Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: space – Page 390

Gamma-ray and meteorites helped life form in outer space, a study suggests

The first-of-its-kind experiment proved that gamma ray-catalyzed reactions can produce amino acids, which contributed to the origin of life on Earth.

How life arose on Earth remains one of science’s most complex mysteries. One of the many myths and hypotheses is the possibility of meteorites delivering amino acids, known as life’s building blocks, to our planet.

In a first-of-its-kind experiment, researchers have shown that amino acids might have formed in early meteorites from reactions driven by gamma rays produced inside space rocks due to the decay of radioactive elements.

In an experiment, researchers demonstrated that the building blocks of life could have formed in early meteorites from reactions driven by gamma rays produced inside the space rocks.

“Dynamic Soaring” Could See Interstellar Probes Reach Super Speeds

Covering interstellar distances in a human lifetime is far from easy. Going at 1 percent of the speed of light, it would take over 400 years to reach the closest star, and we have not been able to propel any spacecraft even close to that speed. But a new method aims to get to those speeds and maybe more – and it takes inspiration from the mighty albatross.

Chemical propulsion can be very useful in achieving high speeds pretty quickly, but there’s the drawback in that you need to carry the fuel with you, which means you need to be able to generate more thrust to shift the extra fuel and so on. It’s a huge issue when it comes to rocket science. A realistic alternative is ion propulsion, used to slowly and successfully maneuver the Dawn spacecraft, but it would take an equally long time to reach enough speed with such a steady but small acceleration.

Solar sails hold a more intriguing possible approach. Proposals such as the Breakthrough Starshot see lasers used to massively accelerate a spacecraft the size of a credit card to one-fifth the speed of light. But, you need to build a very powerful laser. A similar method using sunlight might also work, although not up to such a high speed.

The Universe Is Actually a Strange Superfluid Liquid

Scientists have been trying to understand the nature of the cosmos for hundreds of years. Recent technological advances have allowed scientists to gain more insight into the world and have led to new hypotheses regarding how it all works.

Some seem plausible while others are crazy. We’ll be discussing two of the most bizarre, but intriguing, hypotheses about the construction of our cosmos.

How is the cosmos organized the way it is? This topic has been studied by scientists over the years. They have proposed many theories to explain how it works and what is ahead.

Astronomers trace powerful gamma rays to a never-before-seen stellar phenomenon

But a team including Zhang has a suggestion for what might have caused it: the merger of a neutron star not with another neutron star, as is common for short gamma ray bursts, but with a white dwarf. White dwarfs are larger than neutron stars, but not nearly as big as the massive stars that cause supernovae, which would account for the length and intensity of the unusual burst.

Since there are lots of white dwarf-neutron star binaries and events like this are rare enough that it’s the first to be observed in half a century of looking, he suggests it needs some qualifications: first, the white dwarf needs to be “close to the upper mass limit,” and afterwards the two need to merge into a rapidly-spinning magnetar, which would “inject additional energy into the kilonova.”