Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.
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Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE).
Should We Transmit in Addition to Listening? Our planet has some leakage of radio waves into space, from FM radio, television, military radars, and communication between Earth and our orbiting spacecraft. However, such leakage radiation is still quite weak, and therefore difficult to detect at the distances of the stars, at least with the radio…
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Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence
Given all the developments discussed in this chapter, it seems likely that life could have developed on many planets around other stars. Even if that life is microbial, we saw that we may soon have ways to search for chemical biosignatures. This search is of fundamental importance for understanding biology, but it does not answer…
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Searching for Life beyond Earth
Astronomers and planetary scientists continue to search for life in the solar system and the universe at large. In this section, we discuss two kinds of searches. First is the direct exploration of planets within our own solar system, especially Mars and some of the icy moons of the outer solar system. Second is the…
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Astrobiology
The Building Blocks of Life While no unambiguous evidence for life has yet been found anywhere beyond Earth, life’s chemical building blocks have been detected in a wide range of extraterrestrial environments. Meteorites (which you learned about in Meteorites: Stones From Heaven) have been found to contain two kinds of substances whose chemical structures mark them…
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The expansion of the universe
The universe is not only expanding, but expanding faster. This means that with time, nobody will be able to spot other galaxies from Earth or any other vantage point within our galaxy. “We will see distant galaxies moving away from us, but their speed is increasing with time,” harvard University astronomer Avi Loeb said in…
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Was the Big Bang an Explosion?
Although the Big Bang is often described as an “explosion”, that’s a misleading image. In an explosion, fragments are flung out from a central point into a pre-existing space. If you were at the central point, you’d see all the fragments moving away from you at roughly the same speed. But the Big Bang wasn’t…
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What are gravitational Waves ?
While astronomers study the universe’s beginnings through creative measures and mathematical simulations, they’ve also sought proof of its rapid inflation. They have done this by observing gravitational waves, tiny perturbations in space-time that ripple outwards from great disturbances like, for instance, two colliding black holes or the universe’s birth. According to leading theories, in the first…
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The Age Of the Universe
The CMB has been observed by many researchers now and with many spacecraft missions. One of the most famous space-faring missions to do so was NASA’s Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite, which mapped the sky in the 1990s. Several other missions have followed in COBE’s footsteps, such as the BOOMERanG experiment (Balloon Observations of Millimetric…
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Modelling the Big Bang
Because we can’t see it directly, scientists have been trying to figure out how to “see” the Big Bang through other measures. In one case, cosmologists are pressing rewind to reach the first instant after the Big Bang by simulating 4,000 versions of the current universe on a massive supercomputer. “We are trying to do something like…
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What is the Big Bang Theory?
The Big Bang Theory explains how the universe began: The Big Bang Theory is the leading explanation for how the universe began. Simply put, it says the universe as we know it started with an infinitely hot and dense single point that inflated and stretched — first at unimaginable speeds, and then at a more measurable rate…
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