The new version of Hubble’s deep image is shown above. In dark grey you can see the new light that has been found surrounding nearly every galaxy in this field. That light corresponds to the brightness of more than one hundred billion suns. It took researchers at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias almost three years to produce this deepest image of the Universe ever taken from space by recovering a large quantity of ‘lost’ light around the largest galaxies in the iconic Hubble Ultra-Deep Field (HUDF). (more…)
“It boggles the mind that over 90% of the galaxies in the Universe have yet to be studied. Who knows what we will find when we observe these galaxies with the next generation of telescopes,” says astronomer Christopher Conselice, who led the 2016 team that discovered that there are ten times more galaxies in the universe than previously thought, and an even wider space to search for extraterrestrial life.
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.
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