“This is really an origin story; for the first time we can explain how all nearby star formation began,” says astronomer and data visualization expert Catherine Zucker a NASA Hubble Fellow at the Harvard Center for Astrophysics and Space Science Institute about the discovery that Earth sits in a 1,000-light-year-wide void surrounded by thousands of young stars.
Astronomers discovered “a ringside seat into beautiful and dangerous physics that we have not seen before in our galaxy. This is the first such Wolf-Rayet star system to be discovered in our own galaxy,” explains Joseph Callingham of the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (ASTRON), lead author of the study reporting this system. “We never expected to find such a system in our own backyard.”
British physicist Stephen Wolfram believes extraterrestrial intelligent life is inevitable, but with a caveat. Although intelligent life is inevitable, we will never find it -at least not by searching in the Milky Way. We have a slim chance, he suggests, of distinguishing an ET artifact from a natural celestial object.
Imagine a galaxy filled with roaming, dark, lifeless island worlds – rogue, free-floating planets (FFPs) without the life-giving light of an alien host star. Welcome to the Milky Way Galaxy. Astronomers suggest that there may be more rogue planets than there are stars in the Milky Way.
Is information at the core of life in the Universe? Are we humans an anomaly? Join narrator, Nicole Butscher on this week’s journey of discovery from the emergence of the human “dataome” –a world of bits built of and for information, which was like a sudden invasion by extraterrestrials, or an asteroid impact that precipitates a mass extinction–to the discovery of what astronomers think is the first planet beyond the Milky Way (or is it something more interesting), and more.
In 2019 the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz for pioneering a new field in astronomy with the discovery of the first planet beyond our solar system, 51 Pegasi b. Since the discovery in 1991, over 4,000 exoplanets have been found in our home galaxy. “We answered a very old question,” Mayor said, which was debated by philosophers since the ancient Greeks: “are there other worlds in the Universe?”
Why Were the Earliest Galaxies In the Universe Brighter Than Those We See Today?
NASA LIVE: James Webb Space Telescope Arrives at Final Destination. What’s Next?James Webb Space Telescope Glides Into Its L2 Resting Point -An Epic Achievement for Humanity
Saturn’s “Death Star” Moon to What’s Buried Beneath Mars’ South Pole? (The Galaxy Report)
We Have Existed for Ten One-Billionths of Cosmic History to The Missing Continent (Planet Earth Report)
Violent Neutron Star Collision Discovered Near Earth’s Birthplace (Weekend Feature)
Alien Octopus Hypothesis (YouTube Video)
“The Exoplanet Paradox” -Worlds With Low Oxygen May Be Teeming with Life Based on Early Earth History
Astronomers Share Their Hopes for the JWST to Will Tardigrades Be the First Interstellar Travelers? (Today’s Galaxy Report)
Monster Black Hole in Tiny Galaxy Holds Clues to Their Existence in Early Universe
