“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.
“Honestly, our discovery may just be a coincidence. But if it isn’t, it is truly incredible. It would change our understanding of the universe’s composition and why it is expanding at an ever-increasing rate,” says Steen Harle Hansen, an associate professor at the Niels Bohr Institute’s DARK Cosmology Centre, who created a new computer model that replaces dark energy–the mysterious, elusive phenomena that pushes the cosmos to expand so rapidly and which is estimated to account for 70% of the contents of the universe – with a model that combines with dark matter in the form of magnetic forces.
“If space is truly infinite,” observes Dan Hooper, head of the Theoretical Astrophysics Group at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, in At the Edge of Time, “the implications are staggering. Within an infinite expanse of space, it would be hard to see any reason why there would not be an infinite number of galaxies, stars, and planets, and even an infinite number of intelligent or conscious beings, scattered throughout this limitless volume. That is the thing about infinity: it takes things that are otherwise very unlikely and makes them all inevitable.”
“This newly discovered black hole could be an ancient relic—a primordial black hole—created in the early Universe before the first stars and galaxies formed,” said Eric Thrane from the Monash University School of Physics and Astronomy and Chief Investigator for the ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav). The discovery of a ‘Goldilocks’ black hole is part of a missing link between two populations of black holes. “These early black holes may be the seeds of the supermassive black holes that live in the hearts of galaxies today.”
The massive now-iconic object at the center of the M87 was described by scientists on April 10, 2019 as the “Gates of Hell” and the “End of Spacetime”. The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration, who produced the first ever image of a black hole –described as “fathomless dark creations of the Universe”— an image equal to the famous “Earthrise” photo taken by Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders in December 1968. The EHT has released a new view of the monster elliptical galaxy located 55 million light-years away, that harbors the black hole the size of our solar system, unveiling new insights into the mystery of its magnetic fields and jets that reach at close to the speed of light beyond the galaxy.
“The Standard Model as it stands cannot possibly be right because it cannot predict why the universe exists,” said Gerald Gabrielse, the Board of Trustees Professor of Physics at Northwestern University, about the theory that describes the seventeen known fundamental particles and their interactions and provides us with a detailed set of predictions for how each of them should behave and interact. The model is a mathematical picture of reality, and no laboratory experiments yet performed have contradicted it. “We should be very careful about making assumptions that we’re getting closer to solving the mystery, but I do have considerable hope that we’re getting closer at this level of precision,” Gabrielse added.
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.
