“Venus is like the control case for Earth,” said planetary scientist Sue Smrekar with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory echoing recent research that suggests that Venus might have looked like Earth for three billion years, with vast oceans that could have been friendly to life. “We believe they started out with the same composition, the same water and carbon dioxide. And they’ve gone down two completely different paths. So why? What are the key forces responsible for the differences?”
On December 5th, astronomers announced the discovery of the biggest black hole ever measured –a gargantuan black hole in galaxy cluster Abell 85 is roughly the size of our solar system, that packs the mass of 40 billion suns. On April 10, 2019, astronomers at the Event Horizon Telescope released the first, now iconic image of a supermassive black hole at the heart of monster elliptical galaxy M87 (above) even bigger than our Solar System that has been described as “paradoxical, intriguing, frightening.”
The “Planet Earth Report” connects you to headline news on the science, technology, discoveries, people and events changing our planet and the future of the human species.
NASA’s Cassini mission to Saturn observed surface fissures on Enceladus unique in our Solar System perpetually erupting with water ice from its global subsurface ocean that appear as parallel, evenly spaced “stripes” that are some 130 kilometers long and 35 kilometers apart.
Intrepid researchers at MIT and Caltech have done what was thought impossible: an end run around nature. They have finessed spooky quantum vacuum –the ground state of energy for the Universe and the source of all potentiality– without violating the laws of nature that will allow the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) to detect ghostly signals, the whispers of gravitational waves, ripples in spacetime at the quantum level, with weekly frequency.
Could there be as yet unknown supermassive objects lurking at the hearts of galaxies other than black holes? An object so strange that it has managed to avoid gravitational collapse to form a singularity, the smallest object in the universe in an infinitely Planck-scale space? Where density and gravity become infinite and space-time curves infinitely, and where the laws of physics as we know them cease to operate?
“Among Bennu’s many surprises, the particle ejections sparked our curiosity, and we’ve spent the last several months investigating this mystery,” said Dante Lauretta, OSIRIS-REx principal investigator at the University of Arizona about the objects active discharging of particles into space. “This is a great opportunity to expand our knowledge of how asteroids behave.”