Galaxies from the early Universe are more like our own Milky Way than previously thought, flipping the entire narrative of how scientists think about structure formation in the Universe, according to new research published today.
Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), an international team of researchers including those at The University of Manchester and University of Victoria in Canada discovered that galaxies like our own Milky Way dominate throughout the universe and are surprisingly common.
These galaxies go far back in the Universe’s history with many of these galaxies forming 10 billion years ago or longer. The Milky Way is a typical ‘disk’ galaxy, which a shape similar to a pancake or compact disk, rotating about its centre and often containing spiral arms. These galaxies are thought to be the most common in the nearby Universe and might be the types of galaxies where life can develop given the nature of their formation history.
However, astronomers previously considered that these types of galaxies were too fragile to exist in the early Universe when galaxy mergers were more common, destroying what we thought was their delicate shapes.
The new discovery, published today in the Astrophysical Journal, finds that these ‘disk’ galaxies are ten times more common than what astronomers believed based on previous observations with the Hubble Space Telescope.
Christopher Conselice, Professor of Extragalactic Astronomy at The University of Manchester, said: “Using the Hubble Space Telescope we thought that disk galaxies were almost non-existent until the Universe was about six billion years old, these new JWST results push the time these Milky Way-like galaxies form to almost the beginning of the Universe.” The research completely overturns the existing understanding of how scientists think our Universe evolves, and the scientists say new ideas need to be considered.
Lead author, Leonardo Ferreira from the University of Victoria, said: “For over 30 years it was thought that these disk galaxies were rare in the early Universe due to the common violent encounters that galaxies undergo. The fact that JWST finds so many is another sign of the power of this instrument and that the structures of galaxies form earlier in the Universe, much earlier in fact, than anyone had anticipated.
It was once thought that disk galaxies such as the Milky Way were relatively rare through cosmic history, and that they only formed after the Universe was already middle aged.
“Based on our results astronomers must rethink our understanding of the formation of the first galaxies and how galaxy evolution occurred over the past 10 billion years.”
Professor Christopher Conselice
Previously, astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope believed that galaxies had mostly irregular and peculiar structures that resemble mergers. However, the superior abilities of JWST now allows us to see the true structure of these galaxies for the first time. The researchers say that this is yet another sign that ‘structure’ in the Universe forms much quicker than anyone had anticipated.
Professor Conselice continues: “These JWST results show that disk galaxies like our own Milky Way, are the most common type of galaxy in the Universe. This implies that most stars exist and form within these galaxies which is changing our complete understanding of how galaxy formation occurs. These results also suggest important questions about dark matter in the early Universe which we know very little about.” “Based on our results astronomers must rethink our understanding of the formation of the first galaxies and how galaxy evolution occurred over the past 10 billion years.”
Billions of years of lunar history revealed by Chinese rover
The Independent
China’s Chang’e-4 mission rover has helped scientists visualize “hidden” structures deep below the surface of the moon’s far side. The Yutu-2 rover helped make the discovery through its Lunar Penetrating Radar (LPR) that imaged deep into the moon’s surface by listening to echoes of sound that bounced back off structures under the lunar surface and hidden from view.
The same rover and the mission’s lander had made history in 2019 as the first human objects to land on the far side of the moon – the side that faces away from the Earth. Scientists had previously used the rover’s ground penetrating radar (GPR), but those earlier efforts could help map only the top 40m, or about 130ft, of the moon’s surface. This new discovery has found the “hidden” structures at depths of about 300m (984ft).
The new data suggests the first 130 feet under the lunar surface is made up of layers of dust, soil, and rocks. Radar analysis also revealed the presence of a buried crater that formed when a large object slammed into the lunar surface as well as helped map ancient lava flows under the moon.
“The GPR sends electromagnetic pulses into the lunar interior and receives echoes from subsurface layers. We use the high-frequency channel data to detect the structure of the upper 40 m along the rover’s path, primarily consisting of rock debris and soil,” researchers explained in the study.
Scientists speculate that the broken rocks surrounding this formation was likely debris produced by the impact. The new study, published recently in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, revealed lunar lava likely flowed across the landscape in this part of the moon billions of years ago (https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2022JE007714).
Researchers found volcanic rock layers are thinner the closer they are to the lunar surface.
“The thickness variation of these lava flows suggests a decrease in eruption scale over time,” they noted.Based on this evidence, they said the lunar volcanic activity cooled gradually since the moon’s formation over 4.5 billion years ago, when a Mars-sized object slammed onto Earth and broke off a chunk that eventually coalesced into the moon. “The thickness of the strata decreases with the decreasing depth, suggesting a progressively smaller lava effusion rate over time,” scientists concluded.
