Business Insider
Stephen Hawking's famous theory of how black holes die could mean our entire universe is doomed to evaporate, a new study found
Jessica Orwig
Sat, June 3, 2023 at 4:35 PM CDT
Black holes die by evaporation, Stephen Hawking theorized. Science Photo Library - MARK GARLICK/Getty Images
Stephen Hawking famously predicted in 1974 that black holes die by evaporation.
But experts thought the extreme gravitational environments of black holes were unique to his theory.
A new study suggests this Hawking radiation that kills black holes could also kill everything else.
The ultimate fate of our universe is unknown. But that doesn't stop astronomers from trying to figure it out.
The most recent idea of how our universe might end is that it will simply evaporate. That's right, everything will evaporate, a new study published in the journal Physical Review Letters suggests.
The scientists from Radboud University were examining Stephen Hawking's theory of how black holes die by a phenomenon now famously known as Hawking radiation, which the theoretical physicist predicted in 1974.
According to quantum physics theory and Einstein's theory of gravity, particles spontaneously form and annihilate under the intense gravitational environment located at the mouths of black holes, aka the event horizon.
Hawking calculated that sometimes these particles are trapped behind the event horizon, but others escape to the outside in the form of Hawking radiation. Over time, enough particles escape that the entire black hole evaporates.
Hawking radiation has been observed around a black hole in our universe, confirming the late genius's predictions. And up to this point, black holes were the only places experts had looked for it.
But this new study may change that.
"Objects without an event horizon, such as the remnants of dead stars and other large objects in the universe, also have this sort of radiation," study author Heino Falcke said in a statement on Friday. "And, after a very long period, that would lead to everything in the universe eventually evaporating, just like black holes."
In the study, the scientists propose that you don't necessarily need extreme gravitational environments for Hawking radiation to exist.
Rather, anything with mass that warps the fabric of spacetime could trigger this radiation.
"We show that far beyond a black hole the curvature of spacetime plays a big role in creating radiation," study co-author Walter van Suijlekom said in the statement.
The scientists' calculations will need further analysis and testing as well as observational proof to confirm their predictions.
If their theory holds true, though, there's nothing to worry about in the near future.
It takes black holes longer than the age of the universe to evaporate, researchers have estimated. While it's unclear how long it would take something like a star to do the same, chances are our universe will remain intact for the foreseeable future.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/st ... 25087.html
Articles of Interest in Science
Re: Articles of Interest in Science
Space
'Cosmic magnifying glass' reveals super-rare warped supernova with gravitational lens. (Thanks, Einstein!)
Keith Cooper
Tue, June 13, 2023 at 10:45 AM CDT
The gravity of a distant galaxy warped space and magnified the light of a faraway supernova, potentially revealing tantalizing details about stellar explosions, as well as an unseen population of galaxies and the expansion of the universe.
The galaxy appears very faint to us and not particularly large, but its mass — a combination of its stars, gas and its invisible halo of dark matter — warps space into a gravitational lens, a sort of cosmic magnifying glass. As the light from the supernova passed by the galaxy, the lens magnified the light by as much as 25 times, and split the supernova into four images as the light took four different paths following the contours of the warped space.
The discovery is being called "exceptionally rare," and some of the scientists involved were surprised by it. That's because only a handful of gravitationally lensed supernovas have ever been discovered. "I was observing that night and was absolutely stunned when I saw the lensed image of SN Zwicky," said Caltech's Christoffer Fremling in a statement.
The supernova was a type Ia, meaning it was the destruction of a white dwarf star. It exploded over four billion light-years away and as its light journeyed towards us it encountered a galaxy in our line of sight, 2.5 billion light years away.
The supernova's light finally reached Earth on Aug. 21, 2022, where it was first spotted by Caltech's Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) at Palomar Observatory. Cataloged as SN 2022qmx, the supernova has also become known as 'SN Zwicky'.
The subsequent study of SN Zwicky was led by Ariel Goobar of Stockholm University in Sweden. Follow-up observations were performed by a host of telescopes, including the W. M. Keck Observatory, the Hubble Space Telescope, the Very Large Telescope, the Hobby-Eberly Telescope, the Liverpool Telescope and the Nordic Optical Telescope.
Intriguingly, the four images of the supernova warped by the gravitational lens were not all equal in brightness. Two of the images, designated A and C, were brighter than expected by more than four and two times, respectively. Goobar's team suggest that this could be caused by smaller 'microlensing' events within the lensing galaxy that further magnified the supernova's light.
Microlenses are smaller gravitational lenses created by individual stars or even planets, and in the case of SN Zwicky the additional microlensing effects could reveal clues as to the distribution of masses of stars in the core of the lensing galaxy. Astronomers suspect that conditions in the center of galaxies allow the formation of a larger number of massive stars than normal, and these massive stars would be the most likely candidates for the microlenses.
The lensed supernova will also provide a new and important data point in efforts to chart the expansion of the universe through measurements of its brightness and luminosity.
This is because type Ia supernovas explode with a standard brightness. We can compare their intrinsic luminosity with how bright they actually appear in our telescopes, and from that astronomers are able to figure out how far away they must be. From that they can make an estimation of how fast the universe is expanding and carrying the supernova away from us. Gravitational lenses extend this cosmic 'distance ladder' by allowing us to detect supernovas from farther away, and therefore testing the strength of dark energy — the force causing cosmic expansion to accelerate — in different epochs in the history of the universe.
"Not only is SN Zwicky magnified by the gravitational lens, but it also belongs to a class of supernova that we call 'standard candles' because we can use their well-known luminosities to determine distance in space," said Igor Andreoni of the University of Maryland, in a statement.
In some cases of lensed supernovas, it's also possible to use the time delay between the appearance of the multiple images to calculate the Hubble Constant, which is a value for the expansion rate of the universe. Recently, another lensed supernova discovered in 2014 known as SN Refsdal also displayed four images, but an additional fifth lensed image appeared a year later having taken a longer path through the warped space. By measuring how much the expanding universe had redshifted its light during that year's delay, astronomers were able to calculate the Hubble Constant as being between 64.8 and 66.6 kilometers per second per megaparsec of space. This value deepens the mystery of the so-called Hubble Tension, whereby different methods of measuring the Hubble Constant provide notably different values. To date, nobody knows why this.
This illustration shows the three basic steps astronomers use to calculate how fast the universe expands over time, a value called the Hubble constant. All the steps involve building a strong
Alas, SN Zwicky will not be able to help solve the Hubble Tension because the time delay between its four images — less than a few days — was too short to make a measurement of the Hubble Constant.
Yet another interesting aspect to all this is the lensing galaxy itself, which is rather faint and not particularly massive — it wouldn't have been noticed at all had the supernova not been so bright. Its existence suggests that it could represent another population of faint, modest galaxies billions of light years away that our sky surveys haven't really detected yet.
However, that might be about to change, as might the scarcity of lensed supernovas. The next few years will see the beginning of work by the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile. Home to a survey telescope with a large 8.4-meter mirror, the Rubin Observatory is tasked with scanning the entire sky in high-resolution multiple times each night, searching for anything that goes bump in the dark, including lensed supernovas and their faint lensing galaxies.
"The discovery [of SN Zwicky] paves the way to find more rare lensed supernovas in future big surveys that will help us study transient astronomical events like supernovas and gamma-ray bursts," said Andreoni.
The study of SN Zwicky was published on 12 June 12 in Nature Astronomy.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/co ... 41928.html
'Cosmic magnifying glass' reveals super-rare warped supernova with gravitational lens. (Thanks, Einstein!)
Keith Cooper
Tue, June 13, 2023 at 10:45 AM CDT
The gravity of a distant galaxy warped space and magnified the light of a faraway supernova, potentially revealing tantalizing details about stellar explosions, as well as an unseen population of galaxies and the expansion of the universe.
The galaxy appears very faint to us and not particularly large, but its mass — a combination of its stars, gas and its invisible halo of dark matter — warps space into a gravitational lens, a sort of cosmic magnifying glass. As the light from the supernova passed by the galaxy, the lens magnified the light by as much as 25 times, and split the supernova into four images as the light took four different paths following the contours of the warped space.
The discovery is being called "exceptionally rare," and some of the scientists involved were surprised by it. That's because only a handful of gravitationally lensed supernovas have ever been discovered. "I was observing that night and was absolutely stunned when I saw the lensed image of SN Zwicky," said Caltech's Christoffer Fremling in a statement.
The supernova was a type Ia, meaning it was the destruction of a white dwarf star. It exploded over four billion light-years away and as its light journeyed towards us it encountered a galaxy in our line of sight, 2.5 billion light years away.
The supernova's light finally reached Earth on Aug. 21, 2022, where it was first spotted by Caltech's Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) at Palomar Observatory. Cataloged as SN 2022qmx, the supernova has also become known as 'SN Zwicky'.
The subsequent study of SN Zwicky was led by Ariel Goobar of Stockholm University in Sweden. Follow-up observations were performed by a host of telescopes, including the W. M. Keck Observatory, the Hubble Space Telescope, the Very Large Telescope, the Hobby-Eberly Telescope, the Liverpool Telescope and the Nordic Optical Telescope.
