“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.
NASA’s James Webb Telescope is designed to peer back in time across the universe, observing distant galaxies that are over 13 billion light years away, using its massive honeycomb mirror capable of revealing the cosmos in great detail. Watch it now in all it’s cosmic glory before it’s launch in 2021. Following its launch on March 30, 2021, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope will use its unparalleled infrared capabilities to study the mysteries of the Milky Way and beyond, and build on data returned from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and other observatories.
The Broken Hill skull, discovered in 1921 by miners in Zambia, is one of the best-preserved fossils of the early human species Homo heidelbergensis, who roamed Southern Africa. The fossil is estimated to be about 300,000 years old, according to Australia’s Griffith University scientists, who led an international team to date the skull of an early human found in Africa, potentially upending human evolution knowledge with their discovery.
NASA’s WFIRST’s infrared telescope will explore uncharted regions of the galaxy for exoplanets due to the different goals of previous missions. Kepler, for example, searched a modest-sized region of about 100 square degrees with 100,000 stars at typical distances of around a thousand light-years. TESS scans the entire sky and tracks 200,000 stars; however their typical distances are around 100 light-years. WFIRST will search roughly 3 square degrees, but will follow 200 million stars at distances of around 10,000 light-years.
“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.
At first they thought it might be a neutron star, but new data from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have provided the strongest evidence yet for the existence of Intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs) — a long-sought “missing link” in black hole evolution. There have been a few other IMBH candidates found to date. Confirming one IMBH opens the door to the possibility that many more lurk undetected in the dark, waiting to be revealed by a star passing too close.
“How relativity behaves at very high energies has real consequences for the world around us. Most quantum gravity models say the behavior of relativity will break down at very high energies. Our observation of such high-energy photons at all raises the energy scale where relativity holds by more than a factor of a hundred,” said Pat Harding, an astrophysicist in the Neutron Science and Technology group at Los Alamos National Laboratory about detection of a number of astrophysical sources which produce photons above 100 TeV (a trillion times the energy of visible light), much higher energy than is available from any earthly accelerator.
