The Star Garden
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Are we really alone in the universe or do other intelligent species know something that we don't?
Last year, NASA Space Scientist William Borucki predicted that at least half a billion planets in our galaxy could contain life. Modern cosmology suggests that the Milky Way formed about eight billion years ago, around the same time as the first habitable planets. It took about four billion years from the formation of the Earth to the evolution of intelligent life, so assuming this is not atypical, the first intelligent life forms in the Galaxy could have evolved about four billion years ago.
It would only take half a million years for a
self-replicating spaceship, travelling at 10% the speed of light, to travel across the Milky Way. This means that space-faring intelligent life would only have to have evolved once - on any of the hundreds of millions of possible habitable worlds, during the last four billion years - for the galaxy to be almost entirely inhabited.
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The image to the left shows one of the world's smallest Christmas cards. Created by the University of Leeds in 2007, it shows Santa flying over the Parkinson Tower. The image was created using a focused ion beam (FIB) machine which works in a similar way to a scanning electron microscope (SEM) but uses ions instead of electrons to illuminate objects that would otherwise be invisible. The scale is in nanometres (nm). A nanometre is equal to a billionth of a metre, (or a millionth of a millimetre). The whole image is about 8500 nm wide. By comparison, a human hair is almost 10 times as wide at 80,000 nm.
Two months ago, physicists working on the OPERA (Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus) experiment at CERN announced that they may have discovered particles travelling faster than the speed of light. This implies that either there are conditions when Einstein's theory of special relativity breaks down, or that the particles took a 'short cut' through spacetime, perhaps through an extra dimension. Either way, if information can arrive faster than light, then it should also be travelling back in time, challenging our linear notion of cause and effect.
Last week, NASA announced that water-covered planets, like Earth, may be common in the universe. This is because a team of scientists, led by Dutch astronomer Michiel Hogerheijde, have recently discovered cold water vapour surrounding the orange dwarf star TW Hydrae. Their findings have been published in the October 21 issue of Science and can be read for free here.
Planets and asteroids form from the disk of dust and gas that surrounds newly formed stars, known as a protoplanetary disk. Since this matter is unevenly distributed, gravitational interactions cause it to clump together...
This article was written in May 2011 and was shortlisted for the Wellcome Trust Science Writing Prize.
The desire to explore our surroundings is part of human nature. It is that which drove our ancestors to leave Africa tens of thousands of years ago, walking across continents and traversing unmapped oceans in simple rafts. It is that which led explorers like Christopher Columbus and Sir Walter Raleigh to rediscover these 'new worlds' during the European Renaissance and it is that which eventually put twelve people on the Moon.
Earlier this year, the Wellcome Trust held a competition to find new science writers. I was lucky enough to make the shortlist and, on Wednesday, I attended a science writing workshop at the Guardian offices followed by the awards ceremony. The workshop was hosted by science journalist Alok Jha and covered three different routes into science writing, with discussions from science writer Michael Regnier, science journalist James Randerson and scientist and prominent blogger Stephen Curry. The winners - Penny Sarchet and Tess Shellard - were later announced by comedian and judge Dara O'Briain. Other judges included editors at the Guardian and Observer and directors of the Wellcome Trust.
As human beings, we are used to seeing the universe through a very narrow range of light waves, known as the visible part of the electromagnetic spectrum. The light that we see is composed of photons, 'bundles' of energy travelling with wavelengths of about 390 to 750 billionths of a metre. We perceive different wavelengths as different colours. Whilst some animals can see ultraviolet light, humans have had to invent machines in order to map the universe beyond the visible spectrum and they have found that things can look vastly different. The pictures below show the Earth in infrared, visible, ultraviolet and x-ray light.
Earlier this month physicists working in the UK and Canada provided evidence that there may be universes beyond our own. Their research - co authored by Stephen Feeney, Matthew Johnson, Daniel Mortlock and Hiranya Peiris - is to be published in the journal Physical Review D but can be read for free here. Fenney et al. have found a way to search for evidence of the multiverse predicted by eternal inflation theory. Eternal inflation refers to the inflationary epoch of the big bang, a period when spacetime expanded faster than the speed of light. This idea was first proposed by American physicist Alan Guth in 1980.
As with astronomy, there is evidence that prehistoric man understood simple mathematics. The first of which is the Lebombo bone which is about 37,000 years old and was found in Swaziland. It has 29 notches carved into it which could have been used as a tally stick, to record numbers. Stronger evidence comes from the Ishango bone, found in the Congo. It is about 20,000 years old and has a series of notches in three columns. Some argue that patterns in these numbers show they were made by someone that understood addition, subtraction, multiplication, division and prime numbers. Prime numbers are numbers which are only divisible by themselves and 1.
Earlier this year, Rolf-Dieter Heuer, director general of the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) announced that if they have not discovered the Higgs boson by the end of next year, then physicists should give up on finding it and reconsider the Standard Model of particle physics. The Standard Model was developed in the early 1970s in order to explain how all known particles interact. It divides particles into fermions, which can combine to form atoms, and bosons which carry forces. Fermions are further divided into quarks, which can form protons and neutrons, and leptons which include electrons and neutrinos.
Last week, the Space Shuttle Endeavour left Earth for the final time carrying banana spiders and fruit flies to the International Space Station. They are the latest in a long line of animal astronauts. Literally thousands of animals have been to space including thirty two monkeys, two cats and at least twenty seven dogs. Many have orbited the Earth and worms, mice and tortoises have even orbited the Moon. These days, most space-faring animals survive their flights and suffer minimal harm and distress but this was not always the case. In the early days of space travel, when rocket science was still in its infancy, no one knew what the effects of extreme...
The penultimate Space Shuttle mission is due to launch on the 16th May, transporting a device known as the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, or AMS-02, to the International Space Station. The AMS-02 is designed to identify cosmic rays, high energy particles that originate from space. Although most cosmic rays are composed of ordinary matter, the leader of the AMS project, Nobel laureate Professor Samuel Ting, hopes that it will discover dark matter, strange matter and antimatter. Ting would like to prove that isolated regions of the universe are composed entirely of antimatter and if this is the case then there could be anti galaxies and even anti life...
The obvious answer is that we can't remember the future because it has not happened yet, but this cannot be the whole story, after all Einstein once stated that "people...who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion". There are two ways to look at time, either it is something that flows as the present moves away from the past and towards the future, or it is something which is static, the past is just as real as the future and our experience of the present is an illusion. The former idea is known as the tensed theory of time and the latter is known as the tenseless theory...
Today marks the 21st anniversary of the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope and in order to celebrate, NASA have released a new image showing the interaction of spiral galaxy UGC 1810 with its companion UGC 1813. The success of the Hubble Space Telescope took decades of persistence and hard work. German physicist Hermann Oberth was the first to consider a space based telescope in 1923 and, in 1946, American astronomer Lyman Spitzer discussed the two main advantages to Oberth's idea. Firstly, a space based telescope would have a much greater resolution than an equivalently sized ground based telescope...
In this week's issue of Science, physicists working in Japan and Australia reported a breakthrough in quantum teleportation. Using the devise above, known simply as the teleporter, the team, led by Dr. Noriyuki Lee of the University of Tokyo, transported information contained in a beam of light. This is not the first time information has been teleported, the theory of quantum teleportation was devised by American physicist Charles Bennett in 1993 and it was first demonstrated by physicists in Europe and America in 1998. Matter was first teleported in 2009. The results of Lee's team are groundbreaking because no one has teleported such complex information...
It has now been over fifty years since Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first person to travel to space. On 12th April 1961, he spent one hundred and eight minutes orbiting the Earth in the Vostok 1 spacecraft before safely landing. Gagarin's flight was an early victory for the Soviet Union in the Space Race but, more importantly, it marked the first step in man's exploration of the universe and highlighted the fragility of the Earth. Although there is no footage of Gagarin's journey, it has since been recreated in real time by the crew of the International Space Station. After the flight, Gagarin continued to progress within the Soviet Air Force...
Welcome to The Star Garden blog! From now on, I hope to regularly post articles highlighting recent breakthroughs or events in science. I am also interested in the philosophy of physics so I thought I would start by briefly discussing what this is. The philosophy of science explores the assumptions, implications and methodology of science. It asks how science can be defined, how science progresses and whether science tells us the truth about the world. Two of the most famous arguments in the philosophy of science are pessimistic meta induction and the no miracles argument. Pessimistic meta induction states that our current scientific theories...
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