Astronomers have discovered “a ringside seat into beautiful and dangerous physics that we have not seen before in our galaxy.” (more…)
“We are back to the standard discussions. What is dark matter? Indeed, we are running out of good options,” said Uroš Seljak, a UC Berkeley professor of physics and astronomy and BCCP co-director. “This is a challenge for future generations.”
“It probably bothered the first human beings who realized that the world was not just their local valley,” said Leonard Susskind, the Felix Bloch Professor in Physics at Stanford University. “It probably terrified them a little bit, but by now we’re used to the world getting bigger and bigger. The String Theory Landscape just says it’s way bigger than we thought.”
“Cosmologists have predicted the existence of an oscillating signal that could distinguish between cosmic inflation and alternative theories of the universe’s birth. “The question is whether one can test the entire [inflation] scenario, not just specific models,” said Avi Loeb, an astrophysicist and cosmologist at Harvard University. “If there is no guillotine that can kill off some theories, then what’s the point?”
In their quest to understand the universe, scientists are faced with some major unsolved puzzles. For example, stars move around galaxies as if there is five times more mass present than that observed. What makes comprises this dark matter? And another riddle: Galaxies harbor enormous black holes in their cores, weighing millions of solar masses. In young galaxies, collapsed stars did not have enough time to grow that big. How did these so-called supermassive black holes form?
