Is the Sun Emitting a Mystery Particle?

When probing the deepest reaches of the Cosmos or magnifying our understanding of the quantum world, a whole host of mysteries present themselves. This is to be expected when pushing our knowledge of the Universe to the limit. But what if a well-known -- and apparently constant -- characteristic of matter starts behaving mysteriously?
This is exactly what has been noticed in recent years; the decay rates of radioactive elements are changing. This is especially mysterious as we are talking about elements with "constant" decay rates -- these values aren't supposed to change. School textbooks teach us this from an early age.This is the conclusion that researchers from Stanford and Purdue University have arrived at , but the only explanation they have is even weirder than the phenomenon itself: The sun might be emitting a previously unknown particle that is meddling with the decay rates of matter. Or, at the very least, we are seeing some new physics.
Many fields of science depend on measuring constant decay rates. For example, to accurately date ancient artifacts, archaeologists measure the quantity of carbon-14 found inside organic samples at dig sites. This is a technique known as carbon dating.Carbon-14 has a very defined half-life of 5730 years; i.e. it takes 5,730 years for half of a sample of carbon-14 to radioactively decay into stable nitrogen-14. Through spectroscopic analysis of the ancient organic sample, by finding out what proportion of carbon-14 remains, we can accurately calculate how old it is.But as you can see, carbon dating makes one huge assumption: radioactive decay rates remain constant and always have been constant. If this new finding is proven to be correct, even if the impact is small, it will throw the science community into a spin.
Interestingly, researchers at Purdue first noticed something awry when they were using radioactive samples for random number generation. Each decay event occurs randomly (hence the white noise you'd hear from a Geiger counter), so radioactive samples provide a non-biased random number generator.However, when they compared their measurements with other scientists' work, the values of the published decay rates were not the same. In fact, after further research they found that not only were they not constant, but they'd vary with the seasons. Decay rates would slightly decrease during the summer and increase during the winter.
Experimental error and environmental conditions have all been ruled out -- the decay rates are changing throughout the year in a predictable pattern. And there seems to be only one answer.
As the Earth is closer to the sun during the winter months in the Northern Hemisphere (our planet's orbit is slightly eccentric, or elongated), could the sun be influencing decay rates? In another moment of weirdness, Purdue nuclear engineer Jere Jenkins noticed an inexplicable drop in the decay rate of manganese-54 when he was testing it one night in 2006. It so happened that this drop occurred just over a day before a large flare erupted on the sun.
Did the sun somehow communicate with the manganese-54 sample? If it did, something from the sun would have had to travel through the Earth (as the sample was on the far side of our planet from the sun at the time) unhindered.The sun link was made even stronger when Peter Sturrock, Stanford professor emeritus of applied physics, suggested that the Purdue scientists look for other recurring patterns in decay rates. As an expert of the inner workings of the sun, Sturrock had a hunch that solar neutrinos might hold the key to this mystery.
Sure enough, the researchers noticed the decay rates vary repeatedly every 33 days -- a period of time that matches the rotational period of the core of the sun. The solar core is the source of solar neutrinos.It may all sound rather circumstantial, but these threads of evidence appear to lead to a common source of the radioactive decay rate variation. But there's a huge problem with speculation that solar neutrinos could impact decay rates on Earth: neutrinos aren't supposed to work like that.
Neutrinos, born from the nuclear processes in the core of the sun, are ghostly particles. They can literally pass through the Earth unhindered as they so weakly interact. How could such a quantum welterweight have any measurable impact on radioactive samples in the lab?

In short, nobody knows.

If neutrinos are the culprits, it means we are falling terribly short of understanding the true nature of these subatomic particles. But if (and this is a big if) neutrinos aren't to blame, is the sun generating an as-yet-to-be- discovered particle?
If either case is true, we'll have to go back and re-write those textbooks.

