plumbing is alive with microbes; environmental engineers are working to study those ecosystems to ensure clean water flows in homes.

An international research team has controlled hybrid electron-photon quantum states in helium atoms. Control of these special quantum states was enabled by the pulse formation of very intense, extreme ultraviolet radiation. This method introduces the possibility not only of studying quantum mechanical effects in atoms and molecules, but also of controlling chemical reactions.

The US Navy has many tasks it wants quantum devices to tackle, from setting maintenance schedules to enabling nearly unhackable communication

Not long ago, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) peered into Cosmic Dawn, the cosmological period when the first galaxies formed less than one billion years after the Big Bang. In the process, it discovered something rather surprising. Not only were there more galaxies (and brighter ones, too!) than expected, but these galaxies had supermassive black holes (SMBH) much larger than cosmological models predicted. For astronomers and cosmologists, explaining how these galaxies and their SMBHs (aka. quasars) could have grown so large less than a billion years after the Big Bang has become a major challenge.

Several proposals have been made, ranging from optical illusions to Dark Matter accelerating black hole growth. In a recent study, an international team led by researchers from the National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) analyzed a sample of 21 quasars, among the most distant ever discovered. The results suggest that the supermassive black holes at the center of these galaxies may have reached their surprising masses through very rapid accretion, providing a plausible explanation for how galaxies and their SMBHs grew and evolved during the early Universe.

The study was led by Alessia Tortosa, a researcher with the INAF’s Astronomical Observatory of Rome. She was joined by researchers from the Centre for Extragalactic Astronomy, the Centro de Astrobiología (CAB), the Istituto di Astrofisica Spaziale e Fisica Cosmica Milano, the Institute for Fundamental Physics of the Universe, the National Institute for Nuclear Physics, the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the Italian Space Agency (ASI), the European Space Agency (ESA), the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, and multiple observatories and universities. The paper detailing their findings was recently published in the Astronomy & Astrophysics.

The ESA’s XMM-Newton observatory was launched in 1999 to study interstellar X-ray sources. Credit: ESA

Radio astronomers first observed quasars in the 1950s based on the large amounts of radiation they emitted at many frequencies. These objects, which they named “quasi-stellar objects” (quasar for short), were notable for how their cores would outshine all the stars in their disks. From the 1970s onward, astronomers learned that this phenomenon was due to the presence of SMBHs at the center of these galaxies. Since then, astronomers have been eager to get a look at the earliest galaxies in the Universe to see the “seeds” of these black holes and chart their evolution.

However, Webb’s observations revealed some surprisingly large “seeds” at the center of the early galaxies it imaged. This included galaxies like EGSY8p7, which existed just 570 million years after the Big Bang but had a central black hole roughly 9 million times the mass of the Sun. Even more surprising was UHZ1, a galaxy that existed when the Universe was about 470 million years old. At its center, Webb spotted a massive black hole (designated CEERS 1019) 40 million times the mass of our Sun – ten times the mass of Sagittarius A*, the SMBH at the center of the Milky Way.

According to the most widely accepted cosmological models, these galaxies and black holes did not have enough time to grow so large. For their study, Tortosa and her colleagues analyzed a sample of 21 quasars (including the most distant ever observed) based on X-ray data obtained by the XMM-Newton and Chandra space telescopes. This revealed a completely unexpected connection between the shape of the X-ray emissions and the speed of the winds ejecting matter from the quasars. This connection suggests that wind speeds are connected to the temperature of the gas closest to the black hole’s corona (the X-ray emitting region).

This means that the corona is connected to the powerful accretion mechanisms that allow black holes to grow. Specifically, they observed how quasars with low-energy X-ray emissions and lower temperatures have faster winds, leading to a rapid growth rate that exceeds the Eddington Limit – the theoretical limit to the mass of a star or an accretion disk. Meanwhile, quasars with higher X-ray emissions tended to exhibit slower wind speeds. As Tortosa explained in an INAF press statement:

“Our work suggests that the supermassive black holes at the center of the first quasars formed within the first billion years of the Universe’s life may have actually increased their mass very rapidly, challenging the limits of physics. The discovery of this connection between X-ray emission and winds is crucial for understanding how such large black holes could have formed in such a short time, thus providing a concrete clue to solve one of the greatest mysteries of modern astrophysics.”

