Tag Archives: brightness

iPhone Experts Say You Should Always Have These 3 Settings Turned Off If You Want Your Battery To Last: Background App Refresh, Screen Brightness & Dynamic Wallpapers – Yahoo Life

  1. iPhone Experts Say You Should Always Have These 3 Settings Turned Off If You Want Your Battery To Last: Background App Refresh, Screen Brightness & Dynamic Wallpapers Yahoo Life
  2. Is your smartphone battery failing? Check now Komando
  3. Your iPhone battery life is probably getting worse. Here’s what to do. CNBC
  4. The Battery-Draining Setting iPhone Experts Say You Should Turn Off Immediately: Ask To Join Networks Yahoo Life
  5. The ‘Life-Changing’ iPhone Setting That Will Make Your Battery Last So Much Longer, According To Experts SheFinds
  6. View Full Coverage on Google News

Read original article here

LG Teases 2023 OLED TV That Boosts Screen Brightness By Up to 70%

Ahead of the massive CES 2023 consumer tech show here in Las Vegas, LG previewed a few details about its new OLED televisions, with more hands-on time and specs to come. (I’ll be there in person to see them in action.) One of the most notable models will include the C3, the successor to the best high-end TV for the money, as well as a G3 model promising improved brightness.

The biggest difference between current LG OLED TVs and the new ones is higher brightness on the G3. New light control architecture and light-boosting algorithms increase brightness by up to 70% in the 55-, 65- and 77-inch G3 models.

OLED TVs offer better overall picture quality than other high-end TVs and in my experience are already plenty bright for most lighting environments. Every bit — er, nit — of brightness helps, however, especially in bright rooms and with HDR TV shows and movies, and perhaps the G3 will match or surpass the light output of competing QD-OLED models from Sony and Samsung. They still won’t approach mini-LED sets like the Samsung QN90B and Hisense U8H though, which can get more than twice as bright as any OLED TV. LG doesn’t mention higher brightness for other models including the C3.

None of the other improvements LG teased are what I would call major. The TVs have a new “α9 AI Processor Gen6,” but in my past tests better processing has been tough to discern. The company also gave the G3 a design that hugs the wall even closer than before, “leaving no visible gap” when wall-mounted. The company’s smart TV system, which I don’t like, has been tweaked to add better categorization, personalized recommendations and “a selection of trending content,” according to the press release.

The LG G3 has improved brightness and mounts more flush to the wall.


LG

LG also says its 2023 OLED TVs will be the first to be certified by the HDMI organization for Quick Media Switching VRR, which “can eliminate the momentary ‘black screen’ that sometimes occurs when switching between content played from different source devices connected via the TV’s HDMI 2.1a compliant ports.” This (again minor) feature is intended for video playback as opposed to gaming and requires a QMS-VRR source device — the Apple TV 4K is getting support soon, for example.

For the last couple of years, LG’s OLED TVs, specifically the “C” models, have delivered the best picture quality for the money among high-end TVs, and I expect the C3 to once again compete for that honor. That said, the LG C2 from 2022 continues to be my favorite, and none of the improvements so far seem significant enough for me to recommend waiting for a C3.

LG did not announce specific sizes, prices or availability for its 2023 OLED TVs although the G3 and Z3 will undoubtedly cost more than the C3. The company typically doesn’t announce pricing on its TVs until spring, when they arrive in stores. Meanwhile, I expect to have more information, as well as hands-on impressions of the new models, in the next few days as CES gets underway.

Read original article here

Samsung’s 2023 QD-OLED TVs will reach up to 2,000 nits of peak brightness

Samsung launched its QD-OLED TV lineup last year at CES promising higher brightness than other OLED TVs, particularly its arch-rival LG. However, it was only mildly brighter than LG OLEDs back then, and yesterday, LG unveiled its 2023 OLED TV lineup with up to 70 percent more brightness and peak levels reportedly hitting around 1,800 nits. 