BOSTON, MA — August 29, 2023 — The Interstellar Expedition of June 2023 — led by the expedition’s Chief Scientist, Harvard University Astrophysicist Avi Loeb and coordinated by Expedition Leader Rob McCallum of EYOS Expeditions — retrieved hundreds of metallic spheres thought to be unmatched to any existing alloys in our solar system from the seafloor in the Pacific Ocean near Papua New Guinea. Early analysis shows that some spherules from the meteor path contain extremely high abundances of Beryllium, Lanthanum and Uranium, labeled as a never-seen-before “BeLaU” composition. These spherules also exhibit iron isotope ratios unlike those found on Earth, the Moon and Mars, altogether implying an interstellar origin. The loss of volatile elements is consistent with IM1’s airburst in the Earth’s atmosphere.
The expedition retrieved spherules with a yield per background mass that increased the count of spherules near IM1’s path significantly. Using a heatmap developed from the spherule detection statistics by postdoc Laura Domine, the team was able to identify the regions with a high concentration of the retrieved spherules. The Harvard laboratory team, led by Stein Jacobsen, found “BeLaU”-type spherules of extrasolar composition only in these high-yield regions. “This abundance pattern is unprecedented in the scientific literature and could have originated from differentiation in a magma ocean on an exo-planet with an iron core,” said Stein Jacobsen.
Electron microscope images of some of the collected spherules display lopsided massive composites, indicating mergers of small spherules within the fireball volume. “The “BeLaU” composition is tantalizingly different by factors of hundreds from solar system materials, with beryllium production through spallation of heavier nuclei by cosmic-rays flagging interstellar travel,” said Avi Loeb.
Avi Loeb is the leading author on the expedition team’s paper (linked here), submitted for publication in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. The spherules will continue to be analyzed by four laboratories around the world, at Harvard University, UC Berkeley, the Bruker Corporation, and the University of Technology in Papua New Guinea (Unitech, PNG), using the most advanced instruments of their kind. “Our Vice Chancellor already signed a Memorandum of Understanding on our ongoing partnership with Harvard University,” said Jim Lem, head of the Department of Mining Engineering at Unitech, PNG. “I very much look forward to being part of the team in analyzing the spherules that are believed to have come from outside our solar system and are so rich in scientific information.” Charles Hoskinson, who funded the expedition, likewise expressed his support for the findings: “This is a historic discovery, marking the first time that humans hold materials from a large interstellar object, and I am extremely pleased with these results from this rigorous scientific analysis.”
According to Expedition Coordinator Rob McCallum: “These results have been well received by the entire expedition team; those onboard and those working onshore. The findings demonstrate the success of the first exploratory expedition and pave the way for a second expedition to seek more data. We love to enable our clients’ projects anywhere on Earth, but this one is out of this world”.
A former intelligence official turned whistleblower has given Congress and the Intelligence Community Inspector General extensive classified information about deeply covert programs that he says possess retrieved intact and partially intact craft of non-human origin.
The information, he says, has been illegally withheld from Congress, and he filed a complaint alleging that he suffered illegal retaliation for his confidential disclosures, reported here for the first time. Other intelligence officials, both active and retired, with knowledge of these programs through their work in various agencies, have independently provided similar, corroborating information, both on and off the record.
The whistleblower, David Charles Grusch, 36, a decorated former combat officer in Afghanistan, is a veteran of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO). He served as the reconnaissance office’s representative to the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force from 2019-2021. From late 2021 to July 2022, he was the NGA’s co-lead for UAP analysis and its representative to the task force.
The task force was established to investigate what were once called “unidentified flying objects,” or UFOs, and are now officially called “unidentified anomalous phenomena,” or UAP. The task force was led by the Department of the Navy under the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security. It has since been reorganized and expanded into the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office to include investigations of objects operating underwater.
Grusch said the recoveries of partial fragments through and up to intact vehicles have been made for decades through the present day by the government, its allies, and defense contractors. Analysis has determined that the objects retrieved are “of exotic origin (non-human intelligence, whether extraterrestrial or unknown origin) based on the vehicle morphologies and material science testing and the possession of unique atomic arrangements and radiological signatures,” he said.
In filing his complaint, Grusch is represented by a lawyer who served as the original Intelligence Community Inspector General (ICIG).
“We are not talking about prosaic origins or identities,” Grusch said, referencing information he provided Congress and the current ICIG. “The material includes intact and partially intact vehicles.”
