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?”
So far, we have had only close calls from gamma ray explosions so large, scientists have suggested, that if they occurred within our solar neighborhood (less than 1,000 light years) they could potentially trigger mass extinctions on Earth.
Today’s stories include the Great Filter means we could die out before we discover alien life to White dwarf study suggests planets are as old as their stars to Early meteorites brought enough water to Mars to create a global ocean, and much more.
“The volume of space-time within range of our telescopes—what astronomers have traditionally called ‘the universe’—is only a tiny fraction of the aftermath of the big bang,” says astrophysicist Martin Rees. “We’d expect far more galaxies located beyond the horizon, unobservable, each of which –along with any intelligences it hosts– will evolve rather like our own.”
Today’s stories include Why a Puzzling New Image Of Jupiter Could Help Us Find Life Beyond Earth to Scientists Test Einstein’s Relativity On A Cosmological Scale and Discover Something Strange, and much more.
When NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft flew by the strange world of Neptune’s largest moon, Triton, three decades ago, it imaged a world as stunning as it was puzzling, revealing massive, dark plumes of icy material spraying out from its surface, a captured Kuiper Belt object that evolved, a potential ocean world with active plumes, an energetic ionosphere and a young, unique surface. Voyager 2 is the only spacecraft ever to have flown past Neptune, leaving a trail of intriguing, unanswered questions that NASA hopes to answer.
The Galaxy Report newsletter brings you daily news of space and science that has the capacity to provide clues to the mystery of our existence and add a much needed cosmic perspective in our current Anthropocene Epoch.
Will We Actually Be Able to Detect a Signal from an Alien Intelligence? (Weekend Feature)
Is Something Missing from the Standard Model of the Universe? (Holiday Feature)
Did Water Exist in the Galaxies of the Early Cosmos? (Holiday Feature)
Monster Galaxies at the Dawn of Time
Has Milky Way’s Twin Been Discovered to Will Artificial Intelligence Reveal New Laws of Physics? (The Galaxy Report)
“Alien Habitats Could Be Just About Anywhere”
Was the First Planet Beyond the Milky Way Discovered, or Something Even More Exotic? (Weekend Feature)
“Is Our Universe Extremely Unnatural, a Weird Permutation?” (Weekend Feature)
Eruption from an Object With a Magnetic Field One-Thousand-Trillion Times Stronger than Our Sun’s
