Lifeboat Foundation

An Antares rocket from Northrop Grumman has successfully launched the Cygnus cargo spacecraft on its way to the International Space Station. The launch happened at 9:59AM from the Mid Atlantic Regional Spaceport as anticipated. Assuming nothing unusual happens, NASA says the cargo vessel will arrive at the ISS on Monday, November 4, carrying a huge load of supplies and scientific materials.

Will we have to throw out all of astrophysics?

An astrobiologist argues that lightning should also be prevalent on planets around other sunlike stars.

The new image reveals the twin galaxies AM 2026–424 — a pair of interacting galaxies that may foreshadow our Milky Way’s own frightening fate.

For more information: https://go.nasa.gov/2WkvPpV

Credit: NASA, ESA, J. Dalcanton, B.F. Williams, and M. Durbin (University of Washington).

Continue reading “Hubble has unveiled a spooky new image staring out from the depths of the cosmos just in time for Halloween” »

By 2030, a lunar visit could last two weeks.

Different measurements of the universe’s expansion yield different results. Are we getting something wrong, or do we need brand-new physics to figure it out?

A brand-new particle has possibly emerged and is altering the future destiny of our entire cosmos, a physicist says.

Researchers at the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (WPI) and Tohoku University in Japan have recently identified an anomaly in the electromagnetic duality of Maxwell Theory. This anomaly, outlined in a paper published in Physical Review Letters, could play an important role in the consistency of string theory.

The recent study is a collaboration between Yuji Tachikawa and Kazuya Yonekura, two string theorists, and Chang-Tse Hsieh, a condensed matter theorist. Although the study started off as an investigation into string theory, it also has implications for other areas of physics.

In current physics theory, classical electromagnetism is described by Maxwell’s equations, which were first introduced by physicist James Clerk Maxwell around 1865. Objects governed by these equations include electric and magnetic fields, electrically charged particles (e.g., electrons and protons), and magnetic monopoles (i.e. hypothetical particles carrying single magnetic poles).

Diamonds as big as jewels fall as “rain” on Saturn and Jupiter, seeded by giant lightning storms, according to new calculations by US scientists.