“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.
“Cheops will take exoplanet science to a whole new level,” said Günther Hasinger, the European Space Agency’s director of science about the world’s newest orbiting telescope whose name stands for CHaracterising ExOPlanet Satellite that launched early on Wednesday morning aboard a Soyuz-Fregat rocket from the European spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana. It was the second try after Tuesday’s first launch attempt was delayed and some equipment was replaced.
“All of these other sources are many orders of magnitude stronger than the signal we’re trying to detect. Even an FM radio signal that’s reflected off an airplane that happens to be passing above the telescope is enough to contaminate the data,” said Jonathan Pober, an assistant professor of physics at Brown University and a team member of a new analysis of data collected by the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) radio telescope bringing scientists closer than ever to detecting the ultra-faint signature of an epic turning point in cosmic history when the first stars and galaxies formed.
Like an ancient mythological beast, an international research team led by scientists from Göttingen and Potsdam proved for the first time that the irregular galaxy NGC 6240 contains three supermassive black holes. The observations (above) show the black holes close to each other in the core of the galaxy. The study points to simultaneous merging processes during the formation of the largest galaxies in the universe.
“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.
Astronomers accidentally discovered the a faint light shimmering blob of a monster galaxy cloaked in dust in the early universe that has never been seen before. Like a cosmic Yeti, the scientific community generally regarded these galaxies as folklore, given the lack of evidence of their existence, but astronomers in the United States and Australia managed to snap a picture of the beast for the first time.
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