In a new study, the JWST captured images of quasars—the intensely bright centers of galaxies powered by supermassive black holes—existing in unexpected regions of space. These quasars, some of the oldest and most distant ever observed, appear to be isolated, with very few neighboring galaxies. This finding raises critical questions about how such supermassive black holes could have formed and grown so large in the first few hundred million years after the Big Bang without an abundant supply of nearby matter.

Unexpected Discovery: Lonely Quasars

The JWST has the ability to peer back over 13 billion years, providing scientists with an unprecedented view of the early universe. In their study, astronomers focused on five quasars that formed between 600 to 700 million years after the Big Bang. Quasars are usually expected to form in dense regions of space filled with galaxies that provide the black holes with enough matter to fuel their rapid growth. However, the five quasars identified by JWST exist in what appear to be sparsely populated regions, with very few neighboring galaxies in sight.

“Contrary to previous belief, we find on average, these quasars are not necessarily in those highest-density regions of the early universe. Some of them seem to be sitting in the middle of nowhere,” said Anna-Christina Eilers, lead author of the study and a professor at MIT. “It’s difficult to explain how these quasars could have grown so big if they appear to have nothing to feed from.”

The discovery challenges the established model of how supermassive black holes grow. In denser regions of space, black holes are thought to accumulate mass by consuming gas, dust, and other material provided by nearby galaxies. But the newfound quasars seem to lack these essential materials, raising the question of how they managed to grow into some of the most massive objects in the universe so early in cosmic history.

How Quasars Defy Formation Theories

The most striking aspect of the study is the significant variation between the environments of the quasars. One quasar was found surrounded by nearly 50 neighboring galaxies, while another had only two galaxies nearby. Despite these dramatic differences, all the quasars shared similar sizes, luminosities, and ages, suggesting they formed around the same time and under the same cosmic conditions. “That was really surprising to see,” Eilers remarked, “For instance, one quasar has almost 50 galaxies around it, while another has just two.”

This variation introduces new uncertainties into the standard model of black hole formation. Current theories suggest that dark matter filaments in the early universe acted like gravitational highways, pulling in gas and dust that fed the growth of stars and galaxies. Quasars, which are thought to emerge in these dense regions, would have required large amounts of nearby matter to sustain their rapid growth. However, the “lonely” quasars identified by JWST contradict this, suggesting that some supermassive black holes may have formed in isolation, with little nearby matter to sustain them.

“Our results show that there’s still a significant piece of the puzzle missing of how these supermassive black holes grow,” Eilers added. “If there’s not enough material around for some quasars to be able to grow continuously, that means there must be some other way that they can grow, that we have yet to figure out.”

Implications for Understanding the Early Universe

The discovery of these isolated quasars could significantly reshape our understanding of the early universe. The prevailing cosmological model, which predicts that quasars form in the densest regions of the universe, may need to be revised to account for these findings. The presence of these quasars in seemingly empty regions of space raises the possibility that supermassive black holes can grow in ways that are not yet fully understood.

JWST’s ability to observe these distant quasars in such detail is a major leap forward for astronomy. “It’s just phenomenal that we now have a telescope that can capture light from 13 billion years ago in so much detail,” Eilers commented. The team’s findings, published in The Astrophysical Journal, may provide new clues about how the earliest galaxies and black holes formed, potentially unveiling new pathways for the growth of supermassive black holes in the early universe.

This research also opens the door to further studies, as scientists work to understand the precise mechanisms that allowed these quasars to form in seemingly barren regions of space. Future observations, including more detailed studies of these quasars’ surroundings, could help astronomers solve one of the most puzzling mysteries of modern cosmology.

The microquasar V4641 Sagittarii (V4641 Sgr), located within the Milky Way, has been found to emit gamma photons with energies reaching up to 200 teraelectronvolts (TeV)—an amount of energy that challenges traditional models of cosmic ray production.

The discovery, made through observations from the High-Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) Observatory, is forcing scientists to reconsider how the most energetic particles in the universe are generated, shifting the focus from distant galaxies to objects within our own cosmic "backyard."

Microquasars: A New Type of Cosmic Particle Accelerator

For decades, astrophysicists assumed that the most powerful sources of cosmic rays—high-energy particles traveling through space—originated from supernova remnants or the jets emitted by quasars located in the centers of distant galaxies. Quasars, with their supermassive black holes surrounded by vast accretion disks, shoot out jets of matter moving at close to the speed of light, producing gamma radiation. It was thought that these far-off behemoths were responsible for accelerating particles to the highest known energies.

However, the recent discovery involving microquasars, particularly V4641 Sagittarii, suggests otherwise. Microquasars, unlike their distant relatives, are compact binary systems that consist of a massive star and a stellar-mass black hole. As the black hole siphons material from its companion, jets are ejected at high speeds, which, according to the HAWC data, are capable of producing radiation with energies far exceeding expectations. Dr. Sabrina Casanova from the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences, a key researcher in the project, emphasized the significance of this finding: “Photons detected from microquasars have usually much lower energies than those from quasars... Meanwhile, we have observed something quite incredible in the data recorded by the detectors of the HAWC observatory: photons coming from a microquasar lying in our galaxy and yet carrying energies tens of thousands of times higher than typical!”

The HAWC Observatory, located on the Sierra Negra volcano in Mexico, uses an array of 300 water tanks to detect Cherenkov radiation—the faint flashes of light that occur when particles move faster than the speed of light in water. This setup allows HAWC to observe gamma photons with energies ranging from hundreds of gigaelectronvolts to the teraelectronvolt scale, providing unprecedented insight into the workings of microquasars like V4641 Sgr.

V4641 Sagittarii: A Microquasar with Extraordinary Jets

V4641 Sagittarii, located in the constellation Sagittarius, approximately 20,000 light years from Earth, is composed of a black hole with a mass about six times that of the Sun, and a companion star with three times the solar mass. The pair orbit each other once every three days, a rapid cycle that fuels the powerful outflows of matter observed from the system. What makes V4641 Sgr particularly notable is the orientation of its jets, which are aimed almost directly at Earth. This results in relativistic effects that make the jets appear to move faster than the speed of light, at a staggering nine times the speed of light, due to an illusion caused by their high velocity and direction toward the observer.

The discovery of such ultra-high-energy gamma rays from V4641 Sgr is transformative. While scientists had previously detected gamma radiation from microquasars, the levels observed in this case are far beyond anything previously recorded. “It therefore seems likely that microquasars significantly contribute to the cosmic ray radiation at the highest energies in our galaxy,” Dr. Casanova added, highlighting the profound implications of this discovery for understanding the origins of cosmic rays.

In fact, the observed gamma rays from V4641 Sgr are so energetic that they challenge the long-held belief that the highest-energy cosmic rays are produced exclusively by far-off sources like quasars or supernovae. Instead, this discovery points to a powerful source of radiation much closer to home, providing a rare opportunity to study these phenomena in real time.

Changing the Landscape of Cosmic Ray Research

The findings from the HAWC Observatory have broader implications for the study of cosmic rays. The Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory (LHAASO) in China has also detected high-energy radiation from other microquasars, supporting the idea that these compact systems may play a much larger role in the generation of cosmic rays than previously understood. If this is the case, the way scientists approach the study of cosmic ray production and the mechanisms that drive these high-energy processes may need to be fundamentally reevaluated.

One of the key advantages of studying microquasars over distant quasars is that their proximity allows for much clearer observations. Unlike radiation from quasars, which must travel across millions of light years and through vast stretches of space where it can be absorbed or scattered, radiation from microquasars in our own galaxy faces fewer obstacles. As a result, scientists can study the processes that drive ultra-high-energy particle acceleration in greater detail, potentially uncovering new insights into the physics of jets, black holes, and cosmic rays.

Moreover, the time scales on which microquasars evolve are significantly shorter than those of quasars. While quasars take millions of years to change, the jets from microquasars can be observed over periods of days, making them ideal subjects for studying high-energy astrophysical processes in real time.

Dr. Casanova and her colleagues’ research, published in Nature, represents a significant step forward in understanding these energetic astrophysical systems. As more data are collected from observatories like HAWC and LHAASO, astronomers are likely to uncover even more about how microquasars contribute to the overall population of cosmic rays—an endeavor that could reshape our understanding of the high-energy universe.

Quasar Neighborhoods: Dense Yet Unexpectedly Isolated

Quasars are known to be powered by supermassive black holes accreting massive amounts of gas, which makes them some of the most luminous objects in the cosmos. These black holes are so large that they can only form in regions where gas is abundantly available, and for this reason, scientists have long believed that quasars reside in the densest parts of the early universe. However, despite their expected presence in highly populated galactic clusters, previous observations of quasar environments have yielded mixed results. Some studies reported dense regions of companion galaxies around quasars, while others found sparse surroundings. The inconsistency in these findings has puzzled astronomers for years.

In this latest study, led by Trystan Lambert, researchers turned to DECam's massive field of view and special filters to solve the puzzle. By focusing on the quasar VIK J2348-3054, which is located at a well-established distance thanks to prior observations from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), the team was able to map the quasar’s environment across an unprecedentedly wide area of the sky. According to Lambert, the study benefited from the "perfect storm" of conditions: “We had a quasar with a well-known distance, and DECam on the Blanco telescope offered the massive field of view and exact filter that we needed.” This allowed the team to detect 38 companion galaxies spread over a distance of up to 60 million light-years from the quasar, confirming that these quasars reside in densely populated regions of space, as expected.

However, the real surprise came when the team examined the area closer to the quasar, within a radius of 15 million light-years, and found no galaxies at all. This void around the quasar suggests that the intense radiation emitted by the quasar could be preventing the formation of new stars in nearby galaxies, a phenomenon that had not been conclusively observed before. “Some quasars are not quiet neighbors,” Lambert explained, theorizing that the radiation may be so strong that it "heats up the gas in nearby galaxies, preventing this collapse" and thus suppressing star formation altogether.

Resolving The Quasar Neighborhood Conundrum

This study sheds light on the long-standing confusion about quasar environments and explains why past research has produced conflicting results. Previous smaller-area surveys of quasar surroundings might have been misled by the deceptive emptiness of the regions immediately surrounding the quasar. Without a broad enough view, earlier observations could have missed the larger clusters of companion galaxies further out, giving an incomplete or even contradictory picture of quasar environments. According to Lambert, the success of this study was largely due to DECam’s extremely wide field of view, which was crucial for detecting the more distant companion galaxies: "You really have to open up to a larger area,” he said, adding that this expansive view allowed for a much more thorough analysis of quasar neighborhoods than ever before.

By mapping the region up to 60 million light-years from the quasar, the research team was able to provide a more comprehensive perspective. They found that while quasars are indeed surrounded by dense populations of companion galaxies, there is often a noticeable gap immediately around the quasar itself. The absence of galaxies in this region offers a plausible explanation for why past studies presented conflicting results. Smaller-scale surveys, which lacked the broad field of view offered by DECam, might have focused only on the closer, emptier areas around quasars and thus missed the larger, more distant galaxy clusters.

This unexpected discovery also provides a new understanding of the dynamics of quasar feedback, where the intense radiation from a quasar could disrupt the process of star formation in nearby galaxies. This disruption might explain why galaxies closer to the quasar are invisible or absent. As Lambert pointed out, “Stars in galaxies form from gas that is cold enough to collapse under its own gravity. Luminous quasars can potentially be so bright as to illuminate this gas in nearby galaxies and heat it up, preventing this collapse.” This finding highlights the significant role quasars may play in regulating star formation in their neighborhoods and could reshape our understanding of the formation of galaxy clusters in the early universe.

Future Implications for Quasar and Galaxy Formation Research

Looking ahead, the research team plans to continue investigating the relationship between quasars and their surrounding galaxies. Further observations are needed to confirm whether the radiation from quasars is indeed suppressing star formation in nearby galaxies. Lambert’s team is already preparing for additional spectroscopic observations to gather more data on the potential suppression of star formation and to expand the sample size by studying other quasars in similar environments. These follow-up studies will be critical in determining whether this phenomenon is unique to certain quasars or if it represents a broader pattern across the early universe.

In the near future, the development of more advanced observatories like the NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory is expected to revolutionize our understanding of quasars and their environments. The observatory will offer even more powerful tools for studying the early universe, enabling astronomers to map quasar neighborhoods with even greater precision. “We expect that productivity will be amplified enormously with the upcoming NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory,” said Chris Davis, program director at NSF NOIRLab, highlighting the collaborative effort between the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy that made this study possible.

This research marks a significant step forward in our understanding of how quasars interact with their environments. The combination of DECam's wide-field capabilities and the precise distance measurements provided by ALMA has opened up new possibilities for studying the early universe. By revealing both the dense populations of galaxies surrounding quasars and the unexpected voids near them, this study offers a more nuanced view of the cosmos during its formative stages. As future observations refine these findings, we may soon have a clearer understanding of how supermassive black holes, quasars, and galaxy clusters co-evolved in the early universe, shaping the universe we see today.

According to research published in Nature Astronomy, the two galaxies' circumgalactic mediums (CGMs)—vast halos of gas and dust surrounding each galaxy—are likely overlapping, signaling the early stages of this cosmic encounter. This finding challenges the traditional timeline of galactic collisions and offers new insights into how galaxies evolve and interact over time.

The Role of the Circumgalactic Medium

Every galaxy, including the Milky Way and Andromeda, is surrounded by an expansive halo of gas and dust known as the circumgalactic medium (CGM), which contains up to 70% of the galaxy's visible mass. The CGM is crucial in regulating the flow of gases necessary for star formation and other galactic processes. While difficult to observe directly, the CGM has been studied through its ability to absorb light from distant objects, like quasars.

Thanks to recent advancements in imaging technology, scientists have been able to observe the CGM in greater detail. Nikole Nielsen, lead author from Swinburne University, explained, "We’re now seeing where the galaxy's influence stops, the transition where it becomes part of more of what’s surrounding the galaxy, and, eventually, where it joins the wider cosmic web and other galaxies." These advancements have allowed researchers to map the boundary between a galaxy's core and its circumgalactic halo for the first time.

Evidence of Overlapping Galaxies

The study revealed that the circumgalactic mediums of the Milky Way and Andromeda have likely begun to overlap. Previous models predicted that these galaxies would not interact until their physical collision in 4 billion years, but the outer halos of gas are already mingling, suggesting the interaction has started on a more subtle level.

"It’s highly likely that the CGMs of our own Milky Way and Andromeda are already overlapping and interacting," Nielsen noted. This early-stage interaction is invisible to the naked eye but indicates that the galaxies' outer atmospheres have started to influence each other well before their stars or central regions collide.

Defining Galactic Boundaries

One of the key outcomes of this research is the new understanding of where a galaxy ends. By using the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, researchers were able to peer 100,000 light-years into the edges of a distant spiral galaxy and observe the transition from the interstellar medium (gases and dust within the galaxy) to the circumgalactic medium.

"In the CGM, the gas is being heated by something other than typical conditions inside galaxies, likely heating from the diffuse emissions from the collective galaxies in the Universe and possibly shocks," explained Nielsen. This change helps scientists better define the boundary between galaxies and the surrounding cosmic web.

Understanding the Role of the CGM in Galactic Evolution

The circumgalactic medium is not only a boundary; it also plays a vital role in galactic evolution. The CGM regulates the inflow and outflow of gases, which impacts star formation and the life cycle of a galaxy. "The CGM plays a huge role in that cycling of gas," Nielsen said. "Being able to understand what the CGM looks like around galaxies of different types helps us observe how changes in this reservoir may actually be driving changes in the galaxy itself."

This study sheds light on how galaxies transition through different stages of development. Some galaxies continue to form stars, while others have stopped, and the CGM may be the key to understanding why these transitions occur.

Implications for the Future Collision of the Milky Way and Andromeda

While the physical collision between the Milky Way and Andromeda is still billions of years away, the discovery that their circumgalactic mediums are already overlapping has significant implications for how scientists view the early stages of galactic mergers. This interaction may provide clues about how galaxies behave long before their stars and central regions collide.

Emma Ryan-Weber, a professor at Swinburne University, emphasized the importance of this discovery: "It is the very first time that we have been able to take a photograph of this halo of matter around a galaxy." As researchers continue to observe the early interactions between galaxies, they will gain valuable insights into the processes that shape galactic evolution.

This early interaction suggests that the merging process between the Milky Way and Andromeda is already underway, even though the full collision is still far off. Understanding these subtle interactions will be crucial as scientists continue to study the cosmic collisions that shape the universe.

This discovery offers a rare glimpse into the early universe, just 900 million years after the Big Bang, and provides critical insights into the formation of massive galaxies and supermassive black holes.

Discovery of the Merging Quasars

The discovery, led by Dr. Takuma Izumi from the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, was made possible through the use of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile. The team observed faint emissions from cold gas and dust surrounding the two quasars, which are some of the brightest and most energetic objects in the universe, powered by supermassive black holes at their centers.

The quasars, located in the direction of the constellation Virgo, are at a crucial stage in their evolution. They are relatively dim compared to other ancient quasars, suggesting that they are still in the early stages of development. However, as these quasars and their host galaxies continue to merge, they are expected to combine their resources—stars, gas, and black holes—into a single, extraordinarily massive galaxy. This process will eventually result in a highly luminous object known as a "monster galaxy."

The Role of Quasars and Star Formation

Quasars are incredibly powerful and are often found at the centers of galaxies where matter falling into the supermassive black hole generates enormous amounts of energy. In this particular merger, the gravitational interactions between the two galaxies have triggered both starburst and quasar activity, leading to intense star formation and the growth of the central black holes. The team discovered a massive reservoir of gas, equivalent to nearly 100 billion suns, fueling this process.

"This abundance of material explains how these early quasars could grow so rapidly, addressing a long-standing puzzle in astronomy," noted the researchers. They also observed signs of turbulence and outflows in the gas, indicating that the quasars are already beginning to influence their surroundings—a process known as feedback, which is crucial for understanding how monster galaxies evolve.

As the merger progresses, the quasar activity is expected to intensify, leading to a dramatic increase in the brightness of the quasars. Eventually, the two quasars will combine to form a single, super-bright quasar at the heart of the newly formed monster galaxy. This process is thought to be a key step in the formation of the most massive galaxies seen in the present-day universe.

Implications for Understanding the Early Universe

The discovery of this merging quasar pair is like finding a "baby picture" of the universe's largest galaxies. It offers a rare opportunity to study the formation of massive galaxies and supermassive black holes in the early universe. The findings also provide strong evidence for the importance of mergers in the growth of supermassive black holes and the formation of massive galaxies.

Observations like these are essential for understanding the complex processes that shaped the early universe. The combination of starburst activity and vigorous quasar activity observed in this merger is expected to create one of the brightest types of objects in the universe—a monster galaxy. "We’re not just looking at distant objects; we’re uncovering the roots of the cosmic structures we see around us today," emphasized the researchers.

This study, published in The Astrophysical Journal, demonstrates the power of modern telescopes like ALMA to peer deep into the universe's history and reveals the intricate dance of galaxies that has crafted the cosmos as we know it. As scientists continue to explore these early cosmic events, they gain a deeper understanding of the forces that have shaped the universe, providing a clearer picture of its origins and evolution.

Quasar: Powerful and Destructive

Quasars are some of the brightest and most energetic objects in the universe. They are powered by supermassive black holes at the centres of galaxies, where torrid gas orbits and releases enormous amounts of energy.

In the case of VIK J2348-3054, the quasar's light has travelled 13 billion years to reach us, offering a glimpse of the universe when it was just 770 million years old.

At that time, the black hole powering the quasar was already 2 billion times more massive than the sun, meaning it had consumed a substantial amount of material in a relatively short period.

Astronomers expected the quasar’s galaxy to be surrounded by many star-forming galaxies, particularly given the dense environment of a galactic cluster where new stars should be forming. However, to their surprise, the exact opposite was observed.

A Star-Formation Dead Zone

Trystan Lambert, an astronomer from the Universidad Diego Portales in Santiago, Chile, and his team discovered a significant void around the quasar. The nearest star-forming galaxy was found 16.8 million light-years away—over six times the distance between the Milky Way and its neighbouring Andromeda Galaxy. This suggests that the quasar’s intense radiation has effectively halted the formation of new stars in its vicinity.

“It was shocking,” Lambert said of the finding. “You would expect more [star-forming galaxies] near the quasar than far away, and we found the exact opposite.”

Lambert’s team made this discovery by searching a much larger region around the quasar than previous studies had. Their results suggest that quasars are not benign cosmic neighbours, but rather violent forces that impact their surroundings.

The prevailing theory is that the quasar’s radiation heats up gas in nearby galaxies, preventing it from collapsing to form new stars. Quasars produce vast amounts of energy, and this energy can drastically alter the conditions in nearby galaxies.

If the gas is too hot, it cannot cool and condense into the dense clouds necessary for star formation. In this way, VIK J2348-3054 could be responsible for creating a star-formation dead zone within its local cosmic neighbourhood.

However, not all astronomers are convinced that the quasar is solely responsible for this phenomenon. Martin Rees, an astronomer at the University of Cambridge, suggests that the absence of star-forming galaxies close to the quasar could simply be a statistical anomaly.

Since the volume of space increases with distance, the discovery of more galaxies farther away may be a result of the larger volume of space, rather than the influence of the quasar itself.

Future Observations Could Confirm the Findings

To test this hypothesis, future observations with more sensitive instruments will be needed. If astronomers can detect additional star-forming galaxies at greater distances from the quasar, while still finding none close by, it would strengthen the case that the quasar’s radiation is indeed responsible for halting star formation in its immediate vicinity.

The discovery also raises intriguing questions about whether quasars may have affected star formation in other galaxies, including our own. One example is M87, a massive galaxy located about 54 million light-years from the Milky Way.

It is home to a supermassive black hole that likely powered a quasar during the early universe. When the universe was younger and smaller, M87 was much closer to the Milky Way, potentially influencing our own galaxy's star formation history.

Understanding how quasars impact their environments could offer valuable insights into the evolution of galaxies and the complex interplay between black holes, star formation, and cosmic history.

This remarkable discovery provides new insights into the growth of galaxies in the early universe, offering a glimpse into the processes that shaped the cosmos during its formative years.

Observing the Quasar-galaxy Interaction

In September 2022, the JWST's Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) observed the PJ308-21 system, revealing unprecedented details about this quasar-galaxy merger. The quasar, located in a galaxy that existed when the universe was less than a billion years old, was observed with remarkable precision.

The NIRSpec instrument captured the quasar's spectrum with an uncertainty of less than 1% per pixel, allowing researchers to study the physical properties of the gas within the quasar's host galaxy and its companion galaxies. This high level of detail has provided invaluable data that helps to understand the early stages of galaxy formation and the role of quasars in this process.

High Metallicity and Star Formation

The host galaxy of PJ308-21 exhibits high metallicity and photoionization conditions typical of an active galactic nucleus (AGN), while one of the satellite galaxies shows low metallicity and star formation-induced photoionization. The second satellite galaxy, partially photoionized by the quasar, also displays high metallicity.

These observations confirm that both the quasar and the surrounding galaxies are highly evolved in terms of mass and metal enrichment and are undergoing constant growth. Roberto Decarli, a researcher at INAF and the study's lead author, stated, "Our study reveals that both the black holes at the center of high-redshift quasars and the galaxies that host them undergo extremely efficient and tumultuous growth already in the first billion years of cosmic history, aided by the rich galactic environment in which these sources form."

Innovative Techniques for Detailed Analysis

The observations were conducted as part of one of nine Italian-led projects in the first observation cycle of the JWST. The team employed integral field spectroscopy, allowing them to observe the spectrum of the entire optical band for each image pixel.

This technique enabled the study of various gas tracers and the properties of the ionized interstellar medium, including metallicity, dust obscuration, electron density and temperature, and star formation rate.

Federica Loiacono, an astrophysicist and research fellow at INAF, emphasized the significance of these observations: "Thanks to NIRSpec, for the first time we can study in the PJ308-21 system the optical band, rich in precious diagnostic data on properties of the gas near the black hole in the galaxy hosting the quasar and in the surrounding galaxies. We can see, for example, the emission of hydrogen atoms and compare it with the chemical elements produced by the stars to establish how rich the gas in galaxies is in metals."

Insights from Advanced Data Analysis

The data collected through these observations have allowed researchers to delve deeply into the conditions and processes occurring in these early galaxies. By studying the emission lines of different elements, the team was able to determine the properties of the ionized interstellar medium, such as the source and intensity of the photoionizing radiation, the levels of metallicity, and the density and temperature of electrons.

This detailed analysis provides a clearer picture of the physical conditions in the galaxies and how they interact with the quasar at their center. "The experience in reducing and calibrating these data, some of the first collected with NIRSpec in integral field spectroscopy mode, has ensured a strategic advantage for the Italian community in managing similar data from other programs," said Loiacono.

Implications for Cosmic History

The ability to study the chemical composition and physical properties of galaxies in such detail has profound implications for our understanding of cosmic history and the chemical evolution of galaxies. The data collected by the JWST allows astronomers to map the enrichment of metals in galaxies observed when the universe was still in its infancy.

Roberto Decarli noted, "Until a couple of years ago, data on the enrichment of metals (essential for understanding the chemical evolution of galaxies) were almost beyond our reach, especially at these distances. Now we can map them in detail with just a few hours of observation, even in galaxies observed when the universe was in its infancy."

This ability to measure and analyze the chemical properties of early galaxies opens new avenues for understanding the processes that governed their formation and evolution.

The Transformative Impact of the James Webb Space Telescope

The findings from this study not only shed light on the early growth and development of galaxies and black holes but also demonstrate the transformative impact of the James Webb Space Telescope's advanced capabilities.

The JWST's sensitivity in the near and mid-infrared spectra allows for unprecedented precision in observing distant objects, making it possible to gather detailed data that were previously inaccessible. "The work represented a real 'emotional rollercoaster,' with the need to develop innovative solutions to overcome the initial difficulties in data reduction," Decarli shared, highlighting the challenges and triumphs of the research process.

As the JWST continues to observe the universe, it is expected to unveil further groundbreaking discoveries that will deepen our understanding of the cosmos and the fundamental processes that shaped its evolution.

These quasars, seen as they were around 900 million years after the Big Bang, mark the first confirmed pair from the Cosmic Dawn era. The discovery, published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, underscores the critical role that galactic mergers played in shaping the cosmos as we know it today.

The Cosmic Dawn and Its Significance

The Cosmic Dawn is a critical period in the universe's history, stretching from approximately 50 million to one billion years after the Big Bang. During this epoch, the first light sources, including stars and galaxies, began to form, illuminating the universe and driving the reionization of neutral hydrogen.

Finding merging quasars from this period is particularly significant because it offers direct evidence of the early interactions that shaped large-scale structures in the universe. "The existence of merging quasars in the Epoch of Reionization has been anticipated for a long time. It has now been confirmed for the first time,” said Yoshiki Matsuoka, an astronomer at Ehime University in Japan.

Observations and Methods

The quasars were identified using the Subaru telescope's Hyper Suprime-Cam and confirmed with follow-up spectroscopic imaging.

The light from these quasars, observed at a redshift of z = 6.05, indicates they are seen as they were over 12 billion years ago. Initial images showed the quasars as faint red blotches among numerous closer galaxies and stars.

Detailed analysis revealed that these blotches were indeed quasars, thanks to the spectroscopic capabilities of the Subaru and Gemini North telescopes. “A few hundreds of quasars are now known in the early universe, but none of them have been found in a pair,” Matsuoka explained. “This is contrary to a naive expectation from the standard theory of cosmology, which suggests that the universe has evolved via frequent mergers of galaxies, which would naturally result in many merging quasar pairs observed throughout the universe.”

Characteristics of the Quasars

At the heart of each quasar is a supermassive black hole, each approximately 100 million times the mass of the Sun. These black holes, by far some of the most massive objects in the early universe, are significant because their masses are about the same, leading researchers to refer to them as twins.

The interaction between the two quasars is further evidenced by a bridge of gas stretching between their host galaxies, indicating a major galactic merger in progress. This interaction is not just a localized phenomenon but a large-scale event affecting the structure and dynamics of the surrounding galaxies. “While it is only the first and single case, the present finding indicates that supermassive black holes and galaxies have indeed evolved through mergers with each other,” Matsuoka added.

Implications for Cosmology

The presence of merging quasars in the Cosmic Dawn aligns with theoretical predictions about the universe's evolution. It suggests that the early universe underwent significant galactic interactions, leading to the formation of large structures observed today. This discovery provides empirical evidence supporting the standard cosmological model of hierarchical structure formation.

The merging of these quasars offers a glimpse into the processes that led to the growth of supermassive black holes and the development of galaxies. "It supports our standard paradigm of how the universe has evolved, under the strong pull of the gravity that affects every single bit of material,” Matsuoka stated. The merging quasars serve as a key piece of the puzzle in understanding the early universe’s dynamics and the role of gravity in shaping cosmic structures.

Upcoming Observations with Advanced Telescopes

The team plans to conduct further observations with the James Webb Space Telescope to study the gas dynamics within these galaxies and their star formation processes. Additionally, upcoming telescopes like the Vera Rubin Observatory will enhance the ability to detect and classify distant astronomical objects, offering more opportunities to explore the early universe.

These future observations will provide deeper insights into how the interactions between supermassive black holes and their host galaxies influenced the broader cosmic environment. The researchers hope to clarify the nature of the gas flows and star formation activities in these merging galaxies, shedding light on the complex processes that drive galaxy evolution.

The identification of this quasar pair is a groundbreaking step in understanding the complexities of the universe's formative years, highlighting the importance of continued astronomical research and advanced observational technologies. As new instruments come online and techniques improve, astronomers will continue to peel back the layers of the cosmos, uncovering the secrets of its earliest epochs and the monumental events that have shaped its history.

This discovery reveals a unique region around black holes where matter stops orbiting and plunges straight in, offering new insights into the nature of space-time and the extreme gravitational forces near black holes.

The Plunging Region: A Key Prediction Confirmed

In 1915, Einstein's general theory of relativity predicted that once matter gets sufficiently close to a black hole, the immense gravitational force would force it to abandon a circular orbit and plunge straight in.

Now, X-ray observations made with NASA's NuSTAR and NICER space telescopes have confirmed the existence of this so-called "plunging region." By studying this region, scientists hope to uncover fundamental mysteries about black holes and the nature of space-time.

Observations and Findings

Researchers pointed the two space telescopes at a black hole called MAXI J1820+070, located about 10,000 light-years from Earth. They detected X-rays emitted by the scorching material of its accretion disk.

By placing their X-ray data into mathematical models, they discovered that the two only matched if the models included light coming from matter in the plunging region, thus confirming its existence. This region is where matter, peeled from the outer edge of a star, undergoes its final fall into the black hole.

Implications for Black Hole Studies

The confirmation of the plunging region not only supports Einstein's theory but also opens up new avenues for studying black holes. This region sits just outside black holes' event horizons, points of no return where gravity becomes so strong that not even light can escape.

Studying the light from this cosmic cascade can provide unprecedented insights into the extreme conditions around black holes. It also helps resolve a long-standing problem in X-ray astronomy, where black holes appeared to be spinning faster than theory predicted. The extra light from the plunging region could align the observed spins with theoretical predictions.

New Insights into Black Hole Behavior

This discovery not only validates a crucial aspect of general relativity but also offers new insights into black hole behavior and the dynamics of matter under extreme gravitational forces. By observing the plunging region, scientists can better understand the processes that govern matter as it approaches a black hole, including the transition from stable orbit to rapid infall. This transition zone is critical for comprehending how black holes grow and interact with their environments.

Moreover, the light emitted from the plunging region provides clues about the extreme conditions near the event horizon, where space-time is warped to its limits. This information can help refine models of black hole accretion, shedding light on how these enigmatic objects accumulate mass and influence their surroundings. Understanding these processes is essential for explaining the formation and evolution of black holes, particularly in the context of their role in galaxy formation and dynamics.

Future Technologies and Exploration

The techniques and technologies developed to observe the plunging region around black holes will pave the way for future astronomical discoveries. Enhanced X-ray telescopes and other high-energy observatories will be crucial for probing the most extreme environments in the universe. These advancements will enable astronomers to conduct more detailed studies of black holes and other exotic objects, such as neutron stars and quasars.

