This paper demonstrates that a stochastic, rather than uniform, injection rate of MeV cosmic rays from supernovae can successfully model the observed ionization rate distribution for Galactic molecular clouds.

Seeing a supernova, or an exploding star, is a unique spectacle in itself. But recently, astronomers have found something even more unique: A star explosion so “extremely warped” that it looked like it was multiple images in the sky.

So how did this happen?

It’s not magic, according to the California Institute of Technology, but an effect known as “gravitational lensing,” which happens when gravity from a dense object in space “distorts and brightens the light of an object behind it.” In the case of supernova SN Zwicky, it was the gravity of another galaxy that impacted its appearance.

The smaller black hole, with a mass of about 150 million suns, orbits its larger companion, with a mass of 18 billion suns, at near the speed of light.

It’s this rapid dance that sparked the bright flare from this system, according to a new study published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society in March.

The recorded burst, which astronomers observed in February 2022, occurred when the smaller black hole crashed into a disk of gas surrounding the larger black hole, the study’s scientists said.

Cave divers equipped with brilliant headlamps often explore cavities in rock less than a mile beneath our feet. It’s easy to be wholly unaware of these cave systems – even if you sit in a meadow above them – because the rock between you and the spelunkers prevents light from their headlamps from disturbing the idyllic afternoon.

Apply this vision to the conditions in the early universe, but switch from a focus on rock to gas. Only a few hundred million years after the big bang, the cosmos was brimming with opaque hydrogen gas that trapped light at some wavelengths from stars and galaxies. Over the first billion years, the gas became fully transparent – allowing the light to travel freely. Researchers have long sought definitive evidence to explain this flip.

New data from the James Webb Space Telescope recently pinpointed the answer using a set of galaxies that existed when the universe was only 900 million years old. Stars in these galaxies emitted enough light to ionize and heat the gas around them, forming huge, transparent “bubbles.” Eventually, those bubbles met and merged, leading to today’s clear and expansive views.

A new theory has radically revised Stephen Hawking’s 1974 theory of black holes to predict that all objects with mass may eventually disappear.