In accordance with protocols, Grusch provided the Defense Office of Prepublication and Security Review at the Department of Defense with the information he intended to disclose to us. His on-the-record statements were all “cleared for open publication” on April 4 and 6, 2023, in documents provided to us.
Grusch’s disclosures, and those of non-public witnesses, under new protective provisions of the latest defense appropriations bill, signal a growing determination by some in the government to unravel a colossal enigma with national security implications that has bedeviled the military and tantalized the public going back to World War II and beyond. For many decades, the Air Force carried out a disinformation campaign to discredit reported sightings of unexplained objects. Now, with two public hearings and many classified briefings under its belt, Congress is pressing for answers.
Christopher Mellon, who spent nearly twenty years in the U.S. Intelligence Community and served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, has worked with Congress for years on unidentified aerial phenomena. “A number of well-placed current and former officials have shared detailed information with me regarding this alleged program, including insights into the history, governing documents and the location where a craft was allegedly abandoned and recovered,” Mellon said. “However, it is a delicate matter getting this potentially explosive information into the right hands for validation. This is made harder by the fact that, rightly or wrongly, a number of potential sources do not trust the leadership of the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office established by Congress.”
But some insiders are now willing to take the risk of coming forward for the first time with knowledge of these recovery programs.
Jonathan Grey is a generational officer of the United States Intelligence Community with a Top-Secret Clearance who currently works for the National Air and Space Intelligence Center (NASIC), where the analysis of UAP has been his focus. Previously he had experience serving Private Aerospace and Department of Defense Special Directive Task Forces.
“The non-human intelligence phenomenon is real. We are not alone,” Grey said. “Retrievals of this kind are not limited to the United States. This is a global phenomenon, and yet a global solution continues to elude us.”
At the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, Grusch served as a Senior Intelligence Capabilities Integration Officer, cleared at the Top Secret/Secret Compartmented Information level, and was the agency’s Senior Technical Advisor for Unidentified Aerial Phenomena analysis/Trans-Medium Issues. From 2016 to 2021, he served with the National Reconnaissance Office as Senior Intelligence Officer and led the production of the NRO director’s daily briefing. Grusch was a GS-15 civilian, the military equivalent of a Colonel.
Grusch has served as an Intelligence Officer for over fourteen years. A veteran of the Air Force, he has numerous awards and decorations for his participation in covert and clandestine operations to advance American security. According to a 2021 NRO Performance Report, Grusch was an intelligence strategist with multiple responsibilities who “analyzed unidentified aerial phenomena reports” and “boosted congressional leadership Intel gaps [in] understanding.” He was assessed by the reconnaissance office’s Operations Center Deputy Director as an “adept staff officer and strategist” and “total force integrator with innovative solutions and actionable results.”
Grusch prepared many briefs on unidentified aerial phenomena for Congress while in government and helped draft the language on UAP for the FY2023 National Defense Authorization Act, spearheaded by Senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Marco Rubio and signed into law by President Biden in December 2022. The provision states that any person with relevant UAP information can inform Congress without retaliation, regardless of any previous non-disclosure agreements.
In his statements cleared for publication by the Pentagon in April, Grusch asserted that UFO “legacy programs” have long been concealed within “multiple agencies nesting UAP activities in conventional secret access programs without appropriate reporting to various oversight authorities.”
He said he reported to Congress on the existence of a decades-long “publicly unknown Cold War for recovered and exploited physical material – a competition with near-peer adversaries over the years to identify UAP crashes/landings and retrieve the material for exploitation/reverse engineering to garner asymmetric national defense advantages.”
Beginning in 2022, Grusch provided Congress with hours of recorded classified information transcribed into hundreds of pages which included specific data about the materials recovery program. Congress has not been provided with any physical materials related to wreckage or other non-human objects.
Grusch’s investigation was centered on extensive interviews with high-level intelligence officials, some of whom are directly involved with the program. He says the operation was illegally shielded from proper Congressional oversight and that he was targeted and harassed because of his investigation.
Grusch said that the craft recovery operations are ongoing at various levels of activity and that he knows the specific individuals, current and former, who are involved.
“Individuals on these UAP programs approached me in my official capacity and disclosed their concerns regarding a multitude of wrongdoings, such as illegal contracting against the Federal Acquisition Regulations and other criminality and the suppression of information across a qualified industrial base and academia,” he stated.
Associates who vouched for Grusch said his information was highly sensitive, providing evidence that materials from objects of non-human origin are in the possession of highly secret black programs. Although locations, program names, and other specific data remain classified, the Inspector General and intelligence committee staff were provided with these details. Several current members of the recovery program spoke to the Inspector General’s office and corroborated the information Grusch had provided for the classified complaint.
