Lifeboat Foundation

Congratulations to Dr. Emmanuel Ríos López and her co-advisor Dr. X’opher Añorve and to our collaborators, Dr. Hector Javier Ibarra Medel, the Dr. Mabel Valerdi, the Dr. Gabriela Ileana Tudorica Iacobuta and the lng. Physics. Joaquin Alvira Enriquez. Three generations of summer students (VICI): Alvira-Enriquez, Valerdi and Iacobuta. Three generations of PhD students: Añorve, Ibarra-Medel and Rios-Lopez.

In this work we analyzed a sample of 101 brilliant galaxies using a two-dimensional decomposition of the shallow shine. This work serves to explore the formation of galaxies and their relationship with the supermassive holes black houses in their cores. We fixed some errors that the original sample came dragging.

We are grateful to Prof. Thomas Jarrett and Dr. Chien Peng for helping us along the generation of the work. We are standing on their shoulders, Prof. generated the Large Galaxy Atlas and Dr. Peng gave us GALFIT the best software for galaxy 2D surface brightness analysis.

Continue reading “Article Accepted in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society” »

But a team of physicists is proposing a radical idea: Instead of forming black holes through the usual death-of-a-massive-start route, giant dark matter halos directly collapsed, forming the seeds of the first great black holes.

Supermassive black holes (SMBHs) appear early in the history of the universe, as little as a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. That rapid appearance poses a challenge to conventional models of SMBH birth and growth because it doesn’t look like there can be enough time for them to grow so massive so quickly.

Continue reading “The bonkers connection between massive black holes and dark matter” »

The three-body problem, which has been a focus of scientific study for over 400 years, represented a stumbling block for famous astronomers such as Isaac Newton and Johannes Kepler.

Stars scattered throughout the cosmos look different, but they may be more alike than once thought, according to Rice University researchers.

New modeling work by Rice scientists shows that “cool” stars like the sun share the dynamic surface behaviors that influence their energetic and magnetic environments. This stellar magnetic activity is key to whether a given star hosts planets that could support life.

The work by Rice postdoctoral researcher Alison Farrish and astrophysicists David Alexander and Christopher Johns-Krull appears in a published study in The Astrophysical Journal. The research links the rotation of cool stars with the behavior of their surface magnetic flux, which in turn drives the star’s coronal X-ray luminosity, in a way that could help predict how magnetic activity affects any exoplanets in their systems.

Three scientists on Tuesday won the Nobel Physics Prize, including the first woman to receive the prestigious award in 55 years, for inventing Chirped-pulse amplification, or CPA. The 9-million-Swedish-kronor award (about $1 million) will be doled out to Arthur Ashkin of Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, N.J., Gérard Mourou of École Polytechnique in Palaiseau, France, and Donna Strickland of the University of Waterloo in Canada. This is a technique for creating ultrashort, yet extremely high-energy laser pulses necessary in a variety of applications. It is remarkable what can be achieved with lasers in research and in applications, and there are many good reasons for it, including their coherence, frequency stability, and controllability, but for some applications, the thing that really matters is raw power. Article by Dr. Olivier Alirol, Physicist, Resonance Science Foundation Research Scientist.

Circa 2016

Scientists and engineers since the 1940s have been toying with the idea of building self-replicating machines, or von Neumann machines, named for John von Neumann. With recent advances in 3D printing (including in zero gravity) and machine learning AI, it seems like self-replicating machines are much more feasible today. In the 21st century, a tantalizing possibility for this technology has emerged: sending a space probe out to a different star system, having it mine resources to make a copy of itself, and then launching that one to yet another star system, and on and on and on.

As a wild new episode of PBS’s YouTube series Space Time suggests, if we could send a von Neumann probe to another star system—likely Alpha Centauri, the closest to us at about 4.4 light years away—then that autonomous spaceship could land on a rocky planet, asteroid, or moon and start building a factory. (Of course, it’d probably need a nuclear fusion drive, something we still need to develop.)

Continue reading “Could We Explore the Entire Galaxy With Self-Replicating Robots?” »

According to theory, if you smash two photons together hard enough, you can generate matter: an electron-positron pair, the conversion of light to mass as per Einstein’s theory of special relativity.

It’s called the Breit-Wheeler process, first laid out by Gregory Breit and John A. Wheeler in 1,934 and we have very good reason to believe it would work.

But direct observation of the pure phenomenon involving just two photons has remained elusive, mainly because the photons need to be extremely energetic (i.e. gamma rays) and we don’t have the technology yet to build a gamma-ray laser.

This axion insulating state was realized, Bansil says, by combining certain metals and observing their magnetoelectric response. In this case, researchers used a solid state chip composed of manganese bismuth telluride, which were adhered together in two-dimensional layers, to measure the resulting electric and magnetic properties.

Researchers note that such a finding has implications for a range of technologies, including sensors, switches, computers, and memory storage devices, among many others. The “storage, transportation, and manipulation of magnetic data could become much faster, more robust, and energy-efficient” if scientists can integrate these new topological materials into future devices, the researchers write.

“It’s like discovering a new element,” Bansil says. “And we know there’s going to be all sorts of interesting applications for this.”

Circa 2,016 o,.0.

Like paleontologists describing a fossil, astronomers have teased out the backstory of the first directly detected gravitational waves.