Now, Samsung Display has announced that its 2023 QD-OLED TV lineup will hit up to 2,000 nits of peak brightness, possibly pipping LG and approaching Mini-LED TVs, if accurate. That’s thanks to a new QD-OLED Panel from Samsung Display, which uses a new “HyperEfficient EL” OLED material and Samsung’s IntelliSense AI. The TVs will also be more energy efficient and offer more accurate colors, according to Samsung Display.

The new TVs will also be available in a wider range of sizes. Where the 2022 S95B came in just 55- and 65-inch sizes, you’ll be able to purchase 49-, 55-, 65- and 77-inch TVs this year. The company hasn’t announced other features, but you can expect to see Tizen OS, HDR10+ (and likely not Dolby Vision, once again), along with Bixby, Alexa and SmartThings. Pricing and availability haven’t been revealed either, but we should learn more at CES 2023 in the coming days.

All products recommended by Engadget are selected by our editorial team, independent of our parent company. Some of our stories include affiliate links. If you buy something through one of these links, we may earn an affiliate commission. All prices are correct at the time of publishing.

Read original article here

Samsung Galaxy S23 is getting a brightness and battery boost

We are just one month away from the official Galaxy S23 announcement. So, some solid leaks regarding Samsung’s upcoming high-end phones have started appearing. Yesterday, the first official image of the Galaxy S23+ and the Galaxy S23 Ultra was leaked. Today, we’ve stumbled upon some exciting Galaxy S23 specifications.

According to tipster Ahmed Qwaider, the Galaxy S23, Galaxy S23+, and Galaxy S23 Ultra will have Super AMOLED screens with up to 1,750 nits of peak brightness. That’s lower than the 2,000 nits of peak brightness that a previous report had suggested. Still, it’s good to see that even the vanilla Galaxy S23 is getting the same screen treatment as the Plus and Ultra variants.

Moreover, the vanilla Galaxy S23 is also getting a boost in battery capacity. The device will reportedly be powered by a 3,900mAh battery, but it is still limited to 25W fast charging. The Galaxy S23+ is also getting a bigger battery capacity, at 4,700mAh. That’s a 200mAh battery boost for both non-Ultra models. The device will keep using its predecessor’s 45W fast charging capability.

The Galaxy S23 Ultra is powered by a 5,000mAh battery and will support 45W fast charging. Ahmed also claims that all three phones will run Android 13-based One UI 5.1 out of the box and have an improved cooling solution for better sustained performance. All three phones will also reportedly feature 12MP selfie cameras with dual-pixel autofocus.



Read original article here

App lets you crank the new MacBook Pro’s brightness to over 1,000 nits

Vivid on a MacBook Pro and Pro Display XDR.

Developers Jordi Bruin and Ben Harraway have released an application called Vivid that allows Apple’s new MacBook Pro models and Pro Display XDR to achieve double the brightness systemwide—something that previously wasn’t possible.

For background: Apple says the new 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pro’s MiniLED display can reach 1,600 nits of peak brightness on highlights or 1,000 nits of full-screen brightness. That’s nearly unrivaled in consumer laptop or desktop displays—it’s more in the realm of what you’d expect from a high-end television.

But while certain HDR video content will take advantage of that on highlights, the normal desktop computing experience isn’t much brighter than what you get on another monitor. macOS keeps things around 500 nits tops unless the content you’re specifically watching calls for more—and most content doesn’t.

Vivid overcomes that limitation by using “a clever mixture of different technologies. This includes Metal, Carbon, Cocoa, Swift, SwiftUI, and even some C code” to bring the overall brightness to nearly double its normal maximum when using any desktop application, according to one of the developers.

The app is not always fully baked, though. If you frequently swipe between desktop spaces, you’ll find that your display will take a moment to resolve correctly after each switch. It briefly looks washed out when you first move to a new space. Further, colors can look incorrect in certain video content.

