Great Attractor Research Articles

Universal inflationary attractors implications on static neutron stars

We study static neutron stars in the context of a class of non-minimally coupled inflationary potentials, the universal attractors. Universal attractors are known to generate a viable inflationary era, and they fall into the same category of inflationary phenomenology as the R 2 model and other well-known cosmological attractors. We present the essential features of universal attractors in both the Einstein and Jordan frame, and we extract the Tolman–Oppenheimer–Volkoff equations in the Einstein frame using the usual notation of theoretical astrophysics. We use a python 3 based double shooting numerical code for our numerical analysis and we construct the M–R graphs for the universal attractor potential, using piecewise polytropic equation of state the small density part of which is the WFF1 or the APR or the SLy equation of state. As we show, all the studied cases predict larger maximum masses for the neutron stars, and all the results are compatible with the GW170817 constraints imposed on the radii of the neutron stars.

Numerical exploration of first-order relativistic hydrodynamics

We present the first numerical solutions of the causal, stable relativistic Navier-Stokes equations as formulated by Bemfica, Disconzi, Noronha, and Kovtun (BDNK). For this initial investigation we restrict to plane-symmetric configurations of a conformal fluid in Minkowski spacetime. We consider evolution of three classes of initial data: a smooth (initially) stationary concentration of energy, a standard shock tube setup, and a smooth shockwave setup. We compare these solutions to those obtained with the Muller-Israel-Stewart (MIS) formalism, variants of which are the common tools used to model relativistic, viscous fluids. We find that for the two smooth initial data cases, simple finite difference methods are adequate to obtain stable, convergent solutions to the BDNK equations. For low viscosity, the MIS and BDNK evolutions show good agreement. At high viscosity the solutions begin to differ in regions with large gradients, and there the BDNK solutions can (as expected) exhibit violation of the weak energy condition. This behavior is transient, and the solutions evolve toward a hydrodynamic regime in a way reminiscent of an approach to a universal attractor. For the shockwave problem, we give evidence that if a hydrodynamic frame is chosen so that the maximum characteristic speed of the BDNK system is the speed of light (or larger), arbitrarily strong shockwaves are smoothly resolved. Regarding the shock tube problem, it is unclear whether discontinuous initial data is mathematically well-posed for the BDNK system, even in a weak sense. Nevertheless we attempt numerical solution, and then need to treat the perfect fluid terms using high-resolution shock-capturing methods. When such methods can successfully evolve the solution beyond the initial time, subsequent evolution agrees with corresponding MIS solutions, as well as the perfect fluid solution in the limit of zero viscosity.

Организационные и цифросетевые средства терминальной деструкции развития социума

At the moment, there is a change in the universal attractors of the historical process; in this regard, a new management model is required, corresponding to the new “program requirements” of the attractor “from the future”. The former political and economic regulators have fulfilled their role, but the patterns of thinking developed over the centuries do not allow for any other means of “reset” than destruction. The article analyzes who, why, and by what means attempts to preserve the existing world order. As a tool of destruction, the actors of globalization have chosen ultra-effective digital network methods of cross-border impact — a hidden organizational weapon that allows, without destroying the infrastructure facilities necessary to meet vital needs, to block the development of society through the deformation of the motivational and need base of a person. In order to identify the hidden impact of organizational weapons, the authors propose to use a methodological “polarizing filter” — a normative ranking that allows us to determine the direction of various social phenomena as the results of “horizontal” or “vertical” regulation, leading to the limit of destruction or development.

The Distance and Peculiar Velocity of the Norma Cluster (ACO3627) Using the Near-infrared J- and K s -band Fundamental Plane Relations

Abstract We report distance measurements for the Norma cluster based on the near-infrared J- and K s -band fundamental plane (FP) relations. Our simultaneous J- and K s -band photometry analyses were performed using 31 early-type galaxies in the nearby Norma cluster obtained using the 1.4 m InfraRed Survey Facility (IRSF) at the South African Astronomical Observatory. Our final K s -band FP sample consists of 41 early-type galaxies from the Norma cluster observed using the IRSF and the New Technology Telescope (NTT) at the European Southern Observatory. This is the largest cluster sample used for peculiar velocity studies in the Great Attractor region to date. From the K s -band FP, we find a distance to the Norma cluster of 4915 ± 121 km s−1. The implied peculiar velocity for Norma is 44 ± 151 km s−1, which further supports a small peculiar velocity for the Norma cluster.

Does the Great Attractor partake in large scale motions?

