”Alien-Haunted World to The Comet that Forever Changed Planet Earth"
It's perhaps fitting after our hallucinatory, jarring week of the Impeachment Trial and the silent invasion of seven new COVID-19 variants, that the cosmos should offer up stories ranging from The Alien Haunted World to The Comet That Forever Changed Planet Earth and The Death of Mars.
"Aliens may be out there. And we are looking for them" writes one of my favorite astrophysicists, Columbia University's Caleb Scharf, in The Alien Haunted World for Nautilus in response to Harvard theoretical astrophysicist Avi Loeb's provocative new book, Extraterrestrial, in which he attempts to make a case that a recent interstellar object passing through our solar system (the ‘Oumuamua object) could have been a piece of alien technology.
Scharf looks at Loeb's "Oumuamua" conjecture as metaphor. "There are devoted and talented scientists who pursue the exquisite possibility that somewhere there are alien minds sending out structured, information-rich signals, or repurposing their environments in ways that we—other scraps of thinking life—might just be able to spot across the gaping void of interstellar space,” writes Scharf. “But so too is a clear memory of the many times where enthusiasm for a provocative idea about alien life has given way to disappointment—from fossils in Martian meteorites to arsenic-laced microbes. Fingers have been burnt before in the quest to find clues to life in the universe."
The Comet --"That Forever Changed Planet Earth" reports The Daily Galaxy --"It must have been an amazing sight, but we don't want to see that again," said Harvard astrophysicist, Avi Loeb about the comet that created the the Chicxulub crater off the coast of Mexico that spans 93 miles and runs 12 miles deep that forever changed Earth's evolutionary history when it crashed 66 million years ago.
“The asteroid itself was so large that, even at the moment of impact, the top of it might have still towered more than a mile above the cruising altitude of a 747,” observed Peter Brannen in Ends of The World. “In its nearly instantaneous descent, it compressed the air below it so violently that it briefly became several times hotter than the surface of the sun,” hitting Earth with enough force enough to lift a mountain back into space at escape velocity.
Mars February 18, 2021--"May Change the Way We Think About Our Origins and Extraterrestrial Life" reports The Daily Galaxy --”No cities. No seas. No forests and no battlegrounds. No prairies. No nations. No histories and no legends. No memories. Just features, features and names. Argyre and Hellas and Isidis. Olympus and Alba and Pavonis. Schiaparelli and Noctis Labyrinthus, the haunting Labyrinths of Night,” writes Oliver Morton in Mapping Mars.
Seven minutes of harrowing descent to the Red Planet will occur on February 18th when NASA's Perseverance rover -- a robotic “scientist” weighing 2,260 pounds--will parachute through the tenuous Martian air, marking a new era in red planet exploration. Once at the top of the Red Planet’s atmosphere, a science-fiction movie descent begins as it drops through temperatures equivalent to the surface of the Sun, along with a supersonic parachute inflation, and the first ever autonomous guided landing on Mars delivering the biggest, heaviest, cleanest, and most sophisticated six-wheeled robotic geologist ever launched into space north of the Martian equator.
“The Death of Mars” –Pluto-Size Asteroid Ignited Ancient Climate Change, reports The Daily Galaxy --In the mid-1980s, a group of American archaeologists pored over satellite images trying to understand what had become of the Mayan civilization that had once ruled over Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, discovered a pattern: a near-perfect ring of sinkholes -cenotes- about 200km across, encircling the Yucatecan capital, Merida, and port towns of Sisal and Progreso. They had a hunch that the pattern created by an ancient asteroid explosion may yield clues to the lost ocean and atmosphere of Mars.
In Science Fiction, We Are Never Home writes Steve Erickson for Nautilus, technology leads to exile and yearning. “The first science fiction story,” he writes, “whose title novelist Arthur C. Clarke and director Stanley Kubrick would borrow for their own odyssey three millennia later, Ulysses departs home for glory in the Trojan wars, then overcomes one fantastic obstacle after another to arrive back in an Ithaca that’s no longer the place frozen in memory. Earth-bound, claustrophobic, curbed by our dimensional limits, we’re compelled by the imperative of exploration; far-flung, rootless, untethered to reference points, we covet the familiar where we believe we’re safe, even if the familiar never really was all that safe.”
“A Surprise Almost as Old as the Universe” –Hubble Detects Invisible Mass of Small Black Holes at Globular Cluster Core reports The Daily Galaxy --Hubble astronomers found something extraordinary at the heart of nearby globular cluster NGC 6397 --a concentration of smaller black holes lurking there instead of one monster, supermassive black hole. Ancient stellar jewelry boxes, globular star clusters are densely packed objects, glittering with the light of a million stars in a ball only about 100 light-years across dating back almost to the birth of the Milky Way.
“The Methuselah Dilemma” — Atacama Cosmology Telescope Resolves the True Age of Our Universe, reports The Daily Galaxy. "In 2013, the Hubble Space Telescope found the birth certificate of oldest known star in the universe, cataloged as HD 140283, aptly named 'Methuselah'. The star, located in the constellation Libra, which is at the very first stages of expanding into a red giant, could be as old as 14.5 billion years (plus or minus 0.8 billion years), which at first glance would make it older than the universe’s calculated age of about 13.8 billion years, creating what we commonly call a dilemma.