Lifeboat Foundation

Up to a certain point, very luminous stars can have a positive effect on the formation of planets, but from that point on the radiation they emit can cause the material in protoplanetary discs to disperse.

NASA’s new supersonic jet, the X-59, goes so fast it can’t have a windshield. Here’s how pilots will fly it.

An international team used the James Webb Space Telescope to study a protoplanetary disc in the Orion Nebula, revealing how massive stars significantly influence the formation of planetary systems. They discovered that intense ultraviolet radiation from these stars can prevent the formation of Jupiter-like planets in systems like d203-506, providing new insights into the complexities of how planetary systems develop.

How do planetary systems such as the Solar System form? To find out, CNRS scientists taking part in an international research team^[1] studied a stellar nursery, the Orion Nebula, using the James Webb Space Telescope.^[2] By observing a protoplanetary disc named d203-506, they have discovered the key role played by massive stars in the formation of such nascent planetary systems.^[3].

“Semiparametric Token-Sequence Co-Supervision”

We introduce semiparametric token-sequence co-supervision, which trains LM by simultaneously leveraging supervision from a parametric token and a nonparametric sequence embedding space.

✅ Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.09024 ✅ Code: https://avatars.githubusercontent.com/u/44370759?s=64&v=4

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A paper recently published in Icarus presents findings about the Kuiper Belt Object 486,958 Arrokoth, shedding new light on the preservation of volatile substances like carbon monoxide (CO) in such distant celestial bodies.

Lurking some nine billion light years away from Earth is what appears to be a so-called cosmic megastructure in the shape of an enormous ring. It’s so large that its existence should be impossible, according to new research reported on by The Guardian, challenging a fundamental assumption of our understanding of the Universe.

Known as the “Big Ring,” the structure spans an astonishing 1.3 billion light years in diameter — a significant portion of the observable Universe’s estimated size of 94 billion light years. By contrast, the largest known galaxy is a “mere” 16 million light years across. If it were visible in the night sky to the naked eye, the Big Ring would be equal in diameter to fifteen full moons. Succinctly put: it’s unfathomably huge.

The unpublished findings, presented at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society on Thursday, add to a growing list of inexplicably large structures that remain confounding — if not controversial — to scientists.

How deep is the lunar regolith and megaregolith, the latter of which consists of the cracked lunar crust layers resulting from billions of years of impact craters? This is what the Synthetic Pulse Artemis Radar for Crustal Imaging (SPARCI, pronounced “sparky”) instrument hopes to address as the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) was recently awarded a 3-year, $2,041,000 grant from NASA’s Development and Advancement of Lunar Instrumentation (DALI) program as part of advancing lunar exploration technologies.

Image of the Synthetic Pulse Artemis Radar for Crustal Imaging (SPARCI, pronounced “sparky”). (Credit: Southwest Research Institute/Bryan Pyke)

“Learning more about the lunar megaregolith will help us gain a wider understanding of the Moon’s formation and that of similar bodies with thin, sparse atmospheres,” said Dr. David Stillman, who is a geophysicist at SwRI and SPARCI’s principal investigator. “If we are able to pinpoint exactly where this layer begins, we can use that to create more accurate formation and evolution models.”

Cornell University astrobiologists have devised a novel way to determine ocean temperatures of distant worlds based on the thickness of their ice shells, effectively conducting oceanography from space.

Available data showing ice thickness variation already allows a prediction for the upper ocean of Enceladus, a moon of Saturn, and a NASA mission’s planned orbital survey of Europa’s ice shell should do the same for the much larger Jovian moon, enhancing the mission’s findings about whether it could support life.

The researchers propose that a process called “ice pumping,” which they’ve observed below Antarctic ice shelves, likely shapes the undersides of Europa’s and Enceladus’ ice shells, but should also operate at Ganymede and Titan, large moons of Jupiter and Saturn, respectively. They show that temperature ranges where the ice and ocean interact — important regions where ingredients for life may be exchanged — can be calculated based on an ice shell’s slope and changes in water’s freezing point at different pressures and salinities.

Depending on where we look, the universe is expanding at different rates. Now, scientists using the James Webb and Hubble space telescopes have confirmed that the observation is not down to a measurement error.