MYSTERIOUS signals are being detected coming from a star that has been radio silent for over a decade, according to scientists.
The radio signals are very powerful and their sudden appearance has baffled experts.
According to Live Science, the strange star is a magnetar that suddenly became very active again in 2018.
How optimistic.
First, a little background. With 200 billion trillion (ish) stars in the universe and 13.7 billion years that have elapsed since it all began, you might be wondering where all the alien civilizations are at. This is the basic question behind the Fermi paradox, the tension between our suspicions of the potential for life in the universe (given planets found in habitable zones, etc) and the fact that we have only found one planet with an intelligent (ish) species inhabiting it.
One solution, or at least a way of thinking about the problem, is known as the Great Filter. Proposed by Robin Hanson of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, the argument goes that given the lack of observed technologically advanced alien civilizations, there must be a great barrier to the development of life or civilization that prevents them from getting to a stage where they are making big, detectable impacts on their environment that we can witness from Earth.
There could be other reasons why we haven’t heard from aliens yet, ranging from us simply not listening for long enough (or not searching for the right signals from aliens, due to our technological immaturity) to aliens deliberately keeping us in a galactic zoo. But if the Great Filter idea is correct, we don’t know what point we are at along it.
Physicists at Princeton University successfully visualize the 90-year-old Wigner Crystal theory. This could pave the way for future quantum discoveries.
Astronomers have produced the largest 3D map of the universe, which can be explored in an interactive VR video. In the process, they’ve uncovered some tantalizing hints that our understanding of physics, including the ultimate fate of the cosmos, could be wrong.
The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) is a huge international project to map out the universe in three dimensions, which began collecting data in 2021. This early version of the map only includes data collected during the first year – 5.7 million galaxies and quasars out of the planned goal of 40 million. This data allows the scientists to peer as far as 11 billion light-years into deep space and time, providing a glimpse into the very early universe with an unprecedented precision of less than 1%.
With a view that zoomed-out, the cosmos resembles a colossal web, made up of bright strands of galaxies separated by unimaginably empty voids. If you feel up for an existential crisis, check out this VR fly-through video and remember that each of these blurry blobs of light is an entire galaxy, each containing millions of stars and billions of planets.
String Theory proposes that the fundamental building blocks of the universe are tiny vibrating strings, forcing gravity and quantum mechanics to work together and providing a rich framework for understanding the universe Questions to inspire discussion What is String Theory? —String Theory proposes that the fundament.
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The hoard of more than 100 coffins and priceless artefacts was one of the biggest such hauls archaeologists made in the region.
Researchers at the MIT Department of Chemical Engineering have created a new method of cleaning micropollutants from water, using zwitterionic molecules — i.e., molecules with the same number of positive and negative charges.
Devashish Gokhale, a PhD student and one of the researchers, explained zwitterionic molecules by comparing them to magnets.
“On a magnet, you have a north pole and a south pole that stick to each other, and on a zwitterionic molecule, you have a positive charge and a negative charge which stick to each other in a similar way,” he said in a release by MIT News.
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The mission named STP-S30 is projected to launch in 2026 on a Rocket Lab Electron small launcher from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport at NASA Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.
