A net friend alerted me to the article “Galactic Monster Mystery Revealed in Ancient Universe” (Nov. 19, 2015, by Ian O’Neill). The “monsters” involved are massive galaxies. There are lots of massive galaxies in the universe. What makes these such monstrous mysteries is that they are very far away, and (given the time it would take light to travel so far) we’re seeing them as they were (or would have been) billions of years ago, so long ago that the earliest are said to be at the stage when the universe was just one billion years old: “This selection of massive galaxies all seem to have formed no earlier than around 1 billion years after the Big Bang;” Continue reading Massive Monsters Mash Models (of universe evolution)
First, two news stories.
First up: “Black hole is 30 times bigger than expected” By Amanda Barnett, CNN, Updated 8:04 PM ET, Sat September 26, 2015
“This shouldn’t be possible. Researchers say they’ve detected a supermassive black hole at the center of a newly found galaxy that’s far bigger than current theories allow.” As the title indicates, specifically it’s about 30 times larger than a galaxy the size of the one it’s in should be able to form. Wow. Not much else to say about it; if you want the details, click on the title to go to the article. As to how this surprise came about, the scientists can only guess: “…it could be that the black hole just grew much faster than the galaxy surrounding it, or maybe the galaxy’s growth was prematurely stopped.” Why or how the black hole would or could grow fast, or what would or could stop the galaxy’s growth, they don’t say.
Continue reading Black Holes, Gravity Waves, and Unending Gaps
One of the tantalizing corners of science (or fringe science, or pseudo-science, depending on the case and whom you ask) is OOPArts: Out Of Place Artifacts. These are apparently man-made objects found in geologic layers supposedly much too old for their level of technology, or even for humans to have evolved. I was studying a case today that came up in 2011 of a sort of reverse nature. It is a human skull (or part of one) found in Nigeria, where ancestral human remains are not often found. According to radioactive dating, this one is relatively recent, only 13,000 years old. While this is more than double the Biblically-derived age of the Earth, it’s not that far off compared to the many tens of thousands, or even millions of years, assigned to human ancestors. It is well into the period when even our cousins the Neanderthals are said to have died out, and only fully modern humans were in existence. In fact, an impressive archaeological site, Gobekli Tepe, is thought to be possibly that old, and it has huge stone pillars, not rough as at Stonehenge, but smooth and with carvings of animals. Continue reading OOPS = Out Of Place Skull
Here’s a little mystery from 2011. Apparently, the fighting in Syria has prevented any newsworthy new discoveries. It’s an archaeologic site called Tell Qarqur, the buried remains of a city that was thriving “about 4,200 years ago.” The mystery is that archeaeologists believe it was during that period that “ancient civilizations across the Middle East collapsed, possibly in response to a global drought.” Supposedly this drought was so bad, “Along with the Mesopotamian and eastern Mediterranean societies that met their demise, Old Kingdom Egypt, a civilization that built the Great Pyramids, collapsed. ‘A different weather system reduced the flow of the Nile River at the same period so the Nile was affected.'”(quoting Harvey Weiss of Yale University) So how did this city keep thriving?
“The Orontes River is fed by a huge underground chamber of water, which is called a Karst,” Weiss said. “That huge underground source of water continued to flow and to feed the Orontes River during this period when rainfall was diminished.”