Ongoing Experiments and theories adding insight into our quest of discovery include:
1990 The Hubble Space Telescope
Hubble is a large, space-based observatory that has changed our understanding of the cosmos since its launch. It is one of NASA’s Great Observatories. Hubble orbits Earth at an altitude of about 350 miles (560 kilometers), above most of the Earth’s atmosphere. This allows it to capture images with much sharper resolution than ground-based telescopes. Hubble has also been responsible for some of the most iconic images in astronomy, such as the Pillars of Creation and the Hubble Deep Field.
1999 The Chandra X-ray Observatory
Chandra is a space telescope designed to detect X-rays from celestial objects. Chandra is the most powerful X-ray telescope ever built. It can detect X-ray sources that are 100 times fainter than any previous X-ray telescope. This allows Chandra to study a wide range of celestial objects. Chandra is a vital tool for astronomers studying the universe. It has helped us to better understand the nature of black holes, the physics of supernovae, and the structure and evolution of galaxy clusters.
2002 LIGO
The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) is a large-scale physics experiment and observatory designed to detect cosmic gravitational waves and to develop gravitational-wave observations as an astronomical tool. Two large observatories were built in the United States with the aim of detecting gravitational waves by laser interferometry.
The original LIGO did not detect any gravity waves. The Advanced LIGO Project to enhance the original LIGO detectors began in 2008. In September 2015, the LIGO experiments completed a 5-year overhaul to improve sensitivity.
On 11 February 2016, the LIGO Scientific Collaboration and Virgo Collaboration published a paper about the detection of gravitational waves, from a signal detected at 09.51 UTC on 14 September 2015 of two ~30 solar mass black holes merging about 1.3 billion light-years from Earth
2009 Entropic Gravity
Eric Verlinde’s theory of gravity is a radical new approach to understanding one of the most fundamental forces in the universe. Verlinde argues that gravity is not a fundamental force at all, but rather an emergent phenomenon that arises from the entanglement of information in spacetime.
Verlinde’s theory is based on the holographic principle, which states that all of the information contained in a three-dimensional volume of space can be encoded on a two-dimensional surface. This means that the universe is essentially a holographic projection of a lower-dimensional reality.
Verlinde argues that the entanglement of information in this lower-dimensional reality gives rise to the appearance of gravity in our three-dimensional universe. In other words, gravity is not a force that pulls objects together, but rather an emergent phenomenon that arises from the way that information is distributed in spacetime.
Verlinde’s theory of gravity has a number of important implications. For example, it suggests that gravity is not as strong as it should be if it were a fundamental force. This is because the entropy of spacetime is proportional to its area, and entropy is always increasing. This means that the strength of gravity must be decreasing over time.
2019 Event Horizon Telescope (EHT)
EHT, a network of radio telescopes around the world combines data from several very-long-baseline interferometry (VLBI) stations around Earth Their angular resolution sufficient to observe objects the size of a supermassive black hole’s event horizon.
The project’s observational targets included the two black holes with the largest angular diameter as observed from Earth: the black hole at the center of the supergiant elliptical galaxy Messier 87 and Sagittarius A at the center of the Milky Way. In 2019, the EHT released the first image of a black hole.
2022 The James Webb Space telescope (JWST)
The Webb was launched on 25 December 2021 on an Ariane 5 rocket from Kourou, French Guiana. In January 2022 it arrived at its destination, a solar orbit near the Sun–Earth L2 Lagrange point, about 1.5 million kilometers (930,000 mi) from Earth. Its actual position varies between about 250,000 and 832,000 km (155,000–517,000 mi) from L2 as it orbits, keeping it out of both Earth and Moon’s shadow.
JWST represents a significant advancement in space telescopes. With larger mirrors and improved camera technology offering enhanced sensitivity and a wider bandwidth for astronomical observations, it has already shown the effects of gravity on electromagnetic radiation with clear pictures of gravitational lensing. Additionally, it has shown vast new galaxies existed at what we thought was the beginning of the universe, bringing into question the Big Bang theory.
Objects near this Sun-Earth L2 point can orbit the Sun in synchrony with the Earth, allowing the telescope to remain at a roughly constant distance with continuous orientation of its sunshield and equipment bus toward the Sun, Earth, and Moon. Combined with its wide shadow-avoiding orbit, the telescope can simultaneously block incoming heat and light from all three of these bodies and avoid changes in temperature from Earth and Moon shadows that would affect the structure, yet maintain solar power and Earth communications on its sun-facing side.
Objects near this Sun-Earth L2 point can orbit the Sun in synchrony with the Earth, allowing the telescope to remain at a roughly constant distance with continuous orientation of its sunshield and equipment bus toward the Sun, Earth, and Moon. Combined with its wide shadow-avoiding orbit, the telescope can simultaneously block incoming heat and light from all three of these bodies and avoid changes in temperature from Earth and Moon shadows that would affect the structure, yet maintain solar power and Earth communications on its sun-facing side.
Webb’s primary mirror consists of 18 hexagonal mirror segments made of gold-plated beryllium, which together create a 6.5-meter-diameter (21-foot) mirror. Webb is designed primarily for near-infrared astronomy to detect objects early in the history of the “Big Bang” universe.
The telescope’s first image was released to the public on 11 July 2022. The buzz among professional astronomers like me has been electric since members of the Webb team shared tantalizing test images. And the real images are even better than anyone could have hoped for. During the presentation where the first images were released, Webb project scientist Jane Rigby remarked, “For Webb, there is no blank sky; everywhere it looks it sees distant galaxies.” Most of those galaxies were invisible until now.