Additionally, the insights gained from studying the plunging region may inform the design of future space missions aimed at exploring the vicinity of black holes. By understanding the behavior of matter in these extreme conditions, scientists can develop better instruments and strategies for capturing high-resolution data, potentially leading to breakthroughs in our understanding of the universe's most powerful forces.

The ongoing research into black holes and their unique regions continues to push the boundaries of our knowledge, driving innovation and discovery in astrophysics. As we refine our observational techniques and theoretical models, we move closer to unraveling the mysteries of these enigmatic cosmic phenomena and their profound impact on the cosmos.

This weekend’s stories include Giant Voids of Nothingness may be Flinging the Universe Apart to What can Astrobiology Space Research Teach Us about the Origins of Life?

The James Webb Space Telescope will study countless planets. Here’s your chance to name one, reports Andrew Jones for Space.com. The IAU is looking for names that recognize cultures around the world.

What Is Quantum Field Theory and Why Is It Incomplete?–Quantum field theory may be the most successful scientific theory of all time, but there’s reason to think it’s missing something. Steven Strogatz speaks with theoretical physicist David Tong about this enigmatic theory for Quanta Podcasts.

Could Dark Matter Be a Source of Light In the Universe? asks The Daily Galaxy. “A discovery in 2014 suggested that the source of light in the universe from known populations of galaxies and quasars is not nearly enough to explain observations of intergalactic hydrogen. The filaments of hydrogen and helium that bridge the vast reaches of empty space between galaxies that astronomers use as a “light meter” yielded a stunning 400 percent discrepancy.

Researchers developed a new robot that could help us travel around black holes--The machine functions in curved spaces defying the laws of Earth, reports Interesting Engineering. “New research from the Georgia Institute of Technology has come along to showcase the opposite – when bodies exist in curved spaces, they can move without pushing against something.”

Alien life: What would constitute “smoking gun” evidence? “Multiple lines of evidence — physical, chemical, and biological — must converge for scientists to conclude that alien life has been found,” reports Big Think.

Cultural Bias Distorts the Search for Alien Life –“Decolonizing” the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) could boost its chances of success, says science historian Rebecca Charbonneau for Scientific American.

Giant voids of nothingness may be flinging the universe apart reports Paul Sutter for Live Science. “Gigantic deserts of almost complete nothingness that make up most of the universe may be causing the expansion of the universe to speed up, new research suggests. That means these vast tracts of nothingness could explain dark energy,”

Mysterious mineral on Mars was spat out by an explosive eruption 3 billion years ago, reports Harry Baker for Live Science. “NASA’s Curiosity rover first uncovered the unusual mineral in 2015.”

Astrophysicists Think They’ve Found The Mysterious Source of High-Energy Neutrinos–“A comprehensive analysis has pretty conclusively linked galaxies hosting blazing nuclei known as blazars with these enigmatic particles,” reports Science Alert.

How the Physics of Nothing Underlies Everything, reports Charlie Wood for Quanta. The key to understanding the origin and fate of the universe may be a more complete understanding of the vacuum.

Scientists Debate Signatures of Alien Life–Searching for signs of life on faraway planets, astrobiologists must decide which telltale biosignature gases to target, reports Natalie Wolchover for Quanta.

What can Astrobiology Space Research Teach Us about the Origins of Life? asks EIN News 

Galactic Archeologists Discover “Fossil” of One of the First Ever Galaxies, reports SciTechDaily. “New fossil galaxy discovery could answer important questions about the history of the universe. An ultra-faint dwarf galaxy, thought to be a “fossil” of one of the first ever galaxies, has been discovered by galactic archeologists. 

Curated by The Daily Galaxy Editorial Staff

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.

Yes, sign me up for my free subscription.

Recent Galaxy Reports:

Unmistakable Signal of Alien Life to What Happens if China Makes First Contact?

Clues to Alien Life to A Galaxy 100 x Size of Milky Way 

Cracks in Einstein’s Theory of Gravity to Colossal Shock Wave Bigger than the Milky Way 

Monster Comet Arriving from the Oort Cloud to Black Hole Apocalypse 

Enigmas of Stephen Hawking’s Blackboard to Why the Universe and Life Exist 

Einstein’s Critics to NASA Theologians Prepare for Alien Contact

Mind-Bending New Multiverse Theory to Dark-Matter Asteroids of the Milky Way 

Mysterious Expanding Regions of Dark Matter to Are Black Holes Holograms

Read about The Daily Galaxy editorial team here

Today’s stories include The true story behind Carl Sagan’s cult classic, Contact to Is the Multiverse religion by another name to Will China be the first nation to discover extraterrestrial life, and much more.

Could primordial black holes from the beginning of time explain ‘dark matter’ the mysterious missing mass in the Universe? asks Aeon. “Evidence has grown over the past century that there must be something out there besides the stuff that makes up our tables, our planet, even ourselves. An early hint, in the 1970s, came from the astronomer Vera Rubin, who showed that stars at the edges of galaxies rotate faster than we’d expect from just the mass we can see through telescopes.

Could Dark Matter Be a Source of Light In the Universe? asks The Daily Galaxy. “A discovery in 2014 suggested that the source of light in the universe from known populations of galaxies and quasars is not nearly enough to explain observations of intergalactic hydrogen. The filaments of hydrogen and helium that bridge the vast reaches of empty space between galaxies that astronomers use as a “light meter” yielded a stunning 400 percent discrepancy.”

NASA’s Lucy Team Discovers Moon Around Asteroid Polymele, reports NASA. “Even before its launch, NASA’s Lucy mission was already on track to break records by visiting more asteroids than any previous mission. Now, after a surprise result from a long-running observation campaign, the mission can add one more asteroid to the list.”

Roman Space Telescope top challenge for new NASA astrophysics director, reports Space News. “NASA is starting efforts to plan for the next flagship mission after Roman, currently envisioned as a large infrared, optical and ultraviolet space telescope designated IROUV. A new effort, the Great Observatories Mission and Technology Maturation Program or GOMAP, is getting underway to define science goals and advance key technologies need for the mission.”

Violent ripples reverberating across spacetime might finally reveal how quickly our universe is expanding, reports CNet.–“In 2019, a conference held at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in California concluded with a fraught statement: “We wouldn’t call it a tension or a problem but rather a crisis.”

Most planets in the Universe are orphans without parent stars. Known as orphaned planets, rogue planets, or planets without parent stars, these “outliers” might be the most common planet of all, reports Big Think. “Many of the early-stage planets that form around stars will get ejected, destined to roam the Universe forever as rogue, or orphaned, planets. These rogue planets could be thousands of times as numerous as stars.”

“Eye of Heaven” –Thoughts of China’s Astronomers on Advanced Extraterrestrial Life reports The Daily Galaxy. “With China poised to lead the world in AI and supercomputers, astronomers  are wondering if it will also be the first advanced nation to discover extraterrestrial life? Perhaps the world’s largest single-dish radio observatory, China’s new FAST Radio Telescope –Tiyan, the “Eye of Heaven”– will provide an answer as it prepares to explore a frontier in radio astronomy — using radio waves to locate exoplanets, which may harbor extraterrestrial life.”

The true story behind Carl Sagan’s cult classic, Contact –Do aliens dream about meeting us, too? asks Big Think.

Scientists blast atoms with Fibonacci laser to make an ‘extra’ dimension of time reports Ben Turner for Live Science. “By firing a Fibonacci laser pulse at atoms inside a quantum computer, physicists have created a completely new, strange phase of matter that behaves as if it had two dimensions of time.”

What Is the Black Hole Information Paradox? A Primer, reports Scientific American. 

NASA’s Big Rocket Reaches Launchpad. Next Stop: The Moon--The Space Launch System and Orion capsule will launch on Aug. 29 to formally start the Artemis moon exploration program, reports New York Times Science.

Notorious dark-matter signal could be due to analysis error–Observations that physicists have so far failed to replicate could be the result of misinterpreted data, reports Davide Castelvecchi for Nature. “Physicists have shown that an underground experiment in South Korea can ‘see’ dark matter streaming through Earth — or not, depending on how its data are sliced. The results cast further doubt on a decades-old claim that another experiment has been detecting the mysterious substance.”

Look at What Happens When Two Galaxies Collide–The stars sail past one another, and the night sky would probably be fabulous, reports Marina Koren for The Atlantic. ““The sky would be filled with newly formed stars, and we would be able to see warped streams of stars, gas, and dust stretching across the sky.” The view would be especially stunning if you lived along the outer edges of the galaxy, where the night sky would be less crowded with stars than at the busy galactic center.”

The Multiverse is religion by another name –The false assumption the Multiverse relies on is that something which exists requires an explanation, reports Big Think. “The Multiverse has been proposed as an answer to the question, “Why does our Universe exist?” Its proponents believe the Multiverse can explain our origins without having to reference God. But the Multiverse is in no way falsifiable, and the arguments in its support are nearly identical to the arguments for God. Not all questions need to be answered in order to be meaningful.”

Curated by The Daily Galaxy Editorial Staff

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.

Yes, sign me up for my free subscription.

Recent Galaxy Reports:

Unmistakable Signal of Alien Life to What Happens if China Makes First Contact?

Clues to Alien Life to A Galaxy 100 x Size of Milky Way 

Cracks in Einstein’s Theory of Gravity to Colossal Shock Wave Bigger than the Milky Way 

Monster Comet Arriving from the Oort Cloud to Black Hole Apocalypse 

Enigmas of Stephen Hawking’s Blackboard to Why the Universe and Life Exist 

Einstein’s Critics to NASA Theologians Prepare for Alien Contact

Mind-Bending New Multiverse Theory to Dark-Matter Asteroids of the Milky Way 

Mysterious Expanding Regions of Dark Matter to Are Black Holes Holograms

Read about The Daily Galaxy editorial team here

Today’s stories range from Strange new Higgs particles beyond the Standard Model could explain shocking W boson result to New theory explains why aliens are avoiding Earth to Neighboring alien planets may Be in ‘Early-Earth’ stage of Life to NASA’s “Point of No Return,” and much more. The Galaxy Report” brings you news of space and science that has the capacity to provide clues to the mystery of our existence and adds a much needed cosmic perspective in our current Anthropocene Epoch.

Strange new Higgs particles could explain shocking W boson result –-Ideas from beyond the standard model of particle physics, including technicolor and glueball Higgs particles, could explain the recent shock finding that the W boson is heavier than we thought, reports New Scientist.

The Milky Way is almost as old as the Universe itself –Galactic archaeology has uncovered a spectacular find: the Milky Way already existed more than 13 billion years ago. “A new study, taking advantage of the best measurements of stars within our galaxy, has pushed the Milky Way’s early history back more than 2 billion years: to less than 800 million years after the Big Bang.”

Dark Energy May Not Be the Cosmological Constant as Theorized by Einstein, reports The Daily Galaxy.  “Most scientists have assumed that dark energy is in fact Einstein’s cosmological constant, but recent theories on a special form of dark energy, called quintessence, have suggested that the strength of dark energy itself may change with time.”

A  ‘gravity telescope’ concept could help us explore life on exoplanets –The new tool may just revolutionize how we explore space beyond our solar system, reports Interesting Engineering. “On Tuesday, a team of Stanford researchers revealed a futuristic telescope concept in The Astrophysical Journal that may just revolutionize how we explore space beyond our solar system. It’s called the “gravity telescope,” and it would use the Sun to examine faraway worlds previously unreachable to Earth’s astronomers. 

New ‘burnout’ theory explains why aliens are avoiding Earth –-Blame the singularities, reports The Next Web. ““Civilizations either collapse from burnout or redirect themselves to prioritizing homeostasis, a state where cosmic expansion is no longer a goal, making them difficult to detect remotely,” the scientists hypothesize in Royal Society Open Science.”

Younger exoplanets are better candidates when looking for other Earths, reports Southwest Research Institute–“We know radioactive elements are necessary to regulate climate, but we don’t know how long these elements can do this, because they decay over time,” said Dr. Cayman Unterborn. “Also, radioactive elements aren’t distributed evenly throughout the Galaxy, and as planets age, they can run out of heat and degassing will cease.”

Neighboring Alien Planets May Be in ‘Early-Earth’ Stage of Life -Carl Sagan Institute, reports The Daily Galaxy. “The history of life on Earth provides us with a wealth of information about how biology can overcome the challenges of environments we would think of as hostile,” said astronomer Jack O’Malley-James with the Carl Sagan Institute “

How a new kind of gravitational wave will reveal the early universe–With 90 detections now under our belt, gravitational waves are solving riddles about the evolution of galaxies and missing black holes – and they could soon give us a glimpse of dark matter, reports New Scientist.

NASA’s “Point of No Return”

Astronomers Find What Might Be the Most Distant Galaxy Yet –Is the object a galaxy of primordial stars or a black hole knocking on the door of time? The Webb space telescope may help answer that question, reports The New York Times.

China’s New Space Telescope Will Have 350 Times Wide Views Than Hubble, reports Rally News. “Researcher Li Ran noted that the Hubble telescope’s field of view is about 1/100th the size of a fingernail when our hand is flat, and that all data from Hubble, which has been observing the universe for 30 years, covers only a small part of the night sky. Li Ran said that the main focal plane of the Chinese space station telescope sky scanning module will consist of 30 detectors and each one will have larger and more pixels than Hubble’s detector.

Martin Rees interview: Elon Musk could spawn the first post-humans –Astronomer Royal Martin Rees discusses the most extraordinary aspects of his distinguished career, from black holes to billionaires in space and the prospects of life beyond Earth, reports New Scientist.

New NASA Black Hole Sonifications with a Remix

Trappist 1 Star System Sound

A Galaxy Is Unmasked as a Pulsar — the Brightest outside the Milky Way. Using a technique to block certain wavelengths of light, researchers hope to discover many more hidden pulsars, reports Scientific American.

Chinese rover finds lunar soil could make oxygen and fuel on the moon –-Lunar soil collected by the Chang’e 5 rover has been analyzed, revealing it could be used to help generate oxygen and fuel on the moon, reports New Scientist.

Instability at the Beginning of the Solar System – Implications for Mysterious “Planet 9” reports SciTechDaily. “a new theorycould help solve a galactic mystery of how our solar system evolved. Specifically, how did the gas giants — Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune — end up where they are, orbiting the sun like they do?”

Could scientists accidentally destroy the Earth with a lab-grown black hole? asks The Next Web –“These black holes, if they exist, would have been bombarding Earth (and all the planets) for the entire history of our Solar System, as well as the Sun, and there is absolutely no evidence that any body in our Solar System ever became a black hole or got eaten by one.”

Read about The Daily Galaxy editorial team here

Today’s stories range from During the Planck Era the universe was so small that our laws of physics broke down to  Pondering the bits that build space-time and brains to Neil deGrasse Tyson on alien contact , and much more. “The Galaxy Report” brings you news of space and science that has the capacity to provide clues to the mystery of our existence and adds a much needed cosmic perspective in our current Anthropocene Epoch.

The Planck era: Imagining our infant universe –During the Planck era, the universe was so small that our laws of physics broke down. To dive deeper back in time, we’ll need new scientific language, reports Sten Odenwald  for Astronomy.com.

Quasar Ancestor? A distant object in a deep Hubble Space Telescope field could be in transition from ordinary galaxy to brilliant beacon of light, reports Sky & Telescope. “Astronomers have discovered a precursor to quasars, the brilliant beacons powered by gas-guzzling black holes with masses equivalent to millions or even billions of Suns. The find sheds light on the mystery of how quasars grow so quickly.”

Space needs environmental protection just like Earth, experts say–“The scientific, economic and cultural benefits of space should be considered against the damaging environmental impacts posed by an influx of space debris — roughly 60 miles above Earth’s surface — fueled by the rapid growth of so-called satellite mega-constellations. In a paper published April 22 in Nature Astronomy, the authors assert that space is an important environment to preserve on behalf of professional astronomers, amateur stargazers and Indigenous peoples.”

Inside the simple computer program that could explain why the Universe exists, reports Marcus Chown for BBC Science Focus–“Stephen Wolfram, the British-born scientist, who lives in the US, claims he has found a route to a fundamental theory of physics that answers some of the biggest questions, such as what is space? What is time? And why does the Universe exist?”

Stephen Hawking on “The Ultimate Migration” -Will the Human Species Be Able to Adapt to Life Beyond Earth?, reports astrophysicist Maxwell Moe for The Daily Galaxy. “Before his death in 2018, Stephen Hawking predicted that the world’s mounting population will consume enough energy to render the world a “ball of fire” within 600 years. Speaking via video in 2018 at Beijing’s Tencent WE Summit, Hawking declared that humans must “boldly go where no one has gone before” if they wish to survive another million years. “

Large Hadron Collider to restart and hunt for a fifth force of nature –Latest run is expected to scrutinize findings from last year that may turn into another blockbuster discovery, reports The Guardian. “”The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will restart on Friday after a three-year hiatus and is expected to resolve a scientific cliffhanger on whether a mysterious anomaly could point to the existence of a fifth fundamental force of nature.”

How the James Webb Space Telescope will search for extraterrestrial life –The world’s most powerful telescope, now in space, will offer new tools to address the timeless question about life in the universe: Are we alone on Earth? reports Astronomy.

Gravitational waves could let us find tiny black holes devouring stars –A primordial black hole falling into a neutron star would sink to its center and devour it in seconds, and we might be able to detect this process using gravitational waves, reports New Scientist.

Thousands of satellites are polluting Australian skies, and threatening ancient Indigenous astronomy practices, reports The Conversation –“Since time immemorial, Indigenous peoples worldwide have observed, tracked and memorized all the visible objects in the night sky. This ancient star knowledge was meticulously ingrained with practical knowledge of the land, sky, waters, community and the Dreaming — and passed down through generations.”

TRAPPIST-1 Star System is the Ultimate James Webb Space Telescope Target –-““No matter what we find by studying planets orbiting ultra-cool dwarfs, we cannot lose. We can only learn,” said the researchers. “If we manage to identify the presence of life on a planet similar to those in the TRAPPIST-1 system, then we can start measuring how frequently biology emerges in the universe. We could have the first clues of extraterrestrial biology in a decade!” reports astrophysicist Maxwell Moe for The Daily Galaxy.

Pondering the Bits That Build Space-Time and Brains –Vijay Balasubramanian investigates whether the fabric of the universe might be built from information, and what it means that physicists can even ask such a question, reports Quanta.

Hubble Explores Galactic Wings, reports NASA–“This image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope features two merging galaxies in the VV-689 system, nicknamed the Angel Wing. Unlike chance alignments of galaxies, which only appear to overlap when viewed from our vantage point on Earth, the two galaxies in VV-689 are in the midst of a collision. The galactic interaction has left the VV-689 system almost completely symmetrical, giving the impression of a vast set of galactic wings.”

The Galaxy Report newsletter brings you daily 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.

Yes, sign me up for my free subscription.

Read about The Daily Galaxy editorial team here

Happy 32nd Birthday to Hubble! Celebrates NASA –“We’re celebrating the Hubble Space Telescope’s 32nd birthday with a stunning look at an unusual close-knit collection of five galaxies, called The Hickson Compact Group 40. This eclectic, merging galaxy grouping includes three spiral-shaped galaxies, a giant elliptical galaxy, and a lenticular (lens-like) galaxy. Somehow, these different galaxies crossed paths in their evolution to create an exceptionally crowded and eclectic galaxy sampler held together by a cloud of dark matter. Observations suggest that such tight groups may have been more abundant in the early universe and provided fuel for powering black holes, known as quasars.”

Read about The Daily Galaxy editorial team here

Forget about the hand-held laser guns used in Star Trek. The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image above shows a megamaser, IRAS 16399-0937, located over 370 million light-years from Earth. The entire galaxy essentially acts as a cosmic laser that beams out microwave emission rather than visible light.

New Megamaser Discovery

Using the MeerKAT radio telescope, a radio telescope consisting of 64 antennas in the Northern Cape of South Africa, an international team of researchers have discovered a powerful new megamaser – a radio-wavelength laser that beams out microwave emission originating from dense gas in colliding galaxies. The galaxy merger is 6.6 billion light-years away, making this the most distant such megamaser found so far.

The team consisted of researchers from the University of the Western Cape, the University of Cape Town, Rhodes University, the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory and the South African Astronomical Observatory together with colleagues from 12 other countries.

An Exceedingly Bright Signal

When galaxies merge in collisions of cosmic proportions, the gas they contain becomes extremely dense. In particular, this can stimulate hydroxyl molecules, made of one atom of oxygen and one atom of hydrogen, to emit a specific radio signal called a maser (a maser is like a laser but emits microwave radio waves instead of visible light). When that signal is exceedingly bright, it is called a megamaser. 

Why Were the Earliest Galaxies In the Universe Brighter Than Those We See Today?

A Hydroxyl Lighthouse

“When two galaxies like the Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy collide, beams of light shoot out from the collision and can be seen at cosmological distances. The  hydroxyl (OH) megamasers act like bright lights that say: here is a collision of galaxies that is making new stars and feeding massive black holes,” explains Jeremy Darling, Professor of Astrophysics & CASA Director at the University of Colorado, Boulder, a megamaser expert and co-author of the study. 

The majority of megamasers are hydroxyl (OH) megamasers that emit light at a wavelength of 18cm, light that belongs to the radio part of the electromagnetic spectrum, and it is the type of light that the MeerKAT radio telescope in the Karoo is designed to capture. There are three other known megamasers for the molecules: water (H2O), formaldehyde (H2CO), and methine (CH).

Artist’s impression of a hydroxyl maser. Inside a galaxy merger are hydroxyl molecules, composed of one atom of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen. When one molecule absorbs a photon at 18cm wavelength, it emits two photons of the same wavelength. When molecular gas is very dense, typically when two galaxies merge, this emission gets very bright and can be detected by radio telescopes such as the MeerKAT ( © IDIA/LADUMA using data from NASA/StSci/SKAO/MolView).

LADUMA: Looking At the Distant Universe with the MeerKAT Array

One of the big MeerKAT science experiments is looking for neutral hydrogen gas in galaxies in one area of the sky, and looking for it very deeply – meaning very far from us, both in space and in time. By measuring the neutral hydrogen gas in galaxies from the distant past to now, LADUMA will contribute to our understanding of the evolution of the universe. This is no minor exercise, and so the research team comprises scientists from South Africa, Australia, Chile, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, South Korea, Spain, the UK, and the US. “LADUMA is probing hydrogen within a single ‘cosmic vuvuzela’ that extends to when the universe was only a third of its present age,” says Associate Professor Sarah Blyth from the University of Cape Town.

“An important part of understanding how galaxies form and evolve over cosmic time is understanding the properties of their interstellar gas, from which new stars can be formed,” Rutgers University astrophysicist Andrew Baker told The Daily Galaxy. “The LADUMA team is using very sensitive MeerKAT observations of one area of the sky to study the properties of hydrogen gas in galaxies out to a distance of nine billion light years, thereby looking back in time to when the universe was only a third of its present age. As a bonus, we were also able to detect hydroxl (OH) megamasers produced in galaxy mergers out to even greater distances.”

To look for hydrogen, the team looks for light with a wavelength of 21cm that has been stretched to longer wavelengths by the expansion of the universe. However, light from other atoms and molecules is also present, and in their very first observation with MeerKAT, the team detected bright emission from hydroxyl molecules that had been even more stretched from its original wavelength of 18cm.

“It’s impressive that in a single night of observations with MeerKAT, we already found a redshift record-breaking megamaser. The full 3000+ hour LADUMA survey will be the most sensitive of its kind,” explains Dr. Marcin Glowacki, previously a researcher at the Inter-University Institute for Data-Intensive Astronomy (IDIA) and University of the Western Cape, and now based at the Curtin University node of the International Center for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR), who led the investigation.

When the team saw this signal in the data coming from the telescope, and confirmed that it was coming from hydroxyl, the team realized that they had a megamaser on their hands.

Relic Galaxies Found Untouched Across Cosmic Time

“Nkalakatha” –The Host Galaxy

Once the team knew it was a megamaser, they went on to look for its host galaxy. Where was the megamaser coming from? The patch of sky explored by the LADUMA team has been observed in X-rays, optical light and infra-red, so the team was able to easily identify the host galaxy. 

The host galaxy of “Nkalakatha” – Zulu word that means “big boss”– is known to have a long tail on one side, visible in radio waves. It is about 58 thousand billion billion (58 followed by 21 zeros) kilometers away, and the megamaser light was emitted about 5 billion years ago when the universe was only about two thirds of its current age. 

New Generation of Radio Telescopes Probe much Deeper into the Universe

This is the first time a megamaser has been detected at that distance from its emission at 18cm wavelength. The authors of the study point out that it is not surprising that they found such a bright megamaser, given how powerful the MeerKAT is, but the telescope is very new, so this find hopefully is one of many more to come. “MeerKAT will probably double the known number of these rare phenomena. Galaxies were thought to merge more often in the past, and the newly discovered OH megamasers will allow us to test this hypothesis,” comments Darling.

“Until very recently, radio telescopes were only able to measure the emission from neutral hydrogen gas in galaxies in the nearby Universe. But the new generation of radio telescopes like MeerKAT are much more sensitive and will let us probe much deeper into the universe than ever before,” wrote astronomer Sarah Blyth at the University of Cape Town in an email to The Daily Galaxy.

“The LADUMA survey on MeerKAT probes the emission from neutral atomic hydrogen gas in galaxies back to when the universe was only one third of its current age and will be the deepest survey of its kind until the SKA comes online,” Blyth continued in her email.  “Hydrogen gas is a major component of galaxies – it’s what stars form out of! From our survey we will be able to learn about how the gas content of galaxies has evolved over the past nine billion years of cosmic history.”

“Although LADUMA’s main aim is to search for neutral hydrogen emission, it will also detect emission from hydroxyl (OH) megamasers.” Blyth explained. One of the things we have to do for the survey is disentangle whether a signal we see is from atomic hydrogen or OH, however we expect to find far more hydrogen signals than megamasers, so most of our detections will come from atomic hydrogen gas in galaxies.”

Radio astronomy is entering a truly exciting time with the upcoming Square Kilometer Array and its pathfinder telescopes, including MeerKAT. Unplanned discoveries are starting to emerge from the unprecedented amounts of data these instruments collect. And with MeerKAT and IDIA, South Africa is right at the cutting-edge of astronomy.

“Wreaking Havoc” –Quasars Unleash Massive Tsunami’s ‘Lighting Up Galaxies Like Christmas Trees’

The Last Word –Jeremy Darling 

“I was thrilled when I learned about the discovery of the megamaser in the early LADUMA data because I’ve been thinking about finding distant OH megamasers and using them to study colliding galaxies for more than twenty years,” Darling wrote in an email to The Daily Galaxy. “The prediction was that they should be ‘out there’ in the early universe in large numbers, but they have been elusive for a very long time.”  

“This new discovery will be the first among many — it’s just the most obvious one at the moment.  Like stumbling across a big fossilized bone sticking out of the ground, it signifies that careful digging will uncover more.”  

“It is almost certain that if OH gigamasers billions of times stronger than the average maser in the Milky Way exist,” Darling concluded, “then MeerKAT will detect them. The big question is whether these masers have a maximum power.  Just how luminous they can be is not known.  But when two massive gas-rich galaxies collide, there is a lot of energy available to make masers.”

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image of megamaser IRAS 16399-0937at the top of the page comprises observations captured by two of Hubble’s instruments: the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS), and the Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS) gave astronomers the unique opportunity to observe the structure of IRAS 16399-0937 in detail. They found that IRAS 16399-0937 hosts a double nucleus, both buried deep within the same swirl of cosmic gas and dust and are interacting, giving the galaxy its peculiar structure. The nuclei are very different. IRAS 16399S appears to be a starburst region, where new stars are forming at an incredible rate. IRAS 16399N, however, is something known as a LINER nucleus (Low Ionization Nuclear Emission Region), which is a region whose emission mostly stems from weakly-ionized or neutral atoms of particular gasses. The northern nucleus also hosts a black hole with some 100 million times the mass of the Sun.

Maxwell Moe, astrophysicist, NASA Einstein Fellow, University of Arizona via Sarah Blyth, Andrew Baker, Jeremy Darling and SARAO

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.

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Maxwell Moe, astrophysicist, NASA Einstein Fellow, University of Arizona. Max can be found two nights a week probing the mysteries of the Universe at the Kitt Peak National Observatory. Max received his Ph.D in astronomy from Harvard University in 2015.

Astronomers have known since the 1990s that planets exist around pulsars. It’s a reasonable hypothesis that planets might also exist around black holes, which have a weaker impact on their local environment than rotating neutron stars. In 2019, Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb and NASA’s Jeremy Schnittman proposed that inhabited planets might exist around the black holes harbored at the center of most galaxies. Such planets are similar to the fictional water-world planet Miller, the closest planet in the star system orbiting the supermassive black hole, Gargantua, in the movie Interstellar. 

High-Energy Particles and Winds at 10% Speed of Light

A new paper by astrobiologist Manasvi Lingam and astrophysicist Eric Perlman from Florida Institute of Technology, along with researchers from the University of Rome, University of Maryland and Goddard Space Flight Center, examines the radiation and winds emanating from black hole activity and how they may exert effects on nearby planets. The study focuses on two key mechanisms: how black hole winds can heat atmospheres and drive atmospheric escape, as well as how they can stimulate the formation of nitrogen oxides and thus lead to ozone depletion.

“Most galaxies have black holes in their nuclei,” wrote Perlman in an email to The Daily Galaxy. “Our galaxy has Sagittarius A*, which is 4.2 million times the mass of our Sun. Fortunately, it takes in very little matter, and is not a source of high-energy radiation and particles,” he explained. “But most galaxies go through active stages. What we wanted to know was, what happened to the life-hosting planets in a galaxy when that happens?”

To study how black holes can affect a planet’s atmosphere, the team developed mathematical models to estimate the maximal distance up to which these effects are rendered significant for Earth-like planets in the Milky Way. This demonstrated that this impact may extend approximately over 3,000 lightyears. In the case of quasars hosting larger supermassive black holes, the research found such effects could actually influence the black hole’s host galaxy as a whole.

“It turns out that when you have a supermassive black hole that is active, it not only produces radiation, but it also produces a lot of high energy particles that are powered by the black hole,” Florida Institute of Technology astrobiologist, Mansavi Lingam said. “It is easy to visualize it as a fast-moving wind, like an extremely amplified hurricane. You have this wind of high energy particles that is emanating from the black hole’s vicinity at 10% the speed of light, more than thousand times faster than our current spacecraft.”

“Ping Pong-Sized Monsters” -Primordial Black Holes Could Be of Any Size and Anywhere in the Milky Way

Not Bio Friendly –Black Hole “Indigestion”

The radiation emitting from the black holes is essentially the particles of light known as photons. But if black holes are mainly known for nothing escaping out of them, why is this light being emitted as well as the high-energy particles in the wind? What happens is there is a lot of gas that surrounds the black hole during its active phase. The black hole starts eating up some of that gas. But it doesn’t eat it up in a totally efficient way: as the black hole is consuming more and more gas, the gas is falling in towards the black hole.

While it is falling inward towards the black hole, it’s getting heated. Much like when you rub your hands together and the friction generates heat, the friction experienced by the gas spiraling inwards towards the black hole leads to it getting heated and eventually releasing energy in the form of photons.

Think of it as a form of interstellar indigestion, Lingam said.

“Extremely Extreme Life” –Neutron Star, Pulsar and Black-Hole Planets

Impact Zone: 3,000 maybe 5,000 Light Years

“This radiation can bombard the atmospheres,” he said. “It can lead to those atmospheres getting eroded away. It can supply lots of UV radiation, it can be harmful to biology and so on. Some of the same ramifications apply to the high-speed winds from the black hole as well. These were some of the many effects that we looked at.”

There’s still a lot of black hole wind research that remains to be done. Lingam noted that the model considers the uniform expansion of wind throughout space, whereas future work would need to examine the emission of radiation and winds in the form of jets, which he hopes to investigate with Perlman and his Italian colleagues.

Thousands of Black Holes Surround Mlky Way’s Supermassive Sagittarius A*

Earth is 26,000 Light Years from the Milky Way Center

For those who are worried about radiation and winds from the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole affecting Earth, there is no reason to be concerned.

