Dark Matter Essay

The Discovery and Observation of the Cosmic Microwave Background: Implications for Cosmology On a spring day in late May in 1964, the future of our understanding of the universe was greatly influenced, arguable on accident. Two radio astronomers discovered something unusual, not with their eyes, but with their ears.  Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson essentially heard the buzz that the universe was echoing into their headphones, but they could not wrap their head around what it was. The two scientists

Big Bang is "that the the universe is not static but is expanding and that the expansion began in an incredibly hot, dense Big Bang approximately 13.72 billion years ago" (Krause, 2012, p. 25). This hot, dense bit of matter was only a few millimeters across and contained all of the matter and energy that makes up our universe and as it expanded, it cooled and over the billions of years of existence the universe settled into its current state. In 1916 Einstein proposed his new General Theory of Relativity

How did everything that we know today get started? The beginning of everything, the big bang, the idea that the universe was suddenly born and is not infinite. Up to the middle of the 20th century most scientist thought the universe as infinite and ageless, until Einstein’s theory of relativity gave us a better understanding of gravity and Edwin Hubble discovered that galaxies are moving apart from one another in a way that fits previous predictions. In 1964 by accident cosmic background radiation

Understanding Black Holes A Black hole is a theorized celestial body whose surface gravity is so strong that nothing, including light, can escape from within it's surface. Gravity is the key to a black hole's immense power. The black hole's strong gravity keeps captured material from escaping. For example, if Earth were the same mass it is now but had only one-fourth its present radius, the escape velocity of someone standing on its surface would be twice what

Our lives are limited, the majority of them ending just before becoming a century old. Our collective age as a species is also miniscule, lasting only the hour before New Year’s if the existence of our universe was shrunk into a calendar year. This puts not only time, but our limitations into perspective. Such vast numbers cannot be comprehended by our minds, hence the popular calendar metaphor. Studying astronomy makes aware to us our limitations and thus reveals an awe-inspiring new realm that

Despite its invisible interior, the presence of a black hole can be inferred through its intersection with other matter and with electronic radiation such as visible light. Matter that falls into a black hole can form an external accretion disk heated by friction, forming some of the brightest objects in the universe. If there are other stars orbiting a black hole, their orbits can be used to determine

astronomers first discovered them. The astronaut said “he saw a blob of black matter and black holes are made when a star burns out or explodes but the astronaut never truly saw the actual thing. Black holes absorb light particles that are close enough to it so that it can thrive and continue. When a black hole goes away the light that it absorbed is turned into a new star. When an astronomer found a black sphere shaped cloud of matter in space he didn't really see it but he saw it pulling in large amounts

The sixty-symbols website has quite the collection of intriguing astronomical theories and interviews, but I specifically chose that of the black hole that contains interviews by Omar Almaini, Ed Copeland, Tony Padilla, Meghan Gray and Mike Merrifield from the University of Nottingham. The video began by a man revealing to his audience that he is often questioned about his personal opinion on black holes, which he informs us that “of course” he sees them as frightening and intimidating but goes on

quickly scanned through the humongous area with a total of 3 floors and pinned where I would go, so I prepared my pen and paper to walk into the “Destination, Universe”. The first fact that I perceived straight away was that the room was dark, the room was so dark that it seemed like the gravity is so strong that light can’t escape, similar to the black hole. As I skimmed through the room, I

electromagnetic radiation sent out from AGNs is conjectured to come from matter that the SMBHs accrete which then takes the form of an accretion disk circling the black hole. These accretion disks are best approximated with an irregular density and temperature distribution made up by very hot gas and plasma~\citep{skadowski2015global}. The common conceptual intuition of black holes includes the fact that they attract matter with great force in such a manner that it engulfs everything in its proximity