The woman tapped by the Harris-Walz campaign to head Arab-American outreach said pro-Israel factions were "controlling" U.S. politics in a 2002 interview.

In a fiery statement on Truth Social, former President Donald Trump warned voters about the potential consequences of electing Vice President Kamala Harris and running mate Tim Walz this November, predicting a dire future for America under their leadership.

Former President Donald Trump has said Kamala Harris is bad at many things, but he did offer a compliment to the vice president Thursday during a rally in Potterville, Michigan.

In a joint interview with running mate Tim Walz on Thursday with CNN's Dana Bash, Vice President Kamala Harris avoided addressing comments made by Donald Trump regarding her racial identity, swiftly dismissing the topic with a request to move on.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Democrat Vice President Kamala Harris' running mate, hasn't been shy in calling their Republican rivals, former President Donald Trump and Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, weird.

Donald Trump asked a federal court late Thursday to intervene in his New York business records criminal case, seeking a pathway to overturn his felony conviction and indefinitely delay his sentencing scheduled for next month. Lawyers for the former president and current ...

The merging of black holes and neutron stars are among the most energetic events in the universe. Not only do they emit colossal amounts of energy, they can also be detected through gravitational waves. Observatories like LIGO/Virgo (Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory) and KAGRA (The Kamioka Gravitational Wave Detector) have detected their gravitational waves but new gravitational wave observatories are now thought to be able to detect the collapse of a massive rapidly spinning star before it becomes a black hole. According to new research, collapsing stars within 50 million light years should be detectable.  The acceleration of massive objects can create ripples in space-time known as gravitational waves. They were first predicted by Albert Einstein in 1915 in his General Theory of Relativity. The waves are thought to travel at the speed of light and carry energy across the cosmos. Unlike electromagnetic waves, the gravitational waves seem to interact weakly with matter which allows them to pass unimpeded through stars, planets and galaxies. In 2015, the first gravitational waves were detected by the LIGO. LIGO Observatory Black holes and neutron stars are the remains of the death of stars. When supermassive stars reach the end of their lives they create astronomically (pardon the pun) dense objects. Neutron stars are stellar cores where the space between neutrons has been squeezed out leaving behind one great big neutron, often just a few tens of kilometres across. The remains of even more massive stars get compressed to an object of infinitely small size, a singularity, the power house of a black hole.  In a paper published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters by Ore Gottlieb and team, it proposes how the collapse and death of massive stars (of the region 15 to 20 times the mass of the Sun) can generate gravitational waves. As the star ends its life, the core runs out of fuel and no longer generates the thermonuclear force to stop the collapse. The collapse leaves behind a large disk that quickly spirals around before falling into the black hole and it is this that it is thought, generates gravitational waves. The team goes on to suggest that the various gravity wave detectors on Earth may well be able to detect them. An artist’s illustration of a supermassive black hole (SMBH.) The SMBH in a distant galaxy expelled all the material in its accretion disk, clearing out a vast area. Image Credit: ESA To date, only merger events have been observed through gravitational waves. The simulations from the study took into account stellar evolution models including magnetic fields and cooling rates in the moments after core collapse. The simulations showed that the collapse events produce gravitational waves powerful enough to be detected from a distance of 50 million light years. The more powerful events already detected are ten times more powerful.  The results are a surprise to the team that expected the results to show a jumble of waves that would be difficult to discern above the background noise of the universe. They even suggest that it’s possible that existing data may already hold observations of such events.  To fully model the collapse events and how the gravity wave data may present itself, an estimated 1 million collapse simulations need to be run. Alas this is an expensive undertaking and unlikely to secure funding. Instead gravity wave astronomers are searching through existing data, looking for signals that are similar to the simulations the team have already run. One approach is to search for supernova events and to see if gravity wave observations detected any signals at the same time. The task however, is a daunting one but the hunt continues.  Source : New Detectable Gravitational Wave Source From Collapsing Stars Predicted From Simulations The post For Their Next Trick, Gravitational Wave Observatories Could Detect Collapsing Stars appeared first on Universe Today.

