Lifeboat Foundation

A comparison of surveys taken of the sky years apart has revealed an empty space where a star 280 million light years away once sat.

Coded FIRST J1419+3940, records of the object hint at what would have been a violent death. Curiously, no trace of its final explosive moments can be found – but this ghostly silence has only made astronomers all the more excited.

“We compared images from old maps of the sky and found one radio source that was no longer visible today in the Very Large Array Sky Survey (VLASS),” says astronomer Casey Law from the University of California, Berkeley.

Continue reading “Astronomers Are Getting Excited Over Ghostly Traces of a Massive Cosmic Explosion” »

Billionaires and political leaders are vying to land on the Moon, colonize Mars or mine asteroids.

There, engineers are doing something strange. They’re freezing computer chips to 460 degrees Fahrenheit below zero, colder than deep space, to simulate the quantum structure of the universe.

At such extreme temperatures these remarkable chips, called qubits, enable scientists to peer into the complex, uncertain interaction of particles at the atomic level — an unseen world in which seemingly contradictory results can exist simultaneously, a place where simply observing an interaction can change it. Or wreck it altogether.

“Quantum — it’s something weird,” said Mike Mayberry, Intel’s chief technology officer and general manager of Intel Labs.

Continue reading “Intel plots a weird, spooky future in quantum computing” »

Before the MASCOT lander spent 17 hours studying the asteroid Ryugu, the spacecraft captured some incredible photographs.

Voyager 1 could soon welcome its twin to the space outside our solar system.

by

• Amanda Kooser

As NASA celebrates its 60th anniversary, see how the historic institution is taking us to the moon, to the surface of Mars, to the outer edge of our solar system and beyond. 🔭

Watch above and beyond: nasa’s journey to tomorrow saturday oct 13 at 9p on discovery and discovery GO.

Nanosatellites are the new low-cost way to get your research into space.

“We are all stardust,” astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson tells CBS News Chief White House Correspondent Major Garret on this week’s episode of “The Takeout.” “And you have a connectivity to the universe that for me is uplifting rather than ego-busting.”

Tyson joined the podcast to discuss his new book, “Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysicists and the Military.” The book, written with co-author Avis Lang, explores the long and complicated history of how the study of astrophysics changed warfare.

In July, “The Takeout” welcomed NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, who described how reliant we are on space technology.

Physicist Jun Ye built the world’s most precise clock and is part of the group of scientists who changed our understanding of time itself.