An enigma within a mystery revealed an explanation to the peculiar emission lines seen in a supernovae as bright as an entire galaxy – SN 2006gy, a hypernova or quark-nova inside galaxy NGC 1260, some 250 million light-years away, first discovered on September 18, 2006- as well as an explanation for its previously unknown origin.
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“These pristine stars are among the oldest surviving stars in the Universe, and certainly the oldest stars we have ever seen,” said astronomer Louise Howes at The Australian National University (ANU), currently at Lund University, who was a member of a 2015 team along with the University of Cambridge, about the discovery of of stars that date from before the Milky Way Galaxy formed, when the Universe was just 300 million years old. The stars, found near the center of the Milky Way, are surprisingly pristine, but contain material from an even earlier star, which died in an enormous hypernova explosion. “Our Milky Way galaxy formed around them,” she added.
“Our findings highlight that acquiring precise ages of known craters is important – this one sat in plain sight for nearly two decades before its significance was realized. Yarrabubba is about half the age of the Earth and it raises the question of whether all older impact craters have been eroded or if they are still out there waiting to be discovered,” said Senior Research Fellow Dr Aaron Cavosie at Curtin University about the discovery of Earth’s oldest asteroid strike that occurred at Yarrabubba, in outback Western Australia, and coincided with the big thaw that marked the end of global deep freeze known as a Snowball Earth, vaporizing a large volume of ice into the atmosphere, creating a 70 kilometer diameter crater.
“According to Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, nothing can escape from the gravity of a black hole once it has passed a point of no return, known as the event horizon,” explained Niayesh Afshordi, a physics and astronomy professor at Waterloo about echoes in gravitational wave signals that hint that the event horizon of a black hole may be more complicated than scientists currently think based on research reporting the first tentative detection of these echoes, caused by a microscopic quantum “fuzz” that surrounds newly formed black holes. “This was scientists’ understanding for a long time until Stephen Hawking used quantum mechanics to predict that quantum particles will slowly leak out of black holes, which we now call Hawking radiation.
On April 10, 2019 the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) team unveiled humanity’s first image of a supermassive black hole –described as the Gates of Hell and the End of Spacetime– the picture of galaxy Messier 87’s central supermassive black hole –a monster the size of our solar system. The April event was as epic as the Apollo 11 landing on the Moon, with the world viewing its first image of what had once been purely theoretical, the black hole at the heart of galaxy M87. Now, moving beyond photons, astronomers are using the echoes of X-ray radiation to map the dynamic behavior and surroundings of a black hole.