When the James Webb Space Telescope provided astronomers with a glimpse of the earliest galaxies in the Universe, there was some understandable confusion. Given that these galaxies existed during “Cosmic Dawn,” less than one billion years after the Big Bang, they seemed “impossibly large” for their age. According to the most widely accepted cosmological model—the Lambda Cold Dark Matter (LCDM) model—the first galaxies in the Universe did not have enough time to become so massive and should have been more modestly sized. This presented astronomers with another “crisis in cosmology,” suggesting that the predominant model about the origins and evolution of the Universe was wrong. However, according to a new study by an international team of astronomers, these galaxies are not so “impossibly large” after all, and what we saw may have been the result of a lensing effect. In short, the presence of black holes in some of these early galaxies made them appear much brighter and larger than they actually were. This is good news for astronomers and cosmologists who like the LCDM the way it is! The study was led by Katherine Chworowsky, a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin (UT) and a National Science Foundation (NSF) Fellow. She was joined by colleagues from UT’s Cosmic Frontier Center, NSF’s NOIRLab, the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics, the Mitchell Institute for Fundamental Physics and Astronomy, the Cosmic Dawn Center (DAWN), the Niels Bohr Institute, the Netherlands Institute for Space Research (SRON), NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, the European Space Agency (ESA), the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), and other prestigious universities and institutes. The paper that details their findings recently appeared in The Astrophysical Journal. The first image taken by the James Webb Space Telescope, featuring the galaxy cluster SMACS 0723. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI The data was acquired as part of the Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science (CEERS) Survey, led by Steven Finkelstein, a professor of astronomy at UT and a study co-author. In a previous study, Avishai Dekel and his colleagues at the Racah Institute of Physics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HUJI) argued that the prevalence of low-density dust clouds in the early Universe allowed for rapid star formation in galaxies. Dekel and Zhaozhou Li (a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow at HUJI) were also co-authors of this latest study. As Chworowsky and her colleagues explained, the observed galaxies only appeared massive because their central black holes were rapidly consuming gas. This process causes friction, causing the gas to emit heat and light, creating the illusion of there being many more stars and throwing off official mass estimates. These galaxies appeared as “little red dots” in the Webb image (shown below). When removed from the analysis, the remaining galaxies were consistgent with what the standard LCDM model predicts. “So, the bottom line is there is no crisis in terms of the standard model of cosmology,” Finkelstein said in a UT News release. “Any time you have a theory that has stood the test of time for so long, you have to have overwhelming evidence to really throw it out. And that’s simply not the case.” However, there is still the matter of the number of galaxies in the Webb data, which are twice as many as the standard model predicts. A possible explanation is that stars formed more rapidly in the early Universe. Essentially, stars are formed from clouds of dust and gas (nebulae) that cool and condense to the point where they undergo gravitational collapse, triggering nuclear fusion. As the star’s interior heats up, it generates outward pressure that counteracts gravity, preventing further collapse. The balance of these opposing forces makes star formation relatively slow in our region of the cosmos. The galaxy cluster SMACS0723, with the five galaxies selected for closer study. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI / Giménez-Arteaga et al. (2023), Peter Laursen (Cosmic Dawn Center). According to some theories, the Universe was much denser than it is today, which prevented stars from blowing out gas during formation, thus making the process more rapid. These findings echo what Dekel and his colleagues argued in their previous paper, though it would account for there being more galaxies rather than several massive ones. Similarly, the CEERS team and other research groups have obtained spectra from these black holes that indicate the presence of fast-moving hydrogen gas, which could mean that they have accretion disks. The swirling of these disks could provide some of the luminosity previously mistaken for stars. In any case, further observations of these “little red dots” are pending, which should help resolve any remaining questions about how massive these galaxies are and whether or not star formation was more rapid during the early Universe. So, while this study has shown that the LCDM model of cosmology is safe for now, its findings raise new questions about the formation process of stars and galaxies in the early Universe. “And so, there is still that sense of intrigue,” said Chworowsky. “Not everything is fully understood. That’s what makes doing this kind of science fun, because it’d be a terribly boring field if one paper figured everything out, or there were no more questions to answer.” Further Reading: UT News, The Astronomical Journal The post Remember those Impossible Galaxies Found by JWST? It Turns Out They Were Possible After All appeared first on Universe Today.

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