Scientists have known for almost a century that the universe is expanding, meaning the distance between galaxies across the universe is becoming ever more vast every second. But exactly how fast space is stretching, a value known as the Hubble constant, has remained stubbornly elusive. Several recent studies that point to a nagging discrepancy between modern expansion measurements and predictions based on the universe as it was more than 13 billion years ago, as measured by the European Space Agency’s Planck satellite.
The mystery of FRB’s deepens: many of the brightest, weirdest phenomena in space come from cataclysmic events like explosions or collisions. But many fast radio bursts (FRBs), milliseconds-long bursts of powerful radio waves that come from the depths of space have been attributed to many different sources, from neutron star mergers to alien spaceships. But so far, no explanation seems plausible.
“Mars is the most habitable planet in our Solar System besides Earth,” said Laura Kerber, Research Scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory research scientist at JPL with interests in the ancient Martian climate and extraterrestrial environments. “But it remains a hostile world for many kinds of life. A system for creating small islands of habitability would allow us to transform Mars in a controlled and scalable way.”
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.
On Feb. 14, 1990, the Voyager 1 spacecraft looked back at our solar system and snapped the first-ever pictures of the planets from its perch at that time beyond Neptune. This past April, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) team unveiled humanity’s first image of a supermassive black hole –described as the Gates of Hell and the End of Spacetime– the picture of galaxy Messier 87’s central supermassive black hole. A monster the size of our solar system, and bigger, with the mass of six and a half billion suns, with a ring of gas—in hues of red, orange, and yellow—glowing around it, the shadow cast by the event horizon, predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity.
Russia launched a new space telescope Saturday, the Spektr-RG, developed with Germany, is a space observatory intended to replace the Spektr-R, known as the “Russian Hubble”, which Roskosmos said it lost control of in January. Spektr-R was launched in 2011 to observe black holes, neutron stars and magnetic fields. Its successor will take up similar duties but will also map X-rays across the entire sky in unprecedented detail that will help trace the large-scale structure of the Universe.
“The image we’ve managed to capture is an elegant demonstration of a fundamental property of nature, seen for the very first time,” said Paul-Antoine Moreau of the University of Glasgow said of of an elusive phenomenon which a baffled Albert Einstein once called ‘spooky action at a distance’. (more…)