Lifeboat Foundation

End of the universe would look like?

It’s difficult to speak of the far future of the universe with any level of precision, but we can make rough estimates. Our cosmos is currently 13.77 billion years old, and galaxies throughout the universe will continue making new stars for many years to come. But eventually—roughly one trillion years from now—the last star will be born.

That star will likely be a small red dwarf, barely a fraction of our sun’s mass. Red dwarf stars live fantastically long lives, gently sipping on hydrogen to power a slow but steady fusion reaction. But eventually, all stars, including the red dwarfs, will come to an end. In roughly 100 trillion years, the last light will go out.

US aerospace start-up Relativity Space is planning to launch its 3D-printed Terran 1 rocket on 8 March, skipping planned tests and heading straight for orbit.

By Leah Crane

“Data is the greatest currency created by the human race”.

Cloud computing startup Lonestar Data Holdings announced the results of its latest $5 million funding round, which will help it develop its technology for storing data on the lunar surface.

New lunar data centers will store humanity’s ‘greatest currency.’

Continue reading “Florida startup raises $5 million toward building lunar data centers” »

From Google’s Bard to Microsoft’s new Bing, here are all the major contenders in the AI chatbot space.

After 85 years of searching, researchers have confirmed the existence of a massless particle called the Weyl fermion for the first time ever. With the unique ability to behave as both matter and anti-matter inside a crystal, this strange particle can create electrons that have no mass.

The discovery is huge, not just because we finally have proof that these elusive particles exist, but because it paves the way for far more efficient electronics, and new types of quantum computing. “Weyl fermions could be used to solve the traffic jams that you get with electrons in electronics — they can move in a much more efficient, ordered way than electrons,” lead researcher and physicist M. Zahid Hasan from Princeton University in the US told Anthony Cuthbertson over at IBTimes. “They could lead to a new type of electronics we call ‘Weyltronics’.”

So what exactly is a Weyl fermion? Although we’re often taught in high school science that the Universe is made up of atoms, from a particle physics point of view, everything is actually made up of fermions and bosons. Put very simply, fermions are the building blocks that make up all matter, such as electrons, and bosons are the things that carry force, such as photons.

NASA has released a breathtaking time-lapse video captured from the International Space Station showing a recent aurora over Earth.

Galaxies spotted by the James Webb Space Telescope seem far too massive to have formed so early on in the universe’s history, which could be a problem for our ideas of galaxy formation.

By Leah Crane and Alex Wilkins.

This story comes from our special January 2021 issue, “The Beginning and the End of the Universe.” Click here to purchase the full issue.

By studying this cosmic dawn, Mobasher hopes to answer fundamental questions about our universe today. Understanding the dark ages “would help us understand how galaxies are formed, how stars are formed, the evolution of galaxies through the universe,” he says. “How our own galaxy started, how it was formed, how fast it built up stars … all those questions are important questions we need to answer.”

Space officials are wondering: Should the moon have its own time zone? The ESA has proposed the at a recent agency meeting held in the Netherlands.