Thirteen billion years ago our universe was dark. There were neither stars nor galaxies; there was only hydrogen gas left over after the Big Bang. Eventually hydrogen atoms began to clump together to form stars—the very first ones to exist—initiating a major phase in the evolution of the universe, known as the Epoch of Reionization, or EoR.
“Our form of life and intelligence,” observes Silvano Colombano at NASA’s Ames Research Center, “may just be a tiny first step in a continuing evolution that may well produce forms of intelligence that are far superior to ours and no longer based on carbon machinery.”
Described as “the gates of hell and the end of spacetime” –the international group of scientists of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) that engaged the world with the first ever image of a gargantuan black hole in the M87 galaxy and just won $3 million for the “Oscar of science”, are planning a sequel.
How does an entire planet change the speed of its rotation in 20 years? That’s the sort of change that takes hundreds of millions of years. Even more mysterious was the Cassini Mission’s detection of electromagnetic patterns that suggested the that Saturn’s rotation is different in the northern and southern hemispheres.
“This planet is unlike the planets in our solar system, but more than that, it is unlike any other exoplanets we have discovered so far,” says Caltech’s Sarah Blunt about a planet discovered with three times the mass of Jupiter that travels on a long, slingshot-shaped path around its star.
