Aliens? One of the local deities expressing an opinion?
Nah. It was a satellite doing final maneuvers that by some trick of the light became highly visible.
Note to science fiction writers: Orbital hardware can be remarkably visible from the planet surface, if it's not cloudy.
Mars is well known for weird rock formations. With no life and little soil, formations that might be less obvious on Earth become very visible on the Red Planet.
Here's the latest.
(IMG: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UArizona)
Yes. It's a teddy bear on Mars. It's adorable.
It is, of course, an example of how humans see patterns, not aliens, but this one is so cute I couldn't resist.
...9 billion years away. Or ago. At this point they're the same thing.
No, it's not aliens. It's most likely a very large magnetar producing a periodic signal. Or a very large pulsar.
It was spotted by a large radio telescope in India and while it could also be Earth-based interference, I think in this case it's likely a particularly spectacular natural phenomenon.
Not aliens, but the universe is cool.
Well, not quite. But the JWST has observed a cold, dark molecular cloud...essentially ice...630 light years away that contains things like ammonia, methane, carbonyl sulfide.
These are life precursors, in cold storage. Now imagine that a solar system flies through this cloud. A whole bunch of these molecules land on a planet and "wake up."
Or perhaps the cloud itself heats up and stars start to form.
The chances are that the molecules that make us up originally came from out there.
Earth's core may have stopped spinning and be switching directions.
Don't worry. We're not all going to die. This actually appears to happen every few decades and all it does is create small variations in the length of the day, ones we don't really notice.
Oh, and there may be multiple cores like a Russian doll.
Their guess is it changes direction about every 35 years, but other researchers have different figures.
So, no big deal, but fascinating. Does it slightly impact earthquake frequency? What else might it impact? Tides? Weather?
Or nothing at all?
So, it turns out that a little microbe, a ciliate in the genus Halteria, has an interesting dietary pattern.
It eats viruses. And can get enough nutrition from them to survive. And it could be an important part of the food chain.
Also, could we domesticate this and use it to hoover up, say, RSV, from surfaces? Probably no better than what we already do. The virovory (yes, that's the technical term) is happening in water.
It could impact wastewater monitoring for infectious viruses, though. There's a lot more to study here!
...check out this CNN headline: https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/23/world/trilobites-trident-earliest-example-of-sexual-combat-scn/index.html
Appears that trilobites, some species, had antlers much like stag beetles. Of course, there's one flaw...the females seem to grow them too. Which means they may not have been used to fight for mates.
(Yes, female reindeer have antlers, but that's because they also use them as snow shovels).
We really aren't. Cross-mating with the more cold-adapted Neanderthal did help those of us of European and Middle Eastern descent, but we're a tropical species.
But we're good at faking it with things like, oh, clothes, eating meat and, of course, the key technology of fire.
Neanderthals were stockier to retain heat, but they also had large noses...but an internal structure that helped. At the same time, they still weren't really cold adapted. For that, they would have had to regrow fur.
They too had clothes and fire. They may also have partially hibernated, much like squirrels.
Living in the cold is proof of why it's worth developing intelligence.
It allows us to adapt faster than evolution.
A new study suggests that dark matter may be made of dark photons and all I can think of is an evil version of Monica Rambeau.
These dark photons generate the heat needed to support the universe's existence and it explains the cosmic web between galaxies. Or rather, they turn into low frequency photons, which means heat.
But it sounds like a comic book character.
I mean, if we're really lucky.
But LHS 475 b is the same size as Earth and may be in its stars habitable zone. Of course, it will still be nothing like Earth. It's year is two days long.
(The star it's orbiting is very cool). They're going to study atmospheric composition now. But imagine standing on a world where the sun looms over you. With such a short year it's likely tidally locked, but could still be habitable in the twilight zone.
Or not.
It's proof that JWST can find Earth-sized worlds (most of the known exoplanets are larger). Which is pretty exciting on its own.
We have another oddly behaving star. Gaia17bpp has been gradually increasing in luminosity. And we know why.
