“The cold would have been a shock from which most creatures would never have recovered, disappearing entirely from the fossil record: literally, a mass extinction.”
Starting up in 2024, the enhanced Advanced LIGO Plus detector of gravitational waves will embed the Heisenberg uncertainty principle to improve the machine’s ability to detect ripples in spacetime. One of the foundations of quantum theory, the Heisenberg principle states that it’s impossible to precisely measure certain properties, such as the position and momentum of an object, at the same time.
In the nearby Whirlpool galaxy and its companion galaxy, M51b, two supermassive black holes heat up and devour surrounding material. These two monsters should be the most luminous X-ray sources in sight, but a new study using observations from NASA’s NuSTAR (Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array) mission shows that a much smaller object is competing with the two behemoths.
“With a lethal combination of bone-crunching bite forces, stereoscopic vision, rapid growth rates, and colossal size, tyrant dinosaurs reigned uncontested for 15 million years leading up to the end-Cretaceous extinction—but it wasn’t always that way,” says Lindsay Zanno, paleontologist at North Carolina State University, head of paleontology at the North Carolina Museum of Sciences. “Early in their evolution, tyrannosaurs hunted in the shadows of archaic lineages such as allosaurs that were already established at the top of the food chain.”
“We think of water as this special, magical compound,” said William M. Farrell, a plasma physicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, who helped develop the simulation. “But here’s what’s amazing: every rock has the potential to make water, especially after being irradiated by the solar wind.”
By the end of this century, says astrophysicist Martin Rees, we should be able to ask whether or not we live in a multiverse, and how much variety of the laws of physics its constituent ‘universes’ display. The answer to this question, says Rees, “will determine how we should interpret the ‘biofriendly’ universe in which we live (sharing it with any aliens with whom we might one day make contact).”
“The moon flies through Earth’s atmosphere,” says Igor Baliukin of Russia’s Space Research Institute, lead author of a paper presenting the discovery. “We were not aware of it until we dusted off observations made over two decades ago by the SOHO spacecraft.”
Humanity may not have to wait much longer to get our first evidence of E.T., NASA chief Jim Bridenstine said recently at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory headquarters. Bridenstine isn’t the only NASA leader to express optimism about the alien-life hunt. In 2015, Ellen Stofan, NASA’s chief scientist from 2013 to 2016, who predicted that NASA would find “proof of alien life in 20 years.”