Lifeboat Foundation

Astronomers spotted Jupiter-mass binary objects (JUMBOs) in the Orion constellation, and they don’t know how the objects formed.

Scientists generally, said NSF’s Lisa Winter, will be able to view a very active corona — or upper atmosphere of the sun — during the precious minutes that the sun is nearly completely blocked by the moon. The sun is nearing its maximum of solar activity in its 11-year-cycle, unlike the last U.S. total solar eclipse of 2017, meaning that “the corona will be very active this time around,” said Winter, who is NSF’s program director for solar-terrestrial research.

Solar activity has an immense impact on the ionosphere, which is a layer of Earth’s atmosphere that interacts with electromagnetic radiation from above and below its extent. These interactions affect the propagation of radio signals.

Astronomers may have detected a dozen large objects lurking beyond the Kuiper Belt at the edge of our solar system, suggesting there could be another equally massive, “second Kuiper Belt” hiding beyond the orbit of Pluto.

Agriculture in Syria started with a bang 12,800 years ago as a fragmented comet slammed into the Earth’s atmosphere. The explosion and subsequent environmental changes forced hunter-gatherers in the prehistoric settlement of Abu Hureyra to adopt agricultural practices to boost their chances for survival.

That’s the assertion made by an international group of scientists in one of four related research papers, all appearing in the journal Science Open: Airbursts and Cratering Impacts. The papers are the latest results in the investigation of the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, the idea that an anomalous cooling of the Earth almost 13 millennia ago was the result of a cosmic impact.

“In this general region, there was a change from more humid conditions that were forested and with diverse sources of food for hunter-gatherers, to drier, cooler conditions when they could no longer subsist only as hunter-gatherers,” said Earth scientist James Kennett, a professor emeritus of UC Santa Barbara. The settlement at Abu Hureyra is famous among archaeologists for its evidence of the earliest known transition from foraging to farming. “The villagers started to cultivate barley, wheat and legumes,” he noted. “This is what the evidence clearly shows.”

Scientists worldwide are already using artificial intelligence to sort through huge amounts of data, suggesting that the future of astronomy belongs to AI.

That looks promising. 90% accuracy isn’t bad. Now the trick is getting there though we have options on our own solar system possibly. You never know until you try. I doubt we’ll find high level life remnants but perhaps something much less like at most insect level but more likely microbial. I’m just guessing of course.

A team of scientists supported in part by NASA have outlined a simple and reliable method to search for signs of past or present life on other worlds that employs machine learning techniques. The results show that the method can distinguish both modern and ancient biosignatures with an accuracy of 90 percent.

The method is able to detect whether or not a sample contains materials that were tied to biological activity. What the research team refers to as a “routine analytical method” could be performed with instruments on missions including spacecraft, landers, and rovers, even before samples are returned to Earth. In addition, the method could be used to shed light on the history of ancient rocks on our own planet.

Continue reading “Machine Learning in the Search for Agnostic Biosignatures” »

NGC 4,654 is a spiral galaxy with some interesting nuances of stellar formation.

Have you seen an unusually bright object moving through the evening sky recently?

Chances are that it wasn’t one of the mysterious objects that the DoD and NASA are currently studying, but was instead one of the growing number of manmade spacecraft taking up residence in Earth’s orbit.

And this one has astronomers particularly concerned.

The surprising detection of light 200 times more powerful than previous observations from the nearby pulsar Vela indicates hidden physics around dead stars.