The Universe is astounding. Put it this way: all of its ordinary matter, all the particles that make us and everything we can see only make up 4% of its matter. We only discovered the Universe’s major mass component, the thing that makes up 70% of it, in 1998. We call it dark energy – although nobody has the slightest idea what exactly it is.
The Universe”, to paraphrase the British biologist JBS Haldane, “is not stranger than we imagine. It is stranger than we can imagine.” In celebration of this joyful fact, here are 9 of the most astounding space discoveries of recent times.
Active galaxies often pump out 100 times more light than a normal galaxy. With the discovery in 1963 of quasars, it was clear that the light comes not from stars but from a central region smaller than the Solar System.
The only conceivable energy source is matter heated to incandescence as its swirls down onto a giant black hole up to 50 billion times the mass of the Sun.
In the 1990s, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope found that, although active galaxies account for only about 1% of galaxies, supermassive black holes are no anomaly.
