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POPSSupermassive black hole says sayonara "In their study, Stefanie Komossa and her colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany, examined the spectrum of light from a quasar, a brilliant beacon with the unwieldy name SDSS J092712.65+294344.0. Quasars, which lie at the center of galaxies, are fueled by black holes. An analysis of the quasar spectrum reveals a pattern of light emission that matches that expected from a supermassive black hole shot out of the galaxy’s center, the team reports in the May 10 Astrophysical Journal Letters."
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POPSMilky Way twice as thck as we think. It's funny that they discovered this by downloading publicly available data on the internet and checking the figures. They had the results in a few hours. I'm not sure whether we should feel bigger or smaller, but when I go out tonight the sky will look the same as it ever did.
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POPSIs Time disappearing from the universe? At an everyday level, the change would not be perceptible. However, it would be obvious from cosmic scale measurements tracking the course of the universe over billions of years. The change would be infinitesimally slow from a human perspective, but in terms of the vast perspective of cosmology, the study of ancient light from suns that shone billions of years ago, it could easily be measured Difficult to fathom.
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POPSWeird dark stars dotted early universe Quasars usually need the mass of a galaxy to form, and astronomers have been unable to explain how some quasars seemed to appear before galaxies had formed to make them. These 'dark stars' provide a means by which this may have happened.
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