Lifeboat Foundation

Researchers have developed a new way to produce and shape large, high-quality mirrors that are much thinner than the primary mirrors previously used for telescopes deployed in space. The resulting mirrors are flexible enough to be rolled up and stored compactly inside a launch vehicle.

“Launching and deploying space telescopes is a complicated and costly procedure,” said Sebastian Rabien from Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany. “This new approach—which is very different from typical mirror production and polishing procedures—could help solve weight and packaging issues for telescope mirrors, enabling much larger, and thus more sensitive, telescopes to be placed in orbit.”

In the journal Applied Optics, Rabien reports successful fabrication of parabolic membrane mirror prototypes up to 30 cm in diameter. These mirrors, which could be scaled up to the sizes needed in space telescopes, were created by using chemical vapor deposition to grow membrane mirrors on a rotating liquid inside a vacuum chamber. He also developed a method that uses heat to adaptively correct imperfections that might occur after the mirror is unfolded.

Researchers have discovered that in the exotic conditions of the early universe, waves of gravity may have shaken space-time so hard that they spontaneously created radiation.

The physical concept of resonance surrounds us in everyday life. When you’re sitting on a swing and want to go higher, you naturally start pumping your legs back and forth. You very quickly find the exact right rhythm to make the swing go higher. If you go off rhythm then the swing stops going higher. This particular kind of phenomenon is known in physics as a parametric resonance.

Continue reading “Physicists Discover that Gravity Can Create Light” »

Once confined to the pages of science fiction, they are said to create shortcuts for long journeys across the universe.

Scientists have found they may magnify light by a factor of 100,000 — which is key to finding the strange tunnels.

Albert Einstein predicted their existence more than a century ago in his theory of general relativity.

Over the short span of just 300 years, since the invention of modern physics, we have gained a deeper understanding of how our universe works on both small and large scales. Yet, physics is still very young and when it comes to using it to explain life, physicists struggle.

Even today, we can’t really explain what the difference is between a living lump of matter and a dead one. But my colleagues and I are creating a new physics of life that might soon provide answers.

More than 150 years ago, Darwin poignantly noted the dichotomy between what we understand in physics and what we observe in life—noting at the end of The Origin of Species “…whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been and are being evolved.”

Most of us only ever see a fraction of a full rainbow: an arc. But optically, a full rainbow makes a complete circle. Physics explains why.

The ‘Hawking radiation’ emitted by black holes may be able to carry crucial information, a new study suggests. Scientists may have just found the solution to one of astrophysics most mind-boggling mysteries concerning black holes, also known as the ‘Hawking information paradox’. A study published in the journal Physics Letters B last month offers a resolution to a problem the late physicist Stephen Hawking was working on in his final years.

The universe is expanding, but how fast exactly? The answer appears to depend on whether you estimate the cosmic expansion rate—referred to as the Hubble’s constant, or H₀—based on the echo of the Big Bang (the cosmic microwave background, or CMB) or you measure H₀ directly based on today’s stars and galaxies. This problem, known as the Hubble tension, has puzzled astrophysicists and cosmologists around the world.

A study carried out by the Stellar Standard Candles and Distances research group, led by Richard Anderson at EPFL’s Institute of Physics, adds a new piece to the puzzle. Their research, published in Astronomy & Astrophysics, has achieved the most accurate calibration of Cepheid stars—a type of variable star whose luminosity fluctuates over a defined period—for distance measurements to date based on data collected by the European Space Agency’s (ESA’s) Gaia mission. This new calibration further amplifies the Hubble tension.

The Hubble constant (H₀) is named after the astrophysicist who—together with Georges Lemaître—discovered the phenomenon in the late 1920s. It’s measured in kilometers per second per megaparsec (km/s/Mpc), where 1 Mpc is around 3.26 million light years.

Scientists have achieved a “temporal analogue” to the famous double-slit experiment that could lead to new optical technologies. ABSTRACT breaks down mind-bending scientific research, future tech, new discoveries, and major breakthroughs. Scientists have discovered “unexpected physics” by opening up “slits” in time, a new study reports, achieving a longstanding dream that can help to probe the behavior of light and pioneer advanced optical technologies.

An artificial black hole produced using sound waves and a dielectric medium has been created in the lab, according to researchers with an international think tank featuring more than 30 Ph.D. research scientists from around the world.

The researchers say their discovery is significantly more cost-effective and efficient than current methods in use by researchers who want to simulate the effects of a black hole in a laboratory environment.

New York-based Applied Physics first achieved recognition with the 2021 publication of a peer-reviewed theoretical paper detailing the mathematics behind the construction of a physical warp drive. More recently, the organization published a method for using Cal Tech’s Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) to detect the use of warp drives in outer space, co-authored by Dr. Manfred Paulini, the Associate Dean of Physics at Carnegie Mellon University.