Exoplanet hunting is difficult, and we are limited by our technology. But Peter Vickers believes we’re also limited by our biases.
Researchers from University of Copenhagen have investigated what happened to a specific kind of plasma—the first matter ever to be present—during the first microsecond of Big Bang. Their findings provide a piece of the puzzle to the evolution of the universe, as we know it today.
About 14 billion years ago, our universe changed from being a lot hotter and denser to expanding radically—a process that scientists have named the Big Bang.
And even though we know that this fast expansion created particles, atoms, stars, galaxies and life as we know it today, the details of how it all happened are still unknown.
Aliens symbolize the best and worst of humanity. When we dream of aliens, we are pondering our future selves.
Islands of Habitability or finding the best places to search for life on Mars.
Zeroing in on the best environmental niches to explore during the next mission to Mars.
Dr. Kate Adamala describes what synthetic cells are and how they can teach us the fundamental principles of life.
Continue reading “Kate Adamala (U of M) 1: Synthetic Cells: Building Life to Understand It” »
Some thoughts about the genetic code aliens would use in the 2nd part of the series: The Science of Aliens:
Alien life would likely have different biochemistry, which may change the way it reproduces.
A rare glimpse of a star before it exploded in a fiery supernova looks nothing like astronomers expected, a new study suggests.
Images from the Hubble Space Telescope reveal that a relatively cool, puffy star ended its life in a hydrogen-free supernova. Until now, supernovas without hydrogen were thought to originate only from extremely hot, compact stars.
The discovery “is a very important test case for stellar evolution,” says Sung-Chul Yoon, an astrophysicist at Seoul National University in South Korea, who was not involved in the work. Theorists have some ideas about how massive stars behave right before they blow up, but such hefty stars are scant in the local universe and many are nowhere near ready to go supernova, Yoon says. Retroactively identifying the star responsible for a supernova provides an opportunity to test scenarios of how stars evolve right before exploding.
Scientists believe these photos show mushrooms on mars—and proof of life.
Could there be mushrooms on Mars? In a new paper, an international team of scientists from countries including the U.S., France, and China have gathered and compared photographic evidence they claim shows fungus-like objects growing on the Red Planet.
Debris from an out-of-control Chinese rocket likely plunged into the Indian Ocean, just west of the Maldives, on Saturday night ET, China’s space agency said.
Most of the huge Long March 5B rocket, however, burned up on reentering the atmosphere, the China Manned Space Engineering Office said in a post on WeChat.
It was unclear if any debris had landed on the atoll nation.
