One of the unsolved mysteries of the early universe is why supermassive black holes already existed only a billion years after the Big Bang. How these extreme primordial objects, monsters whose masses are up to billions of times the mass of the Sun, had time to grow in such a relatively short timespan, is an outstanding question among astronomers.
At the center of the galaxy, millions of stars whirl in orbits around a supermassive black hole that can take anywhere from a few hours for stars close to the event horizon of the black hole to thousands of years for their distant neighbors, according to a new study that included scientists at the Institute for Advanced Study. The nature of the dance—how the stars interact collectively through their gravitational forces—can vary from galaxy to galaxy.
The great British physicist, Sir Roger Penrose, has famously said that the human brain is more complex than the Milky Way Galaxy. Our brain is about three times the size of the brains of great apes, allowing among other things, with the evolution of novel brain structures that enabled complex behaviors such as language and tool production. A new study by anthropologists at the University of Zurich now shows that changes in the brain occurred independent of evolutionary rearrangements of the braincase.
The “Planet Earth Report” connects you to headline news on the science, technology, discoveries, people and events changing our planet and the future of the human species.
A string of 13 dwarf galaxies in orbit around the massive galaxy Andromeda –remnants of the population of primordial structures that coalesced to form giant galaxies like the Milky Way–are spread across a flat plane more than one million light years wide and only 30,000 light years thick –a distance so vast that they have yet to complete a single orbit. The discovery suggests that conventional ideas regarding the formation of galaxies are missing something fundamental.
“The Galaxy Report” connects you to headline news on the science, technology, discoveries, people and events changing our knowledge of our Galaxy and beyond.
Two prominent astronomers, Harvard’s Avi Loeb and NASA’s Jeremy Schnittman, have proposed that inhabited planets might exist around the black holes harbored at the center of most galaxies similar to the fictional waterworld planet Miller, the first planet in the system orbiting the supermassive black hole Gargantua in the movie Interstellar. It’s even possible that life may form on some of these planets, given that extremeophiles on Earth have adapted to boiling heat, freezing cold, and acidic, highly salty and even radioactive environments. (more…)