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13.72 billion years in the making.
On December 1st, 2012, I met Neil deGrasse Tyson. I shook the man's hand, and even made him laugh. Not much else to do with my life now.
Here you are:
And my personal favorites are...
Mapping Earliest Complex Human Societies
A new system has been developed to help understand early human settlement patterns. This system utilizes computers to scour satellite images for telltale clues of human habituation, like soil discolorations and the distinctive mounding that results from the collapse of mud-brick homes. This method was first applied this year by a team of archaeologists in a 23,000 square kilometer area of northeastern Syria.
The images revealed 9,000 possible ancient settlements between 7,000 and 8,000 years old. These data were staggering and will help archaeologists understand an area of the world where the first complex human societies emerged in greater detail. At the moment archaeologists only have small-scale understandings of the ancient world, but with these new techniques we may be able to understand the ancient world on large, complex scales, and consequently gain a new understanding of how humans made the first transition from hunting and gathering to settled agricultural city-states.
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Cloaking Technology Improving:
Scientists developed spatial cloaking earlier this century. However, now researchers have developed a device that can hide events in time, or "temporal cloaking". The device does this by speeding up and slowing down different parts of a light beam and then putting them back together. As a result, the event would become "hidden in time". At the moment, this technology can only hide events for 40 trillionths of a second (0.00012), which is a time frame impossible to directly impact human actions.
In the future, the ability to cloak events in both time and space simultaneously may be improved to the point where events and spaces can be hidden on the scale of seconds and minutes. Combining the ability to cloak events both spatially and temporally is theoretically possible. Likewise, extending the current timeframe and spatial scale of cloaking ability is also possible.
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Star Formation at 1/30 of its Original Peak:
The first-generation stars born after the Big Bang were massive and short-lived by today's standards. These early stars produced the complexity of elements found in third-generation stars and solar systems like ours. However, the stars in the present day Universe are much smaller and longer-lived than their predecessors. Understanding this cosmic evolution is key to understanding its future development. In order to better understand this evolution astronomers wanted to assess whether star formation rate over cosmic time was stable, increasing, or decreasing. A team of international researchers collected information on star-forming regions of galaxies at different distances.
Using this data the team was able to determine that star formation was at its highest rate 11 billion years ago, and is 1/30th of its peak in contemporary times. If this decline continues, 95% of the stars that will ever be created in the Universe have already been born. This is because stars today are lasting billions of years longer than their predecessors and are exploding their gaseous material into an ever-expanding Universe. This means fewer stellar nurseries will form in the future. These data help scientists better understand how our Universe has evolved and how it will be structured billions and trillions of years from now.
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Oldest Galaxy Ever Discovered:
Astronomers are constantly improving our understanding of the early universe by utilizing new technologies and methods. As a consequence, our knowledge of the Universe in its infancy keeps improving. Before 2012, astronomers had little knowledge of the "cosmic dawn" a period between 400-600 million years ago. This year, we gained a better understanding of this period when a family of the oldest galaxies were discovered.
The oldest of these galaxies was UDFj-39546284, which formed approximately 380 million years after the Big Bang. This galaxy, along with its surrounding galaxies, which formed between 400-600 million years ago, have indicated that the first galaxies formed gradually, as opposed to suddenly.
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Possibly Habitable Planets Discovered Around Tau Ceti:
The search for "another Earth" continued this year, with phenomenal results. Before 2012 astronomers had detected over 800 planets, but none of them were Earth-sized or within the habitable zone of their host star. That changed this year. In the first month of 2012 astronomers identified three of the smallest planets ever detected (smallest was Mars-sized). However, all three planets orbited their host star as closely as Mercury orbits our Sun, making them way too hot to be Earth-like candidates. Later in the year astronomers made two more significant finds: an Earth-sized planet in the closest solar system to ours (Alpha Centauri), and a "super-Earth" within the habitable zone of its host star.
The Earth-sized planet in Alpha Centauri orbits very closely to its host star, but demonstrated astronomer's ability to detect Earth-sized planets and suggested that Earth-sized planets were relatively common. The "super-Earth" discovered is only 42 light-years away and is thought to be a candidate for life because it may be covered in liquid water. More interesting news from exoplanet detections was made this December when astronomers announced the possible discovery of an Earth-sized planet within the habitable zone of Tau Ceti (12 light-years away). If confirmed, this would become the number one candidate for the discovery of "another Earth" and also a potential hot-spot for complex life in the universe.
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First Model Simulation of Observable Universe:
This year a team of French researchers used CURIE, a new supercomputer, to create the first ever computer model simulation of the entire observable universe from the Big Bang to the present (a distance equivalent to 90 billion light years). The super computer created this simulation by following the evolution of 550 billion particles as part of a project called Deus: full universe run. The results from these simulations allowed the researchers to a) estimate the total number of galaxy clusters with a mass larger than hundred thousand billion solar masses (144 million), and b) discover that the first of these galaxy clusters developed around 2 billion years after the Big Bang.
Their data also revealed that the largest massive cluster in the observable universe weighs 15 quadrillion (15 thousand trillion) solar masses. In the future, data from this simulation will help cosmologists understand the imprint dark energy leaves on cosmic structures and how dark energy can be inferred from observing distributions of matter.
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Planets Around Stars; Rule, Not Exception:
A long-term astronomy study this year suggested exoplanets outnumber stars by a large margin in our galaxy. Their results revealed that each of the 100 billion or so stars in our galaxy hosts 1.6 planets on average. Most of these planets are likely to be low mass, indicating that there may be hundreds of millions of small/rocky planets like Earth. This study was based on statistical extrapolation and provided considerable evidence that stars with a gravitationally bound planetary system is the rule, rather than the exception.
The data was collected between 2002-2007 with earth-based telescopes using gravitational microlensing. Gravitational microlensing is a more reliable approach to uncover hidden extrasolar worlds because other popular methods (e.g., photometry, radial velocity) are biased towards finding stars that orbit closely to their parent star. This made statistically extrapolating the number of planets in the Milky Way based off of the data collected in this study more accurate. Although it is now estimated that there are around 160 billion planets in our galaxy, the number of total planets is likely double that because of the recent discovery of nomad planets (planets without a host star).
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