SPACEX SAYS IT WILL LAUNCH SPACE TOURISTS AS SOON AS NEXT YEAR

SpaceX announced a partnership this week with space tourism Space Adventures to start launching passengers to orbit aboard a Crew Dragon spacecraft starting as early as 2021, TechCrunch reports.

SpaceX says it will send four privately-paying space tourists to orbit the Earth for five days in its Crew Dragon capsule between “late-2021 and mid-2022,” according to CNBC.

“This historic mission will forge a path to making spaceflight possible for all people who dream of it, and we are pleased to work with the Space Adventures’ team on the mission,” SpaceX president and COO Gwynne Shotwell said in a statement.

Space Adventures already sells seats on Russian Soyuz rockets.

SpaceX’s passenger-carrying Crew Dragon capsule, developed as part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, has so far completed a successful test trip and docking maneur  to the International Space Station last year, but has yet to make the journey with any passengers on board.

Earlier this year, SpaceX tested its space taxi’s emergency abort system in dramatic fashion, intentionally blowing up a Falcon 9 rocket in the process.

READ MORE: SpaceX and new partner announce space tourism launches on Dragon starting as early as 2021 [TechCrunch]

The entire Galaxies are dying, Astrophysicists warn the scientific society!

Stripped of their ability to produce new stars, the unfortunate galaxies are stuck in time, slowly vanishing as their existing stars fade away or die in violent supernovas.

Now a team is investigating the nearby Virgo Cluster to figure out what’s going on in hopes that similar phenomena are happening there, project leader and McMaster University astrophysicist Toby Brown writes in The Conversation. Brown suggests that galaxies are being killed as they interact with the extreme conditions of tightly-packed galaxy clusters — but he’s not sure why.

Narrowing Down

To clarify, when Brown writes that “in the most extreme regions of the universe, galaxies are being killed,” he doesn’t mean that they’re suddenly vanishing. Rather, the formation of new stars within them is being shut down by yet-undetermined factors.

So far, Brown’s team has arrived at two possibilities, and Brown hopes that using advanced telescopes to probe the still-forming Virgo Cluster will tilt the scales one way or another.

Cosmic Starvation

The first possibility is called ram pressure stripping, a process through which all of the gas that a galaxy would use to form stars is vacuumed away by nearby intergalactic plasma. The other is that the environment inside a galactic cluster simply becomes too hot for cosmic gases to cool and condense into stars, rendering it useless as fuel.

“When you remove the fuel for star formation, you effectively kill the galaxy,” Brown writes, “turning it into a dead object in which no new stars are formed.”

READ MORE: Something is killing galaxies, and scientists are on the case [The Conversation]

The “Space Nation” Warns That an Asteroid Could Wipe out Humanity

The leader of Asgardia, which styles itself as humanity’s first “space nation,” has a warning for world leaders: a life-threatening asteroid impact is “inevitable” unless we do something to stop it.

“In the last 100 years, the Earth has been hit at least three times by space objects, each with an explosive power many times greater than the Hiroshima atomic bomb,” Igor Ashurbeyli said in a press release. “Future life-threatening impacts are inevitable unless defences [defenses] are built.”

“World leaders must intensify efforts to detect and track [near-earth objects] and create ways to deflect them from a strike on earth,” he added.

Let’s be real: It’d be easy to dismiss anything that comes from Asgardia as a joke. The nation is little more than an idealistic concept at this point — it doesn’t have anywhere for its citizens to live, and its name sounds kinda silly.

However, Ashurbeyli isn’t the first person to express concerns that an asteroid could wipe out humanity — scientists and other experts have been sounding the warningfor years.

He also isn’t the only one who thinks world leaders aren’t doing enough to protect the planet from the threat — retired NASA astronaut Russell “Rusty” Schweickart recently asserted that the United States should be doing a lot more to detect potential asteroid strikes.

Thankfully, space agencies aren’t completely ignoring the threat of Earth-bound asteroids.

NASA is currently developing a probe to smash into incoming asteroids to redirect them away from the Earth, with plans to launch in 2020 or 2021. The European Space Agency, meanwhile, is developing a “self-driving” spacecraft to work in conjunction with NASA’s probe.

Whether these projects will be ready in time to prevent an asteroid from smashing into the Earth and causing humanity to go the way of the dinosaur, however, is currently impossible to predict.

READ MORE: Scientists With Asgardia Are Demanding Swift Action To Stop Threat Of Apocalyptic Asteroid Strike On Earth [Inquisitr]

Do aliens really exist?

Aliens are out there, more likely than not. The Drake equation gives an idea of those odds. Of course, "alien life" may not just be narrowly defined as "intelligent alien life" and Jupiter's moon Europa may hold the answer of whether or not microbial alien life exists in our very solar system. If we find out it does, that would be very exciting (and would also make the movie "2010" rather prophetic...but I seriously doubt in the way portrayed by the movie at all with the energy discharges and such).