Grusch left the government on April 7, 2023, in order, he said, to advance government accountability through public awareness. He remains well-supported within intelligence circles, and numerous sources have vouched for his credibility.
“His assertion concerning the existence of a terrestrial arms race occurring sub-rosa over the past eighty years focused on reverse engineering technologies of unknown origin is fundamentally correct, as is the indisputable realization that at least some of these technologies of unknown origin derive from non-human intelligence,” said Karl Nell, the retired Army Colonel who worked with Grusch on the UAP Task Force.
In a 2022 performance evaluation, Laura A. Potter, Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence, Headquarters, Department of the Army, described Nell as “an officer with the strongest possible moral compass.”
Grusch is represented by Charles McCullough III, senior partner of the Compass Rose Legal Group in Washington and the original Inspector General of the Intelligence Community, confirmed by the U.S. Senate in 2011. At that time, McCullough reported directly to the then-Director of National Intelligence, James R. Clapper, and oversaw intelligence officers responsible for audits, inspections, and investigations.
In May 2022, McCullough filed a Disclosure of Urgent Concern(s); Complaint of Reprisal on behalf of Grusch with the ICIG about detailed information that Grusch had gathered beginning in 2019 while working for the UAP Task Force. An unclassified version of the complaint provided to us states that Grusch has direct knowledge that UAP-related classified information has been withheld and/or concealed from Congress by “elements” of the intelligence community “to purposely and intentionally thwart legitimate Congressional oversight of the UAP Program.” All testimony Grusch provided for the classified complaint was provided under oath.
According to the unclassified complaint, in July 2021, Grusch had confidentially provided classified information to the Department of Defense Inspector General concerning the withholding of UAP-related information from Congress. He believed that his identity, and the fact that he had provided testimony, were disclosed “to individuals and/or entities” within the Department of Defense and the Intelligence Community outside the IG’s office. He did not allege that this information was improperly disclosed by any member of that office.
As a result, Grusch suffered months of retaliation and reprisals related to these disclosures beginning in 2021. He asked that details of these reprisals be withheld to protect the integrity of the ongoing investigation.
The Intelligence Community Inspector General found his complaint “credible and urgent” in July 2022. According to Grusch, a summary was immediately submitted to the Director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines; the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence; and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.
The complaint was drafted and signed by McCullough and his managing partner. It ended with Grusch’s signature attached to his statement that “I do solemnly affirm under the penalties of perjury that the contents of the foregoing paper are true and correct to the best of my knowledge.”
A whistleblower reprisal investigation was launched, and Grusch began his communication with the staff of the Congressional intelligence committees in private closed-door sessions. According to Grusch, certain information which he obtained in his investigation could not be put before Congressional staffers because they did not have the necessary clearances or the appropriate investigative authority.
A representative of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence told us in March that the committee members are not able to comment on the content of a complaint or confirm the identity of a complainant.
“When you have multiple agencies nesting UAP activities in conventional SAP/CAP programs, both as recipients of exploitation-related insights and for operational reasons, without appropriate reporting to various oversight authorities, you have a problem,” Grusch said, referencing the highly secret Special Access Programs and Controlled Access Programs.
Grusch’s willingness to take risks and speak out appears to be emboldening others with similar knowledge who believe in greater transparency.
Jonathan Grey, the intelligence officer specializing in UAP analysis at the National Air and Space Intelligence Center, is speaking publicly for the first time, identified here under the identity he uses inside the agency.
NASIC, headquartered at Wright Patterson Air Force Base, is the Department of Defense’s primary Air Force source for foreign air and space threat analysis. Its mission is to “discover and characterize air, space, missile, and cyber threats,” according to the agency’s website. “The center’s team of trusted subject matter experts deliver unique collection, exploitation, and analytic capabilities not found elsewhere,” the website states.
Grey said that such immense capabilities are not merely relegated to the study of the prosaic. “The existence of complex historical programs involving the coordinated retrieval and study of exotic materials, dating back to the early 20th century, should no longer remain a secret,” he said. “The majority of retrieved, foreign exotic materials have a prosaic terrestrial explanation and origin – but not all, and any number higher than zero in this category represents an undeniably significant statistical percentage.”
It is unusual for an Air Force insider to come forward, as the Air Force has been less forthcoming than other agencies with regard to UAP.
“A vast array of our most sophisticated sensors, including space-based platforms, have been utilized by different agencies, typically in triplicate, to observe and accurately identify the out-of-this-world nature, performance, and design of these anomalous machines, which are then determined not to be of earthly origin,” Grey said.
