On April 10, 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) team of radio astronomers produced the first photograph of the M87 Galaxy’s black hole the size of our solar system described by astronomers as the “gates of hell and the end of spacetime.” The now iconic image captured light from the entire universe wrapping around the object in a nested series of rings.
Unknown to the entire space physics community, 34 years ago Voyager 2 flew through a plasmoid, a giant magnetic bubble that may have been whisking Uranus’ atmosphere out to space. The finding raises new questions about the planet’s one-of-a-kind magnetic environment.
Scientists have quantified the suggestion from decades ago that most of the novas in the Cosmos are deeply hibernating, waiting to wake up, and we haven’t yet identified them, says Michael Shara, an astrophysicist and curator at the American Museum of Natural History and leader of a study confirming that the novae we observe flashing like fireflies throughout the universe represent just a few percent of these cataclysmic variables, as they are known, with the rest “hiding” in hibernation.
“Not being able to turn back time is no longer just a statistical argument. It is already hidden in the basic laws of nature. Not a single system of three moving objects, big or small, planets or black holes, can escape the direction of time,” says Portegies Zwart at the Netherlands Research School for Astronomy, about the principle of irreversibility using the concept of Planck length –the scale at which classical ideas about gravity and space-time cease to be valid, and quantum physics dominates. (more…)
Black holes, predicted Einstein, are supposed to have a singularity—a point that is so small and dense that our human brains can’t even comprehend it. But what if some phenomena that look like black holes are actually cosmic objects full of dark energy –an enigmatic phenomena that has been described as everything from a fifth force to a new form of matter, but so far, no direct evidence has been found of its existence. About which Noble-Prize winning physicist Adam Riess says: we have absolutely no clue what dark energy is. Dark energy appears strong enough to push the entire universe – yet its source is unknown, its location is unknown and its physics are highly speculative.
