Unveiling the Universe

When I covered black holes a while back, I said I would talk about a specific one separately, and that’s what we will do in this article. The black hole in question is supermassive and the farthest from us we’ve discovered so far, sitting in a quasar galaxy 13 billion lightyears away. To explain what a quasar is, let’s experience the birth of a supermassive black hole.

Quasars

We are in the early universe. Gas clouds are scattered everywhere and millions of stars are born from the thicker ones. Most of the stars are supermassive, which means that they burn hot and fast, explode, and then create black holes. Gravity pulls a lot of them together to form larger ones and over hundreds of millions of years, each one grows, producing stronger gravity and pulling in more gas. They have now earned the title of supermassive. Gas actually heats up as it advances to them. Then, inevitability, the black hole overloads and the gas is ejected as it starts to ignite. Consequentially, gas is blasted through the galaxy in huge energy jets, each 20 times our solar system and at a rate of 10 Earths per minute. When this gas does run out, the jets shrink and die. These jets are what we call a quasar.

Unsurprisingly, quasars are the brightest objects in the universe. They are, as we’ve seen, the opposite of black holes. Black holes acquire gas and quasars blow it out. Interestingly, every large galaxy, including our own, was likely a quasar in its youth. Scientists have found thousands of them, but finding the ones farthest away has been lengthy for Bram Venemans and his team. They estimate that there are 20 to 100 as bright and as distant as the one that hosts the black hole we focussing on, across the sky. 

To find our quasar, Bañados (part of Venemans’ team) spotted a few candidates he thought could be distant, then analysed them with the Magellan Telescopes in Chile.

The Black Hole

Due to light having to travel, telescopes reveal the black hole as it was 690 million years after the Big Bang. It started to form when the universe was transitioning from a murky to starlit one. Its mass is 800 million times greater than our Sun, which is the “abnormality”. Robert Simcoe (co-author of the study) says, “The universe was just not old enough to make a black hole that big.”

Bañados and Daniel Stern (another co-author) said that this is a challenge for theories of the growth of supermassive black holes. It’s thought that they grow by acquiring mass from their surroundings. Enormous ones like this should take much longer than 690 million years to form. Simcoe explains that “If you start with a seed like a big star, and let it grow at the maximum possible rate, and start at the moment of the Big Bang, you could never make something with 800 million solar masses.”

The Debate

Astronomers surmise that there must have been special conditions to allow rapid growth in the early universe, but the reason remains unknown. Simcoe claims that “…there must be another way that it formed. And how exactly that happens, nobody knows.” So was there an unknown mechanism at work, and do similar events still happen out there?

Conclusions

This discovery raises many questions regarding the true nature of space and whether or not there is some kind of creator or other force at work. Simcoe states that “This is the only object we have observed from this era”, which makes the discovery rare at present and means that it will uncover information about the universe when it was 5% its current age. Also, black holes are key to understanding how galaxies form and evolve with time. So it’ll be interesting to see how this galaxy evolves in the distant future, considering the nature of its supermassive black hole.

There is a moment I remember when I was old enough to appreciate stars for what they were, and I have admired their beauty and profoundness ever since. It is fascinating to think that some of the stars we see could host planets and moons holding life. A distant neighbour could be looking at our sun right now, as a star in their night sky.

Our nearest star is Proxima Centauri, situated 4.25 lightyears away in the star system Alpha Centauri. Though it’s the closest to us, it’s still so unimaginably far away. To put this distance into perspective, NASA aims to launch the Parker Solar Probe next month that will become the fastest moving man-made object. After using repeated gravity assists from Venus, it will enter an egg-shaped orbit around the Sun and will study its outer corona. At its closest point to the Sun, it will be travelling 200 kilometres per second. At this speed, you could complete an orbit around the Earth at the equator in 3 minutes and 24 seconds. However, this is only 0.07% the speed of light and it would take 7000 years at this pace to reach Proxima Centauri.

This is where Breakthrough Starshot comes in. This is a mission that aims to travel to Alpha Centauri in just 20 years.

