On April 10, 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) team of radio astronomers produced the first photograph of the M87 Galaxy’s black hole the size of our solar system described by astronomers as the “gates of hell and the end of spacetime.” The now iconic image captured light from the entire universe wrapping around the object in a nested series of rings.
“Not being able to turn back time is no longer just a statistical argument. It is already hidden in the basic laws of nature. Not a single system of three moving objects, big or small, planets or black holes, can escape the direction of time,” says Portegies Zwart at the Netherlands Research School for Astronomy, about the principle of irreversibility using the concept of Planck length –the scale at which classical ideas about gravity and space-time cease to be valid, and quantum physics dominates. (more…)
Black holes, predicted Einstein, are supposed to have a singularity—a point that is so small and dense that our human brains can’t even comprehend it. But what if some phenomena that look like black holes are actually cosmic objects full of dark energy –an enigmatic phenomena that has been described as everything from a fifth force to a new form of matter, but so far, no direct evidence has been found of its existence. About which Noble-Prize winning physicist Adam Riess says: we have absolutely no clue what dark energy is. Dark energy appears strong enough to push the entire universe – yet its source is unknown, its location is unknown and its physics are highly speculative.
“The outflows emanate from quasars and tear across interstellar space similar to tsunamis on Earth, wreaking havoc on the galaxies in which the quasars reside,” reports Virginia Tech’s Nahum Arav who has discovered the most energetic outflows ever witnessed in the universe using the unique capabilities of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.
“Paradoxical, Intriguing, Frightening” was how scientists described the monster elliptical galaxy that harbors the now iconic black hole the size of our solar system at the center of M87, the largest, most massive galaxy in the nearby universe. The supermassive object was imaged for the first time ever by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) on April 10, 2019. Today, reports the Institute for Advanced Study, a team of observational astronomers, theoretical physicists, and astrophysicists have published new calculations that predict a striking and intricate substructure within black hole images from extreme gravitational light bending.
“If our universe is just one of an infinite number, then once inflation stopped in ours, pockets within it that had been inflating would have then collapsed into black holes. The longer each pocket inflated, the more massive the black hole,” suggested Alexander Vilenkin, professor of physics and director of the Institute of Cosmology at Tufts University and author of Many Worlds in One: The Search for Other Universes.
