Lifeboat Foundation

It’s hard to spot a black hole.

There are two different approaches to such detection. In “X-ray binary stars” — in which a star and a black hole orbit a shared center while producing X-rays — a black hole’s gravitational field can pull material from its companion. The material circles the black hole, heating up by friction as it does so.

The hot material glows brightly in X-ray light, making the black hole visible, before being sucked into the black hole and disappearing. You can also detect pairs of black holes as they merge together, spiraling inwards and emitting a brief flash of gravitational waves, which are ripples in spacetime.

Continue reading “Scientists may have just found an invisible black hole — should you be worried?” »

We can’t make transistors any smaller, is this the end of Moore’s Law?

There has been a lot of talk about the end of Moore’s Law for at least a decade now and what kind of implications this will have on modern society. Since the invention of the computer transistor in 1947, the number of transistors packed onto the silicon chips that power the modern world has steadily grown in density, leading to the exponential growth of computing power over the last 70 years. A transistor is a physical object, however, and being purely physical it is governed by laws of physics like every other physical object. That means there is a physical limit to how small a transistor can be. Back when Gordon Moore made his famous prediction about the pace of growth in computing power, no one was really thinking about transistors at nanometer scales. But as we enter the third decade of the 21st century, our reliance on packing more transistors into the same amount of silicon is brushing up against the very boundaries of what is physically possible, leading many to worry that the pace of innovation we’ve become accustomed to might come to a screeching end in the very near future.

Full Story:

Continue reading “No more transistors: The end of Moore’s law” »

Stephen Hawking made terrifying predictions of the future. Based on science, the late British physicists predicted several things that could happen on Earth, from the rise of powerful Artificial intelligence to fearful robots poised to destroy humankind. Hawking also spoke about how it was dangerous to search for aliens and how global warming could destroy Earth as we know it.

However, Stephen Hawking also spoke about how abrupt advances in genetic science could lead to creating a future generation of superhumans that could eventually destroy humanity as we know it.

In recently published papers, Prof. Hawking predicted that an elite class of physically altered, intellectually powerful humans could come into existence from rich people choosing to edit their existing DNA and manipulate future generations’ genetic markup.

Fundamental constants like e and π are ubiquitous in diverse fields of science, including physics, biology, chemistry, geometry, and abstract mathematics. Nevertheless, for centuries new mathematical formulas relating fundamental constants are scarce and are usually discovered sporadically by mathematical intuition or ingenuity.

Our algorithms search for new mathematical formulas. The community can suggest proofs for the conjectures or even propose or develop new algorithms. Any new conjecture, proof, or algorithm suggested will be named after you.

Look to the binaries.

Aliens may be traveling from one star system to another when two stars get close enough to one another, a study suggests.

“Now, anyone with internet access and a web browser can enjoy reading a high quality up-to-date copy of Feynman’s legendary lectures.

France’s Defense Ministry oversees development of a biomimetic drone whose resemblance to birds and insects increases its stealth operation.

They are examining all million pieces of the puzzle to make the next #NIF shots “even.” #physics.

https://www.llnl.gov/news/research-looks-piston-model-unders…implosions

Oort Cloud comet C/2014 UN271, also known as Comet measures some 85 miles (137 km) in diameter, give or take 10.5 miles (17 km), reports a research team led by astronomer Emmanuel Lellouch of the Paris Observatory. Their new paper on the mega comet has been accepted for publication in Astronomy and Astrophysics Letters, and you can sneak a peak of the preprint at the arXiv.

These latest observations confirm that Comet is the largest Oort Cloud object ever detected, as it’s nearly twice as big as comet Hale-Bopp (observed in 1997), the nucleus of which measured between 25 and 50 miles (40 and 80 km) wide. It’s also bigger than Comet Sarabat (observed in 1729), which had a nucleus measuring somewhere around 62 miles (100 km) in diameter.

Comet is currently inbound from the Oort Cloud 0, a distant region of the solar system known for packing billions and possibly trillions of icy objects. The comet will make its closest approach to Earth in 2031, when it will come to within 11 au of the Sun (1 billion miles), in which 1 au is the average distance from Earth to the Sun. The comet, coming no closer than Saturn, won’t likely be visible to the unaided eye, but astronomers will be keeping a close watch, as it’s turning out to be a rather extraordinary object.

A team of astronomers using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT) in Chile have found evidence of another planet orbiting Proxima Centauri, the closest star to our Solar System. This candidate planet is the third detected in the system and the lightest yet discovered orbiting this star. At just a quarter of Earth’s mass, the planet is also one of the lightest exoplanets ever found.

“The discovery shows that our closest stellar neighbour seems to be packed with interesting new worlds, within reach of further study and future exploration,” said João Faria, a researcher at the Institute of Astrophysics and Space Sciences, Portugal, lead author of a study published today in Astronomy and Astrophysics. Proxima Centauri is a small, M-class star, lying just 4.2 light years away.

The newly discovered planet, named Proxima d, orbits Proxima Centauri at a distance of about four million kilometres, less than a tenth of Mercury’s distance from the Sun. It lies between the star and the habitable zone – the band where liquid water can exist at the surface of a planet – and takes just five days to complete one orbit around its star.