The famed astrophysicist, Lord Martin Rees, suggests that gas giant Jupiter’s dense, terrifying atmosphere –with its constant storms with thunderheads reaching 40 miles from base to top — five times taller than those on Earth, and powerful lightning flashes up to three times more powerful than Earth’s largest “superbolts”– may be inhabited in the upper regions above by floating balloon-like creatures.
“Planet Earth Report” provides descriptive links to headline news by leading science journalists about the extraordinary discoveries, technology, people, and events changing our knowledge of Planet Earth and the future of the human species.
“This planet is roughly the size of Jupiter, but it also has a very short orbital period — a year on this planet is only 1.4 days, so it’s quickly whipping around its white dwarf star,” said Ian Crossfield, assistant professor of physics and astronomy at University of Kansas about the first-ever discovery of a planet, WD 1856 b, orbiting a white dwarf vestige of a star, like our Sun, that has ballooned into a red giant then collapsed back into a dense, dim core that’s often about the size of Earth.
“Our Sun has relatively high phosphorus and Earth biology requires a small, but noticeable, amount of the element. So, on rocky planets that form around host stars with less phosphorus, it’s likely that it will be unavailable for potential life on that planet’s surface,” said planetary astrophysicist, Natalie Hinkel, a Southwest Research Institute scientist who has identified stellar phosphorus — essential on Earth for the creation of DNA, cell membranes, bones and teeth in people and animals, and even the microbiome of ocean-dwelling plankton–as a probable marker in narrowing the search for life in the cosmos.
Cosmic “telescopes” –dark matter lenses– which warp light like funhouse mirrors in the form of the gravitational fields of dark matter clumps, may create “efficient lenses” that can magnify light from distant reaches of the universe revealing previously unknown objects and phenomena. Although dark matter is invisible because it does not emit light, that does not mean that it doesn’t interact with light at all and can be observed by space telescope such as the NASA/ESA Hubble observatory.
Sunlight is the most precious gold on Earth, biologists say. But for astronomers, the search for the source of the amount of gold existing in in the cosmos continues despite recent hypotheses that most of the precious metal was created by neutron star collisions. On 17 August 2017, the first-ever observations of the gravitational wave signal lasting for about 100 seconds by the LIGO and Virgo detector of two colliding neutron stars stunned the world’s astronomy community.
Was Venus, described by Stephen Hawking as Earth’s “kissing cousin,” the solar system’s first habitable planet? Scientists have recently conjectured that Venus may have been radically different from the hellish Venus we see today, resembling Earth for its first three billion years, with vast oceans that could have been friendly to life. Fast forward to the 21st century –strange dark patches, enigmas, “unknown absorbers” have been detected floating inside the clouds of Venus capturing large amounts of solar radiation that may prove to be extraterrestrial microorganisms.
