Kaushik Patowary
Feb 2, 2021
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Percival Lowell, the American astronomer whose name bears an observatory in Arizona, made several very significant observations of the planets. His biggest contribution being the hunt for Planet X beyond the orbit of Neptune. Although his search was unsuccessful, Pluto was eventually discovered near the place Lowell had predicted the missing planet would be, using the very observatory Lowell founded to study Mars.
The red planet fascinated Lowell, and it was his observations of Mars and the inference he drew from it for which Lowell is remembered the most. Lowell was convinced that there are intelligent beings on Mars, for he could see through the telescope a maze of canal like structures on the surface of the planet. The astronomer theorized that an advanced civilization indigenous to Mars built the canals to bring water from the polar ice caps to the equatorial region in a last ditch attempt to survive in an inexorably drying planet.
A gas filament with a length of 50 million light years –unfathomably large thread-like structures of hot gas that surround and connect galaxies and galaxy clusters–has been observed by astronomers at the University of Bonn for the first time Its structure is uncannily similar to the predictions of recent computer simulations.
“A Tiny Aberration”
We owe our existence to a tiny aberration, reports the University of Bonn. Over the course of 13 billion years, since the Big Bang, “a kind of sponge structure developed: large ‘holes. without any matter, with areas in between where thousands of galaxies are gathered in a small space, so-called galaxy clusters, that should still be connected by remnant filaments of the primordial gas, like the gossamer-thin threads of a spider web.