Universe, Volume 6, Issue 5 (May 2020) – 10 articles

In recent years, substantial progress has been made in black hole visualization. However, there is a lack of essential up-to-date information regarding black holes in current school curricula, in spite of students’ substantial interest in black holes. In this study, we examined the implications of the Event Horizon Telescope project, a recent achievement of the scientific community, for science education. An analysis of the black hole visualization research process, based on Giere’s scientific reasoning model, revealed that there are two categories of the black hole visualization processes: visualization through prediction based on a theory and visualization through real-world observation data. Black hole images are not merely scientific outputs that students must memorize; rather, they can be a useful resource for learning the nature of science and the characteristics of scientific reasoning. Full article

The space-time geometry exterior to a new four-dimensional, spherically symmetric and charged black hole solution that, through a coupling of general relativity with a non-linear electrodynamics, is non-singular everywhere, for small r it behaves as a de Sitter metric, and asymptotically it behaves as the Reissner-Nordström metric, is considered in order to study energy-momentum localization. For the calculation of the energy and momentum distributions, the Einstein, Landau-Lifshitz, Weinberg and Møller energy-momentum complexes were applied. The results obtained show that in all prescriptions the energy depends on the mass M of the black hole, the charge q, two parameters $a\in {\mathbb{Z}}^{+}$ and $\gamma \in {\mathbb{R}}^{+}$ , and on the radial coordinate r. The calculations performed in each prescription show that all the momenta vanish. Additionally, some limiting and particular cases for r and q are studied, and a possible connection with strong gravitational lensing and microlensing is attempted. Full article

We analyze the jet-disk coupling for different subsamples from a complete hard X-ray Seyfert sample to study the coupling indices and their relation to accretion rate. The results are: (1) the power-law coupling index ranges from nearly unity (linear correlation) for radio loud Seyferts to significantly less than unity for radio quiet ones. This decline trend of coupling index also holds from larger sources to compact ones; (2) the Seyferts with intermediate to high accretion rate (Eddington ratio $\lambda \sim$ 0.001 to 0.3) show a linear jet-disk coupling, but it shallows from near to super Eddington ( $\lambda \sim$ 0.3 to 10), and the former is more radio loud than the latter; (3) the Seyfert 1s are slightly steeper than the Seyfert 2s, in the jet-disk correlation. In the linear coupling regime, the ratio of jet efficiency to radiative efficiency ( $\eta /\epsilon$ ) is nearly invariant, but in low accretion or super accretion regime, $\eta /\epsilon$ varies with $\lambda$ in our model. We note that a radio-active cycle of accretion-dominated active galactic nuclei would be: from a weaker jet-disk coupling in $\lambda <0.001$ for low luminosity Seyferts, to a linear coupling in $0.001<\lambda <0.3$ for radio-loud luminous Seyferts and powerful radio galaxies/quasars, and to a weaker coupling in $0.3<\lambda <10$ ones. Full article

In this paper, we argue that the problem of time is not a crucial issue inherent in the quantum picture of the universe evolution. On the minisuperspace model example with the massless scalar field, we demonstrate four approaches to the description of quantum evolution, which give similar results explicitly. The relevance of these approaches to building a quantum theory of gravity is discussed. Full article

An explanation of the origin of dark matter is suggested in this work. The argument is based on symmetry considerations about the concept of mass. In Wigner’s view, the rest mass and the spin of a free elementary particle in flat space-time are the two invariants that characterize the associated unitary irreducible representation of the Poincaré group. The Poincaré group has two and only two deformations with maximal symmetry. They describe respectively the de Sitter (dS) and anti-de Sitter (AdS) kinematic symmetries. Analogously to their shared flat space-time limit, two invariants, spin and energy scale for de Sitter and rest energy for anti-de Sitter, characterize the unitary irreducible representation associated with dS and AdS elementary systems, respectively. While the dS energy scale is a simple deformation of the Poincaré rest energy and so has a purely mass nature, AdS rest energy is the sum of a purely mass component and a kind of zero-point energy derived from the curvature. An analysis based on recent estimates on the chemical freeze-out temperature marking in Early Universe the phase transition quark–gluon plasma epoch to the hadron epoch supports the guess that dark matter energy might originate from an effective AdS curvature energy. Full article

Applying the cosmological principle to Finsler spacetimes, we identify the Lie Algebra of symmetry generators of spatially homogeneous and isotropic Finsler geometries, thus generalising Friedmann-Lemaître-Robertson-Walker geometry. In particular, we find the most general spatially homogeneous and isotropic Berwald spacetimes, which are Finsler spacetimes that can be regarded as closest to pseudo-Riemannian geometry. They are defined by a Finsler Lagrangian built from a zero-homogeneous function on the tangent bundle, which encodes the velocity dependence of the Finsler Lagrangian in a very specific way. The obtained cosmological Berwald geometries are candidates for the description of the geometry of the universe, when they are obtained as solutions from a Finsler gravity equation. Full article

