All posts tagged: light-years

The weirdest presidential election in history

The weirdest presidential election in history

Published by skeptic

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. We are heading into a rematch that promises to be weirder than any presidential election we’ve ever experienced. Let’s review where things stand. First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic: Where Things Stand More than two years ago, I wrote my first newsletter for The Atlantic, titled “An Unserious Country.” I was worried. We’re facing a slew of challenges, from reinvigorated foreign enemies to a dedicated authoritarian movement at home. And yet, as a people, we and our elected officials seem unable to focus even for a nanosecond with enough seriousness and deliberation to muster the cooperative, can-do perseverance that once characterized the American spirit. I wrote this 10 months after the January 6 insurrection, around the same time we learned that thousands of people had died due to their refusal to accept the lifesaving vaccines against …

Earth Could Outlive the Sun

Earth Could Outlive the Sun

Published by skeptic

This article was originally published by Quanta Magazine. Earth’s fate rests on a coin flip. In 5 billion years, our sun will balloon into a red giant star. Whether Earth survives is an “open question,” Melinda Soares-Furtado, an astrophysicist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, says. Sure, Earth could be swallowed by the sun and destroyed. But in some scenarios, Earth escapes and is pushed farther out into the solar system. Now a nearby planetary system has offered clues to our planet’s cosmic hereafter. About 57 light-years away, four planets orbit a sunlike star that is some 10 billion years old—about twice as old as the sun, and already in the advanced stages of its life. Stephen Kane, an astrophysicist specializing in planetary habitability at UC Riverside, recently modeled what might happen to the elderly system’s planets when the star becomes a red giant in a billion years. He found that most of the inner planets will be engulfed but that the outermost known planet, which has an orbit somewhat similar to Venus’s, might …

‘The Marvels’ Is a Reminder of What Marvel Needs

‘The Marvels’ Is a Reminder of What Marvel Needs

Published by skeptic

The Marvels arrives at a strange moment for Marvel Studios, the company that ushered in more than a decade of spandex-clad blockbusters. Because the (just-ended) SAG-AFTRA strike prohibited its actors from participating in promotional activities, the film is being released with little fanfare and is on track to make less at the box office than most of its comic-book predecessors. Plus, as the 33rd movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, with characters pulled from both big- and small-screen projects, it’s been positioned as proof of Marvel’s overreach. It’s all in the title, really: The “Marvels” refers to the trio of superheroes with related powers at the story’s center, but it invokes how oversaturated the pop-culture landscape has become with Marvel-related work. As it turns out, though, The Marvels itself is pleasurably lightweight, its story unburdened by the off-screen drama of the studio that made it. The shortest film in the MCU at a runtime of 105 minutes, this sprightly sequel to 2019’s Captain Marvel operates like a breezy road-trip comedy set in space. Sure, there’s …

Humans Are Ready to Find Alien Life

Humans Are Ready to Find Alien Life

Published by skeptic

In the thousands of years that people have been arguing about whether life exists elsewhere in the universe, one thing has been constant: No one really has had a clue. But not anymore. That’s because we finally know exactly where to look for aliens. Thanks to spectacular advances in science, we’ve identified many stars that have planets in the habitable zone where life can form. We are learning which of those planets are Earthlike enough to be worth pointing our telescopes at. We have giant telescopes equipped with spectrographs that can analyze light from distant stars, and powerful computers to simulate far-flung worlds. If we want to find aliens, we don’t need them to announce their presence to the cosmos. Instead, like detectives on a stakeout, we can just hang out with our doughnuts and cold coffee, watching and waiting. One form of evidence that astronomers are seeking on their great cosmic stakeout is “biosignatures”—features in a planet’s atmosphere that can come only from life. Scientists have learned from studying our own planet’s history that …

You’ve Never Seen a Star Like This

You’ve Never Seen a Star Like This

Published by skeptic

A new image from the Webb telescope shows an infant star not as a diamond hanging in the sky, but a velvety, dark orb surrounded by jets of radiant dust. NASA / ESA / CSA September 15, 2023, 2:55 PM ET From our perspective down here, on the surface of our planet, the stars are tiny, gleaming specks in an inky-dark universe. Occasionally they appear to twinkle, when the air in our atmosphere bends the incoming light. Through telescopes, they are balls of light, their glow distorted by the lens. And up close, the best star in the universe—our sun—is an orangey sphere of flame. But stars can be so much more than that, as telescopes, especially the very good ones, can reveal. The James Webb Space Telescope—the most powerful space observatory ever built, perched a million miles from Earth—has captured a portrait of a star about 1,000 light-years away. It’s not a diamond hanging in the sky, but a velvety, dark orb, suspended in space, with jets of bright material unfurling on two sides …

Black Holes Are an Eternal Mystery

Black Holes Are an Eternal Mystery

Published by skeptic

In 1967, the physicist John Wheeler was giving a lecture about a mysterious and startling phenomenon in deep space that the field was just beginning to understand. But it didn’t have a great name to match. Wheeler and his audience were equally tired of hearing “gravitationally completely collapsed object” over and over, so someone threw out an idea for a different name. A few weeks later, at another conference, Wheeler debuted the suggestion: black hole. And it’s perfect, isn’t it? What else would you call a dark abyss that swallows light and matter and doesn’t let go? Decades later, black holes—invisible, impenetrable, and many light-years away—are more familiar to us than ever before. We know that supermassive versions sit at the center of most galaxies, including our own Milky Way. In 2019, we even got pictures that show a black hole as an imposing shadow against the glow of cosmic material. Scientists have detected the gravitational ripples that result when black holes smash into each other; the entire cosmos, we recently learned, might be humming …