“It’s like a crime scene investigation. The case involves an explosion, a suspect, and various pieces of circumstantial evidence,” said Matthias Kadler, astrophysicist at the University of Würzburg in Germany about the event that occurred on Sept. 22, 2017, when a ghostly particle ejected from a distant supermassive black hole sneaked through the ice of Antarctica at just below the speed of light, with an energy of some 300 trillion electron volts, nearly 50 times the energy delivered by the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the biggest particle accelerator on Earth.
An enormous “something” more massive than a star, appears to have torn a hole in part of the Milky Way’s halo. The “dark substructure” was found in data from Gaia spacecraft observations—a mission producing the most detailed 3D map of our galaxy—with Harvard’s Ana Bonaca noticing a perturbation in a tidal stream. Bonaca is a leading authority on how the tidal field of the Milky Way galaxy disrupts globular clusters, and what the resulting debris can tell us about the underlying distribution of dark matter. (more…)
The outburst was equal to 1,038 nuclear bombs. “This is an extreme case…” said Michael Calzadilla, at the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research (MKI) of a massive black hole explosion in galaxy cluster SPT-0528 so powerful that it punched two holes in the cosmos. Even though the outburst happened billions of years ago, before our solar system had even formed, it took around 6.7 billion years for light from the galaxy cluster to travel all the way to Chandra, NASA’s X-ray emissions observatory that orbits Earth.
A new gargantua, a black hole known as LB-1, has been discovered lurking at the far side of the Milky Way with a mass that is around 70 times larger than our sun with an orbiting blue monster, a star eight times the size of the sun.
One of the unsolved mysteries of the early universe is why supermassive black holes already existed only a billion years after the Big Bang. How these extreme primordial objects, monsters whose masses are up to billions of times the mass of the Sun, had time to grow in such a relatively short timespan, is an outstanding question among astronomers.
Two prominent astronomers, Harvard’s Avi Loeb and NASA’s Jeremy Schnittman, have proposed that inhabited planets might exist around the black holes harbored at the center of most galaxies similar to the fictional waterworld planet Miller, the first planet in the system orbiting the supermassive black hole Gargantua in the movie Interstellar. It’s even possible that life may form on some of these planets, given that extremeophiles on Earth have adapted to boiling heat, freezing cold, and acidic, highly salty and even radioactive environments. (more…)
