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When Three's A Crowd

 A billion light-years from Earth, a rare and exotic " dance of death " is being performed by a trio of supermassive black holes, doomed to merge along with their host galaxies that are on a collision course. Supermassive black holes, that weigh-in at an incredible millions to billions of times solar-mass, are thought to lurk hungrily in the hearts of perhaps every large galaxy in the observable Universe--including our own barred-spiral Milky Way. When galaxies collide, their supermassive hearts of darkness meet-up as well, and become a single, solitary gravitational beast that weighs-in at the combined masses of the merging black holes that created them. In September 2019, a team of astronomers announced that they have discovered a rare system composed of three galaxies colliding--and taking their resident dark hearts along with them for the ride. Several observatories, including NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, as well as other NASA space telescopes, discovered this ex

Hiding In The Universe's Shadowland

 Most of the mysterious Universe is hiding in the shadows. The so-called "ordinary" atomic matter, that makes up the world we are most familiar with, is the runt of the cosmic litter of three. An unidentified exotic form of material, that scientists call dark matter, is thought to account for 25% of the Cosmos. But what is this strange form of non-atomic matter, thought to be the substance responsible for giving rise to the first galaxies to dance in the ancient Universe? Several theories have been proposed over the years, but the identity of this shadowy exotic material has not been determined. In October 2019, a team of astronomers offered a new explanation--that the dark matter is really "fuzzy". Soon after the Big Bang birth of the Universe, about 13.8 billion years ago, particles of the dark matter would have merged together to create clumps within gravitational "halos". The clumps pulled in surrounding clouds of gas into their cores, which gradually

The Strange Case Of The Planet That Shouldn't Be There

 Historically, the quest to find the holy grail of planets in orbit around stars beyond our Sun, proved to be a difficult endeavor. The discovery of the first exoplanet, circling a Sun-like star, happened a generation ago, and it certainly stands as one of humanity's greatest accomplishments . Discovering a giant exoplanet can be likened to observing light bouncing off the wings of a flying moth fluttering near the 1,000-watt light-bulb of a glowing street lamp--when the observer is 10 miles away. One half of the Nobel Prize in Physics 2019 was awarded jointly to Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz "for the discovery of an exoplanet orbiting a solar-type star." Some of the exoplanets discovered since then resemble the planets inhabiting our own Solar System, while others have been proven to be genuine oddballs--so different from our Sun's family of planets that they defied the wildest dreams of planet-hunting astronomers before their discovery. In September 2019, Spanish a