By combining a large X-ray telescope with state-of-the-art scientific instruments, Athena will address key questions in astrophysics. Credit: ESA

Most of the XMM-Newton data was collected between 2021 and 2023 as part of a Multi-Year XMM-Newton Heritage Program known as HYPerluminous quasars at the Epoch of ReionizatION (HYPERION). This program is directed by Luca Zappacosta, an INAF researcher and the second author of the paper, and aims to study hyperluminous quasars during the cosmic dawn of the Universe. Said Zappacosta:

“In the HYPERION program, we focused on two key factors: on one hand, the careful selection of quasars to observe, choosing the titans, meaning those that had accumulated as much mass as possible, and on the other hand, the in-depth study of their properties in X-rays, something never attempted before on such a large number of objects from the cosmic dawn. We hit the jackpot! The results we’re getting are genuinely unexpected, and they all point to a super-Eddington growth mechanism of the black holes.”

This study provides valuable insights into the formation and evolution of SMBHs and their host galaxies. The team’s findings will also inform future X-ray missions, like the ESA’s Advanced Telescope for High Energy Astrophysics (ATHENA) and NASA’s Advanced X-Ray Imaging Satellite (AXIS) and Lynx X-ray Observatory, which are scheduled to launch in the next two decades. These and other next-generation instruments are expected to reveal even more about the early Universe and help resolve its deepest mysteries.

Further Reading: INAF, Astronomy & Astrophysics

The post New Research may Explain how Supermassive Black Holes in the Early Universe Grew so Fast appeared first on Universe Today.

The study, conducted in the US, found that mothers take on seven in ten (71%) of all household mental load tasks.

Researchers have synthesized new molecules able to quickly capture significant amounts of carbon dioxide from the air, an important tactic in climate change mitigation.

Researchers developed an AI debiasing technique that improves the fairness of a machine-learning model by boosting its performance for subgroups that are underrepresented in its training data, while maintaining its overall accuracy.

A research team has developed an ultra-thin, flexible film that could power next-generation wearable devices using body heat, eliminating the need for batteries.

A research team has developed an ultra-thin, flexible film that could power next-generation wearable devices using body heat, eliminating the need for batteries.

Stars similar to the Sun produce a gigantic outburst of radiation on average about once every hundred years per star. Such superflares release more energy than a trillion hydrogen bombs and make all previously recorded solar flares pale in comparison. This estimate is based on an inventory of 56450 sun-like stars. It shows that previous studies have significantly underestimated the eruptive potential of these stars. In data from NASA's space telescope Kepler, superflaring, sun-like stars can be found ten to a hundred times more frequently than previously assumed. The Sun, too, is likely capable of similarly violent eruptions.

A survey of more than 56,000 sun-like stars reveals that “superflares” that could play havoc with electronics on Earth may happen every 100 to 200 years and the last big one to hit us was in 1859

The oldest genomes ever recovered from modern humans have helped pin down when and how the momentous mingling of two hominins played out

Large drones have been spotted flying over the US for weeks, and state and federal officials say they still have no idea who is behind the flights

Every once in a while Sam Harris, who must be overwhelmed with his writing on Substack, his podcast, and his complex meditation site, gets back to what brought him public notice: criticism of religion. And even if you know his views from The End of Faith or Letter to a Christian Nation, you’ll benefit if you’re able to read the two pieces below. (These two Substack essays have titles clearly drawn from the latter book.)

Apparently some high-handed Christian, just called “X,” wrote to Sam chewing him out for dissing Christianity, saying that atheism didn’t disprove God’s existence, claiming that Sam didn’t understand modern religion or sophisticated theology, asserting that religion makes people behave better, and arguing that Sam’s criticism of religion—Christianity in particularly—showed that he was intolerant.

Well, this is all meat for Sam’s grinder, and the poor “X” got it ten ways from Sunday, in two posts on Sam’s site. You won’t be able to access them all unless you’re a member of his Substack, but I’ve linked to them anyway and will give some of the delicious quotes I found. And, in case you haven’t read Sam’s first two books and can read these essays, they’re a decent substitute. (But you should read the books.) Click on the headlines to go to the site.

 

First, a response to X’s claim that Sam was arguing against religious extremists, not moderates (this in fact was taken up in The End of Faith). I’ve indented Sam’s comments.

So let me address my longstanding frustration with religious moderates, to which you alluded. It is true that their “sophisticated” theology has generally taught me to appreciate the candor of religious fanatics. Whenever someone like me or Richard Dawkins criticizes Christians for believing in the imminent return of Christ, or Muslims for believing in martyrdom, moderates like yourself claim that we have caricatured Christianity and Islam, taken extremists to be the sole representatives of these great faiths, or otherwise overlooked a shimmering ocean of nuance. We are invariably told that a mature understanding of the historical and literary contexts of scripture renders faith perfectly compatible with reason and contemporary ethics, and that our attack upon religion is, therefore, “simplistic,” “dogmatic,” or even “fundamentalist.” Needless to say, such casuistry generally comes moistened by great sighs of condescension.

