Lifeboat Foundation

Thirty-five years ago, our Cosmic Background Explorer, or COBE, was launched! The satellite was a crucial stepping stone in understanding the cosmic microwave background — the afterglow of the earliest moments of our universe.

Launched from what’s now Vandenberg Space Force Base on Nov. 18, 1989, COBE carried three instruments to space to measure microwave and infrared light across the whole sky. COBE’s observations helped us learn how our universe started and evolved.

Continue reading “Season 5, Episode 31: Meet a Webb Scientist Who Looks Back in Time” »

With billions of stars in the Milky Way, some nomenclature standardization is necessary.

By Phil Plait edited by Lee Billings.

This timelapse of future technology, the 3rd year of the video series, goes on a journey exploring the human mind becoming digital. Brain chips turn memories and thoughts into data; could this data be sent out into space to live in the cosmos encoded into the magnetic fields between stars.

Other topics covered in this sci-fi documentary video include: bio-printing, asteroid habitats, terraforming Mars, the future of Teslabots, lucid dreaming, and the future of artificial intelligence and brain to computer interfaces (BCI — brain chips).

Continue reading “TIMELAPSE OF FUTURE TECHNOLOGY 3 (Sci-Fi Documentary)” »

As much as we want to tell Mr Sulu to “Take us to warp factor five”, dangerous causality problems, tricky maths and negative energy could get in the way.

Brown dwarfs are curious celestial bodies that appear to straddle the mass divide between stars and planets. Often referred to as “failed stars,” brown dwarfs form in isolation from a collapsing cloud of gas and dust like a star.

However, while fully-fledged stars continue to gather material from the gas and dust cloud that births them, brown dwarfs are less successful at this mass harvesting. As a result, they don’t reach the masses of the smallest stars and can’t trigger the process that defines main sequence stars, like our sun.

Dwarf galaxies like the SMC are often un-evolved when it comes to their chemistry because their history of star formation isn’t very extensive, so they haven’t had a chance to build up many heavy elements, such as carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, silicon or iron. NGC 346, for instance, contains about 10% the abundance of heavy elements that star-forming regions in our Milky Way galaxy have. This makes clusters such as NGC 346 great proxies for studying conditions akin to those found in the early universe.

NGC 346 is still forming lots of stars, and JWST found that many of the young ones, with ages of 20 to 30 million years, still possess planet-forming disks around them. Their existence confounds expectations.

“With Webb, we have a strong confirmation of what we saw with Hubble, and we must rethink how we create computer models for planet formation and early evolution in the young universe,” said Guido De Marchi of the European Space Research and Technology Centre (ESTEC) in the Netherlands, who led the research.

All 3D models created with Meshy AI
https://www.meshy.ai/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=fimcrux.

The sublime is an emotion described as equal parts awe and terror; a perfect description of our universe.

Continue reading “The Sublime” »

Most of Earth’s meteorites also trace their origins to S-type asteroids, yet they contain minimal organic material. This scarcity has made analyzing their organic content a significant challenge. In contrast, the Hayabusa mission’s meticulously curated samples are free from terrestrial interference, enabling groundbreaking studies of organic compounds.

Among the particles returned by Hayabusa, one named “Amazon” has proven particularly revealing. Measuring just 30 micrometers wide, Amazon offers a rare opportunity to investigate both water and organic content. Its unique shape, reminiscent of the South American continent, underscores its distinctiveness.

Amazon’s mineral composition includes olivine, pyroxenes, albite, and traces of high-temperature carbonates. These minerals confirm its origin as an S-type asteroid, linking it directly to ordinary chondrites.

New studies led by researchers at the University of Central Florida offer for the first time a clearer picture of how the outer solar system formed and evolved based on analyses of trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs) and centaurs.

The findings, published today in Nature Astronomy, reveal the distribution of ices in the early solar system and how TNOs evolve when they travel inward into the region of the giant planets between Jupiter and Saturn, becoming centaurs.

TNOs are small bodies, or “planetesimals,” orbiting the sun beyond Pluto. They never accreted into planets, and serve as pristine time capsules, preserving crucial evidence of the molecular processes and planetary migrations that shaped the solar system billions of years ago. These solar system objects are like icy asteroids and have orbits comparable to or larger than Neptune’s orbit.