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.
Something is warping our home galaxy. Astronomers suspect that Sagittarius, a dwarf galaxy orbiting the Milky Way might be causing the ripple, and may have burst through the Milky Way’s galactic disc several times in the distant past. Astronomers think that Sagittarius will be gradually absorbed by the Milky Way, a process which is already underway. The Gaia Spacecraft, with its unique survey of more than one billion stars in our galaxy, might hold the key to unraveling the mystery.
Before his death in 2018, Icelandic director and composer Johann Jóhannsson –director of Arrival and The Theory of Everything–adapted Last and First Men, a “future history” by British science-fiction author Olaf Stapledon –a “film that straddles the border of fiction and documentary. It is a meditation on memory and failed utopia.” The story –a channeled text from the last human species–describes the history of humanity from the present across two billion years and eighteen distinct human species, of which our own is the first.
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