A mysterious vertical rock formation, akin to the monolith in Arthur C. Clarke’s novel and Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey, towers above the surface of Mars’ 17-mile-wide and deeply-grooved moon Phobos. The origin of the monolith and even Phobos itself, which means “fear” in Greek, is unknown. The monolith may explain Russia’s almost mystical obsession with Phobos. First the Soviet Union, then more recently, Russia, made three attempts to reach the enigmatic object, but software errors and launch disasters have aborted each attempt.
This structure, which the researchers nicknamed Hyperion, is the largest and most massive structure to be found so early in the formation of the universe. The enormous mass of the proto-supercluster is calculated to be more than one million billion times that of the Sun. This titanic mass is similar to that of the largest structures observed in the Universe today, but finding such a massive object in the early universe surprised astronomers.
Though astronomers and physicists have studied and marveled at neutron stars for decades where just a single sugar-cube worth of neutron-star material would weigh 100 million tons here on Earth, or about the same as the entire human population, many mysteries remain about the nature of their interiors: Do crushed neutrons become “superfluid” and flow freely? Do they break down into a soup of subatomic quarks or other exotic particles? What is the tipping point when gravity wins out over matter and forms a black hole?
“The insights we gain from thinking about raindrops and clouds in diverse environments are key to understanding exoplanet habitability,” said Robin Wordsworth, Associate Professor of Environmental Science and Engineering at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) about a new study of the behavior of raindrops on other planets that is key to not only revealing the ancient climate on planets like Mars but identifying potentially habitable planets outside our solar system. “In the long term, they can also help us gain a deeper understanding of the climate of Earth itself.”
“I couldn’t believe my eyes,” said Esra Bulbul of the Harvard Center for Astrophysics in July of 2014 of a still unfolding story about a strange signal that appeared not to come from any known type of matter detected in the x-ray spectrum in the Perseus Cluster –one of the most massive known objects in the universe. “What we found, at first glance, could not be explained by known physics.”
“We do not know what dark matter is, but if it has anything to do with any scalar particles, it may be older than the Big Bang,” says astrophysicist Tommi Tenkanen at the Johns Hopkins University, who was not part of a 2019 University of Tokyo study that proposed the axion as a candidate for dark matter. The only fundamental scalar quantum field that has been observed in nature is the Higgs field-a field of energy that is thought to exist in every region of the universe.
The Galaxy Report newsletter brings you twice-weekly news of space and science that has the capacity to provide clues to the mystery of our existence and add a much needed cosmic perspective in our current Anthropocene Epoch.
