Free Republic

Although I suspect that intelligent life is rare in the cosmos, I’m playing little more than a hunch. So it’s interesting to see that Andrew Watson (University of East Anglia) has analyzed the chances for intelligence elsewhere in the universe by looking at the challenges life faced as it evolved. Watson believes that it took specific major steps for an intelligent civilization to develop on Earth, one of which, interestingly enough, is language. Identifying which steps are critical is tricky, but in the aggregate they reduce the chance of intelligence elsewhere. A linguist at heart, I wasn’t surprised with the...

Could The Universe Be Tied Up With Cosmic String? ScienceDaily (Jan. 21, 2008) — A team of physicists and astronomers from the University of Sussex and Imperial College London have uncovered hints that there may be cosmic strings - lines of pure mass-energy - stretching across the entire Universe. Cosmic strings are predicted by high energy physics theories, including superstring theory. This is based on the idea that particles are not just little points, but tiny vibrating bits of string Cosmic strings are predicted to have extraordinary amounts of mass - perhaps as much as the mass of the Sun...

A ‘defect’ in spacetime may be one of the most curious findings of the data collected from the Wilkinson Anisotropy Probe. What WMAP gave us is the earliest image of the cosmos we have in our repertoire, showing temperature changes across the microwave background thought to be the aftereffect of the Big Bang. When Marcos Cruz (Instituto de Fisica de Cantabria) and colleagues found a cold spot in the data, they launched an investigation to determine what in heaven could be causing it. A random fluctuation in the data? Possibly, but the Spanish and British team studying the cold spot...

  Double vortex at Venus South pole     ESA’s Venus Express data undoubtedly confirm for the first time the presence of a huge 'double-eye' atmospheric vortex at the planet's south pole. This striking result comes from analysis of the data gathered by the spacecraft during the first orbit around the planet.  On 11 April this year, Venus Express was captured into a first elongated orbit around Venus, which lasted 9 days, and ranged between 350 000 and 400 kilometres from Venus' surface. This orbit represented for the Venus Express scientists a unique opportunity to observe the planet from...

NEWS ADVISORY, June 20 /Christian Newswire/-- Britain’s renowned astrophysicist Stephen Hawking told a recent Hong Kong news conference the human race must “spread out into space for the survival of the species.“ He cited “sudden global warming, nuclear war, or a genetically engineered virus” as threats that could wipe out humanity at any time. “As dire as Hawking’s concerns may be, humanity’s plight is actually worse,” says astronomer Hugh Ross, founder and president of the science/faith think tank Reasons To Believe (www.reasons.org). “But,” he adds, “that is not to say the human race is without hope.”  Ross explains, “It’s important to...

Roman Catholic priest Fr. Georges Lemaître, working off Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, first proposed the “Big Bang” explanation of the universe’s origin in 1927. It took decades for the theory to win general acceptance. Einstein himself opposed it bitterly for years, in what he would later call “the biggest mistake of my life.” The theory was finally proved experimentally only in 1965 by Penzias and Wilson. For their pains, they were awarded the Nobel Prize. Fr. Lemaître, on the other hand, never received the public recognition that was his due. Nevertheless, in the 1970s several apparent problems with the...

3/1/2006 - KIRTLAND AIR FORCE BASE, N.M. (AFPN) -- When launched in 2010, a football-field-in-length demonstrator radar antenna, weighing more than 5 tons, will serve as the forerunner for the future of America's intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance assets in space. Administered by the Air Force Research Laboratory's Space Vehicles Directorate here, the innovative space-based radar antenna technology, or ISAT, program focuses on developing systems to deploy extremely large (up to 300 yards) electronically scanning radar antennas flying 5,700 miles above the Earth's surface and providing improved ground target detection to the warfighter. "These huge antennas will enable the revolutionary performance...

The stars run in their courses, in billions of galaxies, orbited by planets which are orbited by moons, and if they did not do so in ways which are predictable -- that is with many recurring similarities -- science would not exist. Predictability to some degree or other is the foundation of science. Those italics emphasize an extension of previous demands by science, which insisted on absolutes. Quantum physics took that down, and in the process angered Albert Einstein. But, still and all, even in the subatomic world one can safely play the odds. You cannot predict what any given...

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- Galaxy-gazing scientists surely wonder about what kind of impact finding life or intelligent beings on another planet would have on the world. But what sort of effect would it have on Catholic beliefs? Would Christian theology be rocked to the core if science someday found a distant orb teeming with little green men, women or other intelligent forms of alien life? Would the church send missionaries to spread the Gospel to aliens? Could aliens even be baptized? Or would they have had their own version of Jesus and have already experienced his universal or galactic plan...