Courtesy - Stanford University

Mission Kepler has discovered new planetary system K-9

The Kepler mission has discovered a system of two Saturn size planets with perhaps a third planet that is only 1.5 times the radius of Earth. While the news of this discovery is tempered somewhat with the announcement by a team from the European Southern Observatory of a system with five confirmed Neptune-sized planets and perhaps two additional smaller planets, both discoveries highlight that the spacecraft and techniques astronomers are using to find exoplanets are getting the desired results, and excitingly exoplanet reseach now includes the study of multiplanet systems. This discovery is the first time multiple planets were found by looking at transit time variations, which can provide more information about planets, such as their masses.“What is particularly special about this system, is that the variations in transit times are large enough, that we can use these transit timing to detect the masses of these bodies” said Matthew Holman, Kepler team lead for the study of star Kepler-9, speaking on the AAAS Science podcast. Additionally, these findings should provide the tools astronomers need to determine even more physical conditions of these planets — and others — in the future.
The inner world weighs in at 0.25 Jupiter mass (80 Earths) while the outer world is a slimmer 0.17 Jupiter mass (54 Earths).The team analyzed seven months of data from the orbiting Kepler telescope, and the two large confirmed planets—Kepler-9b and Kepler-9c— are transiting the parent star at unstable rates. The planets’ 19.2- and 38.9-day transition periods are increasing and decreasing at average, respective rates of four and 39 minutes per orbit.“One thing that caught our attention right off, is when we do preliminary estimates at the time of the transit, we saw large variations in this particular system. Not only did we see more than one planet transiting, but one planet seemed to be speeding up and one slowing down," Holman said.Because period one is roughly twice the other, they have a signature of what is called a 2:1 orbital resonance, where astronomers expect to see large timing variation, due to the orbital gravitational push and pull the systems has on all the objects."The variation in transit times depend upon the masses of the planets," Holman told reporters in a news conference announcing the findings. "The larger the mass the larger the variations. These variations allows us to determine the mass of the objects and we can confirm that they are planets."The team also confirmed the objects were planets with radial velocity observations with the Keck I telescope.The third planet, with a mass several times that of the Earth, is transiting the star in a more interior orbit, but further analysis will be necessary to confirm that this signature is actually a planet.“We are being very careful at this point to only call it a planet candidate, rather than a confirmed planet,” Holman said. “If it is confirmed it would only have a radius of about 1.5 that of Earth’s. It has a much shorter orbital period of 1.6 days, so it is very close to its host star, so we should be able to see evidence of many transits.”Holman added that this discovery — regardless of whether they are able to confirm that this is a planet or not — highlights the sensitivity of Kepler to very small signatures.Holman said the planets have probably migrated to be closer to the star from where they started out when they formed. “Likely they formed with the star, but likely they formed farther out at the “snow line” several times farther away from the star than the Earth is, and by a dynamical process move in closer," he said in the Science podcast.The resonance is a signature that some kind of migration that occurred, called convergent migration, where planets are moving towards star and also coming closer to each other.From all the transit timing information that has been gathered so far, astronomers are piecing together the migration history of this planetary system. "The whole history of that system may be encoded in the information we have," said Alycia Weinberger, from the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at the Carnegie Institution. "Isn't it cool that what the planetary system looks like today has much to tell us about its history?".Kepler looks for the signatures of planets by measuring tiny decreases in the brightness of stars when planets cross in front of, or transit them. The size of the planet can be derived from the change in the star's brightness. In June, mission scientists announced the mission has identified more than 700 planet candidates, including five systems with more than one planet candidate. This is the first of those systems to be confirmed.Kepler principal investigator William Borucki said the team is working hard to get these candidates "turned into confirmed planets."Asked about why the public seems to be so interested in the Kepler mission, Borucki said, "We addressing a very important question, which is, are there other earths out there and are they frequent? Any answer is important. If we get zero that might mean there is very little life out there in the universe."

