Lifeboat Foundation

The Cosmicflows team has been studying the movements of 56,000 galaxies, revealing a potential shift in the scale of our galactic basin of attraction. A team of international researchers guided by astronomers at University of Hawai’i Institute for Astronomy is challenging our understanding of the universe with groundbreaking findings that suggest our cosmic neighborhood may be far larger than previously thought.

A decade ago, the team concluded that our galaxy, the Milky Way, resides within a massive basin of attraction called Laniākea, stretching 500 million light-years across.

However, new data suggests that this understanding may only scratch the surface.

Astronomers from the European University Cyprus and the University of Hawaii have investigated a recently discovered obscured hyperluminous quasar known as COS-87259. Results of the study, published October 14 in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, shed more light on the properties of this quasar.

A plasma jet from galaxy M87 appears to move five times faster than light.

In the world of astronomy, a peculiar and seemingly impossible phenomenon is unfolding in galaxy M87. A beam of plasma, or energy, is shooting out from the galaxy’s core and appears to travel at five times the speed of light, as observed by the Hubble Space Telescope. Though this illusion has been known since 1995, it continues to challenge our understanding of the universe’s laws, particularly the cosmic speed limit that states nothing can move faster than light.

Evidence is found for a distant galaxy growing inside-out within the first 700 million years of the Universe. The galaxy has a dense central core comparable in mass density to local massive ellipticals, and an extended star-forming disc.

Since the first sighting of the first-discovered and largest asteroid in our solar system was made in 1801 by Giuseppe Piazzi, astronomers and planetary scientists have pondered the make-up of this asteroid/dwarf planet. Its heavily battered and dimpled surface is covered in impact craters. Scientists have long argued that visible craters on the surface meant that Ceres could not be very icy.

Researchers at Purdue University and the NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) now believe Ceres is a very icy object that possibly was once a muddy ocean world. This discovery that Ceres has a dirty ice crust is led by Ian Pamerleau, Ph.D. student, and Mike Sori, assistant professor in Purdue’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences who published their findings in Nature Astronomy. The duo along with Jennifer Scully, research scientist with JPL, used computer simulations of how craters on Ceres deform over billions of years.

“We think that there’s lots of water-ice near Ceres surface, and that it gets gradually less icy as you go deeper and deeper,” Sori said. “People used to think that if Ceres was very icy, the craters would deform quickly over time, like glaciers flowing on Earth, or like gooey flowing honey. However, we’ve shown through our simulations that ice can be much stronger in conditions on Ceres than previously predicted if you mix in just a little bit of solid rock.”

The X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle (OTV) has been shrouded in mystery since its maiden flight in 2011.

Designed by Boeing and operated by the US Space Force (USSF), this remotely operated, reusable space plane is designed to operate in Low-Earth Orbit (LEO), 240 to 800 kilometers (150 to 500 miles) above the Earth, and test reusable vehicle technologies that support long-term space objectives.

On December 29th, 2023, the X-37B began its seventh mission (OTV-7) and has reportedly been conducting experiments on the effects of space radiation and testing Space Domain Awareness (SDA) technologies.

Australian scientists say they have mapped a million new galaxies using an advanced telescope in the desert.

Astronomers mapped 83% of the sky and discovered 1 million new galaxies in just 300 hours.

The CSIRO, the national science agency, said its new telescope had created “a new atlas of the Universe” in record time – showing unprecedented detail.

The Rapid ASKAP Continuum Survey (RACS) is the first large-area survey to be conducted with the full 36-antenna Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) telescope. RACS will provide a shallow model of the ASKAP sky that will aid the calibration of future deep ASKAP surveys. RACS will cover the whole sky visible from the ASKAP site in Western Australia and will cover the full ASKAP band of 700‑1800 MHz. The RACS images are generally deeper than the existing NRAO VLA Sky Survey and Sydney University Molonglo Sky Survey radio surveys and have better spatial resolution. All RACS survey products will be public, including radio images (with $\sim$15 arcsec resolution) and catalogues of about three million source components with spectral index and polarisation information. In this paper, we present a description of the RACS survey and the first data release of 903 images covering the sky south of declination $+41^\circ$ made over a 288-MHz band centred at 887.5 MHz.

A spinning white dwarf drags space-time around it 100 million times more powerfully than Earth.

Astronomers have recently provided compelling evidence of a star dragging space-time, showcasing one of Einstein’s lesser-known predictions. This phenomenon, known as “frame-dragging,” describes how a spinning object distorts the very fabric of space-time around it. While this effect is nearly imperceptible in everyday life, even on a planetary scale, certain cosmic conditions make it much more noticeable. A study published in Science details these observations using a radio telescope to study a rare pair of compact stars.

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