“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.
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.
The beauty and wonders of our planet’s night sky cloaks a violent, ever-changing universe of life, death, and mayhem –“with firestorms of star birth, dying stars rattling the very fabric of space in titanic explosions,” observes Hubble scientists, and ” death-star-like beams of energy blasting out of overfed black holes at nearly the speed of light. Hubble,” they say, “has seen them all.” A universe of which the Milky Way is one of 150 billion galaxies. A strange universe, hinted Stephen Hawking. “of shadow galaxies, shadow stars, and even shadow people.”
What an amazing week: from an unknown Milky Way signal that may be a gravitational wave, mind-boggling cosmic string, or primordial black hole to a renegade black hole that’s breaking the laws of physics.
“We found evidence that may indicate a change in the structure of iron, which suggests perhaps two separate cooling events in Earth’s history,” said Joanne Stephenson, a researcher from The Australian National University (ANU), about the confirmation of the existence of the Earth’s “innermost inner core” that may point to an unknown, dramatic event in the Earth’s history.
The Milky Way is a dynamic museum of ancient merging relics, river-like streams of stars stripped from dwarf satellite galaxies that flow through the galaxy revealing its history and structure that allow astronomers to better understand how galaxies in the universe have formed and evolved.
“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.
New research shows that during the early universe cosmic filaments ferried cold gas and embryonic, node-shaped galaxies to a dark matter halo, where it all clumped together to form massive galaxies. The larger the galaxy, the more cold gas it needs to coalesce and to grow from a source of cold molecular gases totaling as much as 100 billion times the mass of our sun.