Are Black Holes Linked to the Expansion of the Universe?

Weekend Edition

This weekend’s news stories include Steven Spielberg thinks the US government is hiding information about UFOs to The Webb telescope is scrambling the story of the Universe, and more.

Turning Back the Cosmic Clock: How NASA’s Roman Space Telescope Will Rewind the Universe, reports SciTechDaily. “The Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes are optimized for studying astronomical objects in-depth and up close, so they’re like looking at the universe through pinholes,” said Aaron Yung, a postdoctoral fellow at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, who led the study.

Black Holes May Be The Source Of Mysterious Dark Energy That Makes Up Most Of The Universe–”Searching through data spanning nine billion years of cosmic history, the astronomers have uncovered the first evidence of ‘cosmological coupling’, which would mean that the growth of black holes over time is linked to the expansion of the universe itself.”

Are telescopes on the Moon doomed before they’ve even been built?--"For radio astronomers, the far side of the Moon could be the last unspoiled refuge in the Solar System. Planet Earth — and all the human-made electromagnetic noise it spews out into space — stays permanently below the horizon, so that any radio observatories positioned there would be free to observe the cosmos without interference. But an upcoming boom in lunar exploration could put that at risk", reports Nature.

Astronomers Were Not Expecting This: The Webb telescope is scrambling the story of the universe--"The James Webb Space Telescope, in full operation since last summer, has shown that galaxies formed much sooner after the Big Bang than scientists previously thought—and that some of them are unexpectedly large, absolutely brimming with stars. The findings have thrown scientists into a new reality in which their existing theories longer apply", reports Marina Koren for The Atlantic.