Mellon, the former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, has been instrumental in arranging classified briefings for members of Congress and other officials about UAP, which include references to exotic retrieved materials. The first briefing he facilitated on retrievals of unexplained objects was provided to staff members of the Senate Armed Services Committee on Oct. 21, 2019, and to staff members of the Senate Intelligence Committee two days later, as reported by The New York Times.
Mellon says that once the members of Congress gain greater awareness of the information provided to their staff and the Inspector General, they will be in a position to quickly determine the truth if they have the will to do so.
“This is an unprecedented oversight challenge for the committees, but I believe we have leaders in Congress who are up to the task,” Mellon said.
Classified briefings are often presented for Jonathan Grey and his team at NASIC. “High-level, classified briefing materials exist in which real-world scenarios involving UAP, as evidenced by historical examples, are made available to Intelligence Personnel on a need-to-know basis,” he told us. “I have been the recipient of such briefings for almost a decade.”
The National Defense Authorization Act for FY2023 tasked the Secretary of Defense, in consultation with the Director of National Intelligence, with establishing for the first time a secure mechanism for the authorized reporting of sensitive information to defense channels.
In addition, the legislation asks for reporting on “material retrieval, material analysis, reverse engineering, research, and development” involving unidentified anomalous phenomena currently and going back decades.
Dr. Garry Nolan, a Professor in the Department of Pathology at Stanford University and a renowned inventor and entrepreneur with more than three hundred published papers, has started over half a dozen companies based on technologies out of his laboratory. Nolan has previously applied some of those technologies to the analysis of exotic materials, publishing the first peer-reviewed paper examining such materials.
“Human civilization was utterly transformed by something as small as a grain of silicon or germanium—creating the underpinning of the integrated circuits that underly computation and now even artificial intelligence,” Nolan said.
Studying even small samples of purported anomalous material could lead to currently inconceivable benefits for humanity, he said. “What might be represented here could be hundreds of technology revolutions ahead of us. It could be more transformative for humanity than what the microprocessor accomplished. Imagine what we could do with even a grain of knowledge about how they operate.”
To encourage potential witnesses to come forward, the whistleblower legislation forbids any federal employee from retaliating against anyone providing authorized disclosure.
“Whistleblowing is essential to the checks and balances of our government – and no federal employee should feel discouraged from stepping forward due to fear of retaliation,” Rep. Andre Carson told us. In May 2022, Carson presided over the first open Congressional hearing on UAP since 1968.
The case of David Grusch marks a crucial test of these new whistleblower protections and their ability to protect future whistleblowers who decide to come forward.
What would the Earth look like to an alien civilization located light years away? A team of researchers from Mauritius and Manchester University has used crowd-sourced data to simulate radio leakage from mobile towers and predict what an alien civilization might detect from various nearby stars, including Barnard’s star, six light years away from Earth. Ramiro Saide, currently an intern at the SETI Institute’s Hat Creek Radio Observatory and M.Phils. student at the University of Mauritius, generated models displaying the radio power that these civilizations would receive as the Earth rotates and the towers rise and set. Saide believes that unless an alien civilization is much more advanced than ours, they would have difficulty detecting the current levels of mobile tower radio leakage from Earth. However, the team suggests that some technical civilizations are likely to have much more sensitive receiving systems than we do, and the detectability of our mobile systems will increase substantially as we move to much more powerful broadband systems. (https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/522/2/2393/7028804).
Saide is also excited by the fact that his simulations show that the Earth’s mobile radio signature includes a substantial contribution from developing countries, including Africa. The team is eager to extend their research to include other contributors to the Earth’s radio leakage signature. The next step is to include powerful civilian and military radars, new digital broadcast systems, Wi-Fi networks, individual mobile handsets and the swarm of satellite constellations now being launched into low Earth orbit, such as Elon Musk’s Starlink system. The Earth is already anomalously bright in the radio part of the spectrum; if the trend continues, we could become readily detectable by any advanced civilization with the right technology.”
“This work is a superb example of how a detailed analysis of the properties of human technology (the “anthropogenic technosphere”) can be leveraged toward developing exciting, novel strategies for detecting extraterrestrial technologies,” said Allen Telescope Array Project Scientist Dr. Wael Farah. “We look forward to using the unique instrumentation capabilities and scheduling flexibility of the Allen Telescope Array, paired with our growing knowledge of nearby exoplanet systems, to undertake new searches based on these strategies.”
