Sun-like stars represent just 15 per cent of all stars in the Milky Way. More than half of those, in turn, exist in binary star systems that have also been disregarded as being too different from the conditions present in the solar system. The search for Earth twins therefore covers a nearly insignificant fraction of all the outcomes in nature.
The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) captured this strip of stars and galaxies in the southern sky all the way through one 30-minute duration on Tuesday, Aug. 7, 2018. Created through combining the view from all four of its cameras, here is TESS’ “crack of dawn,” from the 1st staring at sector that can be used for making a choice on planets around other stars. Notable features in this swath of the southern sky come with the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds and a globular cluster known as NGC 104, also known as 47 Tucanae. The brightest stars within the image, Beta Gruis and R Doradus, saturated an entire column of camera detector pixels at the satellite’s moment and fourth cameras.
Observes MIT biophysicist Jeremy England, who created a huge stir in 2013 with a new theory that cast the origin of life as an inevitable outcome of thermodynamics –suggesting that under certain conditions, groups of atoms will naturally restructure themselves so as to burn more and more energy, facilitating the incessant dispersal of energy and the rise of “entropy” or disorder in the universe.
Humanity may be as few as 10 years away from discovering evidence of extraterrestrial life. Once we do, it will only deepen the mystery of where alien intelligence might be hiding. In the seventh episode of Crazy/Genius, the new podcast from The Atlantic on tech, science, and culture, puts the question to several experts, including Ellen Stofan, the former chief scientist of NASA and current director of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum; Adam Frank, a writer and astrophysicist at the University of Rochester; Anders Sandberg, a scientist and futurist at the University of Oxford; and Tim Urban, the science essayist at Wait But Why.
The “appearance of this Other” might be imminent, warns China’s preeminent science-fiction author of The Three-Body Problem, and that it might result in our extinction. “Perhaps in ten thousand years, the starry sky that humankind gazes upon will remain empty and silent,” he writes in the postscript to one of his books. “But perhaps tomorrow we’ll wake up and find an alien spaceship the size of the Moon parked in orbit.”
The National Solar Observatory in Sunspot, New Mexico that caught the attention of the world when it was shut down on September 6 citing a “security issue” by FBI agents who reportedly swooped on the facility after arriving in Blackhawk helicopters, has asked for “patience” as it continues to be locked down. Members of the FBI, the Albuquerque Journal reported, were on the scene.
