"Out of this World"; Two Tantalizing Space Discoveries
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“Out of This World”;
Two Tantalizing Space Discoveries
While our own species preens, postures squabbles and fights, there is something truly awesome going on in space. Two things actually.
The first is a large, bright, fast moving interstellar object, dubbed 31/ATLAS, hurtling toward earth in a hyperbolic orbit that will eventually carry it out of our solar system. It is only the third such interstellar object ever seen. The first was the curious cigar shaped Oumuamua, the second was Comet Borisov.
Oumuamua had a suggestive non-gravitational acceleration that no one could quite explain. One well respected Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb believed it could be the remains of an alien space probe. He is intrigued with the brightness of this new object. Comet Borisov was decidedly more conventional.
The second astounding discovery is that astronomers have found a sulfide gas in the atmosphere of a giant planet called K2-18b. Who comes up with these names? But as far as we know, sulfide gas only comes from marine plankton.
In other words, this huge new planet could be covered with a globe girdling ocean teeming with billions upon billions of plankton --- and on our planet, where there is plankton there are usually ravenous fish, jellyfish and whales.
This means two things, either there is a problem with the data, or that evolution on the hycean planet has already gone through a major step, the evolution from single celled organisms to multi-celled ones.
We will learn more about both discoveries in the next few days as the interstellar object gets closer and scientists collect more data on the sulfide gas. Whatever they find will be out of this world.
