A little more than a month is left before overcoming an important milestone that separates us from 2017, which will come with its joys, worries and singularities. How do we remember 2016? We begin to summarize. Honestly, this year's major scientific events have been disappointments rather than breakthroughs. But a negative result is also a result, so it is worth rejoicing that the field is opening up for new theories, experiments and discoveries.
We found gravitational waves
On February 11, 2016, LIGO scientists officially announced the discovery of gravitational waves. A team of physicists was able to hear and record the sound of two black holes colliding billions of light-years away, thus confirming the latest prophecy of Einstein's theory of general relativity.
This barely audible sound, physicists say, was the first direct evidence for the existence of gravitational waves - ripples in the fabric of spacetime predicted by Einstein in the last century. It is also a confirmation of the nature of the origin of black holes, gravitational traps, from which even light cannot get out. The energy transported by these gravitational waves, 50 times more powerful than the total energy of all the stars in the Universe combined, was recorded by the highly sensitive LIGO antennas.
Gravitational waves will answer such questions: do black holes really exist, do gravitational waves move at the speed of light, does space-time consist of cosmic strings, and more.
Tesla autopilot killed a man
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In the United States, the first accident was recorded involving a Tesla Model S car driven by autopilot, resulting in the death of the driver. The incident occurred on May 7, 2016, but the data about it were published only in July. According to a police report, the car was driving on a Florida expressway and crashed into a truck crossing the road at one of the intersections. Tesla's roof was blown off and it flew another 30 meters before stopping. The driver, Joshua Brown, died in the accident.
Artificial intelligence started killing earlier than we thought. And although this is a wake-up call, it should be so.
“… The reality is, if you look at the numbers, driving with Tesla's autopilot is MUCH safer than driving without it, or in a car without it,” wrote Peter Diamandis, responding to the unfair media reaction.
What will happen next? We will watch how artificial intelligence is killing hundreds of people, anywhere, whatever: for pharmaceutical experiments; eliminates unfortunate designer babies; kills some people to save others; takes the lives of criminals to save lives that they might otherwise have taken. And we will look at this as the salvation of humanity. We will have to come to terms with the lesser evil in order to get rid of the greater. And it started in 2016.
We leave for Proxima b
There were two events here.
On August 24, 2016, scientists from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) confirmed the discovery of an Earth-like exoplanet in the potentially habitable zone of Proxima Centauri, the closest star to us. A planet orbits around Proxima Centauri, a small red dwarf star, just 4.25 light years away. Proxima Centauri is slightly closer than the famous Alpha and Beta pair of Alpha Centauri. The planet is called Proxima b and the ESO team estimates its mass at 1.3 Earth.
The planet's orbit lies almost seven million kilometers from Proxima Centauri, which is 5% of the distance between the Earth and our own Sun. Also, this star is much colder than our Sun, so Proxima b is still in the "potentially habitable zone" of exoplanets, in which the temperature allows water to be liquid on the surface.
Once again: the planet closest to us, the closest star to us, can be potentially habitable and even similar to Earth.
That is why Yuri Milner launched the Breakthrough Starshot project. Objective: Send a postage stamp-sized spacecraft to Alpha Centauri, the closest star system to Earth. Each nano-camera, or StarChip, will be equipped with cameras, an engine and a navigation and communication system. The guys in Silicon Valley know how to make tiny things and glue them onto chips. Once in space, the craft will fly on the energy of light rather than combustion, propelled by a meter-wide laser sail attached to each chip.
The Alpha Centauri system is just the first step on a grand interstellar journey. In terms of cosmic distances, this star system is literally around the corner: just 4.37 light years away. Trillions of kilometers. You can get information about it literally during one human life.
The Mystery of Planet Nine
Astronomers have found a number of compelling, albeit circumstantial, evidence pointing to the existence of a vast invisible world that lies in the far reaches of the Kuiper belt. The new planet - ninth in the solar system - must be super-earths, that is, ten times the size of the Earth.
Earlier this year, Caltech planetary scientists Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown presented powerful circumstantial evidence for a large, as yet undiscovered planet, perhaps ten times more massive than Earth, orbiting in a solar system outside Pluto. Scientists have pulled their evidence from anomalies in the orbits of a handful of small bodies observed.
"Unfortunately," says Brown, "we haven't found anything yet." But the evidence is so strong that other industry experts took their find very seriously.
SpaceX unveils Mars colonization plan
To be fair, it's worth noting that in April 2016, SpaceX successfully landed the first stage of its rocket on a floating barge. This event became important for the development of the company and attracted the attention of the whole world, but the main goal of the company is still different. Namely: the colonization of Mars. And Elon Musk presented a detailed plan for the company at the end of September.
Elon Musk thinks it will take humanity 40 to 100 years to go from landing a ship full of colonists on Mars to founding a self-sustaining civilization. Musk stated that a fleet of ships capable of carrying at least 100 people, departing every two years, could populate Martian cities in a short time.
And the Interplanetary Transport System will help Mask in this. Of course, SpaceX's plans are still very crude, it will take many decades to make the entrepreneur's dream come true. If all goes well.
