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Observations made by a small spacecraft called <keyword id="6720497" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="20" keywordseo="halosat">HaloSat</keyword> have shown that the <keyword id="67503" type="ORGANIZATION" weightage="20" keywordseo="milky-way">Milky Way</keyword> galaxy is surrounded by a clumpy halo of hot gases that is continually being supplied with material ejected by birthing or <keyword id="10138629" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="20" keywordseo="DYING-STARS">dying stars</keyword>.<br /><br />A halo is a large region filled with hot gas that surrounds a galaxy, also known as a "circumgalactic medium."<br /><br />The heated gaseous halo around the Milky Way was the incubator for the Milky Way's formation some 13 billion years ago and could help solve a longstanding puzzle about where the missing matter of the universe might reside.<br /><br />In the new NASA-funded study published in the journal Nature Astronomy, the researchers concluded the circumgalactic medium has a disk-like geometry, based on the intensity of X-ray emissions coming from it.<br /><br />"The X-ray emissions are stronger above the parts of the Milky Way where star formation is more vigorous," said Philip Kaaret, Professor at the University of Iowa and corresponding author on the study.<br /><br />"That suggests the circumgalactic medium is related to star formation, and it is likely we are seeing gas that previously fell into the Milky Way, made stars, and now is being recycled into the circumgalactic medium."<br /><br />Every galaxy has a circumgalactic medium, and these regions are crucial to understanding not only how galaxies formed and evolved but also how the universe progressed from a kernel of helium and hydrogen to a cosmological expanse teeming with stars, planets, comets, and all other sorts of celestial constituents.<br /><br />HaloSat searches for baryonic matter -- that is, the same kind of particles that compose the visible world -- believed to be missing since the universe's birth.<br /><br />The satellite has been observing the Milky Way's circumgalactic medium for evidence that the missing baryonic matter may reside there.<br /><br />Baryonic matter is distinct from dark matter, which is invisible and does not interact through any force except gravity. Scientists can only account for about two-thirds of the baryonic matter that should be present in the universe.<br /><br />To look for the missing matter, Kaaret and his team wanted to get a better handle on the circumgalactic medium's configuration.<br /><br />More specifically, the researchers wanted to find out how big the circumgalactic medium really is.<br /><br />If it is a huge, extended halo that is many times the size of our galaxy, it could house enough material to solve the missing baryonic question.<br /><br />But if the circumgalactic medium is mostly comprised of recycled material, it would be a relatively thin, puffy layer of gas and an unlikely host of the missing baryonic matter.<br /><br />"What we've done is definitely show that there's a high-density part of the circumgalactic medium that's bright in X-rays," Kaaret says.<br /><br />"But there still could be a really big, extended halo that is just dim in X-rays. And it might be harder to see that dim, extended halo because there's this bright emission disk in the way.<br /><br />"So it turns out with HaloSat alone, we really can't say whether or not there really is this extended halo around the Milky Way," Kaaret said.<br /><br />HaloSat is a NASA CubeSat mission led by the University of Iowa.<br /><br /><strong>SEE ALSO:<br /><a href="https://www.businessinsider.in/science/space/news/nokia-is-set-to-build-the-first-4g-network-on-the-moon-for-nasa-it-will-eventually-be-upgraded-to-5g/articleshow/78763251.cms">Nokia is set to build the first 4G network on the Moon for NASA — it will eventually be upgraded to 5G</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.businessinsider.in/science/space/news/the-moon-photobombed-nasas-view-of-the-sun/articleshow/78762020.cms">The Moon photobombs NASA's view of the Sun</a><br /><br /></strong><a href="https://www.businessinsider.in/business/corporates/news/wipro-wins-five-year-contract-with-europes-third-largest-producer-of-clean-electricity/articleshow/78761079.cms"><strong>Wipro wins five-year contract with Europe’s third-largest producer of clean electricity</strong></a><br />

The Milky Way is recycling its gases to form a clumpy halo

<ul><li>Stars within the cluster closest to the Sun have been disappearing.</li><li>The <keyword id="59844" type="ORGANIZATION" weightage="20" keywordseo="European-Space-Agency">European Space Agency</keyword> (ESA) believes this may be due to the elusive <keyword id="86041" type="ENTERTAINMENT" weightage="20" keywordseo="dark-matter">dark matter</keyword> subhalos.</li><li>Scientists believe these subhalos form to make an invisible network across the galaxy. This network expends gravitational influence on anything that dares to get too close.</li></ul>The nearest star cluster to the Sun, dubbed Haydes, may be getting destroyed. And, it could be the key to tracking down evidence of ‘dark matter subhalos’, according to the European Space Agency (ESA).<br /><br />Simply put, dark matter subhalos are invisible clouds of particles, which are thought to be relics from the formation of the <keyword id="67503" type="ORGANIZATION" weightage="20" keywordseo="milky-way">Milky Way</keyword>. Scientists <a href="https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev-astro-081817-051756">believe</a> these subhalos form to make an invisible network across the galaxy. This network expends gravitational influence on anything that dares to get too close.<br /><br />To be clear, the existence of dark matter subhalos is only theoretical so far and have never been observed directly. Hence, Europe’s apex space agency is excited to finally have a trail that they can follow to unlock some of the mystery around dark matter.<br /><br /><strong>The closest star cluster to the Sun<br /></strong>Haydes star cluster is around 153 light years away from Earth. And, it can be spotted without the help of a telescope as a ‘V’ shape of bright stars in the night sky. <br /><br />Star clusters lose their stars naturally because, within the cluster, the stars are pulling at each other’s gravity. The constant tugging changes the speed at which these stars are moving. Some end up at the centre, while others get pushed out to the edges of the cluster.<br /><br /><div type="javascript" title="Custom" contenttype="Video"><cdata><![CDATA[]]></cdata></div><br />The others at the edge of the cluster are at risk of being swept away by the gravitational pull of the galaxy, forming two long tails called ‘tidal tails’. While one trail blazes in the front of the star cluster, the other one trail behind. <br /><br />Even though tidal tails are not as obscure a phenomenon as dark matter halos, they have never been seen this close to Earth. Most observations till now involve colliding galaxies. <br /><br />ESA research fellow Tereza Jerabkova, who made the discovery, realised that the trailing tidal tail seemed to be missing stars. According to her, this was the hint that something much more ‘brutal’ was taking place in Haydes’ cosmic neighbourhood.<br /><br />

The closest star cluster to the Sun may be getting destroyed to unveil a network of dark matter across the Milky Way