“The good thing which we learned during the course of this work is that a lot of these effects extend up to 3,000 light-years, maybe 5,000 light years, in some extreme cases,” Lingam said. “But the earth fortunately is located 26,000 light years from the center of the Milky Way, so it’s comfortably outside that zone of influence, if we can call it that, of the black hole activity. Therefore, we might consider ourselves fortunate to inhabit this relatively peaceful region of our galaxy.”

The Last Word

“Our research indicates that planets in close proximity to active supermassive black holes would receive exceptionally high doses of ultraviolet radiation and high-energy particles,” Manasvi Lingam told The Daily Galaxy, “both of which would pose many obstacles to habitability such as atmospheric erosion, ozone depletion, biological damage, and much more.”

“Perhaps the most likely scenario for ‘life’ near a neutron star or black hole involves colonization … by robotic missions from a civilization around another nearby star,” astronomer James Cordes at Cornell University, told The Daily Galaxy in 2021. Cordes’ research focus includes neutron stars, pulsars, and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. “Such a mission,” he notes, “would be very costly and might not be warranted given the power of remote sensing.  However, an ancient but advanced civilization might afford such a luxury.” 

Maxwell Moe, astrophysicist, NASA Einstein Fellow, University of Arizona via Manasvi Lingam, Eric Perlman, Florida Institute of Technology and Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

Maxwell Moe, astrophysicist, NASA Einstein Fellow, University of Arizona. Max can be found two nights a week probing the mysteries of the Universe at the Kitt Peak National Observatory. Max received his Ph.D in astronomy from Harvard University in 2015.

An understanding of the physics of the “Epoch of Reionization” or EoR, will connect the physics of the modern universe to the Big Bang.  Physicists have become keenly interested in the first billion years of the universe—the stretch between the Big Bang and the formation of the first stars during which galaxies began to form. During the last 600 million years or so of this period, the neutral interstellar galactic medium – and even the pre-galactic medium surrounding fledgling proto-galaxies – became ionized with ultraviolet radiation emitted by the first stars glowing in the earliest, growing galaxies. The ultraviolet radiation from the first stars ionized hydrogen atoms, separating the protons from electrons, for the first time since a few minutes after the Big Bang.

In the image of the Epoch of Reionization shown above, neutral hydrogen, in red, is gradually ionized by the first stars, shown in white. The image was made by the University of Melbourne’s Dark-ages Reionization And Galaxy Observables from Numerical Simulations (DRAGONS) program. (Credit: Paul Geil and Simon Mutch}

“The Epoch of Reionization represents the last major transition of the universe in the story of cosmic evolution,” says theoretical astrophysicist Paul Shapiro, Frank N. Edmonds, Jr Regents Professor in Astronomy at the University of Texas at Austin, “from the phase when all of space was filled with a nearly featureless, homogeneous gas to the phase in which structure emerged, with the first galaxies forming and inside them, stars.”

Radio Signals Detected from Earliest Epoch of the Universe 

Observing the distant sources of reionization directly is challenging, and detections are so far limited to the brightest galaxies. Physicists use computer simulations to recreate the rich physics of the EoR. On April 10, during the APS April Meeting 2022, theoretical astrophysicist Paul Shapiro will present highlights and observational predictions from the Cosmic Dawn III (CoDa) Project, the largest radiation-hydrodynamics simulation of the EoR to date. 

Heavy Computational Lifting

Simulating the EoR with CoDa III required heavy computational lifting. With a trillion computational elements—81923 dark matter particles and 81923 gas and radiation cells in a region 300 million light-years across today—the model had a resolution high enough to follow all the newly forming galactic haloes that sourced reionization in that volume, well beyond the reach of ordinary computers. The simulation ran for 10 days on 131,072 processors coupled to 24,576 graphic processing units at the massively parallel supercomputer, Summit, located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.

Size isn’t the only remarkable feature of the CoDa III simulation, says Shapiro. Tracking the evolution of galaxy formation and reionization requires accounting for a mutual feedback process: ionizing radiation that leaked out of galaxies had to heat the intergalactic medium. That additional heat, in turn, pressurized gas enough to resist the gravitational pull of nearby galaxies. Since the gas would otherwise have fueled the formation of star formation, the net result of this process is to stymie new stars.

Previous models have separated these effects, but Shapiro says CoDa III can simulate the gravitational dynamics of gas and matter together while accounting for ionizing radiation and its effect on the gas. Without radiative transfer, time in the evolutionary model would have to be divided into steps small enough to represent the changing densities of gas and stars and dark matter. The addition of this feedback loop means the time steps must be hundreds of times smaller to capture the high speed of the “surfaces of ionization”—rapidly expanding ionizing bubbles racing outward from newly-formed galaxies and sweeping across the universe. The linked processors and GPUs at the Summit supercomputer, Shapiro says, made it possible to solve these equations almost as quickly as if the model did not include radiation.

The Cosmic Dawn –Epic Turning Point in History of the Universe

Transition neither Instantaneous nor Homogeneous.

The transition between fully neutral to nearly complete ionization of atoms in the intergalactic medium (IGM) was neither instantaneous nor homogeneous. Pockets of intense star formation and dense groupings of galaxies were subject to more ultraviolet radiation and reionization. Previous simulations failed to explain the inferred timescale of this EoR transition measured from the numbers, densities, and temperatures of intervening gas clouds observed along the lines of sight toward extremely distant quasars. 

Syncing Theory with Observation

Notably, Shapiro says, CoDa III solves a problem between theory and observational data that has emerged in EoR studies; namely, that the theoretical predictions of previous models don’t line up with observations of quasar absorption spectra that probe the universe at the end of the EoR and after. This problem vanishes in CoDa III, as the simulation produces self-consistent predictions that agree with the latest observations.

“All the Light”– In the History of the Observable Universe

The Last Word– “The Tip of the Iceberg”

“Theoretical models like our CoDa III simulation of reionization and early galaxy formation tell us that surveys of high-redshift galaxies present during this epoch have so far detected only the brightest ones — the tip of the iceberg, wrote Paul Shapiro in an email to The Daily Galaxy.. The more abundant, lower-mass and lower-luminosity galaxies our theory says dominated reionization are a prime target for study by the recently- launched James Webb Space Telescope and others to follow, in space and on the ground, including the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, Giant Magellan Telescope, and Extremely Large Telescope. 

“We find,” continued Shapiro, “that reionization and galaxy formation exerted a mutual feedback on each other, because UV starlight that escaped from galaxies to ionize the intergalactic gas also heated it, causing pressure forces to rise and oppose gravity, choking off the gas supply to small galaxies overtaken by reionization and suppressing their star formation, thereby causing reionization to ‘self-regulate.’ The next generation telescopes should be able to confirm this.

“The CoDa III simulation allows us to predict what they will find in detail, not by modeling individual galaxies and their surrounding intergalactic H II regions, in isolation, one at a time, but by modeling millions of galaxies and the interdependence of galaxy formation and reionization, all at once. In so doing, we will be able to test, not only the theory of the epoch of reionization, but the basic Cold Dark Matter paradigm of structure formation in the universe, itself.

Shapiro predicts that the study of the EoR is poised to undergo its own rapid expansion in coming years. The new space-based observatories will improve astronomers’ ability to observe the far flung drivers of reionization. Present and upcoming radio investigations could help researchers better constrain the clumpy, inhomogeneous way that the Intergalactic Medium became ionized. 

Simulations like Cosmic Dawn, says Shapiro, provide a theoretical foundation for what these sophisticated telescopes will see. “Apart from matching the existing spectrum of observations and predicting new ones,” he says, “it provides critical insight into the nature of the physical processes that took place.”

Maxwell Moe, astrophysicist, NASA Einstein Fellow, University of Arizona via Paul Shapiro and American Physical Society

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.

Yes, sign me up for my free subscription.

Maxwell Moe, astrophysicist, NASA Einstein Fellow, University of Arizona. Max can be found two nights a week probing the mysteries of the Universe at the Kitt Peak National Observatory. Max received his Ph.D in astronomy from Harvard University in 2015.

“The black holes of nature are the most perfect macroscopic objects there are in the universe: the only elements in their construction are our concepts of space and time,” said astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar. Chandrasekhar first demonstrated that at the end of a star’s life, if its remaining mass is greater than 1.4 times our sun’s mass, then its ultimate fate will be rather strange, collapsing under its own gravity to reach enormous density as a neutron star or black hole.

Today, we know that in the center of most galaxies lies a supermassive black hole millions or even billions times more massive than our Sun. Infalling gas and dust onto supermassive black holes heat up to extreme temperatures in an accretion disk, expelling excess energy as powerful jets and outflows, seen as quasars across the entire observable Universe. A new study led by astronomers at the Cosmic Dawn Center reviewed this process using new techniques—and the results may change how we think about the diets of these cosmic behemoths whose extreme gravitational field engulfs vast amounts of gas, dust, and doomed stars that wander into their grasp.

Mystery of Radiation 30 Times More Efficient than Nuclear Fusion

Physics tells us that this material tends to form a disk as it is drawn towards the black hole in a phenomenon called “accretion.” Now these accretion disks are some of the most uninviting, violent places in the known Universe, with velocities approaching the speed of light, and temperatures far in excess of the surface of our Sun. This heat produces radiation which we see as light, but the conversion of heat to light is so efficient—about 30 times more efficient than nuclear fusion—that physicists don’t quite understand how.

Why Do Supermassive Black Holes Like the Milky Way’s Sagittarius A* Flicker?

Varied Diets and Missing Accretion Disks

The dietary patterns of black holes have a wide range. Some, like the one in our own Galaxy, aren’t very hungry and don’t seem to have accretion disks. But we see other galaxies with ravenous hunger whose supermassive black holes have grown extremely hot accretion disks so bright that they outshine all of the stars in their galaxy.

EHT’s First Image of an Accretion Disk

Only recently have we obtained our first picture of an accretion disk from the Event Horizon Telescope, a worldwide network of radio telescopes. However, this accretion disk belongs to a very nearby galaxy. We cannot repeat this experiment with more distant galaxies as the disks are simply too small and so are unresolved, even by the largest telescopes.

The supermassive black hole in the center of the galaxy M87. The streaks show the polarized light from the electric field of the gas plummeting into the black hole. Credit: EHT Collab. et al. 2021 The lines mark the orientation of polarization, which is related to the magnetic field around the shadow of the black hole. Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration.

“Invisible Monsters” –Supermassive Black Holes Roam the Milky Way 

New Picture from Variations in the Disks’ Light 

Fortunately another method of probing the size and structure of distant accretion disks seems promising. Although we cannot resolve the disks’ various components, we can study how its intensity varies in time. By studying the variations in the disks’ light we can piece together a picture of the accretion disks of even the most distant galaxies.

This is what DAWN Ph.D. Fellow John Weaver has done, looking into past observations of more than 9,000 galaxies with bright accretion disks—the so-called quasars—from the observational program “Sloan Digital Sky Survey.”

When the source is not resolved, the observed light from the accretion disk will be “contaminated” by light from the galaxy hosting the black hole. This unwanted light from the host galaxies has largely been ignored by previous studies. However, by using a new model for the variations in the quasar light, Weaver and his collaborator Keith Horne, professor of astronomy at the University of St Andrews, were able to separate the light of the accretion disk from that of the host galaxy.

In other words, the model allowed them to more directly see the light from the accretion disk around supermassive black holes, even in galaxies billions of lightyears away.

Origin of Supermassive Black Holes? –Dark-Matter Centers of the Early Galaxies

Cosmic Dust was Blocking the View

What Weaver and Horne found was that cosmic dust near the accretion disk was likely blocking their view. Using several different models of cosmic dust to account for, and remove, its obscuring effects, they were able to determine how hot the accretion disk is, both near the black hole and far from it at the edges of the disk.

Temperature Even Hotter than Predicted

This difference in temperature between the hot inner disk and the cold outer disk has been theoretically predicted. However, what Weaver and Horne found observationally was a very different picture of the temperature of the disk: the disks turned out to be even hotter near the black hole than predicted. These unexpected findings were published today in the Monthly Notices of The Royal Astronomical Society and suggest that our assumptions and theoretical models need to be revised—with consequences for our understanding of supermassive black holes altogether.  

“The quasar brightness variations are bluer than expected, implying higher temperatures in the inner disk region. Horne wrote in an email to The Daily Galaxy. “This might mean that the quasar brightness variations are caused by changes in magnetic links connecting the disk and the black hole,” He explained. “The black hole then spins up and down as the magnetic links move energy and angular momentum back and forth between the disk and the hole.”

“Deeply Compelling” –Weird Existence of Primordial Black Holes in the Early Universe

The Last Word –”Accretion Disk is Stealing Energy from the Black Hole”

“Accretion is more efficient than nuclear fusion in converting rest mass to energy. Fusing 4 hydrogen nuclei to make helium, as in the core of the Sun, converts less than 1% of the rest mass into energy (because the neutron’s rest mass is slightly less than the proton’s),” Horne explained in his email. “In an accretion disk feeding gas into a black hole, friction heats the gas enough to radiate away up to 42% of the rest mass, depending on the spin of the black hole, before the gas plunges into the hole.“

“Just to be super clear,” John Weaver wrote to The Daily Galaxy, “the idea that accretion disks are ‘hotter’ may be true, but this is largely an over-simplification. The findings show that the temperature structure of the discs may be steeper. In other words, the inner regions of the disc may be bluer (indeed hotter) than the outer regions (which may be redder — i.e. colder). But we are not finding that they are hotter in an absolute sense, but rather hotter in their inner regions relative to their outer regions (so that the temperature drops off more quickly). 

“In that sense,” Weaver continues in his email, “we’re not claiming that the discs are necessarily more efficient energy producers than previously thought, so that hasn’t changed (from my thinking, at least!). The extreme efficiency of accretion processes (theoretically) is a well known result (see these slides) and so the physics are well understood, with the question being put: are real accretion discs actually behaving according to these (fairly simple) physics? It’s probably more complicated than that in the real world, but they are definitely efficient beasts!”

“What I can say is this,” Weaver concludes in his email: “The environment and physics of the accretion discs around supermassive black holes are not well understood. Long standing theoretical models are powerful, but perhaps missing all of the ingredients that nature provides. As such, these models make several assumptions about how the disc behaves. With this new method we are able to gather a more precise picture about accretion discs, which may indicate that this theoretical picture needs some additional ingredients.

“It seems,” Weaver  concludes, “based on recent theoretical advancements, that our observations support the idea that the disc is stealing energy (angular momentum) from the black hole — increasing its temperature in the innermost region. If confirmed, this picture has significant implications for how we estimate the mass of the black hole, for example. Future facilities such as the Rubin Observatory will enable further investigations in this direction.`

Image at top of the page: artist’s impression of the quasar ULAS J1120+0641. Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser

Maxwell Moe, astrophysicist, NASA Einstein Fellow, University of Arizona via Keith Horne,  John Weaver and the Niels Bohr Institute

Maxwell Moe, astrophysicist, NASA Einstein Fellow, University of Arizona. Max can be found two nights a week probing the mysteries of the Universe at the Kitt Peak National Observatory. Max received his Ph.D in astronomy from Harvard University in 2015.

The beauty of the Universe is that there’s always a mystery. Scientists might have an explanation for the existence of an especially cold region in the afterglow, known as the CMB Cold Spot. Its origin has been a mystery so far but might be attributed to the largest absence of galaxies ever discovered.

After the Big Bang, the universe, glowing brightly, was opaque and so hot that atoms could not form. Eventually cooling down to about minus 454 degrees Fahrenheit (-270 degrees Celsius), much of the energy from the Big Bang took the form of light. This afterglow, known as the cosmic microwave background (CMB), can now be seen with telescopes at microwave frequencies invisible to human eyes. It has tiny fluctuations in temperature that provide information about the early universe.

Largest absence of galaxies ever discovered

Scientists used data collected by the Dark Energy Survey to confirm the existence of one of the largest supervoids known to humanity, the Eridanus supervoid, as reported in a paper published in December 2021. This once-hypothesized but now-confirmed void in the cosmic web might be a possible cause for the anomaly in the CMB.

The Cold Spot resides in the constellation Eridanus in the southern galactic hemisphere. The inset below  shows the microwave temperature map of this patch of sky, as mapped by the European Space Agency Planck satellite. The main figure depicts the map of the dark matter distribution created by the Dark Energy Survey team. (Gergö Kránicz and András Kovács).

The Eridanus Supervoid

The cosmic web is made of clusters and superclusters of galaxies. They are pulled together by the attractive force of gravity and accelerated away from each other by the repulsive force of a mysterious, not-yet-understood phenomenon called dark energy that is perhaps the greatest mystery of modern science.

Dark energy has been described as everything from a fifth force to a new form of matter, but so far, no direct evidence has been found of its existence. “I have absolutely no clue what dark energy is,” says Nobel Prize winning physicist Adam Riess . “Dark energy appears strong enough to push the entire universe – yet its source is unknown, its location is unknown and its physics are highly speculative.”

Elephant in the Cosmos –Massive Gravity Replaces Dark Energy

Vast regions of space that contain fewer galaxies

Between these clusters of galaxies are voids: vast regions of space that contain fewer galaxies, and thus less ordinary matter, and less dark matter than exists within the galaxy clusters.

Among the largest structures known to humanity, the supervoid in the constellation Eridanus is a massive, elongated, cigar-shaped void in the cosmic web that’s 1.8 billion lightyears wide and has been observed to contain about 30% less matter than the surrounding galactic region. Its center is located 2 billion lightyears from Earth, making it the dominant underdensity of matter in our galactic neighborhood.

To make this discovery, scientists used Dark Energy Survey data to create a map of dark matter in the same direction as the CMB Cold Spot, by observing the effect of gravitational lensing. It’s a phenomenon that occurs when the paths of light are warped by the gravitational influence of dark matter.

“This map of dark matter is the largest ever such map that’s been created,” said Niall Jeffrey, the scientist who worked on the construction of a dark matter map. “We have been able to map out dark matter over a quarter of the Southern Hemisphere.”

In Search of Dark Energy –Probing 11-Billion Years of Cosmic History

Under Density of Galaxies and Dark Matter 

Scientists previously counted the number of galaxies visible in the location of the CMB Cold Spot and found an under density of galaxies in that region. The new map shows there is a matching underdensity of invisible dark matter.

The Dark Energy Survey is an international effort to understand the effect dark energy has on the acceleration of the universe. It involves 300 scientists from 25 institutions in seven countries, documenting hundreds of millions of galaxies, supernovae and patterns within the cosmic web, using a 570-Megapixel digital camera, called the DECam, high in the Chilean Andes. This camera’s construction and integration of components was led by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.

Is Dark Energy Evolving? –Ancient Quasars May Offer the Answer

“We were thinking many years ago, a decade and a half at least, how would voids affect the present acceleration of the universe,” said Juan Garcia-Bellido, a cosmologist from IFT-Madrid and co-author of the paper.

At the largest scales of the universe, there is a tug-of-war between the gravitational forces and the expansion of the universe from dark energy, making some of the voids between galactic clusters deeper.

Integrated Sachs-Wolfe Effect – Gravitational Redshift 

“Photons or particles of light enter into a void at a time before the void starts deepening and leave after the void has become deeper,” said Garcia-Bellido. “This process means that there is a net energy loss in that journey; that’s called the Integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect. When photons fall into a potential well, they gain energy, and when they come out of a potential well, they lose energy. This is the gravitational redshift effect.”

Discrepancy between the Predictions

Although the new result confirms that the Eridanus supervoid is gigantic, it still is not sufficient to explain the discrepancy between the predictions of the current standard cosmological model used to predict the behavior of dark energy—known as the Lambda Cold Dark Matter model—and the observed change in temperature in the Cold Spot that can be attributed to the supervoid’s effect on photons from the CMB.

“Having the coincidence of these two individually rare structures in the cosmic web and in the CMB is basically not enough to prove causality with the scientific standard,” said András Kovács, the lead researcher on this project.

“It is enough of a new element in the long history of the CMB Cold Spot problem that after this, people will at least be sure that there is a supervoid, which is a good thing because some people have debated that,” said Kovács.

In short, there are two ways to think about this problem: either the Lambda-CDM model is correct, and the CMB Cold Spot is an extreme anomaly that coincidentally has a massive supervoid in front of it, or the Lambda-CDM model is incorrect, and the integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect is stronger in supervoids than expected. 

The latter would indicate a greater influence of dark energy on the universe and possibly faster cosmic expansion. Interestingly, this possibility is backed up by evidence from other, more distant supervoids. Moreover, the Dark Energy Survey team observed that the lensing signal from the Eridanus supervoid is slightly weaker than expected.

“The trouble is that typical alternative models cannot explain this discrepancy either, so if true, it might mean that we do not understand something very deep about dark energy,” said Kovács.

The Last Word

In an email to The Daily Galaxy, Kovács wrote, “The nature of the Cold Spot problem hints at the possible solutions. “Supervoids probe the very largest scales in the observable Universe, where departures from the Copernican principle’s homogeneous and isotropic worldview may emerge. If the growth rate of structure and the cosmic expansion rate are different at these largest scales, and especially in under-dense environments, that could in principle lead to a different dark energy model and therefore possibly colder spots aligned with supervoids.”

“All things considered,” Kovács concludes,” these assumptions are of course not unjustified but they are subject to scrutiny, since their breakdown would force us to abandon our simplest cosmological models.”

Maxwell Moe, astrophysicist, NASA Einstein Fellow, University of Arizona via Maxwell Bernstein, András Kovács and  Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory

Maxwell Moe, astrophysicist, NASA Einstein Fellow, University of Arizona. Max can be found two nights a week probing the mysteries of the Universe at the Kitt Peak National Observatory. Max received his Ph.D in astronomy from Harvard University in 2015.

Our Universe provided some fascinating news stories over the past few days, ranging from Antimatter Stars of the Milky Way to Can Early Dark Energy Save the Universe to Our Weird Solar System.

Nasa begins months-long effort to focus James Webb space telescope –The revolutionary new scope could provide a glimpse of the cosmos dating back billions of years, but first some painstaking adjustments are needed, reports The Guardian.

The Extraterrestrial-Contact Paradox (YouTube Episode), reports The Daily Galaxy. “British physicist Stephen Wolfram believes extraterrestrial intelligent life is inevitable, but with a caveat. Although intelligent life is inevitable, we will never find it -at least not by searching in the Milky Way.  We have a slim chance, he suggests, of distinguishing an ET artifact from a natural celestial object.”

Do antimatter Stars Lurk in the Milky Way? –Stars made of antimatter could lurk in the Milky Way –If true, the preliminary find might mean some antimatter survived to the present day, reports Science News.

The Staggering Implications of Infinite Space (YouTube Episode), reports The Daily Galaxy –“Some astrophysicists, it has been said, suggest that there are only three important numbers in the universe: zero, one, and infinity. Within an infinite expanse of space, it would be hard to see any reason why there would not be an infinite number of galaxies, stars, and planets, and even an infinite number of intelligent or conscious beings, scattered throughout this limitless volume.”

A century of quantum mechanics questions the fundamental nature of reality –The quantum revolution upended our understanding of nature, and a lot of uncertainty remains, reports Science News.

One of the Last Great Mysteries of the Early Universe –“Did supermassive black holes exist shortly after the big bang, before the birth of stars? “This is one of the last great mysteries of the early universe,” said Kirk S. S. Barrow in 2018, currently at Harvard’s CfA, about how supermassive black holes formed during the birth of a galaxy. It’s a mystery the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) may soon be able to solve,” reports The Daily Galaxy.

What is “early dark energy” and can it save the expanding Universe? –There are two fundamentally different ways of measuring the Universe’s expansion. They disagree. “Early dark energy” might save us, reports Big Think.

Planets Unlike Any in Our Solar System, reports The Daily Galaxy. ““The tiny star TOI-270 (less than half the size and temperature of our Sun) hosts one super-Earth and two sub-Neptunes. In our solar system, there is absolutely nothing that resembles such intermediate planets.”

A giant arc of galaxies stretching across more than 3 billion light-years –Such a finding is counter to the assumption that matter in the universe is evenly distributed on large scales. The arc, invisible to the human eye, came to light in an analysis of about 40,000 quasars — very bright cores of distant galaxies. But some skeptics argue that the arc may be just an artifact of the human tendency to pick up patterns where none actually exist, reports Science News.

Have Astronomers Found a Giant Exomoon Almost Three Times the Size of Earth? “Researchers at Columbia University led by David Kipping  have calculated that there is about a 1 per cent chance that the detection is a false positive caused by noise in the signal. If the exomoon is real, it is about 2.6 times the size of Earth, far bigger than any moon seen in our own solar system and only slightly smaller than the unconfirmed exomoon orbiting Kepler-1625b.

The Large Hadron Collider blips that could herald a new era of physics –Hints of a new particle carrying a fifth force of nature have been multiplying at the LHC – and many physicists are convinced this could finally be the big one, reports New Scientist.

Four scientific ways we can be certain the Moon landings were real –Even though no human has stepped foot on the Moon’s surface in 50 years, the evidence of our presence there remains unambiguous, reports Big Think.

NASA’s Perseverance Rover Chokes on Mars Pebbles While Collecting a Rock Sample –The rover’s latest sample collection—an effort to gather material for eventual return to Earth—is off to a rocky start, reports Scientific American.

Two black holes merged to form a huge one moving at incredible speeds –Astronomers have long suspected that merging black holes can give the resulting larger black hole a massive boost of speed, and have finally spotted this happening, reports New Scientist.

Saturn’s small moon Mimas may be hiding an impossible ocean –Mimas doesn’t show any hints of liquid water, and it seems impossible that it could have an ocean under its surface, but that’s exactly what a new set of simulations suggest, reports New Scientist

Is our solar system a cosmic oddity? Evidence from exoplanets says yes –When we started finding planetary systems around other stars we thought many of them would be like ours. We’ve now found hundreds – and it’s so far, so wrong. reports New Scientist.

Read about The Daily Galaxy editorial team here

Welcome to an extraordinary catch of news from the Cosmos. Today’s stories range from Why AI Needs a Genome to Our Solar System is a Cosmic Oddity to the Quantum Experiment that Could Prove Reality Doesn’t Exist, and much more.

“The Galaxy Report” brings you news of space and science that has the capacity to provide clues to the mystery of our existence and adds a much needed cosmic perspective in our current Anthropocene Epoch.

The Missing Planet –“Citizen scientists have discovered a new object orbiting a Sun-like star that had been missed by previous searches. The object is very distant from its host star—more than 1,600 times farther than the Earth is from the Sun—and is thought to be a large planet or a small brown dwarf, a type of object that is not massive enough to burn hydrogen like true stars,” reports lead author, Jackie Faherty for the American Museum of Natural History.

Mini-Jet Found Near Milky Way’s Supermassive Black Hole, reports NASA. “Our Milky Way’s central black hole has a leak. This supermassive black hole looks like it still has the vestiges of a blowtorch-like jet dating back several thousand years. NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope hasn’t photographed the phantom jet but has helped find circumstantial evidence that it is still pushing feebly into a huge hydrogen cloud and then splattering, like the narrow stream from a hose aimed into a pile of sand.”

Why AI Needs a Genome –AI could learn and adapt like humans with algorithms that work like genes, reports Lina Zeldovich for Nautilus. “Humans come with a lot of scripted behavioral wisdom. AI comes with none.”

When Did Life Start in the Universe? asks Harvard’s Avi Loeb –Interstellar xenia, or the welcoming of cosmic strangers, could solve this mystery. “Our sun is not a typical star. Most stars are one tenth as massive and will live hundreds of times longer than the sun. Moreover, most stars formed billions of years before the sun, based on the observed star formation history since the big bang. Why were we born so late in cosmic history around a relatively massive star like the sun? Statistically speaking, we were more likely to exist earlier or around a lower-mass star.

What if the aliens we are looking for are AI? asks BBC Future–“Maybe there are no intelligent space aliens in our immediate cosmic vicinity. Perhaps they have never evolved beyond unthinking microbial slime or – based on our transmissions – aliens have concluded it is safer to stay away. There is, however, another explanation: ET is nothing like us.”

The Weirdness of Dark-Matter Free Galaxies, reports The Daily Galaxy –“The discovery of yet another dark-matter free, ultra-diffuse galaxy, raises a number of unanswered questions for astronomers: how are they formed? What do they tell us about standard cosmological models? How common are they, and what other unique properties do they have? It will take the discovery of more dark-matter-less galaxies to resolve the ultimate question of what dark matter really is.”

(VIDEO) The astonishing resonances between patterns in nature, microscopic and cosmic –“For the ABC Science series Phenomena, the Australian artist and filmmaker Josef Gatti collaborated with the Australian composer Kim Moyes for an amalgamation of art and science exploring ‘naturally occurring patterns, and the fundamental forces of nature that create them’. This episode explores natural surfaces at a range of scales – from the microscopic to the cosmic.”

Is our solar system a cosmic oddity? Evidence from exoplanets says yes –When we started finding planetary systems around other stars we thought many of them would be like ours. We’ve now found hundreds – and it’s so far, so wrong, reports New Scientist.

New NASA Telescope Will Provide X-Ray Views of the Universe –NASA Launches New Mission to Explore Universe’s Most Dramatic Objects –“A joint effort with the Italian Space Agency, the IXPE observatory is NASA’s first mission dedicated to measuring the polarization of X-rays from the most extreme and mysterious objects in the universe – supernova remnants, supermassive black holes, and dozens of other high-energy objects.”

The Extraterrestrial Signal -We May Not Want to Receive –“Is there a fundamental flaw in why we have not received a signal from an advanced alien civilization? How do we decode an alien message –alien is alien so it might be impossible. What if they communicate chemically? Will they use the language of math and science signaling at 1420 megahertz? What if we are too primitive to comprehend a message or the technology of its signal that may exist in a form beyond matter? What if it’s a message from an extinct civilization astrophysicist such as Harvard’s Avi Loeb believes exist in our galaxy.”

The quantum experiment that could prove reality doesn’t exist, reports New Scientist –“A new class of experiments is putting Einstein’s conviction to the test, seeing if quantum weirdness stretches beyond the tiny world of quarks, atoms and qubits into the everyday world of tables, chairs and, well, moons. “If you can go from one atom to two atoms to three to four to five to a thousand, is there any reason why it stops?” says Jonathan Halliwell at Imperial College London.

This is the way the world ends: not with a bang, but with a quantum vacuum decay of the ground state of the universe to its true minimum, reports Space.com. –“The universe underwent radical phase transitions in the past. These transitions eventually led to the division of the four fundamental forces of nature and the panoply of particles we know today. All of that occurred when the universe was less than a second old, and it has been stable ever since. But it might not last forever.”

Gravitational Waves Should Permanently Distort Space-Time –The “gravitational memory effect” predicts that a passing gravitational wave should forever alter the structure of space-time. Physicists have linked the phenomenon to fundamental cosmic symmetries and a potential solution to the black hole information paradox, reports Katie McCormick for Quanta.

Astronomers theorize that it can take billions of years for supermassive black holes and their accompanying galaxies to form. How is it possible that these quasars became so gigantic, with billions of solar masses, in the first 700 million years of the universe? Once you can see past their glare, what do their accompanying galaxies look like? And what do their “neighborhoods” look like? An an international team of astronomers, will pursue answers to these questions with observations taken by the James Webb Space Telescope. 

NASA Is on the Cusp of a New Era –A planetary scientist explains why SpaceX’s Starship will transform her field, reports Brian Gallagher for Nautilus. ” It shatters the size and constraints with which scientists and engineers have had to content themselves. With space-bound instruments no longer needing to be painstakingly and expensively miniaturized, and with launch costs down and launch frequency up, NASA can think big—really big.”

A young, sun-like star may hold warnings for life on Earth –Astronomers spying on a stellar system located dozens of lightyears from Earth have, for the first time, observed a troubling fireworks show: A star, named EK Draconis, ejected a massive burst of energy and charged particles much more powerful than anything scientists have seen in our own solar system.

Mathematicians Explore Mirror Link Between Two Geometric Worlds — reports Kevin Hartnett for Quanta. “Twenty-seven years ago, a group of physicists made an accidental discovery that flipped mathematics on its head. The physicists were trying to work out the details of string theory when they observed a strange correspondence: Numbers emerging from one kind of geometric world matched exactly with very different kinds of numbers from a very different kind of geometric world.”

