“Is our universe extremely unnatural, a weird permutation among countless other possibilities, observed for no other reason than that its special conditions allowed life to arise, or, are the properties of the universe are inevitable, predictable, that is, ‘natural,’ locking together into a sensible pattern?” This is the question, the great unknown, that preoccupies theoretical physicist Nima Arkani-Hamed, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, N.J.
“We actually saw this decay happen. It’s the longest, slowest process that has ever been directly observed, and our dark matter detector was sensitive enough to measure it,” said Ethan Brown, a particle physicist at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, about a mind-boggling process that takes more than one trillion times longer than the age of the universe, advancing the frontiers of knowledge about the most fundamental characteristics of matter. “It’s amazing to have witnessed this process, and it says that our detector can measure the rarest thing ever recorded.”
With China poised to lead the world in AI and supercomputers, astronomers are wondering if it will also be the first advanced nation to discover extraterrestrial life? Perhaps the world’s largest single-dish radio observatory, China’s new FAST Radio Telescope –Tiyan, the “Eye of Heaven”– will provide an answer as it prepares to explore a frontier in radioastronomy — using radio waves to locate exoplanets, which may harbor extraterrestrial life.
Did NASA scientists detect a dark matter signal from deep inside the Milky Way? In December of 2017, the Chandra X-Ray Observatory observed a strange and distinctive X-ray signal from deep inside the dynamic center of the Milky Way, the 3.5 keV line, that researchers believed could help them in proving the existence of the hidden, dark side of our universe.
“If we point a telescope to the sky and take a deep image, we can see so many galaxies out there. But our understanding of how these galaxies form and grow is still quite limited — especially when it comes to massive galaxies,” said Masayuki Tanaka, at the Graduate University for Advanced Studies and the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan about an ancient galaxy more massive than our Milky Way that has revealed that the ‘cores’ of massive galaxies in the Universe had formed already 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang, about 1 billion years earlier than previous measurements.
“The gates of hell, the end of space and time,” was how black holes were described at the press conference in Brussels where the first ever photograph of one in galaxy M87 was revealed in April 2019. A new image has just be released by the European Southern Observatory (ESO) of a black hole and its halo at the dawn of the cosmos at redshift 6.2, meaning they are being seen as they were 12.8 billion years ago.
