Hailing from the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan and a number of Japanese universities, the scientists based their conclusions on observational data collected by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) observatory. They discovered the galaxy, SXDF-NB1006-2, just four years ago, and have been trying to identify the elements that are present ever since. They describe their findings in a new paper published inScience.

As expected, the galaxy contained hydrogen. But the team was much more curious about the potential presence of oxygen, which they hoped would give key information about how the element formed in the first place.

That doesn’t mean it’s anything close to the oxygen we breathe today. For starters, there’s just not that much of it. The amount is fairly tiny—less than one-tenth of the oxygen found in the sun. This has implications for the age of that oxygen.

On Earth, the presence of oxygen is tied to the presence of life, especially our own. The discovery of oxygen so far away raises questions about the possibility of life out there—either native life forms or perhaps an environment ripe for colonization by us. But this oxygen wouldn’t be something we could breathe.
“The detected oxygen is actually doubly-ionized oxygen atoms, and not oxygen molecules which we breathe,” lead researcher Akio Inoue of Japan’s Osaka Sangyo University told Gizmodo. “So, we could not breathe in the 13.1-billion-light-year-away galaxy we observed if we were there.”

A complex organic molecule essential for biology has been discovered for the first time in interstellar space, a finding that may help understand how life originated in the universe.

Like a pair of human hands, certain organic molecules have mirror-image versions of themselves, a chemical property known as chirality.

These molecules are essential for biology and have been found in meteorites on Earth and comets in our Solar System.

However, none has been detected in the vast reaches of interstellar space, until now.

Scientists using highly sensitive radio telescopes have discovered the first complex organic chiral molecule in interstellar space.

The molecule, propylene oxide (CH3CHOCH2), was found near the centre of our Galaxy in an enormous star-forming cloud of dust and gas known as Sagittarius B2 (Sgr B2).

“This is the first molecule detected in interstellar space that has the property of chirality, making it a pioneering leap forward in our understanding of how prebiotic molecules are made in the Universe and the effects they may have on the origins of life,” said Brett McGuire, postdoctoral fellow at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in the US.

“Propylene oxide is among the most complex and structurally intricate molecules detected so far in space,” said Brandon Carroll, a chemistry graduate student at the California Institute of Technology in the US.

Complex organic molecules form in interstellar clouds like Sgr B2 in several ways. To form complex molecules like propylene oxide astronomers believe thin mantles of ice on dust grains help link small molecules into longer and larger structures.

These molecules can then evaporate from the surface of the grains and further react in the gas of the surrounding cloud.

More than 180 molecules have been detected in space till date. Each molecule gives off a distinctive signature, a series of telltale spikes that appear in the radio spectrum.

Larger and more complex molecules have a correspondingly more complex signature, making them harder to detect.

Every living thing on Earth uses one, and only one handedness of many types of chiral molecules.

This trait, called homochirality, is critical for life and has important implications for many biological structures, including DNA’s double helix.

Scientists do not yet understand how biology came to rely on one handedness and not the other.

“By discovering a chiral molecule in space, we finally have a way to study where and how these molecules form before they find their way into meteorites and comets, and to understand the role they play in the origins of homochirality and life,” McGuire said.

The research was published in the journal Science.

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Scientists have known for several years now that stars, galaxies, and almost everything in the universe is moving away from us (and from everything else) at a faster and faster pace. Now, it turns out that the unknown forces behind the rate of this accelerating expansion—a mathematical value called the cosmological constant—may play a previously unexplored role in creating the right conditions for life.

That’s the conclusion of a group of physicists who studied the effects of massive cosmic explosions, called gamma ray bursts, on planets. They found that when it comes to growing life, it’s better to be far away from your neighbors—and the cosmological constant helps thin out the neighborhood.

“In dense environments, you have many explosions, and you’re too close to them,” says cosmologist and theoretical physicist Raul Jimenez of the University of Barcelona in Spain and an author on the new study. “It’s best to be in the outskirts, or in regions that have not been highly populated by small galaxies—and that’s exactly where the Milky Way is.”

Jimenez and his team had previously shown that gamma ray bursts could cause mass extinctions or make planets inhospitable to life by zapping them with radiation and destroying their ozone layer. The bursts channel the radiation into tight beams so powerful that one of them sweeping through a star system could wipe out planets in another galaxy. For their latest work, published this month in Physical Review Letters, they wanted to apply those findings on a broader scale and determine what type of universe would be most likely to support life.