The Ten Best Science Books of 2021 –From captivating memoirs by researchers to illuminating narratives by veteran science journalists, these works affected us the most this year, reports The Smithsonian.

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Cosmological simulations include dozens of prescriptions to describe the 13.8-billion-year evolution of the Universe, including numerical recipes for dark energy (so-called lambda), weakly interacting cold dark matter, gas accretion onto primordial galaxies, star formation and evolution, and feedback from quasars and supernovae. The outcome of these lambda cold dark matter simulations reproduce many of the observed features of the real universe. However, the models predict that dozens of small dwarf satellite galaxies should orbit medium-sized galaxies like our Milky Way and Andromeda in random orientations, but new research suggests most satellite galaxies orbit their host galaxies aligned along a single plane. 

Vast Polar Structure

“So this means that we are missing something,” said Marcel Pawlowski, a Schwarzschild Fellow at the Leibniz-Institute for Astrophysics about the finding that smaller systems of stars should be more or less randomly scattered around their anchoring galaxies and should move in all directions. Yet massive elliptical galaxy Centaurus A (Hubble image above) is the third documented example, behind the Milky Way and Andromeda, of a “vast polar structure” in which satellite dwarfs co-rotate around a central galactic mass in what Pawlowski calls “preferentially oriented alignment.”

“Either the simulations lack some important ingredient, or the underlying model is wrong. This research may be seen as support for looking into alternative models.”

Validity of Cosmological Models and Simulations Questioned

“The significance of this finding is that it calls into question the validity of certain cosmological models and simulations as explanations for the distribution of host and satellite galaxies in the universe,” said co-author Pawlowski.

An international team of astronomers has determined that Centaurus A.13 million light-years from Earth, is accompanied by a number of dwarf satellite galaxies orbiting the main body in a narrow disk. In a paper published in Science in 2018, the researchers noted that this is the first time such a galactic arrangement has been observed outside the Local Group, home to the Milky Way.

The difficulty of studying the movements of dwarf satellites around their hosts varies according to the target galaxy group. It’s relatively easy for the Milky Way. “You get proper motions,” Pawlowski said. “You take a picture now, wait three years or more, and then take another picture to see how the stars have moved; that gives you the tangential velocity.”

11 Milky Way Satellite Galaxies Measured

Using this technique, scientists have measurements for 11 Milky Way satellite galaxies, eight of which are orbiting in a tight disk perpendicular to the spiral galaxy’s plane. There are probably other satellites in the system that can’t be seen from Earth because they’re blocked by the Milky Way’s dusty disk.

Andromeda provides observers on Earth a view of the full distribution of satellites around the galaxy’s sprawling spiral. An earlier study found 27 dwarf galaxies, 15 arranged in a narrow plane. And Andromeda offers another advantage, according to Pawlowski: “Because you see the galaxy almost edge-on, you can look at the line-of-sight velocities of its satellites to see the ones that are approaching and those that are receding, so it very clearly presents as a rotating disk.”

Centaurus’s Satellites –“Sleeping in the Archives”

Centaurus A is much farther away, and its satellite companions are faint, making it more difficult to accurately measure distances and velocities to determine movements and distributions. But “sleeping in the archives,” Pawlowski said, were data on 16 of Centaurus A’s satellites.

“We could do the same game as with Andromeda, where we look at the line-of-sight velocities,” Pawlowski  said. “And again we see that half of them are red-shifted, meaning they are receding from us, and the other half are blue-shifted, which tells us they are approaching.”

The researchers were able to demonstrate that 14 of the 16 Centaurus A satellite galaxies follow a common motion pattern and rotate along the plane around the main galaxy – contradicting frequently used cosmological models and simulations suggesting that only about 0.5 percent of satellite galaxy systems in the nearby universe should exhibit this pattern.

“Something Unexpected is Going On in that Satellite Galaxy”  ––New Findings 

“The original study was based on archival data and contained a sample of only 16 satellite galaxies around Centaurus A.”  Pawlowski wrote in an email to The Daily Galaxy. “While that was sufficient to identify a substantial mismatch, there are many more satellites known in that system. We were able to obtain time with the fantastic MUSE instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope to measure spectroscopic velocities for another 12 satellites. This new data confirms the strong kinematic correlation we identified originally, and was published early this year in Müller et al. (2021).”

“So, on the observational side the tension with cosmological expectations remains in place, even though the new data could in principle have shown the opposite,”  Pawlowski notes.”I believe that’s a very reassuring confirmation of our original findings, but an alarming result for the cosmological model. Something unexpected is indeed going on in that satellite galaxy system. 

“There has also been progress in the theoretical side since 2018, so we wondered whether that might help resolve the issue,”  Pawlowski adds in his email. “In our new study, we thus now compare to the state of the art IllustrisTNG simulation, which implements a number of improvements over previous simulations. Yet, we again confirm a similar degree of tension, systems with as an extreme degree of correlation among their satellite galaxies as observed for Centaurus A remain rare in these simulated universes. Only one in a few hundred should show similar structures. Additionally, as before there does not seem to be a significant difference between simulations that model the complexities of baryonic physics, and those that merely focus on the dark matter distribution. The problem posed by these planes of satellite galaxies seems quite fundamental, as little tweaks in the details of simulations are insufficient to address it.”

“Beyond work on this specific system, Pawlowski observed, our findings have since motivated a number of studies investigating other satellite galaxy systems. Intriguingly, several of these find hints of similar structures, for example around NGC 253 and NGC 2750 as well as in a broader statistical study of over 100 satellite systems.”

Pawlowski concludes in his email: “There has of course also been a lot of progress on the study of the satellite galaxy planes in the Local Group, which were known to pose a problem for the cosmological expectation already before our Centaurus A work.”

Maxwell Moe, astrophysicist, NASA Einstein Fellow, University of Arizona via Marcel Pawlowski and  UC Irvine 

Image credit top of page: Centaurus A, also known as NGC 5128, is known for its dramatic dusty lanes of dark material. Hubble’s observations, using its most advanced instrument, the Wide Field Camera 3, are the most detailed ever made of this galaxy. As well as features in the visible spectrum, this composite shows ultraviolet light, which comes from young stars, and near-infrared light, which lets us glimpse some of the detail otherwise obscured by the dust. NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration. Acknowledgment: R. O’Connell (University of Virginia) and the WFC3 Scientific Oversight Committee.

Maxwell Moe, astrophysicist, NASA Einstein Fellow, University of Arizona. Max can be found two nights a week probing the mysteries of the Universe at the Kitt Peak National Observatory. Max received his Ph.D in astronomy from Harvard University in 2015.

“Lynx will be an extraordinary advancement over its predecessor, the Chandra X-Ray Observatory,” says Alexey Vikhlinin, co-chair of the Lynx science and technology team and an astronomer at the Harvard Center for Astrophysics. “It will provide factors of 100 to 1,000 times improvement in key metrics such as sensitivity for detecting and locating faint sources, as well as high-resolution spectroscopy to measure the energy distributions for objects ranging from nearby stars to distant quasars. Lynx will enable one of the largest performance leaps in the history of astronomy.”

The American Museum of Natural History visualization of the Milky Way Galaxy in Dark Universe above shows the most accurate 3D simulation ever produced of our galaxy. Developed by the National Astrophysical Observatory of Japan, the high-resolution numerical model includes both stars and gas and is tailored to agree with actual observations of the galaxy.

The Daily Galaxy Editorial Staff

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Another big week for “The Galaxy Report” with insights into our Solar System’s mysterious magnetic fields to  the first planet found to be orbing three stars to physicist Leonard Susskind, founding director of the Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics, on why black holes are so astonishing.

Extending LIGO’s reach into the cosmos, reports Science Daily –“In the future, as more and more upgrades are made to the LIGO observatories — one in Hanford, Washington, and the other in Livingston, Louisiana — the facilities are expected to detect increasingly large numbers of these extreme cosmic events that will help solve fundamental mysteries about our universe, such as how black holes form and how the ingredients of our universe are manufactured.”

The Solar System’s Mysterious Magnetic Fields –Most of our neighboring planets have magnetic fields, but scientists do not fully understand how they arise, reports Scientific American.

A 19th-century artist’s astronomical drawings are stunningly accurate. Compare them to NASA images today, reports Insider. “French artist Etienne Léopold Trouvelot sketched gorgeous illustrations of planets, star clusters, meteor showers, and eclipses in the 19th century. He worked for the Harvard College observatory, using a telescope with a grid etched into the glass eyepiece and sketching his astronomical observations on grid paper.”

The Observable Universe –“Only a Tiny Fraction of the Aftermath of the Big Bang”, reports The Daily Galaxy. “It boggles the mind that over 90% of the galaxies in the Universe have yet to be studied. Who knows what we will find when we observe these galaxies with the next generation of telescopes,” says astronomer Christopher Conselice, who led the 2016 team that discovered that there are ten times more galaxies in the universe than previously thought, and an even wider space to search for extraterrestrial life.”

A Particle Physics Experiment Might Have Directly Observed Dark Energy, reports Paul Sutter for Universe Today.

Distant ‘Requiem’ supernova will be visible again in 2037, astronomers predict –The supernova is visible thanks to a giant galaxy cluster that acts like a magnifying glass, reports Space.com

Is Dark Energy Evolving? –Ancient Quasars May Offer the Answer, reports The Daily Galaxy. “Observational cosmologists are actively searching for a “new physics” that may solve the enduring enigma of our rapidly expanding Universe. Quasars are the ancient cores of galaxies where a supermassive black hole is actively pulling in matter from its surroundings at very intense rates may old the clue to solving the mystery.

How telescopes make the universe self-aware –Telescopes are time machines. Someday, they could take us to a time before starlight. “We are looking for the first light that turned on at the very beginning of cosmic time,” says Caitlin Casey, a UT Austin astronomer who has been approved to use the James Webb Space Telescope.

Mystery of Jupiter’s Metallic Oceans and Enormous Magnetic Field, reports The Daily Galaxy. ““Juno is showing us that connections between the interior—where metallic hydrogen can be found—and the atmosphere are stronger than we thought,” Dr. Michael Wong  told The Daily Galaxy. 

Cosmology, next-gen –The last century has grown our understanding of the universe from speculation to precision science – and raised fundamental questions, reports Cosmos

This May Be the First Planet Found Orbiting 3 Stars at Once –It’s called a circumtriple planet, and evidence that one exists suggests that planet formation is less unusual than once believed, reports the New York Times. An artist’s animation of the three stars’ movement at the center of GW Orionis, based on a computer model using observations made by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope. Animation by ESO/Exeter/Kraus et al./L. Calçada

One of the largest comets ever seen is headed our way –-Comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein offers a rare opportunity for a generation of astronomers to study an object from the extreme edges of the solar system, reports National Geographic.

Strange mathematical term changes our entire view of black holes. Black holes keep getting weirder, reports Paul Sutter for Live Science .

“Emergence of Human Ancestors” -A 300,000 Year-Long Beam of Energy Burst from Milky Way’s Black Hole, reports The Daily Galaxy. “We always thought of our Galaxy as an inactive galaxy, with a not so bright center,” said Magda Guglielmo from the University of Sydney about 2019 Hubble Space Telescope data showing that a titanic, expanding beam of energy sprang from close to the SgrA*, the supermassive black hole in the center of the Milky Way, 3.5 million years ago, shooting a cone-shaped burst of radiation through both poles of the Galaxy and beyond into deep space.

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“We started asking ourselves why we had not found it earlier, because it’s very extreme in its properties and very bright,” says Michael McDonald, assistant professor of physics in MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research about the discovery of a sprawling new galaxy cluster hiding in plain sight. “It’s because we had preconceived notions of what a cluster should look like. And this didn’t conform to that, so we missed it.”

Led Astray by a Blazingly Bright Quasar

The cluster, which sits a mere 2.4 billion light years from Earth, is made up of hundreds of individual galaxies and surrounds an extremely active supermassive black hole, or quasar, that goes by the name PKS1353-341. The quasar is intensely bright—so bright that for decades astronomers observing it in the night sky have assumed that the quasar was quite alone in its corner of the universe, shining out as a solitary light source from the center of a single galaxy.

But as the MIT team reported in the Astrophysical Journal, the quasar’s light is so bright that it has obscured hundreds of galaxies clustered around it. An X-ray image (in blue) with a zoom in optical image (gold and brown) below shows the central galaxy of the hidden cluster, which harbors a supermassive black hole. (Taweewat Somboonpanyakul).

In their 2018 paper, MIT researchers estimated that there are hundreds of individual galaxies in the cluster, which, all told, is about as massive as 690 trillion suns. Our Milky Way galaxy, for comparison, weighs in at around 400 billion solar masses.

The team also calculates that the quasar at the center of the cluster is 46 billion times brighter than the sun. Its extreme luminosity is likely the result of a temporary feeding frenzy: As an immense disk of material swirls around the quasar, big chunks of matter from the disk are falling in and feeding it, causing the black hole to radiate huge amounts of energy out as light.

“Wreaking Havoc” –Quasars Unleash Massive Tsunami’s ‘Lighting Up Galaxies Like Christmas Trees’

Just a Blip?

“This might be a short-lived phase that clusters go through, where the central black hole has a quick meal, gets bright, and then fades away again,” says study author McDonald. “This could be a blip that we just happened to see,” McDonald notes.” In a million years, this might look like a diffuse fuzzball.”

McDonald and his colleagues believe the discovery of this hidden cluster shows there may be other similar galaxy clusters hiding behind extremely bright objects that astronomers have miscatalogued as single light sources. The researchers are now looking for more hidden galaxy clusters, which could be important clues to estimating how much matter there is in the universe and how fast the universe is expanding.

The paper’s co-authors include lead author and MIT graduate student Taweewat Somboonpanyakul, Henry Lin of Princeton University, Brian Stalder of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, and Antony Stark of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

The Mystery

In 2012, McDonald and others discovered the Phoenix cluster, one of the most massive and luminous galaxy clusters in the universe. The mystery to McDonald was why this cluster, which was so intensely bright and in a region of the sky that is easily observable, hadn’t been found before.

This Chandra image on the left shows the newly discovered Phoenix Cluster, located about 5.7 billion light years from Earth. This composite includes an X-ray image from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory in purple, an optical image from the 4m Blanco telescope in red, green and blue, and an ultraviolet (UV) image from NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) in blue. The Chandra data reveal hot gas in the cluster and the optical and UV images show galaxies in the cluster and in nearby parts of the sky.

For the most part, he says astronomers have assumed that galaxy clusters look “fluffy,” giving off a very diffuse signal in the X-ray band, unlike brighter, point-like sources, which have been interpreted as extremely active quasars or black holes.

“The images are either all points, or fluffs, and the fluffs are these giant million-light-year balls of hot gas that we call clusters, and the points are black holes that are accreting gas and glowing as this gas spirals in,” McDonald says. “This idea that you could have a rapidly accreting black hole at the center of a cluster—we didn’t think that was something that happened in nature.”

But the Phoenix discovery proved that galaxy clusters could indeed host immensely active black holes, prompting McDonald to wonder: Could there be other nearby galaxy clusters that were simply misidentified?

To answer that question, the researchers set up a survey named CHiPS, for Clusters Hiding in Plain Sight, which is designed to reevaluate X-ray images taken in the past.

“We start from archival data of point sources, or objects that were super bright in the sky,” Somboonpanyakul explains. “We are looking for point sources inside fluffy things.”

For every point source that was previously identified, the researchers noted their coordinates and then studied them more directly using the Magellan Telescope, a powerful optical telescope that sits in the mountains of Chile. If they observed a higher-than-expected number of galaxies surrounding the point source (a sign that the gas may stem from a cluster of galaxies), the researchers looked at the source again, using NASA’s space-based Chandra X-Ray Observatory, to identify an extended, diffuse source around the main point source.

Rule Breakers

“Some 90 percent of these sources turned out to not be clusters,” McDonald says. “But the fun thing is, the small number of things we are finding are sort of rule-breakers.”

The paper reports the first results of the CHiPS survey, which has so far confirmed one new galaxy cluster hosting an extremely active central black hole.

“The brightness of the black hole might be related to how much it’s eating,” McDonald says. “This is thousands of times brighter than a typical black hole at the center of a cluster, so it’s very extreme in its feeding. We have no idea how long this has been going on or will continue to go on. Finding more of these things will help us understand, is this an important process, or just a weird thing that there’s only one in the universe.”

The team plans to comb through more X-ray data in search of galaxy clusters that might have been missed the first time around.

“If the CHiPS survey can find enough of these, we will be able to pinpoint the specific rate of accretion onto the black hole where it switches from generating primarily radiation to generating mechanical energy, the two primary forms of energy output from black holes,” says Brian McNamara, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Waterloo, who was not involved in the research. “This particular object is interesting because it bucks the trend. Either the central supermassive black hole’s mass is much lower than expected, or the structure of the accretion flow is abnormal. The oddballs are the ones that teach us the most.”

The Phoenix Cluster –“Reveals ‘Dark Skeleton’ of the Universe”

May Help Estimate How Fast the Universe is Expanding

In addition to shedding light on a black hole’s feeding, or accretion behavior, the detection of more galaxy clusters may help to estimate how fast the universe is expanding.

“Take for instance, the Titanic,” McDonald says. “If you know where the two biggest pieces landed, you could map them backward to see where the ship hit the iceberg. In the same way, if you know where all the galaxy clusters are in the universe, which are the biggest pieces in the universe, and how big they are, and you have some information about what the universe looked like in the beginning, which we know from the Big Bang, then you could map out how the universe expanded.”

The Last Word –Thousands of Previously-Unknown Clusters Discovered

In an email to The Daily Galaxy, physicist Antony Stark at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who was a member of the discovery team, wrote: “Cosmic Microwave Background surveys at millimeter wavelengths by the South Pole Telescope and the Atacama Cosmology Telescope are discovering thousands of previously-unknown clusters of galaxies. The clusters are detected via the Sunyaev-Zel’dovich effect. For some regions of the sky (about 15% of the whole sky) we now have a complete census of all galaxy clusters above a certain mass at all redshifts. This result can be directly compared to what is expected from the current standard theory of cosmology, the Lambda Cold Dark Matter Big Bang, giving us accurate measures of the amount of matter in the Universe, its rate of expansion, and its eventual fate.”

“Since the original article was published, we have found at least one other cluster similar to the Phoenix cluster, MIT’s McDonald told The Daily Galaxy. “Clusters such as this are important,” he explains, “as they reveal biases in how we identify clusters — when they don’t look like what we expect, we may overlook them. As the largest bound objects in the Universe, galaxy clusters are sensitive probes into the very nature of the cosmos, but if we are missing even a small number of the total population we may infer a different universe than the one we live in.”

The image at the top of the page shows the Phoenix cluster, an enormous accumulation of about 1,000 galaxies, located 5.7 billion light years from Earth. At its center lies a massive galaxy, which appears to be spitting out stars at a rate of about 1,000 per year. 

Maxwell Moe, astrophysicist, NASA Einstein Fellow, University of Arizona via Michael McDonald, Antony Stark, and  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Hubble Image at the top of the page: was made by combining data from Chandra, Hubble and the VLA. X-rays from Chandra depict hot gas in purple and radio emission from the VLA features jets in red. Optical light data from Hubble show galaxies (in yellow), and filaments of cooler gas where stars are forming (in light blue).

Maxwell Moe, astrophysicist, NASA Einstein Fellow, University of Arizona. Max can be found two nights a week probing the mysteries of the Universe at the Kitt Peak National Observatory. Max received his Ph.D in astronomy from Harvard University in 2015.

Astronomers may soon have the answer to what is perhaps the greatest mystery of modern science –is dark energy a uniform force across space and time, or has its strength evolved over eons?

The universe is not only expanding – it is accelerating outward, driven by what is commonly referred to as “dark energy.” The term is a poetic analogy to the label for dark matter, the mysterious material that dominates the matter in the Universe and that really is dark because it does not radiate light (it reveals itself via its gravitational influence on galaxies).

Gravity or the Vacuum?

Two explanations are commonly advanced to explain dark energy. The first, as Albert Einstein once speculated, is that gravity itself causes objects to repel one another when they are far enough apart. Einstein introduced a non-zero “cosmological constant” term to his field equations of general relativity in 1917 in order to counterbalance the inward pull of gravity, contriving a static, steady-state universe. However, the cosmological constant was abandoned around 1930 when Edwin Hubble demonstrated that the Universe is expanding. A non-zero cosmological constant was reintroduced in the late 1990s as a source of dark energy to explain the recently discovered outward acceleration of the universe. 

The second explanation hypothesizes (based on our current understanding of elementary particle physics) that the vacuum has properties that provide energy to the cosmos for acceleration. Within a random fixed volume of the Universe, roughly 5% is normal baryonic matter such as atoms that compose the stars and planets, 27% is the mysterious attractive dark matter, and 68% comprises the vacuum energy density of the repulsive and even more elusive dark energy. 

For several decades cosmologies have successfully used a relativistic equation with dark matter and dark energy to explain increasingly precise observations about the cosmic microwave background, the cosmological distribution of galaxies, and other large-scale cosmic features. But as the observations have improved, some apparent discrepancies have emerged.

Is Dark Energy Evolving? –Ancient Quasars May Offer the Answer

Planck Satellite Data vs Baryon Acoustic Oscillation Experiments

One of the most notable is the age of the universe: there is an almost 10% difference between measurements inferred from the Planck satellite data and those from so-called Baryon Acoustic Oscillation experiments. The former relies on far-infrared and submillimeter measurements of the cosmic microwave background and the latter on spatial distribution of visible galaxies.

Harvard-Smithsonian CfA astronomer Daniel Eisenstein was a member of a large consortium of scientists who suggest that most of the difference between these two methods, which sample different components of the cosmic fabric, could be reconciled if the dark energy were not constant in time.

The scientists apply sophisticated statistical techniques to the relevant cosmological datasets and conclude that if the dark energy term varied slightly as the universe expanded (though still subject to other constraints), it could explain the discrepancy.

Elephant in the Cosmos –Massive Gravity Replaces Dark Energy

Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument Survey

Direct evidence for such a variation would be a dramatic breakthrough, but so far has not been obtained. One of the team’s major new experiments, the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) Survey, could settle the matter, helping astronomers  better understand the repulsive force associated with “dark energy” that drives the acceleration of the expansion of the universe across vast cosmic distances.

Uniform Across Space and Time or Evolved?

The survey will reconstruct 11 billion years of cosmic history. It could answer the first and most basic question about dark energy: is it a uniform force across space and time, or has its strength evolved over eons?

The  five-year quest to map the universe and unravel the mysteries of “dark energy” began officially May 17, 2021 at Kitt Peak National Observatory near Tucson, Arizona. To complete its quest, DESI will capture and study the light from some 30-million galaxies. Scientists say DESI will help them construct a 3D map of the universe with unprecedented detail,  reaching back to objects only a few billion years after the big bang, and should be completed sometime in the mid 2020’s.

Astrophysicist and member of the XENON collaboration, Rafael Lang at Purdue University  wrote in an email to The Daily Galaxy: “the groundwork for what may turn out to be yet another revolution in cosmology. These colleagues are mapping out our universe to an amazing precision, and that has far reaching consequences. For example, cosmology always had this issue with the “Distance Ladder”, where we needed to work out our way in baby steps out into the cosmic expanse to draw our map as we went out. Get one early turn wrong, and your map is off, getting you completely lost. 

The Great Unknown –Is Dark Energy New Exotic Matter or an ET Force Field?

Drawing the Cosmic Map

“Now, for example,” writes Lang. “these dark energy surveys can measure what is called Baryon-Acoustic Oscillations, across the universe. These are like compass points along every turn and corner, an independent confirmation that our map is right, if you like, they are now reading the signs in our cosmic landscape. That really solidifies our pathfinding around the cosmos, our drawing of the cosmic map. And in mapping out the entire universe with these amazing instruments, that better understanding, that better map is what allows them to measure even small oddities. Like, not only if the landscape ever so slightly slops, to stay in the picture, but to map out how that slope changes as you walk around. And that is exactly what we want to know about Dark Energy: Does it change as we travel across the universe? Was it always the same? Is it truly just a constant property of space, or is it something dynamic, something that changes as the universe evolves? We don’t know, and these measurements have the potential to tell us. This is extremely exciting. We have no clue about the Nature of Dark Energy, so measuring it across the universe will tell us a lot about what’s going on.”

Dark Energy May Not Be the Cosmological Constant as Theorized by Einstein

“Current observations from both satellite studies of the cosmic microwave background and ground-based survey are consistent with a dark energy that behaves like Einstein’s cosmological constant,” astrophysicist Richard Ellis at University College London and former director of the Caltech’s Palomar Observatory told The Daily Galaxy. “DESI and other ambitious upcoming ground-based surveys such as the Subaru Prime Focus Spectrograph,” he noted, “will provide a sufficient increase in the number of spectroscopic redshifts to constrain possible alternatives and even time variations of dark energy. Regardless of what emerges, these will be crucial results for fundamental physics.”

The Last Word

“While we have successfully pushed the boundaries of what was possible in cosmology using current generation experiments like the Dark Energy Survey, new experiments like the Vera C. Rubin Observatory LSST and Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope are on the horizon and will fundamentally change the scope of what is possible, Duke University astrophysicist, Michael Troxel, wrote in an email to The Daily Galaxy. “In terms of the impact of dark energy on the evolution of large-scale structure, we will be able see much larger volumes of space and further back in time. For the first time, we’ll be able to precisely constrain not just the average effect of dark energy over time with these kinds of surveys, but also how dark energy has potentially evolved over time, which may finally reveal conclusively if Einstein’s cosmological constant is correct. The Rubin Observatory in particular will observe a huge volume of space regularly every few days, enabling the study of how transient objects in the Universe like supernovae, which we use to help map the expansion history of the Universe, are changing over small timescales. It is hard to predict exactly what this flood of high quality data will enable us to discover, but there is no potential for a boring outcome.”

Maxwell Moe, astrophysicist, NASA Einstein Fellow, University of Arizona via Michael Troxel,  Richard Ellis, Rafael Lang, Nature and  The Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics 

Image at top of page: Shutterstock License

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Recent Galaxy Reports:

Unmistakable Signal of Alien Life to What Happens if China Makes First Contact?

Clues to Alien Life to A Galaxy 100 x Size of Milky Way 

Cracks in Einstein’s Theory of Gravity to Colossal Shock Wave Bigger than the Milky Way 

Monster Comet Arriving from the Oort Cloud to Black Hole Apocalypse 

Enigmas of Stephen Hawking’s Blackboard to Why the Universe and Life Exist 

Einstein’s Critics to NASA Theologians Prepare for Alien Contact

Mind-Bending New Multiverse Theory to Dark-Matter Asteroids of the Milky Way 

Mysterious Expanding Regions of Dark Matter to Are Black Holes Holograms

Maxwell Moe, astrophysicist, NASA Einstein Fellow, University of Arizona. Max can be found two nights a week probing the mysteries of the Universe at the Kitt Peak National Observatory. Max received his Ph.D in astronomy from Harvard University in 2015.

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Is Dark Energy Evolving? –Ancient Quasars May Offer the Answer

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Did Black Holes Shape Human Evolution to Mystery of Dead Galaxies

Read about The Daily Galaxy editorial team here

An enormous amount of gravity from a cluster of distant galaxies causes space to curve so much that light from more distant galaxies is bent. This “gravitational lensing” effect has allowed University of Copenhagen astronomers to observe the same exploding star –SN Requiem–in three different places in the heavens, and may help solve the mystery of cosmic expansion and reveal the nature of dark matter and dark energy.

Fourth Image Predicted

The Copenhagen team predicts that a fourth image of the same explosion will appear in the sky by 2037. The study, published in the journal Nature Astronomy, provides a unique opportunity to explore not just the supernova itself, but the expansion of our universe.

One of the most fascinating aspects of Einstein’s famed theory of relativity is that gravity is no longer described as a force, but as a “curvature” of space itself. The curvature of space caused by heavy objects does not just cause planets to spin around stars, but can also bend the trajectory of light beams.

Galaxy Clusters and Curvature of Space Create an Illusion

The heaviest of all structures in the universe—galaxy clusters made up of hundreds or thousands of galaxies—can bend light from more distant galaxies behind them so much that they appear to be in a completely different place than they actually are.

But that’s not the whole story: light can take several paths around a galaxy cluster, making it possible for us to get lucky and make two or more sightings of the same galaxy in different places in the sky using a powerful telescope.

Gravity from the MACS J0138 galaxy cluster shown at the top of the page curves space so much that light from a galaxy behind it is bent down towards us in several different ways. To the left is a picture of the cluster from 2016 in which light from the same exploding star—a supernova—is seen in three places in the night sky. To the right, is the same area in 2019, where the supernova is now gone. Astronomers from the Niels Bohr Institute have calculated that it will reappear in 2037. Credit: S. Rodney (U. of S. Carolina), G. Brammer (Cosmic Dawn Center), J. DePasquale (STScI), P. Laursen (Cosmic Dawn Center)

“Seeding the Cosmos for Life” –From Supernova to Super Bubbles 

Single Galaxy Captured in Four Different Places 

Some routes around a galaxy cluster are longer than others, and therefore take more time. The slower the route, the stronger the gravity; yet another astonishing consequence of relativity. This staggers the amount of time needed for light to reach us, and thereby the different images that we see, has allowed a team of astronomers at the Cosmic Dawn Center—a basic research center run by the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen and DTU Space at the Technical University of Denmark—along with their international partners, to observe a single galaxy in no less than four different places in the sky.

The observations were made using the infrared wavelength range of the Hubble Space Telescope. By analyzing the Hubble data, researchers noted three bright light sources in a background galaxy that were evident in a previous set of observations from 2016, which disappeared when Hubble revisited the area in 2019. These three sources turned out to be several images of a single star whose life ended in a colossal explosion known as a supernova.

The light of a galaxy with an exploding star takes different paths around an intermediate galaxy cluster before it reaches us. Astronomers from the Cosmic Dawn Center, among others, have calculated that one route is about 21 light years longer than the other. As such, they predict that come 2037, we should be able to spot the supernova yet again. Credit: Peter Laursen, Cosmic Dawn Center).

“A single star exploded 10 billion years ago, long before our own sun was formed. The flash of light from that explosion has just reached us,” explains Associate Professor Gabriel Brammer of the Cosmic Dawn Center, who led the study.

Mirrored Images of “SN-Requiem”

The supernova, nicknamed “SN-Requiem,” can be seen in three of the four “mirrored images” of the galaxy. Each image presents a different view of the explosive supernova’s development. In the final two images, it has not yet exploded. But, by examining how galaxies are distributed within the galaxy cluster and how these images are distorted by curved space, it is actually possible to calculate how “delayed” these images are.

“The fourth image of the galaxy is roughly 21 years behind, which should allow us to see the supernova explode one more time, sometime around 2037,” explains Brammer.

Sheds Light on Unsolved Cosmological Riddle

Should we get to witness the SN-Requiem explosion again in 2037, it will not only confirm our understanding of gravity, but also help to shed light on another cosmological riddle that has emerged in the last few years, namely the expansion of our universe.

We know that the universe is expanding, and that different methods allow us to measure by how fast. The problem is that the various measurement methods do not all produce the same result, even when measurement uncertainties are taken into account. Could our observational techniques be flawed, or—more interestingly—will we need to revise our understanding of fundamental physics and cosmology?

“Understanding the structure of the universe is going to be a top priority for the main earth-based observatories and international space organizations over the next decade. Studies planned for the future will cover much of the sky and are expected to reveal dozens or even hundreds of rare gravitational lenses with supernovae like SN Requiem,” explained Brammer. “Accurate measurements of delays from such sources provide unique and reliable determinations of cosmic expansion and can even help reveal the properties of dark matter and dark energy.”

“The Case of the Missing Dark Matter” –Hubble Solves a Mystery

Connects Our Late Universe with the Early Universe

“Astronomers currently have a very good cosmological model, called the ‘Lambda CDM’ model that incorporates dark energy (lambda) and cold dark matter (CDM),” wrote first author Steven Rodney, assistant professor of astronomy at the University of South Carolina, in an email to The Daily Galaxy. 

