The magazine MAQ September 2018 MAQ Magazine November 2018 | Page 37

MAQ/November 2018 / 07

The most voracious of black holes ever seen swallows the matter that surrounds it at a speed equal to one third of that of light. It is located in the center of the galaxy PG211 + 143, one billion light years away from Earth, and was discovered thanks to the XMM-Newton European space telescope. This is what emerges from the study by the British University of Leicester coordinated by Ken Pounds and published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Using data from the XMM-Newton telescope and a supercomputer, the researchers realized a simulation of the matter that precipitates into the black hole, a cosmic monster with a mass of about 40 million times that of the sun.

Two particles never seen, maybe three, could help shed light on one of the most fascinating forces, the so-called strong force that, like a powerful glue, keeps together, in the nucleus, those real bricks of matter that are quarks.

Strong force is one of the four fundamental forces of nature and is predicted by the reference theory of contemporary physics, the Standard Model. The particles belong to the great family of the baryons, the largest in the universe as it constitutes all visible matter.

The discovery, announced by CERN, has been published on the arXiv website, which hosts the studies that have not yet been examined by the scientific community. Among the main authors are Paolo Gandini and Giovanni Cavallero, both of the National Institute of Nuclear Physics (Infn).

This is indicated by the research published in the Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics and conducted by the group led by Martin Mlynczak, from the Langley research center of NASA.

The Sun has entered the minimum of activity in its 11-year cycle. Sunspots have been absent for most of 2018 and the amount of ultraviolet rays has drastically reduced. This leads to a progressive cooling in the most external part of the Earth's atmosphere, because ultraviolet radiation and X-rays decrease. Mauro Messerotti, from the Trieste Observatory of the National Institute of Astrophysics (INAF) and the University of Trieste, said: "There is certainly a role of the earth's high atmosphere on the climate, but it should be noted that the weather phenomena occur in a much lower range, 10 kilometers in height, and that there is a poor level of scientific knowledge of the influence of solar radiation on the earth's climate ".

29/09/2018 The Sun has fallen into a deep lethargy

28/09/2018 Cern, two particles never seen shed light on the 'glue' of matter

28/09/2018 Discovered the most voracious black hole ever seen