“I 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,” said physicist Adam Riess in an interview. Riess of Johns Hopkins University is one of three researchers just awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics for their part in the discovery that the expansion of the universe is accelerating.
“We’re showing this hint that there is another population out there that we have yet to really probe in the search for black holes,” said Todd Thompson, a professor of astronomy at The Ohio State University and lead author of a new study that shows that in their search scientists may have been missing an entire class of black holes that they didn’t know existed.
“The final stage in the life of a star,” observes physicist Carlo Rovelli in Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, “where the quantum fluctuations of space-time balance the weight of matter, is what is known as a ‘Planck star’. If the sun were to stop burning and to form a black hole, it would measure about one and a half kilometers in diameter. Inside this black hole the sun’s matter would continue to collapse, eventually becoming such a Planck star. Its dimensions would then be similar to those of an atom.
“If you map the expected orbit of a star around Sagittarius A*, you should see deviations from that orbit if there is a wormhole there with a star on the other side,” Dejan Stojkovic, professor of physics, University at Buffalo, who proposes in a theoretical study, that perturbations in the orbit of stars near supermassive black holes could be used to detect wormholes forming passages connecting one area of our universe to a different time and/or place within our universe, or to a different, alien universe.
“When we look far into the distant universe, we are observing objects way in the past – when they were young. We expected to find that these distant giants would appear as a comparatively small pair of vague lobes. To our surprise, we found that these giants still appear enormous even though they are so far away,” said astrophysicist Michael D. Smith of the Center for Astrophysics and Planetary Science at University of Kent, referring to conventional wisdom tells us that large objects appear smaller as they get farther from us, but this fundamental law of classical physics is reversed when we observe the distant universe.
“Reheating was an insane time, when everything went haywire,” says David Kaiser, the Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science and professor of physics at MIT about the explosive phase just before the Big Bang of cosmic inflation, which lasted less than a trillionth of a second.
