Lifeboat Foundation

Life is really weird. From the vantage point of a physicist, it is even stranger. Life is unlike any other phenomenon in physics. Stars, electrons, and black holes are all amazing in their own ways. But only life invents, and the first thing life invents is itself.

Life is creative in a way that no other physical system can be, and its unique use of information may be the key to understanding what makes it different from other physical systems. Now, thanks to a new grant my colleagues and I have received from the Templeton Foundation, we are going to be exploring exactly how information allows life to work its magic. I’m very excited about the project, and this essay is my first report from the frontier as we plunge into terra incognita.

We still don’t have a clear picture of the Sun’s physics — but the Solar Ring could change that.

To solve this a team of astronomers proposes the Solar Ring. The Solar Ring is a fleet of three spacecraft that will all orbit around the Sun. They will be separated from each other by 120 degrees and be fitted with identical instruments. This way their overlapping fields of view will make it impossible for us to miss anything happening on the surface.

Among the many kinds of observations that the astronomers behind the Solar Ring hope to perform, one involves a technique called reverberation mapping. By carefully mapping the velocity of gas on the surface of the Sun, they can measure vibrations and pulsations. These kinds of “sunquakes” give astronomers rich information about what is happening within deeper layers, much like how earthquakes tell us about the core and mantle of the Earth.

Continue reading “A trio of satellites could take a groundbreaking 360-degree photo of the sun” »

New technique could lead to clearer tests of whether this fundamental constant is truly constant.

Clues to a black hole’s origins can be found in the way it spins. This is especially true for binaries, in which two black holes circle close together before merging. The spin and tilt of the respective black holes just before they merge can reveal whether the invisible giants arose from a quiet galactic disk or a more dynamic cluster of stars.

Astronomers are hoping to tease out which of these origin stories is more likely by analyzing the 69 confirmed binaries detected to date. But a new study finds that for now, the current catalog of binaries is not enough to reveal anything fundamental about how black holes form.

In a study appearing today in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, MIT physicists show that when all the known binaries and their spins are worked into models of black hole formation, the conclusions can look very different, depending on the particular model used to interpret the data.

Thanks to a cool physics trick, flares from a nearby star can heat a planet from the inside, powering plate tectonics.

What we call laws of physics are often just mathematical descriptions of some part of nature. Ultimate physical laws probably don’t exist and physics is all the better for it, says theoretical physicist Sankar Das Sarma.

Until now, it was thought they came from massive star collapses.

Astrophysicists around the world may be shocked to learn that long gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) do not solely come from the collapse of massive stars. A new study by astrophysicists at Northwestern University upends the long-standing belief, uncovering new evidence that at least some long GRBs can result from neutron star mergers, which were previously believed to produce only short GRBs, the university’s publication reported.

It all began in December 2021 when the team detected a 50-second-long GRB (any GRB longer than 2 seconds is considered ‘long’).

Continue reading “New information about long gamma-rays shatters astrophysicists’ theory” »

Read more about Strange Physics: The Universe Isn’t Expanding the Way We Thought.

Gas clouds across the universe are known to absorb the light produced by distant massive celestial objects, known as quasars. This light manifests as the so-called Lyman alpha forest, a dense structure composed of absorption lines that can be observed using spectroscopy tools.

Over the past decades, astrophysicists have been assessing the value of these absorption lines as a tool to better understand the universe and the relationships between cosmological objects. The Lyman alpha forest could also potentially aid the ongoing search for dark matter, offering an additional tool to test theoretical predictions and models.

Researchers at University of Nottingham, Tel-Aviv University, New York University, and the Institute for Fundamental Physics of the Universe in Trieste have recently compared low-redshift Lyman alpha forest observations to hydrodynamical simulations of the intergalactic medium and dark matter made up of dark photons, a renowned dark matter candidate.