“We believe we have just seen the tip of the iceberg, and that the few galaxies discovered so far around this supermassive black hole are only the brightest ones,” said Barbara Balmaverde, at The National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) in Torino, Italy about the discovery by astronomers using the ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) of six galaxies in a cosmic “spider’s web” of gas extending to over 300 times the size of the Milky Way around a supermassive black hole –those “strange galactic monsters, for whom creation is destruction, death life, chaos order”–at the dawn of time when the universe was only 0.9 billion years old.
“Perhaps the most significant sign of the existence of dark matter, however, is our very existence,” observes Harvard theoretical physicist, Lisa Randall in Nature about the elusive substance that permeates the universe, exerts detectable gravitational influences, and yet eludes direct detection. “Despite its invisibility, dark matter has been critical to the evolution of our universe and to the emergence of stars, planets and even life.”
It’s been suggested by astrobiologists and science-fiction authors that there may be evolutionary parallels to Earth on distant worlds because creation tends to be economical, but never, CHEOPS mission data reveals, on the most extreme planet known in the universe –an alien world 20 times closer to its host star than Earth is to the Sun, a star so hot –more than 2000 degrees Celsius hotter than our sun–it appears blue and not yellow-white.
“Everything we know and love about the universe and all the laws of physics as they apply, apply to four percent of the universe. That’s stunning,” says astronomer and “Cosmos” host, Neil deGrasse Tyson. Most of the mass in the universe is missing, hidden in some exotic, as yet undetectable form from the visible matter that makes up galaxies, stars, planets, and Homo sapiens.
On April 10, 2019 the astronomers at Harvard’s Black Hole Initiative were asking what does the glowing bright orange ring around the now iconic black hole the size of our solar system at the center of the monster elliptical galaxy M87 –the largest, most massive galaxy in the nearby universe–mean? according to Harvard Event Horizon Telescope radio astronomer, Michael Johnson.
Albert Einstein described black holes as strange objects “where God divided by zero.” An international team of astrophysicists has now confirmed that black holes are a distinct “species” from neutron stars –comparable to black holes in mass and size but confined within a hard surface, unlike black holes, an exotic cosmic object without a hard surface predicted by Einstein’s theory of General Relativity that do not have a surface, and are confined within an invisible boundary, called an event horizon, from within which nothing, not even light, can escape.