Intriguingly, the four images of the supernova warped by the gravitational lens were not all equal in brightness. Two of the images, designated A and C, were brighter than expected by more than four and two times, respectively. Goobar's team suggest that this could be caused by smaller 'microlensing' events within the lensing galaxy that further magnified the supernova's light.
Microlenses are smaller gravitational lenses created by individual stars or even planets, and in the case of SN Zwicky the additional microlensing effects could reveal clues as to the distribution of masses of stars in the core of the lensing galaxy. Astronomers suspect that conditions in the center of galaxies allow the formation of a larger number of massive stars than normal, and these massive stars would be the most likely candidates for the microlenses.
The lensed supernova will also provide a new and important data point in efforts to chart the expansion of the universe through measurements of its brightness and luminosity.
This is because type Ia supernovas explode with a standard brightness. We can compare their intrinsic luminosity with how bright they actually appear in our telescopes, and from that astronomers are able to figure out how far away they must be. From that they can make an estimation of how fast the universe is expanding and carrying the supernova away from us. Gravitational lenses extend this cosmic 'distance ladder' by allowing us to detect supernovas from farther away, and therefore testing the strength of dark energy — the force causing cosmic expansion to accelerate — in different epochs in the history of the universe.
"Not only is SN Zwicky magnified by the gravitational lens, but it also belongs to a class of supernova that we call 'standard candles' because we can use their well-known luminosities to determine distance in space," said Igor Andreoni of the University of Maryland, in a statement.
In some cases of lensed supernovas, it's also possible to use the time delay between the appearance of the multiple images to calculate the Hubble Constant, which is a value for the expansion rate of the universe. Recently, another lensed supernova discovered in 2014 known as SN Refsdal also displayed four images, but an additional fifth lensed image appeared a year later having taken a longer path through the warped space. By measuring how much the expanding universe had redshifted its light during that year's delay, astronomers were able to calculate the Hubble Constant as being between 64.8 and 66.6 kilometers per second per megaparsec of space. This value deepens the mystery of the so-called Hubble Tension, whereby different methods of measuring the Hubble Constant provide notably different values. To date, nobody knows why this.
This illustration shows the three basic steps astronomers use to calculate how fast the universe expands over time, a value called the Hubble constant. All the steps involve building a strong
Alas, SN Zwicky will not be able to help solve the Hubble Tension because the time delay between its four images — less than a few days — was too short to make a measurement of the Hubble Constant.
Yet another interesting aspect to all this is the lensing galaxy itself, which is rather faint and not particularly massive — it wouldn't have been noticed at all had the supernova not been so bright. Its existence suggests that it could represent another population of faint, modest galaxies billions of light years away that our sky surveys haven't really detected yet.
However, that might be about to change, as might the scarcity of lensed supernovas. The next few years will see the beginning of work by the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile. Home to a survey telescope with a large 8.4-meter mirror, the Rubin Observatory is tasked with scanning the entire sky in high-resolution multiple times each night, searching for anything that goes bump in the dark, including lensed supernovas and their faint lensing galaxies.
"The discovery [of SN Zwicky] paves the way to find more rare lensed supernovas in future big surveys that will help us study transient astronomical events like supernovas and gamma-ray bursts," said Andreoni.
The study of SN Zwicky was published on 12 June 12 in Nature Astronomy.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/co ... 41928.html
Re: Articles of Interest in Science
Space
Scientists beam solar power to Earth from space for 1st time ever
Robert Lea
Mon, June 12, 2023 at 9:00 AM CDT
A space solar power prototype has demonstrated its ability to wirelessly beam power through space and direct a detectable amount of energy toward Earth for the first time. The experiment proves the viability of tapping into a near-limitless supply of power in the form of energy from the sun from space.
Because solar energy in space isn’t subject to factors like day and night, obscuration by clouds, or weather on Earth, it is always available. In fact, it is estimated that space-based harvesters could potentially yield eight times more power than solar panels at any location on the surface of the globe.
The wireless power transfer was achieved by the Microwave Array for Power-transfer Low-orbit Experiment (MAPLE), an array of flexible and lightweight microwave power transmitters, which is one of the three instruments carried by the Space Solar Power Demonstrator (SSPD-1).
SSPD-1 was launched in January 2023 as part of the California Institute of Technology's (Caltech) Space Solar Power Project (SSPP), the primary goal of which is to harvest solar power in space and then transmit it to the surface of Earth.
"Through the experiments we have run so far, we received confirmation that MAPLE can transmit power successfully to receivers in space," Co-Director of the Space-Based Solar Power Project, Dr. Ali Hajimiri, said in a statement. "We have also been able to program the array to direct its energy toward Earth, which we detected here at Caltech. We had, of course, tested it on Earth, but now we know that it can survive the trip to space and operate there."
MAPLE demonstrated the transmission of energy wirelessly through space by sending energy from a transmitter to two separate receiver arrays around a foot away, where it was transformed into electricity. This was used to light up a pair of LEDs.
The instrument then beamed energy from a tiny window installed in the unit to the roof of Gordon and Betty Moore Laboratory of Engineering on Caltech’s campus in Pasadena.
Because MAPLE is not sealed, the experiment also demonstrated its capability to function in the harsh environment of space while subject to large swings in temperature and exposure to solar radiation. The conditions experienced by this prototype will soon be felt by large-scale SSPP units.
“To the best of our knowledge, no one has ever demonstrated wireless energy transfer in space, even with expensive rigid structures,” Hajimiri added. “We are doing it with flexible, lightweight structures and with our own integrated circuits. This is a first!”
In a video from Caltech, Hajimiri, who led the Caltech that developed MAPLE, explained how the wireless transmission of energy through space is based on a quantum phenomenon called “interference.”
Interference arises due to the wave-like nature of light. When two light waves overlap, if they are in phase, the waves align, and the peaks of the waves meet and create a greater peak with a height that is the sum of the two original peaks. This is called constructive interference.
If, however, the waves of light are out of phase and overlap while misaligned, a peak may meet a trough in the wave, and both are canceled out, a process known as destructive interference.
"If you have multiple sources that are operating in concert, in the same phase, you can actually direct energy in one direction so all of them will only add in one direction and will cancel each other out in all other directions," Hajimiri said. "The same way that a magnifying glass can focus light into a small point, you can actually control the timing of this in such a way that you can focus all of that energy in a smaller area than the area that you started with."
Related stories
—Space solar power project got off the ground with billionaire's $100 million donation
—The US Air Force wants to beam solar power to Earth from space
—Space-based solar power getting key test aboard US military's mysterious X-37B space plane
By precisely controlling the timing of this process, the direction of the energy can be adjusted very rapidly on a scale of nanoseconds, and power can be redirected to space-based receivers or even receivers here on Earth. Together this allows the energy to be directed to the desired location and nowhere else, and all this can be done without the need for any moving mechanical parts.
Hajimiri and his team are now assessing the performance of the individual units that comprise MAPLE. a painstaking process that will take as long as six months to complete. This will allow them to provide feedback that will guide the development of fully realized versions of the system in the future.
It is planned that SSPP will eventually consist of a constellation of modular spacecraft collecting sunlight, transforming it into electricity, and turning this into microwaves that are then beamed over vast distances, including back to Earth, where energy is needed. This could include regions of the globe currently poorly served by existing energy infrastructure.
"In the same way that the internet democratized access to information, we hope that wireless energy transfer democratizes access to energy," Hajimiri concluded. "No energy transmission infrastructure will be needed on the ground to receive this power. That means we can send energy to remote regions and areas devastated by war or natural disaster."
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/sc ... 48140.html
Scientists beam solar power to Earth from space for 1st time ever
Robert Lea
Mon, June 12, 2023 at 9:00 AM CDT
A space solar power prototype has demonstrated its ability to wirelessly beam power through space and direct a detectable amount of energy toward Earth for the first time. The experiment proves the viability of tapping into a near-limitless supply of power in the form of energy from the sun from space.
Because solar energy in space isn’t subject to factors like day and night, obscuration by clouds, or weather on Earth, it is always available. In fact, it is estimated that space-based harvesters could potentially yield eight times more power than solar panels at any location on the surface of the globe.
The wireless power transfer was achieved by the Microwave Array for Power-transfer Low-orbit Experiment (MAPLE), an array of flexible and lightweight microwave power transmitters, which is one of the three instruments carried by the Space Solar Power Demonstrator (SSPD-1).
SSPD-1 was launched in January 2023 as part of the California Institute of Technology's (Caltech) Space Solar Power Project (SSPP), the primary goal of which is to harvest solar power in space and then transmit it to the surface of Earth.
"Through the experiments we have run so far, we received confirmation that MAPLE can transmit power successfully to receivers in space," Co-Director of the Space-Based Solar Power Project, Dr. Ali Hajimiri, said in a statement. "We have also been able to program the array to direct its energy toward Earth, which we detected here at Caltech. We had, of course, tested it on Earth, but now we know that it can survive the trip to space and operate there."