Turns out it's a binary and its smaller companion is dragging a ton of dust with it. For the past seven years, this dust cloud has eclipsed the larger star. This won't happen again for another millennium.
Binary systems do this, but this one is particularly spectacula.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/11/world/distant-star-brightening-scn/index.html
...or were they bottle blondes?
We like to think of Vikings as tall blonde people, but in fact their hair came in all kinds of colors.
Except for one thing.
It turns out that many people in the north used lye soap on their hair. Lye soap lightens hair. So the description of vikings as "blonde" may actually be because they were lightening their hair, intentionally or otherwise.
It wasn't great for your hair, but it also wasn't great for the parasites that might find their way into your hair, so...
Literally.
Gateway, the proposed space habitat for moon exploration will be so small astronauts will have to do the equivalent of backing up to the nearest passing space. It's going to be extremely claustrophobic.
And the reason is that every bit of it has to be hauled out of the gravity well and it's harder to get stuff up there.
In the long term, the only way we're going to get livable space habitats outside low Earth orbit is to build them in situ.
Science fiction authors have known this for decades, but now we really have to start thinking about how we make it practical.
One step is the DART test. In addition to planetary defense, DART could be used to point a metal-rich asteroid at a Lagrange point, where it could be captured and mined for raw materials.
We just found more evidence that Mars had significant amounts of water at some point.
An opal.
An opal.
Opals cannot form without water. Significant amounts of water. They are created by the interaction between water and silica.
In fact, they found quite a few opals, in an area which they believe was once a lake.
Yet more evidence that Mars was once a lot wetter than it is now.
How old are the oldest galaxies? One of the surprises from the JWST is the discovery that 11 billion years ago, spiral galaxies had already formed.
We didn't think they could form that quickly. This article has a wealth of pictures.
Spiral galaxies contain bars, which are incredibly active stellar nurseries. Which means stars formed faster than we thought.
This might mean the universe is younger than we guessed. Or older. Either way, we need to rework our models of galaxy evolution.
120 million years ago it lived in what is now China. Cratonavis zhui was about the size of a medium-sized hawk and definitely was a bird. It had wings and talons, it had a wishbone, albeit shaped a bit differently from modern birds. It appears to have been a predatory bird like a raptor.
It had a skull identical to t-rex. No beak. No ability to raise the upper half of the jaw like modern birds. Just a regular dino head.
It appears that beaks and bird skulls evolved after the ability to fly as part of a refinement of it.
Or it's just a small dragon.
It's actually pretty simple. Earth's orbit is not a circle around the sun.
Yesterday was perihelion day. This is the day on which the Earth is closest to the sun, and it's always in the first week of January.
Aphelion day, its opposite, is somewhere in late June and early July.
Summers in Australia are hotter because for them, perihelion coincides with their part of the planet being tilted towards the sun.
It's a small effect, though; the Earth's axial tilt has far more of an impact on weather than the orbit.
The last surviving astronaut from Apollo 7, Walter Cunningham, is now dead. We are losing the Apollo era astronauts one by one...I was hoping more would survive to see Artemis land.
We spent far too long messing around in low earth orbit. It appears that we are only willing to go to the moon when somebody else throws a race (in this case, the Chinese).
But we are going back, one way or another.
Somehow, the Daily Mail catastrophists missed the airplane-sized rock that, according to them, would absolutely hit us today.
It's going to make a close approach of...4.27 million miles. Phewf. I think we can relax.
And with the DART test hopefully we will have a strategy to deal with these big rocks before one of them takes out a city or worse.
Hopefully. I am confident in human ingenuity in this regard.
Honestly, I suspect the image a lot of us have is the Millennium Falcon jumping. In my own series I present hyperspace as a violent place that has weather.
A new study shows that it might be possible for objects to go faster than light, but you would experience multiple "timelines," become a wave, and as light would still be the same speed for you...it would look decidedly weird.
But it does kind of resolve the causality issues.
I don't really think hyperspace has gravitational weather, though. It's just fun to play with. Fasten your seatbelts before we jump!
