“If space is truly infinite,” observes Dan Hooper, head of the Theoretical Astrophysics Group at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, in At the Edge of Time, “the implications are staggering. Within an infinite expanse of space, it would be hard to see any reason why there would not be an infinite number of galaxies, stars, and planets, and even an infinite number of intelligent or conscious beings, scattered throughout this limitless volume. That is the thing about infinity: it takes things that are otherwise very unlikely and makes them all inevitable.”
“Any extraterrestrial organisms we find will be made of the same atoms we are,” observes Harvard’s Center for Astrophysics, Avi Loeb, about the recent detection of a potential biosignature in the atmosphere of Venus, the nearest planet to Earth where NASA is currently considering sending a spacecraft.
Black holes are “a one-way door out of our universe,” said Event Horizon Telescope director and astronomer Sheperd S. Doeleman of the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics about discoveries of the enigmatic cosmic objects that led to three 2020 Noble Prize awards in physics. These “seductive dragon of the universe” described by astronomers as the “gates of hell, the end of spacetime and gateways to eternity” ”after the iconic image of the M87 galaxy supermassive black hole was unveiled in 2019, were first named “black holes” in 1983 by Princeton quantum physicist John Archibald Wheeler. (more…)
New findings by NANOGrav, the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves, could become the “discovery of the century” if the data has been generated by a network of giant filaments –cosmic strings–left over from the birth of the universe.
“Planet Earth Report” provides descriptive links to headline news by leading science journalists about the extraordinary discoveries, technology, people, and events changing our knowledge of Planet Earth and the future of the human species.
