Lifeboat Foundation

Forget about online games that promise you a “whole world” to explore. An international team of researchers has generated an entire virtual universe, and made it freely available on the cloud to everyone.

Uchuu (meaning “outer space” in Japanese) is the largest and most realistic simulation of the universe to date. The Uchuu simulation consists of 2.1 trillion particles in a computational cube an unprecedented 9.63 billion light-years to a side. For comparison, that’s about three-quarters the distance between Earth and the most distant observed galaxies. Uchuu reveals the evolution of the universe on a level of both size and detail inconceivable until now.

Continue reading “Largest virtual universe free for anyone to explore” »

NASA won’t be sending a rover to Saturn’s moon Titan in search of alien fly. It’s sending a Dragonfly.

The huge “dog-boned” asteroid hurling through the solar system has now been imaged in unprecedented detail.

A team of astronomers has seemingly obtained the best pictures and data to date of the peculiar asteroid, Kleopatra. Using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), observers from the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, and the Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Marseille, France, captured images to help two teams of scientists answer some interesting questions.

“Kleopatra is truly a unique body in our Solar System,” says Franck Marchis, who led a study on the asteroid published in Astronomy & Astrophysics. “Science makes a lot of progress thanks to the study of weird outliers. I think Kleopatra is one of those and understanding this complex, multiple asteroid system can help us learn more about our Solar System.”

Continue reading “Astronomers take best pictures of Kleopatra’s ‘portrait’” »

The James Webb Space Telescope is scheduled for launch December 18. It will help scientists hunt for alien life on exoplanets and look to the beginning of time.

This tiny piece of rock will help solve one of the biggest mysteries of the universe.

NASA’s Perseverance rover collected its first Martian sample, which will help scientists determine if there is life beyond Earth.

Continue reading “The NASA Mars rover collects something historic” »

Have you missed the SR Academy Webinar with Seth Shostak of the SETI Institute?

Here you can watch the complete video, including the discussion after the lecture:

Continue reading “SR ACADEMY WEBINAR SERIES — SETI-Institute and Art in Residence Program” »

One of the biggest barriers standing in the way of useful quantum computers is how error-prone today’s devices are.

Why does this matter?

Because creating reliably successful quantum computers will allow us to better control the building blocks of life and the universe.

The big picture: Black science fiction writers and artists known as Afrofuturists say the next 30 years of space exploration could address legacies of racial terror on Earth if people of color join ventures and help reimagine human life among the planets.

Expensive tourism, Mars expeditions, even alien encounters could define space in 2051 — and the Earthly burdens of race could also follow humans to orbit and beyond.

Astronomers have discovered a strangely shaped spot on the surface of a baby star 450 million light-years away, revealing new insights into how our solar system formed.

The familiar star at the center of our solar system has had billions of years to mature and ultimately provide life-giving energy to us here on Earth. But a very long time ago, our sun was just a growing baby star. What did the sun look like when it was so young? That’s long been a mystery that, if solved, could teach us about the formation of our solar system—so-named because sol is the Latin word for sun—and other stellar systems made up of planets and cosmic objects orbiting stars.

“We’ve detected thousands of planets in other stellar systems in our galaxy, but where did all of these planets come from? Where did Earth come from? That’s what really drives me,” says Catherine Espaillat, lead author on the paper and a Boston University College of Arts & Sciences associate professor of astronomy.