The Ships

To get there, tiny ships called ‘sprites’ will be used. These are 3.5 centimetre squares, each weighing 4 grams. Professor Avi Loeb, chair of the advisory committee for the mission, says they have to be this small because they need to travel at about 20 per cent the speed of light to get there this quickly. They carry radios, sensors and computers, and are powered by sunlight.

The Journey

In June 2017, the sprites were put into Earth’s orbit. They will need huge momentum to reach speed, so they have attached sails which are 4 metre squares. These will act like boat sails, but instead of wind providing thrust, a 1 kilometre square on Earth packed with lasers will. The lasers will focus on the sails one at a time, which should propel each one to the aimed speed in 10 minutes. 

The scheduled flight date is 2036, so should arrive in 2056. A thousand will be sent on the journey as at this speed, a collision with a speck of dust would destroy a sprite. The hope is that at least a few will make the journey. Despite the risks, Loeb insists that the wait will be worth it, so there is good reason to be optimistic.

Costs

The laser array will use up to 100 gigawatts for each sail it propels, equal to peak electricity consumption in France at 7 o’clock in the evening. However, the cost of the mission, estimated at $10 billion, is surprisingly low compared to other budgets. NASA’s for 2018 is $19.1 billion, and the cost of the International Space Station has been $150 billion. Going further, the US federal budget for 2018 is well over $4 trillion. Loeb stated that each sprite only costs tens of dollars to make. Taking a small sum from any of these budgets isn’t ally to ask, especially considering its significance for humanity.

Planetary Colonisation

Breakthrough Starshot is a huge leap into developing humanity as a space colonising species. There is a planet orbiting inside the habitable zone of Proxima Centauri called Proxima Centauri b. This means that liquid water could exist there, which has proven to support life. The sprites could take pictures of the planet that might reveal oceans and land. If it shows to be habitable in this way, it will become the primary focus of future human colonisation efforts in our galaxy. It also opens up the possibility of extra-terrestrial life living there. All of our science fiction fantasies of aliens could become a reality when we reach this planet.

My Thoughts

When I discovered this project, I was speechless. This is something astronomers dream about.

Researching space has engrained into me the idea that everything out there is unreachable. It’s incredible that it’s only a 20 year journey, a blink of an eye when being familiar with space and how long things take to happen.

Breakthrough Starshot signifies the time we’re living in and how far we’ve come in terms of scientific technology in such a short amount of time. For all of you who are old enough to witness the launch of this incredible journey and who will be able to see its climax, you should feel very honoured just like me. This mission may answer the question of whether we could live on another planet or if aliens exist relatively close by. It could open up a new solar system for us to explore. It is an attempt to find another world that one day, our descendants could inhabit. If it pulls through, humanity will look back to missions like this one as the events that allowed them to experience a new world, a place to call home.

References:

www.guardian.com

www.space.com

What do they look like?

Scientists can’t actually see black holes like other space objects like stars and planets. They are invisible, but interact with and influence the space around them, which can be detected. When looking at a black hole, you are essentially looking at the event horizon. Anything crossing this needs to travel faster than the speed of light to escape, so you see a black sphere reflecting nothing. However, sometimes material will ricochet off the event horizon instead of being drawn into the black hole. Radiation can’t escape gravitational pull once it crosses the event horizon, so it’s difficult to spot one in isolation. However, stellar black holes are most easily located in X-ray binary systems, where gas from a companion star is being pulled into them. X-rays are made by this gas which is heated up as it spirals towards the black hole via an orbiting structure. Astronomers can also measure a black hole’s mass, (a stellar black hole typically having between 2 and 20 solar masses), by observing its gravitational effect on the companion star.

What would happen if you fell into one?

The simple answer to this is that you would die. A black hole is a singularity surrounded by a barrier (the event horizon). Enthrallingly, we don’t know what the singularity is. It is important to note that black holes don’t suck things up. If we swapped our sun for one, for example, the only consequence would be us freezing to death.