The research is the latest investigation to touch on the so-called anthropic principle: the idea that in some sense the universe is tuned for the emergence of intelligent life. If the forces of nature were much stronger or weaker than physicists observe, proponents note, crucial building blocks of life—such fundamental particles, atoms, or the long-chain molecules needed for the chemistry of life—might not have formed, resulting in a sterile or even completely chaotic universe. Some researchers have tried to gauge how much “wiggle room” various physical constants might have for change before making the cosmos unrecognizable and uninhabitable. Others, however, question what such research really means and whether it is worthwhile.

Jimenez and colleagues tackled one, large-scale facet of the anthropic principle. They used a computer model to run simulations of the universe expanding and accelerating at many different speeds. They then measured how changing the cosmological constant affected the universe’s density, paying particular attention to what that meant about gamma ray bursts raining down radiation on stars and planets.

As it turns out, our universe seems to get it just about right. The existing cosmological constant means the rate of expansion is large enough that it minimizes planets’ exposure to gamma ray bursts, but small enough to form lots of hydrogen-burning stars around which life can exist. (A faster expansion rate would make it hard for gas clouds to collapse into stars.)

Jimenez says the expansion of the universe played a bigger role in creating habitable worlds than he expected. “It was surprising to me that you do need the cosmological constant to clear out the region and make it more suburbanlike,” he says.

Beyond what they reveal about the potential for life in our galaxy and beyond, the findings offer a new nugget of insight into one of the biggest puzzles in cosmology: why the cosmological constant is what it is, says cosmologist Alan Heavens, director of the Imperial Centre for Inference and Cosmology at Imperial College London.

In theory, Heavens explains, either the constant should be hundreds of orders of magnitude higher than it appears to be, or it should be zero, in which case the universe wouldn’t accelerate. But this would disagree with what astronomers have observed. “The small—but nonzero—size of the cosmological constant is a real puzzle in cosmology,” he says, adding that the research shows the number is consistent with the conditions required for the existence of intelligent life that is capable of observing it.

Lee Smolin, a theoretical physicist at Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada, and a skeptic of the anthropic principle, says the paper’s argument is a novel one and that on first reading he didn’t see any obvious mistakes. “I’ve not heard it before, so they’re to be praised for making a new argument,” he says.

However, he adds, all truly anthropic arguments to date fall back on fallacies or circular reasoning. For example, many tend to cherry-pick by looking only at one variable in the development of life at a time; looking at several variables at once could lead to a different conclusion.

Jimenez says the next step is to investigate whether gamma ray bursts are really as devastating to life as scientists believe. His team’s work has shown only that exposure to such massive bursts of radiation would almost certainly peel away a planet’s protective ozone layer.  “Is this going to be catastrophic to life?” he says. “I think so, but it may be that life is more resilient than we think.”

Technology is about to destroy humanity, according to famous physicist Stephen Hawking.

While technology has paved the way for mankind's progress and development, Hawking says it will also be detrimental to the Earth's survival in the future.Humans should take caution since science could spell new ways of how things could go wrong for the survival of humans.

According to Hawking, who turned 74 this month, the end of Earth and humankind could be a major technological disaster which is a "near certainty" in about 1,000 to 10,000 years. He also warned that the only way to escape this is for us to leave Earth,Hawking made the alarming comments on January 7 at BBC's annual Reith Lectures, where he lectured about black hole research. He made the warnings during the Q&A portion with the audience, where he was asked how he thought the world would end.

 According to the Radio Times, the world-renowned scientist said ahead of the lecture that the end of the world could be from a combination of major technological disasters such as global warming, nuclear war and/or engineered viruses.However, the professor from the University of Cambridge also said that there is still hope as long as humans figure out a way of leaving the planet and colonizing other planets.

"Although the chance of a disaster on planet Earth in a given year may be quite low, it adds up over time, becoming a near certainty in the next thousand or ten thousand years...By that time, we should have spread out into space and to other stars, so it would not mean the end of the human race," he said.

He added that this possibility could be 100 years away, and we should still be careful about not destroying Earth."We are not going to stop making progress or reverse it, so we must recognise the dangers and control them," Hawking said.

"We will not establish self-sustaining colonies in space for at least the next hundred years, so we have to be very careful in this period," he added.According to the Daily Mail, Professor Hawking and Tesla founder Elon Musk made an open letter warning that "Autonomous weapons will become the Kalashnikovs of tomorrow," which means artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming powerful enough to become a risk and the cause of humanity's downfall.

In his latest lecture, Hawking gave young scientists advice about retaining their sense of wonder about "our vast and complex" universe.He added that it is also future scientists' responsibility to help the public understand the effects of technology to the Earth.

"It's important to ensure that these changes are heading in the right directions," he said. "In a democratic society, this means that everyone needs to have a basic understanding of science to make informed decisions about the future."Stephen Hawking will be broadcasting his Reith Lecture on BBC Radio 4 on January 26 and February 2.