The Vivid effect is impressive when it works, though. It’s vibrant, looks great, and can fight sunlight glare as hard as any laptop. There’s even a nice, elegant extension to macOS’s normal on-screen brightness meter that indicates whether you’re within the normal range of brightness or the newly unlocked extended range.

Enlarge / Vivid’s extended macOS brightness meter.

Samuel Axon

A license key for the app costs about $16, but you can take it for a spin before you buy. The free version, however, only does half the screen at a time. It shows you the difference, but a screen cut in half defeats the purpose until you pay.

According to the FAQ on the application’s website citing Apple documentation, using Vivid isn’t likely to pose any risk to your hardware. And its impact on performance is relatively small. However, running your laptop at twice the usual brightness all the time will unsurprisingly have a large negative impact on battery life.

The FAQ also says that should Apple make any changes to macOS that make Vivid stop working, Vivid’s developers will strive to update the app to make it work. If the developers are unsuccessful after three months, they say, they will be open to issuing refunds.

If you’re game to roll with its limitations, you can download Vivid from its website.

Listing image by Vivid

Read original article here

LG says next-generation OLED EX technology delivers improved brightness and accuracy

LG is the maker of some of our favorite OLED TVs, so when the company says it’s improved on its basic panel technology, it’s worth paying attention. Today it did just that, with LG Display announcing its next-generation OLED technology — dubbed OLED EX — which the company says will increase brightness by up to 30 percent, boost picture accuracy, and allow for smaller bezels in finished products.

These improvements are due to two key changes. The first is the use of an element known as deuterium in the chemical make-up of LG’s OLED panels, and the second is the incorporation of algorithmic image processing. LG says the latter will predict the usage of each individual light emitting diode in your TV based on your personal viewing habits to “precisely [control] the display’s energy input to more accurately express the details and colors of the video content being played.”

OLED EX panels use new chemical design and predictive algorithms to improve picture quality.
Image: LG Display

This all sounds well and good, but we’ll have to wait until we see these new panels in person to really judge whether OLED EX is a significant improvement or just an incremental advance with some enthusiastic branding. (On that note, LG helpfully explains that the “EX” in OLED EX comes from the words “evolution” and “experience.” Very ‘90s, I thought.)

LG’s claims about reduced bezel sizes with OLED EX are a little more concrete at least. The company says that based on calculations involving a 65-inch OLED display, it will be able to reduce bezel thickness from 6mm to 4mm. It’s not a huge change on paper, but given how optimized this technology already is, every little improvement has to be fought for.

LG says it plans to start incorporating OLED EX technology into all its OLED panels starting in the second quarter of 2022, though it’s not clear how much longer it might then take for this technology to reach consumers. As well as improving its OLED tech, LG has also been playing with some wilder concepts at this year’s CES conference, showing off new transparent displays as well as reclining, curved OLED thrones.

Read original article here

The Hottest White Dwarf We Know of Is Up to Something Ghoulish With Its Neighbor

There’s a dead star behaving very oddly 1,300 light-years away.

It’s a white dwarf named KPD 0005+5106, and X-ray data from the Chandra space telescope have revealed that it’s enacting extreme violence on an orbiting companion. Not only is it siphoning material from this object (which, to be fair, is pretty normal for white dwarfs), the star is giving its companion an absolute drubbing by blasting it with radiation from close proximity.

 

Even more interestingly, we can’t see what the companion actually is, making it tricky to predict its eventual fate, including how long it will take to be completely destroyed and what that will mean for the white dwarf.

“We didn’t know this white dwarf had a companion before we saw the X-ray data,” said astronomer You-Hua Chu of the Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Academia Sinica (ASIAA) in Taiwan. “We’ve looked for the companion with optical light telescopes but haven’t seen anything, which means it is a very dim star, a brown dwarf, or a planet.”

