Lifeboat Foundation

Supernovae produce some of the most powerful explosions in the cosmos, expelling a doomed star’s contents at velocities reaching 10 percent the speed of light. It usually takes a few weeks or months for a supernova to fade into nothingness, but astronomers have now documented a record-setting case in which a star was extinguished in just a few days.

They’re called Fast-Evolving Luminous Transients (FELTs), an exotic type of supernova discovered only a few years ago. As the name implies, these supernovae develop quickly, they’re very bright, and then they disappear. Unlike more “conventional” supernovae, such as Type Ia supernovae, the duration of these explosions can be measured in days rather than weeks or months. These celestial events are rare, and only a handful of FELTs have ever been documented.

The perplexing thing about FELTs, however, isn’t so much that they’re short lived—it’s that they’re also very bright. Scientists have subsequently theorized that they’re the glowing remnant of a gamma-ray burst (a massive explosion produced by a collapsing star that gives birth to a black hole), a supernova fueled by a magnetar (a neutron star with a powerful magnetic field), or a failed Type Ia supernova (in which a white dwarf star sucks up material from a nearby star, eventually causing it to explode). New research published today in Nature Astronomy suggests it’s none of the above.

Continue reading “Rare Type of Supernova Extinguishes Star at Unprecedented Speed” »

The ULTRACAM has been a staple in ESO for almost 16 years. This high-speed camera is able to do 500 photographs per second in three different wavelengths and, since 2002 has been operating at the William Herschel Telescope at La Palma (Canary Islands, Spain), the New Technology Telescope at La Silla (Chile) (where this picture was taken) and, most recently, at the Very Large Telescope at Paranal (Chile) and the Thai National Telescope at Chiang Mai (Thailand).

Some of its past targets have included: the study of black holes, “hot-Jupiters” or variable stars.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zr2_XrOX6E

Continue reading “Bioquark Inc. — Evolution of the New SuperHuman — Ira Pastor” »

Just Out: I did an hour long interview with Josh Peck of Into the Multiverse on Skywatch TV. Josh is a Christian #libertarian and this interview covers a variety of subjects including the compatibility of #Christianity & #Transhumanism, as well as my CA Governor run:

http://skywatchtv.com PLEASE SUBSCRIBE AND SHARE! Here is the full exclusive interview of Zoltan Istvan by Josh Peck on the topic of transhumanism vs Christianity.

Continue reading “Transhumanism VS Christianity (Full Exclusive Interview)” »

Gravitational waves have opened up new ways to test the properties of black holes — and Einstein’s theory of gravity along with them.

March 20 (UPI) — Scientists believe a new material, known as a scintillator, will expand the search for dark matter.

New analysis suggests the scintillator material is sensitive to dark matter particles with less mass than a proton, which should allow scientists to look for dark matter among a previously unexplored mass range.

Weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs, describe dark matter particles with a mass greater than that of a proton. Scientists have tried to directly detect WIMPs using a variety of strategies, but with no success.

Continue reading “New material capable of detecting dark matter, scientists say” »

Roughly 13.8 billion years ago, the Universe as we know it expanded from an infinitely hot and dense singularity in space and time, first in a furious torrent of rapid cosmic inflation for a fraction of a second, and then in the more calm manner we see today – gradual, yet accelerating expansion fueled by dark energy.

This fleetingly describes the Big Bang model of cosmology, the most successful theoretical explanation for our grand Universe. Backed by boatloads of observational evidence, we can be very sure of its veracity. Caltech astrophysicist Sean Caroll even described the Big Bang as “100 percent true.”

But that percentage of surety dwindles to nothing when discussing the singularity that supposedly started it all. Where did it come from? What came before it? What caused it to “bang” in such a big way? As Carroll admitted, this singularity and its accompanying “bang” are essentially stand-ins for what we don’t – and currently can’t – actually know.

Continue reading “We’ll Never Know For Sure How Everything Began” »

A paper submitted for publication just two weeks ago could prove the “multiverse” theory which Hawking loved.

Silke Weinfurtner is trying to build the universe from scratch. In a physics lab at the University of Nottingham—close to the Sherwood forest of legendary English outlaw Robin Hood—she and her colleagues will work with a huge superconducting coil magnet, 1 meter across. Inside, there’s a small pool of liquid, whose gentle ripples stand to mimic the matter fluctuations that gave rise to the structures we observe in the cosmos.

Weinfurtner isn’t an evil genius hell-bent on creating a world of her own to rule. She just wants to understand the origins of the one we already have.

The Big Bang is by far the most popular model of our universe’s beginnings, but even its fans disagree about how it happened. The theory depends on the existence of a hypothetical quantum field that stretched the universe ultra-rapidly and uniformly in all directions, expanding it by a huge factor in a fraction of a second: a process dubbed inflation. But that inflation or the field responsible for it—the inflaton—is impossible to prove directly. Which is why Weinfurtner wants to mimic it in a lab.

Continue reading “To Understand the Universe, Physicists Are Building Their Own” »