The Cosmos provided a bonanza of amazing news headlines and unanswered questions for our Thanksgiving Holiday enjoyment, from will a twisted Universe save cosmology to Homo sapiens “shadow species” to the expanding Universe will break the speed of light and NASA’s new “evidence of alien Life” scale. “The Galaxy Report” brings you news of space and science that has the capacity to provide clues to the mystery of our existence and adds a much needed cosmic perspective in our current Anthropocene Epoch.
In 2017, an international group of astronomers and physicists excitedly reported the first simultaneous detection of light and gravitational waves from the same source–a merger of two neutron stars. In the world of astrophysics, Aug. 17, 2017, was a red-letter day. “This is a game-changer for astrophysics,” said UC Santa Barbara faculty member Andy Howell, who leads the supernova group at the Las Cumbres Observatory (LCO). “A hundred years after Einstein theorized gravitational waves, we’ve seen them and traced them back to their source to find an explosion with new physics of the kind we’ve only dreamed about.”
With stories ranging from the quest for the origin of the universe to the strange cloud in the Outer Solar System to the 60-year extraterrestrial SETI silence of our Milky Way Galaxy, this week’s “Galaxy Report” brings you news of space and science that has the capacity to provide clues to the mystery of our existence and adds a much needed cosmic perspective in our current Anthropocene Epoch.
In 2019, two mysterious globular structures were spotted in the galaxy NGC 3079, located 67 million light years from Earth. Astronomers unveiled nuclear “super bubbles” thousands of light years wide that act like particle accelerators 100 times more powerful than the Large Hadron Collider, and are around 2,000 times longer, on average, than our solar system.
“In some pockets of space, far beyond the limits of our observations,” wrote cosmologist Dan Hooper at the University of Chicago in an email to The Daily Galaxy, referring to the theory of eternal inflation and the inflationary multiverse: “the laws of physics could be very different from those we find in our local universe. Different forms of matter could exist, which experience different kinds of forces. In this sense, what we call ‘the laws of physics’, instead of being a universal fact of nature, could be an environmental fact, which varies from place to place, or from time to time.”
Avi Shporer, Research Scientist, MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. A Google Scholar, Avi was formerly a NASA Sagan Fellow at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). His motto, not surprisingly, is a quote from Carl Sagan: “Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”
“The only things our planet and Mars really have in common is that both are rocky planets with some water ice and both have robots (and Mars doesn’t even have that many),” writes Shannon Stirone for The Atlantic. “Granted, walking around on Mars would be a life-changing, amazing, profound experience,” she notes. “But visiting as a proof of technology or to expand the frontier of human possibility is very different from living there. It is not in the realm of hospitable to humans. Mars will kill you.”
Avi Shporer, Research Scientist, MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. A Google Scholar, Avi was formerly a NASA Sagan Fellow at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). His motto, not surprisingly, is a quote from Carl Sagan: “Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”
The Galaxy Report is our new daily email bringing you news of space and science that has the capacity to provide clues to the mystery of our existence and adds a much needed cosmic perspective in our current Anthropocene Epoch.
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Rise of Oxygen –The Evolutionary Moment that Shaped Our Habitable Planet
Scientists Warn of Extraterrestrial Microbial Invasion to How Dangerous is COVID Mutant B.1.1.529 (Planet Earth Report)
“Life is Electric” –NASA Explores Origins of Life on Earth & Beyond (Holiday-Weekend Feature)
Humans Could Be the Dominant Species in the Universe to Albert Einstein’s Forgotten Idea (The Galaxy Report –Holiday Feature)
“Shaking the Fabric of Spacetime” –Recreating Quark Matter of the Big BangThe Post-Human Dog to Will mRNA Make Us Superhuman? (Planet Earth Report)
The Quasar Enigma –Massively Dense Luminous Objects at the Dawn of the Universe
Alien Chemistry of Other Worlds to One-Month Voyage to Jupiter (The Galaxy Report)
