Lifeboat Foundation

An international team of scientists announced on Wednesday that they have discovered two new “super-Earth” planets just 100 light-years away. Both of them are significantly larger than our own planet — and one of them may even be suitable for life.

Super-Earths are a unique class of exoplanet in the solar system that are more massive than our planet but lighter than the ice giants, according to NASA. They are made by some combination of gas and rock and can get up to 10 times the size of Earth’s mass.

The findings, discovered with NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite and the University of Liège’s Search for Habitable Planets Eclipsing Ultra-Cool Stars (SPECULOOS), will be published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

On this explainer, Neil deGrasse Tyson and comic co-host Chuck Nice break down Big Bang skepticism and what’s going on at the frontier of astrophysics.

What are the core tenets of the Big Bang Theory? We explore the frontier of scientific research and what ideas are being contested. We also walk through the scientific process and experimentations. Could the Big Bang just be a small piece of a bigger theory? Learn about Vulcan, the hypothetical planet pulling on Mercury that was invented to save Newton’s Laws. When Einstein’s relativity came along, why didn’t Newtonian physics go away?

Continue reading “YouTube: Are we rethinking the Big Bang?” »

Vaneev posits that: “‘intelligent impulses’ or even ‘human mind’ itself (because a musician can understand these impulses) existed long before the ‘Big Bang’ happened. This discovery is probably both the greatest discovery in the history of mankind, and the worst discovery (for many) as it poses very unnerving questions that touch religious grounds.”

The Voxengo developer sums up his findings as follows: “These results of 1-bit PRVHASH say the following: if abstract mathematics contains not just a system of rules for manipulating numbers, but also a freely-defined fixed information that is also ‘readable’ by a person, then mathematics does not just ‘exist’, but ‘it was formed’, because mathematics does not evolve (beside human discovery of new rules and patterns). And since physics cannot be formulated without such mathematics, and physical processes clearly obey these mathematical rules, it means that a Creator/Higher Intelligence/God exists in relation to the Universe. For the author personally, everything is proven here.”

Vaneev says that he wanted to “share my astonishment and satisfaction with the results of this work that took much more of my time than I had wished for,” but that you don’t need to concern yourself too much with his findings if you don’t want to.”

A study co-led by physicists at UC Riverside and UC Irvine has found that dark matter halos of ultra-diffuse galaxies are very odd, raising questions about physicists’ understanding of galaxy formation and the structure of the universe.

Ultra-diffuse galaxies are so called because of their extremely low luminosity. The distribution of baryons—gas and stars—is much more spread out in ultra-diffuse galaxies compared to “normal” galaxies with similar masses.

In the following Q&A, Hai-Bo Yu, an associate professor of physics and astronomy at UCRhis thoughts on the findings he and UCI’s Manoj Kaplinghat, his long-term collaborator, have published in The Astrophysical Journal about newly discovered ultra-diffuse galaxies and their dark matter halos.

With the help of ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), astronomers have found six galaxies lying around a supermassive black hole when the Universe was less than a billion years old. This is the first time such a close grouping has been seen so soon after the Big Bang and the finding helps us better understand how supermassive black holes, one of which exists at the centre of our Milky Way, formed and grew to their enormous sizes so quickly. It supports the theory that black holes can grow rapidly within large, web-like structures which contain plenty of gas to fuel them.

“This research was mainly driven by the desire to understand some of the most challenging astronomical objects —supermassive black holes in the early Universe. These are extreme systems and to date we have had no good explanation for their existence,” said Marco Mignoli, an astronomer at the National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) in Bologna, Italy, and lead author of the new research published today in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

The new observations with ESO’s VLT revealed several galaxies surrounding a supermassive black hole, all lying in a cosmic “spider’s web” of gas extending to over 300 times the size of the Milky Way. “The cosmic web filaments are like spider’s web threads,” explains Mignoli. “The galaxies stand and grow where the filaments cross, and streams of gas—available to fuel both the galaxies and the central supermassive black hole—can flow along the filaments.”

This places Drake in the company of towering physicists with equations named after them, including James Clerk Maxwell and Erwin Schrödinger. Unlike those, Drake’s equation does not encapsulate a law of nature. Instead, it combines some poorly known probabilities into an informed estimate.

Whatever reasonable values you feed into the equation (see image below), it is hard to avoid the conclusion that we shouldn’t be alone in the galaxy. Drake remained a proponent and a supporter of the search for extraterrestrial life throughout his days, but has his equation taught us anything?

Continue reading “61 years ago, the founding father of SETI fundamentally altered the search for aliens” »

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Why does our universe appear so exquisitely tuned to create the conditions necessary for life? This is a question that has troubled cosmologists and physicists for decades.

Continue reading “Did God Create The Universe? Brian Greene on The Multiverse & The Fine Tuning Argument” »

It’s difficult to describe the state of the universe’s affairs back when the whole of everything was compressed to a size slightly smaller than the period at the end of this sentence — on account that the concepts of time and space literally didn’t yet apply. But that challenge hasn’t stopped pioneering theoretical astrophysicist, Dr. Laura Mersini-Houghton, from seeking knowledge at the edge of the known universe and beyond. In her new book, Before the Big Bang, Mersini-Houghton recounts her early life in communist Albania, her career as she rose to prominence in the male-dominated field of astrophysics and discusses her research into the multiverse which could fundamentally rewrite our understanding of reality.

Excerpted from Before The Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe and What Lies Beyond by Laura Mersini-Houghton. Published by Mariner Books. Copyright © 2022 by Laura Mersini-Houghton. All rights reserved.

Scientific investigations of problems like the creation of the universe, which we can neither observe nor reproduce and test in a lab, are similar to detective work in that they rely on intuition as well as evidence. Like a detective, as pieces of the puzzle start falling into place, researchers can intuitively sense the answer is close. This was the feeling I had as Rich and I tried to figure out how we could test our theory about the multiverse. Rationally, it seemed like a long shot, but intuitively, it seemed achievable.

https://youtu.be/pDSEjaDCtOU?t=2526

Ian Hutchinson’s concerns for existential risk after minute 42.

Ian Hutchinson is a nuclear engineer and plasma physicist at MIT. He has made a number of important contributions in plasma physics including the magnetic confinement of plasmas seeking to enable fusion reactions, which is the energy source of the stars, to be used for practical energy production. Current nuclear reactors are based on fission as we discuss. Ian has also written on the philosophy of science and the relationship between science and religion.

Continue reading “Ian Hutchinson: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and Religion” »