China is moving boldly to dominate in 21st-Century space and science from being the first nation to explore the farside of the Moon, to creating a laser that can rip spacetime asunder to landing a spacecraft —six-wheeled Zhurong robot, named after the Chinese god of fire—on Mars for the first time on Saturday, a technically challenging feat more difficult than a moon landing.
Your free twice-weekly fix of stories of space and science –a random journey from Planet Earth through the Cosmos– that has the capacity to provide clues to our existence and add a much needed cosmic perspective in our Anthropocene epoch.
In the mid-1980s, a group of American archaeologists pored over satellite images trying to understand what had become of the Mayan civilization that had once ruled over Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, discovered a pattern: a near-perfect ring of sinkholes -cenotes- about 200 kilometers across, encircling the Yucatecan capital, Merida, and port towns of Sisal and Progreso. A pattern created by an ancient asteroid explosion that one young NASA scientist thought may yield clues to the lost ocean and atmosphere of Mars.
Globular clusters are the oldest visible objects in the Universe – each contains hundreds of thousands to occasionally over one million stars, all born at essentially the same time. They are densely packed into a spherical volume with a diameter over a thousand times smaller than the diameter of the Milky Way Galaxy. Globular clusters are thought to have formed soon after the Universe began nearly 13.8 billion years ago, at the same time as, or perhaps even before, the first galaxies formed.
A tiny dwarf galaxy, ESO 495-21, three percent the size of the Milky Way, harbors a supermassive black hole that may offer clues as to how black holes and galaxies evolved in the early Universe. The origin of the central supermassive black holes in galaxies is still a matter of debate — do the galaxies form first and then crush material at their centers into black holes, or do pre-existing black holes gather galaxies around them? Do they evolve together — or could the answer be something else entirely?
“Just because we happen to live in a region that is overwhelmingly dominated by matter doesn’t preclude the existence of other regions of space that are instead dominated by antimatter,” observes Dan Hooper, head of the Theoretical Astrophysics Group at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) and Associate Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Chicago.
“There is something about the Himalayas not possessed by the Alps, something unseen and unknown,” said mountaineer and botanist Frank Smythe…” a mystery intriguing and disturbing. Confronted by them, a man loses his grasp of ordinary things, perceiving himself as immortal, an entity capable of outdistancing all changes, all decay, all life, all death.”
The Galaxy Report newsletter brings you twice-weekly 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.