White dwarfs are what happens to a star under about eight times the mass of the Sun once it runs out of elements it can fuse in its core. As the fuel runs low, it will eject its outer layers into space until finally, the core is no longer able to support itself and collapses under its own gravity into a dense object about the size of Earth (and sometimes even smaller).

Although it may be without fuel to fuse, the white dwarf remains extremely hot, so hot that it will continue to shine brightly with thermal radiation for billions of years. The average white dwarf will have a temperature of over 100,000 Kelvin (99,727 degrees Celsius or 179,540 degrees Fahrenheit) once its core stops contracting. The Sun, for context, has an effective temperature of 5,772 Kelvin.

 

KPD 0005+5106 is an outlier. It’s the hottest white dwarf we’ve identified to date, with an effective temperature of 200,000 Kelvin. This makes it very interesting to scientists since it allows them to probe the limits of what’s possible in the Universe.

Researchers also KPD 0005+5106 observed exhibiting some unusual X-ray activity, so Chu and her team decided to take a closer look using Chandra. They found that the white dwarf increases and decreases in X-ray brightness on a regular basis, every 4.7 hours.

We know of at least one thing that can cause changes in the brightness of a white dwarf: if it’s stripping material from a companion object. That material will be siphoned down to the white dwarf, where it will make its way to the poles and glow brightly. As the star and its companion orbit each other, the hot spot moves in and out of view, causing variations in brightness.

That 4.7-hour period thus would correspond with the system’s orbital period – which would make them very close together indeed. According to the team’s calculations, the white dwarf and its companion would be separated by a distance of just 1.3 times the Sun’s radius. That’s around 900,000 kilometers (550,000 miles). That would mean insanely scorching temperatures.

 

“Whatever this object is,” said astronomer Jesús Toala of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, “it’s getting blasted with heat.”

The researchers investigated possible identities for the companion and concluded that it was most likely an exoplanet with a mass around that of Jupiter. Previous research has found that exoplanets can indeed be found around white dwarfs – if they’re distant enough during the red giant phase, they can survive the star’s transition, then migrate inwards. More than one candidate gas giant has been found orbiting a white dwarf.

According to the team’s models, however, this particular gas giant doesn’t have much longer to live, only a few hundred million years. The white dwarf would be gravitationally stripping it; this stripped material would form a ring around the star and be slowly slurped down onto it.

“This is a slow demise for this object that’s basically being ripped apart by constant gravitational forces,” said astrophysicist Martín Guerrero of The Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia in Spain. “It would be a very unpleasant place to be.”

The team also studied two other white dwarf stars that display peculiar X-ray behavior. Although these other two stars were not quite as extreme as KPD 0005+5106, their behavior was similar, suggesting that they, too, have unseen companion objects.

This suggests that exoplanet survival around a white dwarf may be more common than we thought – although not, perhaps, for very long.

The team’s research was published earlier this year in The Astrophysical Journal.

 

Read original article here

Scientists Figured Out How And When Our Sun Will Die, And It’s Going to Be Epic

What will our Sun look like after it dies? Scientists have made predictions about what the end will look like for our Solar System, and when that will happen. And humans won’t be around to see the final act.

 

Previously, astronomers thought it would turn into a planetary nebula – a luminous bubble of gas and dust – until evidence suggested it would have to be a fair bit more massive.

An international team of astronomers flipped it again in 2018 and found that a planetary nebula is indeed the most likely Solar corpse.

The Sun is about 4.6 billion years old – gauged on the age of other objects in the Solar System that formed around the same time. Based on observations of other stars, astronomers predict it will reach the end of its life in about another 10 billion years.

There are other things that will happen along the way, of course. In about 5 billion years, the Sun is due to turn into a red giant. The core of the star will shrink, but its outer layers will expand out to the orbit of Mars, engulfing our planet in the process. If it’s even still there.

One thing is certain: By that time, we most certainly won’t be around. In fact, humanity only has about one billion years left unless we find a way off this rock. That’s because the Sun is increasing in brightness by about 10 percent every billion years.