When pondering the probability of discovering technologically advanced extraterrestrial life, the question that often arises is, “if they’re out there, why haven’t we found them yet?” And often, the response is that we have only searched a tiny portion of the galaxy. Further, algorithms developed decades ago for the earliest digital computers can be outdated and inefficient when applied to modern petabyte-scale datasets. Now, research published in Nature Astronomy and led by an undergraduate student at the University of Toronto, Peter Ma, along with researchers from the SETI Institute, Breakthrough Listen and scientific research institutions around the world, has applied a deep learning technique to a previously studied dataset of nearby stars and uncovered eight previously unidentified signals of interest.
“In total, we had searched through 150 TB of data of 820 nearby stars, on a dataset that had previously been searched through in 2017 by classical techniques but labeled as devoid of interesting signals,” said Peter Ma, lead author. “We’re scaling this search effort to 1 million stars today with the MeerKAT telescope and beyond. We believe that work like this will help accelerate the rate we’re able to make discoveries in our grand effort to answer the question ‘are we alone in the universe?’”
The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) looks for evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence originating beyond Earth by trying to detect technosignatures, or evidence of technology, that alien civilizations could have developed. The most common technique is to search for radio signals. Radio is a great way to send information over the incredible distances between the stars; it quickly passes through the dust and gas that permeate space, and it does so at the speed of light (about 20,000 times faster than our best rockets). Many SETI efforts use antennas to eavesdrop on any radio signals aliens might be transmitting.
This study re-examined data taken with the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia as part of a Breakthrough Listen campaign that initially indicated no targets of interest. The goal was to apply new deep learning techniques to a classical search algorithm to yield faster, more accurate results. After running the new algorithm and manually re-examining the data to confirm the results, newly detected signals had several key characteristics:
The signals were narrow band, meaning they had narrow spectral width, on the order of just a few Hz. Signals caused by natural phenomena tend to be broadband.
The signals had non-zero drift rates, which means the signals had a slope. Such slopes could indicate a signal’s origin had some relative acceleration with our receivers, hence not local to the radio observatory.
The signals appeared in ON-source observations and not in OFF-source observations. If a signal originates from a specific celestial source, it appears when we point our telescope toward the target and disappears when we look away. Human radio interference usually occurs in ON and OFF observations due to the source being close by.
Cherry Ng, another of Ma’s research advisors and an astronomer at both the SETI Institute and the French National Center for Scientific Research said, “These results dramatically illustrate the power of applying modern machine learning and computer vision methods to data challenges in astronomy, resulting in both new detections and higher performance. Application of these techniques at scale will be transformational for radio technosignature science.”
While re-examinations of these new targets of interest have yet to result in re-detections of these signals, this new approach to analyzing data can enable researchers to more effectively understand the data they collect and act quickly to re-examine targets. Ma and his advisor Dr. Cherry Ng are looking forward to deploying extensions of this algorithm on the SETI Institute’s COSMIC system.
Since SETI experiments began in 1960 with Frank Drake’s Project Ozma at the Greenbank Observatory, a site now home to the telescope used in this latest work, technological advances have enabled researchers to collect more data than ever. This massive volume of data requires new computational tools to process and analyze that data quickly to identify anomalies that could be evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence. This new machine learning approach is breaking new ground in the quest to answer the question, “are we alone?”
A team of physicists affiliated with several institutions in the U.S. has collaborated on a paper that discusses the possibility of using the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) to search for evidence of aliens piloting huge spacecraft around the Milky Way. They group has posted their paper on the arXiv preprint server (https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.02065).
Over the past several decades, astrophysicists and sci-fi enthusiasts alike have grown increasingly frustrated with mankind’s inability to detect the presence of life anywhere in the universe other than planet Earth. Scientists have noted that based on the billions of planets that have been found in habitable zones around the universe, and the fact that life does exist in one place, on Earth, there should be life somewhere else, too.
The problem, now referred to as the Fermi paradox, is that scientists have yet to find even the tiniest shred of evidence for it. Prominent scientists have increasingly begun calling for new and more exotic ways to search.
In this new effort, the researchers note that science has advanced to the point that gravity waves can be detected by technology such as LIGO. They further suggest that it is not beyond the realm of possibility that aliens piloting spacecraft could leave gravity waves in their wake that could be detected here on Earth using such technology.
Intrigued by their own idea, the researchers imagined the factors that might be involved for such a scenario to unfold. First, they factored the size of such a craft. They found it would have to be really big to generate gravity waves strong enough to reach Earth—perhaps the size of Jupiter.
It would also have to be moving really fast—their calculations showed approximately 1/10 the speed of light. And it would have to be reasonably close—say about 326,000 light-years from Earth. They note that under such conditions, if they were to arise, researchers at LIGO should be able to spot the gravity waves generated.
