Lifeboat Foundation

Sanctions imposed on Russia over its invasion of Ukraine are forcing lenders and businesses to pull out of the country.

This visualization shows 22 X-ray binaries in our Milky Way galaxy and its nearest neighbor, the Large Magellanic Cloud, that host confirmed stellar-mass black holes. The systems are depicted at the same physical scale, and their orbital motion is sped up by nearly 22,000 times. The view of each bin.

This visualization shows 22 X-ray binaries in our Milky Way.

The Milky Way is the galaxy that contains the Earth, and is named for its appearance from Earth. It is a barred spiral galaxy that contains an estimated 100–400 billion stars and has a diameter between 150,000 and 200,000 light-years.

An international group of astronomers led by Benjamin Thomas of The University of Texas at Austin has used observations from the Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET) at the university’s McDonald Observatory to unlock a puzzling mystery about a stellar explosion discovered several years ago and evolving even now. The results, published in today’s issue of The Astrophysical Journal, will help astronomers better understand the process of how massive stars live and die.

When an exploding star is first detected, astronomers around the world begin to follow it with telescopes as the light it gives off changes rapidly over time. They see the light from a supernova get brighter, eventually peak, and then start to dim. By noting the times of these peaks and valleys in the light’s brightness, called a “light curve,” as well as the characteristic wavelengths of light emitted at different times, they can deduce the physical characteristics of the system.

“I think what’s really cool about this kind of science is that we’re looking at the emission that’s coming from matter that’s been cast off from the progenitor system before it exploded as a supernova,” Thomas said. “And so this makes a sort of time machine.”

Circa 2014 o.o!

When someone mentions “different dimensions,” we tend to think of things like parallel universes – alternate realities that exist parallel to our own, but where things work or happened differently. However, the reality of dimensions and how they play a role in the ordering of our Universe is really quite different from this popular characterization.

To break it down, dimensions are simply the different facets of what we perceive to be reality. We are immediately aware of the three dimensions that surround us on a daily basis – those that define the length, width, and depth of all objects in our universes (the x, y, and z axes, respectively).

Continue reading “A universe of 10 dimensions” »

We consider dark matter production during the inflaton oscillation epoch. It is conceivable that renormalizable interactions between dark matter and inflaton may be negligible. In this case, the leading role is played by higher dimensional operators generated by gravity and thus suppressed by the Planck scale. We focus on dim-6 operators and study the corresponding particle production in perturbative and non-perturbative regimes. We find that the dark matter production rate is dominated by non-derivative operators involving higher powers of the inflaton field. Even if they appear with small Wilson coefficients, such operators can readily account for the correct dark matter abundance.

Recent Study on the effects of Dark Energy suggests expansion of the universe could in fact slow down and eventually reverse itself to eventually result in a “Big Crunch” billions of years from now. Such a theory had been proposed in the past but was previously rejected due to observed accelerating expansion attributed to Dark Energy.

The universe may stop expanding in just 100 million years if dark energy decays over time, a new study suggests.

AI take over of entertainment industry by about 2030. Already starting, and already messy.

Will the robots replace us all one day? Who knows, but chances are they will eventually learn how to create a superhero movie. Ergo, the start of one of the great legal debates in Hollywood history.

New proof indicates that complexity is intrinsically linked to wormhole volume in quantum gravity.

New findings will help scientists trace a black hole.

A black hole is a place in space where the pull of gravity is so strong not even light can escape it. Astronomers classify black holes into three categories by size: miniature, stellar, and supermassive black holes. Miniature black holes could have a mass smaller than our Sun and supermassive black holes could have a mass equivalent to billions of our Sun.