Posted on Nov 1, 2022 in Science
Today’s stories include Scientists Just Discovered an Entirely New Way of Measuring Time to ‘Planet Killer’ Asteroid Spotted to How Random Events have Shaped the Course of Human History, and much more.
Cosmic inflation solves the “past hypothesis” problem–Billions of years ago, the ever-increasing entropy must’ve been much lower: the past hypothesis. Here’s how cosmic inflation solves it, reports Big Think.
Space Industry Expert Shares Why She Doesn’t Think Aliens Have Been To Earth, reports MSN. “For this space program communications expert, she thinks they just don’t have any idea we’re here. In this video, “Astro Alexandra”—who helps interpret aspects of space, space exploration, and other scientific facts for laymen on social media—explains that when it comes to space, we’re dealing with impossibly big numbers. Distances so large our human brains can hardly comprehend it.”
The cosmologist who claims to have evidence for the multiverse–Cosmologist Laura Mersini-Houghton says our universe is one of many – and she argues that we have already seen signs of those other universes in the cosmic microwave background, the light left over from the big bang, reports New Scientist.
Arecibo’s Legacy: The largest set of radar data for near-Earth asteroids will help us understand their origins and protect Earth from future impacts, reports Sky & Telescope.
Scientists Just Discovered an Entirely New Way of Measuring Time, reports Science Alert. “Marking the passage of time in a world of ticking clocks and swinging pendulums is a simple case of counting the seconds between ‘then’ and ‘now’. Down at the quantum scale of buzzing electrons, however, ‘then’ can’t always be anticipated. Worse still, ‘now’ often blurs into a haze of uncertainty.”
‘Planet Killer’ Asteroid Spotted That Poses Distant Risk to Earth –The space rock, roughly a mile long, had been hidden by the glare of the sun, suggesting that more large asteroids are in a solar system region difficult to study from Earth, reports Robin George Andrews for The New York Times.
NASA combined 18 all-sky images over 12 years to create a timelapse of the Universe. The Universe is over 13 billion years old, so a 12-year slice of that time might seem uneventful. But the timelapse movie from NASA shows how much can change in just over a decade. Stars pulse, asteroids follow their trajectories, and distant black holes flare as they pull gas and dust toward themselves, reports Inverse.com.
How random events have shaped the course of human history–Is history decided by discernible laws or does it unfold based on random, unpredictable occurrences? asks Big Think. “Unlike physics, history lacks discernable laws and principles that bring order to a primordial chaos. Historians are increasingly relying on mathematics and AI to gain a more objective understanding of the past, but they still have a long way to go.”
Hubble telescope spies a cosmic ‘spider web’ containing clues to dark secret, reports Andrew Jones for Space.com. “A spooky image of a “cosmic cobweb” of galaxies is clustering in a way that confounds scientists.”
The Spooky Science of How Undead Spores Reanimate. These cells—and the way they reawaken—can tell biologists quite a lot about life, death, and the gray zone in between, reports Wired.
Unistellar Network Breaks Exoplanet Observing Record, reports the SETI Institute. “In November 2021, Unistellar Network members made their own observations of an exoplanet called Kepler-167 e as it passed in front of its star. Thirty one Citizen Astronomers from around the world participated in this 32-hour exoplanet hunt, each adding valuable data to the longest Unistellar exoplanet campaign at the time.”
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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