In a half-second flash of light in May of this year, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope detected the most powerful explosion since the Big Bang –the brightest infrared light from a short gamma-ray burst ever seen with a bizarre glow that is more luminous than previously thought was possible, unleashing more energy in a blink of an eye than the Sun will produce over its entire 10-billion-year lifetime. This near-infrared emission was 10 times brighter than predicted, defying conventional models.
“One in 200 stars has habitable Earth-like planets surrounding it – in the galaxy, half a billion stars have Earth-like planets going around them – that’s huge, half a billion. So when we look at the night sky, it makes sense that someone is looking back at us,” says physicist, Michio Kaku, author of The Future of Humanity.
The famed astrophysicist, Lord Martin Rees, suggests that gas giant Jupiter’s dense, terrifying atmosphere –with its constant storms with thunderheads reaching 40 miles from base to top — five times taller than those on Earth, and powerful lightning flashes up to three times more powerful than Earth’s largest “superbolts”– may be inhabited in the upper regions above by floating balloon-like creatures.
Ever since Voyager 1 spacecraft flew past Jupiter in March, 1979 (where a day lasts 10 hours), NASA scientists have been captivated by the mysteries that have been unveiled. A new study argues that the four largest moons of the largest planet in the solar system –three of them harboring oceans believed to 100 kilometers deep or more–may have a bigger influence on each other’s tides than the gas giant itself does. The findings suggest that oceans on these moons could then generate more heat from friction and could be more suitable to hosting life than previously thought.
On Tuesday we wrote that Mars tugs at the human imagination like no other planet. “It’s there,” said astronaut Buzz Aldrin, “waiting to be reached.” Today, NASA launched the Perseverance rover that will, if all goes as planned, touch down at the Jezero Crater landing site in February 2021 as a robotic explorer. Jezero, a 45-kilometre-wide crater is home to the remains of an ancient river delta. NASA researchers have detected deposits of hydrated silica from previous flybys –a mineral that’s especially good at preserving microfossils and other signs of past life.
In Space Odyssey 2001, HAL 9000, the Heuristically Programmed Algorithmic Computer, consigned the crew commander to his death by refusing to open the pod bay doors. Leaping forward to today, with life hopefully transcending Arthur C. Clarke’s fiction, NASA has announced a visionary step: that intelligent computer systems will be installed on space probes to direct the search for life on distant planets and moons, starting with the 2022/23 ESA ExoMars mission, before moving beyond to moons such as Jupiter’s Europa, and of Saturn’s Enceladus and Titan.
