Mystery Milky Way Signal to Hidden Messages of the Perseverance Mars Mission
While the Covid-19 pandemic continues its stealth, mutating invasion on Earth, NASA reports that atmospheric pollution on distant worlds in the Milky Way may signal signs of existing or extinct technological civilizations. “The history of the universe indicates a trend toward extinction—of stars, of planets, of solar systems, and, perhaps, of the universe as we know it,” writes Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb in Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth. “The search for, let alone the discovery of, extraterrestrial technology could jar us from our more limited frame, our habit of looking forward a generation or two and not with the future of our civilization uppermost in mind.”
So, on to this week’s discoveries…
Unknown Milky Way Signal –“A Gravitational Wave, Cosmic String, or Primordial Black Hole?” reports The Daily Galaxy. In 1993 Stephen Hawking proposed in Black Holes and Baby Universes that there might be "primordial black holes which were formed in the early universe that could be less than the size of the nucleus of an atom, yet their mass could be a billion tons, the mass of Mount Fuji. A black hole weighing a billion tons," Hawking explained, "would have a radius of about 10-13 centimeter (the size of a neutron or a proton). It could be in orbit either around the sun or around the center of the galaxy, emitting hard gamma rays with an energy of about 100 million electron volts."
Mapping Monsters of the Cosmos --Theoretical physicists have described supermassive black holes as the most perfect objects there are in the universe –“the only elements in their construction are our concepts of space and time.” Some have described these cosmic monsters as the “Gates of Hell” and others as “gateways to another universe” and the largest hard disk that exists in nature, in two dimensions, reports The Daily Galaxy.
NASA Sent a Secret Message to Mars. Meet the People Who Decoded It.--Engineers hinted they had hidden a binary code in the parachute that landed the Perseverance rover. Within hours, puzzle enthusiasts cracked it, reports Kenneth Chang for The New York Times.
A New Era of Black Holes Is Here, reports Thomas Lewton and Quanta for The Atlantic --”Astronomers have discovered a black-hole treasure trove that is changing our view of the cosmos. When the first black-hole collision was detected in 2015, it was a watershed moment in the history of astronomy. Using gravitational waves, astronomers were observing the universe in an entirely new way. But this first event didn’t revolutionize our understanding of black holes—nor could it. This collision would be the first of many, astronomers knew, and only with that bounty would answers come.”
Listen: NASA’s Mars Perseverance Rover Provides Front-Row Seat to Landing, First Audio Recording of Red Planet, reports NASA. A microphone attached to the rover did not collect usable data during the descent, but the commercial off-the-shelf device survived the highly dynamic descent to the surface and obtained sounds from Jezero Crater on Feb. 20. About 10 seconds into the 60-second recording, a Martian breeze is audible for a few seconds, as are mechanical sounds of the rover operating on the surface.
Juno Spacecraft Spots a Bright Explosion in Jupiter’s Atmosphere, reports SciTechDaily --“Jupiter undergoes a huge number of impacts per year, much more than the Earth, so impacts themselves are not rare,” said SwRI’s Dr. Rohini Giles, lead author of a paper outlining these findings in Geophysical Research Letters. “However, they are so short-lived that it is relatively unusual to see them. Only larger impacts can be seen from Earth, and you have to be lucky to be pointing a telescope at Jupiter at exactly the right time. In the last decade, amateur astronomers have managed to capture six impacts on Jupiter.”
Astronomers' hopes raised by glimpse of possible new planet --Astronomers have glimpsed what may be a previously unknown planet circling one of the closest stars to Earth, reports The Guardian. “Researchers spotted the bright dot near Alpha Centauri A, one of a pair of stars that swing around each other so tightly they appear as one in the southern constellation of Centaurus. The stars form what is called a binary system 4.37 light years away, a mere stone’s throw in cosmic terms.”
To Find an Extraterrestrial Civilization, Pollution Could Be the Solution, reports NASA --If there’s an advanced extraterrestrial civilization inhabiting a nearby star system, we might be able to detect it using its own atmospheric pollution, according to new NASA research. The study looked at the presence of nitrogen dioxide gas (NO2), which on Earth is produced by burning fossil fuels but can also come from non-industrial sources such as biology, lightning, and volcanoes.
Until Recently, People Accepted the ‘Fact’ of Aliens in the Solar System, reports astrophysicist Caleb A. Scharf for Scientific American. “For centuries, right up until the 1960s, the notion life on Mars—and elsewhere—wasn’t considered especially remarkable--One of the most intriguing aspects of the history of the human quest to discover whether or not there is other life in the universe, and whether any of it is recognizably intelligent in the way that we are, is just how much our philosophical mood has changed back and forth across the centuries."
Physicists Show a Speed Limit Also Applies in the Quantum World, reports SciTechDaily.--Even in the world of the smallest particles with their own special rules, things cannot proceed infinitely fast. Physicists at the University of Bonn have now shown what the speed limit is for complex quantum operations/
This Renegade Black Hole is Breaking the Rules of Astrophysics -- Stephen Hawking was wrong about Cygnus X-1. We all were, reports Inverse. “The first-ever photo of a black hole, taken in 2019, offered a glimpse of a dark center encased in a fiery ring that can bend space and time with its incredible gravitational pull. Our knowledge of these strange beings is constantly evolving— the black hole from the 2019 photograph, for example, has since been found to be wobbly.”
The cracks in cosmology: Why our Universe doesn’t add up, reports Marcus Chopwn for BBC Science Focus Magazine --In terms of our understanding of the Universe, some things just don’t add up. Which means either our measurements are wrong, or our theories are. The standard model of our Universe may be showing some cracks. Several fundamental cosmological observations are contradicting each other. For instance, the Universe appears to be expanding 10 per cent faster than it should be, according to observations of the leftover heat from the Big Bang.
“The Methuselah Dilemma” — Atacama Cosmology Telescope Resolves 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.
A new study reveals that quantum physics can cause mutations in our DNA, reports University of Surrey.--a team from Surrey's Leverhulme Quantum Biology Doctoral Training Centre used state-of-the-art computer simulations and quantum mechanical methods to determine the role proton tunneling, a purely quantum phenomenon, plays in spontaneous mutations inside DNA.
The Universe’s 7 biggest mysteries (and why they’re unsolved), reports The BBC. Dark matter, the nature of time, aliens and supermassive black holes: these seven things will be puzzling astronomers for years to come.
“In the last decade,” reports the BBC, “we’ve taken photos of a black holes, peered into the heart of atoms and looked back at the birth of the Universe. And yet, there are yawning gaps in our understanding of the Universe and the laws that govern it. These are the mysteries that will be troubling physicists and astronomers over the next decade and beyond.”
“And So It Begins” –Quantum Physicists Create a New Universe With Its Own Rules, reports The Daily Galaxy. Albert Einstein was fond of saying that “Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions.” What if our world, our universe, following Einstein’s insight, is the result of a quantum-physics experiment performed by some ancient hyper-advanced alien civilization. A civilization that, as astrophysicist Paul Davies speculates, may exist beyond matter.
“First Second After” –Gravitational Waves Unveil Hidden Secrets of the Big Bang, reports The Daily Galaxy. “It is undeniable that we are profoundly puzzled, especially when it comes to the first fraction of a second that followed the Big Bang,” wrote theoretical physicist Dan Hooper, author of The Edge of Time in an email to The Daily Galaxy–Great Discoveries Channel. “I have no doubt that these earliest moments hold incredible secrets, but our universe holds its secrets closely. It is up to us to coax those secrets from its grip, transforming them from mystery into discovery.”