Lifeboat Foundation

Till now, only one repeating fast radio burst — FRB20201124A, has been reported with circular polarization.

The latest research by scientists at the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC) has identified circular polarization in active repeating fast radio bursts (FRBs). The results were based on precise observations of the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST).

FRBs hold the distinction of emitting the most luminous radio flashes in the universe, with the energy released in one such incident rivaling the Sun’s output “over a whole day or even a month to a year,” according to phy.org.

Continue reading “Scientists detect a rare circular polarization in active repeating fast radio bursts” »

In theory, it could mitigate the effects of global warming; but experts are wary.

Make Sunsets, a California-based startup, released weather balloons that carried sulfur particles into the stratosphere which possibly burst there, releasing the chemical, MIT Technology Review.

Continue reading “US startup wants to inject sulfur into the atmosphere to cool down the Earth” »

In this article, we review the top 10 NFTs and why they make for great investments this year.

Non-Fungible Tokens, or NFTs for short, have been the buzzword for the year 2022. And, rightly so because even though it might seem like it is a new tech on the block, you will be shocked to know that there are more than 11 million NFTs out there. Each represents a unique (and, not to forget, valuable) piece of art which could be an image, video content, music, or anything else. And, yet, the industry is still in its infancy stage. We bring to you the only guide you will ever need to understand the uprising of the NFT market and what is all the attraction about. We have also shared some of our favorite NFTs to check out if you want to get active in space. This article features the top 10 NFTs that you should look out for in 2023.

Silks.

The nation wants to compete with NASA’S James Webb Space Telescope.

Peking University has ambitious plans to build the largest optical telescope in Asia, according to an article by Space.com

The Expanding Aperture Segmented Telescope

Continue reading “China reveals ambitious plans for Asia’s largest optical telescope” »

For humans to ever venture out among the stars, we will have to solve some hefty logistical problems.

Not the least of these is the travel time involved. Space is so large, and human technology so limited, that the time it would take to travel to another star presents a significant barrier.

The Voyager 1 probe, for instance, would take 73,000 years to reach Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to the Sun, at its current speed.

A team of researchers at Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, working with a colleague at the University of Texas at Austin and another from Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia, has found evidence of ripe conditions for planet formation in the vicinity of two closely orbiting protostars.

In their paper published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, the group describes their observations and outline what might be learned from future study of the star system.

The work by the team on this new effort came on the heels of work done by another team that discovered a pair of protostars still in the very early stages of their development—in their first 500,000 years of existence. In this new effort, the researchers have taken a closer look at the two protostars and also the environment in which they exist.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos plans to open the Orbital Reef commercial space station by the end of the decade, with shuttles available to the tourist hotel via the hypersonic Dream Chaser.

Kepler-1658b’s orbit is getting a little shorter — and therefore a little closer to the blazing surface of its star — every year.

Finding doomed planets is slow, painstaking work. It took thirteen years of close observation — first with Kepler and some of the most powerful telescopes here on Earth, and then with NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), which launched in 2018 — to notice the slow shrinking of Kepler-1658b’s orbit. Recognizing the signs of deadly orbital decay in other exoplanets is going to take a similar amount of time and a similar volume of data, but Vissapragada and his colleagues say they’re getting there.

“We should begin to see hints of orbital decay for these planets within the next decade,” he and his colleagues write in their recent paper.

Continue reading “Astronomers find a star pulling its giant exoplanet into a death spiral” »

Turning astrophysical data into audio has led to all sorts of surprising discoveries, from micrometeoroids bombarding spacecraft to lightning on Saturn. Now, there is a push to get more astronomers to use sonification.