There was a report about a month ago that a Fast Radio Burst (FRB) produced a repeating signal. This is big news because we really don’t know what causes FRBs, and once they have ended it can be difficult to trace their source. But a repeating signal means we can pinpoint their origin and potentially figure out their root cause. It’s no wonder the astronomical community was excited…and skeptical. Most of the FRBs that have been discovered were in archival data – data from past surveys that were given a closer look. Only a few have been seen in real-time, so when...
Baryonic matter, which is everything we are made of and everything we can see in the universe, is not a lot of stuff. I mean to a tiny Earthling, it’s a heck of a lot, but if you put it all together it only makes up about 5% of the total Mass-Energy in the Universe. If you’ve ever seen the Millennium simulation, it highlights the fact that both baryonic and dark matter are organized into filaments of mass, with the baryonic matter at the densest points, ie the galaxies. What lies between these dense nodes and filaments are vast empty...
The only reason we can see black holes in the universe is because some of them swallow up gas and dust. This heats up material that is spinning rapidly around the black hole as it falls in (called an accretion disk), and produces massive jets of material due to conservation of angular momentum that can be seen across the universe. The energy released in the jets and the energy given off in the accretion disk are proportional to how much gas and dust is being consumed by the black hole. More matter = more food = more energy released. But...
