How does an entire planet change the speed of its rotation in 20 years? That’s the sort of change that takes hundreds of millions of years. Even more mysterious was the Cassini Mission’s detection of electromagnetic patterns that suggested that Saturn’s rotation is different in the northern and southern hemispheres. “For a long time, I assumed there was something wrong with the data interpretation,” said astrophysicist Duane Pontius. “It’s just not possible.”
The first “theory” of the dark cosmos was embodied in the Greek god of darkness, Erebus, one of the primordial deities born out of Chaos, the primeval void, foreshadowing the contemporary, emerging reality of the dark side of our universe. Enter Nobel-Prize Laurate, physicist Sir Roger Penrose, and his Erebon field theory, a novel explanation of dark matter that suggests that the Big Bang was not the origin of our universe. Despite ongoing searches, no signs of a dark matter particle have turned up.
“We actually saw this decay happen. It’s the longest, slowest process that has ever been directly observed, and our dark matter detector was sensitive enough to measure it,” said Ethan Brown, an assistant professor of physics at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute about a process that takes more than one trillion times longer than the age of the universe. “It’s amazing to have witnessed this process, and it says that our detector can measure the rarest thing ever recorded.”
New research suggests that in massive galaxies, the central black hole –a strange galactic monster, for which creation is destruction, death is life, and chaos is order – is like a parasite that ultimately grows and kills off star formation. Although many theories have been proposed to explain this process, known as “quenching,” a new study concludes that the growth rate of black holes must change as galaxies evolve from one stage to the next., Suggesting that most of the black hole growth occurs in the “green valley” when galaxies are beginning to quench.
On Sept. 22, 2017, a ghostly particle ejected from a far distant supermassive black hole zipped down from the sky and through the ice of Antarctica at just below the speed of light, with an energy of some 300 trillion electron volts, nearly 50 times the energy delivered by the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the biggest particle accelerator on Earth.
A strange dark-matter phenomenon is speeding towards the Sun at speeds of 500 kilometers per second according to a 2018 study led by theoretical physicist Ciaran O’Hare from the University of Zaragoza in Spain. Billions of years ago, a dwarf galaxy was shred apart by the extreme tidal forces of our larger Milky Way Galaxy. The remnant galaxy now forms a stream, called S1, that arcs around the halo of our Galaxy. The stream is composed of tens of thousands of visible stars, and also up to a billion solar masses of invisible dark matter.
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.