Using <keyword id="6360409" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="20" keywordseo="Nasa">NASA</keyword>'s <keyword id="145693" type="ORGANIZATION" weightage="20" keywordseo="Hubble-Space-Telescope">Hubble Space Telescope</keyword>, scientists have mapped the immense envelope of gas, called a halo, surrounding the <keyword id="1077809" type="PERSON" weightage="20" keywordseo="Andromeda-galaxy">Andromeda galaxy</keyword>, our nearest large galactic neighbour.<br /><br />This tenuous, nearly invisible halo of diffuse plasma extends 1.3 million light-years from the galaxy -- about halfway to our <keyword id="67503" type="ORGANIZATION" weightage="20" keywordseo="milky-way">Milky Way</keyword> -- and as far as two million light-years in some directions, said the study published in The Astrophysical Journal.<br /><br />This means that Andromeda's halo is already bumping into the halo of our own galaxy.<br /><br />The scientists also found that the halo has a layered structure, with two main nested and distinct shells of gas.<br /><br />"Understanding the huge halos of gas surrounding galaxies is immensely important," explained co-investigator Samantha Berek of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, US.<br /><br />"This reservoir of gas contains fuel for future star formation within the galaxy, as well as outflows from events such as supernovae," Berek said, adding that it is full of clues regarding the past and future evolution of the galaxy.<br /><br />A signature of this activity is the team's discovery of a large amount of heavy elements in the gaseous halo of Andromeda.<br /><br />Heavier elements are cooked up in the interiors of stars and then ejected into space -- sometimes violently as a star dies.<br /><br />The halo is then contaminated with this material from stellar explosions.<br /><br />The Andromeda galaxy, also known as M31, is a majestic spiral of perhaps as many as one trillion stars and comparable in size to our Milky Way.<br /><br />At a distance of 2.5 million light-years, it is so close to us that the galaxy appears as a cigar-shaped smudge of light high in the autumn sky.<br /><br />If its gaseous halo could be viewed with the naked eye, this would easily be the biggest feature on the night-time sky.<br /><br /><strong>SEE ALSO:<br /><a href="https://www.businessinsider.in/defense/news/india-likely-to-introduce-a-second-defence-import-embargo-list-by-the-end-of-year-as-it-chases-down-5-billion-in-exports/articleshow/77797223.cms">India likely to introduce a second defence ‘import embargo’ list by the end of year as it chases down $5 billion in exports</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.businessinsider.in/stock-market/markets/news/there-arent-enough-shares-of-hdfc-bank-indusind-bank-and-kotak-bank-that-foreign-investors-can-buy/articleshow/77798108.cms">There aren’t enough shares of HDFC Bank, IndusInd Bank and Kotak Bank that foreign investors can buy</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.businessinsider.in/india/news/covid-19-strikes-ten-of-the-50-surviving-members-of-the-great-andamanese-tribe/articleshow/77797765.cms">COVID-19 strikes ten of the 50 surviving members of the Great Andamanese tribe</a><br /></strong>

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope maps giant halo around Milk Way's closest neighbour

<br /><ul><li>Six galaxies have been spotted by the <keyword id="373638" type="ORGANIZATION" weightage="20" keywordseo="Very-Large-Telescope">Very Large Telescope</keyword> trapped in a web of gas around a <keyword id="2104882" type="ENTERTAINMENT" weightage="20" keywordseo="supermassive-black-hole">supermassive black hole</keyword>.</li><li>The <keyword id="6409890" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="20" keywordseo="black-hole">black hole</keyword> is as dense as one billion of Earth’s suns and is located 0.9 billion light-years away. </li><li>The galaxies have formed where the gases criss-cross each other, fueling them and the accompanying supermassive black hole.</li></ul>The European Southern Observatory's (<a href="https://www.eso.org/public/news/eso2016/">ESO</a>) Very Large Telescope (VLT) has spotted six galaxies trapped in a web around a supermassive black hole that’s just under one billion light-years away from Earth. <br /><br />    <div type="image" title="VLT_edited" msid="78428500" hostid="261" caption="&amp;lt;p&amp;gt;Very Large Telescope (VLT) at the Paranal Observatory in Chile&amp;lt;/p&amp;gt;"></div><br /><br />The black hole itself is as dense as one billion of Earth’s Suns. The galaxies around it are all tucked together in a web of gas extending to over 300 times the size of the <keyword id="67503" type="ORGANIZATION" weightage="20" keywordseo="milky-way">Milky Way</keyword>. <br /><br />    <div type="javascript" title="Custom" contenttype="Video"><cdata><![CDATA[]]></cdata></div><br />“The cosmic filaments are like spider’s web threads,” said Marco Mignoli, the lead author of the discovery published in <a href="https://www.eso.org/public/archives/releases/sciencepapers/eso2016/eso2016a.pdf">Astronomy and Astrophysics</a>. <br /><br />This is the first time that such a large number of galaxies have been spotted so close to each other — and there may be more hidden in the shadows. <br /><br />“We believe we have just seen the tip of the iceberg, and that the few galaxies discovered so far around this supermassive black hole are only the brightest ones,” said co-author Barbara Balmaverde.<br /><br />    <div type="image" title="supermassive black hole web2_edited" msid="78428576" hostid="261" caption="&amp;lt;p&amp;gt;This image shows the sky around SDSS J103027.09+052455.0, a quasar powered by a supermassive black hole surrounded by at least six galaxies&amp;lt;/p&amp;gt;&amp;lt;strong&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/strong&amp;gt;"></div><br /><strong>What created this web around the supermassive black hole?<br /></strong>Since the supermassive black hole is 0.9 billion light-years away, it’s like looking back in time around 0.9 billion years — into the <keyword id="689441" type="PERSON" weightage="20" keywordseo="early-universe">Early Universe</keyword>. "Our work has placed an important piece in the largely incomplete puzzle that is the formation and growth of such extreme, yet relatively abundant, objects so quickly after the Big Bang," says co-author Roberto Gilli.<br /><br />Though astronomers have struggled to explain that conundrum, the web-like structure is now at least one possible theory. The web, along with the galaxies within it, contains enough gas to provide fuel for the central black hole to grow into a supermassive giant.<br /><br />The study proposes that the key to the formation of these web-like structures are ‘giant halos of mysterious dark matter’.<br /><br />In the Early Universe, large regions of invisible matter are assumed to attract huge amounts of gas. The combination of the gas and the dark matter results in the web-like structures where such an ecosystem can grow and evolve.<br /><br />“The galaxies stand and grow where the filaments cross, and the streams of gas — available to fuel both the galaxies and the central supermassive black hole — can flow along the filaments,” he explained. <br /><br /><strong>SEE ALSO:<br /><a href="https://www.businessinsider.in/india/news/hathras-borders-sealed-and-section-144-imposed/articleshow/78423106.cms">Rahul and Priyanka Gandhi detained for violating Section 188 on their march to Hathras</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.businessinsider.in/finance/banks/news/everything-you-need-to-know-about-rbis-new-credit-and-debit-card-rules-that-kick-in-today/articleshow/78422616.cms">RBI's new credit and debit card rules kick in today — Here's everything you need to know</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.businessinsider.in/defense/news/latest-updates-on-india-china-border-issue/articleshow/78162853.cms">India-China decide ‘early date’ needed for military talks on border issue — but stalemate continues</a></strong><br />

Supermassive black hole traps six galaxies in a 'spider web' that is 300 times bigger than the Milky Way

