“Planet Earth Report” provides descriptive links to headline news by leading science journalists about the extraordinary discoveries, technology, people, and events changing our knowledge of Planet Earth and the future of the human species.
Have We Already Been Visited by Aliens?–An eminent astrophysicist argues that signs of intelligent extraterrestrial life have appeared in our skies. What’s the evidence for his extraordinary claim? reports Elizabeth Kolbert for The New Yorker.
A Bitter Archaeological Feud Over an Ancient Vision of the Cosmos –The Nebra sky disk, which has been called the oldest known depiction of astronomical phenomena, is a “very emotional object,” reports Becky Ferreira. –“Nothing else like it has been found in European archaeology. Many archaeologists have declared it the oldest known representation of the heavens, and to Germans it is a beloved emblem of heritage that connects them with ancient sky watchers. “The sky disk is a
The 70-Year-Old Mystery of Two Galactic Mushroom Clouds
Giant bubbles hovering over the Milky Way seem to be remnants of an ancient explosion.
Jeremy Sanders, Hermann Brunner and the eSASS team (MPE); Eugene Churazov, Marat Gilfanov (on behalf of IKI)
When Peter Predehl, an astrophysicist at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany, first laid eyes on the new map of the universe’s hottest objects, he immediately recognized the aftermath of a galactic catastrophe. A bright-yellow cloud billowed tens of thousands of light-years upward from the Milky Way’s flat disk, with a fainter twin reflected below.