Assistant Professor Chao-Lin Kuo surprises Professor Andrei Linde with evidence that supports cosmic inflation theory. The discovery, made by Kuo and his colleagues at the BICEP2 experiment, represents the first images of gravitational waves, or ripples in space-time. These waves have been described as the "first tremors of the Big Bang."
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Good news from the Stars
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To boldly go where only Astrophysicians have gone before. What I find interesting (and can roughly understand) in Astronomy & Space exploration these days.
Curated by
Guillaume Decugis
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This one ship is the equivalent of 15 Boeing 747s bundled together and running at full power.
Guillaume Decugis's insight:
Space X latest version of the Falcon rocket will be no less than the heaviest rocket in existence, coming only third to Saturn V and the Russian Energia rocket in history. 
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It would be wonderful if nobody died in our efforts to explore space. But building a program around that goal is no way to accomplish anything of note.
Guillaume Decugis's insight:
It's safer to be an astronaut than a mountaineer or a navy pilot. We need to change that and go back to the days where there was not only risk but reward. In this article, Mollie Hemingway argues that the space shuttles deadly accidents were hard to accept not per se but because they seemed to be having had trivial objectives. It's great to see arguments piling up for that debate. And it's also important to remember that the greatest risk might be not to take any.
Vincent Lieser's curator insight,
February 5, 2014 4:31 PM
There is no solar-system-wide civilisation if it's risk-free.
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Astronomers have finally identified a jet in Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way.
Guillaume Decugis's insight:
This is a fascinating discovery...
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One of the most powerful tools for understanding the formation and evolution of galaxies has been the use of computer simulations—numerical models of astrophysical processes run on supercomputers and compared with astronomical observations. Getting computer simulations to produce realistic-looking galaxies has been a challenge, however, and different codes (simulation programs) produce inconsistent results.
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Even though we are both heading to more or less the same part of the International Space Station, our routes are completely different, set out by the choreography we have studied meticulously. My route is direct, towards the back of the Station, while Chris has to go towards the front first in order to wind his cable around Z1, the central truss structure above Node 1. At that moment, none of us in orbit or on Earth could have imagined just how much this decision would influence the events of the day.
Guillaume Decugis's insight:
No need to see the Gravity movie to get a good space thriller: this actual story from an Italian astronaut is actually quite scary.
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Aliens do exist and have been found living in the clouds above the Peak District, according to new claims by scientists.
Guillaume Decugis's insight:
"Our conclusion is that life is continually arriving to Earth from space" said the scientists who discovered these microcospic life forms by bringing them back to the ground from a scientific balloon. Comets - they say - are how they got here. While this is fascinating, the discovery has been met with skepticism by the scientific community. Eager to see what's coming next...UPDATE: so what's next is more and more skepticism by the scientific community: http://www.scoop.it/t/good-news-from-the-stars/p/4008117791/scientists-unconvinced-by-evidence-for-alien-life
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Physicists have devised a new experiment to test if the universe is a computer. A philosophical thought experiment has long held that it is more likely than not that we're living inside a machine. Via dannybloomfield
Guillaume Decugis's insight:
Very meta but interesting read. Are we in a matrix?
Ally Greer's curator insight,
October 15, 2013 2:35 PM
Can hardly wrap my brain around this concept and yet it so excites me. I know @Guillaume Decugis loves matrices! 
Ludovic LE MOAN's comment,
January 12, 2014 4:31 AM
I am surprised to find this article since I believe myself, we are part of a simulator. My idea to try to prove it should be to find a gap in our time scale. If we can demonstrate the time is not continious, we will have found this evidence. Like a computer time is sharing by processus, it should be the same for universe!
Guillaume Decugis's comment,
January 12, 2014 7:23 PM
I've just read an interesting SF novel on that topic: Redshirts by John Scalzi http://www.amazon.com/Redshirts-A-Novel-Three-Codas/dp/0765334798 Interesting read on that topic!
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Scientists split over whether Nasa probe has finally left the solar system after 36 years
Guillaume Decugis's insight:
Interesting follow-up to a discussion already started last year. The end of the solar system is being redefined in part thanks to the Voyager missions.
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From
rt
Skylon, a revolutionary UK spacecraft which could take adventurers to Earth’s stratosphere in just 15 minutes or fly travelers to Australia in four hours, will get $90 million from the government. The challenge is to cut the cost of space travel.
Via Stratocumulus
Guillaume Decugis's insight:
Nice project. Competition for Virgin Galactic? Or the future of air travel?
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AVAST gentle reader: mild SPOILER(S) and graphic depictions of shattered satellites ahead!
Guillaume Decugis's insight:
Finally saw the movie Oblivion and that was the first question I googled following that as the movie's (otherwise great) plot seemed strange to me on that point.
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SPACE is expensive. Really expensive. If you want an idea of how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly expensive it is, the International Space Station (ISS) is a good... (Looking forward to see the result!
Guillaume Decugis's insight:
NASA - and more generally government agencies - are losing their monopolies on Space exploration. And that's old for everyone.
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NASA’s Kepler mission has discovered more than 100 confirmed planets orbiting distant stars.
Guillaume Decugis's insight:
Watch them orbit on scale and sort them by size: great job by the nytimes!
Gust MEES's curator insight,
April 27, 2013 10:37 AM
Nice interactive infographic, check it out an learn more...
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Scientists from the Centre for Astrophysics have found evidence of gravitational waves created mere moments after the dawn of the Universe. These waves were created in a period of rapid expansion called cosmic inflation. This new evidence could prove the definitive confirmation of the inflation theory. It seems that finally, scientists can claim to understand the goings on at the beginning of everything.
