The secret history of Earth’s supernova impacts: armed with data from SN 1987A, the supernova Johannes Kepler spotted in our own Milky Way galaxy in 1604, scientists calculated a theoretical radius of doom, inside which a supernova would have grievous effects. They concluded, following Stephen Hawking’s dire prediction, The bottom line was that there would be a supernova close enough to the Earth to drastically affect the ozone layer about once every billion years.
Did primordial Black holes –described as “the gates of hell, the end of spacetime, paradoxical, intriguing, frightening” by the Event Horizon Telescope scientists who imaged the now iconic black hole the size of our solar system at the heart of monster elliptical galaxy M87— exist during the cosmic Dark Age following the Big Bang, before the formation of the first stars?
“Eventually we reach the utmost limits of our telescopes –there we measure shadows, and we search among the ghostly errors of measurement for landmarks that are scarcely more substantial,” said Edwin Hubble in 1929, creator of Hubble’s law that observed that the further galaxies are, the faster they are moving away from Earth –the “red shift.” Predictions of Hubble’s Constant from the standard cosmological model when applied to new measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB)—the leftover radiation from the Big Bang—have produced a value of 67.4, a significant and troubling difference. This difference, which astronomers say is one of the fundamental problems in all of physics, is beyond the experimental errors in the observations.
Could dark matter particles the size of galaxies exist, or a anti-gravitational force field we call “dark energy” that might be getting stronger and denser, leading to a future in which atoms are ripped apart and time ends?
Astronomers using the Very Large Array have solved a long-standing mystery about warm, dense inner regions of the envelope of young stellar objects the size of our Solar System where complex prebiotic organic molecules form the first steps on the possible path to life. These regions, “hot corinos”, first discovered in 2003, are much warmer than their surroundings, though still quite cold by terrestrial standards. Only about a dozen have been found so far in binary systems, with two protostars forming simultaneously. But astronomers have been puzzled by the fact that, in some of these systems, they found evidence for a hot corino around one of the protostars,but not the other.
