“Early Mars was an extremely active planet from a geological point of view,” said Alberto G. Fairén, a visiting astrobiologist at Cornell University. “The planet had the conditions needed to support the presence of liquid water on the surface – and on Earth, where there’s water, there’s life. “So early Mars was a habitable planet,” he said. “Was it inhabited? That’s a question that the next rover Perseverance will help to answer.”
“It’s worthwhile to not just do what was done 60 years ago, but also to keep an eye out for very unusual things,” says SETI Institute astronomer Seth Shostak. “The universe has been around for three times as long as the Earth has been around, so there could be aliens out there that are very, very much more advanced than we are—not just 1,000 years, but millions and billions of years ahead.”
“In a sense, the galaxy hardest for us to see is our own,” wrote Issac Assimov. “For one thing, we are imprisoned within it, while the others can be viewed as a whole from outside… . Furthermore, we are far out from the center, and to make matters worse, we lie in a spiral arm clogged with dust. In other words, we are on a low roof on the outskirts of the city on a foggy day.”
New research has provided clues that galactic magnetars –young pulsars that spin more slowly than ordinary pulsars and have the most powerful magnetic fields in the universe– lying in close proximity to a black hole, could perhaps be the source of “fast radio millisecond-long bursts,” or FRBs –high-energy blasts that originate beyond our galaxy but whose exact nature and origin is unknown.
One new theory, says physicist Michio Kaku, is that the as yet undetected dark matter of the universe may be ordinary matter that makes up stars, planets and galaxies in a parallel universe. “If a galaxy is hovering above in another dimension,’ says Kaku, “we would not be able to see it. It would be invisible, yet we would feel its gravity. Hence, it might explain dark matter.”