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has found an unexpectedly rich realm of early galaxies that has been largely hidden until now, beyond the reach of other telescopes.
Researchers have found two exceptionally bright galaxies that existed approximately 350 and 450 million years after the big bang. These and other observations are nudging astronomers toward a consensus that an unusual number of galaxies in the early universe were much brighter than expected.
“We’ve nailed something that is incredibly fascinating. These galaxies would have to have started coming together maybe just 100 million years after the big bang. Nobody expected that the dark ages would have ended so early,” said Garth Illingworth, professor emeritus of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz. “The primal universe would have been just one hundredth its current age. It’s a sliver of time in the 13.8-billion-year-old evolving cosmos.”
“Everything we see is new. Webb is showing us that there’s a very rich universe beyond what we imagined,” said Tommaso Treu at UCLA, a principal investigator on one of the Webb programs. “Once again, the universe has surprised us. These early galaxies are very unusual in many ways.”
2023 ESA’s mission Euclid
July 1, A SpaceX rocket launched a new space telescope into orbit from Cape Canaveral, Fla. It’s destination was Sun-Earth Lagrange point 2, 1.5 million km from Earth. It took a month to reach its destination and has now begun sending its discoveries back to Earth as it continues to investigate how dark matter and dark energy influenced the way our universe looks today.
ESA’s Euclid mission is designed to explore the composition and evolution of the dark Universe. The space telescope will create a great map of the large-scale structure of the Universe across space and time by observing billions of galaxies out to 10 billion light-years, across more than a third of the sky. Euclid will explore how the Universe has expanded and how structure has formed over cosmic history, revealing more about the role of gravity and the nature of dark energy and dark matter.
The telescope’s high-precision observations will allow unprecedented measurements of weak gravitational lensing—the subtle warping of light from background galaxies and clusters that is caused by the gravitational fields of intervening massive objects. Researchers can use these weak distortions to map dark matter’s distribution. The telescope will also study what are called baryonic acoustic oscillations (BAOs). These are wavelike ripples in the density of matter that froze out from the fiery plasma filling the universe in the first 300,000 years or so after the big bang, and they’re thought to have influenced where galaxies subsequently formed. Mapping the distribution of far-off galaxies will help reveal the presence and patterning of these ripples—two presently murky types of measurements that can help cosmologists pin down the universe’s exact expansion rate.
The goal of the Euclid mission is to create the most extensive three-dimensional map of the cosmos we have ever known. To make it, the telescope’s survey will stretch across one third of the sky and out to a distance of 10 billion light-years. Given the universe’s 13.8-billion-year age and light’s finite speed, that means Euclid will probe the cosmic web’s evolution from a time close to when the first stars were forming. “You’re able to go explore a part of the universe that, up until this point, we have very little data about,” says Tanveer Karim, a fellow in observational cosmology at the University of Toronto, who is not involved in the mission.
The first full-color science images from the Euclid space telescope showcase crystal-clear views of hundreds of thousands of galaxies, star clusters and other stunning cosmic objects. The extraordinary sharpness and breadth of these images are a testament to the Euclid telescope’s ability to survey large swatches of the sky in incredible clarity. Many of them offer sprawling views of well-studied regions that other telescopes could only replicate via stitched-together composites of many time-consuming observations. Euclid, in contrast, can capture such large-scale snapshots in under an hour. There are more than 100,000 galaxies in the telescope’s first snapshot of the Perseus cluster, including extremely faint ones that were never seen before.
The extraordinary sharpness and breadth of these images are a testament to the Euclid telescope’s ability to survey large swatches of the sky in incredible clarity. Many of them offer sprawling views of well-studied regions that other telescopes could only replicate via stitched-together composites of many time-consuming observations. Euclid, in contrast, can capture such large-scale snapshots in under an hour. There are more than 100,000 galaxies in the telescope’s first snapshot of the Perseus cluster, including extremely faint ones that were never seen before.
2022 JILA Experiment– Atomic clock confirms Z0 Gradients
Atomic clocks, which count seconds by measuring the frequency of radiation emitted when electrons around an atom change energy states, can detect these minute gravitational effects. These have been used recently to detect what might be quantum gravity.
Tobias Bothwell and his colleagues at JILA in Boulder, Colorado separated hundreds of thousands of strontium atoms into “pancake-shaped” blobs of 30 atoms. They used optical light to trap these into a vertical stack 1 millimeter high. Then they shone a laser on the stack and measured the scattered light with a high-speed camera.
Because the atoms were arranged vertically, Earth’s gravity caused the frequency of oscillations in each group to shift by a different amount, an effect called gravitational redshift. At the top of the clock, a second was measured as 10-19 of a second longer than it was at the bottom. This means if you were to run the clock for the age of the universe – about 14 billion years – it would only be off by 0.1 seconds, says team member Jun Ye at JILA.
Paradoxically, this experiment is somewhat like Pound Rebka and shows that the oscillation frequency speed is dependent on a change in mass because that could be explained by Newton’s gravity and may not be an indicator of relativity.
The experiment’s findings are consistent with the Z0 Code hypothesis, which states that space’s impedance, Z0, varies with height.
Reflectionless Scattering Modes (RSM), experiments
A new method of understanding the areas of energy used to develop understanding of the Z0 Code are the Reflectionless Scattering Modes (RSM), experiments being carried out by several scientific teams.
RSM experiments involve creating a chamber in which the impedance of space is carefully controlled. This allows scientists to study how light waves interact with matter under different conditions. By observing how light waves are scattered and reflected, scientists can learn about the properties of the medium in which they are propagating.