 

That doesn’t sound like much, but that increase in brightness will end life on Earth. Our oceans will evaporate, and the surface will become too hot for water to form. We’ll be about as kaput as you can get.

It’s what comes after the red giant that has proven difficult to pin down. Several previous studies have found that, in order for a bright planetary nebula to form, the initial star needs to have been up to twice as massive as the Sun.

However, the 2018 study used computer modeling to determine that, like 90 percent of other stars, our Sun is most likely to shrink down from a red giant to become a white dwarf and then end as a planetary nebula.

“When a star dies it ejects a mass of gas and dust – known as its envelope – into space. The envelope can be as much as half the star’s mass. This reveals the star’s core, which by this point in the star’s life is running out of fuel, eventually turning off and before finally dying,” explained astrophysicist Albert Zijlstra from the University of Manchester in the UK, one of the authors on the paper.

 

“It is only then the hot core makes the ejected envelope shine brightly for around 10,000 years – a brief period in astronomy. This is what makes the planetary nebula visible. Some are so bright that they can be seen from extremely large distances measuring tens of millions of light years, where the star itself would have been much too faint to see.”

The data model that the team created actually predicts the life cycle of different kinds of stars, to figure out the brightness of the planetary nebula associated with different star masses.

Planetary nebulae are relatively common throughout the observable Universe, with famous ones including the Helix Nebula, the Cat’s Eye Nebula, the Ring Nebula, and the Bubble Nebula.

Cat’s Eye Nebula (NASA/ESA)

They’re named planetary nebulae not because they actually have anything to do with planets, but because, when the first ones were discovered by William Herschel in the late 18th century, they were similar in appearance to planets through the telescopes of the time.

Almost 30 years ago, astronomers noticed something peculiar: The brightest planetary nebulae in other galaxies all have about the same level of brightness. This means that, theoretically at least, by looking at the planetary nebulae in other galaxies, astronomers can calculate how far away they are.

 

The data showed that this was correct, but the models contradicted it, which has been vexing scientists ever since the discovery was made.

“Old, low mass stars should make much fainter planetary nebulae than young, more massive stars. This has become a source of conflict for the past 25 years,” said Zijlstra 

“The data said you could get bright planetary nebulae from low mass stars like the sun, the models said that was not possible, anything less than about twice the mass of the sun would give a planetary nebula too faint to see.”

The 2018 models have solved this problem by showing that the Sun is about the lower limit of mass for a star that can produce a visible nebula.

Even a star with a mass less than 1.1 times that of the Sun won’t produce visible nebulae. Bigger stars up to 3 times more massive than the Sun, on the other hand, will produce the brighter nebulae.

For all the other stars in between, the predicted brightness is very close to what has been observed.

“This is a nice result,” Zijlstra said. “Not only do we now have a way to measure the presence of stars of ages a few billion years in distant galaxies, which is a range that is remarkably difficult to measure, we even have found out what the Sun will do when it dies!”

The research has been published in the journal Nature Astronomy.

An earlier version of this article was first published in May 2018.

 

Read original article here

Scientists Now Know How Squid ‘Exquisitely Optimized’ Camouflage in Shimmery Shallows

Opalescent inshore squid (Doryteuthis opalescens) are some of the most sophisticated shapeshifters on Earth. These curious cephalopods are cloaked in a special skin that can be precisely tuned to a kaleidoscope of colors.

 

Scientists have long been fascinated by this squid’s remarkable camouflage and communication. New research has brought us even closer to figuring out how they can pull off such an eclectic wardrobe that allows them to hunt near the brightness of the shore, slip by predators unseen, or even evade aggressive suitors by flashing a pair of fake testes.

Previous studies have shown the opalescent squid possesses a complex molecular machine within its skin: a thin film of stacked cells capable of expanding and contracting like an accordion to reflect the entire visible spectrum of light, from red and orange to yellow and green, to blue and violet. 

