Today’s stories range from Mysterious Globular Clusters Could Unlock the Secrets of Galaxy Formation to ‘Quantum Gravity’ Could Emerge From a Holographic Universe to 25,000 Supermassive Black Holes in One Map of the Sky, and much more. “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.
‘Quantum Gravity’ Could Emerge From a Holographic Universe, reports Science Alert. “”In the last decades of his life, Albert Einstein hoped to unite his description of gravity with existing models of electromagnetism under a single master theory. It’s a quest that continues to vex theoretical physicists to this day. Whatever a combination of the two looks like, it will almost certainly reveal foundations to the Universe quite unlike anything we can visualize.
AI Could Reveal Extraterrestrial Intelligence Beyond Our Level of Consciousness. “Machine learning provides a way of providing almost human-like intuition to huge data sets. One valuable application is for tasks where it’s difficult to write a specific algorithm to search for something—human faces, for instance, or perhaps “something strange,” wrote astrophysicist and Director of the Penn State University Extraterrestrial Intelligence Center, Jason Wright in an email to The Daily Galaxy”
NASA Is Cracking Open a 50-Year-Old Vacuum-Sealed Tube of Lunar Gas And Soil –“NASA knew “science and technology would evolve and allow scientists to study the material in new ways to address new questions in the future, Lori Glaze, director of the Planetary Science Division at NASA Headquarters, said in a statement. Dubbed 73001, the sample in question was collected by astronauts Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt in December 1972, during the Apollo 17 mission – the last of the program, reports Science Alert.
The formation of supermassive black holes in a dark sector of the universe. How black holes became supermassive, reports Stephanie Kossmanat Brookhaven National Laboratory. In a paper published in Physical Review Letters, theoretical physicists Hooman Davoudiasl, Peter Denton, and Julia Gehrlein describe a cosmological phase transition that facilitated the formation of supermassive black holes in a dark sector of the universe.
Mysterious globular clusters could unlock the secrets of galaxy formation, reports Paul Sutter for Space.com.” Globular clusters are like astronomical coelacanths — mysterious living fossils. These densely packed collections of ancient stars may hold the ultimate secrets to the formation of galaxies.”
Russian Scientists Face Isolation Following Invasion of Ukraine –International collaborations are unraveling as researchers, including many in Russia, speak out against the invasion of Ukraine, reports Dennis Overbye for the New York Times. “Astronauts take pride in the brotherhood of the cosmos symbolized by ceremonial exchanges of bread and salt when crews arrive at the International Space Station. These ties are now being threatened as opposition to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine continues to grow in scientific circles .
Of Course We’re Living in a Simulation –reports Jason Kehe for Wired/ “Three thing need to happen, and probably in this order, for any crackpot idea to take hold of the culture: (1) its nonthreatening introduction to the masses, (2) its legitimization by experts, and (3) overwhelming evidence of its real-world effects. In the case of the so-called simulation hypothesis, you could hardly ask for a neater demonstration.”
Russia’s War in Ukraine Threatens Joint Missions to Mars, Venus and the Moon –Interplanetary voyages are among several space science collaborations delayed or doomed by the ongoing conflict, reports Scientific American
James Webb researcher reveals how it will investigate the early universe, reports Digital Trends. “Webb will be searching out examples of these very old stars to see if they support current theories about the Big Bang. “The earliest stars formed out of material with this primordial composition. Finding these stars, commonly dubbed as the ‘First Stars’ or ‘Population III stars,’ is an important verification of our cosmological model.”
Will artificial intelligence help us find evidence of UFOs? –Top tech founders and research scientists are now taking UFOs seriously, reports Sifted.com, “In May last year, Barack Obama admitted that there really are objects moving in our skies that can’t be easily explained away: “There’s footage and records of objects in the skies, that we don’t know exactly what they are, we can’t explain how they moved, their trajectory… They did not have an easily explainable pattern.”
