Lifeboat Foundation

Does free will exist? Neil deGrasse Tyson and Chuck Nice sit down with astrophysicist Charles Liu sit down to discuss the existence of free will and whether physics allows for choice in our lives.

We explore cause and effect: how does uncertainty and chaos in the universe factor into free will? How important is the illusion of free will to society? What does a society that acknowledges a lack of free will look like?

Continue reading “Two Astrophysicists Debate Free Will” »

An international research team at the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) at Michigan State University has successfully created five new isotopes, bringing the stars closer to Earth.

The isotopes — known as thulium-182, thulium-183, ytterbium-186, ytterbium-187, and lutetium-190 — were reported Feb. 15 in the journal Physical Review Letters.

These represent the first batch of new isotopes made at FRIB, a user facility for the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science, or DOE-SC, supporting the mission of the DOE-SC Office of Nuclear Physics. The new isotopes show that FRIB is nearing the creation of nuclear specimens that currently only exist when ultradense celestial bodies known as neutron stars crash into each other.

By nudging a thorium-229 nucleus into a higher energy state, physicists have made it possible to develop a nuclear clock that could probe the most fundamental forces in physics. However, there is still a long way to go.

The find, simulated with computer modeling, might explain what happens to liquid water across the universe.

“Water is really important for life,” said Eryn Cangi, co-author and a research scientist at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, in a press release. “We need to understand the conditions that support liquid water in the universe, and that may have produced the very dry state of Venus today.”

At one point, Venus might have hosted seas like Earth. So, what happened? The study’s scientists suspect that Venus underwent a powerful greenhouse event that raised temperatures to 900 degrees Fahrenheit. After this happened, all the planet’s water evaporated, leaving some droplets behind. Even the few drops that were left over might have vanished because of an ion, HCO+, in the planet’s atmosphere.

A team of scientists, astrophysicists and physicists, in an experiment called BICEP2 (Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarisation 2), carried out over nine years at an astronomical observatory at the South Pole, reported that they had discovered undeniable traces of a much sought-after phenomenon in astrophysics: gravitational waves. It was also announced that the method used to make the discovery had provided an important confirmation of the theoretical model of Big Bang cosmology, and would allow the first moments after this primordial explosion—the moment of creation for modern astrophysics—to be studied experimentally.

When you don’t find gravitational waves…

If we imagine space and time as the surface of an ocean, gravitational waves can be thought of as ripples in that ocean. More precisely, gravitational waves are theoretical ripples in space-time, first predicted by Albert Einstein in 1916 on the basis of his general theory of relativity. Like electromagnetic waves, which are produced by the oscillation of an electric charge, it is thought that a sufficiently strong oscillation of a very massive object should produce gravitational waves, which carry energy in the form of gravitational energy.

“Water is really important for life,” said Dr. Eryn Cangi. “We need to understand the conditions that support liquid water in the universe, and that may have produced the very dry state of Venus today.”

How did the planet Venus lose its water? This debate has rage on for some time and something a recent study published in Nature hopes to address as a team of researchers from the University of Colorado Boulder (UCB) and the University of Arizona (UoA) as they have potentially conducted a groundbreaking study that could help explain the processes responsible for making Venus the hellish world it is today, whereas scientists have long hypothesized that the second planet from the Sun was much more hospitable billions of years ago.

“Water is really important for life,” said Dr. Eryn Cangi, who is a research scientist at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) at UCB and a co-author of the study. “We need to understand the conditions that support liquid water in the universe, and that may have produced the very dry state of Venus today.”

Continue reading “Venus Unveiled: The Mystery of Water Loss Revealed” »

Astronomers have picked up a gravitational-wave signal originating from a dramatic collision deep in the cosmos. The event, dubbed GW230529, was recorded by the LIGO Livingston detector in May 2023.

Gravitational waves are caused by the acceleration of massive objects, such as merging black holes or neutron stars. According to Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity, massive objects like planets, stars, and black holes distort the fabric of spacetime around them.

When these massive objects accelerate or change speed, they create waves that propagate outward at the speed of light. The detection of gravitational waves opens up a new window for observing the universe, allowing scientists to study phenomena that were previously inaccessible, such as the mergers of black holes and neutron stars, as well as the nature of gravity itself.

Researchers have discovered what they’re calling a “cosmic glitch” in gravity, which could potentially help explain the universe’s strange behavior on a cosmic scale.

As detailed in a new paper published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, the team from the University of Waterloo and the University of British Columbia in Canada posit that Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity may not be sufficient to explain the accelerating expansion of the universe.

Einstein’s “model of gravity has been essential for everything from theorizing the Big Bang to photographing black holes,” said lead author and Waterloo mathematical physics graduate Robin Wen in a statement about the research. “But when we try to understand gravity on a cosmic scale, at the scale of galaxy clusters and beyond, we encounter apparent inconsistencies with the predictions of general relativity.”

The mystery of how Pluto got a giant heart-shaped feature on its surface has finally been solved by an international team of astrophysicists led by the University of Bern and members of the National Center of Competence in Research (NCCR) PlanetS. The team is the first to successfully reproduce the unusual shape with numerical simulations, attributing it to a giant and slow oblique-angle impact.

Ever since the cameras of NASA’s New Horizons mission discovered a large heart-shaped structure on the surface of the dwarf planet Pluto in 2015, this “heart” has puzzled scientists because of its unique shape, geological composition, and elevation. A team of scientists from the University of Bern, including several members of the NCCR PlanetS, and the University of Arizona in Tucson have used numerical simulations to investigate the origins of Sputnik Planitia, the western teardrop-shaped part of Plutos heart surface feature.

According to their research, Pluto’s early history was marked by a cataclysmic event that formed Sputnik Planitia: a collision with a planetary body about 700 km in diameter, roughly twice the size of Switzerland from east to west. The team’s findings, which were recently published in Nature Astronomy, also suggest that the inner structure of Pluto is different from what was previously assumed, indicating that there is no subsurface ocean.