Intellectual Curiosity | Always Question Authority

Dr. Leroy Chiao PhD, Former NASA Astronaut & International Space Station Commander joins Thom. Earlier today – at 3:18 Greenwich Mean Time – NASAs “Juno” spacecraft successfully reached Jupiter and entered the gas giants orbit. Scott Bolton – principle investigator for the Juno mission described his relief when orbit was achieved – telling The Guardian that “There’s a mixture of tension and anxiety because this is such a critical manoeuvre … The rocket motor has to burn at the right time, in the right direction, for just the right amount of time.” It took the spaceship 5 years to make the 1.8 billion mile trip from Earth to Jupiter and The Juno probe is equipped with 29 sensors and 9 instruments that will study the planet for the next 20 months. The probe will be making a map of the planet before its instruments finally fail and the probe falls to Jupiter’s surface.

By Bob Fredericks

Stephen Hawking’s decades-old black-hole theory has been confirmed by another scientist — and that may finally land the renowned physicist on the short list for a Nobel Prize.

Hawking — whose life with his former wife and struggle with motor neuron disease were dramatized in the 2014 movie “The Theory of Everything” — calculated back in 1974 that tiny particles should be able to rob black holes of a minuscule fraction of their energy and then escape.

That means that the black holes would slowly evaporate over time, spewing out all the dust, light and passing stars they had swallowed in a trickle of heat.

Conventional wisdom at the time said that black holes were places where gravity pulled so hard that nothing could get out, including light.

The development could open up a bizarre vision of the universe in which black holes can cough themselves into nothingness, Hawking said during recent lectures on the BBC and at Harvard.

“This raises a serious problem that strikes at the heart of our understanding of science,” he said.

Richard Dawkins Foundation