Lifeboat Foundation

On one particularly hot planet, hundreds of light-years away from Earth, the forecast is cloudy with a chance of liquid iron rain. Scientists recently discovered the bizarre exoplanet, which they referred to as one of the most “extreme” they’ve ever observed.

Using the Very Large Telescope (VLT) at the European Southern Observatory (ESO), researchers observed an “ultra-hot” giant exoplanet, where temperatures can exceed 2,400 degrees Celsius during the day — hot enough to vaporize metals.

One face of the planet, its “day side,” is always facing its parent star and permanently roasting, while the cooler “night side” remains in constant darkness. Because of this, when strong winds push vaporized iron to the night side, it condenses into droplets, creating an iron rainstorm.

Another reminder that the solar system is awesomely bonkers.

Circa 2019

An asteroid that’s filled with gold and enough precious metals to turn everyone on Earth into a billionaire is being studied by NASA.

The asteroid – known as 16 Psyche – has a mass of less than 1% of our moon and it contains heaps of platinum, iron and nickel alongside the gold. The combined total value of all those precious metals would equal out at something like $700 quintillion.

Continue reading “Gigantic golden asteroid could make everyone on Earth a billionaire” »

Two other international teams are planning Mars launches in July. NASA plans to deploy a rover named Perseverance, and the United Arab Emirates will send a probe called Hope. The European and Russian space agencies were planning to send a probe to Mars this year, but announced on Thursday that the launch will be delayed by two years so they can finish important tests, and partly because of the coronavirus pandemic.

China’s first journey to Mars is one of the most anticipated space missions of the year. But with parts of the country in some form of lockdown because of the coronavirus, the mission teams have had to find creative ways to continue their work.

Researchers involved in the mission remain tight-lipped about its key aspects, but several reports from Chinese state media say that the outbreak will not affect the July launch — the only window for another two years.

Continue reading “How China is planning to go to Mars amid the coronavirus outbreak” »

A simple tractor beam can pull them away like a higgs boson tractor beam.

Too bad they are likely uninhabitable.

Scientists detected the universe’s first type of molecule thanks to a telescope on a plane 😮.

A mind-bending new paper suggests our entire Milky Way galaxy could be located inside an enormous bubble where matter is much less dense than everywhere else.

If research bears the theory out, it’d mean that our galactic neighborhood is very different from the rest of the universe — and it could potentially solve a huge problem looming over the astrophysics field.

Permanent magnets akin to those used on refrigerators could speed the development of fusion energy—the same energy produced by the sun and stars.

In principle, such magnets can greatly simplify the design and production of twisty fusion facilities called stellarators, according to scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) and the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in Greifswald, Germany. PPPL founder Lyman Spitzer Jr. invented the stellarator in the early 1950s.

Most stellarators use a set of complex twisted coils that spiral like stripes on a candy cane to produce magnetic fields that shape and control the plasma that fuels fusion reactions. Refrigerator-like permanent magnets could produce the hard part of these essential fields, the researchers say, allowing simple, non-twisted coils to produce the remaining part in place of the complex coils.

Rosalind Franklin has been built to try to detect life, past or present, on the Red Planet.

Because of this, the rover and its instruments have been prepared to incredibly stringent levels of cleanliness. This status must now be maintained over the coming two years of storage.

The project’s industrial prime contractor, Thales Alenia Space of Italy, will do this in an ISO-7 chamber at its Turin factory.