A rare glimpse of a star before it exploded in a fiery supernova looks nothing like astronomers expected, a new study suggests.
Images from the Hubble Space Telescope reveal that a relatively cool, puffy star ended its life in a hydrogen-free supernova. Until now, supernovas without hydrogen were thought to originate only from extremely hot, compact stars.
The discovery “is a very important test case for stellar evolution,” says Sung-Chul Yoon, an astrophysicist at Seoul National University in South Korea, who was not involved in the work. Theorists have some ideas about how massive stars behave right before they blow up, but such hefty stars are scant in the local universe and many are nowhere near ready to go supernova, Yoon says. Retroactively identifying the star responsible for a supernova provides an opportunity to test scenarios of how stars evolve right before exploding.
Scientists believe these photos show mushrooms on mars—and proof of life.
Could there be mushrooms on Mars? In a new paper, an international team of scientists from countries including the U.S., France, and China have gathered and compared photographic evidence they claim shows fungus-like objects growing on the Red Planet.
Debris from an out-of-control Chinese rocket likely plunged into the Indian Ocean, just west of the Maldives, on Saturday night ET, China’s space agency said.
Most of the huge Long March 5B rocket, however, burned up on reentering the atmosphere, the China Manned Space Engineering Office said in a post on WeChat.
It was unclear if any debris had landed on the atoll nation.
The team went so far as to say that “black fungi-bacteria-like specimens also appeared atop the rovers.”
They didn’t stop there: the team also examined photos taken by NASA’s HiRISE, and found evidence for “amorphous specimens within a crevice” that “changed shape and location then disappeared.”
“It is well established that a variety of terrestrial organisms survive Mars-like conditions,” the team concludes. “Given the likelihood Earth has been seeding Mars with life and life has been repeatedly transferred between worlds, it would be surprising if there was no life on Mars.”
An international collaboration of astronomers led by a researcher from the Astrobiology Center and Queen’s University Belfast, and including researchers from Trinity, has detected a new chemical signature in the atmosphere of an extrasolar planet (a planet that orbits a star other than our Sun).
Watch the Webinar “Space Renaissance and Spirituality”, held yesterday April 25th 2021.
The webinar “The Space Renaissance and Spirituality” discusses another, often neglected, primary need of humans: spirituality. Spirituality animated human deep feeelings and culture since the very ancient times of our history on our mother planet, Earth. Spirituality is a feeling that characterizes us, as human beings, and cannot be felt by other sentient but not self-aware and less intelligent species. Spirituality suggests reverence for life and great appreciation for the highest expression of nature: the intelligent life. The Webinar Series are done in the frame of 2021 Space Renaissance Congress “The Civilian Space Development”. The panel includes: - Adriano V. Autino (SRI President and Co-Founder, author of “A greater world is possible!”, trying to develop further the Astronautic Humanism philosophy) 07:41 - Giulio Prisco (blogger and founder of the Turing Church, Hungary) 34:18 - Paul Ziolo (Director of Psychohistory Department, University of Liverpool, UK) 51:37 - Tsvi Bisk (Strategic Futurist, author of Cosmodeism: A Worldview for the Space Age, founder of The Center for Strategic Futurist Thinking, Israel) 01:10:30 - The Cometan (Brandon R. Taylorian, founder of the Astronism channel, UK) 01:27:32 - Steven Wolfe (Founder of Beyond Earth Institute, author of “The Obligation ”, evolutionist philosopher, USA) 01:47:26 - Alberto Cavallo (SRI Co-Founder, Buddhist, Engineer, Scholar of Philosophy, Italy) 02:01:05 Moderates: Giulio Prisco.
Some introductory questions to the panelists: - Spirituality, and religion, animated human efforts during the whole human history. - Religions were often used as a sectarian flag, to motivate wars, conquers and ethnic cleansing anti-human acampaigns. - However, at the dawn of expansion into outer space, humans feel the need to cultivate spirituality — both as individuals and communities — facing the magnificent mistery of the Universe. - In the same time, a mature open spirituality could be a wonderful synergystic alliedm with science and philosophy, helping to motivate the profund evolutionary impulse to expand Earthly bioma into the Solar System and beyond. - The original meaning of the term Religion, from Latin language, is religere=joining efforts, and can be related to both theist and secular communities. - Should space advocacies include spirituality in their public outreach and discussion? - If yes, how to avoid this message to be confused with irrational, new ageist and fake metaphysics, so common in the web age? - Which are the common shared deep humanist concepts and ideals, among some currents, such as Astronautic Humanism, Astronism, Cosmodeism, and some theist and non theist Religions? - The aim of this discussion shouldn’t be a game among different spiritual currents, but a first effort to share and put together some agreed concepts and believes, for the sake of the space renaissance, a true and urgent well motivated strategy of space settlement.
Rees explained how his astronomy background meshes with his concern for humanity’s fate:
People often ask does being an astronomer have any effect on one’s attitude toward these things. I think it does in a way, because it makes us aware of the long-range future. We’re aware that it’s taken about 4 billion years for life to evolve from simple beginnings to our biosphere of which we are a part, but we also know that the sun is less than halfway through its life and the universe may go on forever. So we are not the culmination of evolution. Post-humans are going to have far longer to evolve. We can’t conceive what they’d be like, but if life is a rarity in the universe, then, of course, the stakes are very high if we snuff things out this century.
Bottom line: From nuclear weapons to biowarfare to cyberattacks, humanity has much to overcome. Martin Rees and Frederick Lamb discuss the obstacles we face as we look forward to humanity’s future on Earth.
Arecibo Observatory’s collapse on Dec. 1, 2020 was a devastating blow for science, but its decades of observations will inform research for years to come.
‘Humans are extraordinarily special’. Not new but well worth remembering.
Either way, their conclusion is that, like stick-shift cars, extraterrestrial civilizations are few and far between. The implication is that our nearest cosmic chums are at least several thousand light-years away.
You may wonder why this story has raised eyebrows. Well, it would make Homo sapiens extraordinarily special, despite the fact that the galaxy is stuffed with planets. It discomfits scientists (including me) because, historically, every time we’ve thought we occupy a privileged position in the universe, we were wrong. Remember that six centuries ago, learned folk would have assured you that Earth was the center of the cosmos.
The lives of infomorphs (or ‘cyberhumans’) who have no permanent bodies but possess near-perfect information-handling abilities, will be dramatically different from ours. Infomorphs will achieve the ultimate morphological freedom. Any infomorph will be able to have multiple cybernetic bodies which can be assembled and dissembled at will by nanobots in the physical world if deemed necessary, otherwise most time will be spent in the multitude of virtual bodies in virtual enviro… See More.
“I am not a thing — a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process — an integral function of the Universe.” — Buckminster Fuller
The term ‘Infomorph’ was first introduced in “The Silicon Man” by Charles Platt in 1991 and later popularized by Alexander Chislenko in his paper “Networking in the Mind Age”: “The growing reliance of system connections on functional, rather than physical, proximity of their elements will dramatically transform the notions of personhood and identity and create a new community of distributed ‘infomorphs’ — advanced informational entities — that will bring the ongoing process of liberation of functional structures from material dependence to its logical conclusions. The infomorph society will be built on new organizational principles and will represent a blend of a superliquid economy, cyberspace anarchy and advanced consciousness.”
The new post-Singularity system will inherit many of today’s structures but at the same time will develop new traits beyond our current human comprehension. The ability of future machines and posthumans alike to instantly transfer knowledge and directly share experiences with each other will lead to evolution of intelligence from the hive ontology of individual biological minds to the global hyperconnected society of digital minds.
