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.
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.
“In string theory,” writes physicist Michu Kaku, “all particles are vibrations on a tiny rubber band; physics is the harmonies on the string; chemistry is the melodies we play on vibrating strings; the universe is a symphony of strings, and the “Mind of God” is cosmic music resonating in 11 dimensional hyperspace.”
Infinitesimally light, the ghostly QCD axion–is at least one billion times lighter than a proton provides clues into three missing pieces of the physics jigsaw puzzle –enduring questions in fundamental physics: How can the Standard Model of particle physics be extended to explain the cosmological excess of matter over antimatter? What is dark matter? And what is the theoretical origin of an unexpected but observed symmetry in the force that binds protons and neutrons together?
The nucleus of an enormous spiral galaxy 160 million light years away –at a point where the universe is vastly expanded, and the atmosphere is at its most transparent (red-shifted at 676 μm)–contains an equivalent amount of water 30 trillion times that of Earth’s oceans combined, and has a diameter 15 million times the distance from Earth to the Sun, according to a study led by physicist Miguel Pereira Santaella, at Oxford University that detected the water transition in space, for the first time.
