In August of 1977, a group of astronomers examining radio transmissions in Ohio received a mysterious signal from an unknown source.
Shocked by its incredible length — 72 seconds — one scientist scribbled “Wow!” next to the recording, inadvertently giving the unusual communication a nickname that would last decades.
Now, after 40 years of grappling with possible explanations for the Wow! signal — which even include the possibility of aliens — scientists at the Center for Planetary Science have finally solved the puzzle.
A comet unknown to researchers in the 1970s likely caused the signal, and researchers were able to test that theory in a recent fly-by. Read more (6/8/17)
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Do you know what missiles at night look like? They look like this:
and this:
and these:
But do you know what they do not fucking loOK LIKE?? THIS:
OR THIS:
And they don’t fucking sound like this (listen with earbuds/headphones): https://twitter.com/angelsuxx/status/663202170502680577
This has been disproving the government’s bullshit with Lily
Why not just buid a solar panel around the sun to solve all energy problemss?
Dyson sphere is a hypothetical mega-structure that completely encompasses a star and captures most or all of its power output.
Over the years many variants have been explored:
The simplest such arrangement is the Dyson ring, in which all ‘energy harvesting structures’ share the same orbit.
Add multiple Dyson ring structures and you will get a Dyson swarm.
Now what if you didn’t like a consistent orbit for your structures, you could employ a solar sail to continuously modify its orbit( called a statite ).
Such an arrangement would be known as a Dyson Bubble
Then there is the fictionally popular version - The Dyson Shell, where a uniform solid shell of matter just encapsulates the entire star.
And many many more. But you get the gist.
When scientists were monitoring the brightness from some stars, they found that it fluctuated in some odd ways like so:
Brightness v/s time for KIC 8462852
It is common for such dips to occur since when a planet eclipses a star, there would a drop in the brightness observed from the star.
Brightness v/s time for a binary star system
But what was baffling was the duration and period of occurrence of these dips.
Although the main line of rationale remains as asteroid impact remnants or interstellar collisions causing these aberrations in data.
But to say that these could the signs of an alien civilization does remain to be the more entertaining interpretation.
Great Question. Thanks for asking !
** For more information. check out this TED talk
Vera Rubin, the groundbreaking astrophysicist who discovered evidence of dark matter, died Sunday night at the age of 88, the Carnegie Institution confirms.
Rubin did much of her revelatory work at Carnegie. The organization’s president calls her a “national treasure.”
In the 1960s and 1970s, Rubin was working with astronomer Kent Ford, studying the behavior of spiral galaxies, when they discovered something entirely unexpected — the stars at the outside of the galaxy were moving as fast as the ones in the middle, which didn’t fit with Newtonian gravitational theory.
The explanation: Dark matter.
Adam Frank, an astrophysicist who writes for NPR’s 13.7 blog, described dark matter by comparing it to a ghost in a horror movie. You can’t see it, he writes — “but you know it’s with you because it messes with the things you can see.”
Adam continued:
“It was Vera Rubin’s famous work in the 1970s that showed pretty much all spiral galaxies were spinning way too fast to be accounted for by the gravitational pull of the their ‘luminous’ matter (the stuff we see in a telescope). Rubin and others reasoned there had to be a giant sphere of invisible stuff surrounding the stars in these galaxies, tugging on them and speeding up their orbits around the galaxy’s center.”
“The second merger held no such hints of electromagnetic signals, but that was less surprising: the black holes were of significantly lower mass, so any signal arising from them would be expected to be correspondingly lower in magnitude. But the third merger was large in mass again, more comparable to the first than the second. While Fermi has made no announcement, and Integral again reports a non-detection, there are two pieces of evidence that suggest there may have been an electromagnetic counterpart after all. The AGILE satellite from the Italian Space Agency detected a weak, short-lived event that occurred just half a second before the LIGO merger, while X-ray, radio and optical observations combined to identify a strange afterglow less than 24 hours after the merger.”
Whenever there’s a catastrophic, cataclysmic event in space, there’s almost always a tremendous release of energy that accompanies it. A supernova emits light; a neutron star merger emits gamma rays; a quasar emits radio waves; merging black holes emit gravitational waves. But if there’s any sort of matter present outside the event horizons of these black holes, they have the potential to emit electromagnetic radiation, or light signals, too. Our best models and simulations don’t predict much, but sometimes the Universe surprises us! With the third LIGO merger, there were two independent teams that claimed an electromagnetic counterpart within 24 hours of the gravitational wave signal. One was an afterglow in gamma rays and the optical, occurring about 19 hours after-the-fact, while the other was an X-ray burst occurring just half a second before the merger.
Could either of these be connected to these merging black holes? Or are we just grasping at straws here? We need more, better data to know for sure, but here’s what we’ve got so far!
New comic! (link)
I’m going to be honest, this it the most I have ever used the science courses I took in undergrad. Glad all those thousands of dollars finally paid off.