MAPLE demonstrated the transmission of energy wirelessly through space by sending energy from a transmitter to two separate receiver arrays around a foot away, where it was transformed into electricity. This was used to light up a pair of LEDs.
The instrument then beamed energy from a tiny window installed in the unit to the roof of Gordon and Betty Moore Laboratory of Engineering on Caltech’s campus in Pasadena.
Because MAPLE is not sealed, the experiment also demonstrated its capability to function in the harsh environment of space while subject to large swings in temperature and exposure to solar radiation. The conditions experienced by this prototype will soon be felt by large-scale SSPP units.
“To the best of our knowledge, no one has ever demonstrated wireless energy transfer in space, even with expensive rigid structures,” Hajimiri added. “We are doing it with flexible, lightweight structures and with our own integrated circuits. This is a first!”
In a video from Caltech, Hajimiri, who led the Caltech that developed MAPLE, explained how the wireless transmission of energy through space is based on a quantum phenomenon called “interference.”
Interference arises due to the wave-like nature of light. When two light waves overlap, if they are in phase, the waves align, and the peaks of the waves meet and create a greater peak with a height that is the sum of the two original peaks. This is called constructive interference.
If, however, the waves of light are out of phase and overlap while misaligned, a peak may meet a trough in the wave, and both are canceled out, a process known as destructive interference.
"If you have multiple sources that are operating in concert, in the same phase, you can actually direct energy in one direction so all of them will only add in one direction and will cancel each other out in all other directions," Hajimiri said. "The same way that a magnifying glass can focus light into a small point, you can actually control the timing of this in such a way that you can focus all of that energy in a smaller area than the area that you started with."
Related stories
—Space solar power project got off the ground with billionaire's $100 million donation
—The US Air Force wants to beam solar power to Earth from space
—Space-based solar power getting key test aboard US military's mysterious X-37B space plane
By precisely controlling the timing of this process, the direction of the energy can be adjusted very rapidly on a scale of nanoseconds, and power can be redirected to space-based receivers or even receivers here on Earth. Together this allows the energy to be directed to the desired location and nowhere else, and all this can be done without the need for any moving mechanical parts.
Hajimiri and his team are now assessing the performance of the individual units that comprise MAPLE. a painstaking process that will take as long as six months to complete. This will allow them to provide feedback that will guide the development of fully realized versions of the system in the future.
It is planned that SSPP will eventually consist of a constellation of modular spacecraft collecting sunlight, transforming it into electricity, and turning this into microwaves that are then beamed over vast distances, including back to Earth, where energy is needed. This could include regions of the globe currently poorly served by existing energy infrastructure.
"In the same way that the internet democratized access to information, we hope that wireless energy transfer democratizes access to energy," Hajimiri concluded. "No energy transmission infrastructure will be needed on the ground to receive this power. That means we can send energy to remote regions and areas devastated by war or natural disaster."
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/sc ... 48140.html
Re: Articles of Interest in Science
Space
Large Hadron Collider may be closing in on the universe's missing antimatter
Keith Cooper
Fri, June 16, 2023 at 2:00 PM CDT
Physicists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are closing in on an explanation for why we live in a universe of matter and not antimatter.
Matter and antimatter are two sides of the same coin. Every type of particle has an anti-particle, which is its equal and opposite. For instance, the antimatter equivalent of a negatively charged electron is a positively charged positron.
The Standard Model of physics tells us that if we substitute a particle for its antiparticle, it should still operate within the laws of physics in the same way. As such, the Big Bang should not have had a preference for creating one type over another — this symmetry at the heart of nature means that matter and antimatter should have formed in equal amounts in the Big Bang.
Related: 10 cosmic mysteries the Large Hadron Collider could unravel
Lucky for us, this does not seem to have been the case, because when you put matter and antimatter together, the outcome is explosive to say the least. Had matter and antimatter been crafted in equal amounts, then they would have annihilated each other, creating a cosmos filled with a sea of radiation, no atoms and no life. Today, the only antimatter is that which is produced in particle decays and interactions.
However, physicists still don't have an explanation for why we are so fortunate. The fact that there's an excess of matter in the universe means that, somewhere along the line, the symmetry in the way that matter and antimatter interact with the laws of physics was broken.
Physicists call this symmetry-breaking a "charge-conjugation parity (CP) violation." One way to envisage it is to consider the rotational symmetry of a particle. Quantum physics theory holds that particles are not solid objects but rather strange little bodies that act like waves along a "wave function." Ordinarily, when you spin that wave function around 360 degrees, the properties of the particle should not change. But when there is a CP violation, the properties of some particles can change — for instance, their quantum spin can alter from 1/2 to –1/2.
CP violation is known to take place in the weak force, which is the fundamental force that is responsible for radioactive decay inside atoms, so we know it can happen (although the weak-force example is a different CP violation than the one that could have possibly created the matter–antimatter imbalance). However, in 2013, scientists working on the LHCb (LHC–beauty) experiment also detected CP violation in the decay of "beauty mesons" and "strange beauty mesons," in which the matter and antimatter versions of these particles behave differently when they decay.
The atoms in our bodies are made of protons and neutrons, which themselves are made of three smaller particles called quarks. Physicists call particles made of three quarks "baryons." Particles made of two quarks (one quark and one anti-quark) are called "mesons," and they tend to decay quickly. "Beauty" is another name for the "bottom" quark, while strange refers to a "strange" quark. (The names are just for descriptive purposes to differentiate quarks with slightly different properties and are not to be taken literally.)
Now, analysis of new and more comprehensive results from the LHCb experiment has measured more precisely than ever before the two most important parameters in the CP-violating decay of these mesons.
"These are key parameters that aid our search for unknown effects from beyond our current theory," said LHCb spokesperson Chris Parkes in a statement.
Probing the decay of approximately 349,000 mesons, the LHCb team measured the angle at which the particles that come from the decay of the mesons were emitted, and the time taken for the mesons to decay. Both properties vary, depending on whether the meson is a matter or antimatter particle.
In particular, the time taken for a meson to decay (which is on the scale of tenths of a nanosecond) is dependent on the quantum state of the meson.
Experiments have observed that mesons are able to oscillate between their matter and antimatter states, which have ever-so-slightly different masses. This is because mesons exist in a state of "mixing:" they are a mixture of their matter and antimatter states, which allows them to oscillate back and forth between those states.
As the oscillations take place, the wave functions of the two states can interfere with one another, a bit like the constructive/destructive interference of light in the famous double-slit experiment. The time to decay depends strongly on the masses of the quantum states and the amount of interference between them, which results in a characteristic pattern of CP violation in the meson decays.
"These measurements are interpreted within our fundamental theory of particle physics, the Standard Model, improving the precision with which we can determine the difference between the behavior of matter and antimatter," said Parkes. "Through more precise measurements, large improvements have been made in our knowledge."
The LHCb team was able to measure these properties with unprecedented accuracy. Although the decay of mesons will not fully answer why there is more matter than antimatter in the universe, understanding the symmetry-breaking CP violation at the heart of their decays will help constrain models that do attempt to explain this strange asymmetry, which acted in force at the beginning of time to create a universe dominated by matter.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/la ... 33787.html
Large Hadron Collider may be closing in on the universe's missing antimatter
Keith Cooper
Fri, June 16, 2023 at 2:00 PM CDT
Physicists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are closing in on an explanation for why we live in a universe of matter and not antimatter.
Matter and antimatter are two sides of the same coin. Every type of particle has an anti-particle, which is its equal and opposite. For instance, the antimatter equivalent of a negatively charged electron is a positively charged positron.
The Standard Model of physics tells us that if we substitute a particle for its antiparticle, it should still operate within the laws of physics in the same way. As such, the Big Bang should not have had a preference for creating one type over another — this symmetry at the heart of nature means that matter and antimatter should have formed in equal amounts in the Big Bang.
Related: 10 cosmic mysteries the Large Hadron Collider could unravel
Lucky for us, this does not seem to have been the case, because when you put matter and antimatter together, the outcome is explosive to say the least. Had matter and antimatter been crafted in equal amounts, then they would have annihilated each other, creating a cosmos filled with a sea of radiation, no atoms and no life. Today, the only antimatter is that which is produced in particle decays and interactions.
However, physicists still don't have an explanation for why we are so fortunate. The fact that there's an excess of matter in the universe means that, somewhere along the line, the symmetry in the way that matter and antimatter interact with the laws of physics was broken.
Physicists call this symmetry-breaking a "charge-conjugation parity (CP) violation." One way to envisage it is to consider the rotational symmetry of a particle. Quantum physics theory holds that particles are not solid objects but rather strange little bodies that act like waves along a "wave function." Ordinarily, when you spin that wave function around 360 degrees, the properties of the particle should not change. But when there is a CP violation, the properties of some particles can change — for instance, their quantum spin can alter from 1/2 to –1/2.