'Puppynout' In Outer Space

Fifty years ago, Russia made a huge stride in its quest to send a man into orbit. On August 20, 1960, reporters crowded around two small but sprightly dogs, trying to get a good picture of the triumphant space travelers. Belka and Strelka, the first creatures to return safely to Earth after 24 hours in orbit, live on in the memories of former Soviets, unlike many of their predecessors, whose difficult and thankless work paved the way for the first human in space.
At one of the many events he attended upon his return to Earth, Yury Gagarin, the first man in space, joked, "I'm not sure if I was the first man in space or the last dog." Although he certainly was the first man in space, his Vostok spacecraft was not entirely fit for human use when he blasted off on April 12, 1961. The reliability of its systems left much to be desired. The Soviet space program, which began gaining momentum in the early post-war years, was desperately in need of experimental data. Everything scientists and engineers were doing was unprecedented. No one knew what might happen to a living body in the airless, zero-gravity environment of space, or the effects of space radiation outside the atmosphere.
In 1951, Sergei Korolyov, the leading engineer in the Soviet space effort, ordered a lab established at the Military Medicine Institute to select and train test animals for suborbital and space launches. Dogs were ultimately chosen as the most suitable test subject. The size of the capsule dictated the choice: no heavier than seven kilos and no taller than 35 cm. Different breeds of dog were considered, but scientists eventually opted for stray mutts. Physicians explained that these dogs' tough life, surviving on the streets on their own from an early age, made them stronger and more "psychologically stable."
The first canine launch took place in 1951. The spacecraft structure was simple then - the capsule separated from the booster rocket after gaining the target altitude and descended with a parachute. Of course, it would be impossible to return from the outer space with a parachute. The first dog in space, the two-year-old Laika, blasted off on November 3, 1957. Her spacecraft, Sputnik-2, was to make a long, seven-day orbital flight and was not expected to return. Landing never became an issue, because the ship's temperature control system malfunctioned, and Laika died from high temperatures on her fourth orbital circuit. Characteristically, the Soviet leadership continued to tell the world for a week that the dog was "feeling well," feeding the illusion that they intended to bring Laika home. After a week, Moscow had no choice but to report that Laika was "put to sleep."
Laika's spaceship burned up in the atmosphere in April 1958, but the details of the story did not become widely known until 2002. Two years ago, a monument to Laika was erected at the Military Medicine Institute, and a memorial plaque on the building honors Laika as "the first living being in space." Although the regime's clumsy handling of the PR side of the mission harmed the Soviet Union's image abroad, the experiment was a success. Laika's flight proved that a living being can be safely launched into orbit and endure zero gravity. There was no other way to obtain reliable data on this at that time, and there was no shortage of wild theories, with some scientists predicting a collapse of higher nervous functions in a living body in zero gravity.
Environmentalists picketed Russian embassies around the world, accusing Moscow of the cruel treatment of animals. Meanwhile, American space researchers were hard at work on their own experiments with monkeys. On May 28, 1959, a space capsule with two female monkeys, Able and Baker, landed safely after a suborbital flight, which the U.S. media incorrectly termed a "spaceflight," implying that it was the equivalent of an orbital flight. In the late 1940s, several monkey "crews" died in a series of suborbital flight experiments. On July 28, 1960, the Soviet Union launched a recoverable capsule carrying two dogs, Chaika and Lisichka. However, their ship's first stage vehicle broke apart 29 seconds after launch. Belka and Strelka were next in line. On August 19, the two dogs successfully orbited the Earth for 25 hours in the company of 40 mice, 28 of which did not survive. The flight went according to plan, and the dogs fared relatively well, although Belka was extremely nervous. The feeding system designed for a zero-gravity environment was also a success. The dogs were fed on a high-calorie jelly, which provided both food and water. The reentry was smooth, and the spacecraft stuck to the planned route, landing between Orsk and Kustanai, just 10 kilometers wide of the mark. The dogs became world-famous as soon as they landed. The Western world was both fascinated and frightened by the Soviet space program : those Russians were doing things no one had done before - intercontinental missiles, then satellites, now returning dogs safely from space. What would they do next? What if they send a man?
After the flight, Strelka had six healthy pups. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev gave one to the Kennedy family, a slight jab at the less successful U.S. space program. Meanwhile, more dogs were launched into orbit under the Vostok space program. Another failed mission claimed the lives of Pchyolka and Mushka on December 1, 1960. Later that month, something truly bizarre occurred. One of the engines failed while launching the next pair, Shutka and Kometa, making it impossible to blast the capsule into orbit. The test capsules usually had a self-liquidation system, which was essentially a bomb, but for some reason, the explosives failed to detonate. The capsule landed deep in the snowy taiga near the remote Nizhnaya Tunguska River. A rescue party had to be sent on an arduous mission to recover the dogs. The rats and insects that accompanied the four-legged astronauts froze to death, but the two mutts came through the four days of severe cold essentially unscathed. The story was later used as the basis for a movie starring the famous actor Oleg Tabakov as a spaceship designer. The only part of the story not shown in the film was the frantic search for experts who could defuse the self-liquidation system.
The spring of 1961 was looming on the horizon, as were the words of Sergei Korolyov: "Two successful test launches in a row, then a man!" On March 9, the next dog, Chernushka, survived its flight, followed by Zvezdochka on March 25. The time had come. Boris Chertok, one of the fathers of the Soviet space program, said later: "If we looked at Gagarin's Vostok today, no chief designer would give the go-ahead for the launch. We didn't understand then how big the risk was." So Gagarin was entitled to indulge in some black humor after he landed. He was the eighth to fly under the Vostok program, and only four of the previous seven launches had been successful. Not all the four-legged astronauts gained the same fame as Belka and Strelka. Indeed, some were not even lucky enough to return home.