Could Artificial Intelligence Be Billions of Years Old? asks The Daily Galaxy. “While the scientific community debates Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb’s bold conjecture that our solar system has been visited by an advanced extraterrestrial civilization, philosopher Susan Schneider, who holds the Baruch Blumberg Chair, Library of Congress and NASA, preemptively upped the ante, suggesting that artificial intelligence exists out in the Universe, and it’s billions of years old.”
See 25,000 supermassive black holes in one map of the sky –Astronomers used supercomputers and an international network of antennas to create the stunning map, reports Big Think. Because black holes don’t emit any light, we can’t see them, but we can detect their presence by measuring radio signals emitted by the matter they eject.
Astrophysicists find a way to form dark matter-deficient galaxies, reports Princeton University. “In a new Nature Astronomy study, an international team of astrophysicists report how, when tiny galaxies collide with bigger ones, the bigger galaxies can strip the smaller galaxies of their dark matter — matter that we can’t see directly, but which astrophysicists think must exist because, without its gravitational effects, they couldn’t explain things like the motions of a galaxy’s stars.”
Alpha Centauri Star System: Life On Its Earth-like Planets Have Had About a Billion Years Longer to Evolve, reports Maxwell Moe for The Daily Galaxy. ” Exoplanet statistics tell us all stars are orbited by some kind of planetary systems, wrote Australia National University astrobiologist and cosmologist, Charley Lineweaver,
Did astronomers see hints of first stars? Experiment casts doubt on bold claim –Radio astronomers suggest that a signal reported to be from the cosmic dawn could have been caused by instrument error, reports Nature.com
“Milky Way’s Sweet Spot” –Earth at Center of Galactic Habitable Zone, reports The Daily Galaxy. “Astronomers identified the ‘Galactic habitable zone’ (GHZ) as an annular region between 7 and 9 kiloparsecs from the Galactic center that widens with time and is composed of stars that formed between 8 and 4 billion years ago.”
Icy, Earth-like worlds may be rare –Hundreds of thousands of simulations show few possible exoplanets with climate conditions like ours, reports Astronomy.com. “A team of researchers from the University of Washington and the University of Bern computationally modeled hundreds of thousands of hypothetical exoplanets. They discovered that our fortunate ice situation isn’t that common, and is due mostly to Earth’s relatively moderate axial tilt.”
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. “The image, taken by the MeerKAT radio telescope, an array of 64 antennas spread across five miles of desert in northern South Africa, reveals a storm of activity in the central region of the Milky Way, with threads of radio emission laced and kinked through space among bubbles of energy. At the very center Sagittarius A*, a well-studied supermassive black hole, emits its own exuberant buzz.”
“The Exoplanet Paradox” -Worlds With Low Oxygen May Be Teeming with Life Based on Early Earth History, reports The Daily Galaxy. “Research by a UC Riverside-led astrobiology team suggests oxygen conditions in the early surface ocean were low and unstable for most of the history of Earth and possibly delayed the emergence of animals for hundreds of millions of years.”
Mysterious repeating fast radio burst from space looks strangely familiar, scientists realize, reports Elizabeth Howell for space.com The powerful signals might be coming from a magnetar.
How did ancient civilizations make sense of the cosmos, and what did they get right? reports Susan Bell, University of Southern California. “the Antikythera mechanism. The world’s oldest analog computer and one of the most remarkable scientific objects of antiquity ever found, the mechanical model of the solar system is thought to date to between the third and first centuries B.C.”
Recent Galaxy Reports
Unmistakable Signal of Alien Life to What Happens if China Makes First Contact?
Clues to Alien Life to A Galaxy 100 x Size of Milky Way
Cracks in Einstein’s Theory of Gravity to Colossal Shock Wave Bigger than the Milky Way
Monster Comet Arriving from the Oort Cloud to Black Hole Apocalypse
Enigmas of Stephen Hawking’s Blackboard to Why the Universe and Life Exist
Einstein’s Critics to NASA Theologians Prepare for Alien Contact
Mind-Bending New Multiverse Theory to Dark-Matter Asteroids of the Milky Way
Mysterious Expanding Regions of Dark Matter to Are Black Holes Holograms?
Mystery of Stephen Hawking’s “Exxon Gravity” to Alien Life in Stellar Graveyards
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