<ul><li>The <keyword id="1025729" type="General" weightage="20" keywordseo="pslv-xl" source="Orion">PSLV-XL</keyword> variant <keyword id="9428" type="General" weightage="20" keywordseo="rocket" source="Orion">rocket</keyword> carries the 1,480.7 kg Aditya-L1 spacecraft as its sole passenger that will study the <keyword id="45681" type="General" weightage="20" keywordseo="solar" source="Orion">solar</keyword> activities. </li><li> About 63 minutes after the lift off, the rocket will eject Aditya-L1 and the whole mission comes to an end at about 73 minutes with the passivation of the fourth stage. </li><li>The flight plan includes switching off the rocket's fourth stage twice, allowing it to coast for about 30 minutes - 26 minutes after the first cut off and about 3 minutes after the second cut off. </li></ul> India's Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle-C57 (PSLV-C57) lifted off with the country's Aditya-L1 spacecraft to study the <keyword id="24879" type="General" weightage="20" keywordseo="sun" source="Orion">Sun</keyword>, on Saturday morning. <br /><br />The PSLV-XL variant rocket carries the 1,480.7 kg Aditya-L1 spacecraft as its sole passenger that will study the solar activities.<br /><br />The 44.4 metre tall PSLV-C57 rocket with a lift off mass of 321 ton carrying Aditya-L1 -- named after the Sun God in Hindu mythology -- blasted off from the second launch pad at the Satish Dhawan Space Centre (SDSC) here at 11.50 a.m.<br /><br />Slowly rising up towards the skies with a thick orange flame at its tail, the rocket gained speed with a sound resembling rolling thunder and went up and up leaving a thick plume while the people assembled at the viewing gallery clapped their hands with pride.<br /><br />Interestingly, this will be one of the longest missions for the rocket as well as for Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO).<br /><br />About 63 minutes after the lift off, the rocket will eject Aditya-L1 and the whole mission comes to an end at about 73 minutes with the passivation of the fourth stage.<br /><br />"We have to meet the argument of perigee of the satellite. For that we are following two burn strategies for the fourth stage. After first burn there is a long coasting to achieve the argument of perigee that occurs naturally," Dr S. Unnikrishnan, Director, Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC) told IANS about the long flight duration.<br /><br />The flight plan includes switching off the rocket's fourth stage twice, allowing it to coast for about 30 minutes - 26 minutes after the first cut off and about 3 minutes after the second cut off.<br /><br />Initially, Aditya-L1 will be ejected in a low earth orbit (LEO). Then the orbit will be elliptical. As the spacecraft travels towards the Sun-Earth Lagrange Point (L1), it will exit the earth's gravitational Sphere of Influence (SOI).<br /><br />After exit from SOI, the cruise phase will start and subsequently the spacecraft will be injected into a large halo orbit around the L1 -- the point where the gravitational pull of two large bodies - Sun and Earth- will be equal and hence the spacecraft will not gravitate towards any one of the planet.<br /><br />The total travel time from launch to L1 would take about four months for Aditya-L1 and the distance will be about 1.5 million km from the Earth.<br /><br />The distance between the Earth and the Moon is about 3,84,000 km.<br /><br />"A satellite placed in the halo orbit around the L1 point has the major advantage of continuously viewing the Sun without any occultation/eclipses. This will provide a greater advantage of observing the solar activities and its effect on space weather in real time," the ISRO said.<br /><br />The scientific objectives of Aditya-L1 mission includes, study of coronal heating, solar wind acceleration, Coronal Mass Ejections (CME), dynamics of solar atmosphere and temperature anisotropy.<br /><br />In its normal configuration PSLV is a four stage/engine expendable rocket powered by solid and liquid fuels alternatively with six booster motors strapped on to the first stage to give higher thrust during the initial flight moments.<br /><br />The rocket that flew on Saturday was the XL variant - with longer strap-on motors.<br /><br />Interestingly, the XL variant rocket was used for the first time for India's first interplanetary mission - the Chandrayaan-1 or Moon Mission -1. Later the rocket was used for Chandrayaan-2 and Mars Mission/Mars Orbiter Mission.<br /><br />And Saturday's PSLV-XL variant is flying for the 25th time for another interplanetary mission.<br /><br />The Saturday rocketing comes soon after India landing on the Moon on August 23 with its lander safely landing on the lunar soil in a text book style. Later the rover rolled down and started doing experiments.<br /><br />Be that as it may, the Indian space agency said, the Aditya-L1 spacecraft carries seven payloads to observe the photosphere, chromosphere, and the outermost layers of the Sun (the corona) using electromagnetic and particle and magnetic field detectors.<br /><br />"Using the special vantage point L1, four payloads directly view the Sun and the remaining three payloads carry out in-situ studies of particles and fields at the Lagrange point L1, thus providing important scientific studies of the propagatory effect of solar dynamics in the interplanetary medium," ISRO said.<br /><br />Aditya-L1's seven payloads are expected to provide the most crucial information to understand the problem of coronal heating, coronal mass ejection, pre-flare and flare activities and their characteristics, dynamics of space weather, propagation of particle and fields and others, the Indian space agency said.<br /><br />The ISRO said the major science objectives of Aditya-L1 mission are: Study of solar upper atmospheric (chromosphere and corona) dynamics, study of chromospheric and coronal heating, physics of the partially ionised plasma, and initiation of the coronal mass ejections, and flares.<br /><br />It will also observe the in-situ particle and plasma environment providing data for the study of particle dynamics from the Sun.<br /><br />Other objectives are physics of solar corona and its heating mechanism, the diagnostics of the coronal and coronal loops plasma: Temperature, velocity and density, development, dynamics and origin of Coronal Mass Ejections (CME), to identify the sequence of processes that occur at multiple layers (chromosphere, base and extended corona) which eventually leads to solar eruptive events, magnetic field topology and magnetic field measurements in the solar corona, and the drivers for space weather (origin, composition and dynamics of solar wind).<br /><br />ISRO said that the Sun estimated to be 4.5 billion years old is a hot glowing ball of hydrogen and helium gases and is the source of energy for the solar system.<br /><br />"The gravity of the Sun holds all the objects of the solar system together. At the central region of the sun, known as 'core', the temperature can reach as high as 15 million degree Celsius," it said.<br /><br />At this temperature, a process called nuclear fusion takes place in the core which powers the Sun. The visible surface of the sun known as photosphere is relatively cool and has a temperature of about 5,500 degree Celsius, the ISRO said.<br /><br />The Sun is the nearest star and therefore can be studied in much more detail as compared to other stars. By studying the Sun, we can learn much more about stars in our Milky Way as well as about stars in various other galaxies, the ISRO said.<br /><br />The Sun is a very dynamic star that extends much beyond what we see. It shows several eruptive phenomena and releases immense amounts of energy in the solar system. If such explosive solar phenomena is directed towards the earth, it could cause various types of disturbances in the near earth space environment.<br /><br />Various spacecraft and communication systems are prone to such disturbances and therefore an early warning of such events is important for taking corrective measures beforehand.<br /><br />In addition to these, if an astronaut is directly exposed to such explosive phenomena, he/she would be in danger. The various thermal and magnetic phenomena on the sun are of extreme nature.<br /><br />Thus, the Sun also provides a good natural laboratory to understand those phenomena which cannot be directly studied in the lab.<br /><br />The Indians space agency said all the seven payloads carried by Aditya-L1 are indigenously developed by different laboratories in the country in close coordination with it.<br /><br />The Visible Emission Line Coronagraph (VELC) instrument is developed at the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Bengaluru; Solar Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope (SUIT) instrument at Inter University Centre for Astronomy &amp; Astrophysics, Pune; Aditya Solar wind Particle Experiment (ASPEX) at Physical Research Laboratory, Ahmedabad; Plasma Analyser Package for Aditya (PAPA) at Space Physics Laboratory, Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre, Thiruvananthapuram; Solar Low Energy X-ray Spectrometer (SoLEXS) and High Energy L1 Orbiting X-ray Spectrometer (HEL1OS) payloads at U R Rao Satellite Centre, Bengaluru and the Magnetometer at the Laboratory for Electro Optics Systems, Bengaluru. <br />

