Massive Liquid Telescopes to China's New Einstein Space Probe (The Galaxy Report)

Posted on Apr 6, 2022 in Astrobiology, Astronomy, Science

Today’s stories range from Was Our Universe Created in a Laboratory to Mystery Signal Traced to a Nearby Galaxy’s Globular Cluster to Jupiter’s Moon Europa, ‘Chaos Terrains’ Could be Shuttling Oxygen to Ocean, 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.

The Weird Gets Weirder–A Fast radio burst traced to a nearby galaxy’s globular cluster –The location is solved, but what’s causing it? asks Phil Plait for SyFy. Or, as Phil writes: “One lesson astronomy teaches you is to never sit back and think, “Yeah, we totally understand this.”

Was Our Universe Created in a Laboratory? asks Harvard’s Avi Loeb –“Developing quantum-gravity technologies may elevate us to a “class A” civilization, capable of creating a baby universe.”

New Inner Ring of the Milky Way Discovered reports The Max Planck Society –“Using a combination of observed stars and a realistic model of the Milky Way, scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics have found a new structure in our home galaxy. Just outside the galactic bar, they found an inner ring of metal rich stars, which are younger than the stars in the bar. The ages of the ring stars can be used to estimate that the bar must have formed at least 7 billion years ago.”

Milky Way Galaxy is Far Older than Previously Thought–“How did the Milky Way’s structure come together? We know it didn’t all happen at once, but what were the different chapters in the galaxy’s life? What is the timeline of the Milky Way?” asks Phil Plait for SyFy Wire.

The gaming tech that may help find alien life, reports Richard Hollingham for BBC Future– An iconic Australian telescope has begun a major new search for ET – using some everyday tech to help locate signals.

China to launch Einstein Probe in 2023 to observe violent cosmic events, reports Space News –“A Chinese wide-field x-ray space observatory has passed a major review and is expected to launch next year to detect flashes from cataclysmic cosmic events. The Einstein Probe is expected to launch around mid-to-late 2023 to observe distant, violent interactions such as tidal disruption events—in which stars are pulled apart by supermassive black holes—supernovae, and detect and localize the high-energy, electromagnetic counterparts to gravitational wave events.”

On Jupiter’s Moon Europa, ‘Chaos Terrains’ Could be Shuttling Oxygen to Ocean reports U of Texas News. “The amount of oxygen brought into Europa’s ocean could be on a par with the quantity of oxygen in Earth’s oceans today.”

NASA’s next-gen space telescopes could dwarf Webb. By using liquid lenses? –They could even “eliminate the effect of gravity”, reports NASA. “What if there was a way to make a telescope 10 times – or even 100 times – bigger than before? What started as a theoretical question is now a series of experiments to see if fluids can be used to create lenses in microgravity. The next experiment is stowed on the International Space Station National Laboratory waiting for the arrival of Axiom-1 astronauts to try it out, and is part of Ax-1 Mission Specialist Eytan Stibbe’s research portfolio.”

Swarms of Black Holes at the Milky Way’s Heart? Maybe Not –Revisiting a controversial claim, astronomers are laying bare deep uncertainties about our understanding of galactic centers, reports Scientific American. “What lurks at the Milky Way’s heart? Astronomers have known most of the answer for decades. Just as in most large galaxies, a supermassive black hole sits at the core of our own island in the universe, enveloped in a swirling maelstrom of molecular clouds and stars. But something seems to be missing from this picture.”

Are Telescopes the Only Way to Find Dark Matter? asks Chanda Prescod-Weinstein for Scientific American –“If the invisible matter does not appear in experiments or particle colliders, we may have to find it in space.”

Scientists want to play chess with aliens as soon as we can find them –Scientists have designed a new message to spark conversation with alien civilizations, and that suggest a game of chess could keep the discussion going, reports New Scientist.

The History of the Milky Way Comes Into Focus, reports Christopher Intagliata for Scientific American –“When you look up at the Milky Way, you’re gazing at the galactic equivalent of Rome. A metropolis of stars, with layers upon layers of history—just like The Eternal City. So says the astronomer Hans-Walter Rix.”

Venus: Secrets of Our Strange Sister Planet –“The three recently selected space missions to Venus– VERITAS DAVINCI and ESA’s EnVision — will embark scientific instruments to test the existence of ancient oceans on Venus,” reports The Daily Galaxy.

The ‘Gargantua’ Hypothesis: Does the Milky Way’s Supermassive Black Hole Impact the Galaxy’s Planets? asks Maxwell Moe for The Daily Galaxy. ” In 2019, Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb and NASA’s Jeremy Schnittman proposed that inhabited planets might exist around the black holes harbored at the center of most galaxies. Such planets are similar to the fictional water-world planet Miller, the closest planet in the star system orbiting the supermassive black hole, Gargantua, in the movie Interstellar. “

Astronomers see star enter a ‘Maunder Minimum’ for the first time, reports Physics World –“For the first time, astronomers have observed a star that has entered a state of low, or flat, activity – analogous to the famous Maunder Minimum that gripped the Sun during the latter half of the seventeenth century.

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