Guillaume Decugis's insight:
The recent discovery of the first direct evidence of cosmic inflation is a big deal: until now, the Big Bang has only been a theory. Until now.
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Imagine a ribbon roughly one hundred million times as long as it is wide. If it were a meter long, it would be 10 nanometers wide, or just a few times thicker than a DNA double helix. Scaled up to the length of a football field, it would still be less than a micrometer across — smaller than a red blood cell. Would you trust your life to that thread? What about a tether 100,000 kilometers long, one stretching from the surface of the Earth to well past geostationary orbit (GEO, 22,236 miles up), but which was still somehow narrower than your own wingspan? Via Dr. Stefan Gruenwald
Guillaume Decugis's insight:
Hundreds of challenges remain to be solved but as even NASA struggles to maintain an edge, the pay-off of a Space Elevator has never been clearer. The original idea of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky which Arthur C. Clarke turned into a novel could be the revolution space exploration needs.
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BROOKLYN, N.Y. — Scientists have long used mathematics to describe the physical properties of the universe. But what if the universe itself is math?
Guillaume Decugis's insight:
Yes: how about considering things the other way around? If cosmologist Max Tegmark's intuition is true this physicist says we can potentially understand all of it. But as he puts it, 'If My Idea Is Wrong, Physics Is Ultimately Doomed'
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WASHINGTON — The Mars One colonization project plans to bring live video of the surface of Mars to Earth via a privately built communications satellite and lander to launch as part of an unmanned mission to the Red Planet in 2018.
Via Stratocumulus
Guillaume Decugis's insight:
Amazing development of the private sector space industry. While we can always regret NASA didn't send a man to walk on Mars yet, what we're seeing from private initiatives will probably lead to a much stronger space coloinzation effort in the long run.
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Space tourism sounds exciting and unforgettable and all, but with a single trip costing as much as a small house, it's simply out of reach for the average person.
Guillaume Decugis's insight:
So these guys came out with the cheap(er) version: a Bautmgartner-like balloon but bigger. Not quite space, no zero-G but a 1/3 of a Virgin Galactic ticket.
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Have scientists found alien life in our atmosphere?
Guillaume Decugis's insight:
Unlikely say many scientists who criticize the rapid conclusion the University of Sheffield scientists arrived at. This is just one article but after being intrigued by my previous post on this, I investigated further and found the scientific community has been raising many concerns such as : - we don't know whether the box where they found the organism was properly isolated nor how it was open after landing - no tests we're run to see whether similar organisms exist on earth
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We may all be Martians. Evidence is building that Earth life originated on Mars and was brought to our planet aboard a meteorite, says biochemist Steven Benner of The Westheimer Institute for Science and Technology in Florida.
Guillaume Decugis's insight:
Sounds counter-intuitive and I find it hard to believe. But then again it's just one theory among many.
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Scooped by
Guillaume Decugis
July 18, 2013 11:19 PM
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The astronomers said the planet's color was created by a hazy turbulent atmosphere of silicate particles that scatter blue light.
Guillaume Decugis's insight:
A great first made possible by Hubble Space Telescope. Now just because it's blue doesn't mean it's similar to earth: this is actually a giant gas planet closer to Jupiter.
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Scooped by
Guillaume Decugis
July 16, 2013 2:43 PM
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Data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory have been used to discover 26 black hole candidates in the Milky Way's galactic neighbor, Andromeda, as described in our latest press release. This is the largest number of possible black holes found in a galaxy outside of our own. A team of researchers, led by Robin Barnard of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, used 152 observations of Chandra spanning over 13 years to find the 26 new black hole candidates. Nine were known from earlier work. These black holes belong to the stellar-mass black hole category, which means they were created when a massive star collapsed and are about 5 to 10 times the mass of the Sun. This wide-field view of Andromeda contains optical data from the Burrell Schmidt telescope of the Warner and Swansey Observatory on Kitt Peak in Arizona. Additional detail of the core and dust in the spiral arms comes from an image taken by astrophotographer Vicent Peris using data from two of his personal telescopes. In this combined optical image, red, green, and blue show different bands from the visible light portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. The inset contains X-ray data from multiple Chandra observations of the central region of Andromeda. This Chandra image shows 28 of the 35 black hole candidates in this view, visible by mousing over the image. The other seven candidates can be seen in this Chandra image with a larger field of view.
Guillaume Decugis's insight:
This is impressive.
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Scooped by
Guillaume Decugis
May 30, 2013 8:23 PM
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"Either we spread earth to other planets, or we risk going extinct. An extinction event is inevitable and we’re increasingly doing ourselves in."
Guillaume Decugis's insight:
We can't blame Musk for not being visionary. I wonder whether dramatizing the topic like he did will have an impact.
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Rescooped by
Guillaume Decugis
from New Space
May 15, 2013 12:30 AM
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Richard Branson, whose Virgin Group co-owns Virgin Galactic, said in Dubai yesterday that he would be on board the first public flight on December 25.
Via Allen Taylor
Guillaume Decugis's insight:
Bold.
Allen Taylor's curator insight,
May 15, 2013 12:27 AM
Richard Branson proclaims first public flight to space of SpaceShipTwo will happen on Christmas Day 2013 and that he will be on it. This puts the pressure on the Scaled Composites team doing the flight testing.
This is probably what scientists live for: the unique moment in one's career when the theory you built is proven true. Awesome.