These tiny grooves are sort of like what you see on a compact disc, researchers say, reflecting a rainbow of colors as you tilt it under the light. But just like a CD, this skin also needs something to amplify its colorful noise. 

When researchers tried to genetically engineer this squid’s skin, they noticed something was slightly off.

The ‘motor’ that tunes the grooves within the squid’s skin is driven by reflectin proteins, which respond to different neural signals and control reflective pigment cells. 

 

Synthetic materials containing reflectin proteins have shown an iridescent look similar to what we see in squid, but these materials could not flicker or shimmer in the same way.

Something was clearly missing, and recent studies within living squid and genetic engineering have shone a light on the mystery. As it turns out, reflectin proteins can only shine bright if they are enclosed in a reflective membrane envelope.

This envelope is what encloses the accordion-like structure, and peering underneath, you can begin to see how it works.

Reflectin proteins are usually repelled by one another, but a neuronal signal from the squid’s brain can turn off that positive charge, allowing the proteins to clump closely together.

When this happens, it triggers the overlying membrane to push water out of the cell, shrinking the thickness and spacing of the grooves, which split light into various colors.

This collapse between the grooves also increases the concentration of reflectin, which allows the light to reflect even brighter.

Thus, the authors explain, this complex process “dynamically [tunes] the color while simultaneously increasing the intensity of the reflected light”, and this is what allows the opalescent squid to shimmer and flicker, sometimes with color and sometimes not. 

 

Cells within the squid’s skin, which reflect only white light, also appear to be driven by this same molecular mechanism. In fact, the authors think this is what allows the squid to imitate the glittering or dappled light of the sun on waves.

“Evolution has so exquisitely optimized not only the color tuning, but the tuning of the brightness using the same material, the same protein, and the same mechanism,” says biochemist Daniel Morse from the University of California, Santa Barbara. 

Engineers have been trying for years to mimic the opalescent squid’s remarkable skin but have never quite gotten there.  The new research, which was supported by the United States Army Research Office, has helped us figure out where we were going wrong. 

On their own, thin films of reflectin cannot deliver the full power of light control that we see in squid, the authors conclude, because it seems we lack that coupled amplifier.

“Without that membrane surrounding the reflectins, there’s no change in the brightness for these artificial thin-films,” says Morse. 

“If we want to capture the power of the biological, we have to include some kind of membrane-like enclosure to allow reversible tuning of the brightness.”

The study was published in Applied Physics Letters

 

Read original article here

Distant ‘Baby’ Black Holes Are Behaving Strangely, And Scientists Are Perplexed

Radio images of the sky have revealed hundreds of ‘baby’ and supermassive black holes in distant galaxies, with the galaxies’ light bouncing around in unexpected ways.

Galaxies are vast cosmic bodies, tens of thousands of light years in size, made up of gas, dust, and stars (like our Sun).

 

Given their size, you’d expect the amount of light emitted from galaxies would change slowly and steadily, over timescales far beyond a person’s lifetime.

But our research, published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, found a surprising population of galaxies whose light changes much more quickly, in just a matter of years.

What is a radio galaxy?

Astronomers think there’s a supermassive black hole at the centre of most galaxies. Some of these are ‘active’, which means they emit a lot of radiation.

Their powerful gravitational fields pull in matter from their surroundings and rip it apart into an orbiting donut of hot plasma called an ‘accretion disk’.

This disk orbits the black hole at nearly the speed of light. Magnetic fields accelerate high-energy particles from the disk in long, thin streams or ‘jets’ along the rotational axes of the black hole. As they get further from the black hole, these jets blossom into large mushroom-shaped clouds or ‘lobes’.

This entire structure is what makes up a radio galaxy, so called because it gives off a lot of radio-frequency radiation. It can be hundreds, thousands or even millions of light years across and therefore can take aeons to show any dramatic changes.

 

Astronomers have long questioned why some radio galaxies host enormous lobes, while others remain small and confined. Two theories exist. One is that the jets are held back by dense material around the black hole, often referred to as frustrated lobes.

