Ever since astronomers reached a consensus in the 1980s that invisible “dark matter” binds galaxies together and gravitationally shapes the cosmos — experimentalists have hunted for the elusive nonluminous particles. Without luck. “The nature of dark matter is one of the biggest mysteries in science and we need to use any related new data to tackle it,” says astronomer Avi Loeb at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
The titanic explosion in galaxy cluster MS 0735 first detected in 2005 held the record as the most powerful black hole cataclysm in the universe prior to the discovery in 2020 of the Ophiuchus galaxy cluster blast -a gargantuan event, a cataclysm that blasted a hole in the cosmos 15 times the size of the Milky Way galaxy. The black hole jets of the 2005 event blazed through the galaxy into the surrounding multimillion degree intergalactic gas, then pushed the hot gas aside to create gargantuan cavities –the mass of the displaced gas was equal to about a trillion Suns, or more than the mass of all the stars in the Milky Way.
Scientists are questioning if there is any upper size limit to black holes either within or beyond the observable universe. In December of 2019, astronomers announced the discovery of one of the most perfect macroscopic objects, the largest hard-disk in the cosmos –the biggest black hole ever measured in the nearby universe at the center of an elliptical galaxy in galaxy cluster Abel 85 that’s 40 billion times the sun’s mass, or roughly the size of our solar system, harboring two-thirds the mass of the 100-billion stars in the Milky Way.
“In a sense, the galaxy hardest for us to see is our own,” wrote Issac Assimov. “For one thing, we are imprisoned within it, while the others can be viewed as a whole from outside… . Furthermore, we are far out from the center, and to make matters worse, we lie in a spiral arm clogged with dust. In other words, we are on a low roof on the outskirts of the city on a foggy day.”
It has been said that Newton gave us answers; Stephen Hawking gave us questions. A trio of scientists are one step closer to resolving the black-hole information paradox, one of the most intriguing physics mysteries of our time.
