Jackie Faherty, astrophysicist, Senior Scientist with AMNH via Carnegie Institution for Science. Jackie was formerly a NASA Hubble Fellow at the Carnegie Institution for Science
A team of astronomers spotted an extreme outburst, or flare, from the Sun’s nearest neighbor–the star Proxima Centauri, a “red dwarf” with about one-eighth the mass of our Sun., Proxima Centauri sits just four light-years, or almost 25 trillion miles, from the center of our Solar System and hosts at least two planets, one of which may look something like Earth. Red dwarfs, also known as M-dwarfs, are a class of stars that contain the least massive and coolest main-sequence stars in the Milky Way. They are also hosts to many of the thousands of known exoplanets.
Today’s stories include JWST Eyes on Titan to Alien water worlds with oceans 500 times deeper than Earth’s to NASA boss sounds alarm on China’s moon ambitions, and much more.
Maxwell Moe, astrophysicist, NASA Einstein Fellow, University of Arizona via Matteo Cantiello and University of California – Santa Barbara
“The luminous blue variable is a supermassive, unstable star,” said Yan-Fei Jiang, a researcher at the Flatiron Institute in New York City. Unlike our own smaller and steady-burning Sun, luminous blue variables (LBVs) have been shown to burn bright and hot, then cool and fade, only to flare up again. Because of its mercurial behavior, conventional one-dimensional models have been less than adequate at explaining their special physics.
In 1993 Stephen Hawking proposed in Black Holes and Baby Universes that there might be “primordial black holes which were formed in the early universe that could be less than the size of the nucleus of an atom, yet their mass could be a billion tons, the mass of Mount Fuji. A black hole weighing a billion tons,” Hawking explained, “would have a radius of about 10-13 centimeter (the size of a neutron or a proton). It could be in orbit either around the sun or around the center of the galaxy, emitting hard gamma rays with an energy of about 100 million electron volts.”
“The Fireworks Galaxy”, NGC 6946, above is a nearby neighbor to the Milky Way, located approximately 10 million light-years away in the Cepheus constellation. This image was captured as part of the Spitzer Infrared Nearby Galaxy Survey (SINGS) Legacy Project using the telescope’s Infrared Array Camera (IRAC).
Maxwell Moe, astrophysicist, NASA Einstein Fellow, University of Arizona via Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Nature, and Julian Munoz
“You’ve heard of electric cars and e-books, but now we are talking about electric dark matter,” said Julian Munoz of Harvard University. “However, this electric charge is on the very smallest of scales.”
Today’s stories include If Aliens Contact Humanity, Who Decides What We Do Next to A Mind-Blowing Experiment Just Showed How Life’s Ingredients Formed in Outer Space, and much more.
Maxwell Moe, astrophysicist, NASA Einstein Fellow, University of Arizona via Science Advances, LA Times
What if an alien civilization was a billion or more years older than ours and detected Earth in its early history? “For billions of years of Earth history, an alien astronomer may have even been sufficiently misled to conclude that Earth was sterile—despite the fact that life was flourishing in our ocean at the time,” says Stephanie Olson, an astrobiologist at the University of California, Riverside with NASA’s Astrobiology Institute.
The Galaxy Report newsletter brings you daily 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.
The Most Mysterious, Volatile Star in the Universe?
Our Best Wishes for the New Year!
Electric Dark Matter: “Lives in Our Solar System”
China Unveils Plans for Largest Optical Telescope in Asia to Something Weird is Happening at the Edge of the Solar System (The Galaxy Report)
Alien Disequilibrium: The Unmistakable Signal of Biological Life
Are We Sorely Underestimating How Far We are From Discovering Alien Life?Elusive First Stars of the Universe to True Nature of Quantum Reality (The Galaxy Report)