The two areas of research, cosmology and exoplanets, “really, sort of tell us something very essential — existential — about our place in the universe,” Ulf Danielsson, theoretical physicist and a member of the Nobel Prize committee that selected the winners, said during an online broadcast.
“It is fascinating to discover that a signal that traveled halfway through the universe, reaching our telescope after a journey of a few billion years, exhibits complex structure, like peaks separated by less than a millisecond,” says Wael Farah at Swinburne University of Technology, who built an automated system that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to revolutionize our ability to detect and capture fast radio bursts (FRBs) in real-time.
Fungi spores on the International Space Station (ISS) that can survive doses of radiation 200 times higher than those that would kill a human, researchers reported at the 2019 Astrobiology Science Conference, might also one day threaten other parts of the solar system hitchhiking on space missions from Earth. Outside of the space station, doses are higher—and they would be higher still on the hull of a spacecraft going to Mars or beyond.
“The fate of black holes in a quantum theory of gravity is, in my view, the most important problem in theoretical physics,” said Jorge Pullin, the Horace Hearne professor of theoretical physics at LSU.
“What’s exciting is that these objects are completely different from the majority of Earth-like planets,” says Caroline Dorn, astrophysicist at the Institute for Computational Science of the University of Zurich – “if they actually exist.” It’s very likely they do, says Dorn and the astrophysicists who made the discovery.
China’s Chang’e-4 lunar rover is due to touchdown on the far side of the moon around New Year, 2019 at the Von Kármán crater in Aitken Basin –the craggy and complex terrain of the lunar south pole region. The planet’s new space superpower will plant its flag. Will it also claim ownership?