After the moon, a journey to the sun with Aditya-L1

<br /><ul><li>Scientists have detected an <keyword id="2052699" type="PERSON" weightage="20" keywordseo="Ancient-star">ancient star</keyword> with a large amount of oxygen in its atmosphere.<br /></li><li>During the early days of the universe, there was no oxygen. It was only produced in nuclear fusion occurring at the centre of massive stars.<br /></li><li>Primitive stars like J0815+4729 could provide clues to how the early production of oxygen led to life on Earth today.<br /></li></ul>Oxygen is the third most abundant element in the universe and essential for life on Earth — or any planet. The universe went from being without any oxygen in its early days to being flooded with it once the first stars were born. <br /><br />A team of astronomers have spotted one such <keyword id="8637736" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="20" keywordseo="primitive-star">primitive star</keyword> — J0815+4729 — using the <a href="https://www.businessinsider.in/a-planet-thrice-the-size-of-jupiter-discovered-due-to-its-strange-orbit/articleshow/70959698.cms">Keck Observatory</a> in Hawaii. The star’s chemical composition could provide clues as to how oxygen and other important elements were produced by the first generation of stars.<br /><br />The study published in <a href="https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ab62ae">The Astrophysical Journal Letters</a> states that the primitive composition of the ancient star indicates that it was formed during the first hundreds of millions of years after the <keyword id="61221" type="ENTERTAINMENT" weightage="20" keywordseo="big-bang">Big Bang</keyword>. <br /><br />It’s possible that it was birthed from the material expelled from the very first supernovae of the Milky Way.<br /><br />"This result is very exciting. It tells us about some of the earliest times in the universe by using stars in our cosmic backyard," said <keyword id="1703883" type="PERSON" weightage="20" keywordseo="keck-observatory">Keck Observatory</keyword> Chief Scientist <a href="http://www.keckobservatory.org/ancientstar_oxygen/">John O'Meara</a>.<br /><br /><b><keyword id="8637737" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="20" keywordseo="what-are-stars-made-of">What are stars made of</keyword>?<br /></b><b></b>J0815+4729 is over 5,000 lightyears away near a constellation called Lynx. Stars like it are also called ‘halo stars’. "This is due to their roughly spherical distribution around the Milky Way, as opposed to the more familiar flat disk of younger stars that include the Sun," explains <a href="http://www.keckobservatory.org/ancientstar_oxygen/">Adam Burgasser</a>, a co-author of the study.<br /><br />The old star is considerably depleted with only 10% of carbon, 8% of nitrogen and 3% of oxygen in comparison to the Sun. But that’s not surprising. Ancient stars like the J0815+4729 are some of the oldest in the universe.<br /><br /><br />However, the scientists did note something else that was unusual. Aside from the three primary elements, others like calcium and iron were only present in quantities one-millionth that of the Sun.<br /><br />"Only a few such stars are known in the halo of our galaxy, but none have such an enormous amount of carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen compared to their iron content," said David Aguado, co-author of the study.<br /><br />Oxygen wasn’t present immediately after the Big Bang. It was created by nuclear fusion reactions occurring deep inside some of the biggest stars in the universe — some even 10 times bigger than the Sun.<br /><br />To figure out how oxygen was produced in the early day’s scientists need to study J0815+4729 and other primitive stars like it. <br /><br />"I look forward to seeing more measurements like this one so we can better understand the earliest seeding of oxygen and other elements throughout the young universe," said O'Meara.<br /><br /><strong>See also:<br /><a href="https://www.businessinsider.in/science/space/news/astronomers-accidentally-discover-a-new-galaxy-with-as-many-stars-as-the-milky-way/articleshow/71715185.cms">Astronomers ‘accidentally’ discover a new galaxy with as many stars as the Milky Way</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.businessinsider.in/science/space/news/bubbles-filled-with-thousands-of-stars-found-in-the-milky-way/articleshow/71385825.cms">Bubbles filled with thousands of stars found in the Milky Way</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.businessinsider.in/science/space/news/nasas-planet-hunter-uncovers-its-first-world-with-two-stars-1300-light-years-away/articleshow/73133158.cms">NASA's planet-hunter uncovers its first world with two stars 1,300 light-years away</a></strong><br />