. . . . The problem, as I see it, is that religious moderates don’t tend to know what it is like to be truly convinced that death is an illusion and that an eternity of happiness awaits the faithful beyond the grave. They have, as you say, “integrated doubt” into their faith. Another way of putting this is that they just have less faith—and for good reason. The result, however, is that your fellow moderates tend to doubt that anybody is ever motivated to sacrifice his life, or the lives of others, on the basis of religion. Moderate doubt—which I agree is an improvement over fundamentalist certainty in most respects—often blinds a person to the reality of full-tilt religious lunacy. Such blindness is now especially unhelpful, given the hideous collision between modern doubt and Islamic certainty that we are witnessing across the globe.

Second, many religious moderates imagine, as you do, that there is some clear line of separation between their faith and extremism. But there isn’t. Scripture itself remains a perpetual engine of extremism: because, while He may be many things, the God of the Bible and the Qur’an is not a moderate. Read scripture as closely as you like, you will not find reasons for religious moderation. On the contrary, you will find reasons to live like a maniac from the 14th century—to fear the fires of hell, to despise nonbelievers, to persecute homosexuals, and to hunt witches (good luck). Of course, you can cherry-pick scripture and find inspiration to love your neighbor and turn the other cheek, but the truth is, the pickings are slim, and the more fully one grants credence to these books, the more fully one will be committed to the view that infidels, heretics, and apostates are fit only to be crushed in God’s loving machinery of justice.

Part 2 of the evisceration of X:

Here, Sam argues why religion is not a net good.

-To be clear, I do not “disdain” religious moderates. I do, however, disdain bad ideas and bad arguments—which, I’m afraid, religious moderates tend to produce in great quantities. I’d like to point out that you didn’t rebut any of the substantial challenges I made in my last volley. Rather, you went on to make other points, most of which I find irrelevant to the case I made against religious faith. For instance, you remind me that many people find religion—both its doctrines and its institutions—important sources of comfort and inspiration. You also insist that many devoutly religious people do good things on the basis of their religious beliefs. I do not doubt either of these propositions. But you could gather such facts until the end of time, and they wouldn’t begin to suggest that the God of Abraham actually exists, or that the Bible is his Word, or that he came to Earth in the person of Jesus Christ to redeem our sins.

I have no doubt that there are millions of nice Mormons who imagine themselves to be dependent upon their church for a sense of purpose and community, and who do good things wherever their missionary work takes them. Does this, in your view, even slightly increase the probability that the Book of Mormon was delivered on golden plates to Joseph Smith Jr.—that a very randy and unscrupulous dowser—by the angel Moroni? Do all the good Muslims in the world lend credence to the claim that Muhammad flew to heaven on a winged horse? And what of the Scientologist next door, who appears to be living his best possible life? Does his success in Hollywood increase your admiration for that patent charlatan, L. Ron Hubbard?

Something that often gets neglected in these discussions is that if one religion is absolutely true, all the others are wrong. And Sam, like the other New Atheists, is absolutely concerned with religious truth, for at bottom most religious behavior is based on the conviction that the tenets of one’s faith are true. If you believe that Christ wasn’t resurrected, you can hardly call yourself a Christian. One important reason for seeing if a religion is “true” is given below: you need good reasons for behaving as you do. But first this:

If Christianity is right, all other religions are wrong:

• Jesus Christ was the Messiah—so the Jews are wrong.
• Jesus was divine and resurrected—so the Muslims are wrong (“Jesus son of Mary, Allah’s messenger—they slew him not nor crucified him, but it appeared so unto them.” Qur’an, 4:157).
• There is only one God—so the Hindus are wrong.

But, of course, the Christians have no better reason to think they’re right than Jews, Muslims, or Hindus do.

And here’s my favorite bit, which tells you why the truth of one’s religion is crucial:

As I have argued elsewhere, the alleged usefulness of religion—the fact that people find it consoling or that it sometimes gets them to do good things—is not an argument for its truth.

And, of course, the utility of religious faith can also be disputed. Wherever religion makes people feel better, or gets them to do good things, it does so for bad reasons—when good reasons are available. Which strikes you as more moral, helping people out of a sincere concern for their suffering, or helping them because you believe God wants you to do it? Personally, I’d prefer that my children acquire the former attitude.

