In 2021, astronomers discovered a previously unrecognized spur of young stars and star-forming gas clouds sticking out of the Milky Way’s Sagittarius spiral arm –one of the most striking arms in our galaxy, noted for its young stars and beautiful nebula that connects to the major Orion arm that harbors our solar system. “Spiral arms in galaxies like the Milky Way typically form from long-lived spiral density waves that periodically cause a bunching up of stars and clouds in a regular symmetric pattern, like a pinwheel,” wrote astronomer Debra Elmegreen, president of the International Astronomical Union, in an email to The Daily Galaxy.
“Using the pulsars we observe across the Milky Way galaxy, we are trying to be like a spider sitting in stillness in the middle of her web,” says Vanderbilt’s Stephen Taylor, assistant professor of physics and astronomy and former astronomer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) about the location of absolute stillness in our solar system, the center of gravity with which to measure the gravitational waves that signal the existence of the invisible paradoxes we call black holes, which have no memory, and contain the earliest memories of the universe.
Today’s stories include The Time Oxygen Almost Killed Everything to Could You Survive the Quietest Place on Earth to Are We About to Find Alien Life? and much more.
“Oxygen flooded into the atmosphere as a pollutant, even a poison, until natural selection shaped living things to thrive on the stuff and, indeed, suffocate without it,” wrote evolutionary biologist, Richard Dawkins, in The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution.
This weekend’s stories include The Mysterious Comets That Hide in the Asteroid Belt to The Seven Most Terrifying Things in Space to Wormholes may Look Almost Identical to Black Holes, and much more.
British physicist Stephen Wolfram believes extraterrestrial intelligent life is inevitable, but with a caveat. Although intelligent life is inevitable, we will never find it. Wolfram says that in order to compress more and more information into our communication signals – be they mobile phone conversations or computers – we remove all redundancy or pattern. If anything in a signal repeats, then it can be deleted. But this process of removing any pattern from a signal makes the signal look more and more random – in fact, pretty much like the random radio “noise” that rains down on Earth coming from stars and interstellar gas clouds.
A 2018 Hubble Space Telescope finding confirmed a nagging discrepancy about the Hubble Constant –the rate at which the Universe is expanding–showing the universe to be expanding faster now than was expected from its trajectory seen shortly after the big bang. Researchers hinted that there may be new physics to explain the inconsistency known as the ‘Hubble Tension’ “The community is really grappling with understanding the meaning of this discrepancy,” said lead researcher and Nobel Laureate Adam Riess of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) and Johns Hopkins University.
It has been said that to understand water is to understand the cosmos and life itself. 2021 observations from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) detected this primal substance in the most massive galaxy in the early Universe.
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.
3,000 Light-Year-Long Anomaly In Milky Way’s Sagittarius Arm
Detecting Our Solar System’s Center of Gravity: “The Location of Absolute Stillness”
How the Space Economy Will Change the World to Conscious Artificial Intelligence? (Planet Earth Report)
Rise of Oxygen –An Evolutionary Moment that Shaped Our Planet
Our Universe Wouldn’t Exist Without Phase Transitions to The Quest for Quantum Gravity (The Galaxy Report Weekend)
Will We Actually Be Able to Detect a Signal from an Alien Intelligence? (Weekend Feature)
Is Something Missing from the Standard Model of the Universe? (Holiday Feature)
Did Water Exist in the Galaxies of the Early Cosmos? (Holiday Feature)
Monster Galaxies at the Dawn of TimeHas Milky Way’s Twin Been Discovered to Will Artificial Intelligence Reveal New Laws of Physics? (The Galaxy Report)