“In the end, the most improbable and hence the most puzzling aspect of space is its very existence. The simple fact that we live in an apparently smooth and regular three dimensional world represents one of the greatest challenges to the developing quantum theory of gravity,” wrote physicist Lee Smolin in Three Roads To Quantum Gravity. “If you look around at the world seeking mystery, you may reflect that one of the biggest mysteries is that we live in a world in which it is possible to look around, and see as far as we like. The great triumph of the quantum theory of gravity may be that it will explain to us why this is so.”
It’s been said that Mars tugs at the human imagination like no other planet. “It’s there,” said astronaut Buzz Aldrin, “waiting to be reached” and this July, 2020, NASA is planning to launch a mission to grab its first ‘taste’ of the Red Planet –the only known planet inhabited solely by robots. On Thursday, 30 July, NASA will launch the Perseverance rover that will, hopefully, touch down at the Jezero Crater landing site in February 2021 as a robotic explorer.
A “lost world,” exoplanet NGTS-11b, the size and mass of Saturn with an orbit of thirty-five days around a star 620 light years away, is located five times closer to its sun than Earth is to our own. The planet is among hundreds of alien worlds that astronomers, using NASA’s alien-planet-hunting TESS telescope data, are pioneering a new method to track down and characterize in the hope of finding cooler, potentially habitable planets.
Often referred to as the “Bermuda Triangle of Space,” the magnetic field in the South Atlantic dates back millions of years. A new study provides the first long-term analysis of the phenomena, revealing that the anomaly in the magnetic field in the South Atlantic is not a unique event –similar anomalies existed eight to 11 million years ago as part of a pattern lasting for over 1,000 years. characterized by a significant reduction in the strength of Earth’s magnetic field compared with areas at similar geographic latitudes.
