The 1st sign of intelligent life beyond Earth?

Physicist Avi Loeb of Harvard believes we should take seriously the idea that ‘Oumuamua – the 1st known object to pass through our solar system from interstellar space – might have been created by an alien civilization. His new book is called “Extraterrestrial.” Source: https://earthsky.org/space/book-avi-loeb-extraterrestrial-1st-sign-of-intelligent-life…

New technique used to discover how galaxies grow

For decades, space and ground telescopes have provided us with spectacular images of galaxies. These building blocks of the universe usually contain several million to over a trillion stars and can range in size from a few thousand to several hundred thousand light-years across. What we typically see in an image of a galaxy are the stars, gas and dust that…

Superpowerful ‘oscillon’ particles could have dominated the infant universe, then vanished

A weird, super-powerful particle that’s not truly a particle could have dominated the universe when it was just a second old, releasing a flood of ripples that permeated all of space-time. Source: https://www.livescience.com/oscillon-particle-early-univrse.html

How the NSA’s Hubris Left America Vulnerable

A new book promises “the untold story of the cyberweapons market — the most secretive, invisible, government-backed market on earth — and a terrifying first look at a new kind of global warfare.” Its author — a New York Times cybersecurity reporter — shares the book’s story about David Evenden, a former National Security Agency analyst who later worked in Abu…

Galaxy-Size Gravitational-Wave Detector Hints At Exotic Physics

The fabric of spacetime may be frothing with gigantic gravitational waves, and the possibility has sent physicists into a tizzy. A potential signal seen in the light from dead stellar cores known as pulsars has driven a flurry of theoretical papers speculating about exotic explanations. Scientific American reports: The most mundane, yet still quite sensational, possibility is that researchers working with…

Maarten Schmidt solves the puzzle of quasars

On February 5, 1963, Maarten Schmidt unraveled the mystery of quasars and pushed back the edges of the known cosmos. His insight into quasars – the most distant and luminous objects known – has changed the way scientists view the universe. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/this-date-in-science-maartin-schmidt-discovers-first-known-quasar…

Why the universe can be described by the equations of fluids

Studying the universe and the flow of fluids may seem worlds apart, but they involve some of the same equations, writes Chanda Prescod-Weinstein Source: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24933200-100-why-the-universe-can-be-described-by-the-equations-of-fluids/?utm_campaign=RSS%7CNSNS&utm_source=NSNS&utm_medium=RSS&utm_content=home…

The stars Shaula and Lesath as heralds of spring

On February mornings, look for the celestial ducks returning to open water on the river of the Milky Way as the stars Shaula and Lesath make their appearance. Source: https://earthsky.org/astronomy-essentials/two-stars-in-scorpius-are-a-harbinger-of-spring…

Astronomers spot bizarre, never-before-seen activity from one of the strongest magnets in the universe

Astronomers from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav) and CSIRO have just observed bizarre, never-seen-before behavior from a radio-loud magnetar—a rare type of neutron star and one of the strongest magnets in the universe. Source: https://phys.org/news/2021-02-astronomers-bizarre-never-before-seen-strongest-magnets.html…