If someone were to go near one and you were watching them from a distance, they would seem to slow down as they approached the event horizon. At some point they would appear to freeze in time, slowly turn red and disappear. If you were the one falling into it, you would see the universe in fast forward, kind of like seeing into the future. 

One theory states that you would die quickly. Black holes curve space so much that once you pass the event horizon, there is only one possible direction to go in. A black hole’s mass is so concentrated that at some point even tiny distances of a few centimetres would mean that gravity acts with millions of times more force on different parts of your body. Your cells would be torn apart as your body stretches until you become a hot stream of plasma, one atom wide. Another theory claims you would die quicker than this. Very soon after you cross the event horizon, you would hit a firewall and be killed instantly.

How soon you die depends on the mass of the black hole. For example, a smaller one would kill you before you entered its event horizon whereas you could travel inside a supermassive black hole for a while. This is because the further away from the singularity you are, the longer you live.

Hawking radiation

To end the terror of this article, I will talk about a process that eventually destroys black holes altogether. Hurrah! This process is called Hawking radiation, and isn’t accepted under classical mechanics. 

The theory starts with the fact that empty space is not actually empty but is filled with virtual particles (particles or interactions with inordinately short lifetimes) popping into existence and obliterating each other again. When this happens on the edge of a black hole, one of the virtual particles will be drawn into it and the other will escape and become a real particle. This causes the black hole to lose energy. It happens slowly to begin with, but quickens as the black hole gets smaller. When the black hole has the mass of a large asteroid, it radiates at room temperature (20ºC) and when it has the mass of a mountain it radiates at around the heat of our sun (6000ºC). In the last second of its life, it radiates away with the energy of billions of nuclear bombs in a colossal explosion. This process is sluggish and the biggest black holes we know of could take up to a googol years to evaporate. On a sad note, when the last one dies, nobody will be around to witness it. The universe will have become uninhabitable long before then. On the other hand, this gives us the time period of all of human existence and whatever type of consciousness that comes after that, to work out what black holes really are. 

References for part 1 and 2:

Katherine Blundell, Black Holes: A Very Short Introduction

www.amazingspace.org

www.astronomy.swin.edu.au

www.hubblesite.org

www.newatlas.com

www.space.com

What are they and how do they come to be?

Black holes are extremely mysterious structures scattered throughout the universe. They are described as a section of space where gravity is supremely strong that not even light (the fastest speed in the universe) can escape. Their existence was predicted before they were detected by Einstein in 1916. In 1967, the term “black hole” was coined by astronomer John Wheeler. Shortly after this, in 1971, the first one was discovered. Theoretically, there could be three kinds of black holes: stellar; supermassive, and miniature. These would have formed in different ways. 

Stellar black holes form when massive stars collapse and their life ends in a supernova explosion. Iron increases inside the star and radiation and gravity become unbalanced. The star collapses and within a fraction of a second, implodes. It begins to move at a quarter of the speed of light, and feeds more mass into the core. The star dies in a supernova explosion and either produces a neutron star or if big enough, the mass of the star collapses into a black hole.

We don’t yet know how supermassive black holes form, but they’re likely a byproduct of a galaxy formation. They are a million to a billion times bigger than our sun and have a mass equal to billions of suns. They probably exist in the centres of most galaxies, including one that does exist in the centre of the Milky Way. Due to this position, they are close to concentrated stars and gas clouds, and are able to grow on this diet, and have been doing so for billions of years. The largest one we know of is 550014+81 which is 40 billion times the mass of our sun, its diameter being 236.7 billion kilometres. This is 47 times greater than the distance from our sun to Pluto. 

Though none have been discovered, miniature black holes would have masses considerably smaller than our sun, and they could have formed shortly after the Big Bang. When the Big Bang occurred, a rapid expansion began. In the early stages of the universe, some matter might have expanded faster than other parts, compressing the slower-moving matter enough to contract into miniature black holes.

How many are there?

