COPUOS operates by consensus, requiring approval of all of its more than 100 member states to move forward on any issue, and thus allowing even a single nation to block action
That’s a shitty way to get anything done. Unanimous approval should only be for really big issues. Otherwise just let it be a majority vote.
It feels like the title should be “uninhabited”. Life on earth doesn’t survive because we continue to be bombarded with nutrient carrying asteroids, it just needed them to kick it off. That few nutrients are likely to make it from the surface to the ocean means the genesis is unlikely to occur, but it doesn’t seem to make a decision about whether an unlikely genesis could survive, even if only in a small pocket of the ocean.
I always thought of our universes as just a bubble, with dark matter all around us. It’s not the edge of the existence as much as the edge of our bubble.
We might not be the only bubble, but it’s impossible to interact or even observe them. Could be millions, could just be us. No way to every know.
Our bubble keeps expanding, until the edges aren’t dense enough to displace whatever’s out there. And we’ll either slowly fade and future civilizations will assume the universe has always shrunk. Because that’s all they’ve ever seen. Like if the human lifespan was a single minute, people would freak out everytime it approaches dawn or dusk. Not understanding that it’s a cycle.
The team’s measurements even suggest that the supernovae that virtually cleared the bubble of space in which the Milky Way resides was born in a cluster of stars within the Radcliffe Wave.
Wait, the Milky Way is inside of a bubble generated by novae which were inside a cluster which is inside the Radcliffe Wave which is… itself… inside the Milky Way?
The Radcliffe Wave formation is a bunch of gas that is apparently, wiggling, in incredibly huge time and distance scales, like a sinusoidal wave.
So, imagine very, very long ago, before the Milky Way formed, you have a particular dense gaseous region/formation.
Dense gaseous regions tend to give birth to new stars. This region did so, and then one of them supernova’d.
Next, the Milky Way ended up forming in the void created by this supernova.
Then, this dense gaseous region was basically incorporated into the Milky Way (seems like one of its spiral arms) over another absurdly long period of time.
But, for some reason, it is wiggling, in a manner that dense gaseous regions have not been observed to behave in.
Thats the best I can do here, I am not an astrophysicist, though I did take two quarters of intro level astronomy in college lol.
Probably worthwhile to note that the article says that their data ‘suggests’ not ‘shows’ or ‘proves’ the bit about the supernova clearing the Milky Way void.
To actually prove that would encompass, among many other things, running the clock backward on star orbits/trajectories over billions of years using extremely complicated models and mountains of data I am absolutely not qualified to comment on.
Im just trying to very broadly explain the chain of events here if this supernova really did cause the void the Milky Way formed in.
Anyway, other fun fact: Our Milky Way Galaxy is not actually a pure spiral Galaxy as it has so often been depicted for quite a long time.
It is actually a barred spiral galaxy. Basically, instead of just swirly arms, there are actually short, more or less straight parts to the arms as they emanate out from the center, which then begin to curve into spirally arms.
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