Mystery Origin of Andromeda-Galaxy Object to Aliens or Spies? The Government’s New UFO Report
Weekend Edition
With dozens of large telescopes scattered across Earth and some well above it, you might think we’ve pretty much discovered all there is to find in the sky. But this is, literally, too narrow a view: A Recently Discovered Gas Cloud Near Andromeda Stumps Astronomers--Clues to the origin of this enormous cloud of gas have been maddeningly vague, reports Phil Plait for Scientific American.
What is it Like Under Alien Skies on an Alien Planet? What is needed to prove aliens are visiting us? Would an Alien look anything like us? Phil Plait the Bad Astronomer joins John Michael Godier in a brilliant discussion of UAP, DART, the Artemis mission, and more.
NASA’s new JWST space telescope has revealed some cosmic surprises, including galaxies that might have assembled earlier than previously thought, reports Wired. This tantalizing discovery was made thanks to NASA’s new flagship James Webb Space Telescope. “This is the first large sample of candidate galaxies beyond the reach of the Hubble Space Telescope,” astronomer Haojing Yan said yesterday at a press conference at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle. Yan, who is at the University of Missouri, led the newly published study.
Aliens or spies? What to make of the government’s new UFO report, asks Harvard's Avi Loeb for The Hill. "The report gets potentially interesting in making the statement that of the 171 unattributed reports, “Some of these uncharacterized UAP appear to have demonstrated unusual flight characteristics or performance capabilities, and require further analysis."
The New York Times: Did Aliens Land on Earth in 1945? A Defense Bill Seeks Answers. The Defense Department’s annual spending bill requires it to review U.F.O. sightings dating to 1945, the year some believe an object from space crashed in the New Mexico desert.
The world we see is not reality, says Donald Hoffman is a cognitive scientist at UC Irvine and author of The Case Against Reality. Cognition has evolved to allow us to survive in our niche.
Astronomers have solved an outstanding problem that challenged our understanding of how the Universe evolved: Unraveling the mystery of the Milky Way’s satellite galaxies, reports Techexplorist.
How can we understand quantum reality if it is impossible to measure?--If we can’t measure something, we can’t know its true nature. This fundamental limitation hampers our understanding of the quantum world – but it doesn't preclude scientific thinking, reports the New Scientist.
The Milky Way seems to be missing nearly half of its regular matter--Measurements of a blast of radio waves passing through our galaxy have shown that the Milky Way's proportion of visible matter is 40 per cent lower than the rest of the universe, reports New Scientist.
ET might be traveling the wrong direction to find us. How We Can Find a ‘Galactic Club’ of Alien Life, asks David Axe for The Daily Beast. "Jacob Haqq Misra, an astrobiologist at the Blue Marble Space Institute of Science in Seattle, has a theory. There could be lots of aliens out there. But they’re spreading across the galaxy in fits and starts, giving preferential treatment to certain types of stars and potentially heading in the opposite direction as us—at least, for now."
Meet TOI-700’s exoplanets: Our best bet for alien life--Red dwarf stars were supposed to be inhospitable. But TOI-700, now with at least two potentially habitable worlds, is quite the exception, reports Big Think. "Despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of known exoplanets were discovered by NASA’s now-defunct Kepler mission, the most likely system to house extraterrestrial life is the planetary system surrounding the star TOI-700, discovered by the ongoing TESS mission."
Methylated gasses could be an unambiguous indicator of alien life--On Earth, these gasses are almost always produced only by organisms, reports Science News. "All we need to do to find hints of alien life is to look for those gasses in the atmospheres of those exoplanets, in images coming from the James Webb Space Telescope or other observatories that could come online soon."
James Webb spots Milky Way look-alikes in the early universe--A few of these bar-sporting galaxies existed so long ago that they are challenging astronomers’ theories for how quickly galaxies evolved, reports Jake Parks for AStronomy.com. "New images from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) are shaking up what astronomers thought they knew about galaxy evolution. The images reveal two galaxies in the distant, early universe that sport long bars stretching between their spiral arms, a first-of-its-kind find for galaxies so young."
The James Webb telescope found ‘Green Pea’ galaxies in the early universe--The galaxies could have been partly responsible for the ‘reionization’ of the universe, reports Science News. "Green Peas first showed up in 2009 in images from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, an ambitious project to map much of the sky. Citizen science volunteers gave the objects their colorful name. Their greenish hue is because most of their light comes from glowing gas clouds, rather than directly from stars."
What lies beneath? Lifting the cosmic veil--Alien planets are shrouded in hazes that hide clues to their makeup. Lab experiments could help clear the view, reports Science. "The spectrum got flatter and flatter and flatter,” says Laura Kreidberg, now at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy. Light just wasn’t getting through. The planet’s impenetrable atmosphere could only indicate one thing, she concluded: A layer of aerosols high in the atmosphere was blocking the light. The chemical richness she wanted to capture was hidden beneath mysterious clouds or hazes.
Back on our Pale Blue Dot:
At least half of the Neanderthal genome is to be found in living humans. “Which means that in effect Neanderthals are not really extinct at all, they are in us" say Nobel Laureate Svante Pääbo: ‘It’s maybe time to rethink our idea of Neanderthals’, reports Kate Connolly for The Guardian.”One of the first of many surprises in the 's research was to find out that the genetic differences between Neanderthals and all modern humans(amounting to about 30,000) are far less than the differences between two random human beings alive today – around 3 million. ‘Our job is to find out which of those 30,000 are most important, because they tell us what makes us uniquely human,’ he says.”
Scientists Discovered These Ancient Cities Have a Secret Link to the Cosmos--The unexpected discovery pushes the timeline of the 260-day Mesoamerican calendar back by several centuries.
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