“The Galaxy Report” brings you news of space and science 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. Today’s stories range from New Earth-like Planet Found Orbiting Star Closest to Our Sun to a New History of the Milky Way, and much more.
NASA Telescope Spots Highest-Energy Light Ever Detected From Jupiter, reports NASA. “The planet’s auroras are known to produce low-energy X-ray light. A new study finally reveals higher-frequency X-rays and explains why they eluded another mission 30 years ago.”
ESO: New Earth-like Planet Found Orbiting Star Closest to Our Sun–“This achievement is extremely important,” says Pedro Figueira, ESPRESSO instrument scientist at ESO in Chile. “It shows that the radial velocity technique has the potential to unveil a population of light planets, like our own, that are expected to be the most abundant in our galaxy and that can potentially host life as we know it.”
Stephen Hawking exhibition hopes to unravel the mysteries of his blackboard –The Cambridge cosmologist, who died in 2018 at the age of 76, treasured a blackboard (image below) that became smothered with cartoons, doodles and equations at a conference he arranged in 1980. But what all the graffiti and in-jokes mean is taking some time to unravel, reports The Guardian.
How to save Earth from a doomsday impact as seen in “Don’t Look Up” –65 million years ago, an asteroid strike caused the 5th great mass extinction. Could we save Earth, today, from a similar event? reports Big Think.
Audio Interview: Astrophysicist Adam Frank on the scientific requirements for aliens to reach our atmosphere –“if those blips on radar are truly aliens in our skies, what technology did they create to get here? What can we learn from that, as we think about colonizing the stars in the future?”
‘Something’s coming’: is America finally ready to take UFOs seriously? asks Harvard’s Avi Loeb in an interview with The Guardian. “Last year was a breakthrough time for UFOs, as a landmark government report prompted the possibility of extraterrestrial visitors to finally be taken seriously by everyone from senators, to a former president, to the Pentagon.”
Solar Storm Destroys 40 New SpaceX Satellites in Orbit –The geomagnetic incident resulted in the Starlink transmitters drifting back into Earth’s atmosphere, where they will burn up, potentially costing the company about $100 million, reports the New York Times.
An Electrifying View of the Heart of the Milky Way –A new radio-wave image of the center of our galaxy reveals all the forms of frenzy that a hundred million or so stars can get up to, reports Dennis Overbye for the New York Times.
Fringe theories stack –Believe in the Loch Ness monster and you’re more likely to believe the Apollo missions were fake. How do weird beliefs work? asks Michael D Gordinis the Rosengarten Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at Princeton University for Aeon.com. His books include Einstein in Bohemia (2020) and On the Fringe (2021).
Anatomy of Milky Way’s Star Creation -Occurs in Skeletal Light-Years-Long Filaments, reports Maxwell Moe for The Daily Galaxy.
Major African Radio Telescope Will Help to Image Black Holes –The $25-million facility in Namibia will be the continent’s first millimeter-range astronomical observatory, reports Scientific American.
‘Alien-like’ life thrives on dead matter in Arctic deep, reports BBC Science. –Scientists say they’ve solved the mystery of how giant sponges flourish in the deep, icy waters of the Arctic.
The New History of the Milky Way –Over the past two years, astronomers have rewritten the story of our galaxy, reports Charlie Wood for Quanta.com
100 Years Ago, a Quantum Experiment Explained Why We Don’t Fall through Our Chairs–The basic concept of quantum spin provides an understanding of a vast range of physical phenomena, reports Davide Castelvecchi for Scientific American.
Asymmetry is why the Universe and life exist –The Universe has asymmetries, but that’s a good thing. Imperfections are essential for the existence of stars and even life itself, reports Big Think.
The ‘Sharp-Tongued’ Physicist Who Everyone Was Scared Of--“When attending lectures that did not live up to those standards, Nobel Laurate Wolfgang Pauli who predicted the existence of the neutrino in 1930, could be scathing. “What you just said was so confused that one could not tell whether it was nonsense or not,” he often said. Pauli eventually distilled this critique to a now-famous aphorism: “This isn’t right. This isn’t even wrong,” he would say of completely balderdash ideas, reports Ross Pomeroy for RealClearScience.
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