“This could be a unique way of probing the physics around these supermassive black holes in a way that could not be probed in any other way,” said theoretical gravitational wave astrophysicist, Rochester Institute of Technology’s Assistant Professor Richard O’Shaughnessy, about simulations that could explain the origins of back hole mergers. “It offers unique insight into how the centers of galaxies grow, which is of course essential to understanding how galaxies as a whole grow, which explains most of the structure in the universe.”
“Just because we happen to live in a region that is overwhelmingly dominated by matter doesn’t preclude the existence of other regions of space that are instead dominated by antimatter,” observes Dan Hooper, head of the Theoretical Astrophysics Group at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) and Associate Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Chicago.
Many scientists believe that it is, suggests Paul Davies, theoretical physicist at Arizona State University and director of the Beyond Center, in The Demon in the Machine, observing that the Great Red Spot is an example of a “dissipative structure” first recognized in the 1970’s by the chemist Ilya Prigogine, who defined life as operating far from equilibrium with its environment and supporting a continued throughput of matter and energy.
“The final stage in the life of a star,” observes physicist Carlo Rovelli in Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, “where the quantum fluctuations of space-time balance the weight of matter, is what is known as a ‘Planck star’. If the sun were to stop burning and to form a black hole, it would measure about one and a half kilometers in diameter. Inside this black hole the sun’s matter would continue to collapse, eventually becoming such a Planck star. Its dimensions would then be similar to those of an atom.
“Reheating was an insane time, when everything went haywire,” says David Kaiser, the Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science and professor of physics at MIT about the explosive phase just before the Big Bang of cosmic inflation, which lasted less than a trillionth of a second.
