Lifeboat Foundation

The idea of traveling to another star system has been the dream of people long before the first rockets and astronauts were sent to space. But despite all the progress we have made since the beginning of the Space Age, interstellar travel remains just that – a dream. While theoretical concepts have been proposed, the issues of cost, travel time and fuel remain highly problematic.

A lot of hopes currently hinge on the use of directed energy and lightsails to push tiny spacecraft to relativistic speeds. But what if there was a way to make larger spacecraft fast enough to conduct interstellar voyages? According to Prof. David Kipping, the leader of Columbia University’s Cool Worlds lab, future spacecraft could rely on a halo drive, which uses the gravitational force of a black hole to reach incredible speeds.

Continue reading “Using black holes to conquer space: The halo drive” »

What would happen if humans could deliberately create a blackhole? Well, for starters we might just unlock the ultimate energy source to create the ultimate spacecraft engine — a potential “black hole-drive” — to propel ships to the stars.

It turns out black holes are not black at all; they give off “Hawking radiation” that causes them to lose energy (and therefore mass) over time. For large black holes, the amount of radiation produced is miniscule, but very small black holes rapidly turn their mass into a huge amount of energy.

Continue reading “Black Hole Drive Could Power Future Starships” »

Dark matter’s naysayers latched onto one tiny puzzle. This new find may have solved it completely.

An international team has constructed the most detailed, highest resolution simulation of a black hole to date. The simulation proves theoretical predictions about the nature of accretion disks—the matter that orbits and eventually falls into a black hole—that have never before been seen.

New experiments are revealing hints of a world and a reality that are complete reflections of ours. This mirrorverse may be able to solve the mystery of the universe’s missing dark matter.

Researchers have found a way to accelerate antimatter in a 1000x smaller space than current accelerators, boosting the science of exotic particles.

The new method could be used to probe more mysteries of physics, like the properties of the Higgs boson and the nature of dark matter and dark energy, and provide more sensitive testing of aircraft and computer chips.

The method has been modelled using the properties of existing lasers, with experiments planned soon. If proven, the technology could allow many more labs around the world to conduct antimatter acceleration experiments.

Continue reading “Mini antimatter accelerator could rival the likes of the Large Hadron Collider” »

Moments after the big bang, calculations show the universe could have collapsed into black holes. The reason it didn’t could be explained by the Higgs boson.

The biggest, most expensive science experiment in the world might be losing all its dark matter. But physicists are looking on the bright side.

The first direct image of the M87 Galaxy’s supermassive black hole that’s almost the size of our solar system required telescopes of unprecedented precision and sensitivity to give the human species a look into the unknown. The realization of this telescope – the Event Horizon Telescope – was a formidable challenge which required upgrading and connecting a planet-scale network of eight pre-existing telescopes deployed at a variety of challenging high-altitude sites, including volcanoes in Hawaii and Mexico, mountains in Arizona and the Spanish Sierra Nevada, the Chilean Atacama Desert, and Antarctica.

We gave humanity its first view of a black hole — “a one-way door out of our universe,” said EHT project director Sheperd S. Doeleman of the Center for Astrophysics, of the image of the massive black hole at the center of elliptical galaxy M87 as it was 55 million years ago “This is a landmark in astronomy, an unprecedented scientific feat accomplished by a team of more than 200 researchers.”

“The gates of hell, the end of space and time.” That was how black holes were described at the press conference in Brussels where the first ever photograph of one was revealed. The black hole, a super-massive object at the center of M87 shown above, really is a monster, observed Ellie Mae O’Hagan for The Guardian. “Everything unfortunate enough to get too close to it falls in and never emerges again, including light itself. It’s the point at which every physical law of the known universe collapses. Perhaps it is the closest thing there is to hell: it is an abyss, a moment of oblivion.”

Continue reading “‘Peering Through Spacetime’ --‘EHT Could Read a Newspaper in NYC from a Sidewalk Café in Berlin’” »