The secret history of Earth’s supernova impacts: armed with data from SN 1987A, the supernova Johannes Kepler spotted in our own Milky Way galaxy in 1604, scientists calculated a theoretical radius of doom, inside which a supernova would have grievous effects. They concluded, following Stephen Hawking’s dire prediction, The bottom line was that there would be a supernova close enough to the Earth to drastically affect the ozone layer about once every billion years.
Using the Lovell Telescope, an international team led by Jodrell Bank Observatory discovered 32 fast radio bursts (FRBs), among the most enigmatic and powerful events in the cosmos, initially thought to be one-off events over a four-year study, revealing the presence of a regular sequence in the burst activity could imply that the powerful bursts are linked to the orbital motion of a massive star, a neutron star or a black hole. The emission from the FRB, known as 121102, follows a cyclic pattern, with radio bursts observed in a window lasting approximately 90 days followed by a silent period of 67 days. The same behavior then repeats every 157 days.
The sublime beauty and the danger of physics is that sometimes things exist that we can never see. Which led scientists to ask: Was an unknown object, perhaps a cosmic string, weird one-dimensional defects in space-time that should be out there, somewhere, detected at the Milky Way’s galactic center in 2016? If yes, it could have profound implications for understanding gravity, space-time and the universe itself.
“I wondered had I really oversold the Hubble. I have to admit that, since, I have been convinced that I didn’t,” said Nancy Grace Roman, NASA’s first Chief Astronomer. Today, NASA announced that it is naming its next-generation ‘dark-energy’ space telescope, Hubble’s successor, the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST), in her honor.
Despite knowing from the geological record that the first multicellular organism, which eventually led to today’s technological civilization, took approximately 4 billion years, scientists still do not understand how life occurred, which has important implications for the likelihood of finding life elsewhere in the universe. “The odds that higher life forms might have emerged through evolutionary processes is comparable with the chance that a tornado sweeping through a junk yard might assemble a Boeing 747,” said British astrophysicist Fred Hoyle.
