THE MOST PUZZLING MYSTERIES OF THE UNIVERSE

HOW OLD IS THE UNIVERSE?

At the dawn of the twenty-first century and despite all our

technological and scientific progress, the universe’s age

remains far from certain. Current estimates place the age of

the universe at 13.799±0.021 billion years.

HOW DID GALAXIES FORM?

There’s a lot of debate as to how galaxies formed but at the

end of the day, no one knows for sure. After the Big Bang,

scientists are not sure if small particles slowly teamed up and

gradually formed stars, star clusters and eventually galaxies

or if the Universe first originated as clumps of matter

that later subdivided into galaxies.

WHAT ARE THE FERMI BUBBLES?

In 2010, a team of scientists working at the Harvard Smithsonian

Centre for Astrophysics discovered a pair of “Fermi bubbles”

extending tens of thousands of light-years above and below

the Milky Way’s disk. These structures are enormous balloons

of energetic gamma rays emanating from the centre of our galaxy

but there are still a lot of things we don’t know about them.

HAVE WE REALLY DISCOVERED A

RECTANGULAR GALAXY?

It’s being called the “emerald-cut galaxy,” and it was recently

discovered by an international team of astronomers with the

Swinburne University of Technology in Australia. The gem-cut

galaxy was detected in a wide-field image taken with the

Japanese Subaru Telescope by astrophysicist 

Dr. Lee Spitler. It’s believed that the unusual shape is

the result of a collision between two galaxies.

THE UNIVERSE BEFORE THE BIG BANG

What, if anything, existed before the big bang? We have been

able to single out the genesis of our known existence to the

Big Bang but beyond that we are still clueless.

DID LIFE ORIGINATE ON EARTH?

We know that Earth was devoid of life when our solar system

was first formed. Life form(s) then appeared on our planet,

eventually evolving into the species we know today. However,

whether the first lifeforms originated on Earth or elsewhere

is a huge mystery that has been the subject of serious

scientific debate. Scientists have pointed out that its possible

for life to have arisen spontaneously when conditions on

Earth were different. On the other hand, some scientists

believe that complex organic molecules could have

originated in space and been brought to Earth

via comets or meteoroids.

WHAT IS DARK MATTER?

The truth is we really don’t know exactly what dark matter is.

However scientists have been able to pin down some of its

characteristics. For example, we know that it is dark, meaning

that it does not take the form of stars or planets that are seen.

Second, it is not in the form of dark clouds of normal matter.

Third, dark matter is not antimatter and finally,

dark matter is not a galaxy-sized black hole.

HOW BIG IS THE UNIVERSE?

Many great debates and even more hypotheses have taken

centre stage in the search for an answer to this antiquated

question, but none has managed to answer it sufficiently.

All we know is that the universe is big! Though the

observable universe is about 13.8 billion years (give or take

21 million years), the distance to the edge of the

observable universe is about 46 billion light years away.

This is because the universe is constantly expanding

and getting bigger.

HOW COMMON ARE BLACK HOLES?

The concept of black holes takes us back to the 1780’s, when

John Michell and Pierre Simon Laplace envisioned “dark stars”

whose gravity was so strong that not even light could escape.

However, we still don’t know much about them. In 2014

for example, scientists discovered a galaxy with three

super-massive black holes at its core, which could mean that

clusters of black holes might be far more common than we

originally thought.