Lifeboat Foundation

NASA has released a breathtaking time-lapse video captured from the International Space Station showing a recent aurora over Earth.

Galaxies spotted by the James Webb Space Telescope seem far too massive to have formed so early on in the universe’s history, which could be a problem for our ideas of galaxy formation.

By Leah Crane and Alex Wilkins.

This story comes from our special January 2021 issue, “The Beginning and the End of the Universe.” Click here to purchase the full issue.

By studying this cosmic dawn, Mobasher hopes to answer fundamental questions about our universe today. Understanding the dark ages “would help us understand how galaxies are formed, how stars are formed, the evolution of galaxies through the universe,” he says. “How our own galaxy started, how it was formed, how fast it built up stars … all those questions are important questions we need to answer.”

Space officials are wondering: Should the moon have its own time zone? The ESA has proposed the at a recent agency meeting held in the Netherlands.

Resonance Science Foundation is a global research and education non-profit organization (501c3) committed to the unification of physics and science as a whole.

Founded by physicist Nassim Haramein in 2004, the RSF team of researchers and educators have developed a formal unified view of physics. These findings have implications and applications to revolutionary technologies that transform people’s lives and the world as a whole, helping to overcome some of the largest challenges facing the world today.

RSF also provides educational opportunities through the Resonance Academy, an online learning platform and international learning community that empowers people to gain a coherent and fundamental understanding of the structure, mechanics and dynamics of the universe.

They include 43 “Earth and Super-Earths.”

As of 2015, the Consortium’s purpose has been to look for terrestrial-type exoplanets around nearby red dwarf stars. Since then, the CARMENES instrument has doubled the number of known exoplanets around nearby M-type stars using the Radial Velocity Method.

The 59 exoplanets they identified between 2016 and 2019 are either new discoveries or confirmations of previously-detected candidates, including 6 Jupiter-like gas giants, 10 Neptune-like gas giants, and 43 Earths and Super-Earths. A dozen of these latter planets were found to orbit within the stars’ circumsolar habitable zones.

Continue reading “Scientists Have Glimpsed 59 New Exoplanets in Our Backyard” »

Previously, astronomers had only detected three short-period ultracool dwarf binary systems. They were relatively young-up to 40 million years old. In a recent study, astrophysicists at Northwestern University and the University of California San Diego (UC San Diego) have discovered an extreme system: the tightest ultracool dwarf binary system ever observed.

This newly discovered system is known as LP 413-53AB. It consists of a pair of ultracool dwarfs. The system is estimated to be billions of years old. Surprisingly, its orbital period is at least three times shorter than all ultracool dwarf binaries discovered so far.

The proximity between the two stars is like this: they take less than one Earth day to revolve around each other. Each star’s “year” lasts just 17 hours.

“The host star, TOI-5205, is just about four times the size of Jupiter, yet it has somehow managed to form a Jupiter-sized planet, which is quite surprising!” exclaimed Dr. Shubham Kanodia, who is a postdoctoral fellow in the Carnegie Earth & Planets Lab and an expert in red dwarf stars, and lead author of the study. Dr. Shubham recently discussed the discovery in an in-depth blog post, as well. Using food as an analogy, Jupiter orbiting our Sun is equivalent to a pea orbiting a grapefruit, whereas TOI-5205b orbiting its parent star would be equivalent to a pea orbiting a lemon.

The general theory of planetary formation begins with a massive, rotating disk of gas and dust encircling young stars, with gas planets initially being formed from rocky material comprising approximately 10 Earth masses. Over time, this material forms the core of the giant planet, which then accumulates large amounts of gas from the disk to produce the massive gas giants we observe today. As it turns out, the confirmation of TOI-5205b could throw this theory into disarray.

Continue reading “Astronomers Find a Seemingly Impossible Exoplanet” »

The fact that we are connected through space and time shows that life is a unitary phenomenon, no matter how we express that fact.