“This model, if correct, can provide a way to connect the ‘late’ universe with the ‘early’ universe. By the late universe I mean all the galaxies and supernovae and whatnot that formed after the universe had expanded and cooled over a few billion years,” Rodney explained in his email. “For the early universe I mean the era that happened within a few hundred thousand years after the big bang, and most importantly includes the cosmic microwave background (CMB). The current challenge of the ‘Hubble constant tension’ is that some of the most precise measurements of the current rate of cosmic expansion (that is the Hubble-LeMaître constant, H0) are in disagreement. Observations using stars and supernovae in the late universe give one number for H0, while observations using the CMB give a different number. This could be because one (or both) of these observations have some mistakes, like bad assumptions or errors in the setup. Or it could be that our Lambda CDM model that is supposed to be the connecting bridge has some fatal flaw in it. That latter possibility may require us to revise our understanding of dark , dark matter or some aspect of fundamental physics.” 

Hubble Unveils a Mystery –“New Physics Needed to Explain Forces That Shaped the Cosmos”

A Powerful Test of Cosmological Models

Steven Rodney elaborates in his email to The Daily Galaxy: “The time delay between appearances of a distant supernovae provides a new way to test our cosmological models. A strongly lensed supernova like SN Requiem appears as multiple points on the sky (multiple images). When we find one of these rare events, we can make a prediction for when the final image will appear. That prediction incorporates the cosmological model (Lambda CDM) and the Hubble constant. So we basically wait on Earth with a stopwatch, and measure the time until the final reappearance. Then we compare that measured time to the predicted time, and that gives us new information about our dark matter and dark energy cosmic model. Any individual lensed supernova is not going to definitely resolve these cosmic mysteries, though. We really need many dozens or hundreds of them, and they should be combined with the well-studied lensed quasars to get a richer and more powerful test of our cosmological models.”

Source: Rodney, S.A. et al. A gravitationally lensed supernova with an observable two-decade time delay. Nat Astron (2021). doi.org/10.1038/s41550-021-01450-9

Maxwell Moe, astrophysicist, NASA Einstein Fellow, University of Arizona via Steven Rodney and NASA.

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Maxwell Moe, astrophysicist, NASA Einstein Fellow, University of Arizona. Max can be found two nights a week probing the mysteries of the Universe at the Kitt Peak National Observatory. Max received his Ph.D in astronomy from Harvard University in 2015.

In August of 2019 at the Keck Observatory near the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii,  astrophysicist Tuan Do, Deputy Director of the UCLA Galactic Center Group, observed that in the space of two hours, the brightness of Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the heart of our galaxy, usually a passive flickering object about twenty-five thousand light years from Earth, increased 75-fold – the brightest since scientists began studying it more than 20 years ago.

Flickers like a candle

“It was strange because I had never seen the black hole that bright before,” said Do –”it flickers like a candle, sometimes even too faint to see. Maybe more gas is falling into the black hole and that leads to higher amounts of accretion, which leads to it being brighter,”

Sagittarius A* Milky Way Galaxy’s Black Hole –“Suddenly Flashing 75-Times Brighter”

Now, the feeding patterns of black holes offer insight into their size, researchers report. A new study revealed that the flickering in the brightness observed in actively feeding supermassive black holes is related to their mass.

“A bit like a burning campfire”

“You can think of an accretion disk of a black hole a bit like a burning campfire. The fire does have an average temperature, but it flickers somewhat randomly,” Colin Burke at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign told The Daily Galaxy. “Just as a campfire is perturbed by the wind,” he explains, “there are many mechanisms which could perturb the accretion disk, such as coupling to magnetic fields. As the disk is perturbed, instabilities in the disk may result in density and temperature fluctuations. The thermal timescale is the time it takes for the disk to restore thermal equilibrium due to temperature perturbations. This may be related to the timescales of the flux variations we see.” 

Supermassive black holes are millions to billions of times more massive than the sun and usually reside at the center of massive galaxies. When dormant and not feeding on the gas and stars surrounding them, SMBHs emit very little light; the only way astronomers can detect them is through their gravitational influences on stars and gas in their vicinity. However, in the early universe, when SMBHs were rapidly growing, they were actively feeding – or accreting – materials at intensive rates and emitting an enormous amount of radiation – sometimes outshining the entire galaxy in which they reside, the researchers said.  

A new study, led by Burke and professor Yue Shen, uncovered a definitive relationship between the mass of actively feeding SMBHs and the characteristic timescale in the light-flickering pattern. The findings are published in the journal Science.

Physical processes that are not yet understood

The observed light from an accreting SMBH is not constant. Due to physical processes that are not yet understood, it displays a ubiquitous flickering over timescales ranging from hours to decades. “There have been many studies that explored possible relations of the observed flickering and the mass of the SMBH, but the results have been inconclusive and sometimes controversial,” Burke said.

“Worlds in Collision” – Reawakening Milky Way’s Supermassive Black Hole

“The official answer to the question why do the supermassive black holes flare, is nobody knows,” astronomer Yue Shen University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign told The Daily Galaxy, “but the general wisdom is that the flaring  should be related to certain instabilities or sudden changes in the accretion flow around the SMBH. It could be instabilities related to magnetic fields, it could be caused by a clump of gas suddenly added to the fueling of the black hole. I think by observing more of these flares to quantify their frequency and characteristics (e.g., detailed time profile, multi-wavelength properties), we will understand them better and hopefully build reasonable physical models to explain them.

Quasars are feasting, while the Milky Way SMBH is “snacking”

“I should also point out though,” adds Shen, “that the Milky Way center SMBH is not as active as quasars (my research focuses on the latter). Quasars are accreting SMBHs that are feasting, while the Milky Way SMBH is “snacking” — their accretion rates differ by orders of magnitude.”

The team compiled a large data set of actively feeding SMBHs to study the variability pattern of flickering. They identified a characteristic timescale, over which the pattern changes, that tightly correlates with the mass of the SMBH. The researchers then compared the results with accreting white dwarfs, the remnants of stars like our sun, and found that the same timescale-mass relation holds, even though white dwarfs are millions to billions times less massive than SMBHs.

Random fluctuations 

The light flickers are random fluctuations in a black hole’s feeding process, the researchers said. Astronomers can quantify this flickering pattern by measuring the power of the variability as a function of timescales. For accreting SMBHs, the variability pattern changes from short timescales to long timescales. This transition of variability pattern happens at a characteristic timescale that is longer for more massive black holes.

The team compared black hole feeding to our eating or drinking activity by equating this transition to a human belch. Babies frequently burp while drinking milk, while adults can hold in the burp for a more extended amount of time. Black holes kind of do the same thing while feeding, they said.

Universal Processes

“These results suggest that the processes driving the flickering during accretion are universal, whether the central object is a supermassive black hole or a much more lightweight white dwarf,” Shen said.

“The firm establishment of a connection between the observed light flicker and fundamental properties of the accretor will certainly help us better understand accretion processes,” said Yan-Fei Jiang, a researcher at the Flatiron Institute and study co-author.

Astrophysical black holes come in a broad spectrum of mass and size. In between the population of stellar-mass black holes, which weigh less than several tens of times the mass of the sun, and SMBHs, there is a population of black holes called intermediate-mass black holes that weigh between about 100 and 100,000 times the mass of the sun.

Seeds of SMBHs?  Intermediate-mass black holes 

IMBHs are expected to form in large numbers through the history of the universe, and they may provide the seeds necessary to grow into SMBHs later. However, observationally this population of IMBHs is surprisingly elusive. There is only one indisputably confirmed IMBH that weighs about 150 times the mass of the sun. But that IMBH was serendipitously discovered by the gravitational wave radiation from the coalescence of two less-massive black holes.

“Now that there is a correlation between the flickering pattern and the mass of the central accreting object, we can use it to predict what the flickering signal from an IMBH might look like,” Burke said.

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory

Astronomers worldwide are waiting for the official kickoff of an era of massive surveys that monitor the dynamic and variable sky. The Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time will survey the sky over a decade and collect light flickering data for billions of objects, starting in late 2023.

“Mining the LSST data set to search for flickering patterns that are consistent with accreting IMBHs has the potential to discover and fully understand this long-sought mysterious population of black holes,” said co-author Xin Liu, an astronomy professor at the University of Illinois.

This study is a collaboration with astronomy and physics professor Charles Gammie and astronomy postdoctoral researcher Qian Yang, the Illinois Center for Advanced Study of the Universe, and researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara; the University of St. Andrews, U.K.; the Flatiron Institute; the University of Southampton, U.K.; the United States Naval Academy; and the University of Durham, U.K.

Burke, Shen and Liu also are affiliated with the Center for Astrophysical Surveys at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at Illinois.

Avi Shporer, Research Scientist, MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research via Colin Burke, Yue Shen, and  University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. 

Image at top of page: X-ray brightness of a black hole shows periodic fluctuations, ESA/XMM-NEWTON; G. MINIUTTI & M. GIUSTINI (CAB, CSIC-INTA, SPAIN)

Avi Shporer, Research Scientist, MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. A Google Scholar, Avi was formerly a NASA Sagan Fellow at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). His motto, not surprisingly, is a quote from Carl Sagan: “Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”

Up until a beautiful May evening in 2019 at Hawaii’s Keck Observatory, Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), the Milky Way’s central supermassive black hole was usually a passive flickering object that appeared like a massive, dormant volcano or a sleeping monster. But suddenly Sgr A*, located twenty-five thousand light years from Earth, brightened 75-fold. “The black hole is always variable,” observed astronomer Tuan Do, “but this was the brightest we’ve seen in the infrared so far. It was probably even brighter before we started observing that night!” 

“The black hole was so bright I at first mistook it for the star S0-2, because I had never seen Sgr A* that bright,” Do said in an interview with ScienceAlert.

Eruptions as Bright as an Entire Galaxy

In a similar experience, astronomers at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics using the SRG/eROSITA all-sky survey data,  found two previously quiescent galaxies that now show quasi-periodic eruptions. The nuclei of these galaxies light up in X-rays every few hours, reaching peak luminosities comparable to that of an entire galaxy.

The origin of this pulsating behavior is unclear. A possible cause is a faint star or white dwarf orbiting too close to the central black hole, where tidal forces can begin to shred the stellar object apart.  When a star comes too close to a very supermassive black hole with a mass exceeding 100 million solar masses, the black hole’s tidal forces completely disrupt the star in single passing. Such tidal disruption events produce powerful luminous transients that are sometimes mistaken for supernovae, and they never repeat as the star is completely destroyed.

The situation may be different for lower mass supermassive back holes, like Sgr A* at the center of our Milky Way, which is only 4 million solar masses. As Sgr A* and galactic nuclei exhibiting quasi-period eruptions are relatively close and small, this discovery could help scientists to better understand how black holes are activated in low-mass galaxies.

Sagittarius A* Milky Way Galaxy’s Black Hole –“Suddenly Flashing 75-Times Brighter”

The image above shows the first galaxy found with quasi-periodic eruptions in the eROSITA all-sky data, the NICER X-ray light-curve is overlaid in green. The galaxy was identified as 2MASS 02314715-1020112 at a redshift of z~0.05. About 18.5 hours pass between the peaks of the X-ray outbursts. ( MPE; optical image: DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys/D. Lang -Perimeter Institute)

Quasars or “active galactic nuclei” (AGN) are often called the lighthouses of the distant universe. The luminosity of their central region, where a very massive black hole accretes large amounts of material, can be thousands of times higher than that of a galaxy like our Milky Way. However, unlike a lighthouse, AGN shine continuously.

“In the eROSITA all-sky survey, we have now found two previously quiescent galaxies with huge, almost periodic sharp pulses in their X-ray emission,” says Riccardo Arcodia, Ph.D. student at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE), who is the first author of the study now published in Nature. These kinds of objects are fairly new: only two such sources were known before, found either serendipitously or in archival data in the past couple of years. “As this new type of erupting sources seems to be peculiar in X-rays, we decided to use eROSITA as a blind survey and immediately found two more,” he adds.

Sudden, Repeating X-ray Eruptions

The eROSITA telescope currently scans the entire sky in X-rays and the continuous data stream is well suited to find transient events such as these eruptions. Both new sources discovered by eROSITA showed high-amplitude X-ray variability within just a few hours, which was confirmed by follow-up observations with the XMM-Newton and NICER X-ray telescopes. Contrary to the two known similar objects, the new sources found by eROSITA were not previously active galactic nuclei.

“These were normal, average low-mass galaxies with inactive black holes,” explains Andrea Merloni at MPE, principal investigator of eROSITA. “Without these sudden, repeating X-ray eruptions we would have ignored them.” The scientists now have the chance to explore the vicinity of the smallest supermassive black holes. These have 100,000 to 10 million times the mass of our Sun.

“There’s a New Beast Out There” –Enormously Powerful Anomaly Found in Tiny Galaxies

Quasi-periodic emission, such as the one discovered by eROSITA, is typically associated with binary systems. If these eruptions are indeed triggered by the presence of an orbiting object, its mass has to be much smaller than the black hole’s—of the order of a star or even a white dwarf, which might be partially disrupted by the huge tidal forces close to the black hole at each passage.

Optical image of the second galaxy (above) found with quasi-periodic eruptions in the eROSITA all-sky data, the XMM-Newton X-ray light-curve is overlaided in magenta. The galaxy was identified as 2MASX J02344872-4419325 at a redshift of z~0.02. This source shows much narrower and more frequent eruptions, approximately every 2.4 hours. Credit: MPE; optical image: DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys/D. Lang (Perimeter Institute)

“We still do not know what causes these X-ray eruptions,” admits Arcodia. “But we know that the black hole’s neighborhood was quiet until recently, so a pre-existing accretion disk as the one present in active galaxies is not required to trigger these phenomena.” 

“Billion Dollar Question”

“You are asking me the billion dollar question,” Arcodia wrote The Daily Galaxy in an email asking if he could offer any conjectures about what could cause these X-ray eruptions, if not by an orbiting object? “The orbiting object scenario (be it much smaller than the central supermassive black hole or a bit bigger than we suggested) is indeed still a conjecture at this point. The strength of it is that we can test it with data incoming over the next year. And truth is, if we’ll disfavor it I have very little left in the ideas tank at this stage, but I am confident that theorists in the community will come through, as theory and observations often march together providing input one to the other.”

The Invisible Galaxy –“Tens of Millions of Enigmatic, Dark Objects Lurking in the Milky Way”

Future X-ray observations will help to constrain or rule out the “orbiting object scenario” and to monitor possible changes in the orbital period. These kinds of objects could also be observable with gravitational waves signals, opening up new possibilities in multi-messenger astrophysics.

Maxwell Moe, astrophysicist, NASA Einstein Fellow, University of Arizona via Max Planck Society and Nature

Maxwell Moe, astrophysicist, NASA Einstein Fellow, University of Arizona. Max can be found two nights a week probing the mysteries of the Universe at the Kitt Peak National Observatory. Max received his Ph.D in astronomy from Harvard University in 2015.

In 2019, the Hubble Space Telescope captured an image of one of the brightest known quasars in early universe, a luminous active galactic nucleus (AGN) shining with orders of magnitudes more luminosity than entire galaxies, powered at their hearts by all-consuming black holes shown above as it existed less than a billion years after the Big Bang. Its gargantuan black hole began devouring anything within its gravitational grasp, triggering a burst of star formation –a firestorm of energy equivalent to the light from 600 trillion Suns blazing across the universe.

Discovery of P172+18

Since their discovery in the 1950s, 750,000 of these “quasi-stellar radio sources” have been detected. This week, with the help of the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT), astronomers have announced the discovery of the most distant source of radio emission known to date –a “radio-loud” quasar P172+18– a bright object with powerful jets emitting at radio wavelengths—that is so far away its light has taken 13 billion years to reach us. The discovery could provide important clues to help astronomers understand the early Universe.

P172+18, powered by a black hole about 300 million times more massive than our Sun that is consuming gas at a stunning rate, reports the ESO, “is so distant that light from it has travelled for about 13 billion years to reach us: we see it as it was when the Universe was just around 780 million years old. While more distant quasars have been discovered, this is the first time astronomers have been able to identify the telltale signatures of radio jets in a quasar this early on in the history of the Universe. Only about 10% of quasars—which astronomers classify as “radio-loud”—have jets, which shine brightly at radio frequencies.”

“Big Bang Quasars” –Colossal Black Holes Detected at Dawn of the Cosmos

“The black hole is eating up matter very rapidly, growing in mass at one of the highest rates ever observed,” explains astronomer Chiara Mazzucchelli, Research Fellow at ESO in Chile, who led the discovery together with Eduardo Bañados of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, who studies how the first galaxies and black holes formed and evolved across cosmic time.

Important New Insights

The astronomers think that there’s a link between the rapid growth of supermassive black holes and the powerful radio jets spotted in quasars like P172+18. Studying radio-loud quasars can provide important insights into how black holes in the early Universe grew to their supermassive sizes so quickly after the Big Bang.

“I find it very exciting to discover ‘new’ black holes for the first time, and to provide one more building block to understand the primordial Universe, where we come from, and ultimately ourselves,” says Mazzucchelli.

P172+18 was first recognized as a far-away quasar, after having been previously identified as a radio source, at the Magellan Telescope at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile by Bañados and Mazzucchelli. “As soon as we got the data, we inspected it by eye, and we knew immediately that we had discovered the most distant radio-loud quasar known so far,” says Bañados.

A Short Observation Time

However, owing to a short observation time, the team did not have enough data to study the object in detail. A flurry of observations with other telescopes followed, including with the X-shooter instrument on ESO’s VLT, which allowed them to dig deeper into the characteristics of this quasar, including determining key properties such as the mass of the black hole and how fast it’s eating up matter from its surroundings. Other telescopes that contributed to the study include the National Radio Astronomy Observatory’s Very Large Array and the Keck Telescope in the US.

“This discovery makes me optimistic and I believe—and hope—that the distance record will be broken soon,” says Bañados. Observations with facilities such as ALMA, in which ESO is a partner, and with ESO’s upcoming Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) could help uncover and study more of these early-Universe objects in detail.

This research is presented in the paper “The discovery of a highly accreting, radio-loud quasar at z=6.82” to appear in The Astrophysical Journal.

Maxwell Moe, NASA Einstein Fellow, astrophysicist at University of Arizona, via The ESO.

Image credit: Hubble Space Telescope

Maxwell Moe, astrophysicist, NASA Einstein Fellow, University of Arizona. Max can be found two nights a week probing the mysteries of the Universe at the Kitt Peak National Observatory. Max received his Ph.D in astronomy from Harvard University in 2015.

The beauty and wonders of our planet’s night sky cloaks a violent, ever-changing universe of life, death, and mayhem –“with firestorms of star birth, dying stars rattling the very fabric of space in titanic explosions,” observes Hubble scientists.  “Death-star-like beams of energy blasting out of overfed black holes at nearly the speed of light”, they say, “Hubble has seen them all.” A universe of which the Milky Way is one of 150 billion galaxies. A strange universe, hinted Stephen Hawking. “of shadow galaxies, shadow stars, and even shadow people.”

The Bright Cores of a Galaxy

Each “eye” in this piercing image, said Julianne Dalcanton , a University of Washington professor of astronomy and chair of the Department of Astronomy, led the team that captured the image, “is the bright core of a galaxy, one of which slammed into another. The outline of the face is a ring of young blue stars. Other clumps of new stars form a nose and mouth.”

Hubble observed this unique system as part of a “snapshot” program that takes advantage of occasional gaps in the telescope’s observing schedule to squeeze in additional pictures. The entire system is catalogued as Arp-Madore 2026-424, or AM 2026-424, from the Arp-Madore “Catalogue of Southern Peculiar Galaxies and Associations.”

“Flash of Light from a Faraway Galaxy 4 Billion Years Ago” –First Triple Black Hole Merger

Halton Arp, an artist’s son with a swashbuckling air, published his compendium of 338 unusual-looking interacting galaxies–“The Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies”– in 1966. Arp’s dogged insistence that astronomers had misread the distances to quasars cast doubt on the Big Bang theory of the universe, eventually led to his exile from his peers and the telescopes he loved. He later partnered with astronomer Barry Madore to extend the search for unique galactic encounters in the southern sky, listing several thousand galaxies in the survey, published in 1987.

Arp’s “Unknown Physics”

Arp, reported Dennis Overbye for The New York Times, “found that galaxies with radically different redshifts, and thus at vastly different distances from us, often appeared connected by filaments and bridges of gas. This suggested, he said, that redshift was not always an indication of distance but could be caused by other, unknown physics.”

Head-On Collision Created this Arp-Madore System

Although galaxy collisions are common — especially back in the young universe — most are not head-on smashups, like the collision that likely created this Arp-Madore system. The violent encounter gives the system an arresting “ring” structure for only a short amount of time, about 100 million years. The crash pulled and stretched the galaxies’ disks of gas, dust and stars outward. This action formed the ring of intense star formation that shapes the nose and face.

“A Roll of the Dice”–Rare Ring Galaxies

Ring galaxies are rare; only a few hundred of them reside in our larger cosmic neighborhood. The galaxies have to collide at just the right orientation to create the ring. The galaxies will merge completely in about 1 billion to 2 billion years, hiding their messy past.

The side-by-side juxtaposition of the two central bulges of stars from both galaxies also is unusual. Because the bulges that make the eyes appear to be the same size, it is evidence that two galaxies of nearly equal proportions were involved in the crash, rather than more common collisions where small galaxies are gobbled up by their larger neighbors.

“The Big Bang Galaxy” –‘Wolfe Disk’ Challenges Prior Assumptions

Dalcanton and her collaborators plan to use this innovative Hubble program to take a close look at many other unusual interacting galaxies. The goal is to compile a robust sample of nearby interacting galaxies, which could offer insight into how galaxies grew over time through galactic mergers. By analyzing these detailed Hubble observations, astronomers could then choose which systems are prime targets for follow-up with NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled to launch in 2021.

Maxwell Moe, NASA Einstein Fellow, University of Arizona, via University of Washington and Hubblesite

Image credits: NASA, ESA, and J. Dalcanton, B.F. Williams, and M. Durbin (University of Washington)

Maxwell Moe, astrophysicist, NASA Einstein Fellow, University of Arizona. Max can be found two nights a week probing the mysteries of the Universe at the Kitt Peak National Observatory. Max received his Ph.D in astronomy from Harvard University in 2015.

Something is messing with our universe, and that something is the enduring mystery astronomers have dubbed dark energy –which comprises about two-thirds of the mass and energy in the universe.

Determining how rapidly the universe is expanding is key to understanding our cosmic fate, but with more precise data has come a conundrum, reports the University of California Berkeley: “estimates based on measurements within our local universe don’t agree with extrapolations from the era shortly after the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago. A new estimate of the local expansion rate — the Hubble constant, or H0 (H-naught) — reinforces that discrepancy.”

“Dark energy is incredibly strange, but actually it makes sense to me that it went unnoticed,” said Adam Riess of Johns Hopkins University, one of three researchers awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2011 for their part in the discovery that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. “I have absolutely no clue what dark energy is. Dark energy appears strong enough to push the entire universe – yet its source is unknown, its location is unknown and its physics are highly speculative.”

“Dark Energy is Hiding”

“The discovery of dark energy has greatly changed how we think about the laws of nature,” said Edward Witten, one of the world’s leading theoretical physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. who has been compared to Newton and Einstein, about proposals suggesting that dark energy is a ‘fifth’ force beyond the four already known – gravitational, electromagnetic, and the strong and weak nuclear forces–that may be ‘screened’ or ‘hidden’ for large objects like planets, making it extremely difficult to detect.

“It’s Possible They’re All Wrong” –Galaxy Clusters and Dark Energy Challenge Current Theories of the Universe

Some cosmologists are exploring the possibility that the vast majority of the energy in the universe is in the form of a hitherto undiscovered substance called “quintessence” that causes the expansion of the universe to speed up. Most forms of energy, such as matter or radiation, cause the expansion to slow down due to the attractive force of gravity. For quintessence, however, the gravitational force is repulsive, and this causes the expansion of the universe to accelerate.

“A Sort of Repulsive Gravity”

Dark energy, say proponents of quintessence, is a sort of “repulsive gravity” that pushes matter and space-time away instead of pulling it closer. Rather than gathering around the regions of dense matter of stars or galaxies, dark energy hides out in the most isolated neighborhoods of the universe in the vast regions of empty interstellar space. If an unknown dark-energy particle was responsible for the acceleration of the universe’s expansion, it would be unlike anything even CERN’s cutting-edge particle physicists had ever seen before

“Perplexing” –Local Expansion Rate vs Cosmic Dawn

Using a relatively new and potentially more precise technique for measuring cosmic distances, which employs the average stellar brightness within giant elliptical galaxies as a rung on the distance ladder, astronomers calculate a rate — 73.3 kilometers per second per megaparsec, give or take 2.5 km/sec/Mpc — that lies in the middle of three other good estimates, including the gold standard estimate from Type Ia supernovae. This means that for every megaparsec — 3.3 million light years, or 3 billion trillion kilometers — from Earth, the universe is expanding an extra 73.3 ±2.5 kilometers per second. The average from the three other techniques is 73.5 ±1.4 km/sec/Mpc.

Perplexingly, estimates of the local expansion rate based on measured fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background and, independently, fluctuations in the density of normal matter in the early universe (baryon acoustic oscillations), give a very different answer: 67.4 ±0.5 km/sec/Mpc –the difference, of about 6 km/sec/Mpc, is a few times larger than the error bars on these measurements, making the difference statistically significant, or “real”.

Astronomers are understandably concerned about this mismatch, because the expansion rate is a critical parameter in understanding the physics and evolution of the universe and is key to understanding dark energy — which accelerates the rate of expansion of the universe and thus causes the Hubble constant to change more rapidly than expected with increasing distance from Earth. 

Tuning in to Giant Elliptical Galaxies

For the new estimate, astronomers measured fluctuations in the surface brightness of 63 giant elliptical galaxies to determine the distance and plotted distance against velocity for each to obtain H0. The surface brightness fluctuation (SBF) technique is independent of other techniques and has the potential to provide more precise distance estimates than other methods within about 100 Mpc of Earth, or 330 million light years. The 63 galaxies in the sample are at distances ranging from 15 to 99 Mpc, looking back in time a mere fraction of the age of the universe.

“Hubble’s Elusive Constant” –‘Something is Fundamentally Flawed’

“For measuring distances to galaxies out to 100 megaparsecs, this is a fantastic method,” said cosmologist Chung-Pei Ma, the Judy Chandler Webb Professor in the Physical Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley, and professor of astronomy and physics. “This is the first paper that assembles a large, homogeneous set of data, on 63 galaxies, for the goal of studying H-naught using the SBF method.”

Ma leads the MASSIVE Survey of local galaxies, which provided data for 43 of the galaxies — two-thirds of those employed in the new analysis.

The data on these 63 galaxies was assembled and analyzed by John Blakeslee, an astronomer with the National Science Foundation’s National Optical-infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory (NOIRLab).. He is first author of a paper now accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal that he co-authored with colleague Joe Jensen of Utah Valley University in Orem. Blakeslee, who heads the science staff that support NSF’s optical and infrared observatories, is a pioneer in using SBF to measure distances to galaxies, and Jensen was one of the first to apply the method at infrared wavelengths. The two worked closely with Ma on the analysis.

“The whole story of astronomy is, in a sense, the effort to understand the absolute scale of the universe, which then tells us about the physics,” Blakeslee said, harkening back to James Cook’s voyage to Tahiti in 1769 to measure a transit of Venus so that scientists could calculate the true size of the solar system. “The SBF method is more broadly applicable to the general population of evolved galaxies in the local universe, and certainly if we get enough galaxies with the James Webb Space Telescope, 100 times more powerful than the Hubble, is scheduled for launch in October. this method has the potential to give the best local measurement of the Hubble constant.”

Fine-Tuning the Hubble Constant

The Hubble constant has been a bone of contention for decades, ever since Edwin Hubble first measured the local expansion rate and came up with an answer seven times too big, implying that the universe was actually younger than its oldest stars. The problem, then and now, lies in pinning down the location of objects in space that give few clues about how far away they are.

Astronomers over the years have laddered up to greater distances, starting with calculating the distance to objects close enough that they seem to move slightly, because of parallax, as the Earth orbits the sun. Variable stars called Cepheids get you farther, because their brightness is linked to their period of variability, and Type Ia supernovae get you even farther, because they are extremely powerful explosions that, at their peak, shine as bright as a whole galaxy. For both Cepheids and Type Ia supernovae, it’s possible to figure out the absolute brightness from the way they change over time, and then the distance can be calculated from their apparent brightness as seen from Earth.

“Dark Energy”– A Fifth Force or New Form of Matter?

The best current estimate of H0 comes from distances determined by Type Ia supernova explosions in distant galaxies, though newer methods — time delays caused by gravitational lensing of distant quasars and the brightness of water masers orbiting black holes — all give around the same number.

The technique using surface brightness fluctuations is one of the newest and relies on the fact that giant elliptical galaxies are old and have a consistent population of old stars — mostly red giant stars — that can be modeled to give an average infrared brightness across their surface. The researchers obtained high-resolution infrared images of each galaxy with the Wide Field Camera 3 on the Hubble Space Telescope and determined how much each pixel in the image differed from the “average” — the smoother the fluctuations over the entire image, the farther the galaxy, once corrections are made for blemishes like bright star-forming regions, which the authors exclude from the analysis.

Confounded by the Glaring Conflict with Estimates from the Early Universe

Neither Blakeslee nor Ma was surprised that the expansion rate came out close to that of the other local measurements. But they are equally confounded by the glaring conflict with estimates from the early universe — a conflict that many astronomers say means that our current cosmological theories are wrong, or at least incomplete.

The extrapolations from the early universe are based on the simplest cosmological theory — called lambda cold dark matter, or ΛCDM — which employs just a few parameters to describe the evolution of the universe. Does the new estimate drive a stake into the heart of ΛCDM?

“Drives a Stake into Heart of Lambda Cold Dark Matter”

“I think it pushes that stake in a bit more,” Blakeslee said. “But it (ΛCDM) is still alive. Some people think, regarding all these local measurements, (that) the observers are wrong. But it is getting harder and harder to make that claim — it would require there to be systematic errors in the same direction for several different methods: supernovae, SBF, gravitational lensing, water masers. So, as we get more independent measurements, that stake goes a little deeper.”

Ma wonders whether the uncertainties astronomers ascribe to their measurements, which reflect both systematic errors and statistical errors, are too optimistic, and that perhaps the two ranges of estimates can still be reconciled.

“The jury is out,” she said. “I think it really is in the error bars. But assuming everyone’s error bars are not underestimated, the tension is getting uncomfortable.”

In fact, one of the giants of the field, astronomer Wendy Freedman, recently published a study pegging the Hubble constant at 69.8 ±1.9 km/sec/Mpc, roiling the waters even further. The latest result from Adam Riess reports 73.2 ±1.3 km/sec/Mpc. Riess was a Miller Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Berkeley when he performed this research, and he shared the Nobel Prize with UC Berkeley and Berkeley Lab physicist Saul Perlmutter.

The MASSIVE  Survey

The new value of H0 is a byproduct of two other surveys of nearby galaxies — in particular, Ma’s MASSIVE survey, which uses space and ground-based telescopes to exhaustively study the 100 most massive galaxies within about 100 Mpc of Earth. A major goal is to weigh the supermassive black holes at the centers of each one.

To do that, precise distances are needed, and the SBF method is the best to date, Ma said. The MASSIVE survey team used this method last year to determine the distance to a giant elliptical galaxy, NGC 1453, in the southern sky constellation of Eridanus. Combining that distance, 166 million light years, with extensive spectroscopic data from the Gemini and McDonald telescopes — which allowed Ma’s graduate students Chris Liepold and Matthew Quenneville to measure the velocities of the stars near the center of the galaxy — they concluded that NGC 1453 has a central black hole with a mass nearly 3 billion times that of the sun. (Photo courtesy of the Carnegie-Irvine Galaxy Survey).

To determine H0, Blakeslee calculated SBF distances to 43 of the galaxies in the MASSIVE survey, based on 45 to 90 minutes of HST observing time for each galaxy. The other 20 came from another survey that employed HST to image large galaxies, specifically ones in which Type Ia supernovae have been detected.

