Lifeboat Foundation

A neutron star is perhaps one of the most awe-inspiring and mysterious things in the Universe. Composed almost entirely of neutrons with no net electrical charge, they are the final phase in the life-cycle of a giant star, born of the fiery explosions known as supernovae. They are also the densest known objects in the universe, a fact which often results in them becoming a black hole if they undergo a change in masspace and science black hole is in space science

For some time, astronomers have been confounded by this process, never knowing where or when a neutron star might make this final transformation. But thanks to a recent study by a team of researchers from Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, it may now be possible to determine the absolute maximum mass that is required for a neutron star to collapse, giving birth to a new black hole. space and science black hole is in space science

As with everything else relating to neutron stars, the process by which they become black holes has long been a source of fascination and bewilderment for astronomers. As the densest of all objects in the known universe, their mass cannot grow without bound – meaning that any increase in mass will also cause an increase in their density. space and science black hole is in space science.

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Amino acids, just like those that make up every protein in our bodies, have been found in the tails of comets.

Because, following a string of remarkable discoveries over the past two decades, the idea of alien life is not as far-fetched as it used to seem.

Discovery now seems inevitable and possibly imminent.

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In trying to answer such questions, scientists bump up against the limits of the laws of physics. Existing theories can account for the evolution of the universe from its earliest moments — from a fraction of a second after the Big Bang — but the question of what came before has been among the most vexing in all of science.

“It’s my life’s work to try to answer that question,” University of Toronto physicist Renée Hložek says.

This image represents the evolution of the universe, starting with the Big Bang. The red arrow marks the flow of time.

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Do you hear that? It’s the sound of Google executives practicing their lines ahead of Google I/O. The company’s annual developer conference in Mountain View, California, kicks off this Tuesday. The three-day event gives Google a chance to show off its latest work and set the tone for the year to come.

Can’t make it to the Shoreline Amphitheater? You can watch the entire keynote on the event page or on the Google Developers YouTube channel. It begins at 10 am PT (1 pm ET) on May 7 and should last for about 90 minutes. We’ll liveblog the whole thing here on WIRED.com.

Google I/O is technically a developer’s conference, and there should be plenty of talk about all the fun things developers can build using Google’s latest tools. But it’s also an opportunity to get consumers excited about what’s cooking in Mountain View. Last year, the company used the conference to debut its “digital wellness” initiative and a suite of new visual search tools for Google Lens. It also introduced Duplex, the eerily realistic AI assistant that can make dinner reservations and schedule haircuts like a human would.

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Space technologies will one day take us to asteroids, Mars and back to the moon, and the impact of these missions will be felt back on Earth, says George Whitesides, Chief Executive Officer at Virgin Galactic and co-chair of the Global Future Council on Space Technologies. In this interview, he explains how the latest developments in space technologies will help bring about revolutions in wifi access, travel and beyond. science space science cool science space and science universe space science.

What is the state of space technology today?

We are at an exciting moment. What we see are several converging trends that will change how we approach space technologies, at a rate of innovation that we haven’t seen in a long time. science space science cool science space and science universe space science.

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It sounds like bad science fiction, but there are good reasons to think that E.T. may be trying to communicate with us via encoded bacterial DNA.

Although the many experiments searching for evidence of dark matter have yet to turn up any solid proof of the stuff yet, they are making other amazing discoveries. The XENON1T experiment has now revealed the longest half-life ever seen in an element, which is far, far longer than the age of the universe.

The cosmos are filled with roughly Earth-sized exoplanets. Various moons, comets, and planets have stores of water, organic molecules, and amino acids like those that make up life on Earth.

Cathal O’Donnell, a 3D bioprinting researcher at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Melbournethose odds — he argues in The Conversation that the abundance of potentially habitable worlds out there makes the discovery of extraterrestrial life “inevitable and possibly imminent.”

How do you observe a process that takes more than one trillion times longer than the age of the universe? The XENON Collaboration research team did it with an instrument built to find the most elusive particle in the universe—dark matter. In a paper to be published tomorrow in the journal Nature, researchers announce that they have observed the radioactive decay of xenon-124, which has a half-life of 1.8 × 10²² years.

“We actually saw this decay happen. It’s the longest, slowest process that has ever been directly observed, and our dark matter detector was sensitive enough to measure it,” said Ethan Brown, an assistant professor of physics at Rensselaer, and co-author of the study. “It’s an amazing to have witnessed this process, and it says that our detector can measure the rarest thing ever recorded.”

The XENON Collaboration runs XENON1T, a 1,300-kilogram vat of super-pure liquid xenon shielded from cosmic rays in a cryostat submerged in water deep 1,500 meters beneath the Gran Sasso mountains of Italy. The researchers search for dark matter (which is five times more abundant than ordinary matter, but seldom interacts with ordinary matter) by recording tiny flashes of light created when particles interact with xenon inside the detector. And while XENON1T was built to capture the interaction between a dark matter particle and the nucleus of a xenon atom, the detector actually picks up signals from any interactions with the xenon.

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