“Hubble simply doesn’t go far enough into the infrared” to see the hidden galaxies of the early universe, said Rogier Windhorst of Arizona State University, co-author of a new study using the near-infrared capabilities of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to probe known quasars, ‘quasi-stellar radio sources’, in hopes of spotting the surrounding glow of their host galaxies, without significant detections, suggesting that cocoons of dust that absorb visible light within the galaxies is obscuring the light of their stars.
“Historically, our assumption has been that the region around Jupiter is fairly empty, cleaned out by the giant planet’s gravity, but our results teach us that there is a region that is constantly being fed,” said Kathryn Volk at the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory in 2019 about a constant source of new objects that may help explain the surprising rate of icy body impacts with Jupiter, such as the Shoemaker-Levy 9 event in 1994 when over twenty fragments of comet that collided with Jupiter were observed by astronomers at hundreds of observatories around the world.
This past February, four distinguished astrophysicists —Jonathan Carroll-Nellenback, Adam Frank, Jason Wright, Caleb Scharf— suggested in new research that Earth may have remained unvisited by space-faring civilizations all the while existing in a galaxy of interstellar civilizations seeded by moving stars that spread alien life, offering a solution to the perplexing Fermi paradox. They concluded that a planet-hopping civilization could populate the Milky Way in as little as 650,000 years.
The blurry orange image of the monster black hole the size of our solar system at the center of massive elliptical galaxy M87 captured by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) on April 10, 2019, was one of the most extraordinary achievements in modern science. The image is an epic example of the human species ability to imagine the existence of an object that not long ago, scientists of the stature of an Einstein, believed “did not exist in the real world,” nor that a fathomless dark creation existed at the very real, violent center of our home galaxy.
New research by Yale astronomers suggests that our Moon may harbor clues that Venus may have had an Earth-like environment billions of years ago, with water and a thin atmosphere. Their findings follow recent studies suggesting that our sister planet may have been the solar system’s first habitable planet.
