“It’s surprising that any galaxy can change its look on human time scales,” said astronomer Sara Frederick at the University of Maryland. “These changes are taking place much more quickly than we can explain with current quasar theory. The forces at play must be very extreme and very dramatic.”
The “Planet Earth Report” connects you to headline news on the science, technology, discoveries, people and events changing our planet and the future of the human species.
“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 new University of Tokyo study that proposes the axion as a candidate for dark matter.
Though astronomers and physicists have studied and marveled at neutron stars for decades where just a single sugar-cube worth of neutron-star material would weigh 100 million tons here on Earth, or about the same as the entire human population, many mysteries remain about the nature of their interiors: Do crushed neutrons become “superfluid” and flow freely? Do they breakdown into a soup of subatomic quarks or other exotic particles? What is the tipping point when gravity wins out over matter and forms a black hole?
“I have a much easier time imagining how we understand the Big Bang than I have imagining how we can understand consciousness,” says Edward Witten, theoretical physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey who has been compared to Isaac Newton and Einstein.
In an interview with The Atlantic, Noble Prize winning physicist Adam Riess said: “I have absolutely no clue what dark energy is. Dark energy appears strong enough to push the entire universe – yet its source is unknown, its location is unknown and its physics are highly speculative.”
