Can you imagine our Sun as it floats out in space? It's mass is equal to 332,946 Earths. Now imagine the Sun multiplied 18 billion times. That is the mass of the black hole that scientists have recently discovered. The biggest black hole yet. Details in the full article.

Researchers say a quasar nine billion light years from earth could offer an alternative to black hole theory. A quasar is a very bright, compact object whose radiation is believed to be generated by a black hole nibbling at its surrounding matter. But the new theory says black holes do not exist but are really bizarre and compact balls of plasma called magnetospheric eternally collapsing object (MECO).

Rudolph Schild of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts and his team observed quasar Q0957+561 during a rare cosmological coincidence that allowed them to probe the structure of the quasar in great detail. Those details suggest the central object is not a black hole at all.

A black hole is an object with such a powerful gravitational field even light is not fast enough to escape it. Anything within the black hole's event horizon (a certain distance from its center) will be trapped. Black holes are also incapable of sustaining a magnetic field of their own. But the team's observations of the quasar indicate its "black hole" does have a magnetic field and they say it could be a MECO, not a black hole.

According to the MECO theory, objects in the universe cannot collapse to form black holes. When an object gets very dense and hot, subatomic particles start popping in and out of existence inside it in huge numbers, producing large amounts of radiation. Outward pressure from this radiation stops the collapse and the object remains a hot ball of plasma rather than forming a black hole.

This just goes to show how much we do not know about our universe and how things really behave and move about over the years even with the advancement of the human mind and technology. Prepare for a long read because recently, scientists have been busy debunking and questioning nature's fundamental laws and they have found discreprancies that will show that the value of certain fundamental parameters, such as the speed of light or the invisible glue that holds nuclei together, may have been different in the past. So constants, seems to not be real constants.

The said differences are small, a few ppms, but even the smallest of changes would mean that the laws of physics would have to be revised--if not completely rewritten. Plus aside from the three spatial dimensions that we have grown accustomed to (length, width, and height), it seems that we might need to make room for six more spatial dimensions.

The evidence for varying constants that scientists rely on comes primarily from quasar studies. A quasar is an astronomical source of electromagnetic energy, including light, that dwarfs the energy output of the brightest stars. This one is bright and usually powered by black holes. It may readily release energy in levels equal to the output of hundreds of average galaxies combined.

Astronomer Michael Murphy heads the team that has been studying the spectra of this ancient light to determine if the early universe was different than now. Specifically, they look at absorption lines, which are due to gas clouds between us and the quasars. These lines are like fingerprints and DNA, it reveals what's in the clouds. All seems well until in 1999, the team found out that these fingerprints and DNA change in time.

How? By using the Keck Observatory in Hawaii, they detected a frequency difference between billion-year-old quasar lines and the corresponding lines measured on Earth. Also they  recently performed careful lab experiments to confirm that there is indeed a shift in the quasar spectra, since some of those Earth-bound lines are not well characterized.

So, what does this mean? Because of the difference between quasars of today and those of billion years ago, this was interpreted as indicating that light was faster in the past, or that the electron had a weaker charge. Thus grilling the Fundamental Law of the Speed of Light and that electrons had a weaker charge.

Another finding from the team of Patrick Petitjean in the Astrophysical Institute of Paris revealed that a change in the proton to electron mass ratio from molecular absorption lines in quasar spectra. Which coincides with the observed electrron charge change in the Murphy study.

And talk about rewriting the Laws of Physics. If this is proven to be accurate and true, this would be a deviance in Albert Einstein's Theories-- the Equivalence Theory which basically says that  any experiment testing nuclear or electromagnetic forces should give the same result no matter where or when it is performed; and the Gravitational Theory or general relativity.

Quasar (Quasistellar Radio Source) is an astronomical source of magnetic energy, including light that dwarfs the energy output of the brightest stars. The most famous quasar is 3C273. It is located in the constellation Virgo and is optically the most luminous quasar in our sky and also with the closest redshift. Up until now the consensus was that quasars were powered by supermassive blackholes.

Now new theories dare to challenge this long known belief like the Synchroton Radiation theory. It is is electromagnetic radiation, similar to cyclotron radiation, but generated by the acceleration of ultrarelativistic electrons through magnetic fields. Pictures using infrared that were taken by a team of astronomers led by researchers at Yale shows a map of the 3C273 jet in infrared, visible light and X-rays.

“The Yale team used the Spitzer Space Telescope to observe 3C273 because it is located in space and is more sensitive to faint infrared jet emission than any previous telescope,” said Yasunobu Uchiyama, a team leader and former postdoctoral fellow at the Yale Center for Astronomy.

The Synchroton Radiation theory was also supported by Sebastian Jester, now at the University of Southampton, led a complementary study that used the Chandra X-ray Observatory. The lifetime of the X-ray producing particles is only about 100 years and the brightest part of the jet indicates that is about 100,000 light years. Since there would be insufficient time for the particles to shoot out from the black hole at close to the speed of light and then release their energy as radiation as far out as they are seen, the particles have to be accelerated locally, where they produce their emission.

These new insights favoring the synchrotron model only deepens the mystery of how jets produce the ultra-energetic particles that radiate at X-ray wavelengths.

“Our results call for a radical rethink of the physics of relativistic jets that black holes drive,” said Uchiyama. “But, we now have a crucial new clue to solving one of the major mysteries in high-energy astrophysics.”