The trip will proceed as follows: first, the spacecraft takes off from pad 39A. Then the spacecraft and the first stage are separated. The first one flies into orbit, and the first stage returns to Earth in 20 minutes. On Earth, she sits down again on the launch pad, and a fuel tank sits on top of it. The rocket takes off again, with fuel. Then it connects to the spacecraft, fueling it in orbit. And finally, this whole structure flies to Mars. On the way, people will be entertained by weightlessness games, films, games, a restaurant and other entertainment in the cabins.
Having reached Mars, the device will land on its surface using a retrotraction. Passengers will use it, as well as cargo and equipment that will be delivered to Mars in advance to establish a long-term colony. After 20-50 trips, there will already be a million people on Mars.
It is not yet known where people will live and what they will eat, how they will stay healthy in microgravity, and how they solved the problem with harmful cosmic radiation. Mask doesn't seem to be bothered by this - he says it's not a major problem. The risk of getting cancer will be slightly increased, and the engineers will surely come up with radiation protection by the time the first ship is dispatched.
People will be able to return: it will not be a one-way trip. In addition, the missiles will need to be returned somehow. Musk noted that there will be no children among the first travelers, and the astronauts will have to be "ready to die."
However, they will have games in zero gravity, so it's not scary.
World's most sensitive detector found no dark matter
The incredibly sensitive detector of dark matter LUX, buried under a kilometer-long layer of rocks, did not find anything in 20 months of searching for dark matter - which significantly narrowed the range of possible properties of the mysterious substance. On July 21, at the 11th Dark Matter Conference (IDM2016) in Sheffield, UK, scientists presented the results of LUX. The conference brought together scientists who seek to understand dark matter - this mysterious substance is believed to be 4/5 of the mass of the Universe. So far, no one has observed it directly.
Researchers examined the massive amount of data collected by a carefully calibrated device in a 20-month experiment that followed a weaker three-month LUX study in 2013 that also failed. They managed to filter out signals in the data created by non-dark matter particles that managed to get into the xenon bath and participate in the experiment. Consequently, scientists have a unique opportunity to study directly the interactions of dark matter, which, as expected, will produce several signals from one hundred per kilogram of xenon.
Just because LUX couldn't find anything doesn't mean that dark matter isn't made up of WIMPs; rather, dark matter wimps have no mass, or cannot affect ordinary matter in a specific given range.
“We thought it was a battle of David and Goliath between us and the much larger Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva,” says Rick Gaitskell, a physicist at Brown University and spokesman for LUX. “LUX has been fighting for the last three years to get the first evidence of a dark matter signal. Now we will have to wait to see if the first launch of the LHC this year will show dark matter particles, or the discovery will take place after a new generation of large detectors appears."
What can I say? All this is sad.
Artificial intelligence beat the world champion in the game of go
In March 2016, AlphaGo, developed by Google's DeepMind, defeated the world champion in logic board game go, Korean Lee Si Dol. Li lost the first game after three and a half hours of play, while the clock still had 28 minutes and 28 seconds left.
DeepMind founder Damis Hassabis expressed his "deep respect for Lee Si Dol and his incredible skills", calling the game of go "incredibly fun" and "very intense." AlphaGo team captain David Silver commented "the amazing complexity of the fun game of go that made their AlphaGo work to its fullest potential."
Probably, he was cunning a little: artificial intelligence is already successfully beating the grandmasters of the whole world, and every year the gap between us is growing more and more. Another victory of artificial intelligence in the piggy bank of machines and the next business in which a person is unsurpassed, less.
James Webb Space Telescope Completed
Twenty years ago, scientists began assembling the next-generation telescope that will be the successor to the Hubble. And in early November, NASA engineers announced that the construction of the James Webb Telescope (JWST) was finally completed. The telescope, with a 6.5-meter mirror twice the size of the Hubble's mirror, is ready for testing ahead of its scheduled launch in October 2018.
This telescope will replace the Hubble Space Telescope and the Spitzer Space Telescope. The significance of this cannot be overemphasized, since Hubble was arguably one of the greatest inventions of mankind, and James Webb is claimed to be 100 times more powerful.
After all, this telescope will start where the Hubble telescope left off, namely Ultra and Extreme Deep Field imagery. Apart from the satellite images of Planck and the WMAP (which provided us with photographs of the radiation from the cosmic microwave background), these are the oldest photographs of light we have taken, the most distant galaxies. Unfortunately, very soon they will leave the spectrum of visible light, go through redshift into infrared due to the expansion of the Universe.
Fortunately, James Webb's instruments are designed to operate primarily in the infrared range of the electromagnetic spectrum, with some capability in the visible range. It will be sensitive to light with a wavelength of 0.6-28 micrometers. The advanced scientific instruments aboard the telescope will have four main themes to explore: first light and the reionization era, the gathering of galaxies, the birth of stars, protoplanetary and planetary systems, and the origin of life.
Juno successfully entered Jupiter orbit
In July, NASA announced that the Juno spacecraft, which was sent on space travel 5 years ago, has finally reached the orbit of Jupiter, the largest gas-gas giant in our solar system.
What does it mean? That we will get another "spy" who will study one of the most interesting bodies in our system.
Over the next 20 months, Juno will complete 37 orbital flights around Jupiter and uncover the gas giant's deepest secrets. Among them, for example, will be data on how planets like Jupiter are formed, and whether they have a solid core. In addition, the device will map the planet's magnetic field, measure the level of water, oxygen and ammonia in Jupiter's atmosphere, and will also monitor the gas giant's auroras.