On the edge of Peru's coastal desert, a remote fishing town where a third of all residents have no running water is being transformed into a huge deep-water port to cash in on the inexorable rise of Chinese interest in resource-rich South America.

By tapping into the enigmatic theory of how neurons transmit signals, scientists have proven they can one day build computer chips with near-zero electrical resistance.

Happy Wednesday! The news is flying fast, so let’s just get to it. The key theme? Donald Trump is not playing around this time. Firebrand Rep. Matt Gaetz Named Attorney General If you were hoping someone…

Shh … can anybody hear that? It could be the sound of legacy media outlets collectively sighing, furtively relieved not to have to report on Kamala Harris for the next four years. What would they talk…

The president-elect is moving quickly, scoring some points and raising some blood pressures. On Nov. 13, President-elect Donald Trump traveled to Washington, DC, where he met with congressional Republicans…

President-elect Donald Trump is in the midst of political machinations that could upend the business-as-usual approach to governance in the nation’s capital. With the GOP House majority now official…

Eric Hovde and his supporters have every right to believe something stinks in Milwaukee.  Of course, the usual suspects in the propaganda press have been quick to mark the Wisconsin Republican Senate…

In the final tense days before the 2024 presidential election, a quiet confidence began to take hold. Shockingly strong polls, massive early voting crowds, a visibly panicked Democrat Party — this time…

At the centre of most galaxies are supermassive black holes. When they are ‘feeding’ they blast out jets of material with associated radiation that can outshine the rest of the galaxy. These are known as quasars and they are usually found in regions where huge quantities of gas exist. However, a recent study found a higher than expected number of quasars that are alone in the Universe. These loners are not surrounded by galaxies nor a supply of gas. The question therefore remains, how are they shining so brightly.  A quasar or ‘quasi-stellar’ object as they are more formally known are among the most powerful and energetic objects in the Universe. They are usually powered by a supermassive black hole at the centre of a galaxy. Matter gets drawn toward the black hole by gravity and as it does, it spirals in forming an accretion disk. It is here that friction and gravitational forces heat material to extremely high temperatures emitting intense light and radiation that can outshine the light from all the stars in the galaxy put together.  This is an artist’s illustration of a supermassive black hole that is inside the dust-shrouded core of a vigorously star-forming “starburst” galaxy. It will eventually become an extremely bright quasar once the dust is gone. New research shows that the object, discovered in a Hubble deep-sky survey, could be the evolutionary “missing link” between quasars and starburst galaxies. The dusty black hole dates back to only 750 million years after the big bang. NASA, ESA, N. Bartmann The team of astronomers used NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to explore 5 distant ancient quasars. They are thought to have formed between 600 and 700 million years after the Big Bang and are a billion times more massive than the Sun. They punt out so much energy that they are more than a trillion times brighter than our local star!  The objects are 13 billion light years away but due to their extreme luminosity their light can be detected across the cosmos. The real surprise though is that they have been found in an unexpected variety of different environments. The ‘quasar fields’ as they are known include areas of space  crowded with galaxies as the models forecast. The others though seem to be isolated, drifting through space with only a few stray galaxies nearby.  Using the James Webb Space Telescope between August 2022 and June 2023 multiple images were taken of each quasar field to produce a mosaic. The images were captured in multiple wavelengths and were stitched together provided a complete picture of the region of space around each quasar. Using this approach, the team could determine if the light was from a neighbouring galaxy or from the central quasar.  Artist impression of the James Webb Space Telescope The discovery flies in the face of quasar models that usually places them in host galaxies with a plentiful supply of gas and dust to keep them fed. Finding quasars floating in voids has left astronomers scratching their heads to understand and modify the theories. It is of course possible the host galaxies are just not visible, perhaps they are just shrouded by dust.  When the quasars formed, the Universe would have been full of filaments of dark matter. The presence of the matter would attract gas and dust through gravitational interactions. It is from this material that the studied quasars would have formed. However the curiosity is that they would have had to grow at an incredible rate through accretion to achieve the luminosity seen just a few hundred years after the Big Bang. Further observations are needed of the quasar fields to try and identify the true nature of the area they exist within to truly understand their nature.  Source : Astronomers detect ancient lonely quasars with murky origins The post Why are Some Quasars So Lonely? appeared first on Universe Today.

It took awhile, but they finally got it right. Continue reading…