“We did not expect that Spitzer, with a mirror no larger than a Hula-Hoop, would be capable of seeing galaxies so close to the dawn of time,” said Michael Werner, Spitzer’s project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California in 2019. “But nature is full of surprises, and the unexpected brightness of these early galaxies, together with Spitzer’s superb performance, puts them within range of our small but powerful observatory.”
Avi Shporer, Research Scientist, MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. A Google Scholar, Avi was formerly a NASA Sagan Fellow at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). His motto, not surprisingly, is a quote from Carl Sagan: “Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”
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.
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?”
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.
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.
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.”
“Unsolved Mystery ” -Strange Particle from Deep Space Detected at Antarctica’s South Pole
Origin of Light-Years-Long Strands at Milky Way’s Center a Mystery
Why Were the Earliest Galaxies In the Universe Brighter Than Those We See Today?
NASA LIVE: James Webb Space Telescope Arrives at Final Destination. What’s Next?James Webb Space Telescope Glides Into Its L2 Resting Point -An Epic Achievement for Humanity
Saturn’s “Death Star” Moon to What’s Buried Beneath Mars’ South Pole? (The Galaxy Report)
We Have Existed for Ten One-Billionths of Cosmic History to The Missing Continent (Planet Earth Report)
Violent Neutron Star Collision Discovered Near Earth’s Birthplace (Weekend Feature)
Alien Octopus Hypothesis (YouTube Video)
“The Exoplanet Paradox” -Worlds With Low Oxygen May Be Teeming with Life Based on Early Earth History