However, the details around this phenomenon remain unknown. It’s still unclear whether the lobes are only temporarily confined by a small, extremely dense surrounding environment – or if they’re slowly pushing through a larger but less dense environment.

The second theory to explain smaller lobes is the jets are young and have not yet extended to great distances.

Hercules A’s supermassive black hole emitting high energy particle jets into radio lobes.  (NASA/ESA/NRAO)

Old ones are red, babies are blue

Both young and old radio galaxies can be identified by a clever use of modern radio astronomy: looking at their ‘radio colour’.

We looked at data from the GaLactic and Extragalactic All Sky MWA (GLEAM) survey, which sees the sky at 20 different radio frequencies, giving astronomers an unparalleled ‘radio colour’ view of the sky.

 

From the data, baby radio galaxies appear blue, which means they’re brighter at higher radio frequencies. Meanwhile the old and dying radio galaxies appear red and are brighter in the lower radio frequencies.

We identified 554 baby radio galaxies. When we looked at identical data taken a year later, we were surprised to see 123 of these were bouncing around in their brightness, appearing to flicker. This left us with a puzzle.

Something more than one light year in size can’t vary so much in brightness over less than one year without breaking the laws of physics. So, either our galaxies were far smaller than expected, or something else was happening.

Luckily, we had the data we needed to find out.

Past research on the variability of radio galaxies has used either a small number of galaxies, archival data collected from many different telescopes, or was conducted using only a single frequency.

For our research, we surveyed more than 21,000 galaxies over one year across multiple radio frequencies. This makes it the first ‘spectral variability’ survey, enabling us to see how galaxies change brightness at different frequencies.

 

Some of our bouncing baby radio galaxies changed so much over the year we doubt they are babies at all. There’s a chance these compact radio galaxies are actually angsty teens rapidly growing into adults much faster than we expected.

While most of our variable galaxies increased or decreased in brightness by roughly the same amount across all radio colours, some didn’t. Also, 51 galaxies changed in both brightness and colour, which may be a clue as to what causes the variability.

Artist’s impression of SKA-mid (left) and SKA-low (right) telescopes. (SKAO/ICRAR/SARAO)

Three possibilities for what is happening

1) Twinkling galaxies

As light from stars travels through Earth’s atmosphere, it is distorted. This creates the twinkling effect of stars we see in the night sky, called ‘scintillation’. The light from the radio galaxies in this survey passed through our Milky Way galaxy to reach our telescopes on Earth.

Thus, the gas and dust within our galaxy could have distorted it the same way, resulting in a twinkling effect.

2) Looking down the barrel

In our three-dimensional Universe, sometimes black holes shoot high energy particles directly towards us on Earth. These radio galaxies are called ‘blazars’.

Instead of seeing long thin jets and large mushroom-shaped lobes, we see blazars as a very tiny bright dot. They can show extreme variability in short timescales, since any little ejection of matter from the supermassive black hole itself is directed straight towards us.

3) Black hole burps

When the central supermassive black hole ‘burps’ some extra particles they form a clump slowly travelling along the jets. As the clump propagates outwards, we can detect it first in the ‘radio blue’ and then later in the ‘radio red’.

So we may be detecting giant black hole burps slowly travelling through space.

Where to now?

This is the first time we’ve had the technological ability to conduct a large-scale variability survey over multiple radio colours. The results suggest our understanding of the radio sky is lacking and perhaps radio galaxies are more dynamic than we expected.

As the next generation of telescopes come online, in particular the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), astronomers will build up a dynamic picture of the sky over many years.

In the meantime, it’s worth watching these weirdly behaving radio galaxies and keeping a particularly close eye on the bouncing babies, too.

Kathryn Ross, PhD Student, Curtin University and Natasha Hurley-Walker, Radio Astronomer, Curtin University.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

 

Read original article here