“Ancient black holes would give us access to physics we would never otherwise be able to do,” wrote Dan Hooper, head of the theoretical astrophysics group at Fermilab, in an email to The Daily Galaxy. If primordial black holes are real, they’d have potential to solve a whole host of the biggest problems in cosmology, not the least being the mystery of dark matter, considered to be the backbone to the structure of the universe.
A gas filament with a length of 50 million light years –unfathomably large thread-like structures of hot gas that surround and connect galaxies and galaxy clusters–has been observed by astronomers at the University of Bonn for the first time Its structure is uncannily similar to the predictions of recent computer simulations.
The Big Bang theory says that our universe began with a colossal explosion, about 14 billion years ago, and has been expanding and cooling ever since. Astronomers combine mathematical models with observations to develop workable theories of how the universe came to be, including Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity along with standard theories of fundamental particles. Today, NASA spacecraft such as the Hubble Space Telescope continue measuring the expansion of the universe.
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“There is probably no way to tell whether the mysteries faced by cosmologists today are the signs of a coming scientific revolution or merely the last few loose ends of an incredibly successful scientific endeavor. There is no question that we have made incredible progress in understanding our universe, its history, and its origin,” says Dan Hooper, a senior scientist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory about 40 miles west of Chicago and a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Chicago.
“The Big Bang theory says nothing about what banged, why it banged, or what happened before it banged,” observed MIT theoretical physicist and cosmologist Alan Guth, who pioneered the the theory that the universe dramatically expanded in size in a fleeting fraction of a second after the Big Bang.
