“The Hubble tension between the early and late universe may be the most exciting development in cosmology in decades,” says Nobel laureate Adam Riess of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) and Johns Hopkins University, about new Hubble Space Telescope data that suggest a faster expansion rate in the modern universe than expected, based on how the universe appeared more than 13 billion years ago strengthening the case that new theories may be needed to explain the dark energy forces that have shaped the cosmos.
Black holes are “a one-way door out of our universe,” said Event Horizon Telescope director and astronomer Sheperd S. Doeleman of the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. They are described by Ellie Mae O’Hagan with The Guardian as “the point at which every physical law of the known universe collapses. Perhaps it is the closest thing there is to hell: it is an abyss, a moment of oblivion.”
“Have you seen your body in X-rays? It looks completely different,” says astrophysicist Rashid Sunyaev. “We will do the same with the Universe.” Sunyaev, an eminent Soviet-born cosmologist at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics about a joint German–Russian mission called Spectrum-Roentgen-Gamma (SRG) will launch into space to create a 3D x-ray map of the cosmos that will reveal how the Universe accelerates under the mysterious repulsive force called dark energy and detect up to three million supermassive black holes.
“We still don’t know what dark matter is,” said John Terning, professor of physics at UC Davis, one of two theoretical physicists at the University of California, Davis who have a new candidate for dark matter, and a possible way to detect it. They presented their work June 6 at the Planck 2019 conference in Granada, Spain. “The primary candidate for a long time was the WIMP, but it looks like that’s almost completely ruled out.”
