“Using the pulsars we observe across the Milky Way galaxy, we are trying to be like a spider sitting in stillness in the middle of her web,” says Vanderbilt’s Stephen Taylor, assistant professor of physics and astronomy and former astronomer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) about the location of absolute stillness in our solar system, the center of gravity with which to measure the gravitational waves that signal the existence of the invisible paradoxes we call black holes, which have no memory, and contain the earliest memories of the universe.
When the iconic black hole the size of our Solar System at the center of Galaxy M87 was imaged in 2019, astronomers described it as witnessing the “gates of Hell and the end of spacetime.” Fast forward to today, astronomers using three Maunakea Observatories in Hawai’i describe the second-most distant quasar ever found –at a cosmological redshift greater than 7.5 and it hosts a black hole twice as large as the other quasar known in the same era– as Pōniuā`ena, which means “unseen spinning source of creation, surrounded with brilliance” in the Hawaiian language. The light observed from Pōniuā`ena reached Earth 13 billion years after leaving the quasar just 700 million years after the Big Bang.
In a distant galaxy, two invisible merging black holes were nestled within a disk surrounding a much larger, invisible supermassive black hole 100 million time larger that the sun surrounded by a swarm of smaller black holes and stars exploded with light, generating gravitational waves, ripples in spacetime, that were captured as a flash of light four billions years later for the first time by astronomers at the NSF’s Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) and the European Virgo detector on May 21, 2019, in what might prove to be an iconic event called S190521g.
Stephen Hawking once wrote about black holes that there is a singularity in our past which constitutes, in some sense, a beginning to the universe. On August 14, 2019, scientists with LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) and the Virgo detector in Italy, discovered of a mystery object of 2.6 solar masses as it merged with a black hole of 23 solar masses, placing it in a gap that lies between neutron stars and black holes.
“It’s likely there are another two million gravitational wave events from merging black holes –a pair of merging black holes every 200 seconds and a pair of merging neutron stars every 15 seconds– that scientists are not picking up,” says Rory Smith at OzGrav (ARC Center of Excellence in Gravitational Wave Discovery), about a new method of detection being tested that means that “we may be able to look more than 8 billion light years further than we are currently observing. This will give us a snapshot of what the early universe looked like while providing insights into the evolution of the universe,” adds Smith.
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?