CP violation is known to take place in the weak force, which is the fundamental force that is responsible for radioactive decay inside atoms, so we know it can happen (although the weak-force example is a different CP violation than the one that could have possibly created the matter–antimatter imbalance). However, in 2013, scientists working on the LHCb (LHC–beauty) experiment also detected CP violation in the decay of "beauty mesons" and "strange beauty mesons," in which the matter and antimatter versions of these particles behave differently when they decay.
The atoms in our bodies are made of protons and neutrons, which themselves are made of three smaller particles called quarks. Physicists call particles made of three quarks "baryons." Particles made of two quarks (one quark and one anti-quark) are called "mesons," and they tend to decay quickly. "Beauty" is another name for the "bottom" quark, while strange refers to a "strange" quark. (The names are just for descriptive purposes to differentiate quarks with slightly different properties and are not to be taken literally.)
Now, analysis of new and more comprehensive results from the LHCb experiment has measured more precisely than ever before the two most important parameters in the CP-violating decay of these mesons.
"These are key parameters that aid our search for unknown effects from beyond our current theory," said LHCb spokesperson Chris Parkes in a statement.
Probing the decay of approximately 349,000 mesons, the LHCb team measured the angle at which the particles that come from the decay of the mesons were emitted, and the time taken for the mesons to decay. Both properties vary, depending on whether the meson is a matter or antimatter particle.
In particular, the time taken for a meson to decay (which is on the scale of tenths of a nanosecond) is dependent on the quantum state of the meson.
Experiments have observed that mesons are able to oscillate between their matter and antimatter states, which have ever-so-slightly different masses. This is because mesons exist in a state of "mixing:" they are a mixture of their matter and antimatter states, which allows them to oscillate back and forth between those states.
As the oscillations take place, the wave functions of the two states can interfere with one another, a bit like the constructive/destructive interference of light in the famous double-slit experiment. The time to decay depends strongly on the masses of the quantum states and the amount of interference between them, which results in a characteristic pattern of CP violation in the meson decays.
"These measurements are interpreted within our fundamental theory of particle physics, the Standard Model, improving the precision with which we can determine the difference between the behavior of matter and antimatter," said Parkes. "Through more precise measurements, large improvements have been made in our knowledge."
The LHCb team was able to measure these properties with unprecedented accuracy. Although the decay of mesons will not fully answer why there is more matter than antimatter in the universe, understanding the symmetry-breaking CP violation at the heart of their decays will help constrain models that do attempt to explain this strange asymmetry, which acted in force at the beginning of time to create a universe dominated by matter.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/la ... 33787.html
A Year of Cosmic Wonder With the James Webb Space Telescope
With a new image, NASA commemorates the first anniversary of doing science with the most powerful observatory ever sent to space.
A new image from the James Webb Space Telescope shows the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex, the closest star-forming region to Earth.Credit...NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Klaus Pontoppidan (STScI)
By now, perhaps, we should be getting used to unreal images of the cosmos made with the James Webb Space Telescope. But a year after NASA released the cosmic observatory’s first imagery, the space agency has dropped yet another breathtaking snapshot of our universe.
Wednesday’s image was Rho Ophiuchi, the closest nursery of infant stars in our cosmic backyard. Located a mere 390 light years away from Earth, this cloud complex is chock-full of stellar goodness.
Around 50 stars with masses comparable to our sun are sprinkled in white: some fully formed and shining bright, others still hidden behind dark, dense regions of interstellar dust. (Zoom in closer and you’ll even find a faint galaxy or two.)
Near the center of the image is a mature star called S1, its starlight illuminating the wispy yellow nebula around it. Toward the upper right are streaming red jets of molecular hydrogen, material that gets spewed out on either side of forming protostars. Black shadows near these regions are accretion disks of swirling gas and dust — some of which could be in the process of creating planetary systems.
The awe the image inspires is comparable to how researchers feel about the Webb’s first year of science.
“As an astronomer that lives and breathes this mission, I’m having to work really hard to keep up — there are so many discoveries,” said Jane Rigby, the senior project scientist for the telescope at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. She finds it fitting that the customary gift for one-year anniversaries is paper, because that’s exactly what researchers using the telescope have been churning out for the past year: scientific papers.
The observatory launched on Christmas in 2021, and scientists spent the next six months prepping the telescope for action: unfolding its sun shield and the honeycomb-like array of golden mirrors, then running tests of the four instruments used to observe the cosmos. When it was ready, the Webb embarked on its journey to peer into the depths of the universe.
The telescope’s agenda has been jam-packed ever since. It has checked out asteroids, quasars, exoplanets and other cosmic phenomena galore. For Dr. Rigby, one of the most gratifying accomplishments of this past year is the way the mission has delivered on its promise to reveal the earliest moments of cosmic time.
“That was the elevator pitch: We’re going to show you the baby pictures of the universe,” she said.
Indeed it has. Before JWST, astronomers knew of only a small handful of candidate galaxies that existed in the first billion years after the Big Bang. Within the past year, hundreds of them — bigger and brighter than expected, packed with forming stars swirling around supermassive black holes — have been confirmed.
“The data from the telescope is better than we promised,” Dr. Rigby said. “It’s over-performed in almost every way.”
Already, the telescope’s schedule for the next year is set, with roughly 5,000 hours of prime observing time for a suite of projects related to galactic formation, stellar chemistry, the behavior of black holes, the large-scale structure of our universe and more. Many of these projects — more ambitious than last year, now that scientists know what the telescope can do — are dedicated to following up on Webb’s own discoveries.
Though the telescope is operated by NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency, observers from around the globe were selected to use it. “This is the telescope for humanity, and we want the best ideas from the whole world,” Dr. Rigby said. “That’s how we’re doing things.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/12/scie ... 778d3e6de3
A new image from the James Webb Space Telescope shows the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex, the closest star-forming region to Earth.Credit...NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Klaus Pontoppidan (STScI)
By now, perhaps, we should be getting used to unreal images of the cosmos made with the James Webb Space Telescope. But a year after NASA released the cosmic observatory’s first imagery, the space agency has dropped yet another breathtaking snapshot of our universe.
Wednesday’s image was Rho Ophiuchi, the closest nursery of infant stars in our cosmic backyard. Located a mere 390 light years away from Earth, this cloud complex is chock-full of stellar goodness.
Around 50 stars with masses comparable to our sun are sprinkled in white: some fully formed and shining bright, others still hidden behind dark, dense regions of interstellar dust. (Zoom in closer and you’ll even find a faint galaxy or two.)
Near the center of the image is a mature star called S1, its starlight illuminating the wispy yellow nebula around it. Toward the upper right are streaming red jets of molecular hydrogen, material that gets spewed out on either side of forming protostars. Black shadows near these regions are accretion disks of swirling gas and dust — some of which could be in the process of creating planetary systems.
The awe the image inspires is comparable to how researchers feel about the Webb’s first year of science.
“As an astronomer that lives and breathes this mission, I’m having to work really hard to keep up — there are so many discoveries,” said Jane Rigby, the senior project scientist for the telescope at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. She finds it fitting that the customary gift for one-year anniversaries is paper, because that’s exactly what researchers using the telescope have been churning out for the past year: scientific papers.
The observatory launched on Christmas in 2021, and scientists spent the next six months prepping the telescope for action: unfolding its sun shield and the honeycomb-like array of golden mirrors, then running tests of the four instruments used to observe the cosmos. When it was ready, the Webb embarked on its journey to peer into the depths of the universe.
The telescope’s agenda has been jam-packed ever since. It has checked out asteroids, quasars, exoplanets and other cosmic phenomena galore. For Dr. Rigby, one of the most gratifying accomplishments of this past year is the way the mission has delivered on its promise to reveal the earliest moments of cosmic time.
“That was the elevator pitch: We’re going to show you the baby pictures of the universe,” she said.
Indeed it has. Before JWST, astronomers knew of only a small handful of candidate galaxies that existed in the first billion years after the Big Bang. Within the past year, hundreds of them — bigger and brighter than expected, packed with forming stars swirling around supermassive black holes — have been confirmed.
“The data from the telescope is better than we promised,” Dr. Rigby said. “It’s over-performed in almost every way.”
Already, the telescope’s schedule for the next year is set, with roughly 5,000 hours of prime observing time for a suite of projects related to galactic formation, stellar chemistry, the behavior of black holes, the large-scale structure of our universe and more. Many of these projects — more ambitious than last year, now that scientists know what the telescope can do — are dedicated to following up on Webb’s own discoveries.
Though the telescope is operated by NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency, observers from around the globe were selected to use it. “This is the telescope for humanity, and we want the best ideas from the whole world,” Dr. Rigby said. “That’s how we’re doing things.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/12/scie ... 778d3e6de3
Physicists Move One Step Closer to a Theoretical Showdown
The deviance of a tiny particle called the muon might prove that one of the most well-tested theories in physics is incomplete.
The Muon g-2 ring at the Fermilab particle accelerator complex in Batavia, Ill.Credit...Reidar Hahn/Fermilab, via US Department of Energy
On July 24, a large team of researchers convened in Liverpool to unveil a single number related to the behavior of the muon, a subatomic particle that might open a portal to a new physics of our universe.
