“They’re out there,” goes the common quip about extraterrestrials. It would seem more likely to be true in light of a 2019 study by astrophysicists at the Georgia Institute of Technology who modeled the evolution of axial tilts of Earth-like analogs in different star systems, including binary stars. Earth’s axial tilt varies only slightly, an important ingredient for climate stability that favors the evolution of complex life. Of all their simulated Earth analogs with axial tilts similarly steady to Earth’s, the astrophysicists found that 87% of them were in binary star systems.
Maxwell Moe, astrophysicist, NASA Einstein Fellow, University of Arizona. Max can be found two nights a week probing the mysteries of the Universe at the Kitt Peak National Observatory.
“We always thought of our Galaxy as an inactive galaxy, with a not so bright center,” said Magda Guglielmo from the University of Sydney about 2019 Hubble Space Telescope data showing that a titanic, expanding beam of energy sprang from close to the SgrA*, the supermassive black hole in the center of the Milky Way, 3.5 million years ago, shooting a cone-shaped burst of radiation through both poles of the Galaxy and beyond into deep space.
Avi Shporer, Research Scientist, MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. Avi was formerly a NASA Sagan Fellow at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). His motto, not surprisingly, is a quote from Carl Sagan: “Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”
“There are precious few fossil relics of the early Universe,” Brian Keating, Chancellor’s Distinguished Professor of Physics at UC San Diego, and author of Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner,” told The Daily Galaxy. “Just after the Big Bang,” Keating explained, “came the epoch of Big Bang nucleosynthesis, ending a few minutes later. The Cosmic Microwave Background, the universe’s oldest light, came about 380,000 years later. Then the great cosmic darkness began. That darkness had to end, or else we would not be here asking what caused the Universe to be so dim.
Maxwell Moe, astrophysicist, NASA Einstein Fellow, University of Arizona. Max can be found two nights a week probing the mysteries of the Universe at the Kitt Peak National Observatory.
In 2019, astronomers accidentally discovered the faint, shimmering blob of a monster galaxy cloaked in dust and a lot of mystery in the early universe. Like a cosmic Yeti, the scientific community generally regarded these galaxies as folklore, given the lack of evidence of their existence, but astronomers in the United States and Australia managed to snap a picture of the beast for the first time. The discovery provides new insights into the some of the biggest galaxies in the universe.
“NASA’s ENIGMA (Evolution of Nanomachines In Geospheres and Microbial Ancestors) research team,” biophysicist Paul Falkowski told The Daily Galaxy, “is focused on answering a single, compelling question in astrobiology: How did proteins evolve to become the predominant catalysts of life on Earth?”
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