Lifeboat Foundation

Because the mineral changesite-(Y) contains the isotope helium-3, it could one day fuel nuclear fusion reactors.

Astronomers used radio telescopes to estimate the temperature of molten rock on Io, the most volcanically active world in the solar system.

Elegant experiments with entangled light have laid bare a profound mystery at the heart of reality.

That’s because as a white dwarf draws material away from its hydrogen-burning partner, the stolen gas follows the star’s magnetic field lines in a big, curving arc toward its new home. And in the process, it drains energy from the stars’ whirling dance (so do the gravitational waves produced by their rotation). When that happens, both stars fall toward the shared center of gravity they’re orbiting. Closer orbits also mean shorter orbits, so it takes the stars less time to complete a single lap.

And the closer the stars get, the stronger the gravitational waves they produce, which drains away more energy, so they fall even closer together. By the time they’re close enough to complete an orbit in just a handful of minutes, the donor star has usually run out of hydrogen. That’s why the really close, fast-orbiting cataclysmic binaries tend to be a white dwarf and a helium-burning star.

The massive launch system will carry a mysterious U.S. Space Force payload to a high-altitude geosynchronous orbit.

It’s been a while since SpaceX launched Falcon Heavy to orbit. A string of payload delays has stopped the heavy-duty rocket from hitting the launch pad since the summer of 2019.

Continue reading “It’s been three years, but SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy might finally launch again this month” »

India’s Mars Orbiter Mission, known as MOM, has ended after eight years – even though it was designed for a six-month lifespan, the Indian Space Research Organization announced this week.

The Mars orbiter launched on Nov. 5, 2013 and made it into orbit about 10 months later. It was an enormous feat to have reached Mars’ orbit successfully in the first attempt, Dr. K. Radhakrishnan, a member of India’s space commission, said during an address Monday.

In 2014, more than half of the world’s attempts at such a mission – 23 out of 41 – had failed, according to the Associated Press. The U.S. was successful with a Mars flyby in 1964, when a spacecraft called Mariner 4 returned with 21 images of the surface of the planet. Other successful missions include the Soviet Union’s in 1971 and the European Space Agency’s in 2003.

A team of 86 scientists from 13 countries recently carried out extensive high-time resolution optical monitoring of a distant active galaxy, BL Lacertae (BL Lac). Mike Joner, BYU research professor of physics and astronomy, was one of the astronomers contributing to the project.

Dr. Joner and BYU undergraduate student Gilvan Apolonio secured over 200 observations of the galaxy using the 0.9-meter reflecting telescope at the BYU West Mountain Observatory. Their measurements were combined with observations made by other scientists around the world in a collaboration known as the Whole Earth Blazar Telescope (WEBT). The WEBT network makes it possible to monitor objects around the clock from different locations during times of high variability.

Using the WEBT observations made in the summer of 2020, astronomers discovered surprisingly rapid oscillations of brightness in the central jet of the galaxy BL Lac. The scientists attribute these cycles of brightness change to twists in the jet’s magnetic field. Their study was recently published in Nature.

Astronomers have discovered a rare binary star system with an orbital period of just 51 minutes – a blazing new record.

This article was originally published at The Conversation. (opens in new tab) The publication contributed the article to Space.com’s Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

A glowing blob known as “the cocoon,” which appears to be inside one of the enormous gamma-ray emanations from the center of our galaxy dubbed the “Fermi bubbles,” has puzzled astronomers since it was discovered in 2012.