“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.
“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.
In 2019, the Hubble Space Telescope captured an image of one of the brightest known quasars in early universe, a luminous active galactic nucleus (AGN) shining with orders of magnitudes more luminosity than entire galaxies, powered at their hearts by all-consuming black holes shown above as it existed less than a billion years after the Big Bang. Its gargantuan black hole began devouring anything within its gravitational grasp, triggering a burst of star formation –a firestorm of energy equivalent to the light from 600 trillion Suns blazing across the universe.
A new theoretical study has proposed a natural explanation for how supermassive black holes –once described as “the most perfect macroscopic objects in the universe, the only elements in their construction are our concepts of space and time” –formed in the early Universe. The proposal is the existence of stable galactic cores –made of dark matter surrounded by a diluted dark matter halo –that become so concentrated once a critical threshold is reached that they collapse into supermassive objects.
In 1993 Stephen Hawking proposed in Black Holes and Baby Universes that there might be “primordial black holes which were formed in the early universe that could be less than the size of the nucleus of an atom, yet their mass could be a billion tons, the mass of Mount Fuji. A black hole weighing a billion tons,” Hawking explained, “would have a radius of about 10-13 centimeter (the size of a neutron or a proton). It could be in orbit either around the sun or around the center of the galaxy, emitting hard gamma rays with an energy of about 100 million electron volts.”
“It is undeniable that we are profoundly puzzled, especially when it comes to the first fraction of a second that followed the Big Bang,” wrote theoretical physicist Dan Hooper, author of The Edge of Time in an email to The Daily Galaxy–Great Discoveries Channel. “I have no doubt that these earliest moments hold incredible secrets, but our universe holds its secrets closely. It is up to us to coax those secrets from its grip, transforming them from mystery into discovery.”
The Galaxy Report newsletter brings you twice-weekly news of space and science that has the capacity to provide clues to the mystery of our existence and add a much needed cosmic perspective in our current Anthropocene Epoch.