Mud Volcanoes On Mars

If life does - or did - exist on Mars, signs of such life might well be found in a region in the northern plains called Acidalia Planitia, according to a new study. The region appears to be dotted with what scientists believe are geological structures known as mud volcanoes, spewing out muddy sediments from underground. These sediments might contain organic materials that could be biosignatures of possible past and present life.

"If there was life on Mars , it probably developed in a fluid-rich environment," said lead author Dorothy Oehler, a research scientist at the Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science Directorate at NASA's Johnson Space Center.

"Mud volcanoes themselves are an indicator of a fluid-rich subsurface, and they bring up material from relatively deep parts of the subsurface that we might not have a chance to see otherwise." In a study published in the August issue of Icarus, Oehler and her co-author Carlton Allen mapped, for the first time, more than 18,000 of these circular mounds. Their estimate is that more than 40,000 mud volcanoes could be found in that region if the mapping continued.

"The Oehler paper adds to [previous studies] by documenting in much greater detail [the] number and distribution [of the mud volcanoes] and analyzes more deeply their origin and possible implications as paleo-habitats," said Kenneth Tanaka, a scientist at the Astrogeology Science Center of the U.S. Geological Survey. Oehler and Allen analyzed images obtained from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), which allowed them to take a closer look at the structure of some of the mounds and their flow-like features. More data from the imaging spectrometer known as CRISM provided new information on the mineralogy of the mud volcano-like mounds.

Through these assessments, the two scientists were able to rule out the possibility that the mounds were caused by other processes. The paper provides a detailed explanation of why the mounds cannot be impact structures, ice-cored mounds, evaporation deposits or structures caused by lava flow. Scientists first observed the mounds in Acidalia using imagery obtained from the Viking mission in the late 1970s. However, it was more recently that these mounds were thought to represent mud volcanoes. Tanaka was one of the first to make that suggestion.

"I also thought that these features, which also occur elsewhere in the northern plains of Mars, were good places to search for signs of life," Tanaka said. Mud volcanoes are geological structures in which a mixture of gas, liquid and fine-grained rock (or mud) is forced to the surface from several meters or kilometers underground. On Earth, mud volcanoes have specific significance to the oil industry. Those found on land have been found to play a significant role in predicting petroleum reservoirs.

Offshore, they can also be a "huge drilling hazard," according to Oehler, because the earth around a mud volcano is unstable and the activity inside is somewhat unpredictable. It is difficult to predetermine how much mud will surface and whether the process will be a quiet one or an explosive one. The size of mud volcanoes can range up to about ten of kilometers in diameter and several hundred meters in height. The mud flows in an upward direction because the muddy mixture is more buoyant than the surrounding rocks.

One of the major goals of the Mars exploration program is to try to understand if life ever evolved on the planet. In that hunt, astrobiologists are searching for biosignatures that would indicate the presence of extraterrestrial life. While the surface of Mars is thought to be inhospitable to life, microbial life possibly could exist underground. Mud volcanoes bring materials from great depths to the surface, providing samples from deep inside the planetary body that, on a place like Mars, would otherwise be completely inaccessible to scientists. "If life were present in the subsurface, the water and slurries involved in forming the mud volcanoes would have brought it to the surface," Tanaka explained. "While life may not have survived at the surface, it at least could have been brought there by this process."

Studies such as this could help identify regions on the Red Planet that may have been the most suitable places for life to take hold. Missions could use this information to target sites that would be the most likely to have organic biosignatures. "None of the previous landers or rovers on Mars has tested any structure interpreted as a possible mud volcano," Oehler said. "So the mounds in Acidalia represent an entirely new, and untested, class of exploration target for Mars."