It’s impossible to count all the black holes in the universe. Our galaxy contains around 100 billion stars and about one out of every thousand that form is massive enough to become a black hole. Therefore, our galaxy must possess around 100 million stellar black holes. Most of these are invisible to us, and only about a dozen have been identified. The nearest one is approximately 1,600 lightyears from Earth. Somewhere out there, a new stellar black hole is born in a supernova every second. In the observable universe, there may be 100 billion galaxies, so if there could be 100 million black holes in each, try and wrap your head around how many there are in total. Lucky for us, the vastness of the universe means that none of its known black holes are close enough to Earth to be a threat.

All galaxies could possess a supermassive black hole, so there could be 100 billion of them in the observable universe. The one in the Milky Way lies 28 thousand lightyears away. The most distant one we know of lives in a quasar galaxy billions of lightyears away. I will write a separate article about this black hole because, intriguingly, its age and size do not add up. 

References for part 1 and 2:

Katherine Blundell, Black Holes: A Very Short Introduction

www.amazingspace.org

www.astronomy.swin.edu.au

www.hubblesite.org

www.newatlas.com

www.space.com

The universe we can see is called the observable universe, and is 13.7 billion light years across. The most distant light we can see from Earth is 13.7 billion light years away. Due to technological limitations, scientists haven’t yet found anything past this distance. Right now, we cannot observe faster than the speed of light. It’s possible that there is a boundary to our universe, but so far, nothing has been detected. However, if there is a boundary to our universe, what lies beyond it?

To begin, there is a theory that suggests there is just more space out there. This implies that there are other habitable planets and therefore possible life forms. There could even be advanced aliens that travel to and from the boundary of our universe. If that wasn’t enough, cosmologists go further, stating that every possible scenario of our lives could be taking place, given that the universe is indeed infinite. Simply put, particles can only be assembled in so many ways before they have to start repeating. This is supported by the idea that space-time is flat because this limits the amount of possible particle configurations. This all means that there are infinite amounts of space that are identical to ours (parallel universes), infinite ones with one particle difference, infinite ones with two particle differences, all the the way to infinite ones totally different to ours. Just think, there could be an infinite amount of versions of you that make an infinite amount of different life decisions.

Our second theory suggests that we are living inside a black hole. Theoretically, a seed (section of a mother universe) is sucked into a black hole and can’t be compressed anymore. This combined with the alleged spin inside a black hole makes the seed explode and form our universe. So, our universe could be the creation of a larger mother universe that in addition to ours, has spawned many others like us. This means that in the observable universe and beyond, there could be other universes hidden inside black holes.

The next theory states that another universe outside of ours is influencing the way ours is expanding. Astronomers used to believe that space was expanding in a consistent fashion, all at the same speed. However, dark flow (the movement of galactic clusters travelling millions of miles an hour), are being attracted to the same patch of space in this constant fashion. This area of space doesn’t seem to add up with anything inside our universe. Dark flow is caused by a large structure beyond our universe that is exerting a gravitational pull that is attracting it. This can’t be a black hole as the speed would increase the closer the clusters got to it. The clusters are travelling at a steady rate. This pull could be caused by another universe outside what we can observe, supporting the idea that another universe is out there, and could possibly support life.

Next up is the multiverse theory. It is proposed that our universe is one of many that exist next to each other. This is similar to the first theory of limitless expansive space, but this theory states that there is an end to ours and a beginning to the next. You could picture this as bubbles floating next to one another, each bubble representing a separate universe. Interestingly, if these universes are expanding at the same rate as ours, they would be getting further away. Furthermore, because our universe isn’t connected to the others, they could have very different laws of physics. The theory states that going into a black hole could lead you to one of these universes, like we said in the black hole theory. 

In relation to this multiverse idea, Max Tegmark of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology stated that the structure of mathematics may change depending on the universe. He also argues that mathematics cannot be influenced by humans. This opens up the possibility of unimaginable worlds existing if this theory is true.

