So… that supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy? It’s inactive, and has been for a long time. Scientists wondered just how long it’s been inactive, and now they have an idea…
It ate it’s last meal about 6 million years ago.
And here’s the image (as usual, click on the image for the hi-res tif file):
Quasar’s Light Yields Clues to Outflow
More infuriating shit from, of all places, Bloomberg…
President Donald Trump is set to sign a sweeping directive to dramatically shrink the role climate change plays in decisions across the government, ranging from appliance standards to pipeline approvals, according to a person familiar with the administration’s plan.
The order, which could be signed this week, goes far beyond a targeted assault on Obama-era measures blocking coal leasing and throttling greenhouse gas emissions from power plants that has been discussed for weeks. Some of the changes could happen immediately; others could take years to implement.
In perhaps the most Captain Obvious moment on the first week of March, we learn that Scott Pruitt, current head of the Environmental Protection Agency, denies climate change…
From the New York Times…
Scott Pruitt, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, said on Thursday that carbon dioxide was not a primary contributor to global warming, a statement at odds with the established scientific consensus on climate change.
Asked his views on the role of carbon dioxide, the heat-trapping gas produced by burning fossil fuels, in increasing global warming, Mr. Pruitt said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” that “I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do and there’s tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact, so, no, I would not agree that it’s a primary contributor to the global warming that we see.”
“But we don’t know that yet,” he added. “We need to continue the debate and continue the review and the analysis.”
Here’s a cool gallery from Space.com, showcasing artist renderings of the strangest exoplanets discovered so far…
I’ll post a few of my favorites, but head on over to see the rest…
Mega-Earth Kepler-10c Planet
Okay okay… potentially habitable planets… the title was already long enough…
(Thanks to Rob Grigjanis for alerting me to this…)
Allowing for the fact that NASA is known for its sensationalism (routinely mocked, actually, by some astronomy podcasts I listen to, like Awesome Astronomy), this is actually really intriguing. From Vox…
TRAPPIST-1 System… planets e, f, and g are the potentially habitable planets
This is a really cool article, written by Stephanie Pappas for LiveScience…
The earliest evidence for life on Earth arises among the oldest rocks still preserved on the planet.
Earth is about 4.5 billion years old, but the oldest rocks still in existence date back to just 4 billion years ago. Not long after that rock record begins, tantalizing evidence of life emerges: A set of filament-like fossils from Australia, reported in the journal Astrobiology in 2013, may be the remains of a microbial mat that might have been extracting energy from sunlight some 3.5 billion years ago. Another contender for world’s oldest life is a set of rocks in Greenland that may hold the fossils of 3.7-billion-year-old colonies of cyanobacteria, which form layered structures called stromatolites.
Some scientists have claimed to see evidence of life in 3.8-billion-year-old rocks from Akilia Island, Greenland. The researchers first reported in 1996 in the journal Nature that isotopes (forms of an element with different numbers of neutrons) in those rocks might indicate ancient metabolic activity by some mystery microbe. Those findings have been hotly debated ever since — as, in fact, have all claims of early life.
Still, the fact that suggestive evidence of life arises right as the rock record begins raises a question, said University of California, Los Angeles, geochemist Elizabeth Bell in a SETI Talk in February 2016: Is the timing a coincidence, or were there earlier forms of life whose remnants disappeared with the planet’s most ancient rocks?
Head on over and read the whole thing! It’s fascinating…
Saturn’s Moon Mimas and It’s Mountain
Yeah yeah… I know Valentine’s Day was yesterday… but Astronomy Picture of the Week is on Wednesdays, so get over it.
This is an infrared mosaic known as “Heart and Soul“… two nebulae captured by NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE. As usual, click on the image for the .tif download…
Heart (right) and Soul (left) Nebulae
I would say “Happy Valentine’s Day from the Universe!” but… you know… day late, and all…
Got 1 hour, 28 minutes, and 3 seconds?
Good! Because this is pretty cool…
You know how they say that, in space, no one can hear you scream? They might say that that’s because there’s no sound in space. And, technically, that’s sort of true…
But in another way, it’s actually not true at all…
Space, in fact, can be quite noisy: