Month: November 2023
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The Decay of Black Holes
Black holes are areas of space where the gravity is so strong that nothing, not even light can escape. However, that was the understanding held until 1974, when the astrophysicist Stephen Hawking proposed that black holes are indeed radiant objects, emitting a variety of particles by a mechanism involving tunnelling through the (gravitational) potential barrier…
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The Fundamentals of Electromagnetic Waves
Electromagnetic waves are electric and magnetic fields traveling through free space at the speed of light; in other words, an electromagnetic wave is a propagating electromagnetic field that travels with finite velocity as a disturbance through a medium. The field itself is the disturbance, rather than simply representing a physical displacement or other effect on…
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What is Dark Matter?
The largest contribution to the mass of the universe is believed to come from dark matter (i.e. matter that we can’t see). This dark matter is inferred to exist from studies of the motion of outlying stars, orbiting galaxies, the motion of galaxy clusters and from images formed by gravitational lenses (composed of clusters of…