Lifeboat Foundation

An international team led by researchers at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), Spain, has found two planets with Earth-like masses in the habitable zone of a red dwarf star, just 16 light years from our own Solar System.

Artist’s impression of two Earth-mass planets orbiting the star GJ 1002. Credit: Alejandro Suárez Mascareño and Inés Bonet (IAC)

“Nature seems bent on showing us that Earth-like planets are very common,” explains Alejandro Suárez Mascareño, an IAC researcher, first author of a study that appears in Astronomy & Astrophysics. “With these two, we now know seven in planetary systems quite near to the Sun.”

A powerful solar flare hit Earth last week, causing a radio blackout over parts of Australia and the South Pacific last week, CNET reported. This is one of the most powerful flares seen since October last year and might be a sign of what is coming next.

A solar flare is an eruption of electromagnetic radiation from the Sun’s surface. According to the European Space Agency, flares occur when energy stored in magnetic fields on the solar surface is suddenly released.

A research team using new methods to analyze data from NASA’s Curiosity, a rover operating on Mars since 2012, was able to independently verify that fracture halos contained opal, on Earth a gemstone formed by the alteration of silica by water.

The study finds that the vast subsurface fracture networks would have provided conditions that were potentially more habitable than those on the surface.

In 2012, NASA sent the Curiosity rover to Mars to explore Gale Crater, a large impact basin with a massive, layered mountain in the middle. As Curiosity has traversed along the Mars surface, researchers have discovered light-toned rocks surrounding fractures that criss-cross certain parts of the Martian landscape, sometimes extending out far into the horizon of rover imagery. Recent work finds that these widespread halo networks served as one of the last, if not the last, water-rich environments in a modern era of Gale Crater. This water-rich environment in the subsurface would have also provided more habitable conditions when conditions on the surface were likely much more harsh.

When the Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope entered low-Earth orbit in 2008, it opened our eyes to a whole new Universe of high-energy radiation.

One of its more curious discoveries was the Fermi Bubbles: giant, symmetrical blobs extending above and below the galactic plane, 25,000 light-years on each side from the Milky Way’s center, glowing in gamma-ray light – the highest energy wavelength ranges on the electromagnetic spectrum.

Then, in 2020, an X-ray telescope named eROSITA found another surprise: even bigger bubbles extending over 45,000 light-years on each side of the galactic plane, this time emitting less energetic X-rays.

A study of intracluster light (ICL) in ten high-redshift galaxy clusters finds evidence that gradual stripping may not be the dominant mechanism of ICL formation, but may occur alongside the formation and growth of the brightest cluster galaxies, and/or accretion of preprocessed stars.

The first orbital space launch from British soil is scheduled to take off on Monday.

A modified Boeing 747 airplane known as Cosmic Girl will take off from Spaceport Cornwall in England. Once it reaches 35,000 feet in the air, the converted aircraft will deploy a rocket, called LauncherOne, into space.

The LauncherOne rocket will deliver several payloads into orbit, including Wales’ first satellite and the first ever satellite launched by Oman to observe Earth.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQ-6Q8pHQE0

Today I’m looking at Elon Musk’s must read science fiction books. Thanks for watching.

Intro — 0:00
The Foundation Saga — 1:09
Atlas Shrugged — 2:22
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy — 3:38
The Dune Chronicles — 4:27
Stranger in a Strange Land — 5:38
The Culture series — 6:24
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress — 8:01
Daemon series — 8:43
The Machine Stops — 9:47

Continue reading “ELON MUSK’s must-read science fiction” »

Humans are eternally curious about the night sky, but figuring out how to use a telescope is non-trivial. At CES in Las Vegas, Unistellar believes it has the perfect solution with its Equinox 2 Smart Telescope.

“When I was a young teenager, I had a telescope that I used during the long summer nights. Fast forward to being an adult – I didn’t have any more time to do astronomy. With a friend of mine, we started to think about what we can do to bring astronomy back to our busy daily lives,” says Laurent Marfisi, co-founder and CEO of Unistellar in an interview with TechCrunch. “We thought up a telescope that is easy to use, that is powerful enough to see through the light pollution, and that has the possibility to reveal galaxies and nebulae, all those things that we could not see even when we were teenagers. The aim is to bring a lot of the power that professionals have in astronomy into the daily lives of consumers who just want to have fun, spend good quality time with their children and their friends around astronomy.”

😗

A newly discovered comet could be visible to the naked eye as it shoots past Earth and the Sun in the coming weeks for the first time in 50,000 years, astronomers have said.

The comet is called C/2022 E3 (ZTF) after the Zwicky Transient Facility, which first spotted it passing Jupiter in March last year.

Continue reading “A Comet Not Seen in 50,000 Years Is Streaking” »