PART ONE: The First Photo of a Black Hole

 U.S. COVID-19 cases are no longer falling in the U.S., as shown below from The New York Times this morning.  Has to do with this Delta variant from India, which is more contagious and dangerous.  

However, the vaccines are working, for most of the new cases are of the unvaccinated, and the few vaccinated who have been infected now don't die.

Other news of the day:

• A new vaccine is coming, Novavax.  It has been tested to be 90% efficient.
• After a 12-year run, Benjamin Netanyahu is no longer Prime Minister.  He was replaced by Naftali Bennett (the bald guy).
• And the winner as Best in Show at the Westminster Dog Show was Wasabi, a Pekingese:

• 
  It was 40 years ago that Harrison Ford made his debut (with Karen Allen) as Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark (Rotten Tomatoes 95/96), by Steven Spielberg and George Lukas.  Won five Oscars.  There were four films, ending with Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (RT 78/53) in 2008.  Oh, a #5 is coming in 2022.

Good segue into the subject of the day, for this weekend I stumbled across a fabulous documentary on Netflix entitled Black Holes:  The Edge of All We Know.  Rotten Tomatoes reviewers gave it a 100 score.  So I just had to watch it.  I won't say much except that this movie influenced me to create a 3-part series about the mysteries of the Universe.

Sure there are equally interesting unknowns regarding religion, extrasensory perception, UFOs and the like, but the most challenging facing humanity are way out there in outer space.  Partly from Science Focus:

• 
  Why is there something rather than nothing?
• Why is there a monster black hole in the heart of the our galaxy?
• There are 2 trillion galaxies in the Universe, and as far as we know, almost every one contains a central supermassive black hole.
• They range in mass from 50 billion times the mass of our Sun to the relatively relatively small 4.3 million Sun masses at the center of our Milky Way.
• The film mentioned above sought to photograph our black hole and another, Messier 87, located 53 million light years away, estimated to be 2.4 billion solar masses.  In other words, the light from that galaxy we see started moving in our direction 53 million years ago.  I'm giving away a big secret, but the team succeeded with this photo in April of 2019, the first and only black hole ever photographed:

• 
  This is what they did to take that shot.  More than 300 scientists from 60 institutions in 20 countries began their quest a dozen years ago.  
• The telescopes were located at those sites on the globe to the right.  I had only three telescopes in PAT (Planetary Abstracting Trinterferometer, proposed to detect the first exoplanet in the mid 1970's).
• What they had to do to keep this a secret so no one else could steal their accomplishment is captured in the film.
• Our black hole has still not been photographed.

• 
  The movie, incidentally, also tracked the progress of another team of astrophysicists in the midst of Stephen Hawking, and produced a paper titled Black Hole and Soft Hair.  One of the four members was Sasha Haco (photo to the right) of Cambridge.  The other three are shown above.  Unfortunately, Hawking passed away just as they were nearing the finish.
• I should mention that in 2019 I picked this accomplishment as the most monumental scientific event of the year.

• 
  To summarize: 
• A Black Hole forms when a very massive star collapses in upon itself in a supernova.
• The M87 Black Hole has a diameter 240,000 light years across, about a quarter the diameter of our Milky Way Galaxy.
• Our Sun is too small to make a Black Hole.  

• 
  If it were possible for a star the size of Planet Earth to make a black hole--and, of course, it won't be able to do this--the mass would fit into a ping pong ball.

• 
  What is dark matter?  This will be my focus tomorrow, for science might well be very close to finally detecting this mystery.  What is dark energy remains out of reach.
• There are other challenges:
• Does time exist?  
• Yes, they are serious about this.  
• Time, in fact, is relative, and it depends on how fast you are going.  
• We live in a 3-dimensional universe with time as an equal dimension in the space-time map.
• Why has nature triplicated its basic building blocks?
• Initially it was only quarks and leptons.
• Now there are second and third generations, and they are somehow related to the Higgs boson, which was discovered by CERN in 2012.

One final mystery is:  Why have we seen no sign of aliens? Considering the age of the Universe, which is 13.8 billion years, any calculation of how long it would take for some form of advanced intelligence (robots) to get to us, or living creatures through a wormhole, says that the Milky Way Galaxy should long ago have been inundated by extraterrestrial creatures.  Also too, we see no sign of unusual activity out there.  The scary conclusion is that past civilizations elsewhere failed over time, or we are the only site in the entire Universe that developed intelligent life.  The fate of the time depends on us.

Part three on Wednesday will suggest how humanity can best flourish.  Of course, set aside a generous sum for  science, but what priority should be given to technology/engineering to optimize societal needs, for there could be more pressing requirements to combat global warming, while developing World Peace in a timely manner.   After all, what is the useful value of finding dark matter?

-