Our Universe was busy this week with news ranging from the discovery a new impact on Jupiter to NASA chief, Bill Nelson, reporting that UFOs might be extraterrestrial life forms or beings from an alternate universe to NASA’s inventing ‘curious AI’ for deep space detection of life.
Another amazing week of discovery in the Cosmos, ranging from the mystery of our Universe’s beginning to a massive void detected in the Milky Way to the spooky implications of quantum-level technologies: “everything that can happen will happen, an infinite number of times.”
The discovery of black holes was the first collision of quantum gravity with general relativity. In 2019, astrophysicists at Western University found evidence for the direct formation of black holes that do not need to emerge from a star remnant. The production of black holes in the early universe, formed from massive seeds aided by gravitational fields soon after the Big Bang, provide scientists with an explanation for what appeared to be the anomaly of extremely massive black holes at a very early stage in the history of our universe.
“Planet Earth Report” provides descriptive links to headline news by leading science journalists about the extraordinary discoveries, technology, people, and events changing our knowledge of Planet Earth and the future of the human species. It’s been another fascinating week on our little blue dot from Neil deGrasse Tyson wanting to go ice fishing on Europa to our moon is leaving us, and we can’t stop it.
Could there be as yet unknown supermassive objects lurking at the hearts of galaxies other than black holes? An object so strange that it has managed to avoid gravitational collapse to form a singularity, the smallest object in the universe in an infinitely Planck-scale space, where density and gravity become infinite and space-time curves infinitely, and where the laws of physics as we know them cease to operate?
Avi Shporer, Research Scientist, MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. A Google Scholar, Avi was formerly a NASA Sagan Fellow at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). His motto, not surprisingly, is a quote from Carl Sagan: “Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”
“The final stage in the life of a star,” observes physicist Carlo Rovelli in Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, “where the quantum fluctuations of space-time balance the weight of matter, is what is known as a ‘Planck star’. If the sun were to stop burning and to form a black hole, the event horizon would measure about six kilometers in diameter. The black hole’s event horizon is not a physical barrier, but simply the boundary where the black hole’s gravitational field becomes so intense that the escape velocity exceeds the speed of light. Nothing, not even light, can escape the event horizon.
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