Lifeboat Foundation

You’re looking at the center of our galactic home, the Milky Way, as imaged by 64 radio telescopes in the South African wilderness.

Scientists released this image today to inaugurate the completed MeerKAT radio telescope. But these scopes form part of an even more ambitious project: the Square Kilometer Array, a joint effort to build the world’s largest telescope, spanning the continents of Africa and Australia.

In a study published in the latest issue of Science, astronomers led by graduate student Huan Meng, of the University of Arizona in Tucson, announced the discovery of remains of a mammoth planetary collision.

The team made its observations using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope and several different ground-based instruments. The collision occurred between two planets orbiting a sunlike star called NGC-2547 ID8, which lies about 1,140 light-years from the earth. The star is a young one, with a system of planets still in the process of formation. The collision, which may have occurred as recently as two years ago, left a ring of dust and debris circling the star.

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July 12 (UPI) — By combining the observations of the two most powerful space telescopes in orbit, scientists have achieved the most precise measurement of the Hubble constant, the universe’s expansion rate.

The new measurement confirms the tension between explosion rate in the early and late universe, researchers report.

Astronomers can measure the expansion of the universe by measuring a galaxy’s redshift, a change in the wavelength of the light due to a change in the velocity of the object. By measuring the redshift of galaxies using the Hubble Telescope, scientists have established the Hubble constant.

Continue reading “Hubble, Gaia produce most precise measure of universe’s expansion rate” »

Sending stuff up to space is no easy task — even 45 years after Apollo 11. Size, weight, and cost are all massively important, so some researchers are turning to advanced origami to fold up solar arrays. The result of their two years’ worth of work is a solar array with a diameter of just 8.9 feet (2.7 meters) when folded and a massive 82 feet (25 meters) when unfurled. A 1/20th scale model of the array is what you see here.

To build the solar array, Shannon Zirbel and professor Larry Howell of Brigham Young University, and mechanical engineer Brian Trease of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, enlisted the help of renowned origami expert Robert Lang. One of the major difficulties faced by the team is that solar arrays are not as thin as paper. “You have to rethink a lot of that design in order to accommodate the thickness that starts to accumulate with each bend,” Trease said in a press release.

Continue reading “These solar arrays fold up like origami flowers” »

Medical X-ray scans have long been stuck in the black-and-white, silent-movie era. Sure, the contrast helps doctors spot breaks and fractures in bones, but more detail could help pinpoint other problems. Now, a company from New Zealand has developed a bioimaging scanner that can produce full color, three dimensional images of bones, lipids, and soft tissue, thanks to a sensor chip developed at CERN for use in the Large Hadron Collider.

Mars Bioimaging, the company behind the new scanner, describes the leap as similar to that of black-and-white to color photography. In traditional CT scans, X-rays are beamed through tissue and their intensity is measured on the other side. Since denser materials like bone attenuate (weaken the energy) of X-rays more than soft tissue does, their shape becomes clear as a flat, monochrome image.

Recent research led by Professor G.V. Shivashankar of the Mechanobiology Institute (MBI) at the National University of Singapore (NUS) and the FIRC Institute of Molecular Oncology (IFOM) in Italy, has revealed that mature cells can be reprogrammed into re-deployable stem cells without direct genetic modification — by confining them to a defined geometric space for an extended period of time.

“Our breakthrough findings will usher in a new generation of stem cell technologies for tissue engineering and regenerative medicine that may overcome the negative effects of geonomic manipulation,” said Prof Shivashankar.

Scientists can’t take pictures of the Higgs boson. But they can find proof of its existence by watching “E=mc” play out in hundreds of millions of particle collisions per second and detecting how it decays into other particles they do know how to spot. Now, six years after officially discovering the Higgs boson, particle physicists are announcing that they’ve spotted the Higgs in another way.

This announcement isn’t a surprise. It matches the predictions of the Standard Model of particle physics, the rock-solid but probably incomplete blueprint of the Universe on the smallest scales. But the news is certainly important; you might say it closes the first chapter of the Higgs boson’s story, and offers a potential window to explore some of most confounding questions in the Universe.

They say outer space is a lonely place, but a new chart shows that some regions have gotten a bit crowded. It purports to show the positions of all the space probes now at work snapping photos and collecting data in our solar system.

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A diagram, updated once a month, of active space missions beyond Earth orbit.

Continue reading “Amazing Map Shows Every Space Probe Now Exploring Our Solar System” »