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Dark Matter Signal, Euclid's Ancient Quasars & Asteroid Double Mission
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LIGO may have detected a subsolar-mass primordial black hole — the strongest dark matter signal yet — while ESA's Euclid telescope confirms 21 ancient quasars from the universe's first 670 million years. Plus two asteroid missions active simultaneously and complex carbon on Mars.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
A gravitational wave detector may have just picked up the strongest evidence yet that dark matter is made of ancient black holes formed in the first second after the Big Bang. That's the claim at the center of a peer-reviewed study just published in the Astrophysical Journal, and it's the kind of signal worth paying close attention to.
The timing matters for another reason. LIGO's sensitivity is about to improve significantly.
The early universe is also under scrutiny from a completely different direction. The ESA Euclid telescope has identified thirty-one ancient quasars, including two at redshifts of seven point seven seven and seven point six nine.
Two asteroid missions are running concurrently right now. Japan's Hayabusa2 flew within eight hundred meters of the four-hundred-and-fifty-meter asteroid Torifune on July seventh, completing a successful extended-mission flyby.
Two more findings are worth flagging. NASA's Perseverance rover has detected complex macromolecular carbon in two mudstone rocks in Jezero Crater.
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