“If we are talking about exoplanets, things should be clear: we will not migrate there,” Nobel laureate Michel Mayor told the AFP. “These planets are much, much too far away. Even in the very optimistic case of a livable planet that is not too far, say a few dozen light years, which is not a lot, it’s in the neighborhood, the time to go there is considerable,” he added. “We are talking about hundreds of millions of days using the means we have available today. We must take care of our planet, it is very beautiful and still absolutely liveable.”
“Finding the axion is a bit like tuning a radio: You have to tune your antenna until you pick up the right frequency. Rather than music, experimentalists would be rewarded with ‘hearing’ the dark matter that the Earth is traveling through says Dr. Alexander Millar at the Department of Physics, Stockholm University.
The two areas of research, cosmology and exoplanets, “really, sort of tell us something very essential — existential — about our place in the universe,” Ulf Danielsson, theoretical physicist and a member of the Nobel Prize committee that selected the winners, said during an online broadcast.
“We went to Gale Crater because it preserves this unique record of a changing Mars,” said William Rapin of Caltech. “Understanding when and how the planet’s climate started evolving is a piece of another puzzle: When and how long was Mars capable of supporting microbial life at the surface?”
Twenty new moons have been discovered orbiting Saturn, bringing the planet’s total number of moons to 82, the most in the solar system, surpassing Jupiter, which has 79. The discovery, led by Carnegie’s Scott S. Sheppard, was announced Monday by the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center.
“The Galaxy Report” connects you to headline news on the science, technology, discoveries, people and events changing our knowledge of our Galaxy and beyond.