The Key–Old Red Stars

Most of the 63 galaxies are between 8 and 12 billion years old, which means that they contain a large population of old red stars, which are key to the SBF method and can also be used to improve the precision of distance calculations. In the paper, Blakeslee employed both Cepheid variable stars and a technique that uses the brightest red giant stars in a galaxy — referred to as the tip of the red giant branch, or TRGB technique — to ladder up to galaxies at large distances. They produced consistent results. The TRGB technique takes account of the fact that the brightest red giants in galaxies have about the same absolute brightness.

“The goal is to make this SBF method completely independent of the Cepheid-calibrated Type Ia supernova method by using the James Webb Space Telescope to get a red giant branch calibration for SBFs,” he said.

“The James Webb telescope has the potential to really decrease the error bars for SBF,” Ma added. But for now, the two discordant measures of the Hubble constant will have to learn to live with one another.

“I was not setting out to measure H0; it was a great product of our survey,” Ma concluded. “But I am a cosmologist and am watching this with great interest.”

Avi Shporer, Research Scientist, MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, via UC Berkeley.  

Image credit top of page: Shutterstock License

Avi Shporer, Research Scientist, MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. A Google Scholar, Avi was formerly a NASA Sagan Fellow at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). His motto, not surprisingly, is a quote from Carl Sagan: “Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”

New research shows that during the early universe cosmic filaments ferried cold gas and embryonic, node-shaped galaxies to a dark matter halo, where it all clumped together to form massive galaxies. The larger the galaxy, the more cold gas it needs to coalesce and to grow from a source of cold molecular gases totaling as much as 100 billion times the mass of our sun.

“Where,” asked University of Iowa astronomers in a new study, “did these early, super-sized galaxies get that much cold gas when they were hemmed in by hotter surroundings?”

Dark-Matter Halo Reservoir

New observational evidence revealed that cold gas pipelines that knifed through the hot atmosphere in the dark matter halo of an early massive galaxy, supplying the materials for the galaxy to form stars. The scientists studied a gaseous region surrounding a previously unstudied, massive galaxy formed when the universe was about 2.5 billion years old, or just 20% of its present age. It took the team five years to pinpoint through its redshift its exact location and distance using the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array, to peer through because of the target galaxy’s opaque, dusty environment.

“It is the prototype, the first case where we detected a halo-scale stream that is feeding a very massive galaxy,” says Hai Fu, associate professor in Iowa’s Department of Physics and Astronomy and the study’s lead and corresponding author. “Based on our observations, such streams can fill up the reservoir in about a billion years, which is far shorter than the amount of time that was available to the galaxy at the epoch that we were observing.”

Chemical Fingerprints Confirm

Crucially, the researchers located two background quasars that are projected at close angular distances to the target galaxy, much like how Jupiter and Saturn’s motion drew them closer to each other when viewed from Earth during the Great Conjunction last December. Due to this unique configuration, the quasars’ light penetrating the halo gas of the foreground galaxy left chemical “fingerprints” that confirmed the existence of a narrow stream of cold gas.

“Gargantuan Filaments” –Incubators of Supermassive Black Holes in Early Cosmos

Those chemical fingerprints showed the gas in the streams had a low concentration of heavy elements such as aluminum, carbon, iron, and magnesium. Since these elements are formed when the star is still shining and are released into the surrounding medium when the star dies, the researchers determined the cold gas streams must be streaming in from outside, rather than being expelled from the star-making galaxy itself.

Quasars Unveil the Stream

“Among the 70,000 starburst galaxies in our survey, this is the only one associated with two quasars that are both nearby enough to probe the halo gas. Even more, both quasars are projected on the same side of the galaxy so that their light can be blocked by the same stream at two different angular distances.” Fu says. “So, I feel extremely fortunate that nature provided us this opportunity to detect this major artery leading to the heart of a phenomenal galaxy during its adolescence.”

Source: “A long stream of metal-poor cool gas around a massive starburst galaxy at Z=2.67,” was published in the Astrophysical Journal Feb. 24.

Avi Shporer, Research Scientist, MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, via University of Iowa. 

Image credit top of page:  shows filaments in massive galaxy cluster using the C-EAGLE simulation.
Joshua Borrow.

Avi Shporer, Research Scientist, MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. A Google Scholar, Avi was formerly a NASA Sagan Fellow at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). His motto, not surprisingly, is a quote from Carl Sagan: “Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”

“The Big Bang theory says nothing about what banged, why it banged, or what happened before it banged,” observed MIT theoretical physicist and cosmologist Alan Guth, who pioneered the the theory that the universe dramatically expanded in size in a fleeting fraction of a second after the Big Bang.

Carl Sagan’s Questions

“If the general picture of an expanding universe and a Big Bang is correct,” said Carl Sagan about the most famous scientific theory since Einstein’s relativity, “we must then confront still more difficult questions. What were conditions like at the time of the Big Bang? What happened before that? Was there a tiny universe, devoid of all matter, and then the matter suddenly created from nothing? How does that happen?”

The Big Bang theory says that our universe began with a colossal explosion, about 14 billion years ago, and has been expanding and cooling ever since. Astronomers combine mathematical models with observations to develop workable theories of how the universe came to be, including Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity along with standard theories of fundamental particles. Today, NASA spacecraft such as the Hubble Space Telescope continue measuring the expansion of the universe.

Gravitational Waves –Pure Data from the Big Bang

Still unanswered is the question of what powered inflation. One difficulty in answering this question, observes NASA, is that inflation was over well before recombination, and so the opacity of the universe before recombination is, in effect, a curtain drawn over those interesting very early events. Fortunately, newly detected gravitational waves by the LIGO and VIRGO observatories provide a way to observe the universe that does not involve photons at all. These ripples in spacetime are the only known form of information that can reach us undistorted from the instant of the Big Bang. Several missions are being considered by NASA and ESA that will look for the gravitational waves from the epoch of inflation.

“Powering the Universe?” –Relic Light of the Big Bang Reveals an Exotic Unknown Force 

However, several renowned scientists believe the Big Bang never happened; that it is completely wrong and contradicted by evidence leading to what some consider a “crisis of cosmology.”

Enter Fred Hoyle –“The Big Bang Never Happened”

The earliest most famous critic of the Big Bang theory is the iconoclastic British astrophysicist, Fred Hoyle who was the scientist who named the theory of the origin our our universe and our existence as the “Big Bang” which he coined in 1950 while he was doing a series of BBC radio lectures on astronomy when he said: One idea was that the Universe started its life a finite time ago in a single huge explosion, and that the present expansion is a relic of the violence of this explosion. This big bang idea seemed to me to be unsatisfactory even before detailed examination showed that it leads to serious difficulties.”

Hoyle, who studied at the University of Cambridge under physicist and Nobel laureate Paul Dirac, who predicted the existence of antimatter, moved rapidly to the forefront of astronomy, showing how nuclear physics could illuminate such celestial phenomena as white dwarfs, red giants, supernovae and the brilliant radio sources that came to be called quasars. Hoyle founded the prestigious Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge in the early 1960’s and served as its first director, yet his stubborn refusal to accept the big bang theory -made him persona non grata in the field he had helped to create.

Hoyle calculated that inside stars carbon would have to exist in a very special “steady state”: the 7.65 MeV state of carbon-12. Without it, nucleosynthesis could not proceed beyond a very simple stage. However, no one had ever observed carbon in this state. If the 7.65 MeV state did not exist, reports The Guardian, Hoyle reasoned, “the universe would contain no carbon. And if there was no carbon, there would be no human beings. Hoyle was saying that the mere fact he was alive and pondering the question of carbon was proof the 7.65 MeV state existed.”

“I began to get the sense that there was something seriously wrong, not only with these new concepts, but with the big bang itself,”
Hoyle said as he watched cosmologists in the 1980’s struggle to explain the formation of galaxies and other puzzles, “I’m a great believer that if you have a correct theory, you show a lot of positive results. It seems to me that they’d gone on for 20 years, by 1985, and there wasn’t much to show for it. And that couldn’t be the case if it was right.”

“Many Little Bangs in Pre-existing Space and Time”

“Rather than one big bang,” Hoyle said in a 2020 interview with John Horgan author of “The End of Science” for Scientific American, “there were many little bangs occurring in pre-existing space and time. These little bangs are responsible for light elements and the red shifts of galaxies. As for the cosmic microwave background, Hoyle’s best guess was that it is radiation emitted by some sort of metallic interstellar dust. Hoyle acknowledged that his “quasi-steady state theory,” which in effect replaces one big miracle with many little ones, is far from perfect. But he insisted that recent versions of the big bang theory, which posit the existence of inflation, dark matter and other exotica, are much more deeply flawed. ‘It’s like medieval theology,’ he exclaimed in a rare flash of anger.”

Will Cosmology Undergo a Paradigm Shift?

“Will cosmology undergo a paradigm shift that leaves the big bang behind?” asks Horgan. “Probably not. The theory rests on three solid pillars of evidence: the red shift of galaxies, the microwave background and the abundance of light elements, which were supposedly synthesized during our universe’s fiery birth. The big bang also does for cosmology what evolution does for biology: it provides cohesion, meaning, a unifying narrative. That is not to say that the big bang can explain everything, any more than evolutionary theory can. The origin of life remains profoundly mysterious, and so does the origin of the universe. Nor can physics tell us why our universe takes its specific form, which allowed for our existence.”

Enter Dark Energy

In the late 1990’s, writes Horgan, “ astrophysicists discovered that the universe is expanding at an increasing rate being driven by enigmatic dark energy. This is the most significant finding in cosmology—and arguably science as a whole—over the last 25 years. But the big bang theory has absorbed this finding, just as evolutionary theory absorbed the discovery of the double helix.”

“Dark energy is incredibly strange, but actually it makes sense to me that it went unnoticed,” said Noble Prize winning physicist Adam Riess about “dark energy,” a force that is real but eludes detection in an interview. “I have absolutely no clue what dark energy is. Dark energy appears strong enough to push the entire universe – yet its source is unknown, its location is unknown and its physics are highly speculative.”

“Dark Energy”– A Fifth Force or New Form of Matter?

Hoyle’s brilliant skepticism, has been reaffirmed as Eric Lerner, author of “The Big Bang Never Happened” and colleagues continue to publish articles refuting the Big Bang theory.

Famous Scientists –“Open Letter to the Scientific Community”

The “Open Letter to the Scientific Community” published in the May 2004 issue of New Scientist was signed by 35 astrophysicists and physicists –famous scientists who made major contributions to astrophysics and astronomy, such as Hermann Bondi, Thomas Gold and Jayant Narlikar–saying that the Big Bang theory had not been proven and that its predictions were contradicted by astronomical evidence.

“The big bang today relies on a growing number of hypothetical entities,” observes the Open Letter, “things that we have never observed– inflation, dark matter and dark energy are the most prominent examples. Without them, there would be a fatal contradiction between the observations made by astronomers and the predictions of the big bang theory. In no other field of physics would this continual recourse to new hypothetical objects be accepted as a way of bridging the gap between theory and observation. It would, at the least, raise serious questions about the validity of the underlying theory.”

“But the big bang theory can’t survive without these fudge factors. Without the hypothetical inflation field, the big bang does not predict the smooth, isotropic cosmic background radiation that is observed, because there would be no way for parts of the universe that are now more than a few degrees away in the sky to come to the same temperature and thus emit the same amount of microwave radiation.

“Without some kind of dark matter, unlike any that we have observed on Earth despite 20 years of experiments, big-bang theory makes contradictory predictions for the density of matter in the universe. Inflation requires a density 20 times larger than that implied by big bang nucleosynthesis, the theory’s explanation of the origin of the light elements. And without dark energy, the theory predicts that the universe is only about 8 billion years old, which is billions of years younger than the age of many stars in our galaxy.

“What is more, the big bang theory can boast of no quantitative predictions that have subsequently been validated by observation. The successes claimed by the theory’s supporters consist of its ability to retrospectively fit observations with a steadily increasing array of adjustable parameters, just as the old Earth-centered cosmology of Ptolemy needed layer upon layer of epicycles.

“Yet the big bang is not the only framework available for understanding the history of the universe,” the Open Letter concludes,. “Plasma cosmology and the steady-state model both hypothesize an evolving universe without beginning or end. These and other alternative approaches can also explain the basic phenomena of the cosmos, including the abundances of light elements, the generation of large-scale structure, the cosmic background radiation, and how the redshift of far-away galaxies increases with distance. They have even predicted new phenomena that were subsequently observed, something the big bang has failed to do.”

Thomas Gold, one of the signers, believed with Hoyle that there was reason to think that the creation of matter was “done all the time and then none of the problems about fleeting moments arise. It can be just in a steady state with the expansion taking things apart as fast as new matter comes into being and condenses into new galaxies”.

Two papers were published in 1948 discussing the “steady-state theory” as an alternative to the Big Bang: one by Gold and Bondi, the other by Hoyle. In their seminal paper, Gold and Bondi asserted that although the universe is expanding, it nevertheless does not change its look over time; it has no beginning and no end.  Since then, over 200 additional astronomers and physicists have added their signatures to the Open Letter.

In an Nov 12, 2020 interview with Jonathan Tennenbaum for Asia Times, Eric Lerner says “I’ve just submitted to a peer-reviewed journal, we look at 18 large, independent data sets of observations, and in 17 of these, the predictions of the Big Bang theory are clearly contradicted by the data.

Lerner starts his book “The Big Bang Never Happened” with the “errors” that he thinks invalidate the Big Bang. These are
The existence of superclusters of galaxies and structures like the “Great Wall” which would take too long to form from the “perfectly homogeneous” Big Bang; The need for dark matter and observations showing no dark matter; the FIRAS CMB spectrum is a “too perfect” blackbody –a physical body that absorbs all incident electromagnetic radiation, regardless of frequency or angle of incidence.

“For example, the universe contains objects that are 10 times older than when the Big Bang was supposed to have happened. The Big Bang’s predictions of the distribution of the light elements in the Universe are completely wrong – orders of magnitude wrong.
The Big Bang’s predictions of the distribution of the light elements in the Universe are completely wrong – orders of magnitude wrong. The Big Bang theory’s predictions concerning the cosmic microwave background have multiple contradictions, as do the theory’s predictions concerning so-called inflation and dark energy.

“You need – with one exception – gravitation, electromagnetism, nuclear forces and nuclear reactions: things that we have studied here on Earth,” says Tennenbaum . “You can get rid of so-called cosmic inflation, you can get rid of dark energy, you can get rid of the expanding universe. You can get rid of dark matter and just throw them into the dustbin of history. The only exception is the one that Edwin Hubble pointed out one hundred years ago, namely the red shift — the shift of the observed spectrum of light from astronomical objects toward longer wavelengths – that is, lower photon energies – which is conventionally explained in terms of the so-called Doppler effect, by assuming that those objects are moving away from us. The red shift appears to be larger, the more distant the object.

“In 1929, Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe is expanding, with most other galaxies moving away from us. Light from these galaxies is shifted to longer (further away and redder) wavelengths – in other words, it is red-shifted, a result of the expansion of the universe. The Big Bang theorists take the red shift measurements as decisive evidence that distant galaxies are moving away from us, and that the Universe itself is expanding.

:Expansion is only one specific explanation of the red shift relationship. But in science, just to give an explanation for something is not enough. The validity of an explanation of a theory needs to be tested by its predictions – by comparing its predictions with subsequent observations.

The point is, apart from the red shift, says Lerner, the expansion theory makes many other predictions. The key observational data set that I and my colleagues concentrated on over the course of a long period from 2005 to 2018 – and the results were published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society in 2018 – deals with surface brightness. And, as I mentioned, for these and 16 other data sets, the predictions of the Big Bang theory turn out to be all wrong.

“So what I’m saying,” concludes Lerner,” is that the crisis in cosmology has reached a point where the alternative to the Big Bang is, quite simply, no Big Bang – no Bang at all.”

The Daily Galaxy, Max Goldberg, via The Open Letter,  UCLA/”Errors in the “The Big Bang Never Happened”, Scientific American and Asia Times

Image credit: Shutterstock License

“Hubble simply doesn’t go far enough into the infrared” to see the hidden galaxies of the early universe, said Rogier Windhorst of Arizona State University, co-author of a new study using the near-infrared capabilities of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to probe known quasars, ‘quasi-stellar radio sources’,  in hopes of spotting the surrounding glow of their host galaxies, without significant detections, suggesting that cocoons of dust that absorb visible light within the galaxies is obscuring the light of their stars.

Unlocking Secrets of the Infrared Universe

“We want to know what kind of galaxies these quasars live in. That can help us answer questions like: How can black holes grow so big so fast? Is there a relationship between the mass of the galaxy and the mass of the black hole, like we see in the nearby universe?” said lead author Madeline Marshall of the University of Melbourne in Australia, who conducted her work within the ARC Centre of Excellence in All Sky Astrophysics in 3 Dimensions.

The new study suggests that NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, set to launch in 2021, will be able to reveal the hidden host galaxies of some distant quasars despite their small sizes and obscuring dust. using the Webb’s infrared detectors. The more distant a galaxy is, the more its light has been stretched to longer wavelengths by the expansion of the universe with ultraviolet light from the black hole’s accretion disk or the galaxy’s young stars shifted to infrared wavelengths. “Webb will open up the opportunity to observe these very distant host galaxies for the first time,” said Marshal.

Webb will primarily look at the Universe in the infrared, while Hubble studies it primarily at optical and ultraviolet wavelengths (though it has some infrared capability). Webb also has a much bigger mirror than Hubble, which means that Webb can peer farther back into time than Hubble is capable of doing. Hubble is in a very close orbit around the earth, while Webb will be 1.5 million kilometers distant at the second Lagrange (L2) point where the Webb’s solar shield will block the light from the Sun, Earth, and Moon.

These simulated images above show how a quasar and its host galaxy would appear to the James Webb Space Telescope (top) and Hubble Space Telescope (bottom) at infrared wavelengths of 1.5 and 1.6 microns, respectively. Webb’s larger mirror will provide more than four times the resolution, enabling astronomers to separate the galaxy’s light from the overwhelming light of the central quasar. The individual images span about 2 arcseconds on the sky, which represents a distance of 36,000 light-years at a redshift of seven. M. (Marshall/University of Melbourne).

Bluetides — First Billion Years of the Universe

To determine what Webb is expected to see, the team used a state-of-the-art computer simulation called BlueTides, developed by a team led by Tiziana Di Matteo at Carnegie Mellon University to study the formation and evolution of galaxies and quasars in the first billion years of the universe’s history

“Its large cosmic volume and high spatial resolution enables us to study those rare quasar hosts on a statistical basis,” said Yueying Ni of Carnegie Mellon University, who ran the BlueTides simulation. BlueTides provides good agreement with current observations and allows astronomers to predict what Webb should see.

The team found that the galaxies hosting quasars tended to be smaller than average, spanning only about 1/30 the diameter of the Milky Way despite containing almost as much mass as our galaxy. “The host galaxies are surprisingly tiny compared to the average galaxy at that point in time,” said Marshall.

“Like Precocious Children”

The galaxies in the simulation also tended to be forming stars rapidly, up to 600 times faster than the current star formation rate in the Milky Way. “We found that these systems grow very fast. They’re like precocious children – they do everything early on,” explained co-author Di Matteo.

The team then used these simulations to determine what Webb’s cameras would see if the observatory studied these distant systems. They found that distinguishing the host galaxy from the quasar would be possible, although still challenging due to the galaxy’s small size on the sky.

They also considered what Webb’s spectrographs could glean from these systems. Spectral studies, which split incoming light into its component colors or wavelengths, would be able to reveal the chemical composition of the dust in these systems. Learning how much heavy elements they contain could help astronomers understand their star formation histories, since most of the chemical elements are produced in stars.

New Insights into Extreme Systems

Webb also could determine whether the host galaxies are isolated or not. The Hubble study found that most of the quasars had detectable companion galaxies, but could not determine whether those galaxies were actually nearby or whether they are chance superpositions. Webb’s spectral capabilities will allow astronomers to measure the redshifts, and hence distances, of those apparent companion galaxies to determine if they are at the same distance as the quasar.

Ultimately, Webb’s observations should provide new insights into these extreme systems. Astronomers still struggle to understand how a black hole could grow to weigh a billion times as much as our Sun in just a billion years. “These big black holes shouldn’t exist so early because there hasn’t been enough time for them to grow so massive,” said co-author Stuart Wyithe of the University of Melbourne.

“At the Dawn of Time” –Spider’s Web of Galaxies Discovered Powering Supermassive Black Hole

Upcoming Observatories

Future quasar studies will also be fueled by synergies among multiple upcoming observatories. Infrared surveys with the European Space Agency’s Euclid mission, as well as the ground-based Vera C. Rubin Observatory, a National Science Foundation/Department of Energy facility currently under construction on Cerro Pachón in Chile’s Atacama Desert. Both observatories will significantly increase the number of known distant quasars. Those newfound quasars will then be examined by Hubble and Webb to gain new understandings of the universe’s formative years.

The Daily Galaxy, Max Goldberg, via Arizona State University

Image credit top of page: Quasar image, Hubble Space Telescope.

Read about The Daily Galaxy editorial team here

The blurry orange image of the monster black hole the size of our solar system at the center of massive elliptical galaxy M87 captured by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) on April 10, 2019, was one of the most extraordinary achievements in modern science. The image is an epic example of the human species ability to imagine the existence of an object that not long ago, scientists of the stature of an Einstein, believed  “did not exist in the real world,” nor that a fathomless dark creation existed at the very real, violent center of our home galaxy.

The Man Who Showed That Black Holes Could Exist

This week, the Nobel Committee recognized three scientists, awarding half of its physics the prize went to Roger Penrose, of the University of Oxford, the man who showed that black holes could exist, and half went to Reinhard Genzel, of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics and UC Berkeley, and Andrea Ghez, director of the UCLA Galactic Center Group, who provided convincing evidence of the supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A*, with a mass 4 million times that of our sun, squeezed into a space smaller than our solar system, at the center of the Milky Way.

“Gateways to Eternity” –Black Hole Discoveries Lead to Three 2020 Nobel Prizes in Physics

Most Important Contribution Since Einstein

“Roger Penrose used ingenious mathematical methods in his proof that black holes are a direct consequence of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity,” said the Noble Prize committee. “Einstein did not himself believe that black holes really exist, these super-heavyweight monsters that capture everything that enters them. Nothing can escape, not even light. In January 1965, ten years after Einstein’s death, Penrose proved that black holes really can form and described them in detail; at their heart, black holes hide a singularity in which all the known laws of nature cease. His groundbreaking article is still regarded as the most important contribution to the general theory of relativity since Einstein.”

“Beyond the Scientific Mainstream”

“Roger Penrose has always been willing — if not happy — to hold views that lie well outside of the scientific mainstream,” observes University of Chicago physicist and Senior Scientist and the Head of the Theoretical Astrophysics Group at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Dan Hooper, in an email to The Daily Galaxy. “He did this in the 19060s when he — correctly — argued that massive stars would ultimately become black holes. More recently, he has expressed skepticism about the conventional view that our very early universe went through an era of cosmic inflation, during which space expanded exponentially. Instead, he speculates that the Big Bang may not have been the beginning of our universe at all.”

“The Eerie Shadow” –M87s Iconic Black Hole Image Tests Einstein’s Theory that Gravity is Matter Warping Spacetime

Penrose also had a daring, speculative side that Dan Hooper alludes to above that underscored Einstein’s observation that the human scientific imagination is “a preview of coming attractions” with his suggestion that extinct universes exist that were filled with ghost black holes that are hidden, embedded in the Cosmic Microwave Background map, and may have harbored alien civilizations from an eon that preceded the Big Bang. Penrose speculates that any civilization we may discover by definition will be millions to billions of years older than Earth, perhaps existing encoded in photons.

“Beings From the Previous Eon” –Sir Roger Penrose and Joe Rogan

If Stephen Hawking was Alive…

“If Stephen Hawking was alive,” writes Harvard astrophysicist and director of the Black Hole Initiative at Harvard, Avi Loeb in an email to The Daily Galaxy, “he would have been a very strong contender for this year’s award since his work paralleled that of Penrose on classical General Relativity with the addition of the quantum mechanical aspects of black hole evaporation.

Penrose Saves Our Ability to Predict the Future Throughout the Universe

“The mathematical work of Roger Penrose on General Relativity,” continues Loeb, “was revolutionary in improving our theoretical understanding of black holes. In 1939, Albert Einstein wrote a paper in Annals of Mathematics doubting that black holes exist! Penrose demonstrated that they are a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity and invented a new mathematical tool to depict spacetimes, called Penrose diagrams.. He also showed that one can extract energy from a spinning black hole, in resemblance to a flywheel, the so-called Penrose Process, that may play an important role in powering some of the most luminous quasars in the universe. His cosmic censorship hypothesis saves our ability to predict the future throughout the universe from the pathology of the singularities associated with black holes, where Einstein’s theory breaks down and cannot forecast the future.”

Penrose’s conjecture, observes Loeb. “asserts that all singularities are hidden from view behind an event horizon and so the whereabouts of matter around them has no causal effect on what happens outside the horizon. Just as in Las Vegas, “whatever happens inside the horizon, stays inside the horizon”.

Black holes, concludes Loeb, “are the new frontier. It would be remarkable to visit the nearest one, especially if it exists in our Solar system.”

Chaotic Center of the Milky Way

When Genzel and Ghez discovered stars orbiting a seeming void at startling speeds in the region in our galaxy, known as Sagittarius A*, they conjectured that could make sense only in the presence of a supermassive black hole.

“Bizarre” –Strange ‘G’ Objects Detected Near Milky Way’s Supermassive Black Hole

“Our nearby black hole is no threat to Earth, writes Marina Koren in The Atlantic. “No known black hole is. If anything, we benefit from their existence,” she writes, “The stellar explosions that produce black holes also spew elements such as carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen into space. The collisions of black holes and neutron stars help spread heavier elements, such as gold and platinum. These elements make up our Earth, and our own selves.”

The image at the top of page is artist Jack Ciurlo’s impression of G objects, with the reddish centers, orbiting the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy represented as a dark sphere inside a white ring.  This a new class of bizarre objects with orbits ranging from about 100 to 1,000 years at the center of our galaxy, not far from Sagittarius A* that look compact most of the time and stretch out when their orbits bring them closest to the black hole.

The Daily Galaxy, Max Goldberg, via New York Times,  The Atlantic and Scientific American

Image credit, text,  shows the blurry orange image of the monster black hole the size of our solar system at the center of massive elliptical galaxy M87 captured by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) on April 10, 2019,

Read about The Daily Galaxy editorial team here

Scientists suggest that a counter-intuitive, hypothetical species of black holes may negate the standard model of cosmology,where dark energy is an inherent and constant property of spacetime that will result in an eventual cold death of the universe. “It’s the big elephant in the room,” says Claudia de Rham, a theoretical physicist at Imperial College London about dark energy, the mysterious, elusive phenomena that pushes the cosmos to expand so rapidly and which is estimated to account for 70% of the contents of the universe. “It’s very frustrating.”

Generic Objects of Dark Energy

Astronomers have known for two decades that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, but the physics of this expansion remains a mystery. In 1966, Erast Gliner, a young physicist at the Ioffe Physico-Technical Institute in Leningrad, proposed an alternative hypothesis that very large stars should collapse into what could be called Generic Objects of Dark Energy (GEODEs). These appear to be black holes when viewed from the outside but, unlike black holes, they contain dark energy instead of a singularity.

In 1998, two independent teams of astronomers discovered that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating, consistent with the presence of a uniform contribution of Dark Energy. Research fellow Kevin Croker, and mathematician Joel Weiner at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, showed that if a fraction of the oldest stars collapsed into GEODEs, instead of black holes, their averaged contribution today would naturally produce the required uniform dark energy.

Is Dark Energy Evolving? –Ancient Quasars May Offer the Answer

Fast forward to today, a team of researchers at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa led by Croker have made a novel prediction—the dark energy responsible for this accelerating growth comes from a vast sea of compact objects spread throughout the voids between galaxies. This conclusion is part of a new study published in The Astrophysical Journal.

In 2019, Kroker proposed that objects like Powehi, the recently imaged supermassive compact object at the center of galaxy M87, might actually be GEODEs. The Powehi GEODE, shown to scale, below would be approximately 2/3 the radius of the dark region imaged by the Event Horizon Telescope. This is nearly the same size expected for a black hole. The region containing Dark Energy (green) is slightly larger than a black hole of the same mass. The properties of any crust (purple), if present, depend on the particular GEODE model. (Photo: EHT collaboration; NASA/CXC/Villanova University)

Mimic Black Holes

In the mid-1960s, physicists first suggested that stellar collapse should not form true black holes, but should instead form Generic Objects of Dark Energy (GEODEs). Unlike black holes, GEODEs do not ‘break’ Einstein’s equations with singularities. Instead, a spinning layer surrounds a core of dark energy. Viewed from the outside, GEODEs and black holes appear mostly the same, even when the “sounds” of their collisions are measured by gravitational wave observatories.

Because GEODEs mimic black holes, it was assumed they moved through space the same way as black holes. “This becomes a problem if you want to explain the accelerating expansion of the universe,” said Croker, lead author of the study. “Even though we proved last year that GEODEs, in principle, could provide the necessary dark energy, you need lots of old and massive GEODEs. If they moved like black holes, staying close to visible matter, galaxies like our own Milky Way would have been disrupted.”

Croker collaborated with UH Mānoa Department of Physics and Astronomy graduate student Jack Runburg, and Duncan Farrah, a faculty member at the UH Institute for Astronomy and the Physics and Astronomy department, to investigate how GEODEs move through space.

In Search of Dark Energy –Probing 11-Billion Years of Cosmic History

“Entirely New Class of Phenomenon”

The researchers found that the spinning layer around each GEODE determines how they move relative to each other. If their outer layers spin slowly, GEODEs clump more rapidly than black holes. This is because GEODEs gain mass from the growth of the universe itself. For GEODEs with layers that spin near the speed of light, however, the gain in mass becomes dominated by a different effect and the GEODEs begin to repel each other.

“The dependence on spin was really quite unexpected,” said Duncan Farrah. “If confirmed by observation, it would be an entirely new class of phenomenon.”

The team solved Einstein’s equations under the assumption that many of the oldest stars, which were born when the universe was less than 2 percent of its current age, formed GEODEs when they died. As these ancient GEODEs fed on other stars and abundant interstellar gas, they began to spin very rapidly. Once spinning quickly enough, the GEODEs’ mutual repulsion caused most of them to ‘socially distance’ into regions that would eventually become the empty voids between present-day galaxies.

Supermassive Black Holes –“Could Actually Be Enigmatic Dark-Energy Objects”

This study supports the position that GEODEs can solve the dark energy problem while remaining in harmony with different observations across vast distances. GEODEs stay away from present-day galaxies, so they do not disrupt delicate star pairs counted within the Milky Way.

“Ancient GEODEs Consistent with Number of Ancient Stars”

The number of ancient GEODEs required to solve the dark energy problem is consistent with the number of ancient stars. GEODEs do not disrupt the measured distribution of galaxies in space because they separate away from luminous matter before it forms present-day galaxies. Finally, GEODEs do not directly affect the gentle ripples in the afterglow of the Big Bang, because they are born from dead stars hundreds of millions of years after the release of this cosmic background radiation.

“It was thought that, without a direct detection of something different than a Kerr [Black Hole] signature from LIGO-Virgo [gravitational wave observatories], you’d never be able to tell that GEODEs existed,” said Farrah. Croker added, “but now that we have a clearer understanding of how Einstein’s equations link big and small, we’ve been able to make contact with data from many communities, and a coherent picture is beginning to form.”

Source: Astrophysical Journal (2020). DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/abad2f
Journal information: Astrophysical Journal

The Daily Galaxy, Max Goldberg, via University of Hawaii at Manoa

Image credit at top of the page: The universe is 7% of its current age at the bottom, 24% in the middle, and the universe today is displayed at the top. Volker Springel and the Max-Planck-Institute for Astrophysics

Read about The Daily Galaxy editorial team here

“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.

The problem of the missing mass, observed NASA, “has gotten to the point where it is more than just a problem. It is an embarrassment, an obstacle to understanding such things as the structure of galaxies, the evolution of clusters of galaxies, and the ultimate fate of the universe.”

