Dark matter pushes at the boundaries of the known fundamental laws of physics, encapsulated in the Standard Model of particle physics, and “The WIMP paradigm is very easy to build into the Standard Model, but we haven’t found it for a long time,” observed Jeff Dror, the lead author of the study who is a postdoctoral researcher in Berkeley Lab’s Theory Group and UC Berkeley’s Berkeley Center for Theoretical Physics about a leading candidates for dark matter that have so far defied every type of detector designed to find it, such as the WIMP, or weakly interacting massive particle.
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The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration, which published the first image of a black hole in the nearby radio galaxy M 87 has observed the finest detail ever seen in a jet produced by a supermassive black hole using the EHT data on the distant quasar 3C 279. that contains a black hole about one billion times more massive than our Sun in a galaxy 5 billion light-years away in the constellation Virgo that scientists classify as a quasar because an ultra-luminous source of energy at its center shines and flickers as gas falls into a giant black hole.
“How relativity behaves at very high energies has real consequences for the world around us. Most quantum gravity models say the behavior of relativity will break down at very high energies. Our observation of such high-energy photons at all raises the energy scale where relativity holds by more than a factor of a hundred,” said Pat Harding, an astrophysicist in the Neutron Science and Technology group at Los Alamos National Laboratory about detection of a number of astrophysical sources which produce photons above 100 TeV (a trillion times the energy of visible light), much higher energy than is available from any earthly accelerator.
On April 10, 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) team of radio astronomers produced the first photograph of the M87 Galaxy’s black hole the size of our solar system described by astronomers as the “gates of hell and the end of spacetime.” The now iconic image captured light from the entire universe wrapping around the object in a nested series of rings.
“Not being able to turn back time is no longer just a statistical argument. It is already hidden in the basic laws of nature. Not a single system of three moving objects, big or small, planets or black holes, can escape the direction of time,” says Portegies Zwart at the Netherlands Research School for Astronomy, about the principle of irreversibility using the concept of Planck length –the scale at which classical ideas about gravity and space-time cease to be valid, and quantum physics dominates. (more…)
