Today’s stories include The Startling Implications of the Cosmic Graviton Background (CGB) to The Missing Plan for Alien First Contact, and much more.
Astronomers Discover Closest Black Hole to Earth, reports Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. “Astronomers have discovered the closest black hole to Earth, which the researchers have dubbed Gaia BH1. The dormant black hole weighs about 10 times the mass of the Sun and is located about 1600 light-years away in the constellation Ophiuchus, making it three times closer to Earth than the previous record holder, an X-ray binary in the constellation of Monoceros.”
Can cosmic inflation be ruled out? asks the University of Cambridge. “The astrophysicists, from the University of Cambridge, the University of Trento, and Harvard University, say that there is a clear, unambiguous signal in the cosmos which could eliminate inflation as a possibility. Their paper, published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, argues that this signal – known as the cosmic graviton background (CGB) – can feasibly be detected, although it will be a massive technical and scientific challenge.”
Researchers reveal a galaxy sparkling with the universe’s oldest star clusters, reports Josslyn Johnstone, University of Toronto. “A team of Canadian astronomers, including experts from the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics in the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Arts & Science, have used the James Webb Telescope (JWST) to identify the most distant globular clusters ever discovered—dense groups of millions of stars that may be relics containing the first and oldest stars in the universe.”
Astronomers Have An Irritating New Solution To The Fermi Paradox, reports IFL Science. “Given that our galaxy is around 13.6 billion years old, it’s puzzling that there is no evidence that we have found of extraterrestrial civilizations. In fact, the paper argues, the absence of aliens on Earth could be seen as evidence that there is no alien life out there.”
An Extragalactic Structure detected lurking in an obscured zone of the Universe, reports Futurism. The notorious zone obscures some 10 to 20 percent of the sky due to stars and dust surrounding the supermassive blackhole at the center of our galaxy
The missing plan for alien first contact, reports BBC Future. “”Finding life or making contact is always going to be highly unlikely until the day we do [it],” says John Zarnecki, emeritus professor of space sciences at the Open University in the UK. “It reminds me of exoplanets: as a young researcher, it was a topic we talked about, and we all suspected exoplanets were out there, but there was no way that we’d ever find one because it was technically far too difficult.”
A Dream of Discovering Alien Life Finds New Hope. For Lisa Kaltenegger and her generation of exoplanet astronomers, decades of planning have set the stage for an epochal detection, reports Quanta.com. “In simulating ersatz Earths and more speculative visions of living planets, Kaltenegger leverages the bizarre life and geology found on Earth to develop a more systematic set of expectations about what might be possible elsewhere.”
An Antarctic neutrino telescope has detected a signal from the heart of a nearby active galaxy--In results published today in Science, the IceCube collaboration reports the detection of neutrinos from an “active galaxy” called NGC 1068, which lies some 47 million light-years from Earth.lescope has detected a signal from the heart of a nearby active galaxy, reports The Conversation.
Four Theories that could lead to faster than light travel–-Since 1994, when Mexican mathematician Miguel Alcubierre proposed a mathematically viable solution for building a real-world faster-than-light warp drive, numerous scientists and engineers have taken a swing at their own version of a viable, real-world warp drive, including an attempt to patent one of these “out there” ideas.
How planets can be an anti-aging formula for stars, reports Phys.org. “Planets can force their host stars to act younger than their age, according to a new study of multiple systems using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. This may be the best evidence to date that some planets apparently slow down the aging process for their host stars.”
Scientists discover largest gas cloud in space that’s 20 times bigger than the Milky Way, reports Elizabeth Rayne for Space.com–Glowing in the Pegasus constellation are five apparently closely packed galaxies known as Stephan’s Quintet, whispering the secrets of galactic evolution to scientists.
Sensors Deep Under Antarctic Ice Located a Source of ‘Ghost Particles’ from Space–Scientists used data from sensors under one mile of ice in the South Pole to to track down one of the biggest mysteries in the universe, reports Vice Science.
Curated by The Daily Galaxy Editorial Staff
Your free daily fix of stories of space and science –a random journey from Planet Earth through the Cosmos– that has the capacity to provide clues to our existence and add a much needed cosmic perspective in our Anthropocene epoch.
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