Astronomers have spent the best part of the last century searching for a strange dark object in the cosmos.
Our galaxy and the universe as a whole have confounded humans for generations. We have spent an inordinate amount of time gazing into the abyss of space to try to better understand what exactly is out there. New findings are making their way to us as technology advances.
What could this odd form of matter be, and what are we doing to find it?
The mysteries left in space for us as humans to discover
While we as a species have mapped our immediate cosmic neighborhood, most of the cosmos remains a mystery.
Approximately 95% of the matter in space is still unknown to modern science. One notable mystery is the Sun. We now understand that its outer atmosphere, known as the corona, is actually millions of degrees hotter than its surface. And science has no clue why.
The Venusian inside-out mystery has also confounded astronomers, as Venus appears to have a “young” surface.
Science has found that Venus essentially “threw up” on itself around 750 million years ago, erasing the surface craters that painted a picture of the planet’s timeline.
Thanks to our space telescopes, the future is looking brighter than ever
While we have made tremendous advancements in technology down here on Earth, the most significant progress has come from our space-based telescopes.
36 years after the Hubble telescope was first launched, NASA has finally started finding unknown objects, strange gravitational forces, and even a few celestial structures that boggle the mind.
In 1977, the now iconic “WOW signal” was seen by a radio telescope that picked up a strange 72-second signal from the Sagittarius constellation.
Despite searching furiously for another, the signal died out, and no new findings from the region have been found. Even home-based telescopes have found astonishing events such as a “space volcano” that shot out jets of energy that covered millions of light-years.
But there is one mystery that is yet to be understood. How has this strange force that we can only identify through its gravity gone over the heads of science?
The study, “A million-solar-mass object detected at a cosmological distance using gravitational imaging,” published in Nature, may have an answer to this age-old mystery.
A strange ‘dark object’ that makes up the majority of space has been identified
In 1933, Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky discovered a strange anomaly that was pushing and pulling objects in space. He was the first person to theorize that dark matter was, in fact, the glue that was holding the universe together.
As astronomers point their telescopes and more crucially, their attention, to the stars out there in the vacuum of space, we are making astonishing findings.
Dark matter makes up 95% of the matter in the universe. And at the moment, there is no way to physically identify it other than the gravitational push and pull that it displays. A team has detected an odd celestial object that has a mass roughly 1.1 million times the size of our sun.
The discovery of dark matter has been a record-breaking achievement, as this finding was the lowest-mass object ever detected at such a vast distance using only its gravitational force.
A black hole, or a dark matter halo. Astronomers are yet to decide
The object is most likely a dark matter halo or possibly an intermediate-mass black hole.
Detecting rare galactic events or celestial bodies that are made of dark matter has become a top priority for science. This new study is significant to our set of knowledge as science has predicted that there should be millions of these strange objects around the emptiness of space.
How will the discovery of dark matter change astronomy over the years to come?