There's no evidence that intelligent extraterrestrials have visited Earth, but there are some tantalising videos on the internet that may or may not be real. The ones of particular interest are the ones that are no longer available, or have been replaced by obvious hoax videos.

Of course, there is the witness accounts from dozens of high-ranking military officials and military pilots from around the world, many of which testified at a global disclosure summit (I believe it was held in Canada in 2011, but I cannot locate the video footage or related articles online to substantiate that), among other reports given by a few commercial airline pilots and police officers over the years. These people may have seen "something", although I cannot say if what they saw were truly extraterrestrial vehicles or not, but they had nevertheless put themselves up for public scrutiny and some have even put their jobs on the line when the reports became public. The obvious question is whether these latter reports were publicity stunts or unintentionally leaked to the press.

It is worth mentioning that in 1952, several UFO's were reported flying in restricted air space over Washington, D.C. in a highly publicised string of sightings, which sent the U.S. government scrambling military fighters to intercept. Keep in mind that the U.S. was in sort of a "UFO hysteria" at that time, and these sort of reports could have helped the government put public opinion in their favor to bolster cold-war military funding.

With that in mind, intelligent extraterrestrial beings visiting our planet seems unlikely, simply for the fact that the nearest habitable planetary system is 13 light years away, jand we are just one planet with really nothing of interest, out in the middle of nowhere, among millions of others just in this sector of our galaxy (being conservative with that number). Our natural resources are sparse, our civilisation is volatile and dangerous and our technology is unimpressive. Nothing to see here...move along. 

New planet that is size of Neptune discovered:

Astronomers have discovered a `lost' planet about the size of Neptune tucked away in a solar system 3,000 light years from Earth. The new planet, Kepler-150 f, was overlooked for several years, according to researchers at the Yale University in the US.

Computer algorithms identify most such “exoplanets“, which are planets located outside our solar system. The algorithms search through data from space mission surveys, looking for the telltale transits of planets orbiting in front of distant stars.

However, sometimes the computers miss something.In this case, it was a planet in the Kepler-150 system with a long orbit around its sun. Kepler-150 f takes 637 days to circle its sun, one of the longest orbits for any known system with five or more planets.

Nasa's Kepler Mission had found four other planets in the Kepler-150 system several years ago. All of them have orbits much closer to their sun than the new planet does.“Only by using our new technique of subtracting out the transit signals of known planets could we then actually see it for what it really was.Essentially , it was hiding in plain sight in a forest of other planetary transits,“ said a student of Yale.

`Supermassive' black hole rocketing through space at 5 million miles per hour: 

`Supermassive' black hole rocketing through space at five million miles an hour, Nasa reveals Hubble Space Telescope image shows it being pushed around galaxy by gravitational waves eight billion light-years from Earth Black holes are the big bullies of space. They're so massive that their gravity doesn't let any light escape.The biggest black holes, called “supermassive“, weigh as much as a billion suns. Looming at the centre of seemingly every galaxy, including the Milky Way, they control the formation of stars and can deform the fabric of space-time itself. It takes a lot to push a black hole around.

But eight billion light-years from Earth, in a galaxy called 3C 186, astronomers have discovered a supermassive black hole that got kicked off its throne. Now it's rocketing through space at a speed of almost 5 million miles an hour. There's one thing that could unseat a supermassive black hole in this manner, the researchers say: gravitational waves.

First predicted by Albert Einstein more than 100 years ago, gravitational waves are ripples in space-time caused by the universe's most cataclysmic events ­ just as concentric circles form on the surface of a pond after you toss in a heavy rock. Last year, researchers at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) showed that this phenomenon exists when they detected gravitational waves produced by the merger of two black holes. In a paper that will publish next week in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, Marco Chiaberge and his colleagues say that the weird behaviour of the black hole in galaxy 3C 186 is likely the result of gravitational waves from another pair of colliding black holes.

The roving black hole was detected in an image taken by Nasa's Hubble Space Telescope. The fuzzy splotch that was galaxy 3C 186 contained an incredibly bright spot, a quasar. This wasn't unusual: a quasar is the nucleus of a galaxy, and it's bright because of the disk of gas that surrounds the black hole at its centre.

What caught Chiaberge's eye was the quasar's location, 35,000 lightyears from the centre of its galaxy.“We were seeing something very peculiar,“ he said in a Nasa release.

Chiaberge, who works at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) and Johns Hopkins University, asked fellow astronomers for their observations from a range of other instruments, including the Chandra space observatory and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey's telescope in New Mexico. The former measures X-rays, the latter specialises in detecting redshift, the stretching of light that is detected as something travels through space. Their observations confirmed the Hubble finding. They also helped pin down the black hole's mass (equal to that of a billion suns) and the speed at which the gas around it was travelling (4.7 million mph).