“With the wake we have a brand new testing ground for theories of dark matter,” wrote Harvard astrophysicist Rohan Naidu in an email to The Daily Galaxy about the first all-sky map of the outermost region of our galaxy, known as the galactic halo predicted to contain a massive reservoir of dark matter, the mysterious and invisible substance thought to make up the bulk of all the mass in the universe.
Check off another amazing few days on Planet Earth, with news stories ranging from the detection of the closest black hole to Earth to what might be one of the great scientific discoveries to Stephen Hawking’ very scary warning. (more…)
Your free twice-weekly fix of stories of space and science –a random journey from Planet Earth through the Cosmos– that has the capacity to provide clues to our existence and add a much needed cosmic perspective in our Anthropocene epoch.
For what purpose did the human brain evolve is a question that has puzzled scientists for decades.In 2010 Colin Blakemore, an Oxford neurobiologist argued that a mutation in the brain of a single human being 200,000 years ago turned intellectually able primates into a super-intelligent species that would conquer the world. Homo sapiens appears to be a genetic accident.
“If the argument about the time scale for the appearance of life on Earth is correct”, Stephen Hawking observed, echoing Enrico Fermi’s infamous question–Where is Everybody– “there ought to be many other stars, whose planets have life on them. Some of these stellar systems could have formed 5 billion years before the Earth. So why is the galaxy not crawling with self-designing mechanical or biological life forms?”
An exoplanet mystery has been imaged by a team of astronomers led by Dutch scientists of a giant planet orbiting at a large distance around a sun-like star. The planet in question is YSES 2b, located 360 light years from Earth in the direction of the southern constellation of Musca (Latin for The Fly).
Astrophysicists have discovered a dozen black holes —“invisible one-way doors out of our universe” —gathered around Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), the supermassive black hole in the center of the Milky Way Galaxy, which in May, 2019 suddenly brightened, appearing like a massive, dormant volcano.
“To me, Mars is the uncanny valley of Earth,” said planetary geophysicist Kevin Lewis of Johns Hopkins University. “It’s similar but was shaped by different processes. It feels so unnatural to our terrestrial experience.”
The Galaxy Report newsletter brings you twice-weekly news of space and science that has the capacity to provide clues to the mystery of our existence and add a much needed cosmic perspective in our current Anthropocene Epoch.
