The 1947 crash in the New Mexico desert that become legendary among UFO fans and conspiracy theorists turns out to have been nearly as strange a visit by an alien spaceship. Long after the Cold War ended, observers continue to report a pattern of UFO activity near missile silos and other nuclear weapons sites. Perhaps it is not surprising that two subjects —nuclear war and alien invasion—should be linked.
“We tend to think about particles as being tiny but, theoretically, there is no reason they can’t be as big as a galaxy,” says Asimina Arvanitaki, The Aristarchus chair in theoretical physics at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada about using solving the mystery of dark matter.
Researchers using ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array) observed signals of oxygen, carbon, and dust from a galaxy in the early Universe 13 billion years ago. This is the earliest galaxy where this useful combination of three signals has been detected. By comparing the different signals, the team determined that the galaxy is actually two galaxies merging together, making it the earliest example of merging galaxies yet discovered.
We didn’t know what the Sun looked like in its first billion years, and it’s super important because it likely changed how Venus’ atmosphere evolved and how quickly it lost water, said Prabal Saxena, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. “It also probably changed how quickly Mars lost its atmosphere, and it changed the atmospheric chemistry of Earth.”
“Man on the moon,” cried Walter Cronkite to an amazed world fifty years ago this summer. Although cosmologically, a mere blink of the eye, the USA celebrates the anniversary of the Apollo 11 Mission marking Neil Armstrong’s first walk on the moon. Meanwhile, China quietly explores the mysterious lunar farside, laying the foundation for the human species’ first moonbase and a radio telescope that will provide an unfettered window on the universe.
A tiny dwarf galaxy, ESO 495-21, three percent the size of the Milky Way, harbors a massive black hole that may offer clues as to how black holes and galaxies evolved in the early Universe. The origin of the central supermassive black holes in galaxies is still a matter of debate — do the galaxies form first and then crush material at their centers into black holes, or do pre-existing black holes gather galaxies around them? Do they evolve together — or could the answer be something else entirely?