And religion often inspires people to do bad things that they would not otherwise do. For instance, at this very moment in Syria and Iraq, perfectly ordinary Shia and Sunni Muslims can be found drilling holes into each other’s skulls with power tools. What are the chances they would be doing this without the “benefit” of their incompatible religious beliefs and identities?

As the late Steven Weinberg said, “With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil – that takes religion.”

On to “sophisticated philosophy” and exegesis:

The Bible, as you suggest, “defies easy synthesis” and “can be hard to understand.” But it is worse than that. No, I haven’t argued that the book “is principally about owning slaves”—just that it gets the ethics of slavery wrong, which is a terrible flaw in a book that is widely imagined to be perfect.

The truth is that even with Jesus holding forth in defense of the poor, the meek, and the persecuted, the Bible basically condones slavery. As I argued in Letter to a Christian Nation, the slaveholders of the South were on the winning side of a theological argument—and they knew it. And they made a hell of a lot of noise about it. We got rid of slavery despite the moral inadequacy of the Bible, not because it is the greatest repository of wisdom we have.

Below is the only part of the essays that confuses me. Sam thinks we have no free will (he has a book called Free Will that’s well worth reading). If that’s the case, how can he say this?

It is true that many atheists are convinced that they know what this relationship is, and that it is one of absolute dependence of the one upon the other. Those who have read the last chapters of The End of Faith or Waking Up know that I am not convinced of this. While I have spent a fair amount of time thinking about the brain, I do not think that the reducibility of consciousness to unconscious information processing has been established. It may be that the very concepts of mind and matter are fundamentally misleading us. But this doesn’t justify crazy ideas about miraculous books, virgin births, and saviors ushering in the end of the world.

It sounds to me that he is separating mind and matter, not a stand that comports with determinism.  It’s always seemed to me palpably unscientific to say, knowing that the brain is made of matter and that our thoughts and behaviors stem almost entirely from the brain, that consciousness (a brain product) must also come from matter and its physical behavior. In fact, this is the point that Sam seems to make repeatedly on his meditation website. But maybe I’m not understanding something,

In the end, Sam gives “X” a final drubbing after “X” calls Sam intolerant for criticizing Christianity.   Sam’s superb writing and thinking make it sting all the harder:

What if I told you that I am confident that I have an even number of cells in my body? Would it be intolerant of you to doubt me? What are the chances that I am in a position to have counted my cells and counted them correctly? Note that, unlike claims about virgin births and resurrections, my claim has a 50% chance of being true—and yet it is clearly ridiculous.

Forgive me for stating the obvious: No Christian has ever been in a position to be confident (much less certain) that Jesus was born of a virgin or that he will one day return to Earth wielding magic powers. Observing this fact is not a form of intolerance.

You seem to have taken special offense at my imputing self-deception and/or dishonesty to the faithful. I make no apologies for this. One of the greatest problems with religion is that it is built, to a remarkable degree, upon lies. Mommy claims to know that Granny went straight to heaven after she died. But Mommy doesn’t actually know this. The truth is that, while Mommy may be honest on every other topic, in this instance, she doesn’t want to distinguish what she really knows (i.e. what she has good reasons to believe) from (1) what she wants to be true or (2) what will keep her children from being too sad in Granny’s absence. So Mommy is lying—either to herself or to her kids—and we’ve all agreed not to talk about it. Rather than learn how to grieve, we learn to lie to ourselves, or to those we love.

You can complain about the intolerance of atheists all you want, but that won’t make unjustified claims to knowledge appear more reasonable; it won’t differentiate your religious beliefs from the beliefs of others which you consider illegitimate; and it won’t constitute an adequate response to anything I have written here, or am likely to write in the future.

Harris is a gifted man, and I’m baffled at the number of people who seem to intensely dislike him.

A fungus named Psilocybe ochraceocentrata is the closest relative of a widely cultivated psychedelic mushroom, giving clues to their evolutionary origins

A team of researchers unlock heat flow principles in ultra-thin metals, paving the way for faster, smaller, more efficient computer chips.

A team of researchers unlock heat flow principles in ultra-thin metals, paving the way for faster, smaller, more efficient computer chips.

Detection of nitric oxide (NO) is important for monitoring air quality because the NO released in the combustion of fossil fuels contributes to acid rain and smog. In medicine, NO is an important messenger molecule and serves as a biomarker for asthma. A research team reports a material that can detect NO reversibly, with low power, and with high sensitivity and selectivity: a copper-containing, electrically conducting, two-dimensional metal--organic framework.