Lifeboat Foundation

NASA continues to outdo itself with the majestic images of space that it keeps releasing – but even by the agency’s high standards, a 12-year timelapse of the entirety of the night sky is an impressive achievement.

The imagery has been captured over those years by the NEOWISE (Near-Earth Object Wide Field Infrared Survey Explorer) space telescope, which was originally launched in 2009 under the previous name ‘WISE’ to study the Universe outside of our Solar System.

Continue reading “NASA Just Unveiled an Epic 12-Year Timelapse of The Entire Sky” »

Astronomers have captured the aftermath of a dramatic gamma-ray burst, which was likely triggered by the death of an enormous star, and the brightest cosmic explosion ever detected.

The new service will provide 350 Mbps internet, even while taking off and landing.

SpaceX just announced its new Starlink Aviation service, which will allow high-speed in-flight internet that will allow users to make voice calls and stream videogames, according to the company.

The new service promises speeds of up to 350 Mbps for airliners and is aimed mainly at private jet contractors. Earlier this year, SpaceX also announced a partnership with Hawaiian Airlines to bring free WiFi to its flights starting early next year.

Continue reading “SpaceX’s new Starlink Aviation service brings 350 Mbps WiFi to private jets” »

The Pillars of Creation, revisited.

The James Webb Space Telescope recaptured the Pillars of Creation in a newly-released photo, revealing a star-studded view of the iconic Hubble target.

Gravitational waves are invisible to the naked eye, but can be detected with instruments such as the Large Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) in Pasadena, California. So, after LIGO detected the first blast of waves from the colliding stars in 2017, astronomers around the world trained their telescopes on the merger to learn whatever they could about it. Before long, astronomers saw visible evidence of a high-speed jet of particles, blazing out of the collision site and lighting up globs of matter that had been ejected by the stars.

In their new paper, astronomers analyzed that jet with NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, the European Space Agency’s Gaia space observatory and several additional radio telescopes on Earth. With these observations, the team calculated both the actual speed of the jet, and the perceived physics-defying speed.

The beyond-light-speed illusion arises from the difference in speed between the particles in the jet, and the light particles (or photons) that they emit. Because the jet’s particles move nearly as fast as the light they emit, it can appear as though particles in the early part of the jet are arriving at Earth at nearly the same time as photons in the later stages of the jet — making it appear as though the jet is actually moving faster than the speed of light.

But the true nature of the pillars was famously revealed in 1995 by the Hubble Space Telescope, an image that wowed the public and was soon one of the most recognized and widely published photos ever captured by the venerable observatory.

But Hubble is primarily a visible-light telescope with only a limited ability to detect cloud-piercing infrared emissions from the interior of the pillars and from stars shining in and behind a translucent, obscuring layer of gas making up the interstellar medium that is most apparent looking into the plane of the galaxy.

Continue reading “Webb space telescope reveals ‘Pillars of Creation’ in stunning new detail” »

The massive launch system will carry a mysterious U.S. Space Force payload to a high-altitude geosynchronous orbit.

It’s been a while since SpaceX launched Falcon Heavy to orbit.

A string of payload delays has stopped the heavy-duty rocket from hitting the launch pad since the summer of 2019.