Today’s stories range from Why Einstein is a “peerless genius” and Hawking is an “ordinary genius” to Bizarre dwarf galaxy discovery to Superweapon of the Cosmos that could melt you from 1,000 km away, and much more.
China’s FAST Telescope Did Not Find an Alien Signal. The Search Continues, reports The New York Times. China’s astronomers have been initiated into the search for extraterrestrial intelligence with the kind of false alarm that others in the field have experienced for decades.
The universe is surprisingly lopsided and we don’t know why –Two analyses of a million galaxies show that their distribution may not be symmetrical, which may mean that our understandings of gravity and the early universe are incorrect, reports New Scientist.
Why Einstein is a “peerless genius” and Hawking is an “ordinary genius” –You’ve heard of Stephen Hawking. Ever heard of Renata Kallosh? Didn’t think so, reports this Big Think podcast.
Seven newfound dwarf galaxies sit on just one side of a larger galaxy –The satellites should surround the larger galaxy, but they don’t. “This satellite distribution is just weird,” astronomer Eric Bell said June 13 at the American Astronomical Society meeting. “The part that’s just bananas,” Bell said, is that the newfound satellite galaxies all sit on one side of M81.”
Behold the Magnetar, nature’s ultimate superweapon–Their magnetic fields—the strongest we’ve observed—could melt you from 1,000 km away, reports Paul Sutter for Ars Technica. “There are balls of dead matter no bigger than a city yet shining a hundred times brighter than the Sun that send out flares of X-rays visible across the galaxy. Their interiors are made of superfluid subatomic particles, and they have cores of exotic and unknown states of matter. Their lifetime is only a few thousand years.”
The James Webb Space Telescope: Prepare for a New Way To See the Universe, reports SciTechDaily.
Astronomers discover a multiplanet system nearby--Astronomers at MIT and elsewhere have discovered a new multiplanet system within our galactic neighborhood that lies just 10 parsecs, or about 33 light-years, from Earth, making it one of the closest known multiplanet systems to our own.
US Congress House Intelligence Committee on unidentified aerial phenomena –“We now have dozens of instances of weird aerial objects that have been picked up on “multiple instruments,” not to mention spotted by trained pilots. In 18 of them, the phenomena seemed to move with no evident source of propulsion or seemed to be masking the way they move — their “signature” — in ways we do not think any country on earth has the technology to do,” reports Ezra Klein for the New York Times.
Ancient meteorite upends our ideas of how Mars formed–Meteorite analysis hints that early Mars got important volatile elements like hydrogen and oxygen from meteorite collisions rather than a cloud of gases, reports New Scientist.
Using the Sun as a Gravitational Lens Would Let Us See Exoplanets With Incredible Resolution, reports Universe Today. “A group of researchers are working on plans to build a spacecraft that could apply this quirk by using our Sun as a gravitational lens. Their goal is to see distant exoplanets orbiting other stars, and to image an Earth-like exoplanet, seeing it in exquisite detail, at a resolution even better than the well-known Apollo 8 Earthrise photo.”
Hubble spies stellar ‘ghost’ wandering the Milky Way galaxy, reports CNN. “Astronomers believe that 100 million free-floating black holes roam our galaxy. Now, researchers believe they have detected such an object. The detection was made after dedicating six years to observations — and astronomers were even able to make a precise mass measurement of the extreme cosmic object.”
Curated by The Daily Galaxy Editorial Staff
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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
Read about The Daily Galaxy editorial team here