Lifeboat Foundation

Turns out, dehydrated passion fruits exhibit a type of symmetry not previously known, inspiring self-adapting robots that could one day ‘grasp’ space junk.

A previously unknown type of wrinkling pattern on the surface of dehydrated passion fruits inspired the invention of a device that could be used to clean up space debris and hazardous materials, according to South Morning China Post (SMCP)

The real-life application comes after Fan Xu, Xi-Qiao Feng and colleagues at Fudan University in Shanghai reported an unknown type of chiral wrinkling pattern on the surface of dehydrated passion fruits in their study published in the journal Nature Computational Science the same day. previously unknown type of wrinkling pattern on the surface of dehydrated passion fruits inspired the invention of a device that could be used to clean up space debris and hazardous materials, according to South Morning China Post (SMCP).

A type of aurora briefly tore a 400 km wide hole in Earth’s ozone layer.

An international team of researchers showed that a certain type of aurora called the “Isolated proton aurora” depletes our atmosphere’s ozone layer. They discovered a nearly 250-mile-wide (400 kilometers) hole in the ozone layer right above where an aurora occurred. Before now, the influence of these particles was only vaguely known. The study is published in Scientific reports.

What causes the auroras?

Continue reading “Auroras are responsible for punching holes in the ozone layer” »

The new Halloween haunted house soundtrack just dropped, courtesy of the European Space Agency.

New Halloween haunted house soundtrack just dropped, courtesy of the European Space Agency.

Kiona Smith

Continue reading “Earth’s magnetic field is the spookiest thing you’ve ever heard” »

Astronomers have discovered a mysterious neutron star that’s far lighter than previously thought possible, undermining our understanding of the physics and evolution of stars. And fascinatingly, it may be composed largely of quarks.

As detailed in a new paper published in the journal Nature Astronomy this week, the neutron star has a radius of just 6.2 miles and only the mass of 77 percent of the Sun.

That makes it much lighter than other previously studied neutron stars, which usually have a mass of 1.4 times the mass of the Sun at the same radius.

A tactical ground station that finds and tracks threats to support long-range precision targeting, TITAN promises to bring together data from ground, air, and space sensors. Graphic courtesy of Raytheon.

With Project Convergence, the Army has sought to further its integration into the Joint Force and change the way it fights, with an eye toward greater speed, range, and accuracy — particularly for long-range precision fires. Army leadership is looking particularly to close the gaps around sensor-generated intelligence — specifically how it’s sensed, made sense, and acted upon.

To that end, Raytheon Intelligence & Space (RI&S) was selected in June for a competitive, prototype phase in the continued development of the Army’s Tactical Intelligence Targeting Access Node (TITAN) program. Awarded under an Other Transaction Agreement, TITAN seeks to turn battlefield intelligence into targeting information. A tactical ground station that finds and tracks threats to support long-range precision targeting, TITAN promises to bring together data from ground, air, and space sensors.

The engineering of so-called Floquet states leads to almost-perfect atom-optics elements for matter-wave interferometers—which could boost these devices’ ability to probe new physics.

Since Michelson and Morley’s famous experiment to detect the “luminiferous aether,” optical interferometry has offered valuable tools for studying fundamental physics. Nowadays, cutting-edge applications of the technique include its use as a high-precision ruler for detecting gravitational waves (see Focus: The Moon as a Gravitational-Wave Detector) and as a platform for quantum computing (see Viewpoint: Quantum Leap for Quantum Primacy). But as methods for cooling and controlling atoms have advanced, a new kind of interferometer has become available, in which light waves are replaced by matter waves [1]. Such devices can measure inertial forces with a sensitivity even greater than that of optical interferometers [2] and could reveal new physics beyond the standard model.

In the past decades, the number of known exoplanets—planets in other solar systems—has skyrocketed. But we’re still in the dark about a number of details, including how massive they are and what they’re made up of.

A University of Chicago undergraduate, however, was able to tease some clues out of data that most scientists had overlooked.

Jared Siegel, B.S. ‘22, spent six months analyzing data taken by a NASA spacecraft. Some of this data was full of statistical noise, making it hard to differentiate planets from other phenomena; but Siegel and his advisor, astrophysicist Leslie Rogers, were able to extract useful information about these planets, setting an upper bound on how massive they could be.

Quarks all the way down.

Astronomers recently discovered that this neutron star left behind by the collapse and explosion of a supergiant is now roughly 77 percent the mass of our Sun, packed into a sphere about 10 kilometers wide. That’s a mind-bogglingly dense ball of matter — it’s squished together so tightly that it doesn’t even have room to be atoms, just neutrons. But as neutron stars go, it’s weirdly lightweight. Figuring out why that’s the case could reveal fascinating new details about exactly what happens when massive stars collapse and explode.

What’s New — When a massive star collapses, it triggers an explosion that blasts most of the star’s outer layers out into space, where they form an ever-widening cloud of hot, glowing gas. The heart of the star, however, gets squashed together in the final pressure of that collapse and becomes a neutron star. Normally, what’s left behind is something between 1.17 and 2.35 times as massive as the Sun, crammed into a ball a few dozen kilometers wide.

Billions of years ago, a version of planet Earth that looked very different than the one we live on today was hit by an object about the size of Mars, called Theia – and out of that collision the Moon was formed. How exactly that formation occurred is a scientific puzzle researchers have studied for decades, without a conclusive answer.

Until now, most theories have claimed that the Moon formed out of the debris of this collision, coalescing in orbit over months or years. However, a new simulation presents a different outcome – the Moon may have formed immediately, in a matter of hours, when material from the Earth and Theia was launched directly into orbit after the impact.

“This opens up a whole new range of possible starting places for the Moon’s evolution,” said Jacob Kegerreis, a postdoctoral researcher at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California and lead author of a paper this month in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. “We went into this project not knowing exactly what the outcomes of these high-resolution simulations would be. So, on top of the big eye-opener that standard resolutions can give you misleading answers, it was extra exciting that the new results could include a tantalisingly Moon-like satellite in orbit.”