Lifeboat Foundation

What astronomers see in the light bouncing across the universe.

Scientists studying the chemical makeup of asteroid Ryugu and the Murchison meteorite find intriguing differences in their organic molecules.

O.o!!!

NEW DELHI: The “Devil Comet,” officially known as 12P, is currently making its way towards Earth and is anticipated to undergo a significant eruption soon. This comet, which is nearly three times the size of Mount Everest, is classified as a cryovolcano, which means it erupts due to the build-up and ignition of gas and ice, much like a frozen soda can exploding. The comet is notably large, with a diameter of 18.6 miles, comparable to the size of a small city.

According to Astronomy.com, it’s a short-period comet, completing an orbit around the Sun approximately every 71.2 years, a pattern similar to the well-known Halley’s Comets like this, with an orbital period of less than 200 years, are categorized as short-period comets.

Continue reading “‘Devil comet’, bigger than Mount Everest, racing towards Earth and is set to explode soon” »

Early PDP-11 models were not overly impressive. The first PDP-11 11/20 cost $20,000, but it shipped with only about 4KB of RAM. It used paper tape as storage and had an ASR-33 teletype printer console that printed 10 characters per second. But it also had an amazing orthogonal 16-bit architecture, eight registers, 65KB of address space, a 1.25 MHz cycle time, and a flexible UNIBUS hardware bus that would support future hardware peripherals. This was a winning combination for its creator, Digital Equipment Corporation.

The initial application for the PDP-11 included real-time hardware control, factory automation, and data processing. As the PDP-11 gained a reputation for flexibility, programmability, and affordability, it saw use in traffic light control systems, the Nike missile defense system, air traffic control, nuclear power plants, Navy pilot training systems, and telecommunications. It also pioneered the word processing and data processing that we now take for granted.

And the PDP-11’s influence is most strikingly evident in the device’s assembly programming.

Boeing and SpaceX have shared footage of U.S. Space Force’s secretive X-37B mini-shuttles in space with a payload-laden service module attached. A brief video clip showing the X-37B with the module separating from its launch rocket after being lofted into space in 2020 was included in a video montage shown ahead of the latest launch of an X-37B yesterday. You can find out more about what we can expect from the new X-37B mission in The War Zone’s previous reporting.

SpaceX broadcast the video montage that included the clip in question just minutes before a Falcon Heavy rocket with an X-37B on top blasted off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida last night. User @DutchSpace on X, formerly known as Twitter, was among the first to spot the clip of the X-37B separating into space.

Continue reading “Look At An X-37B In Space With An Extended Payload Module” »

1. AGI could be achieved or we will get even closer. There will OpenAI releasing GPT5 and updates of Google LLM like improved Gemini.

Definition’s for AI AGI = artificial general intelligence = a machine that performs at the level of an average (median) human.

ASI = artificial superintelligence = a machine that performs at the level of an expert human in practically any field.

The FASHI survey has mapped 35% of its target sky area with the FAST telescope, discovering over 41,000 extragalactic HI sources, and gaining acclaim in the astronomical community.

The FAST All Sky HI survey (FASHI) was designed to cover the entire sky observable by the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST), spanning approximately 22,000 square degrees of declination between-14 deg and +66 deg, and in the frequency range of 1050–1450 MHz, with the expectation of eventually detecting more than 100,000 HI sources.

Between August 2020 and June 2023, FASHI covered more than 7,600 square degrees, which is approximately 35% of the total sky observable by FAST. FASHI team has detected a total of 41,741 extragalactic HI sources in the frequency range 1305.5−1419.5 MHz. When completed, FASHI team will provide the largest extragalactic HI catalog and an objective view of HI content and large-scale structure in the local universe.

New theoretical analysis places the likelihood of massive neutron stars hiding cores of deconfined quark matter between 80 and 90 percent. The result was reached through massive supercomputer runs utilizing Bayesian statistical inference.

Neutron star cores contain matter at the highest densities reached in our present-day Universe, with as much as two solar masses of matter compressed inside a sphere of 25 km in diameter. These astrophysical objects can indeed be thought of as giant atomic nuclei, with gravity compressing their cores to densities exceeding those of individual protons and neutrons manyfold.

These densities make neutron stars interesting astrophysical objects from the point of view of particle and nuclear physics. A longstanding open problem concerns whether the immense central pressure of neutron stars can compress protons and neutrons into a new phase of matter, known as cold quark matter. In this exotic state of matter, individual protons and neutrons no longer exist.

In 2024, we’ll have much to look at in our wonderful solar system.