BOSS – The Great Wall Of Universe

Astronomers discover the biggest object in the Universe so far – the BOSS Great Wall.
It’s 1 billion light-years long.
Boss – Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey
                

                         As if staring up at the night sky didn’t make us feel small already, astronomers have recently announced the discovery of
                                  the BOSS Great Wall, a group of superclusters that span roughly 1 billion light-years across and represents the largest structure ever found in space.

The BOSS Great Wall, which sounds aptly named for its size but actually stands for the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey, is a string of superclusters connected by gases lying roughly 4.5 to 6.5 billion light-years away from Earth. Thanks to gravity, these superclusters stay connected and swirl together through the void of space.

According to Joshua Sokol at New Scientist, the megastructure discovered by a team from the Canary Islands Institute of Astrophysics is composed of 830 separate galaxies and has a mass 10,000 times greater than the Milky Way.
                    To put the scale of this structure into perspective, we orbit one single star, the Sun. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, has over 200 billion stars, just like our Sun, in it alone with an unknown amount of planets orbiting them.

Now, multiply that insane thought by 10,000 and you have the BOSS Great Wall. To our limited scope, it is effectively infinite.

However, not everyone agrees that the super structure should even be considered a structure at all. The argument is that these superclusters are not actually connected. Instead, they have dips and gaps between them that are sort of linked by clouds of gas and dust.

                            This loose connection causes a debate every time ‘great wall-like‘ structures are found. In the end, the arguments seem to boil down to personal definitions of what constitutes a single structure with most researchers agreeing that they are one.

Despite the debate, the BOSS Great Wall is so far the largest object ever found in space. Even more mind-boggling is the fact that there are a lot of ‘great walls’ of superclusters floating around thousands and millions of light-years away.

Besides being straight-up awesome, the web of galaxies is also helping researchers better understand how the Universe was structured after the Big Bang.
           The crazy thing is that this newly found king of the skies will likely get dethroned in the very near future as our ability to see further and further into the Universe increases.

Confirmation Of The Four New Elements

Confirmation that four new elements – those with atomic numbers
                              113 , 115 , 117 and 118 – have indeed been synthesised , has come from the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (Iupac), completing the seventh row of the periodic table.

Now that Iupac has confirmed the discovery of the four new elements that complete the periodic table’s seventh row, the institution will choose their names and element symbols.

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The groups credited for creating them – in Japan, Russia and the US – have spent several years gathering enough evidence to convince experts from Iupac and its physics equivalent, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry ,
                  of the elements’ existence. All four are highly unstable superheavy metals that exist for only a fraction of a second. They are made by bombarding heavy metal targets with beams of ions, and can usually only be detected by measuring the radiation and other nuclides produced as they decay.

Element 113 – currently known by its placeholder name ununtrium – is the first to be discovered in east Asia.
                             It was created by Kosuke Morita’s group at the RIKEN Nishina Center for Accelerator-based Science in Japan, by firing a beam of zinc-70 at a target made of bismuth-209.
                      The group first claimed to have created the element in 2004, but there was still some uncertainty at that time because of the instability of one of its decay products. They followed up these experiments with more convincing evidence in 2012.

            Element 115 – (ununpentium) and
           Element 117 – (ununseptium) were discovered by groups collaborating across three institutions – Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the US, the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Russia and Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the US. The Lawrence Livermore-Joint Institute for Nuclear Research collaboration is also credited with having fulfilled the criteria for discovering
                    
                     Element 118 – (ununoctium) in work published in 2006.

But it will be a while before the textbooks and posters can be updated, as the new names and symbols will have to be approved by the inorganic chemistry division of Iupac and submitted for public review.
              Various rules govern the names that can be given to new elements, which can be inspired by nature, mythology, people, properties or places.
       
                 ‘The symbol is particularly important,’ says Soby. ‘They have to go through all the archives to check if it has ever been used before. It has to be unique.’ She adds that the timing is hard to predict, but estimates the process will take between four and six months.

These groups and others are now likely to turn their attention to elements beyond the seventh row. This presents fresh challenges, partly because the targets used for bombardment experiments would have to be made of superheavy, short-lived elements themselves.
                   So far, no one claims to have discovered 119 or any elements heavier than it. Researchers are hopeful that an ‘island of stability’ may exist beyond element 118, allowing production of further superheavy elements, although exactly where this island can be found or whether it exists at all is still a matter of debate. ‘We just don’t know when that [sighting] will be … it could be next week, it could take a year or 10 years.

Gravitational Waves

In physics, gravitational waves are ripples in the curvature of spacetime that propagate as waves, travelling outward from the source.
                                            Predicted in 1916 by Albert Einstein on the basis of his theory of general relativity, 

gravitational waves transport energy as gravitational radiation.

The existence of gravitational waves is a consequence of the Lorentz invariance of general relativity since it brings with it the concept of a finite speed of propagation of physical interactions.
             By contrast, gravitational waves cannot exist in the Newtonian theory of gravitation, since Newtonian theory postulates that physical interactions propagate at infinite speed.

Various gravitational-wave observatories (detectors) are under construction or in operation, such as Advanced LIGO which began observations in September 2015.

Potential sources of detectable gravitational waves include binary star systems composed of white dwarfs, neutron stars, or black holes. On February 11, 2016, the LIGO Scientific Collaboration and Virgo Collaboration teams announced that they had made first observation of gravitational waves, originating from a pair of merging black holes using the Advanced LIGO detectors.

Introduction

History of the Universe – gravitational waves are hypothesized to arise from cosmic inflation, a faster-than-light expansion just after the Big Bang (17 March 2014).

In Einstein’s theory of general relativity, gravity is treated as a phenomenon resulting from the curvature of spacetime.

           This curvature is caused by the presence of mass. Generally, the more mass that is contained within a given volume of space, the greater the curvature of spacetime will be at the boundary of its volume.
            
            As objects with mass move around in spacetime, the curvature changes to reflect the changed locations of those objects. In certain circumstances, accelerating objects generate changes in this curvature, which propagate outwards at the speed of light in a wave-like manner. These propagating phenomena are known as gravitational waves.

As a gravitational wave passes an observer, that observer will find spacetime strained. Distances between objects increase and decrease rhythmically as the wave passes, at a frequency corresponding to that of the wave.
           This occurs despite such free objects never being subjected to an unbalanced force. The magnitude of this effect decreases with distance from the source.

Stars are predicted to be a powerful source of gravitational waves as they coalesce, due to the very large acceleration of their masses as they orbit close to one another.
                    
However, due to the astronomical distances to these sources, the effects when measured on Earth are predicted to be very small, having strains of less than 1 part in 1020.

Scientists have demonstrated the existence of these waves with ever more sensitive detectors.
        
The most sensitive detector accomplished the task possessing a sensitivity measurement of about one part in 5×1022 (as of 2012) provided by the LIGO and VIRGO observatories.

The Laser Interferometer Space Antenna, is currently under development by ESA.