Radio Signals Detected from Earliest Epoch of the Universe 

Faint ‘whispers’ from the Moon may unveil the the first billion years of the Universe’s evolution, which  has yet to be observed in detail. Very little is known about the first stars and galaxies that came into existence in this early period. One avenue to explore this epoch is to study the faint radio waves from neutral hydrogen atoms.

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The Weirdness of Dark-Matter Free Galaxies

Welcome to our very strange Universe. And, yes, that is a galaxy. The discovery of yet another dark-matter free, ultra-diffuse galaxy, raises a number of unanswered questions for astronomers: how are they formed? What do they tell us about standard cosmological models? How common are they, and what other unique properties do they have? It will take the discovery of more dark-matter-less galaxies to resolve the ultimate question of what dark matter really is.

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Universal Mechanics of Galaxies – Outer Edge Rotates Once Every Billion Years 

In 2018, astronomers discovered that the stars in the outer rims of galaxies would rotate once every billion years, no matter how big they are. “It’s not Swiss-watch precision,” said Dr. Gerhardt Meurer with the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR), who studies the interrelationship between the interstellar medium (ISM) and the various populations of stars and dark matter; in particular, how stars form in galaxies. “But regardless of whether a galaxy is very big or very small,’ he explains, “if you could sit on the extreme edge of its disk as it spins, it would take you about a billion years to go all the way round.”

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Last Week’s Top 5 Space & Science Headlines –Stephen Hawking’s Warning to the Missing Black Holes

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The Extraterrestrial Signal -We May Not Want to Receive (Weekend Feature)

Is there a fundamental flaw in why we have not received a signal from an advanced alien civilization? How do we decode an alien message –alien is alien so it might be impossible. What if they communicate chemically? Will they use the language of math and science signaling at 1420 megahertz? What if we are too primitive to comprehend a message or the technology of its signal that may exist in a form beyond matter? What if it’s a message from an extinct civilization astrophysicist such as Harvard’s Avi Loeb believes exist in our galaxy? Or, as John Gertz suggests for Scientific American, maybe the aliens are already in our solar system, probably in the form of robotic probes.

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Theoretical Wormholes — “Could Be Hiding Within Dark Matter Inside the Milky Way” (Weekend Feature)

“If we combine the map of the dark matter in the Milky Way with the most recent Big Bang model to explain the universe and we hypothesize the existence of space-time tunnels, what we get is that our galaxy could really contain one of these tunnels, and that the tunnel could even be the size of the galaxy itself. But there’s more,” explained Paolo Salucci, astrophysicist with SISSA and a dark matter expert. “We could even travel through this tunnel, since, based on our calculations, it could be navigable.”  Salucci is among the authors of the paper published in Annals of Physics.

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This Week’s Space & Science Quote

“They share a lot, astronomy and childhood. Both are voyages across huge distances. Both search for facts beyond their grasp. Both theorize wildly and let possibilities multiple without limits. Both are humbled every few weeks. Both operate out of ignorance. Both are mystified by time. Both are forever starting out.”

—Bewilderment, a novel by Pulitzer-Prize winner Richard Powers

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Plumes of Enceladus and Europa–Harbinger’s of Life in Global Oceans of Our Solar System?

“Something is going on on Enceladus – is active and we want to know,”  said astrophysicist Laura Danly, curator at the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles. NASA’s Cassini mission to Saturn observed surface fissures on Enceladus that are unique in our Solar System and are perpetually erupting with water ice from its global subsurface ocean, that appear as parallel, evenly spaced “stripes” that are some 130 kilometers long and 35 kilometers apart.

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