Lifeboat Foundation

Alien enthusiasts have a new reason to get excited about potential life on Mars, after scientists found cracked mud on the Red Planet.

A recent research paper showed that the conditions that created cracks in the surface of Mars might have been favourable for microscopic life to thrive.

While scientists don’t yet know how life on Earth began, a prevalent theory is that repeated cycles of wet and dry conditions might have helped build the complex chemical building blocks needed for microbial life.

Albert Einstein is considered one of the most brilliant minds in history. Not only was he a great physicist who transformed the way we see the universe, but he had profound wisdom about life itself.

Let’s take a fresh look at some of his illuminating philosophies.

The classic film “Alien” was once promoted with the tagline “In space, no one can hear you scream.” Physicists Zhuoran Geng and Ilari Maasilta from the Nanoscience Center at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, have demonstrated that, on the contrary, in certain situations, sound can be transmitted strongly across a vacuum region.

In a recent article published in Communications Physics they show that in some cases, a sound wave can jump or “tunnel” fully across a vacuum gap between two solids if the materials in question are piezoelectric. In such materials, vibrations (sound waves) produce an electrical response as well, and since an electric field can exist in vacuum, it can transmit the sound waves.

The requirement is that the size of the gap is smaller than the wavelength of the sound wave. This effect works not only in audio range of frequencies (Hz–kHz), but also in ultrasound (MHz) and hypersound (GHz) frequencies, as long as the vacuum gap is made smaller as the frequencies increase.

Finding the origin of life on Earth has been a goal for scientists for decades. However, like anything, it’s always based on theories and possible evidence, which can often change and evolve as we learn about our world and the universe we are part of.

Euclid, a space mission led by the European Space Agency.

The European Space Agency (ESA) is an intergovernmental organization dedicated to the exploration and study of space. ESA was established in 1975 and has 22 member states, with its headquarters located in Paris, France. ESA is responsible for the development and coordination of Europe’s space activities, including the design, construction, and launch of spacecraft and satellites for scientific research and Earth observation. Some of ESA’s flagship missions have included the Rosetta mission to study a comet, the Gaia mission to create a 3D map of the Milky Way, and the ExoMars mission to search for evidence of past or present life on Mars.

Here’s a bit of science history that genuinely surprised many of us here at Ars Technica. We all know the famous story of how Jocelyn Bell-Burnell discovered pulsars in 1967 as a graduate student at the University of Cambridge—and the longstanding debate about whether she should have shared the Nobel Prize awarded to her supervisor, Antony Hewish. But apparently, an Air Force staff sergeant manning an early warning radar station in Alaska arguably beat Bell-Burnell to the punch. He just couldn’t come forward until 2007, after the instrument had been decommissioned. Nature reported the story at the time, but we most definitely missed it—and we probably weren’t the only ones.

Pulsars are rapidly spinning neutron stars that create pulsed emissions as their magnetic fields sweep across the line of sight with Earth. As previously reported, whenever a massive star runs out of fuel, it explodes into a supernova. If it’s above a certain threshold in mass, it becomes a black hole. Below that threshold, it becomes an ultra-dense neutron star. Pulsars are unusual in that they spin rapidly and have very powerful magnetic fields, so they emit very high-energy beams of light. The star’s rotation makes it seem like those beams are flashing on and off like a cosmic lighthouse.

Bell-Burnell was monitoring the new radio telescope at the Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory, sifting through reams and reams of paper records to hunt for any unusual anomalies in the peaks of data representing incoming galactic radio waves. Three weeks in, on August 6, she spotted a faint signal coming from a particular area of the sky that disappeared, then reappeared, in 1.34-second intervals. The team quickly ruled out any known natural sources or other kinds of interference. She and Hewish even joked that it might be a signal from an alien civilization, dubbing the object “LGM-1” for “Little Green Men.”

With unusually powerful magnetic fields, these stars seem to get a boost when their cores start to drift apart. Thus, they may not be the ideal hosts for habitable exoplanets.

The search for alien life has always been hampered by the huge racket that Earth generates, rendering it difficult to tease out alien signals from all the local noise.

But a new method for recognizing radio signals traveling through interstellar space could narrow the search considerably.

Continue reading “Filtering Out Alien Signals From Earth Noise Just Got a Whole Lot Easier” »

Dismantling the belief in a static universe, Edwin Hubble’s revolutionary observations in the 1920s laid the groundwork for our understanding of a continually expanding cosmos. However, we must seek to reconcile this theory with observations that are consistent with a non-expanding universe, writes Tim Anderson.

You have been taught that the universe began with a Big Bang, a hot, dense period about 13.8 billion years ago. And the reason we believe this to be true is because the universe is expanding and, therefore, was smaller in the past. The Cosmic Microwave Background is the smoking gun for the Big Bang, the result of a reionization of matter that made the universe transparent about 300–400,000 years after the Big Bang.

How did we go from Einstein modifying his equations to keep the universe static and eternal, which he called the biggest blunder of his life, to every scientist believing that the universe had a beginning in 10 years? It all started with astronomer Edwin Hubble using the most powerful telescope at the time on Mount Wilson in California. At the time, in the 1920s, scientists believed that the Milky Way galaxy was the totality of the universe. Objects in the night sky like Andromeda that we now know are galaxies were called “nebulae”.