Chinese astronomers plan to use the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST), the world’s largest telescope, to probe dark regions in the Milky Way that are rich in atomic and molecular gases and cosmic dust, known as interstellar dark clouds –the birthplaces of new stars, planets, and possibly life. They hope to find the answer to “how many new suns could emerge in the Milky Way in the future?” (more…)
“We don’t yet know where methane on Mars comes from,” tweeted Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s Associate Administrator for the Science Mission Directorate. “A leading idea is that methane on Mars is being released from underground reservoirs created by past biology. But sometimes, methane is a sign of geology rather than biology.”
In contrast to Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb’s optimism that extraterrestrials are less speculative than dark matter or extra dimensions, a study that we posted in September of 2018 conducted by three scholars from the Future of Humanity Institute (FHI) at Oxford University, suggests that although we exist in a universe with a potential 50 quintillion habitable planets, the expectation that life — from inorganic to bacteria to sentient beings —abiogenesis– has or will develop on other planets as it has on Earth, might be based more on optimism than scientific evidence.
Theoretical physicist Nima Arkani-Hamed, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, N.J., takes us past the edge, beyond Einstein, beyond space-time and quantum mechanics and the tropes of 20th-century physics, to a spectacular new vision of the cosmos. (more…)
“This data release is a tremendous milestone for the Breakthrough Listen team,” said Dr. Danny Price of the search “pipeline” that scans through billions of radio channels, looking for signals of radio-transmitting extraterrestrial civilizations in our Galactic neighborhood that are too narrow and well-defined to result from natural processes.
“Many physicists believe that there must a beautiful set of laws in Nature and that one way to quantify the beauty is by symmetry. Some of the symmetries may be hidden in our world, but they should manifest themselves if we look at Nature at a more fundamental level. We showed that this expectation is wrong once we take into account the gravity,” said Caltech’s Hirosi Ooguri, Director of the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe, about a new study that has found that, when gravity is combined with quantum mechanics, symmetry is not possible.
