The Daily Galaxy --Great Discoveries Channel: Sci, Space, Tech

Image of the Day: White Dwarf Zoombies

 

"Zombie" stars that explode like bombs as they die, only to revive by sucking matter out of other stars. According Andy Howell, an astrophysicist at UC Santa Barbara, this isn't the plot for the latest scifi blockbuster,iInstead, it's something that happens every day in the universe. This special category of stars, known as Type Ia supernovae, help to probe the mystery of dark energy, which scientists believe is related to the expansion of the universe.

News Flash: Hope Revived! First Signal Received from Errant Mars' Phobos-Gunt Mission

The European Space Agency has received the first signal from Russia's unmanned Phobos-Gunt spacecraft bound for a moon of Mars since it got stuck in Earth's orbit two weeks ago, officials said Wednesday, raising hope that the mission might be saved.

Russia's space agency said an ESA tracking facility in Australia got the signal from the Phobos-Ground probe early Wednesday in the western city of Perth. The $170 million craft became stranded in orbit after its thrusters failed to fire following the Nov. 9 launch to send it on its path to one of Mars' two moons, Phobos. The initial contact raised hopes of preventing the probe from crashing back to Earth

Is the Human Species Entering an Evolutionary Inflection Point? (Today's Most Popular)

 

Will the future of space exploration evolve into a hybrid of human and robotic expeditions, one which may change the face of humanity in space?

The species that you and all other living human beings on this planet belong to is Homo sapiens. During a time of dramatic climate change 200,000 years ago, Homo sapiens (modern humans) evolved in Africa. Is the human species entering another evolutionary inflection point?

Paul Davies, a British-born theoretical physicist, cosmologist, astrobiologist and Director of the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science and Co-Director of the Cosmology Initiative at Arizona State University, says in his new book The Eerie Silence that any aliens exploring the universe will be AI-empowered machines. Not only are machines better able to endure extended exposure to the conditions of space, but they have the potential to develop intelligence far beyond the capacity of the human brain.

"I think it very likely – in fact inevitable – that biological intelligence is only a transitory phenomenon, a fleeting phase in the evolution of the universe," Davies writes. "If we ever encounter extraterrestrial intelligence, I believe it is overwhelmingly likely to be post-biological in nature."

Alien Worlds "Planetary Habitability Index" Proposed

In the next few years, the number of catalogued exoplanets will be counted in the thousands. This will vastly expand the number of potentially habitable worlds and lead to a systematic assessment of their astrobiological potential.

A U.S./German research team proposes to rank planets on both an Earth Similarity Index (ESI) and also a broader Planetary Habitability Index (PHI). The first tier consists of an Earth Similarity Index (ESI), which allows worlds to be screened with regard to their similarity to Earth, the only known inhabited planet at this time.

Antarctica's Dry Valley and Chile's Atacama Desert Offer a Hint of Alien-Life Habitats

Because the surface of Mars today is bone-dry and frozen all year round, it’s difficult to find any place on Earth that is truly Mars-like. But two locations, Antarctica’s Upper Dry Valleys and the hyper-arid core of Chile’s Atacama Desert (above), come close. They have become prime destinations for scientists who want to understand the extreme limits of life on Earth and the prospects for life on Mars.

Image of the Day: A Massive Cluster of Ancient & Young Stars

A new NASA Hubble Space Telescope image shows globular cluster NGC 1846, located roughly 160,000 light-years away in the direction of the constellation Doradus. The cluster is a spherical collection of hundreds of thousands of stars in the outer halo of the Large Magellanic Cloud, a neighboring dwarf galaxy of the Milky Way that can be seen from the southern hemisphere.
 
Aging bright stars in the cluster glow in intense shades of red and blue. The majority of middle-aged stars, several billions of years old, are whitish in color. A myriad of far distant background galaxies of varying shapes and structure are scattered around the image.

The most intriguing object, however, doesn't seem to belong in the cluster. It is a faint green bubble in the white box near the bottom center of the image. This so-called "planetary nebula" is the aftermath of the death of a star.

EcoAlert: New Space Tech Monitoring Earth's Climate Change

"These long-term data records are critical in monitoring how the Earth's surface is changing - either from human activity or through climate change."

Chris Justice --professor of geography at the University of Maryland

News Update: Hubble & Spitzer Heir to Open Eye to Cosmos in Search for Signatures of Life

he James Webb Space Telescope will go forward after all, but US lawmakers warned that the troubled flagship mission will be under close scrutiny, capping additional funding to complete the project at $8 billion. Its escalting cost overruns and schedule delays led the US House of Representatives to threaten its cancellation in July, when about $3 billion had been spent, and more than 75 percent of its hardware is either in production or undergoing testing.

Countdown! NASA's Dream-Machine Search for Mars' Life Imminent

An incredible voyage across the red planet will begin this when NASA’s Mars Curiosity rover --now nestled atop its Atlas 5 rocket--lands in a crater 96 miles wide and three miles deep that contains a geological record of the planet’s epic history  and starts its quest to determine if Mars is, or ever was, capable of supporting microbial life.

The car-size Curiosity rover, the centerpiece of NASA's $2.5 billion Mars Science Laboratory  (MSL) mission, is slated to blast off from Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on Saturday (Nov. 26) after a one-day delay due to a rocket battery issue.

Stephen Hawking: "We've Been Overlooked by Advanced ET Civilizations" (Today's Most Popular)

In his famous lecture, Life in the Universe, Stephen Hawking asks: "What are the chances that we will encounter some alien form of life, as we explore the galaxy?"

If the argument about the time scale for the appearance of life on Earth is correct, Hawking says "there ought to be many other stars, whose planets have life on them. Some of these stellar systems could have formed 5 billion years before the Earth. So why is the galaxy not crawling with self-designing mechanical or biological life forms?"