“Beautiful as it is, our Universe is constantly evolving, often through violent events like the Milky Way’s forthcoming collision with the Large Magellanic Cloud,” said Carlos Frenk, Director of the Institute for Computational Cosmology at the University of Durham. “Barring any disasters, like a major disturbance to the Solar System, our descendants, if any, are in for a treat: a spectacular display of cosmic fireworks as the newly awakened supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy, Sagittarius A*, reacts by emitting jets of extremely bright energetic radiation.”
The “Planet Earth Report” connects you to headline news on the science, technology, discoveries, people and events changing our planet and the future of the human species.
In January of 2019, The Galaxy asked, why is that of the tens of thousands of reports of UFO’s since the iconic radio broadcast of Orson Welles “War of the World’s” terrified the nation in 1938, have none been reported by astronomers manning the observatories across our pale blue dot?
An enormous ‘ghost’ galaxy, believed to be one of the oldest in the universe, was detected lurking on the outskirts of the Milky Way in November of 2018 by a team of astronomers who discovered the massive object when trawling through new data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite. The object, named Antlia 2, avoided detection thanks to its extremely low density as well as a perfect hiding place in the Zone of Avoidance, behind the shroud of the Milky Way’s disc–a region full of dust and an overabundance of bright stars near the galactic center.
A dark legacy of the Nazi Era looms far beyond Pluto in the cold outermost reaches of our solar system. Earlier this week we reported that NASA’s New Horizons mission team published the first results of its New Year’s 2019 flyby of the farthest world ever explored, a planetary building block and Kuiper Belt object called Ultima Thule, also known less poetically as object 2014 MU69.
The “Planet Earth Report” connects you to headline news on the science, technology, discoveries, people and events changing our planet and the future of the human species.
Every time we feature a new Hubble galaxy discovery, it triggers the question “what forms of alien life live there?” The Hubble object in question, irregular galaxy NGC 4485, shows all the signs of having been involved in a hit-and-run accident with a bypassing galaxy. But rather than destroying the galaxy, the chance encounter is spawning a new generation of stars, planets, and a starscape breathtaking beauty.
“We’re looking into the well-preserved remnants of the ancient past,” said New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, Colorado about Ultima Thule. “There is no doubt that the discoveries made about Ultima Thule are going to advance theories of solar system formation.