Can all life as we know it be traced back to the interstellar medium (ISM)? This March 2021, Michael McCarthy, an astrochemist and Acting Deputy Director of Harvard Center for Astrophysics (CfA), commented about the discovery of a vast, previously unknown reservoir of carbon as well as new molecules in a cold, dark molecular cloud in the interstellar medium for the first time “It makes you wonder,” he exclaimed, “what else is out there that we just haven’t looked for.”
The universe we see –stars, moons, planets, galaxies– is but a small, accidental tip of an infinite cosmic iceberg. During the epoch of inflation, thought to have been triggered by the phase transition that marked the end of the grand unification at approximately 10−36 seconds after the Big Bang, the accelerating expansion of space was far more dramatic than in today’s universe, expanding at an absolutely staggering rate, tearing space asunder. During this period no objects—even two elementary particles—remained close enough to one another for long enough to interact.
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, which are comparable to black holes in mass and size but confined within a hard surface. A black hole is an exotic cosmic object without a hard surface predicted by Einstein’s theory of General Relativity and is confined within an invisible boundary, called an event horizon, from within which nothing, not even light, can escape.
So far, we have had only close calls from gamma ray explosions so large, scientists have suggested, that if they occurred within our solar neighborhood (less than 1,000 light years) they could potentially trigger mass extinctions on Earth.
“The amazing thing about these observations, about this discovery, and about these molecules, is that no one had looked, or looked hard enough,” said Michael McCarthy, an astrochemist and Acting Deputy Director of Harvard Center for Astrophysics (CfA) about the discovery of a vast, previously unknown reservoir of new molecules in a cold, dark molecular cloud in the interstellar medium for the first time, “It makes you wonder what else is out there that we just haven’t looked for.”
The Galaxy Report newsletter brings you twice-weekly news of space and science that has the capacity to provide clues to the mystery of our existence and add a much needed cosmic perspective in our current Anthropocene Epoch.