The Norma cluster is a very rich, massive nearby galaxy cluster lying at or close to the ‘core’ of the Great Attractor (GA). A carefully determined redshift-independent distance and peculiar velocity of this cluster, therefore, helps us clarify if the GA partakes in large-scale motions. We have thus determined the distance and peculiar velocity of the Norma cluster using the Ks-band isophotal Tully-Fisher relation. Using near-infrared Ks-band isophotal magnitudes and Hi line widths for 12 late-type galaxies, six of which lie within the Norma cluster, the measured distance of the Norma cluster is 4893 ± 329 km s−1 (d = 69.4 ± 4.7 Mpc). The corresponding peculiar velocity is +61± 329 km s−1, which although with large uncertainty, is consistent with zero.

Phase-space structure of protohalos: Vlasov versus particle-mesh

The phase-space structure of primordial dark matter halos is revisited using cosmological simulations with three sine waves and cold dark matter (CDM) initial conditions. The simulations are performed with the tessellation based Vlasov solver ColDICE and a particle-mesh (PM) N-body code. The analyses include projected density, phase-space diagrams, radial density ρ(r), and pseudo-phase space density: Q(r) = ρ(r)/σv(r)3 with σv the local velocity dispersion. Particular attention is paid to force and mass resolution. Because the phase-space sheet complexity, estimated in terms of total volume and simplex (tetrahedron) count, increases very quickly, ColDICE can follow only the early violent relaxation phase of halo formation. During the violent relaxation phase, agreement between ColDICE and PM simulations having one particle per cell or more is excellent and halos have a power-law density profile, ρ(r) ∝ r−α, α ∈ [1.5, 1.8]. This slope, measured prior to any merger, is slightly larger than in the literature. The phase-space diagrams evidence complex but coherent patterns with clear signatures of self-similarity in the sine wave simulations, while the CDM halos are somewhat scribbly. After additional mass resolution tests, the PM simulations are used to follow the next stages of evolution. The power law progressively breaks down with a convergence of the density profile to the well-known Navarro–Frenk–White universal attractor, irrespective of initial conditions, that is even in the three-sine-wave simulations. This demonstrates again that mergers do not represent a necessary condition for convergence to the dynamical attractor. Not surprisingly, the measured pseudo phase-space density is a power law Q(r) ∝ r−αQ, with αQ close to the prediction of secondary spherical infall model, αQ ≃ 1.875. However this property is also verified during the early relaxation phase, which is non-trivial.

Observational constraints on α-attractor inflationary models with a Higgs-like potential

We investigate the observational viability of a class of α-attractors inflationary models in light of the most recent Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) and Large-Scale Structure (LSS) data. By considering a double-well potential we perform a slow-roll analysis to study the behavior of this class of models, which is a continuous interpolation between the chaotic inflation for large values of α and the universal attractor, i.e., ns=1−2/N and r=α12/N2 for small α, where ns is the scalar spectral index, r is the tensor-to-scalar ratio, and N is the e-fold number. In order to explore the parameter space of the model, we also perform a MCMC analysis and find α=7.56±5.15 (1σ).

Постпандемический синдром как социально-психологическая и экономическая деструкция

The article highlights the socio-psychological and economic aspects of the regulation of society during an extreme psychosocial event in the format of a Pandemic as a staged act of social separation. Artificial Extremum highlighted the main thing: in state entities aimed at satisfying only the vital needs of a person, intra-system contradictions are critically increasing, since the regulation of society is associated with the dominant satisfaction of higher needs in the creative development of a person. Technologies of social separation have led to pathological psychological consequences — a critical breakdown of social ties. This is the first time that an irrevocable extreme situation has emerged in History, and there is no way out of it under the old model of social regulation. It also became clear that the “Pandemic-2020” did not allow to remove the accumulated financial crisis contradictions, as the global industrial Autonomous circuit continues to work properly and consistently provides vital functions of the human population. Since the second wave of the pandemic extreme has been announced, individuals who have lost the features of social subjectivity cannot integrate to achieve socially significant results of their activities. The only way out of the crisis situation is a conscious scientifically based transition to a new psychosocial model of society, already programmed by a new universal attractor of the historical process.

