Space – Lifeboat News: The Blog

Dec 6
2023

Elon Musk’s AI startup — X.AI — files to raise $1 billion in fresh capital

X.AI, Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup, has filed with the SEC to raise up to $1 billion in an equity offering. The company has raised nearly $135 million from four investors, with the first sale occurring on Nov. 29, according to the filing. The AI startup, which Musk announced in July,…

X.AI, an artificial intelligence startup founded by Elon Musk, has filed with the SEC to raise up to $1 billion in an equity offering.

The company has already brought in nearly $135 million from four investors, with the first sale occurring on Nov. 29, and has a “binding and enforceable agreement” for the purchase of the remaining shares, the filing says.

The AI startup, which Musk announced in July, seeks to “understand the true nature of the universe,” according to its website. Last month, X.AI released a chatbot called Grok, which the company says is modeled after “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” The chatbot debuted with two months of training and has real-time knowledge of the internet, the company claims.

Dec 6
2023

Jeff Bezos goes to Elon Musk for a helping hand

The two billionaires are teaming up to further Amazon’s efforts in space.

Dec 6
2023

‘Space Rescue Service’ needed for coming space tourism era, report argues

The more people who fly in space, the higher the likelihood of something going wrong.

Dec 5
2023

Our Galaxy Appears to Be in a Huge Empty Void

Researchers have come up with a solution to the “Hubble tension,” arguing that Einstein didn’t consider we’re in the middle of a cosmic void.

Dec 5
2023

Hydrogen Detected in Lunar Samples, points to Resource Availability for Space Exploration

U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) researchers have discovered solar-wind hydrogen in lunar samples, which indicates that water on the surface of the Moon may provide a vital resource for future lunar bases and longer-range space exploration. Space-based resource identification is a key factor in planning for civilian-and government-led space exploration.

“Hydrogen has the potential to be a resource that can be used directly on the lunar surface when there are more regular or permanent installations there,” said Dr. Katherine D. Burgess, geologist in NRL’s Materials Science and Technology Division.

“Locating resources and understanding how to collect them prior to getting to the Moon is going to be incredibly valuable for space exploration.”

Dec 5
2023

Scientists Find Evidence for Large Unknown Objects in Distant Solar System

The potential detection of objects lying beyond the Kuiper Belt’s limits may upend our understanding of what encircles our solar system.

Dec 5
2023

Astronomers Discover Rare Solar System Where Planets Orbit in Mathematical Harmony

The ‘resonant’ planets could provide insight about how such systems form and evolve—and why our own solar system is not synced up.

Dec 4
2023

Massive Planet Challenges Current Planet Formation Theories

“This discovery really drives home the point of just how little we know about the universe,” said Dr. Suvrath Mahadevan. “We wouldn’t expect a planet this heavy around such a low-mass star to exist.”

A recent study published in Science examines exoplanet LHS 3154b that orbits its parent star in just 3.7 days but is 13.2 times as massive as the Earth wit | Space.

Dec 4
2023

Zhurong rover detects mysterious polygons beneath the surface of Mars

China’s Zhurong rover was equipped with a ground-penetrating radar system, allowing it to peer beneath Mars’s surface. Researchers have announced new results from the scans of Zhurong’s landing site in Utopia Planitia, saying they identified irregular polygonal wedges located at a depth of about 35 meters all along the robot’s journey.

The objects measure from centimeters to tens of meters across. The scientists believe the buried polygons resulted from freeze-thaw cycles on Mars billions of years ago, but they could also be volcanic, from cooling lava flows.

The Zhurong rover landed on Mars on May 15, 2021, making China the second country ever to successfully land a rover on Mars. The cute rover, named after a Chinese god of fire, explored its landing site, sent back pictures—including a selfie with its lander, taken by a remote camera—studied the topography of Mars, and conducted measurements with its ground penetrating radar (GPR) instrument.

Dec 4
2023

KiDS in the sky: New Stellar system discovered by the Kilo-Degree Survey

Astronomers have discovered a new stellar system in the outskirts of the Milky Way as part of the Kilo-Degree Survey (KiDS). The newfound system, named Sextans II, is most likely an ultra-faint dwarf galaxy. The finding is reported in a paper published November 10 on the pre-print server arXiv.

KiDS is an extensive multi-band photometric survey utilizing the VLT Survey Telescope (VST) at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile. Since 2011, the survey has been mapping 1,350 square degrees of the night sky in four broad-band filters (u, g, r, i). Although KiDS is focused on the assembly of large-scale structures in the universe, it may also detect low-surface brightness extragalactic stellar systems.

That is why a team of astronomers led by Massimiliano Gatto of the Astronomical Observatory of Capodimonte in Naples, Italy, decided to conduct a large-scale search for unknown faint stellar systems with KiDS. For this purpose, they looked for low-luminosity stellar overdensities in the KiDS latest data release (DR4), which brought promising results.