All eyes were on a computer screen as someone typed in a secret code to release the results. The first number that popped out was met with exasperation: a lot of concerning gasps, oh-my-God’s and what-did-we-do-wrong’s. But after a final calculation, “there was a collective exhale across multiple continents,” said Kevin Pitts, a physicist at Virginia Tech who was five hours away, attending the meeting virtually. The new measurement matched exactly what the physicists had computed two years prior — now with twice the precision.
So comes the latest result from the Muon g-2 Collaboration, which runs an experiment at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, or Fermilab, in Batavia, Ill., to study the deviant motion of the muon. The measurement, announced to the public and submitted to the journal Physical Review Letters on Thursday morning, brings physicists one step closer to figuring out if there are more types of matter and energy composing the universe than have been accounted for.
“It really all comes down to that single number,” said Hannah Binney, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Lincoln Laboratory who worked on the muon measurement as a graduate student.
Scientists are putting to the test the Standard Model, a grand theory that encompasses all of nature’s known particles and forces. Although the Standard Model has successfully predicted the outcome of countless experiments, physicists have long had a hunch that its framework is incomplete. The theory fails to account for gravity, and it also can’t explain dark matter (the glue holding our universe together), or dark energy (the force pulling it apart).
One of many ways that researchers are looking for physics beyond the Standard Model is by studying muons. As heavier cousins of the electron, muons are unstable, surviving just two-millionths of a second before decaying into lighter particles. They also act like tiny bar magnets: Place a muon in a magnetic field, and it will wobble around like a top. The speed of that motion depends on a property of the muon called the magnetic moment, which physicists abbreviate as g.
In theory, g should exactly equal 2. But physicists know that this value gets ruffled by the “quantum foam” of virtual particles that blip in and out of existence and prevent empty space from being truly empty. These transient particles change the rate of the muon’s wobble. By taking stock of all the forces and particles in the Standard Model, physicists can predict how much g will be offset. They call this deviation g-2.
But if there are unknown particles at play, experimental measurements of g will not match this prediction. “And that’s what makes the muon so exciting to study,” Dr. Binney said. “It’s sensitive to all of the particles that exist, even the ones that we don’t know about yet.” Any difference between theory and experiment, she added, means new physics is on the horizon.
Image
An aerial view of the Fermilab particle accelerator complex features two enormous, circular particle accelerators in green fields.
The Fermilab particle accelerator complex.Credit...Reidar Hahn/Fermilab, via US Department of Energy
To measure g-2, researchers at Fermilab generated a beam of muons and steered it into a 50-foot-diameter, doughnut-shaped magnet, the inside brimming with virtual particles that were popping into reality. As the muons raced around the ring, detectors along its edge recorded how fast they were wobbling.
Using 40 billion muons — five times as much data as the researchers had in 2021 — the team measured g-2 to be 0.00233184110, a one-tenth of 1 percent deviation from 2. The result has a precision of 0.2 parts per million. That’s like measuring the distance between New York City and Chicago with an uncertainty of only 10 inches, Dr. Pitts said.
“It’s an amazing achievement,” said Alex Keshavarzi, a physicist at the University of Manchester and a member of the Muon g-2 Collaboration. “This is the world’s most precise measurement ever made at a particle accelerator.” The results, when revealed to the public at a scientific seminar on Thursday morning, were met with applause.
“The kind of precision that these people have managed to attain is just staggering,” said Dan Hooper, a theoretical cosmologist at the University of Chicago who was not involved in the work. “There was a lot of skepticism they would get here, but here they are.”
But whether the measured g-2 matches the Standard Model’s prediction has yet to be determined. That’s because theoretical physicists have two methods of computing g-2, based on different ways of accounting for the strong force, which binds together protons and neutrons inside a nucleus.
The traditional calculation relies on 40 years of strong-force measurements taken by experiments around the world. But with this approach, the g-2 prediction is only as good as the data that are used, said Aida El-Khadra, a theoretical physicist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and a chair of the Muon g-2 Theory Initiative. Experimental limitations in that data, she said, can make this prediction less precise.
A newer technique called a lattice calculation, which uses supercomputers to model the universe as a four-dimensional grid of space-time points, has also emerged. This method does not make use of data at all, Dr. El-Khadra said. There’s just one problem: It generates a g-2 prediction that differs from the traditional approach.
“No one knows why these two are different,” Dr. Keshavarzi said. “They should be exactly the same.”
Compared with the traditional prediction, the latest g-2 measurement has a discrepancy of over 5-sigma, which corresponds to a one in 3.5 million chance that the result is a fluke, Dr. Keshavarzi said, adding that this degree of certainty was beyond the level needed to claim a discovery. (That’s an improvement from their 4.2-sigma result in 2021, and a 3.7-sigma measurement done at Brookhaven National Laboratory near the turn of the century.)
But when they compared it with the lattice prediction, Dr. Keshavarzi said, there was no discrepancy at all.
Rarely in physics does an experiment surpass the theory, but this is one of those times, Dr. Pitts said. “The attention is on the theoretical community,” he added. “The limelight is now on them.”
Dr. Binney said, “We are on the edge of our seats to see how this theory discussion pans out.” Physicists expect to better understand the g-2 prediction by 2025.
Gordan Krnjaic, a theoretical particle physicist at Fermilab, noted that if the experimental disagreement with theory persisted, it would be “the first smoking-gun laboratory evidence of new physics,” he said. “And it might well be the first time that we’ve broken the Standard Model.”
While the two camps of theory hash it out, experimentalists will hone their g-2 measurement further. They have more than double the amount of data left to sift through, and once that’s included, their precision will improve by another factor of two. “The future is very bright,” said Graziano Venanzoni, a physicist at the University of Liverpool and one leader of the Muon g-2 experiment, at a public news briefing about the results.
The latest result moves physicists one step closer to a Standard Model showdown. But even if new physics is confirmed to be out there, more work will be needed to figure out what that actually is. The discovery that the known laws of nature are incomplete would lay the foundation for a new generation of experiments, Dr. Keshavarzi said, because it would tell physicists where to look.
“Physicists get really excited when theory and experiment do not agree with each other,” said Elena Pinetti, a theoretical physicist at Fermilab who was not involved in the work. “That’s when we really can learn something new.”
For Dr. Pitts, who has spent nearly 30 years pushing the bounds of the Standard Model, proof of new physics would be both a celebratory milestone and a reminder of all that is left to do. “On one hand it’s going to be, Have a toast and celebrate a success, a real breakthrough,” he said. “But then it’s going to be back to work. What are the next ideas that we can get to work on?”
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/10/scie ... 778d3e6de3
The Muon g-2 ring at the Fermilab particle accelerator complex in Batavia, Ill.Credit...Reidar Hahn/Fermilab, via US Department of Energy
On July 24, a large team of researchers convened in Liverpool to unveil a single number related to the behavior of the muon, a subatomic particle that might open a portal to a new physics of our universe.
All eyes were on a computer screen as someone typed in a secret code to release the results. The first number that popped out was met with exasperation: a lot of concerning gasps, oh-my-God’s and what-did-we-do-wrong’s. But after a final calculation, “there was a collective exhale across multiple continents,” said Kevin Pitts, a physicist at Virginia Tech who was five hours away, attending the meeting virtually. The new measurement matched exactly what the physicists had computed two years prior — now with twice the precision.
So comes the latest result from the Muon g-2 Collaboration, which runs an experiment at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, or Fermilab, in Batavia, Ill., to study the deviant motion of the muon. The measurement, announced to the public and submitted to the journal Physical Review Letters on Thursday morning, brings physicists one step closer to figuring out if there are more types of matter and energy composing the universe than have been accounted for.
“It really all comes down to that single number,” said Hannah Binney, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Lincoln Laboratory who worked on the muon measurement as a graduate student.
Scientists are putting to the test the Standard Model, a grand theory that encompasses all of nature’s known particles and forces. Although the Standard Model has successfully predicted the outcome of countless experiments, physicists have long had a hunch that its framework is incomplete. The theory fails to account for gravity, and it also can’t explain dark matter (the glue holding our universe together), or dark energy (the force pulling it apart).
One of many ways that researchers are looking for physics beyond the Standard Model is by studying muons. As heavier cousins of the electron, muons are unstable, surviving just two-millionths of a second before decaying into lighter particles. They also act like tiny bar magnets: Place a muon in a magnetic field, and it will wobble around like a top. The speed of that motion depends on a property of the muon called the magnetic moment, which physicists abbreviate as g.
In theory, g should exactly equal 2. But physicists know that this value gets ruffled by the “quantum foam” of virtual particles that blip in and out of existence and prevent empty space from being truly empty. These transient particles change the rate of the muon’s wobble. By taking stock of all the forces and particles in the Standard Model, physicists can predict how much g will be offset. They call this deviation g-2.
But if there are unknown particles at play, experimental measurements of g will not match this prediction. “And that’s what makes the muon so exciting to study,” Dr. Binney said. “It’s sensitive to all of the particles that exist, even the ones that we don’t know about yet.” Any difference between theory and experiment, she added, means new physics is on the horizon.
