Lifeboat Foundation

I am not an astronomer or astrophysicist. I have never worked for NASA or JPL. But, during my graduate year at Cornell University, I was short on cross-discipline credits, and so I signed up for Carl Sagan’s popular introductory course, Astronomy 101. I was also an amateur photographer, occasionally freelancing for local media—and so the photos shown here, are my own.

Carl Sagan is aware of my camera as he talks to a student in the front row of Uris Hall

By the end of the 70’s, Sagan’s star was high and continuing to rise. He was a staple on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, producer and host of the PBS TV series, Cosmos, and he had just written Dragons of Eden, which won him a Pulitzer Prize. He also wrote Contact, which became a blockbuster movie, starring Jodie Foster.

Sagan died in 1996, after three bone marrow transplants to compensate for an inability to produce blood cells. Two years earlier, Sagan wrote a book and narrated a film based on a photo taken from space.

Continue reading “What has changed since ‘Pale Blue Dot’?” »

In celebration of the detection of gravitational waves, Stephen Wolfram looks forward and discusses what technology black holes could make possible.

Supermassive black holes are incredibly tiny. So small that we’ve never actually seen one.

New equation proves no “Big Bang” theory and no beginning either as well as no singularity.

(Phys.org) —The universe may have existed forever, according to a new model that applies quantum correction terms to complement Einstein’s theory of general relativity. The model may also account for dark matter and dark energy, resolving multiple problems at once.

The widely accepted age of the universe, as estimated by general relativity, is 13.8 billion years. In the beginning, everything in existence is thought to have occupied a single infinitely dense point, or singularity. Only after this point began to expand in a “Big Bang” did the universe officially begin.

Continue reading “No Big Bang? Quantum equation predicts universe has no beginning” »

Astrophysicists famously proved Einstein’s theory on the existence of gravitational waves last week. Here’s the less covered part of it all: It might, down the line, bring us closer to moving through time.

A now-famous team of astrophysicists shocked the world Thursday after recording the gravitational waves of two black holes slamming into each other 1.3 billion light-years away.

This detection supports Einstein’s general theory of relativity in a way that revolutionizes scientific understanding of how space and time behave in extreme environments, and astrophysics will never be the same.

Read more

Japan is studying the black holes.

This week the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) successfully launched a new space observatory designed to study black holes, dying stars and the history of galaxy clusters. The X-ray Astronomy Satellite, known as ASTRO-H, will be able to detect X-rays more than 10 times fainter than its telescope predecessor, Suzaku.

Continue reading “Japan Launches Observatory To Study Black Holes And Dying Stars” »

Here’s a concept; the Universe is Shrinking.

“The field of cosmology these days is converging on a standard model, centered around inflation and the Big Bang,” says physicist Arjun Berera at the University of Edinburgh, UK. “This is why it’s as important as ever, before we get too comfortable, to see if there are alternative explanations consistent with all known observation.”

Read more

You know what they say about rules…

If you thought regular black holes were about as weird and mysterious as space gets, think again, because for the first time, physicists have successfully simulated what would happen to black holes in a five-dimensional world, and the way they behave could threaten our fundamental understanding of how the Universe works.

The simulation has suggested that if our Universe is made up of five or more dimensions — something that scientists have struggled to confirm or disprove — Einstein’s general theory of relativity, the foundation of modern physics, would be wrong.

Continue reading “A 5-dimensional black hole could break the laws of physics as we know them” »

It’s the first time we’ve ever seen rumblings from a black hole with our eyes.

Read more