Space News & Blog Articles

Our universe may feature large, macroscopic clumps of dark matter, known as q-balls. These q-balls would be absolutely invisible, but they may reveal their presence through tiny magnifications of starlight.

We do not currently understand the nature of dark matter. But we do know that it exists. Multiple independent lines of evidence all indicate that the vast majority of matter in the universe does not interact with light or with normal matter. It is, for all intents and purposes, invisible. But we can see the evidence for dark matter everywhere we look through its gravitational influence on normal matter. For example, galaxies rotate far too quickly given the amount of visible matter inside of them. Clusters of galaxies have gas that is far too hot to be accounted for by normal matter. Even the development of the large-scale structure of the universe occurred too rapidly for the amount of matter that we can see.

Until we have a better understanding of dark matter and its nature, we must work to develop ideas of what it might be. Most theories of dark matter assume that It is some exotic kind of fermion. Fermions are the type of matter that are the building blocks of nature, like electrons and protons. But other theories of dark matter are a little more exotic, arguing that it might be a form of boson. Bosons are typically associated with the force carriers of nature, like the photon that carries the electromagnetic force and the gluon that carries the strong nuclear force.

But dark matter may be an entirely new kind of boson. If it is, it might have some surprisingly strange properties. For example, this exotic form of dark matter may not be entirely smooth throughout a galaxy. Instead it may form stable clumps the size of stars. Known as q-balls, these clumps would remain stable but invisible, drifting through every galaxy.

In a recent paper a team of the astrophysicists have proposed a method to search for q-balls. Because they do not emit or absorb light, we can’t look for them through the normal astronomical techniques. But q-balls would still have a lot of matter compressed into a relatively small volume. This can bend the path of light the same as any other massive object in the universe.

NASA’s Apollo program most notably explored the Moon. But it also helped us study the Earth as well, as it provided some of the first high-resolution images of our whole planet, like the famous “Blue Marble” photo taken by the Apollo 17 astronauts.

However, these full-Earth photos revealed a mystery.  Scientists expected that Earth’s two hemispheres, the north and south, would have different albedos, a difference in the amount of light they reflect. This is because Earth’s northern and southern hemispheres of Earth are quite different from each other. The southern hemisphere is mostly covered with dark oceans, while the northern hemisphere contains vast land areas that are much brighter than the oceans

Yet, when observing Earth from space, the two hemispheres appear equally bright.

This symmetry in brightness has been a puzzle for over 50 years. But now, a new study shows that the albedos are roughly the same because of the increased clouds and storms in the southern hemisphere.

“Cloud albedo arising from strong storms above the Southern Hemisphere was found to be a high-precision offsetting agent to the large land area in the Northern Hemisphere, and thus symmetry is preserved,” said Or Hadas of the Weizmann Institute’s Earth and Planetary Sciences Department in Canada.  “This suggests that storms are the linking factor between the brightness of Earth’s surface and that of clouds, solving the symmetry mystery.”

Black holes are the most massive objects that we know of in the Universe. Not stellar mass black holes, not supermassive black holes (SMBHs,) but ultra-massive black holes (UMBHs.) UMBHs sit in the center of galaxies like SMBHs, but they have more than five billion solar masses, an astonishingly large amount of mass. The largest black hole we know of is Phoenix A, a UMBH with up to 100 billion solar masses.

How can something grow so massive?

UMBHs are rare and elusive, and their origins are unclear. A team of astrophysicists working on the question used a simulation to help uncover the formation of these massive objects. They traced UMBH’s origins back to the Universe’s ‘Cosmic Noon‘ around 10 to 11 billion years ago.

Their paper is “Ultramassive Black Holes Formed by Triple Quasar Mergers at z = 2,” and it’s published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. The lead author is Yueying Ni, a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Astrophysics/Harvard & Smithsonian.

“We found that one possible formation channel for ultra-massive black holes is from the extreme merger of massive galaxies that are most likely to happen in the epoch of the ‘cosmic noon,'” said Ni.

Solar Orbiter’s unique vantage point recently allowed researchers to make a crucial observation of the solar system’s innermost world.

You never know when a chance for some extra space science will present itself. Recently, European Space Agency (ESA) mission controllers had just such a chance, when the planet Mercury passed in front of our host star as seen from the Solar Orbiter’s point of view in space.

Also known as SolO, ESA’s Solar Orbiter mission launched on a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on February 10, 2020, on a mission to explore the Sun. Specifically, Solar Orbiter will make up close observations of the deep heliosphere and the nascent (emergent) solar wind, as well as make passes over the solar poles, which are regions that are difficult to observe from the Earth.

To accomplish this, SolO carries a suite of instruments, including its Polarimetric and Helioseismic Imager (PHI) and the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI), both of which witnessed and documented the January 3, 2023 transit of the innermost planet. All of these instruments sit behind a massive heat shield, needed to survive the intense heat of the blistering perihelion passages that the mission must endure.

None More Black

Beyond just a unique view of a rare celestial scene, the silhouette of Mercury allowed researchers a one-time, sharp-edged calibration target that was absolutely black: even ragged-edged sunspots and deep space (which is still dappled with faint stars) doesn’t provide such a view in context with the dazzling Sun.