Lifeboat Foundation

An innovative experiment flying aboard NASA’s Psyche mission just hit its first major milestone by successfully carrying out the most distant demonstration of laser communications. The tech demo could one day help NASA missions probe deeper into space and uncover more discoveries about the origin of the universe.

Launched in mid-October, Psyche is currently en route to catch humanity’s first glimpse of a metal asteroid between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. The spacecraft will spend the next six years traveling about 2.2 billion miles (3.6 billion kilometers) to reach its namesake, located in the outer part of the main asteroid belt.

Along for the ride is the Deep Space Optical Communications technology demonstration, or DSOC, which is carrying out a mission of its own during the first two years of the journey.

A groundbreaking study by University of Leeds scientists proposes that Be stars are part of triple star systems, not binary systems as previously thought. This finding, derived from Gaia satellite data, challenges conventional star formation theories and could impact our knowledge of black holes, neutron stars, and gravitational waves.

Gravitational waves are distortions or ripples in the fabric of space and time. They were first detected in 2015 by the Advanced LIGO detectors and are produced by catastrophic events such as colliding black holes, supernovae, or merging neutron stars.

Observations from the Event Horizon Telescope show that the supermassive black hole at the heart of the galaxy M87 has twisted magnetic fields that help matter and light escape from the immense gravit.

Sean Carroll speaking at the 6th International FQXi Conference, “Mind Matters: Intelligence and Agency in the Physical World.”

The Foundational Questions Institute (FQXi) catalyzes, supports, and disseminates research on questions at the foundations of physics and cosmology, particularly new frontiers and innovative ideas integral to a deep understanding of reality but unlikely to be supported by conventional funding sources.

Continue reading “Sean Carroll on Causality and the Arrow of Time” »

Join Brian Greene and Juan Maldacena as they explore a wealth of developments connecting black holes, string theory, quantum gravity, quantum entanglement, wormholes, and the holographic principle.

This program is part of the Big Ideas Series, made possible with support from the John Templeton Foundation.

Continue reading “String Theory, Quantum Gravity and Black Holes (Or, Are We Holograms?)” »

The supermassive black hole at the heart of our galaxy isn’t just spinning — it’s doing so at almost maximum speed, dragging anything near it along for the ride.

Physicists calculated the rotational speed of the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole, called Sagittarius A* (Sgr A•, by using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory to view the X-rays and radio waves emanating from outflows of material.

This is a testable hypothesis, and with current technology, we should be able to confirm or disprove it within a few years.

Once inflation comes to an end, and all the energy that was inherent to space itself gets converted into particles, antiparticles, photons, etc., all the Universe can do is expand and cool. Everything smashes into one another, sometimes creating new particle/antiparticle pairs, sometimes annihilating pairs back into photons or other particles, but always dropping in energy as the Universe expands.

The Universe never reaches infinitely high temperatures or densities, but still attains energies that are perhaps a trillion times greater than anything the LHC can ever produce. The tiny seed overdensities and underdensities will eventually grow into the cosmic web of stars and galaxies that exist today. 13.8 billion years ago, the Universe as-we-know-it had its beginning. The rest is our cosmic history.

In this episode, we explore the Hubble constant problem, which is one of the most intriguing and perplexing mysteries in cosmology. We explain how a recent study used the Hubble Space Telescope to measure the expansion rate of the universe, and how it differs from the prediction of the cosmic microwave background and the standard cosmological model. We also discuss some of the possible implications and solutions for this discrepancy, such as the nature of dark energy, dark matter and dark radiation, and the need to revise our understanding of the universe.

Chapters:
00:00 Introduction.
01:13 Measuring the Hubble Constant.
03:36 Comparing the Results.
05:39 Implications and Solutions.
07:54 Outro.
08:39 Enjoy.

Continue reading “A New Study Finds a Surprising Answer on How Fast the Universe is Expanding” »