Lifeboat Foundation

Ever wonder what travel to a planet outside our solar system would be like?

Though most exoplanets aren’t fit for human habitation, researches at NASA have added a new feature to its Exoplanet Exploration website that allows users to explore them.

Watch Earth change over the past 20 years, thanks to a compilation of NASA satellite footage.

Throughout history, astronomers have used both optical and radio telescopes to see and hear the universe. Now, a new project will combine both kinds of telescopes to combine the two senses so that scientists can get a more complete look at the universe in real-time.

MeerLICHT — which is Dutch for “more light” — is a new, fully robotic telescope that uses a 65-centimeter main mirror and a 100-megapixel camera that was unveiled Friday near Sutherland, South Africa, which is a few hours northeast of Cape Town. What makes this telescope different is that it will be connected to MeerKAT, a radio telescope that consists of 64 dishes and located 125 miles away. Both telescopes will scan the Southern Sky in matching fields of view. The project will be the first of its kind and size to listen as well as see into space.

Saturn has ravioli-shaped moons, but they’re not as delicious as real ravioli. (via Seeker Universe)

The three-body problem, which determines how objects orbit each other in space, is notoriously difficult to solve. Now there are 231 new valid orbits.

Scientists in South Africa on Friday launched the world’s first optical telescope linked to a radio telescope, combining “eyes and ears” to try to unravel the secrets of the universe.

The device forms part of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) project in the remote Karoo desert, which will be the world’s most powerful radio telescope system.

The latest move combines the new optical telescope MeerLITCH — Dutch for ‘more light’ — with the recently-completed 64-dish MeerKAT radio telescope, located 200 kilometres (125 miles) away.

Continue reading “In S.Africa, a unique telescope link-up scans deep space” »

Despite this, a regular ritual of hype and hysteria is now built into the news cycle. Every now and again, at some huge auditorium, a senior staff member at one of the big firms based in northern California – ordinarily a man – will take the stage dressed in box-fresh casualwear, and inform the gathered multitudes of some hitherto unimagined leap forward, supposedly destined to transform millions of lives. (There will be whoops and gasps in response, and a splurge of media coverage – before, in the wider world, a palpable feeling of anticlimax sets in.)

It’s years since Silicon Valley gave us a game-changer. Instead, from curing disease to colonies on Mars, we’re fed overblown promises, says Guardian columnist John Harris.

A team of astronomers has performed one of the highest resolution observations in astronomical history by observing two intense regions of radiation, 20 kilometres apart, around a star 6500 light-years away.