A primitive star sheds light on how the universe learned to breathe

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<p class="source"><span><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_b7Sjatlmg">SISSA - International School for Advanced Studies</a></span></p>
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</div></div>An international team of scientists have crunched the numbers and discovered something straight out of science-fiction: They claim that the center of our galaxy could host a giant wormhole. <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/space/11360840/Wormhole-to-another-galaxy-may-exist-in-Milky-Way.html">Despite what some media outlets are saying</a> about the study, the results are entirely unfounded according to scientific experts.
<p>So, as much as some of us might want to shoot through a wormhole like in Nolan's latest film "Interstellar," it's never going to happen. At least not from the center of our galaxy the way the team suggests in their paper, which was recently published in the journal <a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0003491614002395">Annals of Physics</a>.</p>
<p>Wormholes are cosmic portals that some physicists theorize can connect distant corners of the same universe together or link one universe to an entirely <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7wdPGFW4W0">separate, parallel universe</a>. They form when extremely heavy objects create a well in the fabric of space time that is deep enough to reach another side of the universe.</p>
<p>If they existed, wormholes could help humans travel to or communicate with parts of the universe that are millions of light years away that we might otherwise never reach, unless we developed faster-than-light spaceships.</p>
<p>The team discusses a specific type of wormhole called a <a href="http://hardsf.org/TechWor2.htm">Morris-Thorne wormhole</a>. This wormhole is what theorists call a traversable wormhole, which means you can enter either end and fall out the other side. In comparison, the original wormhole - called a <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wnet/hawking/strange/html/wormhole.html">Rosen-Einstein bridge</a> and featured in the film "Thor"- is unstable and closes up, so once you get through, there's no going back. (Unless you have someone who can open the wormhole up again, like <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heimdall_(comics)">Heimdall</a> in "Thor".)</p>
<p>Luckily for the characters in "Interstellar," the wormhole was stable and traversable, which is no surprise since the <keyword id="41551" type="ENTERTAINMENT" weightage="100" keywordseo="science">science</keyword> consultant of the film, Kip Thorne, first predicted the possibility of traversable wormholes with his graduate student Mike Morris in 1988.</p>
<p></p>
<div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table full"><div>
<div class="image on-image">
<p class="source"><span><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSWdZVtXT7E">Warner Bros. UK</a></span></p>
<p class="caption">Wormhole in "Interstellar" film.</p>
</img></div>
<p></p>
</div></div>What makes Morris-Thorne wormholes stable, and therefore traversable, is that instead of closing off, like a Rosen-Einstein bridge, they are held open. Holding them open is what theorists have dubbed "exotic matter," a hypothetical, mysterious form of matter that does not follow the regular laws of physics.
<p>Dark matter is one possible example of exotic matter and there's strong evidence to suggest that our home galaxy, the Milky Way, is encased in a massive dark matter bubble, called a <a href="http://arxiv.org/abs/1201.3998">dark halo</a>. Astronomers have found that in most spiral galaxies, including the Milky Way, <a href="http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1997ApJ...490..493N">dark matter is most dense</a> at the center of the dark halo.</p>
<p>And in this latest paper, the team suggests that the amount of dark matter at the center of our galaxy's dark halo could have enough density to create a giant wormhole. Last year, some of the same authors <a href="http://arxiv.org/abs/1406.3045">published earlier results</a> indicating that wormholes could exist at other points in the dark halo.&#xa0;</p>
<p>"This result is an important compliment to the earlier result, thereby confirming the possible existence of wormholes in most of the spiral galaxies," the team state in a pre-print of their latest paper on <a href="http://arxiv.org/pdf/1501.00490.pdf">arXiv.org</a>.</p>
<p>But some experts are skeptical:</p>
<p><a href="http://www.physics.rutgers.edu/people/pips/Buckley.html">Matthew Buckley</a>, a theoretical physicist at Rutgers University, told Business Insider in a series of tweets that exotic material necessary to hold open a Morris-Thorne wormhole at the center of our galaxy "would not have the necessary properties to be dark matter." He goes on to say that some of the team's work "seems very suspect."</p>
<p>MIT theoretical astrophysicist, <a href="http://space.mit.edu/people/prescod-weinstein-chanda">Chanda Prescod-Weinstein</a>, also speculates the paper's approach saying that the solution the team provides would not form a stable wormhole:</p>
<div><div>
 <blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en">
  <p>
   <a href="https://twitter.com/orwigwrites">@orwigwrites</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/AstroKatie">@AstroKatie</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/mcnees">@mcnees</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/reneehlozek">@reneehlozek</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/physicsmatt">@physicsmatt</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/BI_Science">@BI_Science</a> suggests an overly complicated &amp; likely unstable solution to problem  </p>- Chanda (???)  (@IBJIYONGI) <a href="https://twitter.com/mims/statuses/557982345983434752">January 21, 2015</a>
 </blockquote>
 
</div></div>
<p>Astrophysicist, <a href="http://www.astrokatie.com/">Katie Mack</a> had something to say about the paper, as well:</p>
<div><div>
 <blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en">
  <p>
   <a href="https://twitter.com/mcnees">@mcnees</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/orwigwrites">@orwigwrites</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/IBJIYONGI">@IBJIYONGI</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/reneehlozek">@reneehlozek</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/physicsmatt">@physicsmatt</a> I mean I think the motivation was "Interstellar." But nothing from physics.  </p>- Katie Mack  (@AstroKatie) <a href="https://twitter.com/mims/statuses/557986220500725760">January 21, 2015</a>
 </blockquote>
 
</div></div>
<div>Another theoretical physicist, Lawrence Krauss of Arizona State University, told <a href="http://www.nbcnews.com/science/weird-science/interstellar-reality-check-could-our-galaxy-host-wormhole-n290861">NBC News</a>: "My understanding of wormholes is that we have no idea how to make them stable and traversable without exotic unknown forms of energy," he told NBC News in an email, "so any discussion of traversable wormholes as realistic travel devices is highly speculative at best."</div>

A Crazy New Theory Suggests That Our Galaxy Is A Giant Worm Hole - Here's What The Experts Say

<p>Clumps of strange yellow balls have been showing up in several images captured by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, and a group of volunteers were the first to spot them after combing through thousands of photos.</p>
<p>These amateur astronomers were helping out with NASA's web-based Milky Way Project which relies on volunteers to help make sense of tens of thousands of photos. The project focuses on a patch of space called W33 about 13,000 light-years away where newborn stars are bursting into existence.</p>
<p>The volunteers started chatting about mysterious yellow balls that showed up in several photos and Spitzer scientists took notice. They are quite unique:</p>
<p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table full"><div><div class="image on-image"></div><p></p></div></div>They think the yellow balls could be a new stage of massive star formation.</p>
<p>However, these yellow balls aren't actually yellow - they just appear that way because Spitzer snaps photos in infrared.</p>
<p>There are also green bubbles with red centers surrounding the yellow balls. The green rings are halos of organic molecules blasted outward by bursts of radiation and stellar winds from the new stars. The red center is dust heated by the star. Volunteers had already spotted about 5,000 of the green and red balls, but the yellow balls are a new discovery.</p>
<p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table full"><div><div class="image on-image"></div><p></p></div></div>Areas where green and red overlap appear yellow in infrared light. Astronomers realized that the yellow balls are patches where the green organic material overlaps with the red dust because stellar winds haven't pushed the organic material out into a halo yet. Astronomers think the yellow balls are the missing link between the birth of a star and the green and red bubbles they produce.</p>
<p>The yellow balls look small in the picture, but they're actually several hundred times the size of our solar system, and volunteers have spotted over 900 of them so far.</p>
<p>Astronomers are now calculating the distribution of the yellow balls in the star-forming stretch of galaxy called W33. It looks like most of the yellow balls appear right on the rim of the green and red bubbles. This could mean that the bubbles being blown by young stars are triggering the births of even more stars, a process called "triggered star formation."</p>
<p>The Milk Way Project is one of several on the Zooniverse website that relies on volunteers to make sense of scientific data.</p>

