Imagine you walk into a parking lot full of cars. You have in your pocket one single key. It’s the key to your car. The same key you’ve always used, the same key you’ve always trusted, the same key that you always manage to realize that you’ve lost right when you’re rushing out the door.
The supermassive black hole in the Milky Way's galactic center, Sagittarius A-star, is known for being quiet and dim. But that wasn't always the case. The powerful XRISM x-ray telescope shows that it flared brightly at least once in the very recent past.
But we’re not going for one thing or another, are we? We’re here to explore ideas – that’s most of the fun anyway. And there’s one more aspect of physics that takes part in the free will discussion, and that’s the concept of emergence.
Mars has a curious past. Rovers have shown unequivocal evidence that liquid water existed on its surface, for probably at least 100 years. But climate models haven’t come up with how exactly that happened with what we currently understand about what the Martian climate was like back then. A new paper, published in the journal AGU Advances by Eleanor Moreland, a graduate student at Rice University, and her co-authors, has a potential explanation for what might have happened - liquid lakes on the Red Planet would have hid under small, seasonal ice sheets similar to the way they do in Antarctica on Earth.
All of physics rests on causal determinism. It’s like…how we do physics. It IS physics.
New research shows that Jupiter's moon Europa, one of the prime targets in the search for life, may not have the conditions required after all. The research shows that the moon lacks the type of active seafloor faulting needed to create habitability. Deep sea vents created by the faulting introduce nutrients into the water that organisms use to harness energy, and without those nutrients, the moon's subsurface ocean is likely dead.
A study published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters demonstrates that decaying dark matter (DDM) can potentially be detected in unidentified X-ray emission lines in the spectra of galaxy clusters.