Crisis in the Cosmos?Galaxy-formation theory is in peril Ron Cowen Imagine peering into a nursery and seeing, among the cooing babies, a few that look like grown men. That's the startling situation that astronomers have stumbled upon as they've looked deep into space and thus back to a time when newborn galaxies filled the cosmos. Some of these babies have turned out to be nearly as massive as the Milky Way and other galactic geezers that have taken billions of years to form. Despite being only about 800 million years old, some of the infants are chock-full of old stars....

Leonard David Senior Space Writer SPACE.com In a unique case of space bumper cars, two pieces of rocket hardware have collided high above Earth. The orbital run-in involved a 31-year-old U.S. rocket body and a fragment from a more recently launched Chinese rocket stage. The collision occurred on January 17 of this year, with the incident happening some 550 miles (885 kilometers) above Earth. That area of low Earth orbit (LEO) has an above-average satellite population density. The American and Chinese space hardware cruised through space in similar orbits at the time of the rear-ender. The U.S. Surveillance Network of...

Black holes are staples of science fiction and many think astronomers have observed them indirectly. But according to a physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, these awesome breaches in space-time do not and indeed cannot exist. Over the past few years, observations of the motions of galaxies have shown that some 70% the Universe seems to be composed of a strange 'dark energy' that is driving the Universe's accelerating expansion. George Chapline thinks that the collapse of the massive stars, which was long believed to generate black holes, actually leads to the formation of stars that contain...

2004 July 25 A Solar Filament Lifts Off Explanation: Hot gas frequently erupts from the Sun. One such eruption produced the glowing filament pictured above, which was captured in 2000 July by the Earth-orbiting TRACE satellite. The filament, although small compared to the overall size of the Sun, measures over 100,000 kilometers in height, so that the entire Earth could easily fit into its outstretched arms. Gas in the filament is funneled by the complex and changing magnetic field of the Sun. After lifting off from the Sun's surface, most of the filamentary gas will eventually fall back. More powerful...

<p>Can you access the flash of emancipation you felt the first time you were able to stay up on a bike or propel yourself through the water? Can you remember the way your new knowledge enhanced your life? And can you recall the gratitude you felt toward those people who had the skill and the patience to pass that knowledge along to you?</p>

Dark energy. Does it exist, and what are its properties? Using galaxy-cluster images from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, astronomers have applied a powerful, new method for detecting and probing dark energy. The results offer intriguing clues about the nature of dark energy and the fate of the Universe. The Marshall Center manages the Chandra program. Astronomers have detected and probed dark energy by applying a powerful, new method that uses images of galaxy clusters made by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. The results trace the transition of the expansion of the Universe from a decelerating to an accelerating phase several billion...

How big is the universe? It is one of the oldest questions in science, and the answer could be anything from "slightly bigger than the area of the universe that we can see" to "infinite". Until now. Cosmologists scrutinizing patterns in the microwave radiation 'afterglow' of the big bang have taken a big chunk out of that uncertainty. They calculate that the universe cannot possibly be smaller than a hefty 78 billion light years across. That rules out earlier suggestions that the universe could be a relatively small shape wrapped around itself. A recent suggestion that the cosmos could be...

WASHINGTON, D.C. – What are the limits of organic life in planetary systems? It’s a heady question that, if answered, may reveal just how crowded the cosmos could be with alien biology. A study arm of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Research Council (NRC), has pulled together a task group of specialists to tackle the issue of alternative life forms -- a.k.a. "weird life". To get things rolling, a workshop on the prospects for finding life on other worlds is being held here May 10-11. The meeting is a joint activity of the NRC’s Space Studies Board's Task...

Hubble's mission will end in 2010. Four years later it will re-enter the atmosphere and burn up. This link is to a shockwave (2 minute audio and video) presentation of The Best of Hubble

A cosmic message in a bottle is scheduled to float into outer space from a radio telescope in Ukraine today, bringing greetings of good will from 90,000 people on planet Earth. "I'm excited," said Cindy Price, 50, of League City. "It's almost a religious, spiritual connecting with the rest of the universe." Price is a member of Team Encounter, a Houston-based company organizing the cosmic call. She said she doubts the message will be received, but she's willing to try. "It's a message in a bottle," said Charles Chafer, Team Encounter's president and chief executive officer. "We certainly don't guarantee...

Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2003 June 30 Disappearing Clouds in Carina Credit: Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA), N. Walborn (STScI) & R. Barbß (La Plata Obs.), NASA Explanation: This dense cloud of gas and dust is being deleted. Likely, within a few million years, the intense light from bright stars will have boiled it away completely. Stars not yet formed in the molecular cloud's interior will then stop growing. The cloud has broken off of part of the greater...