Today, no politics, no wars, no Trump.  All space science, for astronomers found what may be the Universe's brightest object in the sky,  J0529-4351 , and it's humongous. Out there 12 billion light-years away is a quasar with a black hole at its heart, growing so fast that it swallows the equivalent of a Sun a day. A light-year is 5.8 trillion miles. From your early science courses you must remember that the Sun is 92 million miles from us. A light year ( which is a unit of length ) is equivalent to doing 31,500 round trips to the sun. Thus, you would need to do that 12 billion times to get to J0529-4351. This quasar shines 500 trillion times brighter than our Sun.   That black hole powering that quasar is more than 17 billion times more immense than our Sun.  But there are bigger ones, for at the center of the galaxy cluster Abell 1201 is a black hole equivalent to 30 billion Suns. This is the most violent place in our Universe. Age?  Began to form not long after the Big Bang.

Roger Penrose has been my scientific hero for a very long time.  He might not be the smartest, for 47-year old Terence Tao, the   Mozart of Maths,   at 230, has a higher IQ.  Setting aside intelligence quotients,   one list  early this year has Stephen Hawking ( IQ only 160-170 ), who passed away five years ago, as the smartest ever.  In this ranking, Tao only comes in at #27, with Benjamin Netanyahu   (the leader of Israel, 180 ) #12, James Woods ( 180, the actor ) #18 and Marilyn Vos Savant (w ho Guinness had in 1986 as possessing the highest IQ in the world at 186 ) #20.  No sign of Penrose. Who is Roger Penrose ?  From  Wikipedia : Was born in England and is now 91 years old. Is an emeritus professor of math at Oxford. Won a Nobel Prize in 2020 for "discovering" the concept of the Black Hole. In his twenties communicated with MC Escher to create the  Penrose Triangle .  Simple, yet impossible. His 1974  Penrose tiling  is difficult to explain, but was observed a decade la

I recently saw an article indicating that astroscientists finally photographed a black hole.  However, I send you to my posting of a year ago with a title:    The First Photo of a Black Hole . 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 sec

Yesterday I announced my intent to spend future Tuesdays featuring the best of my 14 years of posting this blog.  As Wednesday is my sci-tech day, I will provide a similar alert indicating what science topics I will focus on over next few days and weeks: What is a star?  Part 2 will feature dwarf stars, which are relatively small, and rest somewhere between stars and large planets, from a fascinating  Scientific American  article. Chemistry's quantum future.  Many products developed by industry were pure accidents, like teflon.  Chemistry is nearing a phase of being able to bypass this thing called serendipity. A possible solution to global warming:  the answer might be within our mantle, as seen in a remote desert of Oman. Virus scoreboard:  what can we expect in the future. A new understanding of Alzheimer's:  is microglia the real target? While only 1% of us stutter, as I once did, we getting closer to better understanding and curing this problem. Are hypersonic weapons over