In February 2001, an eruption from the Surt volcano on the hellscape of Jupiter’s moon, Io, the volcanic epi-center of our solar system, exploded with an estimated output of an almost incomprehensible 78,000 gigawatts. By comparison, the 1992 eruption of Mount Etna, Sicily, was estimated at 12 gigawatts. During its peak, observed by the WM Keck II Telescope on Hawaii, its output almost matched the eruptive power of all of Io’s active volcanoes combined.
In February 2020, four distinguished astrophysicists —Jonathan Carroll-Nellenback, Adam Frank, Jason Wright, Caleb Scharf— suggested that Earth may have remained unvisited by space-faring civilizations all the while existing in a galaxy of interstellar civilizations seeded by moving stars that spread alien life, offering a solution to the perplexing Fermi paradox. They concluded that a planet-hopping civilization could populate the Milky Way in as little as 650,000 years.
The discovery of black holes was the first collision of quantum gravity with general relativity. In 2019, astrophysicists at Ontario’s Western University found evidence for the direct formation of black holes that do not need to emerge from a star remnant. The production of black holes in the early universe, formed from massive seeds aided by gravitational fields soon after the Big Bang, provide scientists with an explanation for what appeared to be the anomaly of extremely massive black holes at a very early stage in the history of our universe.
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A string of 13 dwarf galaxies in orbit around the massive galaxy Andromeda –remnants of the population of primordial structures that coalesced to form giant galaxies like the Milky Way–are spread across a flat plane more than one million light years wide and only 30,000 light years thick –a distance so vast that they have yet to complete a single orbit. The 2016 discovery suggests that conventional ideas regarding the formation of galaxies are missing something fundamental.
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Editor, Jackie Faherty, astrophysicist, Senior Scientist with AMNH. Jackie was formerly a NASA Hubble Fellow at the Carnegie Institution for Science. Aside from a love of scientific research, she is a passionate educator and can often be found giving public lectures in the Hayden Planetarium. Her research team has won multiple grants from NASA, NSF, and the Heising Simons foundation to support projects focused on characterising planet-like objects. She has also co-founded the popular citizen science project entitled Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 which invites the general public to help scan the solar neighbourhood for previously missed cold worlds. A Google Scholar, Faherty has over 100 peer reviewed articles in astrophysical journals and has been an invited speaker at universities and conferences across the globe. Jackie received the 2020 Vera Rubin Early Career Prize from the American Astronomical Society, an award that recognises scientists who have made an impact in the field of dynamical astronomy and the 2021 Robert H Goddard Award for science accomplishments.
“When we look far into the distant universe, we are observing objects way in the past – when they were young. We expected to find that these distant giants would appear as a comparatively small pair of vague lobes. To our surprise, we found that these giants still appear enormous even though they are so far away,” said astrophysicist Michael D. Smith at University of Kent. Conventional wisdom tells us that large objects appear smaller as they get farther from us, but this fundamental law of classical physics is reversed when we observe the distant universe.
This week’s “Heard in the Milky Way” offers audio and video talks and interviews with leading astronomers and astrophysicists that range from Would Data from an Alien Intelligence be Lethal for Us to Neal Stephenson on Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI and the Future of Humanity to Is Alien Life Weirder than We Think, and much more. This new weekly feature, curated by The Daily Galaxy editorial staff, takes you on a journey with stories that change our knowledge of Planet Earth, our Galaxy, and the vast Cosmos beyond. Highly recommended for insomniacs.
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.
Giant Asteroid Impacts Created Earth’s Continents to Michio Kaku: “We’ll Make Contact with Aliens in This Century” (Planet Earth Report Weekend)
Black Hole Robots to Physics of Nothing Key to Understanding Origin of the Universe (The Galaxy Report Weekend)
The Language That Doesn’t Use “No” to Why Do JWST’s Images Inspire Panic Among Cosmologists? (Planet Earth Report)
Michio Kaku On the Shift in the UFO Phenomenon to The Psychology of Alien Contact (The Galaxy Report)
Io, Jupiter’s Exploding Moon: Unique in the Milky Way?
Could Dark Matter Be a Source of Light In the Universe?
Human Brain Did Not Shrink 3,000 Years Ago to The Insect Apocalypse (Planet Earth Report)
Building Blocks for Life Found at Milky Way’s Center to Does Light Live Forever? (The Galaxy Report Weekend)Does Life on Earth Have a Purpose to Ancient ‘Ghost’ Tracks of the West (Planet Earth Report)The Origin of Zero to What Earth’s Minerals Can Tell Us About Aliens (The Galaxy Report)
