Welcome to our new daily feature: today’s news from the Universe that has the capacity to provide clues to the mystery of our existence and adds a much needed cosmic perspective in our current Anthropocene Epoch.
‘Intriguing’ Carbon Isotopes on Mars Could Be From Cosmic Dust, UV Radiation or Ancient Life –NASA scientists compared the data to chemical signatures of biological processes on Earth and found some similarities to billion-year-old microbes, reports Smithsonian Magazine.
What Is Spacetime Really Made Of? –Spacetime may emerge from a more fundamental reality. Figuring out how could unlock the most urgent goal in physics—a quantum theory of gravity reports Adam Becker for Scientific American.
A New Study Calculates The Number of Black Holes in The Universe. It’s a lot, reports Science Alert.
Venus Could Have Been Habitable and Radically Different from the Planet We See Today, reports Avi Shporer for The Daily Galaxy.
Has a new experiment just proven the quantum nature of gravity? –At a fundamental level, nobody knows whether gravity is truly quantum in nature. A novel experiment strongly hints that it is, reports Big Think.
Pandora mission to study stars and exoplanets continues toward flight, reports Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory –“The mission will study approximately 20 stars and exoplanets by analyzing starlight that passes through exoplanets’ atmospheres, using a technique called transit spectroscopy. Pandora will disentangle signals to understand which are from exoplanet atmospheres and which are from starspots, stellar phenomena that are similar to sunspots and can contaminate data.
Scientists have shown how the freezing of a ‘slushy’ ocean of magma may be responsible for the composition of the Moon’s crust, reports University of Cambridge
Symmetries Reveal Clues About the Holographic Universe–Physicists have been busy exploring how our universe might emerge like a hologram out of a two-dimensional sheet. New clues have come from the symmetries found on an infinitely distant “celestial sphere,” Reports Quanta.
Is Pluto a Planet? What’s a Planet, Anyway? –More than 15 years after Pluto was demoted to dwarf planet, the debate, even among scientists, continues, reports The New York Times.
Image at top of page: ESO observatories in Chile.
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