What remains unexplained is the object’s giant size, says astronomer Sergey Koposov at Carnegie Mellon University. “Normally, as galaxies lose mass to the Milky Way’s tides, they shrink, not grow.”
During the rise of mammals, following the Chicxulub impact (above) that ended the dinosaur epoch with the force of 300 million nuclear bombs, the planet’s temperatures spiked in a spooky way that the planet may experience again and soon. The planet’s leading climate scientists, including the late Stephen Hawking, are predicting that Earth will soon reach a tipping point and that the human species we’ll need an escape plan, an insurance policy, a Planet B.
“Understanding the causes of the differences between the Trojans will provide unique and critical knowledge of planetary origins, the source of volatiles and organics on the terrestrial planets, and the evolution of the planetary system as a whole,” said Dr. Catherine Olkin, Lucy mission’s deputy principal investigator.
You would have though it was 1938 again following Orson Welles’ radio broadcast of the War of the Worlds the way the way Twitter lit up last week when the chairman of Harvard’s astronomy department, Israel-born theoretical physicist Avi Loeb, suggested that an alien spaceship was possibly on its way to Earth to study humankind, and probably had Stephen Hawking spinning in his grave.
Think of beautiful blue planets with endless oceans orbiting many of the Milky Way’s one trillion stars. Could they support life? Perhaps even intelligent life? “There may be life there,” says Lisa Kaltenegger of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. “But could it be technology-based like ours? Life on these worlds would be under water with no easy access to metals, to electricity, or fire for metallurgy. Maybe life’s inventiveness to get to a technology stage will surprise us.”
“Marine mammals, such as manatees or bottlenose dolphins, are sentinel species—the canary in the coal mine,” says Nathan Clark, associate professor in Pitt’s Department of Computational and Systems Biology, and the Pittsburgh Center for Evolutionary Biology and Medicine. “If you follow their health, it will tell you a lot about potential environmental issues that could eventually affect humans.”
