Friday, November 21, 2014

Some Things Travel Faster Than Light

The lonely photon is now king of the universe ...
The lonely photon is now king of the universe as the last of the supermassive black holes evaporate. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Locating Black Holes in Distant Galaxies
Locating Black Holes in Distant Galaxies (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Black hole quasar NASA
Black hole quasar NASA (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The supermassive black holes are all that rema...
The supermassive black holes are all that remains of galaxies once all protons decay, but even these giants are not immortal. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)


Spooky alignment of quasars across billions of light-years
the rotation axes of the central supermassive black holes in a sample of quasars are parallel to each other. .... alignments of the largest structures ever discovered in the universe. ... the rotation axes of these quasars tend to be aligned with the vast structures in the cosmic web in which they reside. ..... Quasars are very active supermassive black holes at the nuclei of galaxies. These black holes are surrounded by spinning disks of extremely hot material that is often spewed out in long jets along their axes of rotation. Quasars can shine more brightly than all the stars in the rest of their host galaxies put together. ...... 93 quasars that were known to form huge groupings spread over billions of light-years, seen at a time when the universe was about one-third of its current age. ..... a cosmic web of filaments and clumps around huge voids where galaxies are scarce. This intriguing and beautiful arrangement of material is known as large-scale structure. ...... if the quasars are in a long filament, then the spins of the central black holes will point along the filament. ..... a hint that there is a missing ingredient in our current models of the cosmos