Stephen Hawking: Did the Universe Have a Beginning?
Today’s stories include Mystery of the human genome's dark matter, Marcelo Gleiser on The Origins of Life, and more…
A.I. Reveals That the Iconic, Giant M87 Galaxy Black Hole Just Got Bigger and Darker, reports Dennis Overbye for The New York Times.--Astronomers recently used artificial intelligence to fine-tune the first-ever image of a black hole, captured in 2019 by the Event Horizon Telescope. "Every April, when M87 and the center of our galaxy (home to a smaller black hole) are in view, the Earth-size eye renews its gaze into the darkness."
ESA: The ‘Jupiter’ Odyssey of Exploration
The mystery of the human genome's dark matter, reports David Cox for BBC Future. "Twenty years ago, an enormous scientific effort revealed that the human genome contains 20,000 protein-coding genes, but they account for just 2% of our DNA. The rest of was written off as junk – but we are now realizing it has a crucial role to play."
Primordial Black Holes May Have “Frozen” the Early Universe--Primordial holes formed in the exotic conditions of the big bang may have become their own source of matter and radiation, reports Paul Sutter for Universe Today.
How Stephen Hawking flip-flopped on whether the Universe has a beginning--The question of what the Big Bang really represented still bamboozles cosmologists — and Hawking provided more than one answer, reports Nature.
Why some cosmologists found the Big Bang offensive--For many years, some cosmologists embraced the idea of an eternal, steady state universe. But science triumphed over philosophical prejudice, reports Marcelo Gleiser for Big Think.