Last is the idea that there is nothing beyond what we can see. We may never have the technology to see beyond the observable universe, so we could argue that there is an empty void or aliens upon aliens if we wanted to. This might seem anti-climatic, but it raises an even more fascinating question. If there is nothing beyond what we can see, then what is nothing? Would it still be something? Looking back before the Big Bang, quantum mechanics shows that there were particles coming in and out of existence before there was “something”, before there was the universe. So, is nothing really nothing? Or is it in fact something? Stephen Hawking’s response to this question was that “nothing” is beyond human understanding and that we simply can’t answer that question. 

The theories I mentioned are all possible, but the answer could be something that won’t make sense to us at all. Moreover, due to the universe expanding and at an increasing speed, if we can’t see the boundary of our universe now, we never will. So, we will never be able to see what is beyond our universe. So, just imagine what could exist out there and when you get bored of that, look at other questions about the universe that we may be able to answer one day.

References:

www.space.com

Deep Astronomy (Youtube)

Third on the list is HD 189773-b. At 63 light years away, it is slightly bigger than Jupiter and orbits its sun in 2.2 days, reaching temperatures of 930ºC. The rain on this planet is something out of a nightmare. It rains glass.. sideways. Winds can reach up to 5400mph (7 times the speed of sound). Interestingly, sound travels faster in hot temperatures and slower in cold ones, but I’ll cover that another time! This rain storm is so fast it would travel around Earth’s equator in a remarkable 5 hours and 33 minutes!

If you thought that was fast, the gas planet HD 189733-b has the fastest winds we know of in the universe. It is tidally locked with the daytime side reaching 966ºC and the night side 688ºC. The small difference between these temperatures is because the wind is so quick that it circulates heat around the planet. It travels at 22,000mph (29 times the speed of sound). The fastest wind recorded on Earth was during a tornado in Oklahoma in 1999. This was 301mph. You could fly around the Earth in 1 hour and 8 minutes if you travelled at the speed of this planet’s wind.

I saved the best til last. In my opinion, WASP-12b is just unbelievable. It is 870.8 light years away and was discovered in 2008. Its surface temperature is half the heat of our sun, or twice the temperature of lava, being over 2200ºC. It is 2 million miles from its sun and takes 1.1 Earth days to orbit it. Interestingly, this is the only known planet to orbit so close to its sun without being destroyed instantly. However, it’s shaped like an egg because the sun is tearing apart its atmosphere. Due to this, it’s estimated to only have 10 years left to exist! Now, this planet is double the size of Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system. You could fit 1300 Earths in Jupiter. Think about how much WASP-12b is losing every second if its destruction is 10 years away. Bringing this a little closer to home, it is possible that when our sun transforms into a red giant, our planets will suffer a similar fate.

If you viewed WASP-12b from space, it would look pitch black. This is because molecular hydrogen breaks into atomic hydrogen in the planet’s skies due to the atmosphere being so hot. It is this atmosphere of mostly atomic hydrogen and helium that gives it this appearance. The planet reflects 0.064% of light compared to Earth which reflects 0.37%. This is only the second exoplanet to have its reflection measured in this way. The other, HD 189733-b (the fourth planet on our list), appears to be deep blue. These two planets are classified as hot Jupiters (planets like Jupiter in size, but ones that orbit their suns very closely, causing their extreme temperatures), and these measurements show diversity among them. Though it reflects practically no light, it does emit some. It is so hot that it glows red like molten metal. Now, that is extreme global warming.

I really hope that you found this two-part article engrossing, eye-opening and inspiring. This is the effect space has on me and I want to be able to share these feelings and share the crazy facts that I love to learn. I haven’t yet decided what to write for my second article but I have some ideas about some incredible aspects of space and time. Space is a phenomenally large field to research but this is what makes it so interesting because it’s literally endless. I hope that you enjoy my future articles as much as I enjoy researching and writing them, and I hope you feel ever inspired by them.