Image
An aerial view of the Fermilab particle accelerator complex features two enormous, circular particle accelerators in green fields.
The Fermilab particle accelerator complex.Credit...Reidar Hahn/Fermilab, via US Department of Energy
To measure g-2, researchers at Fermilab generated a beam of muons and steered it into a 50-foot-diameter, doughnut-shaped magnet, the inside brimming with virtual particles that were popping into reality. As the muons raced around the ring, detectors along its edge recorded how fast they were wobbling.
Using 40 billion muons — five times as much data as the researchers had in 2021 — the team measured g-2 to be 0.00233184110, a one-tenth of 1 percent deviation from 2. The result has a precision of 0.2 parts per million. That’s like measuring the distance between New York City and Chicago with an uncertainty of only 10 inches, Dr. Pitts said.
“It’s an amazing achievement,” said Alex Keshavarzi, a physicist at the University of Manchester and a member of the Muon g-2 Collaboration. “This is the world’s most precise measurement ever made at a particle accelerator.” The results, when revealed to the public at a scientific seminar on Thursday morning, were met with applause.
“The kind of precision that these people have managed to attain is just staggering,” said Dan Hooper, a theoretical cosmologist at the University of Chicago who was not involved in the work. “There was a lot of skepticism they would get here, but here they are.”
But whether the measured g-2 matches the Standard Model’s prediction has yet to be determined. That’s because theoretical physicists have two methods of computing g-2, based on different ways of accounting for the strong force, which binds together protons and neutrons inside a nucleus.
The traditional calculation relies on 40 years of strong-force measurements taken by experiments around the world. But with this approach, the g-2 prediction is only as good as the data that are used, said Aida El-Khadra, a theoretical physicist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and a chair of the Muon g-2 Theory Initiative. Experimental limitations in that data, she said, can make this prediction less precise.
A newer technique called a lattice calculation, which uses supercomputers to model the universe as a four-dimensional grid of space-time points, has also emerged. This method does not make use of data at all, Dr. El-Khadra said. There’s just one problem: It generates a g-2 prediction that differs from the traditional approach.
“No one knows why these two are different,” Dr. Keshavarzi said. “They should be exactly the same.”
Compared with the traditional prediction, the latest g-2 measurement has a discrepancy of over 5-sigma, which corresponds to a one in 3.5 million chance that the result is a fluke, Dr. Keshavarzi said, adding that this degree of certainty was beyond the level needed to claim a discovery. (That’s an improvement from their 4.2-sigma result in 2021, and a 3.7-sigma measurement done at Brookhaven National Laboratory near the turn of the century.)
But when they compared it with the lattice prediction, Dr. Keshavarzi said, there was no discrepancy at all.
Rarely in physics does an experiment surpass the theory, but this is one of those times, Dr. Pitts said. “The attention is on the theoretical community,” he added. “The limelight is now on them.”
Dr. Binney said, “We are on the edge of our seats to see how this theory discussion pans out.” Physicists expect to better understand the g-2 prediction by 2025.
Gordan Krnjaic, a theoretical particle physicist at Fermilab, noted that if the experimental disagreement with theory persisted, it would be “the first smoking-gun laboratory evidence of new physics,” he said. “And it might well be the first time that we’ve broken the Standard Model.”
While the two camps of theory hash it out, experimentalists will hone their g-2 measurement further. They have more than double the amount of data left to sift through, and once that’s included, their precision will improve by another factor of two. “The future is very bright,” said Graziano Venanzoni, a physicist at the University of Liverpool and one leader of the Muon g-2 experiment, at a public news briefing about the results.
The latest result moves physicists one step closer to a Standard Model showdown. But even if new physics is confirmed to be out there, more work will be needed to figure out what that actually is. The discovery that the known laws of nature are incomplete would lay the foundation for a new generation of experiments, Dr. Keshavarzi said, because it would tell physicists where to look.
“Physicists get really excited when theory and experiment do not agree with each other,” said Elena Pinetti, a theoretical physicist at Fermilab who was not involved in the work. “That’s when we really can learn something new.”
For Dr. Pitts, who has spent nearly 30 years pushing the bounds of the Standard Model, proof of new physics would be both a celebratory milestone and a reminder of all that is left to do. “On one hand it’s going to be, Have a toast and celebrate a success, a real breakthrough,” he said. “But then it’s going to be back to work. What are the next ideas that we can get to work on?”
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/10/scie ... 778d3e6de3
Re: Articles of Interest in Science
India is the first country to land at the Moon's south pole
Chandrayaan-3 is also India's first successful Moon lander.
Jon Fingas·Reporter
Updated Wed, August 23, 2023 at 1:07 PM CDT
India just made spaceflight history in more ways than one. The Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft's Vikram lander has successfully touched down on the Moon, marking the country's first successful landing on the lunar surface. It's just the fourth country to do so after the Soviet Union, US and China. More importantly, it's the first country to land near the Moon's south pole — a difficult target given the rough terrain, but important for attempts to find water ice. Other nations have only landed near the equator.
The landing comes four years after Chandrayaan-2's Vikram lander effectively crashed. The Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) designed the follow-up with a "failure-based design" that includes more backup systems, a wider landing area and software updates.
Vikram will remain idle for hours to allow lunar dust to settle. Once the area is clear, the Pragyaan rover will deploy to take photos and collect scientific data. Combined, the lander and rover have five instruments meant to gauge the properties of the Moon's atmosphere, surface and tectonic activity. ISRO timed the landing for the start of a lunar day (about 28 Earth days) to maximize the amount of solar power available for Vikram and Pragyaan.
Chandrayaan-3's success is a matter of national pride for India. The country has been eager to become a major power in spaceflight, and hopes to launch a space station around 2030. It can now claim to be one of just a handful of countries that have ever reached an extraterrestrial surface. The info gathered near the pole could also be crucial for future lunar missions from India and other countries, which could use any discovered ice for fuel, oxygen and water.
The landing also puts India ahead of other countries racing to land on the Moon, if not always for the first time. Russia's Luna-25 spacecraft crashed just two days earlier, and Israel expects a follow-up to its Beresheet lander in 2024. The United Arab Emirates also wants to land by 2024. The US, meanwhile, hopes to return people to the moon with its Artemis 3 mission in late 2025. These also didn't include commercial efforts. There's a renewed interest in Earth's closest cosmic neighbor, and India is now part of that vanguard.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/finance ... 22596.html
Chandrayaan-3 is also India's first successful Moon lander.
Jon Fingas·Reporter
Updated Wed, August 23, 2023 at 1:07 PM CDT
India just made spaceflight history in more ways than one. The Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft's Vikram lander has successfully touched down on the Moon, marking the country's first successful landing on the lunar surface. It's just the fourth country to do so after the Soviet Union, US and China. More importantly, it's the first country to land near the Moon's south pole — a difficult target given the rough terrain, but important for attempts to find water ice. Other nations have only landed near the equator.
The landing comes four years after Chandrayaan-2's Vikram lander effectively crashed. The Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) designed the follow-up with a "failure-based design" that includes more backup systems, a wider landing area and software updates.
Vikram will remain idle for hours to allow lunar dust to settle. Once the area is clear, the Pragyaan rover will deploy to take photos and collect scientific data. Combined, the lander and rover have five instruments meant to gauge the properties of the Moon's atmosphere, surface and tectonic activity. ISRO timed the landing for the start of a lunar day (about 28 Earth days) to maximize the amount of solar power available for Vikram and Pragyaan.
Chandrayaan-3's success is a matter of national pride for India. The country has been eager to become a major power in spaceflight, and hopes to launch a space station around 2030. It can now claim to be one of just a handful of countries that have ever reached an extraterrestrial surface. The info gathered near the pole could also be crucial for future lunar missions from India and other countries, which could use any discovered ice for fuel, oxygen and water.
The landing also puts India ahead of other countries racing to land on the Moon, if not always for the first time. Russia's Luna-25 spacecraft crashed just two days earlier, and Israel expects a follow-up to its Beresheet lander in 2024. The United Arab Emirates also wants to land by 2024. The US, meanwhile, hopes to return people to the moon with its Artemis 3 mission in late 2025. These also didn't include commercial efforts. There's a renewed interest in Earth's closest cosmic neighbor, and India is now part of that vanguard.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/finance ... 22596.html
Re: Articles of Interest in Science
Reuter
Mon, September 4, 2023 at 12:32 PM CDT
Huawei Technologies and China's top chipmaker SMIC have built an advanced 7-nanometer processor to power its latest smartphone, according to a teardown report by analysis firm TechInsights.
Huawei's Mate 60 Pro is powered by a new Kirin 9000s chip that was made in China by Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC), TechInsights said in the report shared with Reuters on Monday.
Huawei started selling its Mate 60 Pro phone last week. The specifications provided advertised its ability to make satellite calls, but offered no information on the power of the chipset inside.
