The center of our Galaxy has been intensely studied for many years, but it still harbors surprises for scientists. A snake-like structure lurking near our galaxy’s supermassive black hole is one of the more intriguing discoveries. “Part of the thrill of science is stumbling across a mystery that is not easy to solve,” said Jun-Hui Zhao of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics,. “While we don’t have the answer yet, the path to finding it is fascinating.”
Avi Shporer, Research Scientist, MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. A Google Scholar, Avi was formerly a NASA Sagan Fellow at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). His motto, not surprisingly, is a quote from Carl Sagan: “Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”
The discovery of black holes was the first collision of quantum gravity with general relativity. In 2019, astrophysicists at Western University found evidence for the direct formation of black holes that do not need to emerge from a star remnant. The production of black holes in the early universe, formed from massive seeds aided by gravitational fields soon after the Big Bang, provide scientists with an explanation for what appeared to be the anomaly of extremely massive black holes at a very early stage in the history of our universe.
The discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 has proved to be a source of rich speculation for particle physicists. In 2019, researchers proposed that three types of very high-energy Higgs Bosons, dubbed the “Higgs Troika”, may have played a role in ridding the infant universe of most of its antimatter. The Higgs boson may also reveal insights into the nature of dark matter and dark energy, the so-called “dark sector” that comprises 95% of the Universe.
“Once an axion is detected,” astrophysicist Raymond Co at the University of Minnesota wrote in an email to The Daily Galaxy, “the implications to cosmology will be profound. For instance, signals from experiments with different search strategies will determine whether the axion is dark matter. If it is, with the measured axion properties, one can narrow down its possible cosmological origins.
Avi Shporer, Research Scientist, MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. A Google Scholar, Avi was formerly a NASA Sagan Fellow at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). His motto, not surprisingly, is a quote from Carl Sagan: “Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”
This weekend’s “Galaxy Report” ranges from the fragile lifespan of technological civilizations to Stephen Hawking’s ‘lost’ Nobel Prize to probing for life on Saturn’s moon, Titan to colonizing Mars could accelerate human evolution.
Another big week for “The Galaxy Report” with insights into our Solar System’s mysterious magnetic fields to the first planet found to be orbing three stars to physicist Leonard Susskind, founding director of the Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics, on why black holes are so astonishing. (more…)
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