How slight differences could have forever changed our cosmic history.
Category: space
After the launch of Tiangong space station’s core module in April, China took on its next challenge: send astronauts to live there.
The crew of Shenzhou-12 successfully docked at Tiangong this week, and will stay on board for 3 months.
First astronauts enter China’s Tiangong space station.
The three took up residence in the core module hours after the Shenzhou 12 launch craft lifted off from the Gobi Desert.
The first astronauts for China’s new space station blasted off Thursday for the country’s longest crewed mission to date, a landmark step in establishing Beijing as a major space power.
Perseverance, NASA’s rover that landed on Mars in February, is looking for signs of ancient microbial life and determining if the Red Planet is habitable for humans.
From Mariner 4 to Curiosity, these historical missions have shaped our understanding of the Red Planet.
By using a reusable booster, the newest branch of the military signals openness to this cornerstone of Elon Musk’s rocketry company.
In search for a unifying quantum gravity theory that would reconcile general relativity with quantum theory, it turns out quantum theory is more fundamental, after all. Quantum mechanical principles, some physicists argue, apply to all of reality (not only the realm of ultra-tiny), and numerous experiments confirm that assumption. After a century of Einsteinian relativistic physics gone unchallenged, a new kid of the block, Computational Physics, one of the frontrunners for quantum gravity, states that spacetime is a flat-out illusion and that what we call physical reality is actually a construct of information within [quantum neural] networks of conscious agents. In light of the physics of information, computational physicists eye a new theory as an “It from Qubit” offspring, necessarily incorporating consciousness in the new theoretic models and deeming spacetime, mass-energy as well as gravity emergent from information processing.
In fact, I expand on foundations of such new physics of information, also referred to as [Quantum] Computational Physics, Quantum Informatics, Digital Physics, and Pancomputationalism, in my recent book The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind’s Evolution. The Cybernetic Theory of Mind I’m currently developing is based on reversible quantum computing and projective geometry at large. This ontological model, a “theory of everything” of mine, agrees with certain quantum gravity contenders, such as M-Theory on fractal dimensionality and Emergence Theory on the code-theoretic ontology, but admittedly goes beyond all current models by treating space-time, mass-energy and gravity as emergent from information processing within a holographic, multidimensional matrix with the Omega Singularity as the source.
There’s plenty of cosmological anomalies of late that make us question the traditional interpretation of relativity. First off, what Albert Einstein (1879 — 1955) himself called “the biggest blunder” of his scientific career – t he rate of the expansion of our Universe, or the Hubble constant – is the subject of a very important discrepancy: Its value changes based how scientists try to measure it. New results from the Hubble Space Telescope have now “raised the discrepancy beyond a plausible level of chance,” according to one of the latest papers published in the Astrophysical Journal. We are stumbling more often on all kinds of discrepancies in relativistic physics and the standard cosmological model. Not only the Hubble constant is “constantly” called into question but even the speed of light, if measured by different methods, and on which Einsteinian theories are based upon, shows such discrepancies and turns out not really “constant.”
A giant star called VVV-WIT-08 exhibited a smooth, eclipse-like drop in brightness to a depth of 97% in 2012; minimum brightness occurred in April 2012 and the total event duration was a few hundred days, according to an analysis of data from the VISTA Variables in the Via Lactea survey (VVV), a project using the British-built VISTA telescope in Chile and operated by ESO.
It may belong to a new class of ‘blinking’ binary system, where a giant star — 100 times larger than the Sun — is eclipsed once every few decades by an as-yet unseen orbital companion.
Livescience.com|By LiveScience
The five-year survey, conducted across a section of the cosmos known as the nearby universe because of its proximity to our own galaxy, used the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA) radio telescope located in Chile’s Atacama Desert. By conducting their survey in the radio part of the electromagnetic spectrum, rather than the optical part, the astronomers could focus on the faint glow from the dust and gas of the dark and dense molecular clouds, as opposed to the visible light from the young stars birthed by them.
This allowed the researchers to study how a star’s home cloud shapes its formation.
The agency has put out a request for mission proposals to send people to the International Space Station.