Globular clusters are the oldest visible objects in the Universe – each contains hundreds of thousands to occasionally over one million stars, all born at essentially the same time. They are densely packed into a spherical volume with a diameter over a thousand times smaller than the diameter of the Milky Way Galaxy. Globular clusters are thought to have formed soon after the Universe began nearly 13.8 billion years ago, at the same time as, or perhaps even before, the first galaxies formed.
Stephen Hawking once wrote about black holes that there is a singularity in our past which constitutes, in some sense, a beginning to the universe. On August 14, 2019, scientists with LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) and the Virgo detector in Italy, discovered of a mystery object of 2.6 solar masses as it merged with a black hole of 23 solar masses, placing it in a gap that lies between neutron stars and black holes.
“Our new discoveries represent much more powerful evidence for very high temperatures that could only be associated with a cosmic impact. To help with perspective, such high temperatures would completely melt an automobile in less than a minute,” said James Kennett, a UC Santa Barbara emeritus professor of geology, who with his colleagues first reported evidence of an event in 2012 of the direct effects of a fragmented comet on a human settlement. Such intensity, he added, could only have resulted from an extremely violent, high-energy, high-velocity phenomenon, something on the order of a cosmic impact.
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