Amateur astronomers found these mysterious yellow balls in deep space

<p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span><a href="http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2008/a1689/">X-ray: NASA/CXC/MIT/E.-H Peng et al; Optical: NASA/STScI</a></span></p><p class="caption">Dark matter illustrated in purple around the Coma Cluster of galaxies, also called Abell 1689.</p></div><p></p></div></div>Astronomers have a very big problem on their hands: Four-fifths of all the stuff in the universe can't be found, a cosmic mystery known as "dark matter."</p><p>People have searched for tiny, hypothetical particles of dark matter for years in machines <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/dark-matter-experiment-finds-nothing-2013-10">deep below</a> <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/r-cerns-large-hadron-collider-to-resume-smashing-particles-in-hunt-for-dark-matter-2015-6">the ground</a> and <a href="http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/dark-matter-hopes-dwindle-with-x-ray-signal">in</a> <a href="http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/experiments/742.html">space</a>, but we have yet to find a single speck. All we know is that it tugs on "normal" matter with gravity.</p><p>That's why some scientists are revisiting an old idea that <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/dark-matter-primordial-black-holes-2016-7">black holes born at the dawn of time</a> - invisible monsters that could have avoided our detection until now - are a <a href="http://arxiv.org/abs/1607.06077">prime suspect</a> for all that missing mass.</p><p>Researchers call these speculative black holes "massive compact halo objects," or MACHOs, since dark matter lurks in a "halo" in and around big galaxies.</p><p>But a new study in The Astrophysical Journal Letters <a href="http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8205/824/2/L31">offers a serious reality check</a> to the idea that MACHOs are dark matter.</p><p><a href="https://www.ias.edu/scholars/timothy-david-brandt">Timothy Brandt</a>, an astrophysicist at the Institute for Advanced Study, wrote the study after he took a close look at 11 dim, feeble, and weird little galaxies. The stars there are choking with dark matter, at least compared to larger galaxies like the Milky Way or Andromeda, but the little galaxies don't seem to show any obvious signs of harboring a flotilla of old black holes.</p><p>"These galaxies would be less dense and larger than we see," Brandt told Business Insider.</p><p>Instead they're inexplicably compact. And that could represent a big threat to the MACHO hypothesis.</p><h2>The mystery of 11 non-puffy dwarfs</h2><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span><a href="http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/details.php?id=PIA16613">NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/ESO/JPL-Caltech/DSS</a></span></p><p class="caption">A dwarf galaxy.</p></div><p></p></div></div></p><p>Brandt's interest started with relatively recent discoveries of small, seemingly very old, and ultra-faint star clusters.</p><p>Some of these clusters are large enough to be called dwarf galaxies, yet are billions of times dimmer than larger galaxies. Such ultra-faint dwarfs are thought to be incredibly common, Brandt says, perhaps outnumbering visible galaxies by 10- or 100-to-one.</p><p>Nearly all of their young, bright stars have burned out over the eons, which is why these ultra-faint dwarf galaxies are so hard to find.</p><p>"If you're looking with your own eyes you'd never see them," Brandt said, noting they can be as small as a few thousand stars. "We've only been finding these things for about 10 years with computer algorithms."</p><p>What made them so interesting to Brandt is that some of these clusters exist at all.</p><p>By mass our own Milky Way is somewhere between 70% and 80% dark matter - most of it lurking near the outer edge of the galaxy. Meanwhile, ultra-faint dwarf galaxies are roughly 99% dark matter.</p><p>"The dark matter is holding them together and preventing them from flying apart," Brandt told Business Insider.</p><p>And that's where Brandt realized he could see if a bunch of old black holes between 20 to 100 times the mass of the sun (a size range for MACHOs that has yet to be ruled out) really exist there. If so, they'd accelerate stars as they passed nearby, causing the entire cluster or galaxy to "puff" outward over billions of years.</p><p>A diffuse cloud of dark matter particles, on the other hand, would keep the cluster glued together.</p><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span><a href="http://arxiv.org/abs/1503.02079">Sergey E. Koposov et al./Dark Energy Survey</a></span></p><p class="caption">The Eridanus II ultra-faint dwarf galaxy.</p></div><p></p></div></div>Brandt focused his attention on one ultra-faint, dark matter-choked star cluster near the center or Eridanus II, or Eri II.</p><p>Eri II is a 3- to 12-billion-year-old <a href="http://arxiv.org/abs/1503.02079">dwarf galaxy that astronomers barely and recently noticed</a> hanging out near our much-larger Milky Way galaxy.</p><p>Brandt's calculations show that if the cluster's dark matter is made of MACHOs, then it would have puffed out and faded into Eri II a long time ago.</p><p>But there it was: A small, dim, ancient star cluster that was much too compact, as well as its parent galaxy.</p><p>He noted the 10 dwarf galaxies that are similar to Eri II should act the same, but that "we don't see puffy ultra-faint dwarf galaxies."</p><p>"This one cluster could be a coincidence. But if you look at all the other dwarf galaxies, I don't see how [the dark matter] could be black holes between 20 and 100 solar masses," Brandt said.</p><h2>Why dark matter might be ancient black holes</h2><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span>Alain Riazuelo of the French National Research Agency, via Wikipedia</span></p><p class="caption">An artist's depiction of a black hole.</p></div><p></p></div></div></p><p>Brandt's study comes at a time when scientists like <a href="http://www.kashlinsky.info">Alexander Kashlinsky</a>, a cosmologist at NASA, have started revisiting the MACHO idea that dark matter may just be a bunch of <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/1605.04023">really, really old black holes</a>.</p><p>That's because several searches for tiny bits of dark matter, called "weakly interactive massive particles" or <a href="https://www.astro.umd.edu/~ssm/darkmatter/WIMPexperiments.html">WIMPs</a>, keep <a href="http://www.space.com/33497-dark-matter-search-comes-up-empty-lux-detector.html">striking out</a>.</p><p>"[WIMP] searches have been going on for quite some time, but nothing has been reliably detected, slowly shrinking the box of parameters where [dark matter] particles can hide," Kashlinsky previously wrote in an email to Business Insider.</p><p>Meanwhile, MACHOs of a few sizes - including those weighing roughly 30 solar masses - have yet to be firmly ruled out.</p><p>Scientists figured MACHOs probably formed within a fraction of a second of the Big Bang some 13.8 billion years ago. This was right as the event's hot, energetic soup of plasma cooled into the first subatomic bits of matter (then later into atoms, gases, stars, and so on).</p><p>These primordial black holes would have lurked in the background as the first stars, galaxies, and planets started to form millions of years later, subtly influencing their destinies while vastly outweighing them; for every bright, shining star, four stars' worth of mass was forever locked away in a black hole.</p><p>Trouble is, no one could find enough black holes to finger them as dark matter. So this spooky hypothesis lost steam over the past couple of decades.</p><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span><a href="https://www.advancedligo.mit.edu/core.html">LIGO</a></span></p><p class="caption">A technician inspects a mirror in a LIGO facility.</p></div><p></p></div></div>But the <a href="https://ligo.caltech.edu/">Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO)</a> - a 15-nation, 900-scientist, $1 billion experiment - recently gave the notion new life.</p><p>LIGO's <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/gravitational-waves-detected-first-time-ligo-2016-2">first-ever detection of gravitational waves</a> was made possible by two black holes smacking together, each roughly 30 times the mass of our sun.</p><p>Thing is, this size of black hole is <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/1006.2834">supposed to be rare in nature</a> - so detecting two at once is rather remarkable.</p><p>Calculations suggest black holes of that size could be MACHOs that formed within a second inside the hot, energetic soup of the Big Bang.</p><p>If so, then a lot more of them are out there, others will eventually collide, and LIGO will keep detecting them as it listens for ripples in space-time.</p><p>"We should know the answer within a couple of years," Kashlinsky previously said, later emphasizing that this is irrespective of Brandt's challenging findings.</p><p>"LIGO is starting a new run of observations in September. If they keep discovering these beasts at this rate, every one to two weeks, we should have good enough statistics to rule in the possibility." </p><h2>'We could be in trouble'</h2><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span><a href="http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/february-2014/cdms-result-covers-new-ground-in-search-for-dark-matter">Reidar Hahn/Fermilab</a></span></p><p class="caption"> Researchers poke their head into a super-cooled dark matter particle detector. </p></div><p></p></div></div></p><p>Both Brandt and Kashlinsky told Business Insider the ultra-dim dwarf galaxy study isn't the end of the end of the line for MACHOs.</p><p>Although unlikely, the star cluster in Eri II may have recently dropped into the center - so its stars may not have had enough time to be accelerated by MACHOs.</p><p>"It takes a long time for MACHOs to share their energy with the stars" if they exist, Brandt said.</p><p>Kashlinsky says another possibility, as pointed out in Brandt's study, is that a chance alignment makes the star cluster only appear to be near the core of Eri II. If true, the cluster exists near the edge or outside of the dwarf galaxy, which could explain its non-puffiness (there is less mass nearby to pull on stars and help accelerate them).</p><p>Brandt's study pegs that possibility at about 1%. "Statistically speaking that is non-negligible at all," Kashlinsky wrote in an email to Business Insider.</p><p>A more radical explanation is that MACHOs may be smaller than anyone thought, perhaps somewhere between the the weight of the moon and an asteroid. These may be impossible to detect, though, since Brandt said since they'd be less than a millimeter in size.</p><p>A scenario like that is one Brandt fears the most.</p><p>"It's possible there is no interaction of dark matter [with normal matter] except through gravity," he said. "If that's the case, we're in trouble. We've never come to that point where we know something is out there but is completely invisible to our experiments."</p><p>"But I'm not that pessimistic," he said. "Not yet."</p>    <div class="margin-top">        <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/most-mysterious-point-universe-black-hole-singularity-2016-7">Einstein's powerful equations can't explain the most mysterious point in the universe</a></h3>        <div>            <div>        <div class="ooyala-video-player" data-video-autoplay="false" data-video-id="Q5Y210NDE6vXset6CmVYHDgJ0Qw45n3H" data-player-variable="ooyalapopvideo" id="ooyalaplayer_popvideo" style="width:1280px;height:720px"></div>        </div>        </div>            </div>

