“The Last Holdout” –LHC Scientists Seek Portal to the ‘Dark-World’ Unveiled By the Higgs
“One particularly interesting possibility is that these long-lived dark particles are coupled to the Higgs boson in some fashion—that the Higgs is actually a portal to the dark world,” said LianTao Wang, a University of Chicago physicist, referring to the last holdout particle in physicists’ grand theory of how the universe works, discovered at the LHC in 2012. “We know for sure there’s a dark world, and there’s more energy in it than there is in ours. It’s...
New Gigantic Exoplanets Discovered With Orbits of 15-40 Years
Over 4000 exoplanets have been discovered since the first one in 1995, but the vast majority of them orbit their stars with relatively short periods of revolution. But five new planets have been discovered with periods of revolution between 15.6 and 40.4 years, with masses ranging approximately from 3 to 27 times that of Jupiter. A new study using the EULER telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile increases the list of 26 planets with a rotation period greater than 15 years.
“Momentous Shift” –Emergence of 1st Molecule 100,000 Years After the Big Bang
“It was the beginning of chemistry,” said David Neufeld, a professor of molecular astrophysics at John Hopkins University and co-author of a study published Wednesday detailing how—after a multi-decade search—scientists finally detected the elusive molecule HeH+ in space — the first step on a path of increasing complexity in the Universe, “as momentous a shift as the one from single-cell to multicellular life on Earth,” he told AFP. “The discovery is a dramatic and beautiful demonstration of Nature’s tendency to form molecules.”
Planet Earth Report –“Cities That Trigger Psychotic Breaks to New Species of Sapiens”
The “Planet Earth Report” connects you to headline news on the science, technology, discoveries, people and events changing our planet and the future of the human species.
“World of Two Suns”–Kepler-47 System So Compact Would Fit Inside Earth’s Orbit
The Kepler-47 planetary system is an example of the diversity of solar systems outside our own. Despite having two “suns,” the entire system is so compact that it would fit inside the orbit of Earth. A team of astronomers from the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, discovered a third planet in the system approximately 3,340 light-years away in the direction of the constellation Cygnus.
“Proof?” –‘Oumuamua-Like’ Interstellar Object Struck Earth in 2014
Interstellar meteors may be common, and could potentially help life travel from star to star throughout the Milky Way, according to Harvard astronomer’s Amir Siraj and Avi Loeb who report that they have uncovered possible evidence of an extrasolar object striking the Earth back in 2014 from their study of the Center for Near-Earth Object database. They were searching the data for telltale objects that traveled faster than normal, suggesting that it was likely ejected out of an alien star system.
“Terminator Habitable Zone” –Alien Star-System Planets Face Death-Stream of High-Energy Particles
“The flux of these particles in the TRAPPIST-1 system can be up to 1 million times more than the particles flux on Earth,” said Federico Fraschetti with the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory.
“A Forgotten World” –Apocalypse of the ‘Great Dying’ Gave Rise to the Dinosaurs
The evolutionary pruning shears of the Permian, a series of extinctions, including the Judgment Day at the period’s close known as the Great Dying that killed off more than 95 percent of life on Earth, cut the blossoming tree of life down to only a branch or two of mammal forerunners, including that of our ancestors. This is the forgotten world of the Permian epoch, the supercontinent of Pangaea, inhabited by our bizarre and formidable cousins, long overshadowed by the epic reign of the dinosaurs that followed.
The neutral hydrogen gas that filled the universe during the first few hundred million years after the Big Bang tended to absorb ambient light, leading to what cosmologists and science fiction authors poetically call the universe’s “dark ages.” Although the cosmos was filled with a diffuse ambient light from the cosmic microwave background (CMB) — the so-called afterglow of the Big Bang — this neutral gas absorbed it at specific wavelengths.