Far-from-equilibrium search for the QCD critical point

Initial conditions for relativistic heavy-ion collisions may be far from equilibrium (i.e. there are large initial contributions from the shear stress tensor and bulk pressure) but it is expected that on very short time scales the dynamics converge to a universal attractor that defines hydrodynamic behavior. Thus far, studies of this nature have only considered an idealized situation at LHC energies (high temperatures $T$ and vanishing baryon chemical potential $\mu_B=0$) but, in this work, we investigate for the first time how far-from-equilibrium effects may influence experimentally driven searches for the Quantum Chromodynamic critical point at RHIC. We find that the path to the critical point is heavily influenced by far from equilibrium initial conditions where viscous effects lead to dramatically different $\left\{T,\mu_B\right\}$ trajectories through the QCD phase diagram. We compare hydrodynamic equations of motion with shear and bulk coupled together at finite $\mu_B$ for both DNMR and phenomenological Israel-Stewart equations of motion and discuss their influence on potential attractors at finite $\mu_B$ and their corresponding $\left\{T,\mu_B\right\}$ trajectories.

Galaxies in the Zone of Avoidance with the Spitzer Space Telescope

Abstract In this work we describe 59 galaxies discovered in the talk-forum of the Milky Way Project (MWP) by volunteers of the project. The MWP is based on infrared images by the Spitzer Space Telescope and primarily probes the Zone of Avoidance for star-forming regions located in the Milky Way. The list of galaxies found here include 35 galaxies previously not described, a possible galaxy cluster and two galaxies that could be located in the Great Attractor Wall. The volunteers mainly discovered larger (d > 12″) galaxies with a higher star-forming rate and likely missed galaxies with low star-forming rate or small galaxies. This work demonstrates that many galaxies in the Zone of Avoidance remain undiscovered in the GLIMPSE data set.

THE ROLE OF QUASIREALIA IN THE VERBALIZATION OF THE CONCEPT OF “POWER” IN THE CONCEPTUAL SPACE OF GEORGE R. R. MARTIN’S ENGLISH FANTASY SERIES OF NOVELS “A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE”

The article presents the results of the conceptual space of the literary work analysis conducted through the defining of its key concepts and the research of their associative-image and lexical representatives. Particular attention is paid to defining the relationship between the notions of “concept” and “realia” as linguistic and cultural categories that form a picture of the world presented in the literary work, and to substantiating the functional field and the role of quasi-realia in the creation of an autonomous, surreal fantasy world as well. Such an emphasis on the analysis of realia (quasirealia in particular) as an integral part of a literary work is stipulated by the fact that until now they have been regarded as linguistic units outside of the text and their functions have not been taken into account in the context of the literary work itself. In view of this and in view of a number of genre and compositional features of the fantasy literature, which is nowadays at the peak of its popularity, the role and place of quasi-realia in the creation of such a fantasy space that would meet all the requirements and certain canons of the genre and, in particular, the requirements of high fantasy, are determined in this work. The basis of the study presented in the article is an analysis of ways and means of realization the concept of “POWER” in the world-renowned series of fantasy novels “A Song of Ice and Fire” by George R. R. Martin. The plot of the saga is centered on a struggle for power in all its manifestations. The given study identifies the essence of power as a universal attractor for most characters of the saga, analyzes semantics of the saga books titles and their semantic radius in the text, examines the explicit and hidden sources of power according to the typology presented by French and Raven, as well as the limits and means of power exercising on the basis of a number of systems of quasirealia of the saga in question.

Donald Lynden-Bell. 5 April 1935— 6 February 2018

Donald Lynden-Bell's many contributions to astrophysics encompass general relativity, galactic dynamics, telescope design and observational astronomy. In the 1960s, his papers on stellar dynamics led to fundamental insights into the equilibria of elliptical galaxies, the growth of spiral patterns in disc galaxies and the stability of differentially rotating, self-gravitating flows. Donald introduced the ideas of ‘violent relaxation’ and ‘the gravothermal catastrophe’ in pioneering work on the thermodynamics of galaxies and negative heat capacities. He shared the inaugural Kavli Prize in Astrophysics in 2008 for his contributions to our understanding of quasars. His prediction that dead quasars or supermassive black holes may reside in the nuclei of nearby galaxies has been confirmed by multiple pieces of independent evidence. His work on accretion discs led to new insights into their workings, as well as the realization that the infrared excess in T Tauri stars was caused by protostellar discs around these young stars. He introduced the influential idea of monolithic collapse of a gas cloud as a formation mechanism for the Milky Way Galaxy. As this gave way to modern ideas of merging and accretion as drivers of galaxy formation, Donald was the first to realize the importance of tidal streams as measures of the past history and present-day gravity field of the Galaxy. Though primarily a theorist, Donald participated in one of the first observational programmes to measure the large-scale streaming of nearby galaxies. This led to the discovery of the ‘Great Attractor’. The depth and versatility of his contributions mark Donald out as one of the most influential and pre-eminent astronomers of his day.