The processor is the first to utilize SMIC's most advanced 7nm technology and suggests the Chinese government is making some headway in attempts to build a domestic chip ecosystem, the research firm said.
The firm's findings were first reported by Bloomberg News.
Huawei and SMIC did not immediately reply to Reuters' request for comment.
Buyers of the phone in China have been posting tear-down videos and sharing speed tests on social media that suggest the Mate 60 Pro is capable of download speeds exceeding those of top line 5G phones.
The phone's launch sent Chinese social media users and state media into a frenzy, with some noting it coincided with a visit by U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo.
From 2019, the U.S. has restricted Huawei's access to chipmaking tools essential for producing the most advanced handset models, with the company only able to launch limited batches of 5G models using stockpiled chips.
But research firms told Reuters in July that they believed Huawei was planning a return to the 5G smartphone industry by the end of this year, using its own advances in semiconductor design tools along with chipmaking from SMIC.
Dan Hutcheson, an analyst with TechInsights, told Reuters the development comes as a "slap in the face" to the U.S.
"Raimondo comes seeking to cool things down, and this chip is [saying] 'look what we can do, we don't need you,'" he said.
(Reporting by Shivani Tanna in Bengaluru and Max A.; Editing by Sandra Maler Cherney in San Francisco; Editing by Shilpi Majumdar)
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/finance ... 18841.html
Mon, September 4, 2023 at 12:32 PM CDT
Huawei Technologies and China's top chipmaker SMIC have built an advanced 7-nanometer processor to power its latest smartphone, according to a teardown report by analysis firm TechInsights.
Huawei's Mate 60 Pro is powered by a new Kirin 9000s chip that was made in China by Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC), TechInsights said in the report shared with Reuters on Monday.
Huawei started selling its Mate 60 Pro phone last week. The specifications provided advertised its ability to make satellite calls, but offered no information on the power of the chipset inside.
The processor is the first to utilize SMIC's most advanced 7nm technology and suggests the Chinese government is making some headway in attempts to build a domestic chip ecosystem, the research firm said.
The firm's findings were first reported by Bloomberg News.
Huawei and SMIC did not immediately reply to Reuters' request for comment.
Buyers of the phone in China have been posting tear-down videos and sharing speed tests on social media that suggest the Mate 60 Pro is capable of download speeds exceeding those of top line 5G phones.
The phone's launch sent Chinese social media users and state media into a frenzy, with some noting it coincided with a visit by U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo.
From 2019, the U.S. has restricted Huawei's access to chipmaking tools essential for producing the most advanced handset models, with the company only able to launch limited batches of 5G models using stockpiled chips.
But research firms told Reuters in July that they believed Huawei was planning a return to the 5G smartphone industry by the end of this year, using its own advances in semiconductor design tools along with chipmaking from SMIC.
Dan Hutcheson, an analyst with TechInsights, told Reuters the development comes as a "slap in the face" to the U.S.
"Raimondo comes seeking to cool things down, and this chip is [saying] 'look what we can do, we don't need you,'" he said.
(Reporting by Shivani Tanna in Bengaluru and Max A.; Editing by Sandra Maler Cherney in San Francisco; Editing by Shilpi Majumdar)
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/finance ... 18841.html
Frank Rubio, NASA Astronaut, Returns Home After a Record Year-Plus in Space
The trip to space was only supposed to last six months for Frank Rubio, but technical difficulties kept his crew in orbit for over a year.
Frank Rubio, a NASA astronaut, being helped out of the Soyuz MS-23 spacecraft on Wednesday minutes after he and Roscosmos cosmonauts landed near Dzhezkazgan, Kazakhstan. The trio returned to Earth after logging 371 days in space.Credit...NASA/Getty Images
A NASA astronaut safely returned to Earth on Wednesday after spending 371 days in space, a record in spaceflight for American astronauts.
Frank Rubio of NASA and his crewmates, the Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin, made a safe, parachute-assisted landing southeast of the remote town of Dzhezkazgan, Kazakhstan, at 7:17 a.m. Eastern time.
After post-landing medical exams, the crew will return to Karaganda, Kazakhstan. Mr. Rubio will then board a NASA plane bound for his return to Houston where he lives with his family.
“For me, honestly, obviously, hugging my wife and kids is going to be paramount, and I’ll probably focus on that for the first couple days,” Mr. Rubio said during a news conference from space last week.
Mr. Rubio had expected to be gone only six months when he first embarked on his journey on the Russian Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan last September.
His return was upended in December, after mission control found a coolant leak in the Soyuz spacecraft. The leak could have created dangerously hot temperatures for the crew on their return to Earth, so a different spacecraft had to be sent to the space station, delaying Mr. Rubio’s return. The single spaceflight by Mr. Rubio surpassed the record of 355 days for a U.S. astronaut, which was previously held by Mark Vande Hei, NASA said.
Mr. Rubio’s unplanned extended stay was more than just hitting another milestone, said Bill Nelson, the administrator of NASA.
“It’s a major contribution to our understanding of long-duration space missions,” Mr. Nelson said in a statement. “Our astronauts make extraordinary sacrifices away from their homes and loved ones to further discovery.”
During his prolonged stay, Mr. Rubio made “invaluable scientific contributions,” Mr. Nelson said. The mission provided researchers the opportunity to observe the effects that long spaceflight has on humans as the agency plans to return to the Moon with the Artemis missions and to explore Mars, he added.
Mr. Rubio spent hours conducting research on a variety of topics from plants to physical sciences studies. These included investigations into how bacteria adapt to spaceflight and how exercise affects humans during long missions.
During his mission, Mr. Rubio completed about 5,936 orbits aboard the space station. He journeyed more than 157 million miles, roughly the equivalent of 328 trips to the Moon and back.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/27/scie ... 778d3e6de3
Frank Rubio, a NASA astronaut, being helped out of the Soyuz MS-23 spacecraft on Wednesday minutes after he and Roscosmos cosmonauts landed near Dzhezkazgan, Kazakhstan. The trio returned to Earth after logging 371 days in space.Credit...NASA/Getty Images
A NASA astronaut safely returned to Earth on Wednesday after spending 371 days in space, a record in spaceflight for American astronauts.
Frank Rubio of NASA and his crewmates, the Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin, made a safe, parachute-assisted landing southeast of the remote town of Dzhezkazgan, Kazakhstan, at 7:17 a.m. Eastern time.
After post-landing medical exams, the crew will return to Karaganda, Kazakhstan. Mr. Rubio will then board a NASA plane bound for his return to Houston where he lives with his family.
“For me, honestly, obviously, hugging my wife and kids is going to be paramount, and I’ll probably focus on that for the first couple days,” Mr. Rubio said during a news conference from space last week.
Mr. Rubio had expected to be gone only six months when he first embarked on his journey on the Russian Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan last September.
His return was upended in December, after mission control found a coolant leak in the Soyuz spacecraft. The leak could have created dangerously hot temperatures for the crew on their return to Earth, so a different spacecraft had to be sent to the space station, delaying Mr. Rubio’s return. The single spaceflight by Mr. Rubio surpassed the record of 355 days for a U.S. astronaut, which was previously held by Mark Vande Hei, NASA said.
Mr. Rubio’s unplanned extended stay was more than just hitting another milestone, said Bill Nelson, the administrator of NASA.
“It’s a major contribution to our understanding of long-duration space missions,” Mr. Nelson said in a statement. “Our astronauts make extraordinary sacrifices away from their homes and loved ones to further discovery.”
During his prolonged stay, Mr. Rubio made “invaluable scientific contributions,” Mr. Nelson said. The mission provided researchers the opportunity to observe the effects that long spaceflight has on humans as the agency plans to return to the Moon with the Artemis missions and to explore Mars, he added.
Mr. Rubio spent hours conducting research on a variety of topics from plants to physical sciences studies. These included investigations into how bacteria adapt to spaceflight and how exercise affects humans during long missions.
During his mission, Mr. Rubio completed about 5,936 orbits aboard the space station. He journeyed more than 157 million miles, roughly the equivalent of 328 trips to the Moon and back.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/27/scie ... 778d3e6de3
Re: Articles of Interest in Science
What would happen if you drilled all the way through Earth?
Hannah Loss
Sat, December 16, 2023 at 4:00 AM CST·
Earth's many layers are hidden from view. But what if we could drill through the center of the planet to the other side? What extreme forces and temperatures would we encounter deep within the planet?
Even though drilling through Earth remains science fiction, scientists have some ideas about what might occur based on experience from other drilling projects.
Earth's diameter is 7,926 miles (12,756 kilometers), so drilling all the way through the planet would require a gargantuan drill and decades of work.
The first layer to drill through is the crust, which is about 60 miles (100 km) thick, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. The atmospheric pressure would increase as the drill traveled farther underground. Every 10 feet (3 meters) of rock is equal to about 1 atmospheric pressure, the pressure at sea level, Doug Wilson, a research geophysicist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, told Live Science. "That adds up really quick when you're talking about a large number of kilometers," he said.
