“Hubble simply doesn’t go far enough into the infrared” to see the hidden galaxies of the early universe, said Rogier Windhorst of Arizona State University, co-author of a new study using the near-infrared capabilities of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to probe known quasars, ‘quasi-stellar radio sources’, in hopes of spotting the surrounding glow of their host galaxies, without significant detections, suggesting that cocoons of dust that absorb visible light within the galaxies is obscuring the light of their stars.
This past February, four distinguished astrophysicists —Jonathan Carroll-Nellenback, Adam Frank, Jason Wright, Caleb Scharf— suggested in new research that Earth may have remained unvisited by space-faring civilizations all the while existing in a galaxy of interstellar civilizations seeded by moving stars that spread alien life, offering a solution to the perplexing Fermi paradox. They concluded that a planet-hopping civilization could populate the Milky Way in as little as 650,000 years.
Black holes are “a one-way door out of our universe,” said Event Horizon Telescope director and astronomer Sheperd S. Doeleman of the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics about discoveries of the enigmatic cosmic objects that led to three 2020 Noble Prize awards in physics. These “seductive dragon of the universe” described by astronomers as the “gates of hell, the end of spacetime and gateways to eternity” ”after the iconic image of the M87 galaxy supermassive black hole was unveiled in 2019, were first named “black holes” in 1983 by Princeton quantum physicist John Archibald Wheeler. (more…)
“We believe we have just seen the tip of the iceberg, and that the few galaxies discovered so far around this supermassive black hole are only the brightest ones,” said Barbara Balmaverde, at The National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) in Torino, Italy about the discovery by astronomers using the ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) of six galaxies in a cosmic “spider’s web” of gas extending to over 300 times the size of the Milky Way around a supermassive black hole –those “strange galactic monsters, for whom creation is destruction, death life, chaos order”–at the dawn of time when the universe was only 0.9 billion years old.
“Perhaps the most significant sign of the existence of dark matter, however, is our very existence,” observes Harvard theoretical physicist, Lisa Randall in Nature about the elusive substance that permeates the universe, exerts detectable gravitational influences, and yet eludes direct detection. “Despite its invisibility, dark matter has been critical to the evolution of our universe and to the emergence of stars, planets and even life.”
“Very soon the heavens presented an extraordinary appearance, for all the stars directly behind me were now deep red, while those directly ahead were violet,” is how philosopher and science-fiction author Olaf Stapledon described the phenomena known as “redshift” in his science fiction novel, Star Maker, a history of life in the universe. In 1929, Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe is expanding, with most other galaxies moving away from us. Light from these galaxies is shifted to longer (further away and redder) wavelengths – in other words, it is red-shifted, a result of the expansion of the universe.
