The universe we see –stars, moons, planets, galaxies– is but a small, accidental tip of an infinite cosmic iceberg. During the epoch of inflation, thought to have been triggered by the phase transition that marked the end of the grand unification at approximately 10−36 seconds after the Big Bang, the accelerating expansion of space was far more dramatic than in today’s universe, expanding at an absolutely staggering rate, tearing space asunder. During this period no objects—even two elementary particles—remained close enough to one another for long enough to interact.
The German-Russian, eRosita space telescope mounted on the Spectrum-Roentgen-Gamma (SRG) was launched in July of 2019. Rotating at an observing position some 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, the spacecraft has created a seminal 3D map from 165 gigabytes of data, recording over a million violent sources of X-rays in the cosmos that reveals how the universe accelerates under the mysterious force called dark energy. The X-ray eye is expected to detect up to three million supermassive black holes, many of which will be new to science, including both obscured and unobscured objects, providing a unique view of the evolution of the supermassive objects within the emerging cosmos.
“Eventually we reach the utmost limits of our telescopes –there we measure shadows, and we search among the ghostly errors of measurement for landmarks that are scarcely more substantial,” said Edwin Hubble in 1929, creator of Hubble’s law that observed that the further galaxies are, the faster they are moving away from Earth –the “red shift.” Predictions of Hubble’s Constant from the standard cosmological model when applied to new measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB)—the leftover radiation from the Big Bang—have produced a value of 67.4, a significant and troubling difference. This difference, which astronomers say is one of the fundamental problems in all of physics, is beyond the experimental errors in the observations.
Could dark matter particles the size of galaxies exist, or a anti-gravitational force field we call “dark energy” that might be getting stronger and denser, leading to a future in which atoms are ripped apart and time ends?
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 Galaxy Report” provides summaries and links to headline news by leading science journalists about the amazing discoveries, technology, people, and events changing our knowledge of Planet Earth and the Cosmos beyond. Our caffine-inspired curation team scours the world, doing your work for you –all in one place.
