The Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) radio telescope array in Chile found significant concentrations of cyanides believed to be essential precursors of amino acids and other building blocks of life.
Researchers at the Max Planck institute in Germany have discovered large quantities of organic molecules at the center of the Milky Way that resemble life-bearing amino acids in their complexity. The new-found presence of this complex organic molecule, iso-propyl cyanide, is a good indicator that amino acids themselves are floating throughout the interstellar medium. If this is indeed the case, it in turn suggests that these wandering amino acids may have played a vital role in the synthesis of life on other planets in the galaxy.
Since 2001, the Parkes radio telescope in Australia has been picking up mysterious, unidentified bursts of energy that astronomers have since dubbed ‘fast radio bursts.’ At first, because no other telescope in the world had ever seen these bursts, it was assumed that these FRBs were probably just glitches in the telescope’s electronics — but now, 13 years later, a telescope on the other side of the planet in Puerto Rico has detected an FRB. No one knows what’s causing these FRBs, but it’s almost certainly something very exotic, like an intelligent alien civilization.
Astrophysicists at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center have observed gravitational waves — the first ever direct evidence of the Big Bang, the theory that the entire universe sprung into existence from a tiny spot in the universe 13.8 billion years ago. The significance of this discovery is comparable in importance to CERN’s confirmation of the Higgs boson in 2012, and there is already talk of a Nobel prize for Harvard’s new findings.
IBM and ASTRON have announced that they have begun work on building an exascale supercomputer that will collect data from the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), a 3,000km-wide telescope that will produce a few exabytes of data per day — up to 10 times more data than the internet.
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