Insights from the world’s leading scientists on evolution, climate change, technology and extraterrestrial life. We are the only species of the billions of species that have existed on Earth that has shown an aptitude for radios and even we failed to build one during the first 99% of our 7 million year history, says Australia National University’s Charley Lineweaver.
Researchers are proposing the idea of using our planet itself as a “paleo-detector” to solve the enduring mystery of dark matter–Earth has been orbiting through interplanetary space for some 4.5 billion years, during which time it must have been penetrated by a new form of dark matter known as massive, super-heavy gravitinos. Strong and electromagnetic interactions with known matter may make this new form of dark matter particles with large mass, easier to track down despite their extreme rarity.
“It must have been a supernova, not so near as to kill us but not too far to be diluted in space,” said physicist Dominik Koll, at Australian National University, about the new discovery that our planet probably picked up stray particles not naturally produced on Earth while traveling through the Local Interstellar Cloud (image above), also known as the Local Fluff, for somewhere between 40,000 and 150,000 years and will probably not emerge for another 20,000 years.
“It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God – but to create him, wrote Arthur C Clarke, author of 2001 A Space Odyssey. Clarke also famously warned against a mission to explore the most intriguing of Jupiter’s 79 moons, which has now been given the green light to proceed to the final stages of development of NASA’s Europa Clipper Mission.
Recently, the world was transfixed when the first ever image of a black hole shown above was released by the Event Horizon Telescope. Or, to be more precise, the pictures showed the bright circle, called an Einstein ring, made by the light that just barely escaped the grasp of the black hole’s immense gravity. This ring of light was due to fact that, according the theory of general relativity, the fabric of spacetime itself becomes so contorted by the mass of the black hole that it acts like a huge lens.
“We know there were periods when the surface of Mars was frozen; we know there were periods when water flowed freely,” said Briony Horgan with Purdue University at the at the Goldschmidt Geochemistry Conference in Barcelona. “But we don’t know exactly when these periods were, and how long they lasted. We have never sent unmanned missions to areas of Mars which can show us these earliest rocks, so we need to use Earth-bound science to understand the geochemistry of what may have happened there.
