James' World 2

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If alien astronomers observed our solar system from a distance 4.5 billion years ago, they would have seen a star surrounded by primordial gas and dust. That material, arranged in a narrow but dense disk, whirled round and round the young star. Over time, its particles collided and formed clumps. Gravity smoothed the jagged edges of the biggest ones to make planets and moons, and left the bits and pieces to become asteroids and comets.

The same process happens around other stars across the universe. We can even take a snapshot of it with the help of powerful telescopes. It doesn’t look like much, but that small, flying-saucer-looking thing in the image at the top of this article is a planetary system in the making. The little bright bulb in the darkness, encircled in its own ring of dust and gas, is known to astronomers as a protoplanetary disk. This is what our cosmic home looked like in the beginning, long before its star became known, to a bunch of life-forms on the third planet from the center, as the sun.

This work in progress is situated in the Orion Nebula, a luminous cloud of interstellar gas and dust about 1,500 light-years away. Its star is about 1 million years old—a baby, in astronomy terms. The dust around the star blocks the light from the bright nebula in the background, rendered here in gray, so the planetary disk appears in silhouette. The faint, fuzzy orb nestled within is not the star itself but rather starlight shining off the halo of dust around it, according to Mark McCaughrean, an astronomer and senior adviser for science and exploration at the European Space Agency. This is one of the most tantalizing environments in the cosmos, where small particles will eventually transform into full-blown worlds.

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Mark McCaughrean and Sam Pearson of the European Space Agency / JWST / NASA / ESA / CSA

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Key Takeaways

• The most puzzling, unexplained anomaly in all of cosmology is the Hubble tension: the difference in the measured expansion rate depending on which method is used.
• However, a second, less-publicized anomaly is also extremely puzzling: a difference in our observed motion through the Universe and how different things appear in various directions.
• We have many different methods of estimating how the Universe differs in different directions, and they’re not all consistent with one another. That’s a real, unsolved, but important problem!

Sorry, astronomers: the expanding Universe doesn’t add up.

The largest anomaly is the Hubble tension.

Two expansion rate measurement methods yield incompatible values.

The early relic method, via cosmic imperfections, yields 67 km/s/Mpc.

The distance ladder method, from individually measured objects, yields 73 km/s/Mpc.

But another cosmic imperfection anomaly is similarly puzzling.

Consider the cosmic microwave background (CMB): leftover radiation from the Big Bang.

Although mostly uniform, one direction is ~3.3 millikelvin hotter while the opposite is similarly cooler.

(See article for images and narritive)

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At lower left, the actual signal of the temperature fluctuations is shown. In the other three panels, possible modifications to the microwave sky are shown due to rotation or other forms of anisotropy. By constraining the magnitude of these signals, we can demonstrate just how isotropic (the same in all directions) and non-rotating the Universe actually is. However, indicators other than the CMB do not give consistent results with what we observe here  Credit: D. Saadeh et al., Phys. Rev. Lett., 2016)

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The next 12 months will be another test of leadership for Canada’s CEOs.

Already in the past two years, they have dealt with the pandemic, supply-chain issues, talent shortages, technological advances, market volatility, the war in Ukraine, surging inflation and interest rates, digital transformation, and intensifying sustainability agendas. All remain ongoing concerns that tests their organization’s resiliency and agility.

Now just as the economy has started its post-pandemic recovery, a recession looms.

Ninety-two percent of the 75 top Canadian company CEOs in KPMG’s annual bellwether Global CEO Outlook Report believe the country will fall into a recession in the next 12 months.

In separate, new research, into 503 small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), two-thirds (66 percent) also anticipate a recession. However, the majority of leaders (69 percent of CEOs and 52 percent of SMBs), irrespective of company size, are optimistic that it will be mild and short and have already taken steps to help ride out the upcoming turbulence.

While the economy and an anticipated recession are currently keeping CEOs up at night, our surveys also reveal shared concerns with global peers that emerging or disruptive technology and operational issues are forever changing the way they do business and present an ongoing threat — and opportunity — to their ability to grow.

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KPMG

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Getty Images

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