Lifeboat Foundation

There are volcanoes erupting hundreds of millions of miles beyond Earth. And a NASA spacecraft is watching it happen.

The space agency’s Juno probe, which has orbited Jupiter since 2016, swooped by the gas giant’s volcanic moon Io last week, its last close planned flyby. The craft captured a world teeming with volcanoes, which you can see in the footage below.

“We’re seeing an incredible amount of detail on the surface,” Ashley Davies, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory who researches Io, told Mashable in February after a recent Io flyby. “It’s just a cornucopia of data. It’s just extraordinary.”

Yes, the Universe is expanding, but if you’ve ever wondered, ‘How fast is it expanding,’ the answer isn’t in terms of a speed at all.

An international team of astronomers has performed radio observations of a massive galaxy cluster known as ACT-CL J0329.2–2330, which resulted in the detection of a new radio halo in this cluster. The finding was reported in a research paper published April 5 on the pre-print server arXiv.

Quaise Energy, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology spin-off, plans to vaporize rocks in the Earth’s core and tap into deep geothermal energy.

NASA is proposing to wind down its Chandra X-ray Observatory. And astronomers are pissed.

The robot is controlled by a neural network trained in deep reinforcement learning via simulation.

Students at ETH Zurich are creating a robot that can move around in extremely low gravity by hopping like a human.

Continue reading “Spacehopper: Three-legged jumping robot to study asteroids in space” »

The idea of a static universe would mean our cosmos is eternal, and it isn’t expanding after all.

For the first time, astronomers have measured the speed of fast-moving jets in space, crucial to star formation and the distribution of elements needed for life.

The jets of matter, expelled by stars deemed ‘cosmic cannibals’, were measured to travel at over one-third of the speed of light — thanks to a groundbreaking new experiment published in Nature today.

The study sheds new light on these violent processes, making clever use of runaway nuclear explosions on the surface of stars.

Last September, the James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST, discovered JWST-ER1g, a massive ancient galaxy that formed when the universe was just a quarter of its current age. Surprisingly, an Einstein ring is associated with this galaxy. That’s because JWST-ER1g acts as a lens and bends light from a distant source, which then appears as a ring—a phenomenon called strong gravitational lensing, predicted in Einstein’s theory of general relativity.