The researchers also note that if aliens are using warp drives, scientists on Earth should be able to spot them, too, using the same technology, because such a craft would also generate gravity waves.
When Mars was a young planet, it was bombarded by ice asteroids delivering water and organic molecules necessary for life to emerge. According to the professor behind a new study, this means that the first life in our solar system may have been on Mars.
Mars is called the red planet. But once, it was actually blue and covered in water, bringing us closer to finding out if Mars had ever harbored life.
Most researchers agree that there has been water on Mars, but just how much water is still debated.
Now a study from the University of Copenhagen shows that some 4.5 billion years ago, there was enough water for the entire planet to be covered in a 300-meter-deep ocean.
“At this time, Mars was bombarded with asteroids filled with ice. It happened in the first 100 million years of the planet’s evolution. Another interesting angle is that the asteroids also carried organic molecules that are biologically important for life,” says Professor Martin Bizzarro from the Centre for Star and Planet Formation.
In addition to water, the icy asteroids also brought biologically relevant molecules such as amino acids to the Red Planet. Amino acids are used when DNA and RNA form bases that contain everything a cell needs. The study was published in the renowned journal Science Advances. (https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abp8415)
The new study indicates that the oceans that covered the entire planet in water were at least 300 meters deep. They may have been up to one kilometer deep. In comparison, there is actually very little water on Earth, explains Martin Bizzarro.
“This happened within Mars’s first 100 million years. After this period, something catastrophic happened for potential life on Earth. It is believed that there was a gigantic collision between the Earth and another Mars-sized planet. It was an energetic collision that formed the Earth-Moon system and, as the same time, wiped out all potential life on Earth,” says Martin Bizzarro.
Therefore, the researchers have really strong evidence that conditions allowing the emergence of life were present on Mars long before Earth.
It was by means of a meteorite that is billions of years old that the researchers have been able to look into Mars’s past history. The meteorite was once part of Mars’s original crust and offers a unique insight into what happened at the time when the solar system was formed.
The whole secret is hiding in the way Mars’s surface has been created—and of which the meteorite was once a part—because it is a surface that does not move. On Earth it is opposite. The tectonic plates are in perpetual motion and recycled in the planet’s interior.
“Plate tectonics on Earth erased all evidence of what happened in the first 500 million years of our planet’s history. The plates constantly move and are recycled back and destroyed into the interior of our planet. In contrast, Mars does not have plate tectonics such that planet’s surface preserves a record of the earliest history of the planet,” explains Martin Bizzarro.
By David Rothery Professor of Planetary Geosciences, The Open University for The Conversation
How many intelligent civilizations should there be in our galaxy right now? In 1961, the US astrophysicist Frank Drake, who passed away on September 2, 2022 at the age of 92, came up with an equation to estimate this. The Drake equation, dating from a stage in his career when he was “too naive to be nervous” (as he later put it), has become famous and bears his name.
This places Drake in the company of towering physicists with equations named after them including James Clerk Maxwell and Erwin Schrödinger. Unlike those, Drake’s equation does not encapsulate a law of nature. Instead it combines some poorly known probabilities into an informed estimate.
Whatever reasonable values you feed into the equation (see image) it is hard to avoid the conclusion that we shouldn’t be alone in the galaxy. Drake remained a proponent and a supporter of the search for extraterrestrial life throughout his days, but has his equation really taught us anything?
Drake’s equation may look complicated, but its principles are really rather simple. It states that, in a galaxy as old as ours, the number of civilizations that are detectable by virtue of them broadcasting their presence must equate to the rate at which they arise, multiplied by their average lifetime.
Putting a value on the rate at which civilizations occur might seem to be guesswork, but Drake realized that it can be broken down into more tractable components.
He stated that the total rate is equal to the rate at which suitable stars are formed, multiplied by the fraction of those stars that have planets. This is then multiplied by the number of planets that are capable of bearing life per system, times the fraction of those planets where life gets started, multiplied by the fraction of those where life becomes intelligent, times the fraction of those that broadcast their presence.
When Drake first formulated his equation, the only term that was known with any confidence was the rate of star formation—about 30 per year.
As for the next term, back in the 1960s, we had no evidence that any other stars have planets, and one in ten may have seemed like an optimistic guess. However, observational discoveries of exoplanets (planets orbiting other stars) that began in the 1990s and have blossomed this century now makes us confident that most stars have planets.
Common sense suggests that most systems of multiple planets would include one at the right distance from its star to be capable of supporting life. Earth is that planet in our solar system. In addition, Mars may have been suitable for abundant life in the past – and it could still be clinging on.
