Lifeboat Foundation

Jocelyn Bell Burnell was a PhD student at Cambridge University some five decades ago when she made an astronomical discovery while reviewing data from a radio telescope: faint, repeating pulses of radio waves.

These signals came to be known as pulsars, a type of neutron star described by Scientific American as “a city-sized collapsed core of a massive sun that is made of degenerate matter and throws off lighthouse-like beams of radio waves.” The discovery was a leap forward: It pointed to the existence of black holes, provided evidence for gravitational waves, and much more.

It also yielded a 1974 Nobel Prize—but not for Bell Burnell. Instead, the prize went to Antony Hewish, Bell Burnell’s PhD supervisor, the Guardian reports.

Continue reading “Scientist Passed Over for Nobel Wins $3M, Donates It” »

When two neutron stars collided in August of 2017, the resulting black hole emitted a jet of cosmic material at extremely high speed.

As reported by the Inquisitr in June 2018, the collision of two neutron stars in the cosmic event known as GW170817, perceived by humans in August of last year, appears to have created a black hole. It also appears to have created a jet of superfast material, detected and measured by a collection of National Science Foundation radio telescopes, and the results of those measurements seemed to show the jet moving at nearly four times the speed of light, an impossibility in our current understanding of the laws of physics.

In observations less than half a year apart, the jet seemed to cover a distance greater than two light years. Since a light year is defined as the distance light can travel through a vacuum in a year, that would indicate that the jet was hurtling toward Earth at nearly four times the speed of light, according to Space.com.

Continue reading “Jet Of Material From Neutron Star Collision Appears To Eclipse Light Speed” »

We could be living in a multiverse with an infinite number of universes.

We can’t entirely rule out that the Spot is caused by an unlikely fluctuation explained by the standard model.

A study on the strange Cold Spot in space may prove that we live in a multiverse.

Chile’s Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) has observed a galaxy that looks nothing like what researchers expected. It’s forming stars at an absolutely incredible rate.

The “Monster Galaxy”, also known as COSMOS-AzTEC-1, formed just 2 billion years after the Big Bang, and it turns more than a thousand Suns worth of gas into stars each year. Scientists still don’t understand these early galaxies very well, but now they have some new information that can shed light on why they form stars so blisteringly fast.

It’s common knowledge that, because of the speed at which light travels, we can see things in space that aren’t even there anymore. If we peer at a distant galaxy we’re really only seeing what the objects within it looked like when the light itself was beaming in our direction. If the galaxy is a thousand light-years away, we’re seeing what the galaxy looked like a thousand years ago.

Now, researchers believe that they may be able to use a similar technique to search for black holes that don’t exist anymore. The only difference is that the black holes aren’t just from long ago, they’re from an entirely different version of the universe. Woah.

A research team comprised of scientists from Oxford University, the University of Warsaw, and the New York Maritime College, believe they have evidence that points to the leftovers of a black hole that existed in a universe that preceded the one we’re currently living in. However, rather than visible light, the black holes leave behind what is known as cosmic microwave background radiation, or (CMB).

Researchers make significant progress toward proving a critical mathematical test of the theory of general relativity.

• By Kevin Hartnett, Quanta Magazine on August 27, 2018

This week, newspapers reported that a man had fallen into an art installation consisting of an 8-foot-deep circular hole painted black. It’s kinda not his fault.

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com’s Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

Philosophers have debated the nature of “nothing” for thousands of years, but what has modern science got to say about it? In an interview with The Conversation, Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal and Emeritus Professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics at the University of Cambridge, explains that when physicists talk about nothing, they mean empty space (vacuum). This may sound straightforward, but experiments show that empty space isn’t really empty – there’s a mysterious energy latent in it which can tell us something about the fate of the universe.

Rees was interviewed for The Conversation’s Anthill podcast on Nothing. This Q&A is based on an edited transcript of that interview.