11 wimpy galaxies are beating up our brightest explanation yet for a deep, dark cosmic mystery

<p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span><a href="http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2015/10/randall-follows-dramatic-chain-of-events/">Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer</a></span></p><p class="caption">Photo of Lisa Randall.</p></div><p></p></div></div>Where do we come from? Well, it depends on who you ask.</p><p>For example, an astrophysicist might say that the chemical components of our bodies were first forged in the <a href="http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/01/150128-big-bang-universe-supernova-astrophysics-health-space-ngbooktalk/">nuclear fires of stars</a>.</p><p>On the other hand, an evolutionary biologist might look at the similarities between our DNA and that of other primates' and conclude we evolved <a href="http://humanorigins.si.edu/education/intro-human-evolution">from apes</a>.</p><p><a href="https://www.physics.harvard.edu/people/facpages/randall">Lisa Randall</a>, a theoretical physicist at Harvard University, has a different, and novel answer, which she describes in her latest book "<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Dark-Matter-Dinosaurs-Astounding-Interconnectedness/dp/0062328476">Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs</a>."</p><p>Randall has written other popular <keyword id="41551" type="ENTERTAINMENT" weightage="100" keywordseo="science">science</keyword> books including the New York Time's bestseller "<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Warped-Passages-Unraveling-Mysteries-Dimensions/dp/0060531096">Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions</a>." Her studies at Harvard explore theoretical particle physics and cosmology.</p><p>In her latest book, she posits that the extinction of the dinosaurs - necessary for the emergence of humans - is linked to dark matter. Dark matter is the mysterious, invisible matter that astronomers estimate makes up 85% of all matter in our universe.</p><h2>One species' extinction is another's head start</h2><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span>Thomson Reuters</span></p></div><p></p></div></div>Paleontologists largely agree that about 66 million years ago a giant, 9-mile-long celestial body - likely a comet - struck Earth. The impact wiped out 75% of species across the planet, including most of the dinosaurs.</p><p>Amongst the survivors were small primates. Over the next 66 million years these primates diversified, grew larger, learned to walk on two legs, and developed large brains, which they eventually used to invent pizza delivery.</p><p>So what caused that giant space rock to collide with our planet in the first place and give primates a chance to thrive?</p><p>It could just be chance - or luck, depending on your perspective - but Randall would disagree with both of these ideas.</p><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span>Business Insider</span></p></div><p></p></div></div>In her book, Randall describes a dark, pancake-shaped patty of densely packed dark matter within our galaxy that could be responsible for our emergence as a species.</p><p>Dark matter has never been directly detected. However, there is enough evidence for its immense gravitational influence on our universe that the vast majority of the scientific community <a href="http://www.nature.com/news/largest-ever-dark-matter-experiment-poised-to-test-popular-theory-1.18772">agrees that dark matter is a form of mysterious matter</a> that we can neither see or touch, but that nevertheless must permeate the cosmos.</p><p>Generally, dark matter tends to be concentrated in large halos around galaxies like giant bubbles. But Randall thinks that there could also be a flatter, denser region of dark matter amidst the stars, planets, and gas clouds in our galaxy.</p><h2>Beware the dark disc</h2><p>If there is dark matter in Randall's hypothetical disc, then it stands to reason that the disc has a powerful gravitational influence on the objects around it - including our solar system.</p><p>But our solar system is not always near the disc, which is the crux of Randall's theory.</p><p>As the solar system revolves around the center of the Milky Way - the same way Earth revolves around the sun - it moves up and down, or oscillates, through the plane of our galaxy. And the rate of this oscillation is very intriguing.</p><p>Below is an illustration of our solar system's oscillation where the orange dot in the lower left rectangle is our sun and the black line at the center is the dark disc:</p><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table full"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span><a href="http://physics.aps.org/articles/v7/41">APS/Alan Stonebraker</a></span></p></div><p></p></div></div>A team of astronomers made a rough estimate of this oscillation rate near the turn of this century, calculating that our solar system passes through the plane of the Milky Way about once every 32 million years, which means if there's a dark disc, we pass through that at the same rate.</p><p>Interestingly, <a href="http://www.pnas.org/content/81/3/801">there's evidence to suggest</a> that mass extinctions in Earth's past happened within this time frame, or about once every 25 to 35 million years.</p><p>It's this similarity between the rate of mass extinction rates and the rate of our solar system's oscillation through the galaxy that made Randall and her Harvard colleague Matthew Reece first suggest the link in scientific paper published in the journal <a href="http://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.112.161301">Physical Review Letters</a> last year, and that Randall explores more in her book.</p><p>Randall hypothesizes that when we're passing through the dark disc, the gravity from the dark matter within influences the outer region of our solar system, called the Oort cloud.</p><p>The Oort cloud, illustrated below just right of center, sits about two light years from the sun and is thought to contain billions of icy objects at least 12 miles wide.</p><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oort_cloud#/media/File:PIA17046_-_Voyager_1_Goes_Interstellar.jpg">Uploaded by WolfmanSF to Wikipedia</a></span></p></div><p></p></div></div></p><p>If something 12 miles wide hit Earth today, it would mean the end of life as we know it. And Randall thinks that's exactly what happened to the dinosaurs 66 million years ago that opened the door for widespread primate evolution.</p><h2>Prove it</h2><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span><a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/gsfc/5168930063/in/photolist-nCPYtD-cedYUA-bBh4BV-btMqqR-4R8CL-697x6u-a9pqX-9VUouG-5Rk6Q1-bq7L6J-7t5UhK-9copD3-bbTJj6-nbqYQG-5g2ofZ-jWg3qY-nHzL9k-cntvR-5fisTj-8h7tpM-p5xsc4-akFLBv-644Ln2-8SL7PR-4Gd8Cq-5CbcTW-8tVWNf-5gFXBr-kuWy58-5W8MtJ-a7yJES-qEJrHB-2LGgJY-8tSSgv-849K3U-oLHueQ-5RcUCf-7oS5Ng-eRVHgC-iqKpmj-8qgaUZ-bXQoBu-6WVTh6-84toZq-rb76Rr-53MvGH-fqVzaX-kJXh78-j2vQ9c-dc6rUv">NASA Goddard Spaceflight Center</a></span></p><p class="caption">Dark matter is illustrated here as the fog between galaxies.</p></div><p></p></div></div>While it's impossible to wind back the clock, proving the existence of the dark disc would greatly advance Randall's theory.</p><p>She's tried to do so by looking at the speed and direction of stars in our galaxy. If stars moved in ways that couldn't be explained by the amount of ordinary, visible matter around them, then it could suggest the presence of the dark disc.</p><p>But that's a very tall order. There are about 100 billion stars in the Milky Way, and hunting dark matter is notoriously tricky.</p><p>We have a dozen or so functioning detectors underground, on Earth's surface, and in space - and none of them has yet managed to sniff out a dark matter particle. If they do, it would be a significant step toward supporting Randall's hypothesis.</p><p>In her concluding remarks, Randall writes:</p><p> </p>    <div class="margin-top">        <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/scientific-links-extraterrestrial-life-aliens-2015-11">Here's why aliens might actually exist</a></h3>        <div>            <div>        <div class="ooyala-video-player" data-video-autoplay="false" data-video-id="w3ZXBxeDolmQmCfI8DI7FIZrunatjOe8" data-player-variable="ooyalapopvideo" id="ooyalaplayer_popvideo" style="width:1280px;height:720px"></div>        </div>        </div>            </div>

