“Everything we know and love about the universe and all the laws of physics as they apply, apply to four percent of the universe. That’s stunning,” says astronomer and “Cosmos” host, Neil deGrasse Tyson. Most of the mass in the universe is missing, hidden in some exotic, as yet undetectable form from the visible matter that makes up galaxies, stars, planets, and Homo sapiens.
“In less than a hundred years, we have found a new way to think of ourselves,” observed Stephen Hawking. “From sitting at the center of the universe, we now find ourselves orbiting an average-sized sun, which is just one of billions of stars in our own Milky Way galaxy.” And now, a short-lived eclipse of an extremely bright x-ray source 23 million lightyears from Earth in the Whirlpool Galaxy, illuminated a world about the size of Saturn orbiting a binary star system –a stellar remnant, either a neutron star or black hole, and a massive star–further underscoring our cosmic insignificance.
“If you went below the cloud tops, you would probably find liquid water rain drops, hail, and snow,” says Andy Ingersoll, Caltech professor of planetary science, about the chaotic swirling storms at Jupiter’s South Pole arranged in a strange geometric pattern in the shape of a pentagon or hexagon that have presented a mystery to scientists. “The winds would be hurricane-force winds. Hurricanes on Earth are a good analog of the individual vortices within these arrangements we see on Jupiter, but there is nothing so stunningly beautiful here.”
On April 10, 2019 the astronomers at Harvard’s Black Hole Initiative were asking what does the glowing bright orange ring around the now iconic black hole the size of our solar system at the center of the monster elliptical galaxy M87 –the largest, most massive galaxy in the nearby universe–mean? according to Harvard Event Horizon Telescope radio astronomer, Michael Johnson.
“Something is going on on Enceladus – it’s active and we want to know,” said astrophysicist and curator at California’s Griffith Observatory, Laura Danly. That “something” turned out to be plumes of water vapor and ice particles erupting hundreds of miles into space from the ocean through cracks in Enceladus’s ice-encased surface — detected by the NASA’s Cassini spacecraft prior to the spacecraft’s fiery death-plunge into Saturn in 2017. The plumes provide a tantalizing glimpse into what the moon’s subsurface ocean might harbor –likely heated and churned by hydrothermal vents like those on Earth’s ocean floors. (more…)
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 –comparable to black holes in mass and size but confined within a hard surface, unlike black holes, an exotic cosmic object without a hard surface predicted by Einstein’s theory of General Relativity that do not have a surface, and are confined within an invisible boundary, called an event horizon, from within which nothing, not even light, can escape.