Панацея от пандемии

The article analyzes the causes of an extreme social event in the format of a global pandemic. They are associated with the “re-quantization of reality” — the change of universal attractors of the historical process, which set specific ways of regulating system structures. The old system-forming meaning of the development of society as a Zoopopulation has finally exhausted its regulatory possibilities; the new meaning is just beginning to integrate social elements for the transition to a psychosocial formation. The clash and struggle of old and new causal connections generates causal dissonance, leads to an increase in entropy in social systems, which, in turn, generates an extremum that threatens humanity with self — destruction-an omnicide. The specifics of a possible suicide of humanity is of relative importance: epidemics, earthquakes, asteroid crashes, and other variants of global misery can threaten and increase until a new sense of development dominates the social consciousness. A real pandemic is the best time for a quantum transition from the old regulation to the new: as soon as the new anthropic principle of managing causal connections prevails, the disease will disappear, and civilization will pass to a new period of its development.

Early- and Late-Time Behavior of Attractors in Heavy-Ion Collisions.

Whether, how, and to what extent solutions of Bjorken-expanding systems become insensitive to aspects of their initial conditions is of importance for heavy-ion collisions. Here we study 1+1D and phenomenologically relevant boost-invariant 3+1D systems in which initial conditions approach a universal attractor. In Israel-Stewart theory (IS) and kinetic theory where the universal attractor extends to arbitrarily early times, we show that all initial conditions approach the attractor at early times by a power law while their approach is exponential at late times. In these theories, the physical mechanisms of hydrodynamization operational at late times do not drive the approach to the attractor at early times, and the early-time attractor is reached prior to hydrodynamization. In marked contrast, the attractor in strongly coupled systems is realized concurrent with hydrodynamization. This qualitative difference may offer a basis for discriminating weakly and strongly coupled scenarios of heavy-ion collisions.

Highly occupied gauge theories in 2+1 dimensions: A self-similar attractor

Motivated by the boost-invariant Glasma state in the initial stages in heavy-ion collisions, we perform classical-statistical simulations of SU(2) gauge theory in 2+1 dimensional space-time both with and without a scalar field in the adjoint representation. We show that irrespective of the details of the initial condition, the far-from-equilibrium evolution of these highly occupied systems approaches a unique universal attractor at high momenta that is the same for the gauge and scalar sectors. We extract the scaling exponents and the form of the distribution function close to this non-thermal fixed point. We find that the dynamics are governed by an energy cascade to higher momenta with scaling exponents $\alpha = 3\beta$ and $\beta = -1/5$. We argue that these values can be obtained from parametric estimates within kinetic theory indicating the dominance of small momentum transfer in the scattering processes. We also extract the Debye mass non-perturbatively from a longitudinally polarized correlator and observe an IR enhancement of the scalar correlation function for low momenta below the Debye mass.

Generalized conformal transformation and inflationary attractors

We investigate the inflationary attractors in models of inflation inspired from general conformal transformation of general scalar-tensor theories to the Einstein frame. The coefficient of the conformal transformation in our study depends on both the scalar field and its kinetic term. Therefore the relevant scalar-tensor theories display the subset of the class I of the degenerate higher-order scalar-tensor theories in which both the scalar field and its kinetic term can non-minimally couple to gravity. We find that if the conformal coefficient $\Omega$ takes a multiplicative form such that $\Omega \equiv w(\phi)W(X)$ where $X$ is the kinetic term of the field $\phi$, the theoretical predictions of the proposed model can have usual universal attractor independent of any functions of $W(X)$. For the case where $\Omega$ takes an additive form, such that $\Omega \equiv w(\phi) + k(\phi) \Xi(X)$, we find that there are new $\xi$ attractors in addition to the universal ones. We analyze the inflationary observables of these models and compare them to the latest constraints from the Planck collaboration. We find that the observable quantities associated to these new $\xi$ attractors do not satisfy the constraints from Planck data at a strong coupling limit.

A universal state and its relaxation mechanisms of long-range interacting polygons

Using polygonal magnetic particles, we conduct experiments to explore the space-filling properties of anisotropic blocks with long-range interactions. In contrast to previous studies, we obtain the surprising finding that our systems’ structures do not depend on the shape of building blocks: a single state, the hexagonal plastic crystal, appears as a universal attractor for a wide range of different polygons. This robust particle-shape independency appears as the interactions go beyond nearest neighbors. Particle shape plays an essential role in system relaxation, and determines the basic relaxation dynamics through a microscopic control parameter, internal roughness, produced by particle vertices. Thus our study reveals a new pattern-forming paradigm, in which particle shape plays little role in the static structure but determines the essential relaxation dynamics. Due to the ubiquity of long-range interactions and anisotropic building blocks, our discovery may shed new light on diverse problems involving structure formation, self-assembly, and packing.

