(For the Holiday Season, from Christmas through New Year’s Day, we’ll post 2020’s most viewed articles as ranked by Google Analytics.)
The world’s astronomers are increasingly probing the mystery of where the enormous magnetic fields that permeate our universe come from –from Earth to Mars to the Milky Way to intergalactic voids and beyond to the darkest, most remote regions of the cosmos.
(For the Holiday Season, from Christmas through New Year’s Day. we’ll post 2020’s most viewed articles as ranked by Google Analytics.)
“If space is truly infinite,” observes Dan Hooper, head of the Theoretical Astrophysics Group at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, in At the Edge of Time, “the implications are staggering. Within an infinite expanse of space, it would be hard to see any reason why there would not be an infinite number of galaxies, stars, and planets, and even an infinite number of intelligent or conscious beings, scattered throughout this limitless volume. That is the thing about infinity: it takes things that are otherwise very unlikely and makes them all inevitable.”
New research suggests that in massive galaxies, the central black hole –those strange galactic monsters, for whom creation is destruction, death life, chaos 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.
Invisible radio signals from the cosmos have revealed previously unknown phenomena from prebiotic molecules in a starburst about 250 million light-years from Earth to the true rotation of Mercury. But the most famous occurred on August 6, 1967, when a squiggly stretch of high-speed recordings occupying less than a quarter-inch of astronomer Jocelyn Bell Burnell’s radio-telescope readouts revealed the first sign of something strange — an unknown cosmic mystery.
To determine the amount of energy or radiation at the center of the Milky Way, researchers had to peer through a galaxy packed with more than 200 billion stars and harbors dark patches of interstellar dust and gas. University of Wisconsin-Whitewater professor Bob Benjamin—a leading expert on the structure of stars and gas in the Milky Way– was taking a look at two decades’ worth of data when he spotted a scientific red flag —a peculiar shape poking out of the Milky Way’s dark, dusty center rippling with highly-energized ionized hydrogen moving in the direction of Earth.
A gargantuan black hole, known as J2157, 34 billion times the mass of our sun mass, and about 8,000 times bigger than the black hole in the center of the Milky Way, gorges on nearly the equivalent of one sun every day, according to Dr. Christopher Onken at The Australian National University (ANU) about a monster of the early universe that brings an end to time and space and the laws of physics. If the Milky Way’s black hole wanted to grow to that size, “it would have to swallow two thirds of all the stars in our Galaxy,” he added.
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.