Much to the surprise and consternation of astronomers, reports NASA, “as radio and optical observations have extended the velocity measurements for the stars and gas to the outer regions of spiral galaxies, they have found that the stars and gas clouds are moving at the same speed as the ones closer in, with a substantial part of the mass of the galaxy not concentrated toward the center of the galaxy but must distributed in a dark, unseen halo surrounding the visible galaxy.”

These outer regions of galaxies, faintly seen in a photograph, may actually contain most of the matter. In the words of astronomers Margaret and Geoffrey Burbidge —former director of Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona and one of the last giants of the postwar era of astronomy who discovered that life leads to stardust– it appears that “the tail wags the dog.” The Burbidges, reported Dennis Overbye for the New York Times, unveiled  a universe “more diverse and violent than anybody had dreamed: radio galaxies and quasars erupting with gargantuan amounts of energy, pulsars and black holes pinpricking the cosmos, and lacy chains of galaxies rushing endlessly away into eternity.”

Earth-Sized Haloes 

While the biggest dark matter haloes contain huge galaxy clusters, which weigh over a quadrillion times as much as our Sun, are well documented, the masses of the smallest dark matter haloes –hypothesized to be about the mass of the Earth–are unknown reports an international research team led by Wang Jie from the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC).

Largest Black Holes in the Universe May Be Source of Dark Matter

Deepest Zoom–500 Times Size of Our Solar System

The dark matter density map shown below  was created using a simulation measuring 2.4 billion light years on each side. The intermediate square (top right) is just under a million light years across. The smallest square (bottom left) is the deepest zoom: it is only 783 light years across, equivalent to 500 times the size of the solar system. In the intermediate square(top right) the largest dark matter haloes have a mass similar to that of a rich galaxy cluster (a million trillion times the mass of the Sun). In the smallest square (bottom right) the smallest clearly visible haloes have a mass comparable to that of the Earth (0.000003 the mass of the Sun). (Dr Sownak Bose, Center for Astrophysics, Harvard University).

The research team, based at the National Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in China, Durham University, the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Germany, and the Center for Astrophysics at Harvard University, took five years to develop, test and “zoom in on a typical region of a virtual universe as if zooming in on an image of the Moon to see a flea on its surface.”

The simulations were carried out using the Cosmology Machine supercomputer, part of the DiRAC High-Performance Computing facility in Durham and computers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Such small haloes would be extremely numerous, according to the study, containing a substantial fraction of all the dark matter in the universe. However, they would remain dark throughout cosmic history because stars and galaxies grow only in haloes more than a million times as massive as the Sun. “These small haloes can only be studied by simulating the evolution of the Universe in a large supercomputer,” said Wang.

Haloes Too Small to Contain Stars

“By zooming in on these relatively tiny dark matter haloes we can calculate the amount of radiation expected to come from different sized haloes,” said co-author Carlos Frenk, Ogden Professor of Fundamental Physics at the Institute for Computational Cosmology, at Durham University. “Most of this radiation would be emitted by dark matter haloes too small to contain stars and future gamma-ray observatories might be able to detect these emissions, making these small objects individually or collectively ‘visible’. This would confirm the hypothesized nature of the dark matter, which may not be entirely dark after all.”

“Invisible” — Could Dark Matter Be a Source of Light In the Universe?

It enabled them to study the structure of dark matter haloes of all masses between that of the Earth and that of a big galaxy cluster. In number, the zoom covers a mass range of 10 to the power 30 (that is a one followed by 30 zeroes), which is equivalent to the number of kilograms in the Sun.

A Virtual Universe in Microscopic Detail

By zooming-in on the virtual universe in such microscopic detail, the researchers were able to study the structure of dark matter haloes ranging in mass from that of the Earth to a big galaxy cluster.

“Surprisingly, we find that haloes of all sizes have a very similar internal structure, i.e., they are extremely dense at the center, become increasingly spread out, and have smaller clumps orbiting in their outer regions,” said Wang. “Without a measure scale it was almost impossible to tell an image of a dark matter halo of a massive galaxy from one whose mass is a fraction of the Sun.”

Particles of dark matter can collide near the centers of haloes, and may, according to some theories, annihilate in a burst of energetic (gamma) radiation.

“By zooming in on these relatively tiny dark matter haloes, we can calculate the amount of radiation expected to come from different sized haloes,” said Frenk. Most of this radiation would be emitted by dark matter haloes too small to contain stars and future gamma-ray observatories might be able to detect these emissions, making these small objects individually or collectively “visible”.

Harbor a Substantial Fraction of the Universe’s Dark Matter

“We expect that small dark matter haloes would be extremely numerous, containing a substantial fraction of all the dark matter in the universe, said co-author Simon White, of the Max Planck Institute of Astrophysics, Germany, “but they would remain mostly dark throughout cosmic history because stars and galaxies grow only in haloes more than a million times as massive as the Sun. Our research sheds light on these small haloes as we seek to learn more about what dark matter is and the role it plays in the evolution of the universe.”

The Daily Galaxy, Max Goldberg, via Durham University and NASA

Read about The Daily Galaxy editorial team here

“Very soon the heavens presented an extraordinary appearance, for all the stars directly behind me were now deep red, while those directly ahead were violet,” is how philosopher and science-fiction author Olaf Stapledon described the phenomena known as “redshift” in his science fiction novel, Star Maker, a history of life in the universe. In 1929, Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe is expanding, with most other galaxies moving away from us. Light from these galaxies is shifted to longer (further away and redder) wavelengths – in other words, it is red-shifted, a result of the expansion of the universe.

Quasar –Bright as 600 Trillion Suns

A single quasar can outshine 10,000 galaxies for millions of years. In January 2019, astronomers using data from the Nasa/ESA Hubble Space Telescope announced that the discovery of the brightest quasar ever seen in the early universe with a brightness of about 600 trillion suns –by far the brightest nucleus ever found of an active galaxy and its powerful glow created by the energy released by gas falling towards the supermassive black hole at its center several hundred million times as massive as our sun. Ancient quasars can provide an insight into the birth of galaxies when the universe was about one billion years old.

The “Redshift” Galaxy 

Fast forward to this week, astronomers at the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias (IAC) have announced the discovery of a galaxy with a ultraviolet luminosity comparable to that of a quasar using observations made with the Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC), at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory in the Canary Islands, and with the ATACAMA Large Millimetre/submillimetre Array (ALMA), in Chile.

“Forces Beyond Comprehension” –Event Horizon Telescope Zooms in on Massive Quasar Jet

The galaxy, called BOSS-EUVLG1, has a red-shift of 2.47. This is a measure of the reddening of the light coming from the galaxy, and can be used to find its distance, the further away the galaxy, the greater the value. For BOSS-EUVLG1, the value of 2.47 means that we are observing the galaxy when the universe was some 2 thousand million years old, around 20% of its present age.

In the image above, left and center: shows the region of the sky containing BOSS-EUVLG1, which stands out due to its blue color. Credit: DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys. Right: Artist`s drawing of the burst of star formation in BOSS-EUVLG1, which contains a large number of young massive stars, and hardly any dust. (Gabriel Pérez Díaz, SMM, IAC).

The large values of redshift and luminosity of BOSS-EUVLG1 caused it to be classified previously in the BOSS (Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey) project as a quasar. However, from the observations made with the OSIRIS and EMIR instruments on the GTC, and with the millimetre wave telescope ALMA, the researchers have shown that it is not a quasar but in fact a galaxy with extreme, exceptional properties.

Young, Massive Stars –1000 Times Milky Way 

The study revealed that the high luminosity of BOSS-EUVLG1 in the ultraviolet and in Lyman-alpha emission is due to the large number of young, massive stars in the galaxy. This high luminosity, well above the range for other galaxies, gave rise to its initial identification as a quasar. However, in quasars the high luminosity is due to the activity around the supermassive black holes in their nuclei, and not to star formation.

“BOSS-EUVLG1 seems to be dominated by a burst of formation of young, very massive stars, with hardly any dust, and with a very low metallicity, explains Rui Marques Chaves, a researcher at the CAB, formerly a doctoral student at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias and the University of La Laguna (ULL), and first author of the article.

The rate of star formation in this galaxy is very high, around a thousand solar masses per year, around a thousand times higher than that in the Milky Way, although the galaxy is 30 times smaller. “This rate of star formation is comparable only to the most luminous infrared galaxies known, but the absence of dust in BOSS-EUVLG1 allows its ultraviolet and visible emission to reach us with hardly any attenuation”, explains Ismael Pérez Fournon, an IAC researcher and a co-author.

Brief Lifespan of High Luminosity in UV 

So, the results of the study suggest that BOSS-EUVLG1 is an example of the initial phases of the formation of massive galaxies. In spite of its high luminosity and star formation rate, its low metallicity shows that the galaxy has hardly had time to enrich its interstellar medium with dust and newly formed metals. Nevertheless, “the galaxy will evolve towards a dustier phase, similar to the infrared galaxies, -notes Camilo E. Jiménez Ángel, a doctoral student at the IAC, and a co-author of the article-. Also, its high luminosity in the UV will last only a few hundred million years, a very short period in the evolution of a galaxy”.

“This would explain why other galaxies similar to BOSS-EUVLG1 have not been discovered”, observed Claudio Dalla Vecchia, a researcher at the IAC, and a co-author.

Source: “The discovery of the most UV-Ly-alfa luminous star-forming galaxy: a young, dust- and metal-poor starburst with QSO-like luminosities”.

The Daily Galaxy, Sam Cabot, via IAC and Hubble Space Telescope 

Image at the top of the page shows four ‘Ultra-Red’ galaxies that formed when our Universe was about a billion years old detected by a team of astronomers, led by Jiasheng Huang (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) using the Spitzer Space Telescope.

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The world’s astronomers are increasingly probing the mystery of where the enormous magnetic fields that permeate our universe come from –from Earth to Mars to the Milky Way to intergalactic voids and beyond to the darkest, most remote regions of the cosmos. 

The Death of Mars

A half a billion years ago, Mars magnetic field that protected an ocean as deep as the Mediterranean Sea was switched off. An impact basin deep enough to swallow Mount Everest in Valles Marineris reveals what might be the results of an ancient asteroid the size of Pluto colliding with the Red Planet, switching off its magnetic field, bathing the Red Planet in harmful radiation, and eroding its atmosphere by particles streaming from solar winds. Today, Mars is a frigid desert world with a carbon dioxide atmosphere 100 times thinner than Earth’s.

A strong magnetic field had probably played an important role in protecting the atmosphere from the solar wind and keeping the planet wet and habitable. “Venus and Mars have negligible magnetic fields and do not support life, while Earth’s magnetic field is relatively strong and does,” said exobioexplorer Sarah McIntyre at Australia National University. “We find most detected exoplanets have very weak magnetic fields, so this is an important factor when searching for potentially habitable planets.” 

The Death of Mars (YouTube Episode)

Milky Way Center

An iconic new image of the Milky Way’s violent center (below) from the Murchison Widefield Array, a radio telescope in the Western Australian outback, shows huge golden filaments that indicate enormous magnetic fields –what our galaxy would look like if human eyes could see radio waves.

“An Unseen Magnetic Soul”

Anytime astronomers figure out a new way of looking for magnetic fields in ever more remote regions of the cosmos, inexplicably, they find them, observes Natalie Wolchover in Quanta about the invisible magnetic field lines that loop and swirl through intergalactic space like the grooves of a fingerprint, an unseen “magnetic soul”.

“Magnetism is primordial,’ she writes, “tracing all the way back to the birth of the universe. In that case, weak magnetism should exist everywhere, even in the “voids” of the cosmic web — the very darkest, emptiest regions of the universe. The omnipresent magnetism would have seeded the stronger fields that blossomed in galaxies and clusters.”

In 2019, astronomers discovered 10 million light-years of magnetized space spanning the entire length of a “filament” of the cosmic web, part of the massive web that fills much of space, connecting two galaxy clusters dubbed Abell 0399 and Abell 0401 that are slowly colliding with each other.

The Cosmic Web

“We are just looking at the tip of the iceberg, probably,” said Federica Govoni of the National Institute for Astrophysics in Cagliari, Italy, who led the first detection using the Low-Frequency Array (LOFAR) radio telescope to observe the bridge of radio-emitting plasma extending between the two galaxy clusters that are approaching a merger. The results imply that intergalactic magnetic fields connect the two clusters and challenge theories of particle acceleration in the intergalactic medium.  

“To understand the nature of this extended radio source is a real challenge, since the maximum distance that these relativistic electrons can cover during their radiative life is much smaller than the size of the radio filament connecting Abell 0399 and Abell 0401,” Govoni told The Daily Galaxy. “Therefore,” she expains, “a mechanism responsible for the acceleration of electrons along the entire filament must exist. Different theories on the acceleration of particles in the intergalactic medium can therefore be investigated.”

The cosmic web, shown here in a computer simulation, illustrates massive filaments of galaxies separated by giant voids.

Primordial magnetism might also help resolve another cosmological conundrum known as the Hubble tension, observes Wolchover, pointing out that it is “probably the hottest topic in cosmology.” 

Primordial Magnetism in the early Universe may Resolve the Hubble Tensio

Currently, the expansion rate of the local Universe is 73 km/s/Mpc according to the measured recession velocities of and distances to nearby galaxies. According to this Hubble constant, a galaxy that is 10 megaparsecs (33 million light years) away is redshifted by 730 km/s, while a more distant galaxy that is 100 megaparsecs away (330 million light years) is moving away from us at 7,300 km/s. Meanwhile, the Hubble constant inferred from the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) as measured by the Planck satellite implies a lower Hubble constant of 67 km/s/Mpc, assuming the early Universe has since evolved to the present day according to standard cosmological models. Although the difference is only 9%, both of these Hubble constants are measured to roughly 2% precision, and so there is statistically significant tension between the two values. The addition of non-standard physics to the cosmological models, such as a primordial magnetism in the early Universe, may potentially resolve this tension. 

Cosmic Highways -Gargantuan Filaments of Gas Fueled the Structure of the Universe 

“While the Hubble Constant is constant everywhere in space at a given time, it is not constant in time.” explains Chris Fassnacht, professor of physics at UC Davis about the current crisis in cosmology, or “tension”, in understanding the rate of expansion of the universe —known as the “Hubble Constant”—since the Big Bang, a central part of the quest to discover the origins of the universe.

“Dark Energy is Incredibly Strange”

Some physicists meanwhile  propose dark energy is a ‘fifth’ force beyond the four already known – gravitational, electromagnetic, and the strong and weak nuclear forces. However, researchers think this fifth force may be ‘screened’ or ‘hidden’ for large objects like planets, making it difficult to detect.

“Dark energy is incredibly strange, but actually it makes sense to me that it went unnoticed,” said Noble Prize winning physicist Adam Riess, in an interview with The Atlantic. “I have absolutely no clue what dark energy is. Dark energy appears strong enough to push the entire universe – yet its source is unknown, its location is unknown and its physics are highly speculative.”

In a paper posted online in April and under review with Physical Review Letters, the cosmologists KarstenJedamzik and Levon Pogosian, a professor of physics at Simon Fraser University in Canada, propose that weak magnetic fields in the early universe would lead to the faster cosmic expansion rate seen today. 

Is Dark Energy Evolving? –Ancient Quasars May Offer the Answer

Like a Living Organism

Astrophysicists at Johns Hopkins led by Nobel Laureate, Adam Riess, say researchers need to find conclusive evidence of primordial magnetism that appears to be everywhere, is the missing agent that shaped the universe.

“Everyone knows it’s one of those big puzzles,” said Pogosian. “But for decades, there was no way to tell whether magnetism is truly ubiquitous and thus a primordial component of the cosmos, so cosmologists largely stopped paying attention.”

Magnetism “is a little bit like a living organism,” said Torsten Enßlin, a theoretical astrophysicist at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, “because magnetic fields tap into every free energy source they can hold onto and grow. They can spread and affect other areas with their presence, where they grow as well.”   

“Free energy is energy that can be used to perform some work,” Enßlin explains  in an email to The Daily Galaxy. “For example the ordered motion of a gas stream can certainly be regarded as free energy, but the random thermal motion of its atoms not necessarily as such. Magnetic fields that are frozen into an ionized gas are able to extract kinetic energy from it and convert this into further magnetic energy to grow exponentially in strength, up to a level at  which their own forces are starting to alter the gas flow pattern significantly. This dynamo mechanism maintains magnetic fields in many astrophysical bodies, from planets, over stars, to galaxy and galaxy clusters.”

“This ability to grow lets magnetic fields appear a bit like living organisms,” Enßlin observes, “as they can harvest free energy to maintain themselves. Furthermore, one needs a seed magnetic field for this growth, similar as one needs some seed organisms to grow an ecosystem. Of course this analogy has its limitations, as magnetic fields for example do not have a complex genetic code that gets copied from one generation to the next. Nevertheless, if one focuses on magnetization of an ionized gas in turbulent motion, one sees that this can spread and grow very much like microorganisms in an environment with nutrition.”

The Last Word

“Rather than saying ‘magnetic fields lead to the faster cosmic expansion,’ it would be more accurate to say that accounting for the magnetic fields would lead to a ‘prediction’ of a faster cosmic expansion, Levon Pogosian explains, replying to an email from The Daily Galaxy. “Let me elaborate on this point: The Hubble tension” refers to the disagreement between the value of the Hubble constant (i.e. the current expansion rate of the universe) measured directly and the value predicted by the Lambda Cold Dark Matter (LCDM) model fit to the Cosmic Microwave Background data. Magnetic fields introduce a new ingredient into the LCDM model, such that, the fit to the CMB data results in a larger value of Hubble Constant.” 

“Why does this happen?” Pogosian explains: “Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) is the oldest light in the universe we can see. This light was released some 400,000 years after the Big Bang, when the universe turned from opaque to transparent. This transition happened when electrons and protons started to bind to form neutral hydrogen atoms. Cosmologists refer to this period as the epoch of recombination.”

“The CMB has been measured with exquisite accuracy,” he notes in his email, “allowing us to measure all free parameters of the LCDM model very precisely. Once these parameters are known, one should be able to predict all the observed properties of the universe, with the current expansion rate being one of them.

“The LCDM parameters one measures from CMB depend strongly on when the CMB was released. If recombination happened at an earlier time, the predicted H0 would be larger. That’s where magnetic fields help.

“Inhomogeneous primordial magnetic fields, if present just prior and during recombination, would compress the proton-electron plasma in little pockets, making it clumpy. As a result of this clumping, the protons and electrons would be forming hydrogen more efficiently and recombination would occur at an earlier time, which is what LCDM needs to predict a higher Hubble Constant.”

“Interestingly,” Pogosian concludes in his email, “the strength of the magnetic field one needs to relieve the H0 tension, around 0.05 nano-Gauss in comoving units, happens to be of just the right order to also explain all the other sightings of cosmic magnetic fields. Needless to say, this is very exciting!”

“An earlier completion of recombination would mean that the comoving sound horizon at the time CMB was emitted was smaller. The angular size of that sound horizon is the best measured quantity in cosmology. With this angular size fixed, a smaller sound horizon would mean that the comoving distance to the epoch of recombination is shorter. This, in turn, would require the current rate of expansion to be larger.”

New Discovery of Magnetic Fields in Cosmic Filaments

Shane O’Sullivan, a radio astronomer that works on understanding the properties of magnetic fields that pervade the Universe and  co-PI of the LOFAR Magnetism Key Science Project (MKSP), wrote The Daily Galaxy to announce: “Excitingly, we have just discovered the signature of magnetic fields in intergalactic cosmic filaments, using measurements of ~1,000 galaxies with the LOFAR radio telescope. This first detection by our team is described in Carretti et al. (2022), where we find an average field strength of ~3 picoTesla (about a billion times weaker than a fridge magnet). This discovery is only the beginning, and soon we will be able to trace the evolution of these fields back in time to understand the origin of cosmic magnetism in the very early Universe. ” 

Image credit: Combined radio/optical image of galaxy IC 342, using data from both the VLA and the Effelsberg telescope. Lines indicate the orientation of magnetic fields in the galaxy. R. Beck, MPIfR; NRAO/AUI/NSF; graphics: U. Klein, AIfA; Background image: T.A. Rector, University of Alaska Anchorage and H. Schweiker, WIYN; NOAO/AURA/NSF.

Maxwell Moe, astrophysicist, NASA Einstein Fellow, University of Arizona via Federica Govoni, Torsten Enßlin, Levon Pogosian,  Shane O’Sullivan and The Hidden Magnetic Universe Begins to Come Into View/Quanta and Science

Maxwell Moe, astrophysicist, NASA Einstein Fellow, University of Arizona. Max can be found two nights a week probing the mysteries of the Universe at the Kitt Peak National Observatory. Max received his Ph.D in astronomy from Harvard University in 2015.

“The sign of our extinction would be no more than a match flaring for a second in the heavens,” said film director Stanley Kubrick, about an image of the destruction of our planet to an alien observer in the Andromeda Galaxy, a massive spiral galaxy so close to our increasingly fragile Earth that it appears as a cigar-shaped smudge of light high in the autumn night sky. The Hubble Space Telescope has announced this week that it has captured the nearly invisible halo of our neighbor, M31–a veil of diffuse plasma extending 1.3 million light-years from the galaxy—about halfway to our Milky Way—and as far as 2 million light-years in some directions.

In the landmark study, scientists using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have mapped the immense halo of gas, surrounding the Andromeda galaxy, our nearest large galactic neighbor discovering a complex and dynamic inner shell triggered by from the impact of supernova activity, that extends to about a half million light-years. “The outer shell,” says study leader Nicolas Lehner, astrophysicist at the University of Notre Dame,”is smoother and hotter.”

Reveals a Layered Structure

The Hubble team also found that the halo has a layered structure, with two main nested and distinct shells of gas. “Understanding the huge halos of gas surrounding galaxies is immensely important,” explained co-investigator Samantha Berek of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. “This reservoir of gas contains fuel for future star formation within the galaxy, as well as outflows from events such as supernovae. It’s full of clues regarding the past and future evolution of the galaxy, and we’re finally able to study it in great detail in our closest galactic neighbor.”

“The Monster” –Andromeda Galaxy Foreshadows the Milky Way’s Fate

A signature of this activity is the team’s discovery of a large amount of heavy elements in the gaseous halo of Andromeda. Heavier elements are cooked up in the interiors of stars and then ejected into space—sometimes violently as a star dies. The halo is then contaminated with this material from stellar explosions.

Ancient Light of 43 Quasars

Through a program called Project AMIGA (Absorption Map of Ionized Gas in Andromeda), the study examined the light from 43 quasars—the very distant, brilliant cores of active galaxies powered by black holes—located far beyond Andromeda. The quasars are scattered behind the halo, allowing scientists to probe multiple regions. Looking through the halo at the quasars’ light, the team observed how this light is absorbed by the Andromeda halo and how that absorption changes in different regions.

The immense Andromeda halo is made of very rarified and ionized gas that doesn’t emit radiation that is easily detectable. Therefore, tracing the absorption of light coming from a background source is a better way to probe this material.

The purple-hued illustration of Andromeda galaxy’s halo, with background quasars (shown with yellowish dots) scattered throughout. This illustration shows the location of the 43 quasars scientists used to probe Andromeda’s gaseous halo. These quasars—the very distant, brilliant cores of active galaxies powered by black holes—are scattered far behind the halo, allowing scientists to probe multiple regions. Looking through the immense halo at the quasars’ light, the team observed how this light is absorbed by the halo and how that absorption changes in different regions. By tracing the absorption of light coming from the background quasars, scientists are able to probe the halo’s material. (NASA, ESA, and E. Wheatley, STScI)

The Andromeda Signal –“From No Known Particle or Atom”

The researchers used the unique capability of Hubble’s Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS) to study the ultraviolet light from the quasars. Ultraviolet light is absorbed by Earth’s atmosphere, which makes it impossible to observe with ground-based telescopes. The team used COS to detect ionized gas from carbon, silicon, and oxygen. An atom becomes ionized when radiation strips one or more electrons from it.

The 2015 Probe

Andromeda’s halo has been probed before by Lehner’s team. In 2015, they discovered that the Andromeda halo is large and massive. But there was little hint of its complexity; now, it’s mapped out in more detail, leading to its size and mass being far more accurately determined.

“Previously, there was very little information—only six quasars—within 1 million light-years of the galaxy. This new program provides much more information on this inner region of Andromeda’s halo,” explained co-investigator J. Christopher Howk, also of Notre Dame. “Probing gas within this radius is important, as it represents something of a gravitational sphere of influence for Andromeda.”

Similar to Milky Way’s Halo

Because we live inside the Milky Way, scientists cannot easily interpret the signature of our own galaxy’s halo. However, they believe the halos of Andromeda and the Milky Way must be very similar since these two galaxies are quite similar. The two galaxies are on a collision course, and will merge to form a giant elliptical galaxy beginning about 4 billion years from now.

Scientists have studied gaseous halos of more distant galaxies, but those galaxies are much smaller on the sky, meaning the number of bright enough background quasars to probe their halo is usually only one per galaxy. Spatial information is therefore essentially lost. With its close proximity to Earth, the gaseous halo of Andromeda looms large on the sky, allowing for a far more extensive sampling.

“This is truly a unique experiment because only with Andromeda do we have information on its halo along not only one or two sightlines, but over 40,” explained Lehner. “This is groundbreaking for capturing the complexity of a galaxy halo beyond our own Milky Way.”

In fact, Andromeda is the only galaxy in the universe for which this experiment can be done now, and only with Hubble. Only with an ultraviolet-sensitive future space telescope will scientists be able to routinely undertake this type of experiment beyond the approximately 30 galaxies comprising the Local Group. “So Project AMIGA has also given us a glimpse of the future,” said Lehner.

The Daily Galaxy, Sam Cabot, via NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

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Astronomers have discovered the source and cycle of mysterious ultra-bright gamma ray flashes, which runs on a clockwork 162-days at a distance of 15,000 light years away from Earth. The “gamma ray heartbeat” may reveal a link to a rare “microquasar” star system called SS 433 –a binary system comprising a compact “microquasar, a black hole or neutron star submerged in a dense, bright disk of gas spitting out huge amounts of X-rays, gamma-rays, and radio waves, plus hydrogen gas flying at speeds of 25 percent of the speed of light.

SS433 is a small-scale version of quasars that are present within our Milky Way Galaxy first discovered in 1977–orbiting a massive companion star, creating an enormous disk of hot gas around the dead compact star.

The brilliant, luminous heartbeat “is unexpected from previously published theoretical models” and is yet another reason why “SS 433 continues to perplex observers at all frequencies and theoreticians alike,” reports a study published in Nature Astronomy based on more than ten years of gigaelectronvolt gamma-ray data from the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. A radio image of SS433, with particles streaming away from the black hole in a corkscrew pattern is shown above.

Unknown Phenomena –“Repeating FRB’s Formed by Events Never Seen Before”

The corkscrew shape is created by a phenomenon known as precession; as they move outwards through space, the two jets shown are slowly tumbling around an axis in a similar way to the motion of a gyroscope or a spinning top slowing down, the orientation of their rotational axes changing as they do so. The scale of this corkscrew is enormous, at 5000 times the size of the Solar System.

Locked in Orbit with a Dead Star

SS433, one of the most exotic star systems known to astronomers,  consist of a massive, hot star locked in a mutual orbit with a compact object, a black hole or neutron star, which has produced an accretion disk with jets. Material transfers from the massive star into an accretion disk surrounding the compact object blasting out two jets of ionized gas in opposite directions – at about 1/4 the speed of light. Radiation from the jet tilted toward the observer is blueshifted, while radiation from the jet tilted away is redshifted. The binary system itself completes an orbit in about 13 days while the jets precess (wobble like a top) with a period of about 162 days .

Mystery Blob Detected Hidden Deep Inside a Supernova –“Not a Pulsar or Black Hole”

Linked to a Large Hydrogen Gas Cloud?

Another odd source of gamma rays, a large cloud of hydrogen gas called Fermi J1913+0515 about 100 light years from SS 433, is being charged with some kind of energetic emission, causing the flashes of light. To determine if there’s a link between SS 433 and Fermi J1913+0515, Jian Li, who co-led the new study and serves as Humboldt Fellow at Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY) in Germany, examined the precessional period of SS 433. It’s disk wobbles like a spinning top over a period of about 162 days, causing the jets to get twisted into spiral shapes. The Fermi data revealed that the period of the gamma ray heartbeat matched SS 433’s precessional period, peaking at 162 days, which is consistent with the precession period of the jet.

Mystery Object Observed by LIGO –“The Strangest Black Hole Ever Detected?”

The gamma ray heartbeat, however, should be too distant for a connection with SS 433, reports Motherboard Science, and is not located in the direct path of its jets, which models also predict would collapse long before they could travel across 100 light years and illuminate the sky with such intense energy. Another potential explanation is that the heartbeat is illuminated by more diffuse and unstructured outflows of gas and particles generated by the disk’s precession, rippling out to Fermi J1913+0515 and light it up in this unique way.

The Daily Galaxy, Jake Burba, via Nature, ALMA Observatory, and Motherboard Science

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Astronomers have discovered a rare dual quasar–a quasi-stellar radio source, one of the most luminous, powerful engines known in the universe, powered by supermassive black holes that are millions to billions times more massive than our Sun– that existed 4.6 billion years ago, 13,000 light years apart near the center of a single massive galaxy. By comparison, the gargantuan explosion of a single supernova can outshine an entire galaxy for a few weeks; a single quasar can outshine 10,000 galaxies for millions of years.

Galactic Lighthouses

These two monster galactic lighthouses, SDSS J141637.44+003352.2, are at the heart of a galaxy that appears to be part of a cluster, as shown by the neighboring galaxies in the left panel in the image above. In the lower panels, optical spectroscopy has revealed broad emission lines associated with each of the two quasars, indicating that the gas is moving at thousands of kilometers per second in the vicinity of two distinct supermassive black holes. The two quasars shown in the image below are different colors, due to different amounts of dust in front of them.

As material swirls around a black hole at the center of a galaxy, reports the W. M. Keck Observatory, it is heated to high temperatures, releasing so much light that the quasar can outshine its host galaxy. This makes a merging pair of galaxies with quasar activity hard to detect; it is difficult to separate the light from the two quasars because they are in such close proximity to each other. Also, observing a wide enough area of the sky to catch these rare events in sufficient numbers is a challenge.

Unveiled by Three Hawaii Observatories

Astronomers have discovered several pairs of such merging galaxies, or luminous “dual” quasars, using three Maunakea Observatories in Hawaii—Subaru Telescope, W. M. Keck Observatory, and Gemini Observatory. These dual quasars are so rare, a research team led by the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe at the University of Tokyo estimates only 0.3% of all known quasars have two supermassive black holes that are on a collision course with each other.

Is Dark Energy Evolving? –Ancient Quasars May Offer the Answer

“In spite of their rarity, they represent an important stage in the evolution of galaxies, where the central giant is awakened, gaining mass, and potentially impacting the growth of its host galaxy,” said Shenli Tang, a graduate student at the University of Tokyo and co-author of the study.

To overcome these obstacles, the team took advantage of a sensitive wide survey of the sky using the Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC) camera on the Subaru Telescope.

“To make our job easier, we started by looking at the 34,476 known quasars from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey with HSC imaging to identify those having two (or more) distinct centers,” said lead author John Silverman of the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe. “Honestly, we didn’t start out looking for dual quasars. We were examining images of these luminous quasars to determine which type of galaxies they preferred to reside in when we started to see cases with two optical sources in their centers where we only expected one.”

421 Promising Candidates

The team identified 421 promising cases. However, there was still the chance many of these were not bona-fide dual quasars but rather chance projections such as starlight from our own galaxy. Confirmation required detailed analysis of the light from the candidates to search for definitive signs of two distinct quasars.

The newly discovered dual quasars demonstrate the promise of wide-area imaging combined with high-resolution spectroscopic observations to reveal these elusive objects, which are key to better understanding the growth of galaxies and their supermassive black holes.

Source: John D. Silverman et al. Dual Supermassive Black Holes at Close Separation Revealed by the Hyper Suprime-Cam Subaru Strategic Program, The Astrophysical Journal (2020). DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/aba4a3

The Daily Galaxy, Max Goldberg, via W. M. Keck Observatory

Image credit top of page: Astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope found that Markarian 231 (Mrk 231), the nearest galaxy to Earth that hosts a quasar, is powered by two central black holes.

