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"Where is everybody?" That famous phrase, uttered over lunch by eminent physicist Enrico Fermi, perfectly encapsulated what has since become known as the Fermi paradox: If life happened here on Earth and the universe tends to not do things only once, then life should also occur elsewhere. In fact, the universe should be teeming with advanced spacefaring civilizations.
This image of the Geminid meteor shower is the result of a fair amount of work consisting of aligning stars aligning and combining ten folders that each contained hundreds of gigabytes of photos. The images were captured from Dark Sky Alqueva Researve in Portugal. The meteors were captured by different cameras that I set up for two consecutive nights during the 2023 Geminid meteor shower. I managed to catch more than 100 meteors in total, from the brightest ones to the faintest streaks.
The world's most massive science experiment has done it again, detecting hints of the heaviest antimatter particle ever found. This means the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the most powerful particle accelerator ever built, has given scientists a glimpse into conditions that existed when the universe was less than a second old. The antimatter particle is the partner of a massive matter particle called hyperhelium-4, and its discovery could help scientists tackle the mystery of why regular matter came to dominate the universe, despite the fact that matter and antimatter were created in equal amounts at the dawn of time.
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket shined above a twinkling Christmas tree like a festive tree topper during last week's holiday lighting ceremony at Vandenberg Space Force Base. SpaceX launched 20 new Starlink internet satellites from California's Vandenberg Space Force Base on Wednesday (Dec. 4) at 10:05 p.m. EST (7:05 p.m. local California time; 0305 GMT on Dec. 5). The launch coincided with the annual tree lighting ceremony held at the base to ring in the holiday season.
Artificial intelligence is being developed to provide a robotic brain for a future NASA mission to land on the icy surface of one of the solar system's ocean moons, such as Europa or Enceladus. The autonomous software is being developed by teams of researchers who are making use of a robotic arm, mimicking that belonging to a lander or rover, and a virtual reality simulation at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and Ames Research Center, respectively.
On Mars, some of the most likely places to look for traces of ancient life may also be the least likely to preserve those traces. This is the result of a recent study that simulated exposing important building blocks of life called "lipids" to cosmic rays pummeling the surface of Mars. And, in short, the exposed material appeared to break down very quickly under the bombardment of radiation from space - and even faster when there was salt mixed in with the sediment, which is the case in many of the places we consider the most likely ancient habitats on Mars.
Written by "Star Trek" veteran Una McCormack ("Picard: The Last Best Hope," "Discovery: Wonderlands"), "Strange New Worlds: Asylum" makes for an excellent seasonal read for clear starry nights when our thoughts turn towards the heavens.
