The Extraordinary Consequences of Einstein's Universe to NASA's Habitable Worlds Observatory

NASA Unveils Plan for Telescope to Find Life on Alien Worlds, reports Daniel Clery for Science Magazine. Habitable Worlds Observatory would be designed for robotic servicing. " Flush with JWST’s success, NASA is now planning an optical telescope that would be just as big as JWST and have a grand new goal: looking for signs of life on Earth-like planets, perhaps by the early 2040s."

Why aliens were in the news so much in 2022--For decades, the search for extraterrestrial life was a fringe pursuit; now, experts are taking it seriously, reports Salon. "Once considered the realm of cranks and fringe conspiracy theorists, respectable institutions and scientists — including the Pentagon and physicists like Avi Loeb, a Harvard University professor who specializes in astrophysics and cosmology — took a sober and serious look at stray bits of evidence that might point to extraterrestrial intelligence at work in the universe."

New physics? Ultra-precise measurement in particle physics confounds scientists--The difference between predictions and observations of the magnetic properties of muons suggests a mystery for the Standard Model, reports Big Think.

The Sun isn’t a typical star in the Universe--Most of us have heard that the Sun is an ordinary, typical, unremarkable star. But science shows we're actually anything but average, reports Big Think.

Speculative New Paper Suggests We Could Detect Gravitational Waves From Alien Megacraft, reports Science Alert. "According to a new paper penned by an international group of scientists and engineers called Applied Physics, Earth-based detectors such as the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) should – theoretically – be able to detect the gravitational waves generated by extraterrestrial mega-technology."

Cosmic Burst Probes Milky Way's Halo, reports Caltech. Results support theories that matter is flung out of galaxies. "The results show that our galaxy has significantly less "regular," or baryonic, matter (the same type of matter that makes up stars, planets, and living beings) than expected. This, in turn, supports theories that say matter is regularly flung out of galaxies by powerful stellar winds, exploding stars, and actively feeding, or accreting, supermassive black holes."

BlueWalker 3, an enormous and bright communications satellite, is genuinely alarming astronomers, reports Michael J. I. Brown for Space.com. "At 64 square meters, it's the largest commercial communications satellite(opens in new tab) in low Earth orbit — and very bright.  such satellites are bright enough to produce trails in images taken with telescopes. These trails overwrite the stars and galaxies underneath them, which can only be remedied by taking additional images. Short transient phenomena, such as a brief flash from a gamma-ray burst(opens in new tab), could potentially be lost."

The extraordinary consequences of Einstein's universe--Relativity shatters our experience of time, reports Michael David Silberstein | Professor of Philosophy at Elizabethtown College and faculty member in the Foundations of Physics Program and Fellow on the Committee for Philosophy and the Sciences, the University of Maryland for iAiTV.

JWST’s “most distant galaxies” might be fooling us all--JWST has seen more distant galaxies than any other observatory, ever. But many candidates for "most distant of all" are likely impostors, reports Big Think. "n its very first deep-field image, in fact, there were a total of 87 "candidate ultra-distant galaxies" identified in JWST's one viewing of galaxy cluster SMACS 0723. But there's an excellent chance that many of those candidates, perhaps even most or almost all of them, aren't actually ultra-distant at all."