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FIVE CONCENTRIC RINGS AROUND THE BLACK HOLE V404CYG

Image Credit: G. Vasilopoulos & M. Petropoulou. RGB image of the X-ray dust scattered rings observed by Swift/XRT. The Swift/XRT field-of-view is enclosed by the green circle, while a white circle of radius 9′ is overplotted for guiding the eye. The black hole is located at the center of the rings. First detection of X-ray dust scattered rings from the Galactic low mass X-ray binary V404 Cyg. The observation of the system with Swift/XRT on June 30 2015 revealed the presence of five concentric ring-like structures centred at the position of V404 Cyg.

UNIVERSE IS FINITE OR INFINITE?

Art by Moonrunner Design   At present there is no answer to this question. However I will try to list the hypothesys currently on the table with related issues.

A UNIVERSE WITHOUT A CENTER?

Image Credit: Eugenio Bianchi, Carlo Rovelli & Rocky Kolb. According to the standard theories of cosmology, there is no center of the universe. In a conventional explosion, material expand out from a central point and the instinct suggests that with the Big Bang happened something similar. But the Big Bang was not an explosion like that at all: it was an explosion of space, not an explosion in space . The Big Bang happened everywhere in the Universe.

QUASARS AND THE COSMIC REIONIZATION

Credit: NASA/ESA Recently it has been suggested that quasars can be primarily responsible for the reionization of the universe.

CONTAMINATION BY SUPERNOVAE IN GLOBULAR CLUSTERS

Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/Alexandra Angelich (NRAO/AUI/NSF) Only a small amount of the supernovae products remains trapped within globular clusters and this "catch" only occurs in the most massive cases (mass cluster ≥ 10^6 solar masses).

A SIGNIFICATIVE FRACTION OF BARYONS RESIDE IN THE FILAMENTS OF THE COSMIC WEB

(Credit: NASA, ESA, and E. Hallman (University of Colorado, Boulder) Observations of the cosmic microwave background indicate that baryons (protons, neutrons, etc., - the ordinary matter just to understand) occupies only 5% of the total energy content of the Universe (95% is dark matter and dark energy). However in the local universe approximately half of this "ordinary" matter it has never been observed.

GIANT PLANETS IN PROTOPLANETARY DISKS WITH SPIRAL ARMS?

There are many theories about the formation of the planets but the direct observational evidences are quite a few. Recently, the ground-based telescopes photographed two large spiral arms around two young stars. The mechanisms that have generated these structures are not very clear.