Today’s stories range from Astronomers Might See Dark Matter by Staring into the Void to No Sign Found of a “Cosmic Dawn” to How to Make the Universe Think for Us, and much more.
‘Dark’ free-floating black hole –“A team of astronomers led by UC Berkeley graduate student Casey Lam and associate professor Jessica Lu has for the first time discovered what may be a free-floating black hole by observing the brightening of a more distant star as its light was distorted by the object’s strong gravitational field — so-called gravitational microlensing.”
We Were Here –How advanced civilizations could leave us a message of their presence, reports Nautilus.com. ” In a new paper on “SETI beacons”—SETI is the “search for extraterrestrial intelligence”—astronomers show how advanced civilizations could leave an unmistakable trace of their presence using entire exoplanet systems..
Astronomers Reimagine the Making of the Planets –Observations of faraway planets have forced a near-total rewrite of the story of how our solar system came to be, reports Rebecca Boyle for Quanta. “Our middle-aged star may be more placid than most, but it is otherwise unremarkable. Its planets, however, are another story.”
Unfathomable Abodes of Life? –Water Worlds of the Milky Way, reports Avi Shporer, Research Scientist, formerly a NASA Sagan Fellow at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, with MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research for The Daily Galaxy. “Before life appeared on land some 400 million years ago, all life on Earth including the mind evolved in the sea. Astronomers have recently conjectured that blue exoplanets with endless oceans may be orbiting many of the Milky Way’s one trillion stars.”
India’s mysterious gateway to the stars, reports The BBC. “Created 300 years ago, Jaipur’s Jantar Mantar is an outdoor complex filled with gargantuan astronomy tools designed to be used by the naked eye – and they’re still accurate.”
Astronomers Might See Dark Matter by Staring into the Void –Vast reaches of mostly empty space could offer superior odds for detecting the invisible substance thought to make up more than 80 percent of the material in the universe, reports Scientific American.
Four Years On, New Experiment Sees No Sign of “Cosmic Dawn”, reports Nautilus.com “When astronomers tried to confirm a signal from the birth of the first stars after the Big Bang, they saw nothing.”
Our Sun Could Someday Reveal the Surfaces of Alien Earths –-In the far future, we could reveal detailed views of distant worlds by turning our home star into a gravitational lens, reports Scientific American.
AI reveals unsuspected math underlying search for exoplanets –UC Berkeley astronomers used AI to find unsuspected connections hidden in the complex mathematics arising from general relativity — in particular, how that theory is applied to finding new planets around other stars.
Physicists Rewrite the Fundamental Law That Leads to Disorder –The second law of thermodynamics is among the most sacred in all of science, but it has always rested on 19th century arguments about probability. New arguments trace its true source to the flows of quantum information, reports Philip Ball for Quanta.
Gaia telescope’s new map of the Milky Way will let us rewind time –The European Space Agency has released a new tranche of data from its Gaia space observatory, and it could help us rewind the path of stars to see the history of the Milky Way.
Repeating fast radio bursts from space are mysterious. This one is even weirder, reports CNN.
NASA’s Perseverance Rover Begins Key Search for Life on Mars –Rolling up an ancient river delta in Jezero Crater, the rover starts crucial rock sampling, reports Scientific American and Nature. “On 28 May, Perseverance ground a 5-centimeter-wide circular patch into a rock at the base of what was once a river delta in the crater. This delta formed billions of years ago, when a long-vanished river deposited layers of sediment into Jezero, and it is the main reason that NASA sent the rover there. On Earth, river sediment is usually teeming with life.”
How to Make the Universe Think for Us –Physicists are building neural networks out of vibrations, voltages and lasers, arguing that the future of computing lies in exploiting the universe’s complex physical behaviors, reports Charlie Wood for Quanta.
James Webb Space Telescope Set to Study Two Strange Super-Earths –Space agency officials promise to deliver geology results from worlds dozens of light-years away, reports Elizabeth Howell at SPACE.com.
Surfaces Beyond Imagination Are Discovered After Decades-Long Search –Using ideas borrowed from graph theory, two mathematicians have shown that extremely complex surfaces are easy to traverse, reports Quanta.com
Gravitational Waves Continue to Astound –Seven years after their discovery, the ripples in spacetime have opened new windows on the universe’s deepest secrets, reports Sidney Perkowitz for Nautilus.
How lessons learned from space exploration could feed the world –Sustainable food systems developed for deep space could help mitigate the food crisis, reports New Scientist.
Curated by The Daily Galaxy Editorial Staff
Image credit: ESO Observatories, Chile
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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
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