Globular clusters are the oldest visible objects in the Universe – each contains hundreds of thousands to occasionally over one million stars, all born at essentially the same time. They are densely packed into a spherical volume with a diameter over a thousand times smaller than the diameter of the Milky Way Galaxy. Globular clusters are thought to have formed soon after the Universe began nearly 13.8 billion years ago, at the same time as, or perhaps even before, the first galaxies formed.
Stephen Hawking once wrote about black holes that there is a singularity in our past which constitutes, in some sense, a beginning to the universe. On August 14, 2019, scientists with LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) and the Virgo detector in Italy, discovered of a mystery object of 2.6 solar masses as it merged with a black hole of 23 solar masses, placing it in a gap that lies between neutron stars and black holes.
“Our new discoveries represent much more powerful evidence for very high temperatures that could only be associated with a cosmic impact. To help with perspective, such high temperatures would completely melt an automobile in less than a minute,” said James Kennett, a UC Santa Barbara emeritus professor of geology, who with his colleagues first reported evidence of an event in 2012 of the direct effects of a fragmented comet on a human settlement. Such intensity, he added, could only have resulted from an extremely violent, high-energy, high-velocity phenomenon, something on the order of a cosmic impact.
“Lots of people just don’t understand that there’s a darker side to Antarctica,” says Klaus Dodds, professor of geopolitics at Royal Holloway University of London. “What we’re seeing is great power politics play out in a space that a lot of people think of as just frozen wastes.”
Through massive replication around the solar system we will be able to guarantee that the DNA Lunar Library will never be lost – even millions to billions of years in the future, said Nova Spivack, co-founder and Chairman of the Arch Mission Foundation. “We can definitely preserve our unique cultural heritage and biological record in a way that will survive for millions to billions of years, and that has not been possible before. We see the Lunar Library as the ultimate in cold storage for human civilization.”
“Before this discovery, Palaeolithic archaeologists have for a long time been convinced that unambiguous symbols first appeared when Homo sapiens entered Europe, about 40 000 years ago, and later replaced local Neanderthals,” says Christopher Henshilwood at the Centre for Early Sapiens Behaviour and University of the Witwatersrand. “Recent archaeological discoveries in Africa, Europe and Asia, in which members of our team have often participated, support a much earlier emergence for the production and use of symbols.”
The Galaxy Report newsletter brings you twice-weekly news of space and science that has the capacity to provide clues to the mystery of our existence and add a much needed cosmic perspective in our current Anthropocene Epoch.
