Lifeboat Foundation

• The universe radiates only half as much energy as 2 billion years ago
• New findings establish cosmos’ decline with unprecedented precision

From CNN—The universe came in with the biggest bang ever. But now, with a drooping fizzle, it is in its swan song. The conclusion of a new astronomical study pulls no punches on this: “The Universe is slowly dying,” it reads.

Astronomers have believed as much for years, but the new findings establish the cosmos’ decline with unprecedented precision. An international team of 100 scientists used data from the world’s most powerful telescopes — based on land and in space — to study energy coming from more than 200,000 galaxies in a large sliver of the observable universe. _{[Full story below or at CNN.com]…}

Based on those observations, they have confirmed the cosmos is radiating only half as much energy as it was 2 billion years ago. The astronomers published their study on Monday on the website of the European Southern Observatory.

The team checked the energy across a broad spectrum of lightwaves and other electromagnetic radiation and says it is fading through all wavelengths, from ultraviolet to far infrared.

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A thing of beauty!

We all need a little cosmic perspective from time to time, and this is as good as it gets. NASA has released this truly stunning GIF of the Moon passing in front of the Earth. The image sequence offers an unprecedented look at the relationship between the two planetary objects, and also gives a detailed look at the rarely seen far side of the Moon.

The resulting GIF is so amazing that it’s almost unbelievable, but the images are completely real. The whole sequence was taken by the Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (or “EPIC,” a wonderfully appropriate acronym) on the DSCOVR satellite that was launched in February.

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How does science fiction become science fact? Often the link between art and science can be hard to pin down. It can be unclear if science fiction is actually influencing science or merely observing it, giving the public sneak peaks into the implications of scientist’s work.

But some work of science fiction create direct links to the future. As a young man in Russia, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky read a translation of Jules Verne’s ‘From the Earth to the Moon.” And although Verne’s plan to get to the moon wouldn’t have worked, the novel had just enough science mixed in with its romance to make the central idea seem plausible. Tsiolkovsky became obsessed with the idea of spaceflight, and his life’s work created the foundations of modern rocketry.

One hundred years after Verne wrote his novel, a group of individuals who had been inspired by Verne’s fantasy as children launched a voyage to the moon.

Astronomers said Thursday they had found a planetary system with three super-Earths orbiting a bright, dwarf star — one of them likely a volcanic world of molten rock. The four-planet system had been hiding out in the M-shaped, northern hemisphere constellation Cassiopeia, “just” 21 light years from Earth, a team reported in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. Super-Earths have a mass higher than Earth’s but are lighter than gas giants like Neptune, Saturn or Jupiter. They can be made of gas, rock, or both.

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NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity went out of its way to investigate a rock the likes of which it has never seen before on the Red Planet. Measurements by Curiosity’s rock-zapping ChemCam laser and another instrument revealed that the target, a chunk of bedrock dubbed Elk, contains high levels of silica and hydrogen, NASA officials said. “One never knows what to expect on Mars, but the Elk target was interesting enough to go back and investigate,” ChemCam principal investigator Roger Wiens, of Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, said in a statement.

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It’s asteroids like these that will be (and to a certain extent already ARE) the economic engine that powers the first wave of human expansion from our homeworld out into the vast, unimaginably resource rich expanse of the greater solar system.

The near-Earth asteroid is an intriguing candidate for mining, said representatives of the company Planetary Resources, which is hoping to begin these activities in the coming decades. Previous studies by Planetary Resources estimated that 2011 UW158 contains about $5.4 trillion worth of platinum, an element that is rare on Earth.

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100 Year Starship (100YSS) today announced the establishment of the Canopus Award, an annual writing prize recognizing the finest fiction and non-fiction works that contribute to the excitement, knowledge, and understanding of interstellar space exploration and travel.

100YSS, led by former astronaut, engineer, physician and entrepreneur Dr. Mae Jemison, is an independent, long-term global initiative working to ensure that the capabilities for human interstellar travel, beyond our solar system to another star, exist within the next 100 years.

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The investigation into the dwarf planet Ceres‘ mysterious bright spots has taken an intriguing new twist. The famous bright spots at the bottom of Ceres’ Occator crater appear to be sublimating material into space, creating a localized atmosphere within the walls of the 57-mile-wide (92 kilometers) hole in the ground, new observations by NASA’s Dawn spacecraft suggest.

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