Lifeboat Foundation

While volcanic eruptions and earthquakes serve as immediate reminders that Earth’s interior is anything but peaceful, there are also other, more elusive, dynamic processes taking place deep down below our feet. Using information from ESA’s Swarm satellite mission, scientists have discovered a completely new type of magnetic wave that sweeps across the outermost part of Earth’s outer core every seven years. This fascinating finding, presented today at ESA’s Living Planet Symposium, opens a new window into a world we can never see.

Earth’s magnetic field is like a huge bubble protecting us from the onslaught of cosmic radiation and charged particles carried by powerful winds that escape the Sun’s gravitational pull and stream across the Solar System. Without our magnetic field, life as we know it could not exist.

Recently, scientists made groundbreaking detections that allowed them that gravity does not act instantaneously as Newton thought, instead it propagates at the speed of light.

Neil Cornish, a physicist at Montana State University said, “The speed of gravity, like the speed of light, is one of the fundamental constants in the Universe. Until the advent of gravitational wave astronomy, we had no way to directly measure the speed of gravity.”

In the course of recent months, physicists have gained exceptionally fast ground in bouncing the speed of gravity utilizing gravitational wave perceptions. Earlier, the first LIGO detections of gravitational waves constrained the speed of gravity suggests 50% of the speed of light.

Classifying celestial objects is a long-standing problem. With sources at near unimaginable distances, sometimes it’s difficult for researchers to distinguish between objects such as stars, galaxies, quasars or supernovae.

Instituto de Astrofísica e Ciências do Espaço’s (IA) researchers Pedro Cunha and Andrew Humphrey tried to solve this classical problem by creating SHEEP, a machine-learning algorithm that determines the nature of astronomical sources. Andrew Humphrey (IA & University of Porto, Portugal) comments: “The problem of classifying celestial objects is very challenging, in terms of the numbers and the complexity of the universe, and artificial intelligence is a very promising tool for this type of task.”

The first author of the article, now published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, Pedro Cunha, a Ph.D. student at IA and in the Dept. of Physics and the University of Porto, says, “This work was born as a side project from my MSc thesis. It combined the lessons learned during that time into a unique project.”

This March, we, a group of educators, scientists, and psychologists started an educational non-profit (501 c3) Earthlings Hub, helping kids in refugee camps and evacuated orphanages. We are getting lots of requests for help, and are in urgent need to raise funds. If you happen to have any connections to educational and humanitarian charities, or if your universities or companies may be interested in providing some financial support to our program, we would really appreciate that! Please share with everyone who might be able to offer help or advice.

Our advisory board includes NASA astronaut Greg Chamitoff, Professor Uri Wilensky, early math educator Maria Droujkova, AI visionary Joscha Bach, and others.

Support Us The Earthlings Hub works with a fiscal sponsor Blue Marble Space. CREDIT CARD & PAYPAL Please contact us if you would like to via other means, such as checks, stocks, cryptocurrency, or using your Donor Advised Fund: [email protected]

This week’s image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows two galaxies that are a hotbed of star formation. The pair, known together as Arp 303 or individually as IC 563 on the bottom right and IC 564 on the top left, are located 275 million light-years away. They are in the dim constellation of Sextans, named after the astronomical instrument used to measure the position of stars.

The image below was captured by two Hubble instruments during two separate observations. The two observations were combined to show both visible light data and data from the infrared part of the spectrum.

“The image holds data from two separate Hubble observations of Arp 303,” Hubble scientists write. “The first used Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) to study the pair’s clumpy star-forming regions in infrared light. Galaxies like IC 563 and IC 564 are very bright at infrared wavelengths and host many bright star-forming regions.

Models suggest that a comet that split away in 1995 (and is still disintegrating) will approach our orbit, according to Earth Sky.

That means we’ll witness a spectacular meteor shower unlike anything we’ve seen in most of our lives.

If you purchase an independently reviewed product or service through a link on our website, BGR may receive an affiliate commission.

NASA’s James Webb space telescope is almost ready to get to work. The telescope’s mirrors are perfectly aligned. The team is currently finishing up the final calibrations of the spacecraft’s various instruments. Once that is done, Webb will be ready to get to work. One of the first things NASA plans to do with it is study two “super-Earth” planets known as 55 Cancri e and LHS 384 b.

Of note, both planets are located in our own Milky Way galaxy.

Ready to embrace some meteoric uncertainty?

The Tau Herculids meteor shower may light up the skies over North America on May 30 and 31. Or it may not. There’s a chance we might pass through the thickest part of the comet fragment that is creating the debris, in which case the night skies will be filled with shooting stars.

While the SR-71 Blackbird remains the world’s fastest air-breathing aircraft, the rocket-powered X-15 has its own richly deserved place in the aviation history record books: on October 3, 1967, U.S. Air Force test pilot William “Pete” Knight became the fastest flying pilot ever when he achieved a speed of Mach 6.7, a record that has stood for nearly 55 years.

The Baby Steps Before that “One Small Step for Man…”

As if that one particular superlative weren’t impressive enough, the X-15 helped make history in other ways: before Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the Moon, he was taught to fly the X-15 to the edge of space by then-Colonel Chuck Yeager, who, of course, made history in his own right as the first man to break the sound barrier whilst flying the first of the “X” planes, t he Bell X-1.