The H i mass function in the Parkes H i Zone of Avoidance survey

An HI mass function (HIMF) was derived for 751 galaxies selected from the deep Parkes HI survey across the Zone of Avoidance (HIZOA). HIZOA contains both the Great Attractor Wall and the Local Void, two of the most extreme environments in the local Universe, making the sample eminently suitable to explore the overall HIMF as well as its dependence on local environment. To avoid any selection bias because of the different distances of these large-scale structures, we first used the two-dimensional stepwise maximum-likelihood method for the definition of an average HIMF. The resulting parameters of a Schechter-type HIMF for the whole sample are $\alpha = -1.33\pm0.05$, $\log(M_{\rm HI}^*/M_{\odot})=9.93\pm0.04$, and $\phi^* = (3.9\pm0.6)\times 10^{-3}$ Mpc$^{-3}$. We then used the $k$-th nearest-neighbour method to subdivide the sample into four environments of decreasing local density and derived the Schechter parameters for each subsample. A strong trend is observed, for the slope $\alpha$ of the low-mass end of the HIMF. The slope changes from being nearly flat, i.e. $\alpha = -0.99\pm0.19$ for galaxies residing in the densest bin, to the steep value of $\alpha = -1.31\pm0.10$ in the lowest density bin. The characteristic mass, however, does not show a clear trend between the highest and lowest density bins. We find similar trends in the low-mass slope when we compare the results for a region dominated by the Great Attractor, and the Local Void, which are found to be over-, respectively underdense by 1.35 and 0.59 compared to the whole sample.

Random attractor for the 3D viscous primitive equations driven by fractional noises

We develop a new and general method to prove the existence of the random attractor (strong attractor) for the primitive equations (PEs) of large-scale ocean and atmosphere dynamics under non-periodic boundary conditions and driven by infinite-dimensional additive fractional Wiener processes. In contrast to our new method, the common method, compact Sobolev embedding theorem, is to obtain the time-uniform a priori estimates in some Sobolev space whose regularity is higher than the solution space. But this method can not be applied to the 3D stochastic PEs with the non-periodic boundary conditions. Therefore, the existence of universal attractor (weak attractor) was established in previous works (see [15,16]). The main idea of our method is that we first derive that P-almost surely the solution operator of stochastic PEs is compact. Then we construct a compact absorbing set by virtue of the compact property of the solution operator and the existence of a absorbing set. We should point out that our method has some advantages over the common method of using compact Sobolev embedding theorem, i.e., using our method we only need to obtain time-uniform a priori estimates in the solution space to prove the existence of random attractor for the corresponding stochastic system, while the common method need to establish time-uniform a priori estimates in a more regular functional space than the solution space. Take the stochastic PEs for example, as the unique strong solution to the stochastic PEs belongs to C([0,T];(H1(℧))3), in view of our method, we only need to obtain the time-uniform a priori estimates in the solution space (H1(℧))3 to prove the existence of random attractor for this stochastic system, while the common method need to establish time-uniform a priori estimates for the solution in the functional space (H2(℧))3. However, time-uniform a priori estimates in (H2(℧))3 for the solution to stochastic PEs are too difficult to be established. The present work provides a general way for proving the existence of random attractor for common classes of dissipative stochastic partial differential equations driven by Wiener noises, fractional noises and even jump noises. In a forth coming paper, using this new method we [46] prove the existence of random attractor for the stochastic nematic liquid crystals equations. This is the first result about the long-time behavior of stochastic nematic liquid crystals equations.

Analyticity of the attractors of dissipative‐dispersive systems in higher dimensions

We investigate the analyticity of the attractors of a class of Kuramoto‐Sivashinsky–type pseudodifferential equations in higher dimensions, which are periodic in all spatial variables and possess a universal attractor. This is done by fine‐tuning the techniques used in a previous work of the second author, which are based on an analytic extensibility criterion involving the growth of ∇nu, as n tends to infinity (here, u is the solution). These techniques can now be utilized in a variety of higher‐dimensional equations possessing universal attractors, including Topper‐Kawahara equation, Frenkel‐Indireshkumar equations, and their dispersively modified analogs. We prove that the solutions are analytic whenever γ, the order of dissipation of the pseudodifferential operator, is higher than one. We believe that this estimate is optimal based on numerical evidence.