However, Tanaka said the age of the mud volcanoes, which could be two to three billion years old, might make them less suitable locations for finding signs of life. "There has been a great amount of time [for UV radiation and other surface processes] to destroy possible microfossils in surface rocks and soils," Tanaka said. "For this reason, it is unclear if these features are the best places to search for preserved life. Better places might include recent crater impacts and deposits from younger flood discharges."

Tanaka points to a Martian valley called Athabasca Valles as a good alternative location for astrobiologists to search for biosignatures. Scientists estimate its age to be in the range of two to 30 million years, making it the youngest channel on the planet. The younger the geological structure, the greater likelihood of finding better-preserved biosignatures. Meanwhile, Oehler and her colleagues are hoping to continue analyzing the MRO imagery to provide further evidence that the circular structures in Acidalia are in fact mud volcanoes. They plan on analyzing their distribution on the surface, and how the shapes of the different structures vary. This analysis could provide more information about the subsurface conditions in the Acidalia region.

"We do believe that Acidalia is a place where life could have been abundant because of long-lived water sources," Oehler said. "It is one of the better places to look for evidence of life - if life ever developed on Mars."

Exit Earth, or Face Extinction : Hawking

Here is the full Interview of Pr. Stephen Howking published at portal BigThing ( www.bigthink.com)
Let's face it: The planet is heating up, Earth's population is expanding at an exponential rate, and the the natural resources vital to our survival are running out faster than we can replace them with sustainable alternatives. Even if the human race manages not to push itself to the brink of nuclear extinction, it is still a foregone conclusion that our aging sun will expand and swallow the Earth in roughly 7.6 billion years.
So, according to famed theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, it's time to free ourselves from Mother Earth. "I believe that the long-term future of the human race must be in space," Hawking tells Big Think. "It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster on planet Earth in the next hundred years, let alone the next thousand, or million. The human race shouldn't have all its eggs in one basket, or on one planet. Let's hope we can avoid dropping the basket until we have spread the load." Hawking says he is an optimist, but his outlook for the future of man's existence is fairly bleak. In the recent past, humankind's survival has been nothing short of "a question of touch and go" he says, citing the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1963 as just one example of how man has narrowly escaped extinction. According to the Federation of American Scientists there are still about 22,600 stockpiled nuclear weapons scattered around the planet, 7,770 of which are still operational. In light of the inability of nuclear states to commit to a global nuclear non-proliferation treaty, the threat of a nuclear holocaust has not subsided. In fact, "the frequency of such occasions is likely to increase in the future," says Hawking, "We shall need great care and judgment to negotiate them all successfully."

Even if humans manage to avoid a nuclear stand-off over the next thousand years, our fate on this planet is still pretty much certain. University of Sussex astrophysicist Dr. Robert Smith says eventually the aging Sun will accelerate global warming to a point where all of Earth's water will simply evaporate."Life on Earth will have disappeared long before 7.6 billion years," says Smith, "Scientists have shown that the Sun's slow expansion will cause the temperature at the surface of the Earth to rise. Oceans will evaporate, and the atmosphere will become laden with water vapor, which (like carbon dioxide) is a very effective greenhouse gas. Eventually, the oceans will boil dry and the water vapor will escape into space. In a billion years from now the Earth will be a very hot, dry and uninhabitable ball."Finally, between the next thousand years or so that Hawking says it will take man to make the planet uninhabitable and the billion years it will take for the sun to turn our planet into an arid wasteland, there is always the chance that a nearby supernova, an asteroid, or a quick and painless black hole could do us in.
Why We Should Reject This Idea
Despite what Hawking describes as humankind's "selfish and aggressive instinct," there may be some biological impediments to finding another planet to inhabit।

"The nearest star [to Earth] is Proxima Centauri which is 4.2 light years away," says University of Michigan astrophysicist Katherine Freese, "That means that, if you were traveling at the speed of light the whole time, it would take 4.2 years to get there."Unfortunately, at the moment we can only travel at about ten thousandth of light speed, which means if man were to use chemical fuel rockets similar to the those used during the Apollo mission to the moon, the journey would take about 50,000 years. Without the use of a science-fiction-like warp drive or cryogenic freezing technology, no human would live long enough to survive the journey. In addition, "the radiation you would encounter alone would kill you, even if you could get a rocket to go anywhere near that fast," says Freese. On the upside, if man ever develops the technology to travel at the speed of light while remaining shielded from cosmic radiation, he could effectively travel into the future. "A five year trip at light speed could push an astronaut forward by 1000 earth years," says Freese, "If he wanted to see if any humans were still around by then."