The Titanoboa, is a 48ft long snake dating from around 60-58million years ago. It had a rib cage 2ft wide, allowing it to eat whole crocodiles, and surrounding the ribcage were muscles so powerful that it could crush a rhino. Titanoboa was so big it couldn’t even spend long amounts of time on land, because the force of gravity acting on it would cause it to suffocate under its own weight.
1800 years ago two stars were coming together in a huge cataclysmic explosion. The light from that collision will finally arrive on Earth creating a new star in the night sky - dubbed the ‘Boom Star’ - in an incredibly rare event which is usually only spotted through telescopes. Before their meeting the two stars were too dim to be seen by the naked eye, but in 2022, the newly formed Red Nova will burn so brightly in the constellation Cygnus that everyone will be able to to see it. For around six months the Boom Star will be one of the brightest in the sky before gradually dimming, returning to its normal brightness after around two to three years. Read more
Planet 55 Cancri e is basically a giant diamond. like the planet is a diamond. and it would be worth $26.9 nonillion
Planet Gliese 436 b is an ice planet that is constantly on fire do to its close proximity to its parent star. the ice doesn’t melt bc the planet’s gravity is so strong it physically prevents the ice from melting
Planet HD 189733b rains sideways glass…. constantly
Planet J1407-B has planetary rings that are 200x the size of saturn. if saturn’s ring were as big as J1407-B’s we’d be able to see them with our naked eye from earth AND they would dominate our sky and look larger than a full moon
Planet Wasp-12b rotates so close to its parent star that its slowly being consumed by the it
Planet Gliese 581c is one of the candidates for a planet that can support life however it orbits a tiny dwarf star and is tidally locked so one side is constantly subject to immense sunlight while the other is constantly in darkness. there’s a small area of the planet however, that is just the right temp to support life. u just can’t step out of said area. the skies are red and the plants would have be a black color instead of a green bc they would use infrared light for photosynthesis. (a message was actually sent to the planet in 2008 in hopes that there’s life on the planet but the message wont reach the planet until 2029).
Planet GJ 1214b is a water planet nicknamed “water world” is has no land at all and the water is so deep it goes down miles all the way to the planet’s core.
Planet Wasp-17b is the largest planet discovered thus far. its so large its existence contradicts our understanding of how planets are formed. and it has a retrograde orbit, so it orbits in the opposite direction of its parent star.
Planet HD 188753 has 3 suns you should have triple shadows and there would be almost daily eclipses. and no matter which direction u face on the planet u would always see a sunset
Planet HD106906b is the loneliest planet discovered thus far. its known as “super jupiter” bc its 11x bigger than jupiter. it orbits its parent star at a distance of 60 billion miles (which is v strange) hence why its the loneliest planet.
Planet Tres 2b is the darkest planet known. it reflects less than 1% of light (it reflects less light than coal and black acrylic paint). the tiny part of the planet that does reflect light is red making the planet glow a dim red.
The Drake Equation
In 1961, following an early SETI experiment using radio telescopes called Project Ozma, astronomer Frank Drake arranged a historic meeting at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia. The ten attendees - among them a young Carl Sagan - discussed the feasibility and methodology of detecting extraterrestrial civilizations using radio astronomy. They formulated the Drake Equation - a rough, speculative means of estimating the possible number of current technologically-advanced civilizations in the galaxy.
N = the number of advanced extraterrestrial civilizations potentially detectable by radio signals in the Milky Way Galaxy.
Depending on the values used for each variable, N can work out to be hundreds of thousands or more, or very few.
R* = Rate of new star formation.
One estimate is 7 stars per year.
Fp = Percentage of stars with planetary systems around them.
New solar systems are being discovered every year.
Ne = Number of planets per star system capable of sustaining life.
Depending upon the temperature, type, and size of the star, the habitable zone of a planet for Earth-like life may be nearer or further from its star. Based on our own solar system, we might guess 1 or 2.
Fl = Fraction of those planets upon which life appears.
How many of those habitable planets upon which life has developed is difficult to estimate. In our own solar system, it’s at least 1 - there is a good chance that at one point, life developed on Mars, though traces of it have yet to be found.
Fi = Fraction of those planets where intelligent life appears.
Estimates vary wildly. We know it’s happened at least once here on Earth. As ‘intelligence’ is subjective, it may be that it has developed in other non-human, communicating species, like whales.
Fc = Fraction of those societies that develop advanced communication technology and send signals into space.
Intentional or unintentional, other civilizations might transmit identifiable signals into outer space that modern Earth technology could pick up.
L = Lifetime of communicative civilizations.
Do technologically-capable civilizations inevitably self-destruct, or can they last forever? This is an immensely uncertain question. We’ve been communicating with radio waves for fewer than 100 years, with the long-term survival of our species and our status as ‘technological’ uncertain.
Stardate: 2258.42...or, uh, 4... Whatever. Life is weird, at least we've got science.
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