One of the Last Great Mysteries of the Early Universe

Did supermassive black holes exist shortly after the big bang, before the birth of stars? “This is one of the last great mysteries of the early universe,” said Kirk S. S. Barrow in 2018, currently at Harvard’s CfA, about how supermassive black holes formed during the birth of a galaxy. It’s a mystery the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) may soon be able to solve.

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Maxwell Moe

Maxwell Moe, astrophysicist, NASA Einstein Fellow, University of Arizona. Max can be found two nights a week probing the mysteries of the Universe at the Kitt Peak National Observatory. Max received his Ph.D in astronomy from Harvard University in 2015.

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Has the First Planet Beyond the Milky Way Been Discovered –Or is It Something More Interesting? (Weekend Feature)

In 2019 the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz for pioneering a new field in astronomy with the discovery of the first planet beyond our solar system, 51 Pegasi b. Since the discovery in 1991, over 4,000 exoplanets have been found in our home galaxy. “We answered a very old question,” Mayor said, which was debated by philosophers since the ancient Greeks: “are there other worlds in the Universe?”

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Maxwell Moe

Maxwell Moe, astrophysicist, NASA Einstein Fellow, University of Arizona. Max can be found two nights a week probing the mysteries of the Universe at the Kitt Peak National Observatory. Max received his Ph.D in astronomy from Harvard University in 2015.

dailygalaxy.com

Relic Galaxies Found Untouched Across Cosmic Time

Massive ultracompact galaxies have similar numbers of stars as our Milky Way but are confined to only a tenth the size or a thousandth the volume. They evolve in an accelerated way when compared to other galaxies in the Universe. By understanding their properties, astronomers can understand the eventual fate of all galaxies, including our own Milky Way.

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Maxwell Moe

Maxwell Moe, astrophysicist, NASA Einstein Fellow, University of Arizona. Max can be found two nights a week probing the mysteries of the Universe at the Kitt Peak National Observatory. Max received his Ph.D in astronomy from Harvard University in 2015.

dailygalaxy.com

The Weirdness of Dark-Matter Free Galaxies

Welcome to our very strange Universe. And, yes, that is a galaxy. The discovery of yet another dark-matter free, ultra-diffuse galaxy, raises a number of unanswered questions for astronomers: how are they formed? What do they tell us about standard cosmological models? How common are they, and what other unique properties do they have? It will take the discovery of more dark-matter-less galaxies to resolve the ultimate question of what dark matter really is.

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Maxwell Moe

Maxwell Moe, astrophysicist, NASA Einstein Fellow, University of Arizona. Max can be found two nights a week probing the mysteries of the Universe at the Kitt Peak National Observatory. Max received his Ph.D in astronomy from Harvard University in 2015.

dailygalaxy.com

Universal Mechanics of Galaxies – Outer Edge Rotates Once Every Billion Years 

In 2018, astronomers discovered that the stars in the outer rims of galaxies would rotate once every billion years, no matter how big they are. “It’s not Swiss-watch precision,” said Dr. Gerhardt Meurer with the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR), who studies the interrelationship between the interstellar medium (ISM) and the various populations of stars and dark matter; in particular, how stars form in galaxies. “But regardless of whether a galaxy is very big or very small,’ he explains, “if you could sit on the extreme edge of its disk as it spins, it would take you about a billion years to go all the way round.”

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Maxwell Moe

Maxwell Moe, astrophysicist, NASA Einstein Fellow, University of Arizona. Max can be found two nights a week probing the mysteries of the Universe at the Kitt Peak National Observatory. Max received his Ph.D in astronomy from Harvard University in 2015.

dailygalaxy.com

Dark-Matter Apocalypse to Standard Model Cannot Predict Why the Universe Exists (Last Week’s Top 5 Space & Science Headlines)

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Daily Galaxy Editorial Staff

Read about The Daily Galaxy editorial team here

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