Moments ago, NASA announced that the Kepler space telescope, for the first time ever, has discovered a star that has a system of 8 planets, similar to our own solar system. The exceptional part of the discovery is that it was found in existing Kepler data, using google artificial intelligence software that was trained to find positive detections in over 30,000 data sets. Known as a neural network, the software was trained to look for patterns in the intensity of light from stars. Normally, humans would need to do this work, but with so much data, there simply wasn’t enough...
In the early Universe, things were quite different. The first stars were much more massive than stars today, and contained mostly Hydrogen. Astronomers have good ideas about how they formed, but other objects from around this time, namely black holes, are much tougher to account for. Early black holes were huge, with no explanation for how they grew so large. “Early” means “first Billion years after the Big Bang,” but even in that time, it’s hard to determine how observed black holes could grow as large as 100,000 solar masses. I say 100,000 solar masses, because that is the mass of two ‘seed’ black holes, discovered...
As I’ve said before, the most powerful, most energetic, most intense processes happen in the center. The gravitational center of the Earth, the Sun, and the galaxy are all places where temperature, pressure, and interactions of matter and energy are pushed to their limits. When you look up to the sky it’s easy to see the Milky Way (unless you live in an urban center). Do you ever wonder where the middle of it is? Where that supermassive black hole lies? Astronomers know where it is, but you need infrared cameras to see it past the thick dust that blocks...
Beyond the atmosphere, past the stars we see, farther than the Milky Way, and continuing past Andromeda, we reach the real cosmic ocean. So called because like an ocean on Earth, it is vast, homogeneous, and impossible to navigate by common sense alone. In the cosmic ocean, an impossibly huge amount of space separates island galaxies, whose strong gravity binds them across incredible distances, dictating their course, and forming the largest and most massive structures in the universe: galaxy clusters. Because these immense structures are so vast and so distant, it requires the work of several telescopes to map out...
