M.J. Rose

This is how amazing the Hubble is (it’s even proving Einstein wrong lately) —

“Imagine a firefly moving from one side of a U.S. quarter to the other side. You have to detect this movement from 1,500 miles away,” he says. “Second, there is a bright light bulb [the white dwarf] next to the firefly. And you have to detect the small movement of the firefly in the glare of the bright light bulb.”

From National Geographic,

Einstein’s ‘Impossible’ Experiment Finally Performed
The Hubble telescope just weighed a star using a technique the famed physicist described but said humanity would have “no hope” of using.

By Nadia Drake

“Leave it to the Hubble Space Telescope to prove Albert Einstein wrong. Or at least, unnecessarily pessimistic.

Recently, Hubble spied a dead star about 18 light-years away warping the light of a more distant star that appeared to pass behind it. Einstein predicted this effect would happen based on his general theory of relativity, but he then claimed scientists had “no hope” of actually seeing it.

Of course, he wrote that dour phrase nearly 60 years before humans launched a rather impressive piece of hardware into Earth’s orbit.

Now, Hubble has managed to witness the spectacle, and astronomers were able to read clues carried in the curved starlight and discern the mass of the dead star, called Stein 2051B. The result perfectly matches a prediction of the star’s mass made a century ago…”

For the rest, click here.

It wasn’t very long ago that black holes were considered merely theoretical — Einstein predicted the existence of black holes, but the first one was not discovered until 1971. Now with LIGO (the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) three massive black hole collisions have been measured to date, the most recent, a merger of “a pair of mammoth black holes resulting in a pit of infinitely deep darkness weighing as much as 49 suns” — the science of black holes is in full swing…

From The New York Times,

Third Gravitational Wave Detection, From Black-Hole Merger 3 Billion Light Years Away

A newly discovered “missing link” indicates that our ancestors were evolving and splitting from chimpanzees in Europe, not in Africa. The mysterious origins of humanity continue to come to light….but the story is not anywhere near complete. What will they discover next that changes our understanding of our beginnings?

From The Telegraph,

Europe was the birthplace of mankind, not Africa, scientists find

The history of human evolution has been rewritten after scientists discovered that Europe was the birthplace of mankind, not Africa.

by Sarah Knapton, Science Editor

“Currently, most experts believe that our human lineage split from apes around seven million years ago in central Africa, where hominids remained for the next five million years before venturing further afield.

But two fossils of an ape-like creature which had human-like teeth have been found in Bulgaria and Greece, dating to 7.2 million years ago.

The discovery of the creature, named Graecopithecus freybergi, and nicknameded ‘El Graeco’ by scientists, proves our ancestors were already starting to evolve in Europe 200,000 years before the earliest African hominid.

An international team of researchers say the findings entirely change the beginning of human history and place the last common ancestor of both chimpanzees and humans – the so-called Missing Link – in the Mediterranean region…”

For the rest, click here.