This Black Hole Breaks Rules

When scientists looked deep into the early universe with the James Webb Space Telescope, they expected to see small galaxies, young stars, and black holes struggling to grow. They certainly didn’t expect to find a giant black hole almost totally alone, with barely any stars around it.

Spotted in a galaxy called Abell 2744-SQO1, it existed just 700 million years after the Big Bang. It already had a mass about 50 million times that of the sun. This challenges the idea of how black holes are born. Perhaps… some black holes were formed before stars existed?

The standard theory is that stars are form from collapsing gas clouds, and, much later, when the biggest stars exhaust their fuel, black holes appear and grow by feeding on gas and merging with other black holes. But all this takes time, a very long time. QSO1 contains very little mass, so how did a black hole get so large?

The scientists turned to an idea proposed in the 1970s—primordial black holes. These would have emerged directly from extreme density variations shortly after The Big Bang, but most would have been tiny and short-lived.

This team ran simulations about how gas behaves around an initial primordial back hole, how stars might form nearby, and how stellar deaths could feed the growing object. When the team compared the outcome of the simulation with real data, they found a close match. Not only in the black hole mass, but also in the number of stars and the chemical elements in the area.

It’s not proof that the QSO1 black hole began as a primordial black hole, but standard models struggle with the reality that is there.

 

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/50-million-times-heavier-than-sun-this-black-hole-breaks-rules-of-how-galaxies-are-formed/ar-AA1TvEdx?ocid=hpmsn&cvid=695967d3c656406cac6ac0fbef2407bf&ei=66

FOUND: the Universe’s Missing Matter

There are two kinds of matter in the universe. There is dark matter, which is invisible to us. It is known only because of its gravitational effects on a grand scale. And there is ordinary matter, which we are all familiar with; it makes up gases, dust, stars, planets, and earthly things like cake batter and camping gear.

Scientists have estimated that ordinary matter makes up only 15% of all matter. But they have struggled to document where all of the matter is located, since only about half of it is accounted for. Now, with the help of powerful bursts of radio waves emanating from 69 locations in the cosmos, researchers have found the “missing” matter.

It was primarily hiding as thinly distributed gas spread out in the vast expanses between galaxies and was detected because of the effect the matter has on the radio waves traveling through space. This tenuous gas is the intergalactic medium, a sort of fog between galaxies.

Scientists had previously determined the total amount of ordinary matter using a calculation involving light observed that was left over from the Big Bang. But they could not actually find half of this matter.

Researchers found that a smaller slice of the missing matter resides in the halos of diffuse material surrounding galaxies, including our Milky Way.

Ordinary matter is composed of baryons, which are the subatomic particles needed by protons and neutrons to build atoms. Dark matter, on the other hand, is a mysterious substance. Scientists do not know what new particle or substance makes up dark matter.

How did so much ordinary matter end up in the middle of nowhere? Vast amounts of gas are ejected from galaxies when massive stars explode as supernovas of when supermassive black holes inside galaxies “burp,” expelling material after consuming stars or gas.

If the universe were a more boring place, or the laws of physics were different, ordinary matter would all fall into galaxies, cool down and form stars until every proton and neutron were a part of a star.

Thus, these violent processes throw ordinary matter across immense distances and consign it to the cosmic wilderness. This gas is not in its usual state; it is in the form of plasma, with its electrons and protons separated.

The missing ordinary matter was detected and measured by using phenomena called fast radio bursts, or FRBs. These are powerful pulses of radio waves emanating from faraway points in the universe. Their exact cause remains mysterious, but a leading hypothesis is that they are produced by highly magnetized neutron stars, which are compact stellar embers left over after a massive star dies in a supernova explosion.

As light in the radio wave frequencies travels from the source to Earth, it becomes dispersed into different wavelengths, just like a prism turns sunlight into a rainbow. The degree of dispersion depends on how much matter is in the light’s path. This provides the mechanism for pinpointing and measuring matter where it otherwise would remain unfound.

Scientists used radio waves traveling from 69 FRBs. Of these, 39 were discovered using a network of 110 telescopes located at Caltech’s Owens Valley Radio Observatory near Bishop, California, which is called the Deep Synoptic Array. The remaining 30 FRBs were discovered using other telescopes.

The FRBs were located at distances up to 9.1 billion light-years from Earth, which is the farthest of these on record. A light-year is the distance light travels in a year (5.9 trillion miles/9.5 trillion km).

With all the ordinary matter accounted for, researchers were able to determine its distribution. About 76% resides in intergalactic space, approximately 15% in galaxy halos, with the remaining 9% concentrated within galaxies as stars or gas.

Now they can move on to other mysteries regarding ordinary matter. And beyond that, they still don’t know the nature of dark matter.

 

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/astronomers-locate-universe-s-missing-matter/ar-AA1GPaMp?ocid=hpmsn&cvid=c615a1d5e8e948159c93cc31030732f0&ei=41

What Existed Before The Big Bang

Our universe began with The Big Bang. But what existed before the Big Bang?

From the University of Texas at Austin, researchers propose that dark matter might have been created during a brief, explosive period of expansion called “Cosmic Inflation,” which occurred just before the Big Bang. The universe, at that point, would have consisted of mostly dark matter, completely undetectable to our eyes.

Scientists believe that dark matter makes up roughly 85% of all matter. This study suggests that the substance existed before the event that many consider the beginning of time.

The model for the study assumes that dark matter is successfully produced during inflation. In most models, anything that is created during inflation is thinned away by the expansion of the universe until there is essentially nothing left.

The research introduces a mechanism called WIFI (Warm Inflation Freeze-In), which suggests that dark matter could have been generated during the universe’s earliest moments through rare interactions within an incredibly hot and energetic environment.

Cosmologists understand the universe’s beginning was more complex than a simple explosive moment. Before the Big Bang, matter and energy were compressed into an incredibly dense state that physicists struggle to describe. A fraction of a second of rapid expansion preceded the Big Bang, setting the stage for everything that would follow.

In this new model, the quantum field driving inflation loses some energy to radiation, which then produces dark matter particles through a process called ‘freeze-in’. According to this research, all the dark matter that exists today could have been created during that brief inflationary period.

The study focused on the production of dark matter, but WIFI suggests the production of other particles that could play a role in the early universe’s evolution.

Although currently unconfirmable through direct observation, the theory opens exciting new avenues for exploring the universe’s fundamental building blocks. The researchers are optimistic that upcoming experiments studying the Cosmic Microwave Background and large sale universal structures could provide validation.

 

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/scientists-may-finally-know-what-existed-before-the-big-bang/ar-AA1vY9Mf?ocid=hpmsn&cvid=51d4d625bcc24515f51422de711080a7&ei=66