Has Life Occurred Many Times in the Milky Way?
Looking at the stars through a puddle of mercury--The International Liquid Mirror Telescope (ILMT) uses rotating liquid instead of glass mirrors, reports Briley Lewis for Popular Science.
The Weirdos of the Star-Spangled Cosmos and What They Reveal--In “Things That Go Bump in the Universe,” the astronomer C. Renée James writes about what we can learn from the more exotic shapes and sounds in outer space.
All Habitable Worlds Come to an End--"How many tragedies of alien civilizations have we missed over the 13.8 billion years that elapsed since the Big Bang? Life must have been lost in many places before humans came onto the cosmic scene," reports Avi Loeb, head of the Galileo Project, founding director of Harvard University’s Black Hole Initiative, director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the former chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University (2011-2020).
Scientists practice communicating with aliens by chatting to whales--"Alien life could not just have their own language but completely different modes of communication – they might banter by breakdancing, or convey an entire emotional spectrum through the volume, frequency, tone, smell, flavor and density of passing gas."
A bar of stars at the center of the Milky Way looks surprisingly young--"Future models of the galaxy’s evolution will have to account for why the bar developed so late," reports Science News.
Astronomers capture a green ghost in our atmosphere--The strange phenomenon, which rarely appears above red sprites that dance over thunderstorms, reveals the presence of metals in our atmosphere.