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.
Some scientists have suggested that in our anxious search for the answer to the Fermi Paradox –“are we alone in the cosmos”–we’re searching for intelligent, conscious, tool-making beings that have developed a language we’re capable of understanding, we are, in fact, searching for ourselves .
“We do not know what dark matter is, but if it has anything to do with any scalar particles, it may be older than the Big Bang,” says astrophysicist Tommi Tenkanen at the Johns Hopkins University, who was not part of a 2019 University of Tokyo study that proposed the axion as a candidate for dark matter. The only fundamental scalar quantum field that has been observed in nature is the Higgs field-a field of energy that is thought to exist in every region of the universe.
“Researchers argue that it’s of utmost importance to unravel the nature of black holes, lest we someday begin to worship them,” said Harvard astrophysicist, Eric Chaisson. In April 2019 an event took place that was as epic as the Apollo 11 landing on the Moon, and may make Chaisson’s warning seem prescient.
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.
The Galaxy Report is our new daily email bringing you news of space and science that has the capacity to provide clues to the mystery of our existence and adds a much needed cosmic perspective in our current Anthropocene Epoch.
Yes, Sign Me Up for “The Galaxy Report”
