Lifeboat Foundation

This post is regarding binary black holes, supermassive black holes and LIGO detections.

Black holes formed from the death of a single star may collect and collide with other black holes to form even more-massive objects.

It’s growing so rapidly that it’s shining thousands of times more brightly than an entire galaxy.

A “supermassive” black hole swallowing up the mass of our sun every two days has been found by Australian astronomers.

Astronomers at the Australian National University (ANU), led by Dr Christian Wolf of the Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics, found the fastest-growing black hole known in the universe by looking back more than 12 billion years to what they call “the early dark ages of the universe.”

Continue reading “The fastest-growing black hole in the universe eats a sun every 48 hours — and astronomers have found it” »

According to the current dominant theory, if there are other universes out there, they’re not likely to have life. But now an international team of researchers has demonstrated that the Multiverse is more hospitable than we thought.

The Multiverse hypothesis — wherein our observable Universe is just one of many universes — is a proposed explanation for the not-large-enough amount of dark energy in the empty space in our Universe.

We don’t really know what dark energy is — it’s the name we give to the force that drives the expansion of our Universe, which, contrary to pretty much everything else we observe, accelerates over time instead of slowing down.

Continue reading “The Multiverse Could Be Teeming With Life But Is Also Problematic, Says New Study” »

Two new studies analyzing the relationship between dark energy, life, and the multiverse suggest it’s possible life exists in universes outside our own. Though the idea of the multiverse is not new, the concept of our universe being extraordinarily special might not be true.

The historic first detection of gravitational waves from colliding black holes far outside our galaxy opened a new window to understanding the universe. A string of detections—four more binary black holes and a pair of neutron stars—soon followed the Sept. 14, 2015, observation.

Now, another detector is being built to crack this window wider open. This next-generation observatory, called LISA, is expected to be in space in 2034, and it will be sensitive to gravitational waves of a lower frequency than those detected by the Earth-bound Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO).

A new Northwestern University study predicts dozens of binaries (pairs of orbiting compact objects) in the globular clusters of the Milky Way will be detectable by LISA (Laser Interferometer Space Antenna). These binary sources would contain all combinations of black hole, neutron star and white dwarf components. Binaries formed from these star-dense clusters will have many different features from those binaries that formed in isolation, far from other stars.

Continue reading “Dozens of binaries from Milky Way’s globular clusters could be detectable” »

Using data from the Chandra X-ray observatory, a team of scientists have found evidence that indicates that thousands of black holes may reside near the center of our galaxy.

A new estimate of the Hubble constant – the rate at which the universe is expanding – is baffling many of the finest minds in the cosmology community.

Hannah Devlin, Science correspondent.

According to new calculations, we may have a little less time to prepare for a star on course to kiss the edges of our Solar System.

Yep. Dwarf star Gliese 710, which we’ve known about for some time, could now arrive in 1.29 million years, instead of the previously calculated 1.36 million years.

Gliese 710 is what is classified as a rogue star — one that has gone roaming across the galaxy, free of the gravitational chains that normally hold stars in position.

Continue reading “A Rogue Star Hurtling Towards The Solar System Is Going to Arrive Sooner Than We Realised” »

The Fermi Paradox poses an age-old question: With light and radio waves skipping across the galaxy, why has there never been any convincing evidence of other life in the universe—or at least another sufficiently advanced civilization that uses radio? After all, evidence of intelligent life requires only that some species modulates a beacon (intentionally or unintentionally) in a fashion that is unlikely to be caused by natural phenomena.

The Fermi Paradox has always fascinated me, perhaps because SETI spokesperson, Carl Sagan was my astronomy professor at Cornell and—coincidentally—Sagan and Stephen Spielberg dedicated a SETI radio telescope at Oak Ridge Observatory around the time that I moved from Ithaca to New England. It’s a 5 minute drive from my new home. In effect, two public personalities followed me to Massachusetts.

What is SETI?

In November of 1984, SETI was chartered as a non-profit corporation with a single goal. In seeking to answer to the question “Are we alone?” it fuels the Drake equation by persuading radio telescopes to devote time to the search for extraterrestrial life and establishing an organized and systematic approach to partitioning, prioritizing, gathering and mining signal data.

Continue reading “Where are the aliens? Solutions to Fermi Paradox” »