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It’s been said that maps codify the miracle of existence. Often referred to as the “cosmic genome” project, the new Sloan Digital Sky Survey is the largest three-dimensional map of the universe ever created, filling in the most significant gaps in its history.

“We know both the ancient history of the universe and its recent expansion history fairly well, but there’s a troublesome gap in the middle 11 billion years,” says cosmologist Kyle Dawson of the University of Utah, about the results of the analysis of The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) released today.

“For five years,” Dawson added, “we have worked to fill in that gap, and we are using that information to provide some of the most substantial advances in cosmology in the last decade.”

11 Billion Years of Cosmic Time

The new results come from the extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (eBOSS), one of the SDSS’s component surveys that collated a three-dimensional map of distant galaxies, enabling the most precise measurements yet of dark energy and the acceleration of the expansion of the Universe, and to study the early, formative years of the cosmos. At the heart of the new results are detailed measurements of more than two million galaxies and quasars covering 11 billion years of cosmic time.

“We have spent five years collecting measurements of 1.2 million galaxies over one quarter of the sky to map out the structure of the Universe over a volume of 650 billion cubic light years,” said astronomer Jeremy Tinker, about the latest map that extends about twice as far as the previous sky survey, providing unprecedented insight into the evolution of the Universe by examining the distribution of galaxy clusters.

“We know,” reports the Sloan team,” what the universe looked like in its infancy, thanks to the thousands of scientists from around the world who have measured the relative amounts of elements created soon after the Big Bang, and who have studied the Cosmic Microwave Background. We also know its expansion history over the last few billion years from galaxy maps and distance measurements, including those from previous phases of the SDSS –a multi-institution group of astronomers who since 2000 have searched the skies with the 100-inch, wide-angle optical telescope at the Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico.”

Epoch of the Cosmic Dawn –Faint Signal of First Atoms Detected

“Inconsistent” –Hubble Constant Measurements

The Hubble Constant measurements from SDSS and other surveys are inconsistent with the measurements from nearby galaxies, which find a value close to 74 in these units – as opposed to 68 for the SDSS. Only with the data taken from SDSS and other experiments in the last decade has it been possible to reveal this discrepancy.

“Taken together, detailed analyses of the eBOSS map and the earlier SDSS experiments have now provided the most accurate expansion history measurements over the widest-ever range of cosmic time,” says Will Percival of the University of Waterloo, eBOSS’s Survey Scientist. “These studies allow us to connect all these measurements into a complete story of the expansion of the universe.”

A close look at the map reveals the filaments and voids that define the structure in the universe, starting from the time when the universe was only about 300,000 years old. From this map, researchers measure patterns in the distribution of galaxies, which give several key parameters of our universe to better than one percent accuracy.

The Dark Energy Enigma

The map represents the combined effort of more than 20 years of mapping the universe using the Sloan Foundation telescope. The cosmic history that has been revealed in this map shows that about six billion years ago, the expansion of the universe began to accelerate, and has continued to get faster and faster ever since. This accelerated expansion seems to be due to a mysterious invisible component of the universe called “dark energy,” consistent with Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity but extremely difficult to reconcile with our current understanding of particle physics.

The busy SDSS map below is shown as a rainbow of colors, located within the observable Universe (the outer sphere, showing fluctuations in the Cosmic Microwave Background). We are located at the center of this map. The inset for each color-coded section of the map includes an image of a typical galaxy or quasar from that section, and also the signal of the pattern that the eBOSS team measures there. As we look out in distance, we look back in time. So, the location of these signals reveals the expansion rate of the Universe at different times in cosmic history. (Anand Raichoor (EPFL), Ashley Ross (Ohio State University) and the SDSS Collaboration)

“I have absolutely no clue what dark energy is. Dark energy appears strong enough to push the entire universe – yet its source is unknown, its location is unknown and its physics are highly speculative,” said Noble Prize winning physicist Adam Riess in an interview with The Atlantic about the mysterious force — beyond the four already known, gravitational, electromagnetic, and the strong and weak nuclear–that is causing the universe to expand at an accelerating rate– that may be a hidden ‘fifth’ force that acts on matter with no evidence of its existence.

“Hubble’s Elusive Constant” –‘Something is Fundamentally Flawed’

“The discovery of dark energy has greatly changed how we think about the laws of nature,” said Edward Witten, one of the world’s leading theoretical physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. who has been compared to Newton and Einstein.

Cracks in the Picture

Combining observations from eBOSS with studies of the universe in its infancy reveals cracks in this picture of the universe. In particular, the eBOSS team’s measurement of the current rate of expansion of the universe (the “Hubble Constant”) is about 10 percent lower than the value found from distances to nearby galaxies. The high precision of the eBOSS data means that it is highly unlikely that this mismatch is due to chance, and the rich variety of eBOSS data gives us multiple independent ways to draw the same conclusion.

“Only with maps like ours can you actually say for sure that there is a mismatch in the Hubble Constant,” says Eva-Maria Mueller of the University of Oxford, who led the analysis to interpret the results from the full SDSS sample. “These newest maps from eBOSS show it more clearly than ever before.”

There is no broadly accepted explanation for this discrepancy in measured expansion rates, but one exciting possibility is that a previously-unknown form of matter or energy from the early universe might have left a trace on our history.

In total, the eBOSS team made the results from more than 20 scientific papers public today. Those papers describe, in more than 500 pages, the team’s analyses of the latest eBOSS data, marking the completion of the key goals of the survey.

Within the eBOSS team, individual groups at Universities around the world focused on different aspects of the analysis. To create the part of the map dating back six billion years, the team used large, red galaxies. Farther out, they used younger, blue galaxies. Finally, to map the universe eleven billion years in the past and more, they used quasars, which are bright galaxies lit up by material falling onto a central supermassive black hole. Each of these samples required careful analysis in order to remove contaminants, and reveal the patterns of the universe.

“By combining SDSS data with additional data from the Cosmic Microwave Background, supernovae, and other programs, we can simultaneously measure many fundamental properties of the universe,” says Mueller. “The SDSS data cover such a large swath of cosmic time that they provide the biggest advances of any probe to measure the geometrical curvature of the universe, finding it to be flat. They also allow measurements of the local expansion rate to better than one percent.”

eBOSS, and SDSS more generally, leaves the puzzle of dark energy, and the mismatch of local and early universe expansion rate, as a legacy to future projects. In the next decade, future surveys may resolve the conundrum, or perhaps, will reveal more surprises.

The Daily Galaxy, Max Goldberg, via Sloan Digital Sky Survey

Image credit top of page: Each dot in this SDSS picture indicates the position of a galaxy 6 billion years into the past. The image covers about 1/20th of the sky, a slice of the Universe 6 billion light-years wide, 4.5 billion light-years high, and 500 million light-years thick. Color indicates distance from Earth, ranging from yellow on the near side of the slice to purple on the far side. Galaxies are highly clustered, revealing superclusters and voids whose presence is seeded in the first fraction of a second after the Big Bang. This image contains 48,741 galaxies, about 3% of the full survey dataset. Grey patches are small regions without survey data. Daniel Eisenstein and the SDSS-III collaboration

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The coronavirus pandemic provided a pair of astronomers the free time to travel back through archives of old 1997 data from W. M. Keck Observatory on Mauankea in Hawaii and old X-ray data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory to unlock a mystery 10-billion light years away surrounding an extremely rare, bright, gravitationally-lensed quasar–the first discovered, spectacularly luminous Einstein ring, named MG 1131+0456, an early universe galaxy– obscured by a feeding black hole stirring up gas and dust, cloaking the ancient object.

The Keck Observatory reports that finding a a quasar that is gravitationally lensed, making it appear brighter and larger, is exceptionally exciting. While slightly over 200 lensed obscured quasars are currently known, the number of lensed obscured quasars discovered is in the single digits.

MG 1131+0456, which was observed in 1987 with the Very Large Array network of radio telescopes in New Mexico. Remarkably, though widely studied, the quasar’s distance or redshift remained a question mark. “This whole paper was a bit nostalgic for me, making me look at papers from the early days of my career, when I was still in graduate school. The Berlin Wall was still up when this Einstein ring was first discovered, and all the data presented in our paper are from the last millennium,” said Daniel Stern, senior research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Is Dark Energy Evolving? –Ancient Quasars May Offer the Answer

The Lens as a Probe for Dark Matter

“As we dug deeper, we were surprised that such a famous and bright source never had a distance measured for it,” said Stern, senior author of the study. “Having a distance is a necessary first step for all sorts of additional studies, such as using the lens as a tool to measure the expansion history of the universe and as a probe for dark matter.”

Stern and co-author Dominic Walton, an STFC Ernest Rutherford Fellow at the University of Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy (UK), are the first to calculate the quasar’s distance, a redshift of z = 1.849.

Coronavirus pandemic provided free time to probe old archives

At the time of their research, telescopes around the planet were shuttered due to the coronavirus pandemic (Keck Observatory has since reopened as of May 16); Stern and Walton took advantage of their extended time at home to creatively keep science going by combing through data from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) to search for gravitationally lensed, heavily obscured quasars. While dust hides most active galaxies in visible light surveys, that obscuring dust makes such sources very bright in infrared surveys, such as provided by WISE.

“Galaxy Dragons” –The All-Consuming Supermassive Black Holes in the Center of Quasars

Though quasars are often extremely far away, astronomers can detect them through gravitational lensing, a phenomenon that acts as nature’s magnifying glass. This occurs when a galaxy closer to Earth acts as a lens and makes the quasar behind it look extra bright. The gravitational field of the closer galaxy warps space itself, bending and amplifying the light of the quasar in the background. If the alignment is just right, this creates a circle of light called an Einstein ring, predicted by Albert Einstein in 1936. More typically, gravitationally lensing will cause multiple images of the background object to appear around the foreground object.

Its Distance a Mystery

Once Stern and Walton rediscovered MG 1131+0456 with WISE and realized its distance remained a mystery, they meticulously combed through old data from the Keck Observatory Archive (KOA) and found the Observatory observed the quasar seven times between 1997 and 2007 using the Low Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (LRIS) on the Keck I telescope, as well as the Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSPEC) and the Echellette Spectrograph and Imager (ESI) on the Keck II telescope.

Harvard CfA image of MG 1131+0456

“We were able to extract the distance from Keck’s earliest data set, taken in March of 1997, in the early years of the observatory,” said Walton. “We are grateful to Keck and NASA for their collaborative efforts to make more than 25 years of Keck data publicly available to the world. Our paper would not have been possible without that.”

The team also analyzed NASA’s archival data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory in 2000, in the first year after the mission launched.

“Big Bang Quasars” –Colossal Black Holes Detected at Dawn of the Cosmos

Fortuitous Geometry

With MG 1131+0456’s distance now known, Walton and Stern were able to determine the mass of the lensed galaxy with exquisite precision and use the Chandra data to robustly confirm the obscured nature of the quasar, accurately determining how much intervening gas lies between us and its luminous central regions.

“We can now fully describe the unique, fortuitous geometry of this Einstein ring,” said Stern. “This allows us to craft follow-up studies, such as using the soon-to-launch James Webb Space Telescope to study the dark matter properties of the lensing galaxy.”

“Our next step is to find lensed quasars that are even more heavily obscured than MG 1131+0456,” said Walton. “Finding those needles is going to be even harder, but they’re out there waiting to be discovered. These cosmic gems can give us a deeper understanding of the universe, including further insight into how supermassive black holes grow and influence their surroundings,” says Walton.

The Daily Galaxy, Max Goldberg, via W.M. Keck Observatory

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“Eventually we reach the utmost limits of our telescopes –there we measure shadows, and we search among the ghostly errors of measurement for landmarks that are scarcely more substantial,” said Edwin Hubble in 1929, creator of Hubble’s law that observed that the further galaxies are, the faster they are moving away from Earth –the “red shift.” Predictions of Hubble’s Constant from the standard cosmological model when applied to new measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB)—the leftover radiation from the Big Bang—have produced a value of 67.4, a significant and troubling difference. This difference, which astronomers say is one of the fundamental problems in all of physics, is beyond the experimental errors in the observations.

This model is called Lambda Cold Dark Matter, or Lambda CDM, where “Lambda” refers to Einstein’s cosmological constant and is a representation of dark energy. The model divides the composition of the Universe mainly between ordinary matter, dark matter, and dark energy, and describes how the Universe has evolved since the Big Bang.

This difference, which astronomers say is beyond the experimental errors in the observations, has serious implications for the Standard Model, which while describing the fundamental nature of the Universe, does not explain aspects of the large-scale universe. For example, the Standard Model cannot explain why the universe is made of matter and not antimatter, nor can it explain what constitutes the dark matter of the universe These new measurements, made with an international collection of radio telescopes, have greatly increased the likelihood that theorists need to revise the “standard model”.

The Standard Model – “Cannot Possibly Be Right Because It Cannot Predict Why the Universe Exists”

Fine Tuning the “Constant”

The new distance measurements allowed astronomers to refine their calculation of the Hubble Constant, the expansion rate of the Universe, a value important for testing the theoretical model describing the composition and evolution of the Universe. The problem is that the new measurements exacerbate a discrepancy between previously measured values of the Hubble Constant and the value predicted by the model when applied to measurements of the cosmic microwave background made by the Planck satellite.

“Hubble’s Elusive Constant” –‘Something is Fundamentally Flawed’

“We find that galaxies are nearer than predicted by the standard model of cosmology, corroborating a problem identified in other types of distance measurements. There has been debate over whether this problem lies in the model itself or in the measurements used to test it. Our work uses a distance measurement technique completely independent of all others, and we reinforce the disparity between measured and predicted values. It is likely that the basic cosmological model involved in the predictions is the problem,” said James Braatz, of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO).

Megamaser Cosmology Project

Braatz leads the Megamaser Cosmology Project, an international effort to measure the Hubble Constant by finding galaxies with specific properties that lend themselves to yielding precise geometric distances. The project has used the National Science Foundation’s Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA), and Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT), along with the Effelsberg telescope in Germany. The team reported their latest results in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The Chameleon –“Dark Energy is Hiding”

Edwin Hubble, after whom the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope is named, first calculated the expansion rate of the universe (the Hubble Constant) in 1929 by measuring the distances to galaxies and their recession speeds. The more distant a galaxy is, the greater its recession speed from Earth. Today, the Hubble Constant remains a fundamental property of observational cosmology and a focus of many modern studies.Measuring recession speeds of galaxies

Measuring recession speeds of galaxies

is relatively straightforward. Determining cosmic distances, however, has been a difficult task for astronomers. For objects in our own Milky Way Galaxy, astronomers can get distances by measuring the apparent shift in the object’s position when viewed from opposite sides of Earth’s orbit around the Sun, an effect called parallax. The first such measurement of a star’s parallax distance came in 1838.

Beyond our own Galaxy, parallaxes are too small to measure, so astronomers have relied on objects called “standard candles,” so named because their intrinsic brightness is presumed to be known. The distance to an object of known brightness can be calculated based on how dim the object appears from Earth. These standard candles include a class of stars called Cepheid variables and a specific type of stellar explosion called a Type Ia supernova.

The Standard Model that Describes the Fundamental Nature of the Universe – “Something Substantial is Missing”

Another method of estimating the expansion rate involves observing distant quasars whose light is bent by the gravitational effect of a foreground galaxy into multiple images. When the quasar varies in brightness, the change appears in the different images at different times. Measuring this time difference, along with calculations of the geometry of the light-bending, yields an estimate of the expansion rate.

Determinations of the Hubble Constant based on the standard candles and the gravitationally-lensed quasars have produced figures of 73-74 kilometers per second (the speed) per megaparsec (distance in units favored by astronomers).

Lambda CDM –Problems with the Model?

However, predictions of the Hubble Constant from the standard cosmological model when applied to measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB)—the leftover radiation from the Big Bang—produce a value of 67.4, a significant and troubling difference. This difference, which astronomers say is beyond the experimental errors in the observations, has serious implications for the standard model.

The model is called Lambda Cold Dark Matter, or Lambda CDM, where “Lambda” refers to Einstein’s cosmological constant and is a representation of dark energy. The model divides the composition of the Universe mainly between ordinary matter, dark matter, and dark energy, and describes how the Universe has evolved since the Big Bang.

The Megamaser Cosmology Project focuses on galaxies with disks of water-bearing molecular gas orbiting supermassive black holes at the galaxies’ centers. If the orbiting disk is seen nearly edge-on from Earth, bright spots of radio emission, called masers—radio analogs to visible-light lasers—can be used to determine both the physical size of the disk and its angular extent, and therefore, through geometry, its distance. The project’s team uses the worldwide collection of radio telescopes to make the precision measurements required for this technique.

In their latest work, the team refined their distance measurements to four galaxies, at distances ranging from 168 million light-years to 431 million light-years. Combined with previous distance measurements of two other galaxies, their calculations produced a value for the Hubble Constant of 73.9 kilometers per second per megaparsec.

Discrepancy Creates one of the most fundamental problems in all of physics

“Testing the standard model of cosmology is a really challenging problem that requires the best-ever measurements of the Hubble Constant. The discrepancy between the predicted and measured values of the Hubble Constant points to one of the most fundamental problems in all of physics, so we would like to have multiple, independent measurements that corroborate the problem and test the model. Our method is geometric, and completely independent of all others, and it reinforces the discrepancy,” said Dom Pesce, a researcher at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard and Smithsonian, and lead author on the latest paper.

“The maser method of measuring the expansion rate of the universe is elegant, and, unlike the others, based on geometry. By measuring extremely precise positions and dynamics of maser spots in the accretion disk surrounding a distant black hole, we can determine the distance to the host galaxies and then the expansion rate. Our result from this unique technique strengthens the case for a key problem in observational cosmology.” said Mark Reid of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard and Smithsonian, and a member of the Megamaser Cosmology Project team.

“Our measurement of the Hubble Constant is very close to other recent measurements, and statistically very different from the predictions based on the CMB and the standard cosmological model. All indications are that the standard model needs revision,” said Braatz.

Astronomers have various ways to adjust the model to resolve the discrepancy. Some of these include changing presumptions about the nature of dark energy, moving away from Einstein’s cosmological constant. Others look at fundamental changes in particle physics, such as changing the numbers or types of neutrinos or the possibilities of interactions among them. There are other possibilities, even more exotic, and at the moment scientists have no clear evidence for discriminating among them.

“This is a classic case of the interplay between observation and theory. The Lambda CDM model has worked quite well for years, but now observations clearly are pointing to a problem that needs to be solved, and it appears the problem lies with the model,” Pesce said.

Source: D. W. Pesce et al. The Megamaser Cosmology Project. XIII. Combined Hubble Constant Constraints, The Astrophysical Journal (2020). DOI: 10.3847/2041-8213/ab75f0

The Daily Galaxy, Max Goldberg, via National Radio Astronomy Observatory

Image credit: Sophia Dagnello, NRAO/AUI/NSF

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All the light in the observable universe provides about as much illumination as a 60-watt bulb seen from 2.5 miles away. And all the energy ever radiated by all the stars that ever existed is still with us, filling the universe with a sort of fog, a sea of photons known as the extragalactic background light.

And yet, a discovery in 2014 suggested that the source of light in the universe from known populations of galaxies and quasars is not nearly enough to explain observations of intergalactic hydrogen. The filaments of hydrogen and helium that bridge the vast reaches of empty space between galaxies that astronomers use as a “light meter” yielded a stunning 400 percent discrepancy.

“The most exciting possibility is that the missing photons are coming from some exotic new source, not galaxies or quasars at all,” said Neal Katz of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst about the discovery that the source of light in the Universe from known populations of galaxies and quasars is not nearly enough to explain observations of intergalactic hydrogen. Filaments of hydrogen and helium that bridge the vast reaches of empty space between galaxies that astronomers use as a precise “light meter” yield a stunning 400 percent discrepancy.

Exotic Dark Matter

“Astronomers estimate that the observable universe — a bubble 14 billion light-years in radius, which represents how far we have been able to see since its beginning — contains at least two trillion galaxies and a trillion trillion stars,” writes Dennis Overbye  for “Out There” in New York Times. “Most of these stars and galaxies are too far and too faint to be seen with any telescope known to humans.”

In a 2014 study, The Photon Underproduction Crisis, published in The Astrophysical Journal, a team of scientists finds that the light from known populations of galaxies and quasars is not nearly enough to explain observations of intergalactic hydrogen. “It’s as if you’re in a big, brightly-lit room, but you look around and see only a few 40-watt light bulbs,” noted Carnegie Institute’s Juna Kollmeier. “Where is all that light coming from? It’s missing from our census.”

Arriving at a number on the amount of starlight ever produced has variables that make it difficult to quantify. But according to the new measurement, the number of photons (particles of visible light) that escaped into space after being emitted by stars translates to 4×10^84, or a lot.

Enter mysterious dark matter, which, suggests Katz, holds galaxies together but has never been seen directly, and could itself decay and ultimately be responsible for this extra light. “You know it’s a crisis when you start seriously talking about decaying dark matter!” he quips.

“The great thing about a 400% discrepancy is that you know something is really wrong,” commented co-author and astrophysicist, David Weinberg of The Ohio State University. “We still don’t know for sure what it is, but at least one thing we thought we knew about the present day universe isn’t true.”

“The Hidden Signal” –Birth of Light in the Universe

It All Adds Up in the Early Universe

Strangely, this mismatch only appears in the nearby, relatively well-studied cosmos. When telescopes focus on galaxies billions of light years away and billions of years in its past, everything seems to add up. The fact that this accounting works in the early universe but falls apart locally has scientists baffled.

The light in question consists of highly energetic ultraviolet photons that are able to convert electrically neutral hydrogen atoms into electrically charged ions. The two known sources for such ionizing photons are quasars—powered by hot gas falling onto supermassive black holes over a million times the mass of the sun—and the hottest young stars.

“All the Light”– In the History of the Observable Universe

Missing Source of Ionizing photons

Observations indicate that the ionizing photons from young stars are almost always absorbed by gas in their host galaxy, so they never escape to affect intergalactic hydrogen. But the number of known quasars is far lower than needed to produce the required light.

“Either our accounting of the light from galaxies and quasars is very far off, or there’s some other major source of ionizing photons that we’ve never recognized,” Kollmeier said. “We are calling this missing light the photon underproduction crisis. But it’s the astronomers who are in crisis—somehow or other, the universe is getting along just fine.”

The mismatch emerged from comparing supercomputer simulations of intergalactic gas to the most recent analysis of observations from Hubble Space Telescope’s Cosmic Origins Spectrograph.

“The simulations fit the data beautifully in the early universe, and they fit the local data beautifully if we’re allowed to assume that this extra light is really there,” explained Ben Oppenheimer a co-author from the University of Colorado. “It’s possible the simulations do not reflect reality, which by itself would be a surprise, because intergalactic hydrogen is the component of the Universe that we think we understand the best.”

The Last Word –David Weinberg

“The most exciting potential interpretation of our 2014 result would be that decaying dark matter particles produce a background of X-rays and ultraviolet photons that keeps intergalactic hydrogen highly ionized even after the quasars have largely faded away,” wrote David Weinberg in an email to The Daily Galaxy.

“However,” he continued, “several papers have argued that the number of quasars in the low redshift universe is higher than we assumed in our paper, by a factor of several, and that these quasars alone are enough to explain the ionization that we see.

“I think the consensus of the community is that this higher quasar number combined with moderate uncertainty about the simulation predictions is enough that exotic explanations are not required — the “photon underproduction crisis” may not be completely resolved, but it’s no longer a crisis.

“Since Occam’s razor (and scientific experience) tell us that we should generally favor mundane explanations over exotic explanations, I think this “no-crisis” consensus is a reasonable way to read the current evidence.”

David Weinberg and Carnegie Institution

Image credit: The new version of Hubble’s deep image is shown at the top of the page  In dark grey you can see the new light that has been found around the galaxies in this field–the brightness of more than one hundred billion suns. The image tookresearchers at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias almost three years to produce this deepest image of the Universe ever taken from space, by recovering a large quantity of ‘lost’ light around the largest galaxies in the iconic Hubble Ultra-Deep Field.

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Hubble’s infrared eye unveiled an enormous flash from Milky Way’s black hole about 3.5 million years ago that lit up a portion of a massive ribbon-like gas structure called the Magellanic Stream of high-velocity clouds of gas torn out of the Magellanic Clouds hundreds of millions of years ago, extending from the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds through the Galactic south pole of the Milky Way. The flash ionized its hydrogen (enough to make 100 million Suns) by stripping atoms of their electrons. The radiation cone was surely witnessed by Earth’s early hominids, already afoot on the African savannas as the ghostly glow spread high overhead in the then unnamed constellation Sagittarius.

“The flash was so powerful that it lit up the stream like a Christmas tree—it was a cataclysmic event!” said principal investigator Andrew Fox of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland. “This shows us that different regions of the galaxy are linked—what happens in the galactic center makes a difference to what happens out in the Magellanic Stream. We’re learning about how the black hole impacts the galaxy and its environment.”

Now, eons later, astronomers are using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope’s unique capabilities to uncover even more clues about this cataclysmic explosion. Looking to the far outskirts of our galaxy, they found that the black hole’s floodlight reached so far into space it illuminated a vast train of gas trailing the Milky Way’s two prominent satellite galaxies: the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), and its companion, the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC).

Sagittarius A* Milky Way Galaxy’s Black Hole –“Suddenly Flashing 75-Times Brighter”

The black hole outburst was probably caused by a large hydrogen cloud up to 100,000 times the Sun’s mass falling onto the disk of material swirling near the central black hole. The resulting outburst sent cones of blistering ultraviolet radiation above and below the plane of the galaxy and deep into space.

Fox’s team used Hubble’s ultraviolet capabilities to probe the stream by using background quasars—the bright cores of distant, active galaxies—as light sources. Hubble’s Cosmic Origins Spectrograph can see the fingerprints of ionized atoms in the ultraviolet light from the quasars. The astronomers studied sightlines to 21 quasars far behind the Magellanic Stream and 10 behind another feature called the Leading Arm, a tattered and shredded gaseous “arm” that precedes the LMC and SMC in their orbit around the Milky Way.

“When the light from the quasar passes through the gas we’re interested in, some of the light at specific wavelengths gets absorbed by the atoms in the cloud,” said STScI’s Elaine Frazer, who analyzed the sightlines and discovered new trends in the data. “When we look at the quasar light spectrum at specific wavelengths, we see evidence of light absorption that we wouldn’t see if the light hadn’t passed through the cloud. From this, we can draw conclusions about the gas itself.”

The team found evidence that the ions had been created in the Magellanic Stream by an energetic flash. The burst was so powerful that it lit up the stream, even though this structure is about 200,000 light-years from the galactic center.

Unlike the Magellanic Stream, the Leading Arm did not show evidence of being lit up by the flare. That makes sense, because the Leading Arm is not sitting right below the south galactic pole, so it was not showered with the burst’s radiation.

The same event that caused the radiation flare also “burped” hot plasma that is now towering about 30,000 light-years above and below the plane of our galaxy. These invisible bubbles, weighing the equivalent of millions of Suns, are called the Fermi Bubbles. Their energetic gamma-ray glow was discovered in 2010 by NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. In 2015, Fox used Hubble’s ultraviolet spectroscopy to measure the expansion velocity and composition of the ballooning lobes.

Have Astronomers Detected a Cosmic String from the Dawn of the Universe?

Now his team managed to stretch Hubble’s reach beyond the bubbles. “We always thought that the Fermi Bubbles and the Magellanic Stream were separate and unrelated to each other and doing their own things in different parts of the galaxy’s halo,” said Fox. “Now we see that the same powerful flash from our galaxy’s central black hole has played a major role in both.”

This research was possible only because of Hubble’s unique ultraviolet capability. Because of the filtering effects of Earth’s atmosphere, ultraviolet light cannot be studied from the ground. “It’s a very rich region of the electromagnetic spectrum—there’s a lot of features that can be measured in the ultraviolet,” explained Fox. “If you work in the optical and infrared, you can’t see them. That’s why we have to go to space to do this. For this type of work, Hubble is the only game in town.”

The findings, to be published in the Astrophysical Journal, will be presented during a press conference today, June 2 at the 236th meeting of the American Astronomical Society, which will be conducted virtually this year.

The Daily Galaxy, Sam Cabot via Space Telescope Science Institute

Image top of page: NASA/ESA/STScI

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When the iconic black hole the size of our Solar System at the center of Galaxy M87 was imaged in 2019, astronomers described it as witnessing the “gates of Hell and the end of spacetime.” Fast forward to today, astronomers using three Maunakea Observatories in Hawai’i describe the second-most distant quasar ever found –at a cosmological redshift greater than 7.5 and it hosts a black hole twice as large as the other quasar known in the same era– as Pōniuā`ena, which means “unseen spinning source of creation, surrounded with brilliance” in the Hawaiian language. The light observed from Pōniuā`ena reached Earth 13 billion years after leaving the quasar just 700 million years after the Big Bang.

“How can the universe produce such a massive black hole so early in its history?” asked Xiaohui Fan, Regents’ professor and associate department head of the Department of Astronomy at the University of Arizona about current theory that holds the growth of the first giant black holes started during the Epoch of Reionization, beginning about 400 million years after the Big Bang. “This discovery presents the biggest challenge yet for the theory of black hole formation and growth in the early universe.”

Most Massive, Second Most Distant

Astronomers discovered the most distant quasar (named J1342+0928) in 2018 and now the second-most distant, Pōniuā`ena (or J1007+2115, at redshift 7.515). Spectroscopic observations from Keck Observatory and Gemini Observatory show the supermassive black hole powering Pōniuā`ena is 1.5 billion times more massive than our Sun.

Pōniuā`ena is the most distant object known in the universe hosting a black hole exceeding one billion solar masses,” said Jinyi Yang, a postdoctoral research associate at the Steward Observatory of the University of Arizona and lead author of the study.

“Fireflies of the Big Bang” –Did Primordial Black Holes Create Dark Matter?

Started as a Cosmic “Seed”

For a black hole of this size to form this early in the universe, it would need to start as a 10,000 solar mass “seed” black hole about 100 million years after the Big Bang, rather than growing from a much smaller black hole formed by the collapse of a single star.

The discovery of quasars like Pōniuā`ena, deep into the reionization epoch, is a . Pōniuā`ena has placed new and important constraints on the evolution of the matter between galaxies (intergalactic medium) in the reionization epoch.

“Ring of Fire Galaxy” –Massive Object Observed at Beginning of the Cosmos

“Pōniuā`ena acts like a cosmic lighthouse. As its light travels the long journey towards Earth, its spectrum is altered by diffuse gas in the intergalactic medium which allowed us to pinpoint when the Epoch of Reionization occurred,” said co-author Joseph Hennawi, a professor in the Department of Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Yang’s team first detected Pōniuā`ena as a possible quasar after combing through large area surveys such as the UKIRT Hemisphere Survey and data from the University of Hawai’i Institute for Astronomy’s Pan-STARRS1 telescope on the Island of Maui.

Revealed by the Gemini Observatory 

In 2019, the researchers observed the object using Gemini Observatory’s GNIRS instrument as well as Keck Observatory’s Near Infrared Echellette Spectrograph (NIRES) to confirm the existence of Pōniuā`ena.

“The preliminary data from Gemini suggested this was likely to be an important discovery. Our team had observing time scheduled at Keck just a few weeks later, perfectly timed to observe the new quasar using Keck’s NIRES spectrograph in order to confirm its extremely high redshift and measure the mass of its black hole,” said co-author Aaron Barth, a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of California, Irvine.

Exotic Objects –“Switched On the Early Universe”

“We recognize there are different ways of knowing the universe,” said John O’Meara, chief scientist at Keck Observatory. “Pōniuā`ena is a wonderful example of interconnectedness between science and culture, with shared appreciation for how different knowledge systems enrich each other.”

The Keck astronomers “recognize and acknowledge the very significant cultural role and reverence that the summit of Maunakea has always had within the Native Hawaiian community. We are most fortunate to have the opportunity to conduct observations from this mountain.”

The Daily Galaxy via Sam Cabot, via Keck Observatory

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