Leading Harvard physicist has a radical new theory for why humans exist

<p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table center"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span><a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/sermoa/5360947421/in/photolist-9aJfTX-9q54FM-9oXrLm-4VWRtX-bhVyNa-9aGFyp-9xj3M9-4DhwjH-6A5gsu-9oUmAM-7CZA7P-7y1Y7L-Fn3goZ-8YYzmC-rrk32n-6jNt8a-cULb4C-eMHZ7P-c7KVVw-6uD7UK-qU7swg-9aJfTF-6uHjrj-6uD85M-6uD7Ze-6icuhT-7UhFr5-cuXBTA-eRp8m7-cUJgjJ-zy3KrT-AtJUxu-47JgpP-n5mSb-7NPtoR-rrKr7s-aVZiJB-dbwmhC-fQuab-pexeSN-octRvq-r3hu1a-5kJmxJ-6uHjnd-drDjWp-6uHji3-6uHjbW-dQxDKF-3zCr2-5ZVb2U">Aimee Rivers CC BY SA 2.0</a></span></p></div><p></p></div></div>It was the low, hissing sound of static, like what you might hear if you tuned your radio between stations. The year was 1963, and all Robert Wilson and Arno Penzias, a pair of radio astronomers at Bell Laboratories, wanted to measure the minimum brightness of the sky. But this low, hissing static was getting in the way.</p><p>The static signaled the existence of extra radiation. But for the life of them, Wilson and Penzias couldn't figure out where on Earth this radiation was coming from.</p><p>According to Smithsonian, the pair had ruled out <a href="http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/how-scientists-confirmed-big-bang-theory-owe-it-all-to-a-pigeon-trap-180949741/">radio noise from nearby cities, after-effects of nuclear detonations, and signals from the Van Allen belts</a>, the huddles of charged particles loitering around by Earth's magnetic field.</p><p>"I had a lot of experience fixing practical problems in radio telescopes," Robert Wilson told Smithsonian. "We looked for anything in the instrument or in the environment that might be causing the excess antenna noise. Among things, we searched for radiation from the walls of the antenna, especially the throat, which is the small end of the horn. We constructed a whole new throat section and then tested the instrument with it."</p><h2><strong>Feathered squatters</strong></h2><p>And then they noticed them. A pair of pigeons living inside their radio antenna, recklessly splattering the expensive instrument with their gooey bird droppings. Wilson and Penzias wondered if these feathered squatters might somehow be causing that annoying static.</p><p>So the scientists went out and got a Havahart trap and jailed the unsuspecting pigeons inside so they could send them far, far away.</p><p>"We took the pigeons, put them in a box, and mailed them as far away as we could in the company mail to a guy who fancied pigeons," Wilson said in an <a href="https://aeon.co/videos/how-pigeon-droppings-nearly-derailed-a-massive-discovery-in-cosmology">Aeon video</a>. "He looked at them and said these are junk pigeons and let them go and before long they were right back."</p><p>But in the meantime, Wilson and Penzias had ruled out the pigeons as a source for the strange signal. Even with the pigeons gone, the static was still there.</p><h2><strong>The afterglow of the big bang</strong></h2><p>This clued them in that the noise wasn't coming from Earth at all, or even from inside the galaxy. "We were really running out of ideas when we heard about the idea of radiation left over from the big bang," Wilson said in the Aeon video.</p><p>Around that time Robert Dicke, a physicist at Princeton, was piecing together a theory that stated that if the universe was truly created in the big bang, "the residue of the explosion would now be a <a href="http://futurism.com/bird-poops-role-in-revolutionizing-our-understanding-of-space/">low level background radiation</a> spread evenly throughout the universe," Futurism writes.</p><p>Dicke was talking about something called the cosmic microwave background, which is the faint afterglow of the big bang, a whisper from the formation of the universe, an echo of the universe's first baby cries.</p><p>Back in the days of analog television and radio, you could see this afterglow in a small fraction of the snowy static between channels and hear it in the hisses that filled the spaces between radio programs.</p><p>And it was this cosmic microwave background radiation that was clouding their experiment. It was the very first confirmation of the big bang.</p><p>In 1978, Wilson and Penzias received the Nobel Prize in physics for their accidental discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation.</p><p>"We started out seeking a halo around the Milky Way and we found something else," Wilson <a href="http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/how-scientists-confirmed-big-bang-theory-owe-it-all-to-a-pigeon-trap-180949741/?no-ist">told Smithsonian</a>. "When an experiment goes wrong, it's usually the best thing. The thing we did see was much more important than what we were looking for. This was really the start of modern cosmology."</p>    <div class="margin-top">        <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/what-existed-before-the-big-bang-2016-5">The Big Bang is not the beginning of our universe - it's actually the end of something else entirely </a></h3>        <div>            <div>        <div class="ooyala-video-player" data-video-autoplay="false" data-video-id="sxNGZoMzE6Spo9NwxNCUJiR64jyOT6kW" data-player-variable="ooyalapopvideo" id="ooyalaplayer_popvideo" style="width:1280px;height:720px"></div>        </div>        </div>            </div>

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