“Einstein’s gravitational theory, said to be the greatest single achievement of theoretical physics, resulted in beautiful relations connecting gravitational phenomena with the geometry of space,” said the great Caltech physicist Richard Feynman. For all its vast voids, the universe is rippling with ghostly gravitational waves produced by extreme astrophysical phenomena, vibrating the fabric of space-time, like the ringing of a cosmic bell.
Astronomers have discovered a rare dual quasar–a quasi-stellar radio source, one of the most luminous, powerful engines known in the universe, powered by supermassive black holes that are millions to billions times more massive than our Sun– that existed 4.6 billion years ago, 13,000 light years apart near the center of a single massive galaxy. By comparison, the gargantuan explosion of a single supernova can outshine an entire galaxy for a few weeks; a single quasar can outshine 10,000 galaxies for millions of years.
“The black holes of nature are the most perfect macroscopic objects there are in the universe –the only elements in their construction are our concepts of space and time,” said Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, the Noble-Prize winning, Indian-American astrophysicist NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory was named for.
“Black holes are the seductive dragons of the universe,” wrote science-fiction author Robert Coover, “outwardly quiescent yet violent at the heart, uncanny, hostile, primeval, emitting a negative radiance that draws all toward them, gobbling up all who come too close…these strange galactic monsters, for whom creation is destruction, death life, chaos order.”
“We were all getting together and asking: what does this thing mean?” says radio astronomer Michael Johnson at Harvard’s Black Hole Initiative about the glowing bright orange ring around the now iconic black hole the size of our solar system at the center of the monster elliptical galaxy M87 –the largest, most massive galaxy in the nearby universe–described by astronomers on April 10, 2019 as “paradoxical, intriguing, frightening” and “the end of spacetime.”
In the fall of 1967, Princeton’s great quantum physicist, John Archibald Wheeler was giving a lecture on pulsars at a conference where he was arguing that we should consider the possibility that the center of a pulsar is a gravitationally completely collapsed object. He remarked that one couldn’t keep saying “gravitationally completely collapsed object” over and over. That we needed a shorter descriptive phrase. “How about black hole?” asked someone in the audience, giving birth to the name of one of the most paradoxical objects in the universe.
