Death by Primordial Black Hole to U.F.O.s and the Search for Alien Life

Why aren’t we talking more about UFOs? asks  Megan McArdle in Washington Post Opinion --"We are now getting previews of the latest government investigation into that question, a declassified version of which is scheduled to be released soon. Sifting through scores of incidents of UFOs that seemed to move in ways that exceed current technology, the investigators reportedly found no evidence that they were looking at extraterrestrial technology — but also no way to rule it out. Apparently, all they could say for sure was that most of the reported sightings did not involve involve secret U.S. government advanced technology."

Is the Milky Way's supermassive black hole a colossal  glob of dark matter? asks SyFy Wire. Whatever is lurking in the heart of the galaxy might be something weirder and even more of an enigma than any black hole. Try dark matter. At least that is what a team of researchers believe after the suspicion raised by a huge gas cloud that passed what was allegedly a black hole gargantuan enough to shred it and feast on its remains. Instead, the cloud just floated by as if there was no monstrous gravitational force sneaking up from behind. That could be because there never was.

Death by Primordial Black Hole --If such an object a mere thousand times bigger than an atom passed through your body, the result would not be pretty, reports Harvard astrophysicist, Avi Loeb in Scientific American. " Pan STARRS and the forthcoming Vera C. Rubin Observatory take advantage of the sun as a lamppost that illuminates the dark space near us. An early alert would allow us to deflect dangerous asteroids away from Earth. But PBHs do not reflect sunlight and cannot be identified this way ahead of impact. They do glow faintly in Hawking radiation, but their luminosity is lower than a mini light bulb of 0.1 watt for masses above a millionth of the mass of the moon. Is this invisibility a reason for concern?"

U.F.O.s and the Search for Alien Life --New York Times Opinion, "Wouldn’t it be safe to say that, whatever might be out there, a few quadrillion miles away from us, is likely to be utterly dissimilar to everything we know with our earthbound consciousness? If so, we literally couldn’t even conceive of that world’s nature or its inhabitants, if there be any."

“Rediscovering Venus” –NASA’s New Missions to Discover if Venus was the First Habitable Planet in the Solar System reports The Daily Galaxy--Was Venus the first habitable planet in the Solar System? NASA intends to find out. “It is astounding how little we know about Venus, but the combined results of these missions will tell us about the planet from the clouds in its sky through the volcanoes on its surface all the way down to its very core,” said Tom Wagner, NASA’s Discovery Program scientist about NASA's JPL designing two missions to survive the planet's extreme temperatures and atmospheric pressure. “It will be as if we have rediscovered the planet.” 

Messages scrambled by black holes stand their ground against quantum computers, reports Physics World --"Black holes are nature’s fastest data-scramblers, and new research suggests that secrets thrown into them may be more secure than previously thought. In a paper published in Physical Review Letters, researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in the US show that once a message has been scrambled by a black hole or another system with similar properties, not even a quantum computer can put it back together."

Weird nearby gamma-ray burst defies expectations-- This isn't how GRBs are supposed to behave. "We were really sitting in the front row when this gamma-ray burst happened," Andrew Taylor, a physicist at the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (German Electron Synchrotron, or DESY) and co-author on the new paper, said in a statement. "We could observe the afterglow for several days and to unprecedented gamma-ray energies," reports Space.com

“Quark Star as Big as Our Solar System” --An enigma within a mystery revealed an explanation to the peculiar emission lines seen in a supernovae as bright as an entire galaxy – SN 2006gy, a hypernova or quark-nova (a hypothetical supernova that gives birth to a quark star instead of a neuron star) inside galaxy NGC 1260, some 250 million light-years away, first discovered on September 18, 2006- as well as an explanation for its previously unknown origin, reports The Daily Galaxy.

Dark Photons ---”Existed in Eons Before the Big Bang”--The first "theory" of the dark cosmos was embodied in the Greek god of darkness, Erebus, one of the primordial deities born out of Chaos, the primeval void, foreshadowing the contemporary, emerging reality of the dark side of our universe. Enter Nobel-Prize  Laurate, physicist Sir Roger Penrose, and his Erebon field theory, a novel explanation of dark matter that suggests that the Big Bang was not the origin of our universe. Despite ongoing searches, no signs of a dark matter particle have turned up.

Weird World of Quantum Black Holes – “May Be Radically Different from What Einstein Predicted and Lack Event Horizons” --reports The Daily Galaxy --"“According to Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, nothing can escape from the gravity of a black hole once it has passed a point of no return, known as the event horizon,” explained Niayesh Afshordi, a physics and astronomy professor at Waterloo in 2020 about echoes in gravitational wave signals that hint that the event horizon of a black hole may be more complicated than scientists currently think based on research reporting the first tentative detection of these echoes, caused by a microscopic quantum “fuzz” that surrounds newly formed black holes."

1st matter in the universe may have been a perfect liquid reports Spce.com --Scientists have recreated the first matter that appeared after the Big Bang in the Large Hadron Collider. "Smashing together lead particles at 99.9999991% the speed of the light, scientists have recreated the first matter that appeared after the Big Bang. Out of the wreck came a primordial type of matter known as quark-gluon plasma, or QGP.”

Nasa to launch baby squid to International Space Station, reports The BBC --"More than 100 baby squid and 5,000 microscopic animals are set to be launched to the International Space Station (ISS) on Thursday. The creatures, along with other equipment for experiments, will head to the ISS aboard Space X's Falcon 9 rocket. Its hoped that the experiments will be able to help scientists understand the effects of spaceflight."

Image credit: Arrival Movie, courtesy of Paramount.