We investigate whether Szabo’s metrizability theorem can be extended to Finsler spaces of indefinite signature. For smooth, positive definite Finsler metrics, this important theorem states that, if the metric is of Berwald type (i.e., its Chern–Rund connection defines an affine connection on the underlying manifold), then it is affinely equivalent to a Riemann space, meaning that its affine connection is the Levi–Civita connection of some Riemannian metric. We show for the first time that this result does not extend to general Finsler spacetimes. More precisely, we find a large class of Berwald spacetimes for which the Ricci tensor of the affine connection is not symmetric. The fundamental difference from positive definite Finsler spaces that makes such an asymmetry possible is the fact that generally, Finsler spacetimes satisfy certain smoothness properties only on a proper conic subset of the slit tangent bundle. Indeed, we prove that when the Finsler Lagrangian is smooth on the entire slit tangent bundle, the Ricci tensor must necessarily be symmetric. For large classes of Finsler spacetimes, however, the Berwald property does not imply that the affine structure is equivalent to the affine structure of a pseudo-Riemannian metric. Instead, the affine structure is that of a metric-affine geometry with vanishing torsion. Full article

Young pulsars are thought to be highly magnetized neutron stars (NSs). The crustal magnetic field of a NS usually decays at different timescales in the forms of Hall drift and Ohmic dissipation. The magnetization parameter ${\omega }_B\tau$ is defined as the ratio of the Ohmic timescale ${\tau }_{Ohm}$ to the Hall drift timescale ${\tau }_{Hall}$ . During the first several million years, the inner temperature of the newly born neutron star cools from $T={10}^9$ K to $T=1.0\times {10}^8$ K, and the crustal conductivity increases by three orders of magnitude. In this work, we adopt a unified equations of state for cold non-accreting neutron stars with the Hartree–Fock–Bogoliubov method, developed by Pearson et al. (2018), and choose two fiducial dipole magnetic fields of $B=1.0\times {10}^{13}$ G and $B=1.0\times {10}^{14}$ G, four different temperatures, T, and two different impurity concentration parameters, Q, and then calculate the conductivity of the inner crust of NSs and give a general expression of magnetization parameter for young pulsars: ${\omega }_B\tau \simeq (1-50)B_0/({10}^{13}$ G) by using numerical simulations. It was found when $B\le {10}^{15}$ G, due to the quantum effects, the conductivity increases slightly with the increase in the magnetic field, the enhanced magnetic field has a small effect on the matter in the low-density regions of the crust, and almost has no influence the matter in the high-density regions. Then, we apply the general expression of the magnetization parameter to the high braking-index pulsar PSR J1640-4631. By combining the observed arrival time parameters of PSR J1640-4631 with the magnetic induction equation, we estimated the initial rotation period $P_0$ , the initial dipole magnetic field $B_0$ , the Ohm dissipation timescale ${\tau }_{Ohm}$ and Hall drift timescale ${\tau }_{Hall}$ . We model the magnetic field evolution and the braking-index evolution of the pulsar and compare the results with its observations. It is expected that the results of this paper can be applied to more young pulsars. Full article

Probing quark matter is one of the important tasks in the studies of neutron stars (NS). Some works explicitly consider the existence of quark matter in the appearance of hybrid star (HS) or pure quark star (QS). In the present work, we study the roto-chemical heating with accretion in HS and QS, and compare their chemical evolution and cooling features with pure NS. Different from HS and NS, there are two jumps in the chemical evolution of QS, which results from the fast direct Urca (Durca) reaction causing the fast recovery to chemical balance. However, the sudden change in the chemical evolution doesn’t provide an obvious heating effect in the thermal evolution. Differently, the roto-chemical heating effect appears both in the accretion phase and spin-down phase of the HS, and the heating platform in the accretion phase relies on the accretion rate. Larger accretion rate results in larger chemical deviation, higher and longer heating platform, and earlier appearance of the heating effect. Interestingly, with the disappearance of the heating effect in the accretion phase, the surface temperature drops fast, which is another possibility of the rapid cooling trend of the NS in Cas A. Furthermore, the surface temperature of the QS is obviously lower than the HS and NS, which is a latent candidate for the explanation of the old classical pulsar J2144-3933 with the lowest known surface temperature. Full article

The rapid thermalization of quarks and gluons in the initial stages of relativistic heavy-ion collisions is treated using analytic solutions of a nonlinear diffusion equation with schematic initial conditions, and for gluons with boundary conditions at the singularity. On a similarly short time scale of $t\le 1$ fm/c, the stopping of baryons is accounted for through a QCD-inspired approach based on the parton distribution functions of valence quarks, and gluons. Charged-hadron production is considered phenomenologically using a linear relativistic diffusion model with two fragmentation sources, and a central gluonic source that rises with ${ln}^3\left(s_{NN}\right)$ . The limiting-fragmentation conjecture that agrees with data at energies reached at the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider (RHIC) is found to be consistent with Large Hadron Collider (LHC) data for Pb-Pb at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}=2.76$ and $5.02$ TeV. Quarkonia are used as hard probes for the properties of the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) through a comparison of theoretical predictions with recent CMS, ALICE and LHCb data for Pb-Pb and p-Pb collisions. Full article