Latest scientific Dicoveries

Discoveries that comply with cosmological models are like a scientific pat on the back. But the ones that don’t hold up to previous standards excite the imagination the most because they imply a more mysterious, dynamic, and maybe even scarier universe.

Sometimes, we get a little too sure of our scientific knowledge. These latest discoveries show us just how much we don’t know and how much we’ll have to rethink our previous theories about the final frontier.

A Supernova Birthed Our Solar System

Every cosmic catastrophe is just the birth of some other phenomenon. A supernova, for example, might spark a solar system into life. Our solar system.

The solar system began as a debris cloud, which coagulated into countless bodies that drifted together or apart to form the eight planets and miscellaneous rocks we call home. But that process needed a catalyst.[1]

Like a supernova. The evidence comes from isotopes in ancient meteorites. One of these is iron-60, which decays into nickel-60 and is produced by certain stars and supernovae. The meteorites contained this telltale nickel-60, suggesting a supernova shock wave punched the solar system to life. This implies that supernovae across the universe could be continuously birthing new solar systems.

All Sunlike Stars Have Siblings

Lots of stars have companions, potentially even the Sun. A new study says that it does because all Sunlike stars are born binary. Astronomers surveyed young single stars and binaries in the Perseus constellation 600 light-years away, but the math makes the most sense when all Sunlike stars are born as “wide binaries” approximately 500 astronomical units apart (1 AU = 150 million kilometers (93 million mi)).But the partnerships either shrink or break apart early in their lifetime, after only about a million years. And a long-lost sibling could better explain the current state of our own solar system.

The First Exomoon

The spaceborne Kepler spacecraft has discovered thousands of exoplanets but no exomoons, which might be because they’re hiding around the planets farthest out from their stars. Recently, Twitter broke the news that astronomers may have detected the first extrasolar moon.

They discovered a planet candidate, Kepler-1625 b, which obscures a curious amount of light from its star. The lopsided light dip outlines Kepler-1625 b as a heaving Jupiter-size body with a Neptune-size companion moon. Astronomy is finally on the brink of glimpsing alien moons. This means a significant boost in the search for habitable bodies, though further review with Hubble is necessary to consolidate the claim.

Dark Energy Is Acting Up

The universe is expanding more quickly than it should, and no one knows why. Astronomers have been using Hubble for the past six years to improve the accuracy of expansion parameters. They calculated that the universe is expanding at a rate of 73 kilometers (45 mi) per second per megaparsec. So two galaxies separated by 3.3 million light-years, or one megaparsec, are flying apart at 73 kilometers (45 mi) per second.

That’s an irreconcilable 9 percent discrepancy compared to Planck satellite predictions, with only a 1-in-5,000 chance of error.[9]

The study implies that dark energy is even more confounding that previously thought. Maybe it’s growing stronger. Or maybe it’s more “sociable” than thought and is interacting with the universe in a novel way. Or an entirely new type of particle could be at fault.

TRAPPIST-1 Is Too Old For Life

The seven-planet TRAPPIST-1 system discovered in February 2017 is a prime suspect in the search for alien life, with multiple potentially habitable planets. At least it was when its age was estimated at 500 million years old. But new criteria, including the system’s speed around the center of the galaxy, the star’s metal content, and chemical absorption lines, suggest that the TRAPPIST family is at least as old as our solar system and potentially twice as old at 9.8 billion years. So it’s unlikely to host life as it was probably sterilized by flares long ago, a cosmic tragedy and reminder of how rare life may be.

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