Lifeboat Foundation

That looks promising. 90% accuracy isn’t bad. Now the trick is getting there though we have options on our own solar system possibly. You never know until you try. I doubt we’ll find high level life remnants but perhaps something much less like at most insect level but more likely microbial. I’m just guessing of course.

A team of scientists supported in part by NASA have outlined a simple and reliable method to search for signs of past or present life on other worlds that employs machine learning techniques. The results show that the method can distinguish both modern and ancient biosignatures with an accuracy of 90 percent.

The method is able to detect whether or not a sample contains materials that were tied to biological activity. What the research team refers to as a “routine analytical method” could be performed with instruments on missions including spacecraft, landers, and rovers, even before samples are returned to Earth. In addition, the method could be used to shed light on the history of ancient rocks on our own planet.

Continue reading “Machine Learning in the Search for Agnostic Biosignatures” »

NGC 4,654 is a spiral galaxy with some interesting nuances of stellar formation.

Have you seen an unusually bright object moving through the evening sky recently?

Chances are that it wasn’t one of the mysterious objects that the DoD and NASA are currently studying, but was instead one of the growing number of manmade spacecraft taking up residence in Earth’s orbit.

And this one has astronomers particularly concerned.

The surprising detection of light 200 times more powerful than previous observations from the nearby pulsar Vela indicates hidden physics around dead stars.

The Vela pulsar has claimed the record for emitting the most powerful gamma rays among all known pulsars.

A corpse of a dead star has been found to be emanating the most intense gamma rays ever observed. This unexpected observation was found coming from the Vela pulsar, situated in the constellation Vela.

Astronomers noted that the detected gamma rays had an astonishing energy level of 20 tera-electronvolts (TeV), which is ten trillion times higher than the energy of visible light.

Continue reading “Most energetic gamma-ray emission detected from a pulsar” »

After decades of searching, scientists have found stars accompanying the gas streaming from two smaller galaxies that orbit our Milky Way.

Our galaxy is so big that astronomers are still exploring its stellar backwaters. Now, new observations have enabled them to map a previously uncharted structure in the Milky Way.

Scientists have found 13 stars that they believe are associated with the Magellanic Stream — a giant ribbon of gas stretching over three-quarters of the way across the sky. The researchers presented their findings on the arXiv astronomy preprint server in June.

Two conflicting methods to measure the expansion rate of the universe give different results, but researchers could resolve the disparity by watching merging neutron stars explode.

For the first time, astronomers have directly imaged the faint glow of the diffuse cosmic web that stretches throughout the known the universe.

The first asteroid sample collected in space by a U.S. spacecraft and brought to Earth is unveiled to the world at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston on…