References for Part 1 and 2:

www.forbes.com

www.nasa.gov

www.scientificamerican.com

www.solarsystemquick.com

www.space.com

www.thrillist.com

TheRichest (Youtube)

Our planet’s surface temperature averages at 14ºC. It’s the perfect climate for us because we’ve evolved to live in it and this evolution was made possible by our distance from the sun. Earth is a Goldilocks planet, slap bang in the middle of too hot and too cold. It is perfect for life. In this article, we will visit some planets that are the opposite of this. We’re going to look at some of the most unimaginable climates on other planets. Here we go.

To kick off, it’s Titan. Though not a planet but a moon of Saturn, it’s the only non-planet on our list and is worth looking at because it presents a fascinating atmosphere. It took the Cassini spacecraft about 7 years to travel to this amazing moon, starting its journey in 1997 and landing the Huygens space probe on it in 2005. This revealed a new world, the atmosphere being too thick to see through before, from space. It was discovered that Titan boasts rivers and lakes. However, its freezing temperature of -179ºC means that water is as hard as rock. Methane, the main ingredient of natural gas, is in a liquid state, making up its lakes. It does, however, exist as a gas, being found in its clouds also. Scientists have mapped about 20% of Titan’s surface, and of this amount, it has 100 times the amount of natural gas and oil than all of Earth! This is illustrated when it rains gas! An incredible fact about Titan is that because the atmosphere is so thick and its gravity weak, you could fly (given that you’d handmade yourself some wings) around the moon! Pretty cool right?

The first planet on our list, COROT-7b, is 489 light years away from us and was discovered in 2009. This distance means that it would take light 489 years to travel from the planet to us, or vice versa. To put this into perspective, I have a mind-blowing statistic for you that a friend told me about how fast the speed of light actually is. So, if we take a human who walks 7500 steps a day and they do this until they’re 80, altogether, they would have walked around 110,000 miles. The speed of light is 299,792,458 miles per second. I’ll give you a moment to take that in. So COROT-7b is the smallest exoplanet (a planet outside our solar system that orbits a star), and orbits crazy close to its sun COROT-7. Brian Jackson’s team at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre found that the planet could have been a gas giant whose atmosphere was evaporated by its closeness to its sun, it now being a rocky planet. COROT-7b has been moving closer and closer to its sun, making it a hellish place.

The maximum surface temperature of COROT-7b is 1800-2600°C. The planet is 1.6 million miles away from its star, which is 22 times closer than Mercury is to our sun or 60 times closer than we are to our sun. As a result, it only takes 20.5 hours for it to orbit the star, meaning this is a whole year on COROT-7b. Since the planet is tidally locked (never spinning and always having a side facing the sun), the dayside of the planet is much hotter than the nightside. I must explain here that close-orbiting planets tend to be tidally locked due to gravity (in the simplest explanation) like how the moon always shows one side to Earth. On its dayside, it is hot enough to vaporise rocks, which evaporate into rock clouds, then it rains magma. As the temperature is cooler higher up in the atmosphere and due to the coolness of the night side, these vaporised rocks in rock clouds can harden and they rain rocks. Another result of its closeness to its sun is its appearance as blue in colour likely from a rain of super-hot molten glass.

Part 2 will be uploaded shortly. It only gets more shocking, believe me!

References for Part 1 and 2:

www.forbes.com

www.nasa.gov

www.scientificamerican.com

www.solarsystemquick.com

www.space.com

www.thrillist.com

TheRichest (Youtube)

Can we just take a minute to think about space? There are nearly 8 billion humans on Earth and we belong to a bigger, more fantastic home called the universe. This place is scary, unforgiving and beautiful, and we are its creations. In the not-so-long amount of time that humans or even mammals have walked the Earth, we have only just realised that we are part of this huge canvas.

I have only fairly recently started to research space a heck of a lot. I’d say it was about a year ago that this began and it is an interest I hold profoundly close to my heart. 

Space will forever fascinate me and it is something I am always going to be excited about. I know that there are going to be so many discoveries that I am going to be awestruck by every day. We find so much now. We are in the prime time of discovery, like the Age of Discovery where Europeans were blown away by new continents, gifted to them by explorers. We are finding new planets, suns, galaxies, etc. That is something to look forward to again and again.