A map created in 2021 revealed the extremely violent center of our Milky Way Galaxy. New research and images by University of Massachusetts Amherst astronomer Daniel Wang reveals, with unprecedented clarity, an X-ray thread, G0.17-0.41, which hints at a previously unknown interstellar mechanism that may govern the energy flow and potentially the evolution of the Milky Way.
Today’s stories include Earth’s algae and moss could survive under the light of another star to Ancient stars of the Milky Way’s center confirmed, and much more.
Today’s stories include Why science suddenly has a lot to say about UFOs and UAP to Super-Earths are bigger, more common and more habitable than Earth itself, and much more.
Today’s stories include The Enduring Mystery: How Big is the Universe? to the Planets that the Webb Space Telescope has Observed So Far to Saturn’s Lost Moon, and much more.
“If space is truly infinite,” observes Dan Hooper, head of the Theoretical Astrophysics Group at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, in At the Edge of Time, “the implications are staggering. Within an infinite expanse of space, it would be hard to see any reason why there would not be an infinite number of galaxies, stars, and planets, and even an infinite number of intelligent or conscious beings, scattered throughout this limitless volume. That is the thing about infinity: it takes things that are otherwise very unlikely and makes them all inevitable.”
The story: In April of 2019, Space Telescope Science Institute astronomer Marc Postman said that when he first first saw the Hubble image of the monster elliptical galaxy galaxy in the Abell 2261 galaxy cluster with a core bigger and brighter than any seen before, he knew immediately that something was odd, that its central core embraced a mystery never before seen. Spanning a little over one million light-years, the galaxy is about ten times the diameter of our own Milky Way galaxy.
Astronomers studying the motions of galaxies and the character of the cosmic microwave background radiation came to realize in the last century that most of the matter in the universe was not visible. About 84 percent of the matter in the cosmos is dark matter, much of it located in halos around galaxies. It was dubbed dark matter because it does not emit light, but it is also mysterious: it is not composed of atoms or their usual constituents like electrons and protons.
Albert Einstein described black holes as strange objects “where God divided by zero.” An international team of astrophysicists has now confirmed that black holes are a distinct “species” from neutron stars, which are comparable to black holes in mass and size but confined within a hard surface. A black hole is an exotic cosmic object without a hard surface predicted by Einstein’s theory of General Relativity and is confined within an invisible boundary, called an event horizon, from within which nothing, not even light, can escape.
The Galaxy Report newsletter brings you daily news of space and science that has the capacity to provide clues to the mystery of our existence and add a much needed cosmic perspective in our current Anthropocene Epoch.
The Milky Way Is Like an Ecosystem: The Center Is Where the Action Is
Did the Big Bang Make Cracks in Spacetime to What Would Intelligent Aliens Mean? (The Galaxy Report)
How Earth Avoided a Mars-like Fate to Why is There No Planet B? (Planet Earth Report)
“Life is Electric” –NASA’s ENIGMA Explores Origins of Life on Earth & Beyond