Indian Scientist For Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter

NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has a new project manager: Phil Varghese, who has managed another veteran NASA Mars mission - the Mars Odyssey orbiter - since 2004. Varghese has worked at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., since 1989.
The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has been examining Mars with six advanced instruments since 2006. It has returned more data than the total from all other NASA missions that have flown farther than the moon.
Mars Odyssey began orbiting Mars in 2001 and is the longest-active spacecraft studying the Red Planet. Varghese previously managed the Deep Space 1 technology demonstration mission, which flew past asteroid Braille and comet Borrelly using solar-powered ion propulsion.
Varghese, a native of Kerala, India, came to the United States on a Fulbright Scholarship in 1971 to study physics, earned his doctorate at the University of Oregon, Eugene, Ore., and then worked with computer and aerospace companies. He began his work at JPL as an engineer on NASA's Mars Observer Project. He lives in Los Angeles.
JPL's Jim Erickson managed the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Project from December 2006 to February 2010, succeeding the project's original manager, Jim Graf. Erickson now manages JPL's Deep Space Network and Mission Service Planning and Management Program. Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Mission Manager Dan Johnston served as acting Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter project manager for the past four months.
JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Mars Odyssey for NASA.

Are we living inside a Blackhole?

WE could be living inside a black hole. This head-spinning idea is one cosmologist's conclusion based on a modification of Einstein's equations of general relativity that changes our picture of what happens at the core of a black hole.
In an analysis of the motion of particles entering a black hole, published in March, Nikodem Poplawski of Indiana University in Bloomington showed that inside each black hole there could exist another universe. "Maybe the huge black holes at the centre of the Milky Way and other galaxies are bridges to different universes," Poplawski says. If that is correct - and it's a big "if" - there is nothing to rule out our universe itself being inside a black hole.
In Einstein’s general relativity (GR), the insides of black holes are "singularities" - regions where the density of matter reaches infinity. Whether the singularity is an actual point of infinite density or just a mathematical inadequacy of GR is unclear, as the equations of GR break down inside black holes. Either way, the modified version of Einstein's equations used by Poplawski does away with the singularity altogether.
For his analysis, Poplawski turned to a variant of GR called the Einstein-Cartan-Kibble-Sciama (ECKS) theory of gravity. Unlike Einstein's equations, ECKS gravity takes account of the spin or angular momentum of elementary particles. Including the spin of matter makes it possible to calculate a property of the geometry of space-time called torsion.
When the density of matter reaches gargantuan proportions (more than about 1050 kilograms per cubic metre) inside a black hole, torsion manifests itself as a force that counters gravity. This prevents matter compressing indefinitely to reach infinite density, so there is no singularity. Instead, says Poplawski, matter rebounds and starts expanding again.
Now, in what is sure to be a controversial study, Poplawski has applied these ideas to model the behaviour of space-time inside a black hole the instant it starts rebounding. The scenario resembles what happens when you compress a spring: Poplawski has calculated that gravity initially overcomes torsion's repulsive force and keeps compressing matter, but eventually the repulsive force gets so strong that the matter stops collapsing and rebounds. Poplawski's calculations show that space-time inside the black hole expands to about 1.4 times its smallest size in as little as 10-46 seconds.
This staggeringly fast bounce-back, says Poplawski, could have been what led to the expanding universe we observe today.
How would we know if we are living inside a black hole? Well, a spinning black hole would have imparted some spin to the space-time inside it, and this should show up as a "preferred direction" in our universe, says Poplawski. Such a preferred direction would result in the violation of a property of space-time called Lorentz symmetry, which links space and time. It has been suggested that such a violation could be responsible for the observed oscillations of neutrinos from one type to another.
If we are living inside a black hole, it would have imparted a 'special direction' to our universe
Sadly, there is no point in us looking for other universes inside black holes. As you approach a black hole, the increasing gravitational field makes time tick slower and slower. So, for an external observer, any new universe inside would form only after an infinite amount of time had elapsed.