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.
All the light in the observable universe provides about as much illumination as a 60-watt bulb seen from 2.5 miles away. And all the energy ever radiated by all the stars that ever existed is still with us, filling the universe with a sort of fog, a sea of photons known as the extragalactic background light. And yet, a discovery in 2014 suggested that the source of light in the universe from known populations of galaxies and quasars is not nearly enough to explain observations of intergalactic hydrogen. The filaments of hydrogen and helium that bridge the vast reaches of empty space between galaxies that astronomers use as a “light meter” yielded a stunning 400 percent discrepancy.
Warning: you are about to enter an invisible world of anisotropic quasiparticles of magnons and phonons as planet Earth moves through the Milky Way’s dark matter halo.
The cosmos contains a Higgs field—similar to an electric field—generated by Higgs bosons in the vacuum. Particles interact with the field to gain energy and, through Albert Einstein’s iconic equation, E=mc2, mass.The Standard Model of particle physics, although successful at describing elementary particles and their interactions at low energies, does not include a viable and hotly debated dark-matter particle. The only possible candidates, neutrinos, do not have the right properties to explain the observed dark matter.
Did primordial Black holes –described as “the gates of hell, the end of spacetime, paradoxical, intriguing, frightening” by the Event Horizon Telescope scientists who imaged the now iconic black hole the size of our solar system at the heart of monster elliptical galaxy M87— exist during the cosmic Dark Age following the Big Bang, before the formation of the first stars?
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?
