Lifeboat Foundation

Only a few years ago, scientists the world over celebrated as the first-ever gravitational waves were detected—confirming a long-held scientific theory and opening up an entirely new field of research.

Now, the international research team responsible for detecting gravitational waves has announced a further 39 gravitational wave events, bringing the total number of confirmed detections to 50.

The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and Virgo Collaborations, which include researchers from the University of Portsmouth, have today published a series of papers that record events including the mergers of binary black holes, binary neutron stars and, possibly, neutron star-black holes.

This could lead to artificial gravity like we see on star trek.

Many physicists said that gravitons exist but some believe that it is impossible to observe it in the natural world. Recent studies suggest that gravitons create ‘noise’ making them easier to spot.

Continue reading “Gravitons Create ‘Noise’ in Gravitational Wave Detectors, New Study Reveals” »

NASA’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) has confirmed, for the first time, water on the sunlit surface of the Moon. This discovery indicates that water may be distributed across the lunar surface, and not limited to cold, shadowed places.

SOFIA has detected water molecules (H₂O) in Clavius Crater, one of the largest craters visible from Earth, located in the Moon’s southern hemisphere. Previous observations of the Moon’s surface detected some form of hydrogen, but were unable to distinguish between water and its close chemical relative, hydroxyl (OH). Data from this location reveal water in concentrations of 100 to 412 parts per million – roughly equivalent to a 12-ounce bottle of water – trapped in a cubic meter of soil spread across the lunar surface. The results are published in the latest issue of Nature Astronomy.

“We had indications that H₂O – the familiar water we know – might be present on the sunlit side of the Moon,” said Paul Hertz, director of the Astrophysics Division in the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Now we know it is there. This discovery challenges our understanding of the lunar surface and raises intriguing questions about resources relevant for deep space exploration.”

An international team of astronomers has gained new insights into the physical conditions prevailing in the gas tail of so-called jellyfish galaxies. They are particularly interested in the parameters that lead to the formation of new stars in the tail outside the galaxy disk. They analyzed, for example, the strength and orientation of the magnetic fields in the galaxy JO206.

Ancla Müller and Professor Ralf-Jürgen Dettmar from Ruhr-Universität Bochum describe their findings together with Professor Christoph Pfrommer and Dr. Martin Sparre from the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics in Potsdam as well as colleagues from the INAF—Italian national institute of Astrophysics in Padua, Selargius and Bologna in the journal Nature Astronomy from 26 October 2020.

Earlier this month, Roger Penrose, Reinhard Genzel, and Andrea Ghez split the 2020 physics Nobel Prize for decades of work on black holes. Click here to learn more about their monumental achievement and about the history of our understanding of these exotic objects in space.

From prow to stern, this little boat measures 30 micrometers, about a third of the thickness of a hair. It has been 3D-printed by Leiden physicists Rachel Doherty, Daniela Kraft and colleagues.

The image was made using an electron microscope and can be found in their article about 3D printing synthetic microswimmers in the scientific journal Soft Matter.

Black holes are perhaps the most mysterious objects in nature. They warp space and time in extreme ways and contain a mathematical impossibility, a singularity – an infinitely hot and dense object within. But if black holes exist and are truly black, how exactly would we ever be able to make an observation?

This morning the Nobel Committee announced that the 2020 Nobel Prize in physics will be awarded to three scientists – Sir Roger Penrose, Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez – who helped discover the answers to such profound questions. Andrea Ghez is only the fourth woman to win the Nobel Prize in physics.

Continue reading “The 2020 Nobel Prize in physics awarded for work on black holes. An astrophysicist explains the trailblazing discoveries” »

It’s unbelievable all that’s going on at the moment in astronomy” — DER SPIEGEL — international.

DER SPIEGEL: Wherever black holes are discussed, that picture is shown. And you are now telling us that we don’t really even know what it is?

Genzel: Exactly. It could be that we are looking at the shadow of a black hole, as it is commonly portrayed. But it could also be the outer wall of a jet that is coming directly at us at the speed of light. To know for sure, we need additional measurements. But we have a problem at the moment: the corona pandemic. Most Earth-based telescopes have been switched off.

Continue reading “Nobel Prize in Physics Winner” »

Much of the ‘memory’ of the world and all our digital activities are based on media, hard disks, where the information is encoded thanks to magnetism, by orienting the spin of electrons in one direction or the opposite.

An international team of scientists led by the Italian physicist Stefano Bonetti, professor at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and the Stockholm University, has managed for the first time to observe the ‘nutation’ of these spins in magnetic materials, i.e. the oscillations of their axis during precession. The measured nutation period was of the order of one picosecond: one thousandth of a billionth of a second. The discovery was recently published by Nature Physics.

The axis of a spin performs nutation and precession, as with any object that revolves, from spinning tops to planets. In this research, physicists observed experimentally that the nutation of the magnetic spin axis is 1000 times faster than precession, a curiously similar ratio to that of Earth.