Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: space – Page 281

Morphological study of open clusters can provide observational evidence for tracing the formation mechanism of star clusters and help to explore the evolution of star clusters.

The morphology of open clusters on the two-dimensional (2D) projection planes mostly conforms to the core-shell structure. However, whether this layered structure actually exists in three-dimensional (3D) space is not known.

Recently, researchers from the Xinjiang Astronomical Observatory (XAO) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences proposed a rose diagram overlaying method based on Gaia data to study the 3D layered structure of open samples within 500 parsec (pc) near the sun.

Read more | >

Tesla received a large order for Model 3s from an Emirati taxi company, Arabia Taxi Dubai, helping the company to cut its carbon footprint.

Tesla’s retail consumer pressure is undeniably large. Still, the automaker has also grown in popularity in the commercial space, especially from customers looking to cut operating costs while reducing their carbon footprints. Predominantly, these orders have been coming from ride-hailing companies and car rental services. Now, a Dubai-based taxi company is also looking to capitalize on the cut-cutting opportunity.

According to the announcement from Arabia Taxi Dubai, it will buy 269 Tesla Model 3s to become part of its taxi fleet in the United Arab Emirates. Currently, Arabia Taxi advertises itself as the largest taxi fleet in Dubai and one of the largest in the country. With this new purchase, it looks to double down on that lead.

Read more | >

As well as showing Deimos in more detail — including the first images of its far side — insights have been gained about its makeup and structure. The new observations challenge the longstanding theory that Mars’ moons are captured asteroids, and instead point to a planetary origin. In other words, both Deimos and Phobos likely came from Mars itself, possibly ejected from a large impact.

The science team behind the Emirates Mars Mission has revealed ground-breaking imagery and data that advances our understanding of Deimos.

Deimos is one of the two small moons of Mars, the other being Phobos. Discovered in 1,877, and named after the Ancient Greek god of terror, this rocky and irregularly shaped moon has a mean radius of 6.2 km (3.9 mi) and orbits at 23,500 km (6.9 Mars radii), making it the smaller and outermost natural satellite.

Read more | >

Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), astronomers from the University of Padua, Italy, and elsewhere have observed a metal-poor globular cluster known as Messier 92. The observations deliver crucial information regarding multiple stellar populations in this cluster. Results were published April 12 on the arXiv pre-print server.

Studies show that almost all (GCs) exhibit star-to-star abundance variations of light elements such as helium (He), oxygen (O), nitrogen (N), carbon © and calcium (Na). This indicates self-enrichment in GCs and suggests that are composed of at least two stellar populations.

Located some 26,700 away in the constellation of Hercules, Messier 92 (or M92 for short) is a GC with a metallicity of just-2.31 and a mass of about 200,000 . The cluster, estimated to be 11.5 billion years old, is known to host at least two stellar generations of stars—named 1G and 2G. Previous studies have found that Messier 92 has an extended 1G sequence, which hosts about 30.4% of cluster stars, and two distinct groups of 2G stars (2GA and 2GB).

Read more | >

A new study published in Ecology and Evolution by Henrik Svensmark of DTU Space has shown that the explosion of stars, also known as supernovae, has greatly impacted the diversity of marine life over the past 500 million years.

The fossil record has been extensively studied, revealing significant variations in the diversity of life forms throughout geological history. A fundamental question in evolutionary biology is identifying the processes responsible for these fluctuations.

The new research uncovers a surprising finding: the fluctuation in the number of nearby supernovae closely corresponds to changes in biodiversity of marine genera over the last 500 million years. This correlation becomes apparent when the marine diversity curve is adjusted to account for changes in shallow coastal marine regions, which are significant as they provide habitat for most marine life and offer new opportunities for evolution as they expand or shrink. Thus, alterations in available shallow marine regions play a role in shaping biodiversity.

Read more | >

The kardeshev scale of possible future technological advance.

In 1964, Russian astrophysicist Nikolai Kardashev figured that civilizations can be categorized by the total amount of energy available to them. He called it the Kardashev Scale. He initially came up with 3 civilization types; type 1, type 2, and type 3. However, other astronomers have recently extended the scale from type 0 all the way to type 7 as new theories in modern physics have emerged. Check out the complete playlist as we unveil each level of the Kardashev Scale! Enjoy the videos, and do let us know your thoughts in the comments!

Read more | >

The gargantuan artificial construct enveloping your local star is going to be rather difficult to miss, even from a few light years away. And given the literally astronomical costs of resources needed to construct such a device — the still-theoretical-for-humans Dyson Sphere — having one in your solar system will also serve as a stark warning of your technological capacity to ETs that comes sniffing around.

Or at least that’s how 20th century astronomers like Nikolai Kardashev and Carl Sagan envisioned our potential Sol-spanning distant future going. Turns out, a whole lot of how we predict intelligences from outside our planet will behave is heavily influenced by humanity’s own cultural and historical biases. In The Possibility of Life, science journalist Jaime Green examines humanity’s intriguing history of looking to the stars and finding ourselves reflected in them.

Excerpted from The Possibility of Life by Jaime Green, Copyright © 2023 by Jaime Green. Published by Hanover Square Press.

Read more | >