Check out today’s eclectic coverage of programs broadcast and streamed on the (occasionally “far side”) state of affairs on our pale blue dot, signaling our existence to possible exo-civilizations.
“FM signals and those of broadcast television travel out to space at the speed of light. Any eavesdropping alien civilization will know all about our TV programs (probably a bad thing), will hear all our FM music (probably a good thing), and know nothing of the politics of AM talk-show hosts (probably a safe thing).” –Neil deGrasse Tyson, Death By Black Hole
“Imagine the beings that exist there!” Is our thought every time we look at the spectacular ESO image of spiral galaxy NGC 3981 suspended in the inky blackness of space. NGC 3981, lying approximately 65 million light years from Earth, is part of the NGC 4038 group, which also contains the well-known interacting Antennae Galaxies. This group is part of the larger Crater Cloud, which is itself a smaller component of the Virgo Supercluster, the colossal collection of galaxies that harbors our Milky Way galaxy.
“Mercury’s interior is still active, due to the molten core that powers the planet’s weak magnetic field, relative to Earth’s,” said Antonio Genova, an assistant professor at Sapienza University of Rome who led the research while at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. “Mercury’s interior has cooled more rapidly than our planet’s. Mercury may help us predict how Earth’s magnetic field will change as the core cools.”
“The final theory of nature must be octonionic,” observed Michael Atiyah, a British mathematician who united mathematics and physics during the 1960s in a way not seen since the days of Isaac Newton.
“One particularly interesting possibility is that these long-lived dark particles are coupled to the Higgs boson in some fashion—that the Higgs is actually a portal to the dark world,” said LianTao Wang, a University of Chicago physicist, referring to the last holdout particle in physicists’ grand theory of how the universe works, discovered at the LHC in 2012. “We know for sure there’s a dark world, and there’s more energy in it than there is in ours. It’s possible that the Higgs could actually decay into these long-lived particles.”
Over 4000 exoplanets have been discovered since the first one in 1995, but the vast majority of them orbit their stars with relatively short periods of revolution. But five new planets have been discovered with periods of revolution between 15.6 and 40.4 years, with masses ranging approximately from 3 to 27 times that of Jupiter. A new study using the EULER telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile increases the list of 26 planets with a rotation period greater than 15 years.
