Astronomers have spotted a distant pair of titanic black holes each with a mass more than 800 million times that of our sun headed for a collision in a galaxy roughly 2.5 billion light-years away. The supermassive black holes (inset above) are lit up by warm gas and bright stars that surround the objects. The finding improves estimates of when astronomers will first detect gravitational waves emanating from the black hole pair “a million times louder than those detected by LIGO.”
“Astronomers had concentrated only on vegetation before, but with a better color palette, researchers can now look beyond a half-billion years and up to 2.5 billion years back on Earth’s history to match like periods on exoplanets,” said Lisa Lisa Kaltenegger, Cornell University professor of astronomy and director of the Carl Sagan Institute. “If an alien had used color to observe if our Earth had life, that alien would see very different colors throughout our planet’s history – going back billions of years – when different life forms dominated Earth’s surface.” (more…)
Arguably the most important Cosmological discovery ever made, Hubble’s Constant, is that our universe is expanding. Its stands, observes the Harvard -Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, along with the Copernican Principle — that there is no preferred place in the universe, and Olbers’ paradox — that the sky is dark at night, as one of the cornerstones of modern cosmology.
The “Planet Earth Report” connects you to headline news on the science, technology, discoveries, people and events changing our planet and the future of the human species.
The 13-minute period between the time the Apollo 11 crew members started the Eagle’s engine and when they touched down on the moon was packed with an entire podcast series’ worth of drama.
LISA, the European Space Agency’s planned Laser Interferometer Space Antenna, scheduled for launch in 2034. will comprise three spacecraft, arranged in a triangular formation, 2.5 million kilometers apart designed to function as an enormous, orbiting gravitational wave detector. With only a minor technological tweak LISA, could also function as a detector for signals broadcast by advanced extraterrestrial civilizations, according to Marek Abramowicz of Sweden’s University of Gothenburg.
