On April 10, 2019 the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) team unveiled humanity’s first image of a supermassive black hole –described as the Gates of Hell and the End of Spacetime– the picture of galaxy Messier 87’s central supermassive black hole –a monster the size of our solar system. The April event was as epic as the Apollo 11 landing on the Moon, with the world viewing its first image of what had once been purely theoretical, the black hole at the heart of galaxy M87. Now, moving beyond photons, astronomers are using the echoes of X-ray radiation to map the dynamic behavior and surroundings of a black hole.
Our knowledge of black holes has grown exponentially since Princeton quantum physicist John Wheeler first named these enigmatic monsters in 1967, observing that “the laws of physics that we regard as ‘sacred,’ as immutable, are anything but.” Observations have shown that stellar black holes typically have masses of about ten times that of the Sun, in accordance with the theory of stellar evolution. But a Chinese team of astronomers recently claimed to have discovered a black hole as massive as 70 solar masses, which, if confirmed, would severely challenge the current view of stellar evolution.
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“We found that its core seems already fully formed at that time,” says Masayuki Tanaka who led a team of researchers of the Cosmic Dawn Center at the Niels Bohr Institute and the National Observatory of Japan about a recently discovered massive galaxy already dying only 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang. “This result pairs up with the fact that, when these dying gigantic systems were still alive and forming stars, they might have not been that extreme compared with the average population of galaxies”, adds Francesco Valentino, author of an article on the past history of dead galaxies appeared in the Astrophysical Journal.
“At first, we thought it was absurd. How else could you respond to the idea that black holes generate swirling clouds of planet-sized particles that could be the dark matter thought to hold galaxies together? We tend to think about particles as being tiny but, theoretically, there is no reason they can’t be as big as a galaxy,” said theoretical physicist Asimina Arvanitaki, at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics referring to the heated debate about the standard model for dark matter that proposes that it is ‘cold,’ meaning that the particles move slowly compared to the speed of light which is tied to the mass of dark matter particles. The lower the mass of the particle, the ‘warmer’ it is and the faster it will move.
Phosphorus, present in our DNA and cell membranes, is one of the six main elements that make up the human body and an essential element for life as we know it. Unlike hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen and calcium, phosphorus is rare. It is even more scarce in the rest of the Solar System. The source of its arrival on early Earth has long been up to debate.
Gaia Mission scientists called it “hiding in plain sight” referring to their major breakthrough in unraveling the formation history of the Milky Way when our galaxy merged with another galaxy early in its life, littering evidence across the sky all around us. The merger — a collision, actually — reports astronomers at Yale University, happened 11.5 billion years ago when a small galaxy called Gaia-Enceladus slammed into what then existed of the Milky Way, Earth’s home galaxy, which is about 13.5 billion years old.