From dark-matter life to billion-year old technological civilizations: In 2019, several leading astrophysicists from NASA to Harvard and Columbia universities have publicly announced their view that aliens are not science fiction: that advanced and ancient technological civilizations may exist but be beyond our comprehension or ability to detect. As early as the NASA Contact Conference in 2002, which focused on serious speculation about advanced extraterrestrial life, an attendee loudly interrupted the keynote speech with the observation that “We have absolutely no idea what is out there!”
An enormous “something” more massive than a star, appears to have torn a hole in part of the Milky Way’s halo. The “dark substructure” was found in data from Gaia spacecraft observations—a mission producing the most detailed 3D map of our galaxy—with Harvard’s Ana Bonaca noticing a perturbation in a tidal stream. Bonaca is a leading authority on how the tidal field of the Milky Way galaxy disrupts globular clusters, and what the resulting debris can tell us about the underlying distribution of dark matter. (more…)
“We actually saw this decay happen. It’s the longest, slowest process that has ever been directly observed, and our dark matter detector was sensitive enough to measure it,” said Ethan Brown, a particle physicist at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, about a mind-boggling process that takes more than one trillion times longer than the age of the universe, advancing the frontiers of knowledge about the most fundamental characteristics of matter. “It’s amazing to have witnessed this process, and it says that our detector can measure the rarest thing ever recorded.”
Did NASA scientists detect a dark matter signal from deep inside the Milky Way? In December of 2017, the Chandra X-Ray Observatory observed a strange and distinctive X-ray signal from deep inside the dynamic center of the Milky Way, the 3.5 keV line, that researchers believed could help them in proving the existence of the hidden, dark side of our universe.
“The really exciting thing about primordial black holes is that there are so many mysteries that in principle they could explain,” says Stephen Hawking’s colleague, physicist Bernard Carr. “Not the least of them being the existence of dark matter and dark energy.” (more…)
“Finding the axion is a bit like tuning a radio: You have to tune your antenna until you pick up the right frequency. Rather than music, experimentalists would be rewarded with ‘hearing’ the dark matter that the Earth is traveling through says Dr. Alexander Millar at the Department of Physics, Stockholm University.