Astronomers have recently speculated that our nearest neighbor, Venus, may have been he first habitable planet in the Solar System — “a place where life was just as likely to arise as it was on Earth,” says Darby Dyar, a planetary scientist at Mount Holyoke College with NASA’s Solar System Exploration team.
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A new theoretical study has proposed a natural explanation for how supermassive black holes –once described as “the most perfect macroscopic objects in the universe, the only elements in their construction are our concepts of space and time” –formed in the early Universe. The proposal is the existence of stable galactic cores –made of dark matter surrounded by a diluted dark matter halo –that become so concentrated once a critical threshold is reached that they collapse into supermassive objects.
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In 1993 Stephen Hawking proposed in Black Holes and Baby Universes that there might be “primordial black holes which were formed in the early universe that could be less than the size of the nucleus of an atom, yet their mass could be a billion tons, the mass of Mount Fuji. A black hole weighing a billion tons,” Hawking explained, “would have a radius of about 10-13 centimeter (the size of a neutron or a proton). It could be in orbit either around the sun or around the center of the galaxy, emitting hard gamma rays with an energy of about 100 million electron volts.”
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