Today we also realise that planets don’t need to be warm enough for liquid water to exist at the surface to support life. It can occur in the internal ocean of an ice-covered body, supported by heat generated either by radioctivity or tides rather than sunlight.
There are several likely candidates among the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, for example. In fact, when we add moons as being capable of hosting life, the average number of habitable bodies per planetary system could easily exceed one. The values of the terms towards the right hand side of the equation, however, remain more open to challenge. Some would hold that, given a few million years to play with, life will get started anywhere that is suitable.
That would be mean that the fraction of suitable bodies where life actually gets going is pretty much equal to one. Others say that we have as yet no proof of life starting anywhere other than Earth, and that the origin of life could actually be an exceedingly rare event.
Will life, once started, eventually evolve intelligence? It probably has to get past the microbial stage and become multicellular first.
There is evidence that multicellular life started more than once on Earth, so becoming multicellular may not be a barrier. Others, however, point out that on Earth the “right kind” of multicellular life, which continued to evolve, appeared only once and could be rare on the galactic scale.
Intelligence may confer a competitive advantage over other species, meaning its evolution could be rather likely. But we don’t know for sure.
And will intelligent life develop technology to the stage where it (accidentally or deliberately) broadcasts its existence across space? Perhaps for surface-dwellers such as ourselves, but it might be rare for inhabitants of internal oceans of frozen worlds with no atmosphere.
What about the average lifetime of a detectable civilization, L? Our TV transmissions began to make Earth detectable from afar in the 1950s, giving a minimum value for L of about 70 years in our own case.
In general though, L may be limited by the collapse of civilization (what are the odds of our own lasting a further 100 years?) or by the near total demise of radio broadcasting in favour of the internet, or by a deliberate choice to “go quiet” for fear of hostile galactic inhabitants.
Play with the numbers yourself – it’s fun! You’ll find that if L is more than 1,000 years, N (the number of detectable civilisations) is likely to be greater than a hundred. In an interview recorded in 2010, Drake said his best guess at N was about 10,000.
We are learning more about exoplanets every year, and are entering an era when measuring their atmospheric composition to reveal evidence of life is becoming increasingly feasible. Within the next decade or two, we can hope for a much more soundly based estimate of the fraction of Earth-like planets where life gets started.
This won’t tell us about life in the internal oceans, but we can hope for insights into that from missions to the icy moons of Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus. And we could, of course, detect actual signals from extraterrestrial intelligence. Either way, Frank Drake’s equation, which has stimulated so many lines of research, will continue to give us a thought-provoking sense of perspective. For that we should be grateful.
Most biological materials, for example, amino acids, fossils, sedimentary rocks, plants, microbes, proteins and lipids, have strong organic fluorescence signals that can be detected by specialized scanning cameras. In a study published in Nature Scientific Reports recently, the research team reported that the Biofinder is so sensitive that it can accurately detect the bio-residue in fish fossils from the 34-56 million year-old Green River formation.
“The Biofinder is the first system of its kind,” said Anupam Misra, lead instrument developer and researcher at the Hawaii‘ Institute of Geophysics and Planetology at the UH Mānoa School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST). “At present, there is no other equipment that can detect minute amounts of bio-residue on a rock during the daytime. Additional strengths of the Biofinder are that it works from a distance of several meters, takes video and can quickly scan a large area.”
Though the Biofinder was first developed in 2012 by Misra, advances supported by the NASA PICASSO program culminated in the latest color version of the compact Biofinder.
Finding evidence of biological residue in a vast planetary landscape is an enormous challenge. So, the team tested the Biofinder’s detection abilities on the ancient Green River fish fossils and corroborated the results through laboratory spectroscopy analysis, scanning electron microscopy and fluorescence lifetime imaging microscopy. The search for life—which may be existing or extinct—on planetary bodies is one of the major goals of planetary exploration missions conducted by NASA and other international space agencies.
“If the Biofinder were mounted on a rover on Mars or another planet, we would be able to rapidly scan large areas quickly to detect evidence of past life, even if the organism was small, not easy to see with our eyes, and dead for many millions of years,” said Misra. “We anticipate that fluorescence imaging will be critical in future NASA missions to detect organics and the existence of life on other planetary bodies.”
“The Biofinder’s capabilities would be critical for NASA’s Planetary Protection program, for the accurate and no-invasive detection of contaminants such as microbes or extraterrestrial biohazards to or from planet Earth,” said Sonia J. Rowley, the team biologist and co-author on the study.
Misra and colleagues are applying to have the opportunity to send the Biofinder on a future NASA mission. “The detection of such biomarkers would constitute groundbreaking evidence for life outside of planet Earth,” said Misra.