The deepest human-made hole today is the Kola Superdeep Borehole in Russia, which is 7.6 miles (12.2 km) deep. At its bottom, the pressure is 4,000 times that at sea level. It took scientists nearly 20 years to reach this depth, according to World Atlas. And that's still over 50 miles (80 km) away from the next layer, the mantle, according to Earth layer data from the USGS. The mantle is a 1,740-mile-thick (2,800 km) layer of dark, dense rock that drives plate tectonics.
Layers of the earth, showing the earth's core and other structures. The core, mantle, crust, and asthenosphere, lithosphere, troposphere, stratosphere, mesosphere, thermosphere, and exosphere.
Layers of the earth, showing the earth's core and other structures. The core, mantle, crust, and asthenosphere, lithosphere, troposphere, stratosphere, mesosphere, thermosphere, and exosphere.
The boundary between the mantle and the core is called the "Moho" (short for "Mohorovičić discontinuity"). Scientists first attempted to dig here through the deep seafloor in the 1950s and 1960s with Project Mohole, but they were unsuccessful.
The hole made in the quest to drill through the planet would cave in unless we continuously pumped drilling fluid into the hole. In deep-sea and oil-well drilling, that fluid is a mix of mud that includes heavy minerals, like barium. The weight of the fluid balances the pressure inside the hole with the pressure of the surrounding rock and prevents the hole from collapsing, Wilson explained.
The drilling fluid serves two additional roles: It cleans the drill bit to prevent sand and gravel from gunking up the machinery, and it helps lower the temperature, although it would become nearly impossible to keep the drill cool in Earth's innermost layers.
For instance, the temperature in the mantle is a searing 2,570 degrees Fahrenheit (1,410 degrees Celsius). Stainless steel would melt, so this drill would need to be made of an expensive specialized alloy, like titanium, Wilson said.
Once through the mantle, the drill would finally reach Earth's core at about 1,800 miles (2,896 km) down. The outer core is made mostly of liquid iron and nickel and is extremely hot, with temperatures ranging from 7,200 to 9,000 F (4,000 to 5,000 C), according to the California Academy of Sciences. Drilling through this hot, molten iron-nickel alloy would be especially difficult.
"That would cause a whole range of issues," Damon Teagle, a professor of geochemistry at the University of Southampton in the U.K., told Live Science. The fiery outer core would be like drilling through a liquid, and it would likely melt the drill unless cold water was pumped down.
Then, after 3,000 miles (5,000 km), the drill would reach the inner core, where the pressure is so intense that, despite the scorching temperatures, the nickel and iron core remains solid. "You'd really be at indescribable pressures," Teagle said — about 350 gigapascals, or 350 million times atmospheric pressure.
This whole time the drill would be pulled down to the core by Earth's gravity. In the center of the core the gravity would be similar to being in orbit — effectively weightless. That's because the pull of Earth's mass would be equal in all directions, Wilson said.
Then as the drill continues toward the other side of the planet, the pull of gravity will switch relative to the position of the drill, effectively pulling it "down" toward the core again. The drill will have to work against gravity as it pushes "up" toward the surface, back through the outer core, mantle and crust to reverse the downward journey.
If all these obstacles are overcome, the biggest problem once you reach the midpoint is that you'd still have "a long way to go" to reach the other side, Teagle said.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/lifesty ... 00334.html
Hannah Loss
Sat, December 16, 2023 at 4:00 AM CST·
Earth's many layers are hidden from view. But what if we could drill through the center of the planet to the other side? What extreme forces and temperatures would we encounter deep within the planet?
Even though drilling through Earth remains science fiction, scientists have some ideas about what might occur based on experience from other drilling projects.
Earth's diameter is 7,926 miles (12,756 kilometers), so drilling all the way through the planet would require a gargantuan drill and decades of work.
The first layer to drill through is the crust, which is about 60 miles (100 km) thick, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. The atmospheric pressure would increase as the drill traveled farther underground. Every 10 feet (3 meters) of rock is equal to about 1 atmospheric pressure, the pressure at sea level, Doug Wilson, a research geophysicist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, told Live Science. "That adds up really quick when you're talking about a large number of kilometers," he said.
The deepest human-made hole today is the Kola Superdeep Borehole in Russia, which is 7.6 miles (12.2 km) deep. At its bottom, the pressure is 4,000 times that at sea level. It took scientists nearly 20 years to reach this depth, according to World Atlas. And that's still over 50 miles (80 km) away from the next layer, the mantle, according to Earth layer data from the USGS. The mantle is a 1,740-mile-thick (2,800 km) layer of dark, dense rock that drives plate tectonics.
Layers of the earth, showing the earth's core and other structures. The core, mantle, crust, and asthenosphere, lithosphere, troposphere, stratosphere, mesosphere, thermosphere, and exosphere.
Layers of the earth, showing the earth's core and other structures. The core, mantle, crust, and asthenosphere, lithosphere, troposphere, stratosphere, mesosphere, thermosphere, and exosphere.
The boundary between the mantle and the core is called the "Moho" (short for "Mohorovičić discontinuity"). Scientists first attempted to dig here through the deep seafloor in the 1950s and 1960s with Project Mohole, but they were unsuccessful.
The hole made in the quest to drill through the planet would cave in unless we continuously pumped drilling fluid into the hole. In deep-sea and oil-well drilling, that fluid is a mix of mud that includes heavy minerals, like barium. The weight of the fluid balances the pressure inside the hole with the pressure of the surrounding rock and prevents the hole from collapsing, Wilson explained.
The drilling fluid serves two additional roles: It cleans the drill bit to prevent sand and gravel from gunking up the machinery, and it helps lower the temperature, although it would become nearly impossible to keep the drill cool in Earth's innermost layers.
For instance, the temperature in the mantle is a searing 2,570 degrees Fahrenheit (1,410 degrees Celsius). Stainless steel would melt, so this drill would need to be made of an expensive specialized alloy, like titanium, Wilson said.
Once through the mantle, the drill would finally reach Earth's core at about 1,800 miles (2,896 km) down. The outer core is made mostly of liquid iron and nickel and is extremely hot, with temperatures ranging from 7,200 to 9,000 F (4,000 to 5,000 C), according to the California Academy of Sciences. Drilling through this hot, molten iron-nickel alloy would be especially difficult.
"That would cause a whole range of issues," Damon Teagle, a professor of geochemistry at the University of Southampton in the U.K., told Live Science. The fiery outer core would be like drilling through a liquid, and it would likely melt the drill unless cold water was pumped down.
Then, after 3,000 miles (5,000 km), the drill would reach the inner core, where the pressure is so intense that, despite the scorching temperatures, the nickel and iron core remains solid. "You'd really be at indescribable pressures," Teagle said — about 350 gigapascals, or 350 million times atmospheric pressure.
This whole time the drill would be pulled down to the core by Earth's gravity. In the center of the core the gravity would be similar to being in orbit — effectively weightless. That's because the pull of Earth's mass would be equal in all directions, Wilson said.
Then as the drill continues toward the other side of the planet, the pull of gravity will switch relative to the position of the drill, effectively pulling it "down" toward the core again. The drill will have to work against gravity as it pushes "up" toward the surface, back through the outer core, mantle and crust to reverse the downward journey.
If all these obstacles are overcome, the biggest problem once you reach the midpoint is that you'd still have "a long way to go" to reach the other side, Teagle said.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/lifesty ... 00334.html
Flowers Are Evolving to Have Less Sex
As the number of bees and other pollinators falls, field pansies are adapting by fertilizing their own seeds, a new study found.
A study in France of field pansies found that the flowers were more often selfing, or using their own pollen to fertilize their seeds, over the last few decades.Credit...Samson Acoca-Pidolle
Every spring, trillions of flowers mate with the help of bees and other animals. They lure the pollinators to their flowers with flashy colors and nectar. As the animals travel from flower to flower, they take pollen with them, which can fertilize the seeds of other plants.
A new study suggests that humans are quickly altering this annual rite of spring. As toxic pesticides and vanishing habitats have driven down the populations of bees and other pollinators, some flowers have evolved to fertilize their own seeds more often, rather than those of other plants.
Scientists said they were surprised by the speed of the changes, which occurred in just 20 generations. “That’s rapid evolution,” said Pierre-Olivier Cheptou, an evolutionary ecologist at the University of Montpellier in France who led the research.
Dr. Cheptou was inspired to carry out the study when it became clear that bees and other pollinators were in a drastic decline. Would flowers that depend on pollinators for sex, he wondered, find another way to reproduce?
The study focused on a weedy plant called the field pansy, whose white, yellow and purple flowers are common in fields and on roadsides across Europe.
Field pansies typically use bumblebees to sexually reproduce. But they can also use their own pollen to fertilize their own seeds, a process called selfing.
Selfing is more convenient than sex, since a flower does not have to wait for a bee to drop by. But a selfing flower can use only its own genes to produce new seeds. Sexual reproduction allows flowers to mix their DNA, creating new combinations that may make them better prepared for diseases, droughts and other challenges that future generations may face.
To track the evolution of field pansies in recent decades, Dr. Cheptou and his colleagues took advantage of a cache of seeds that France’s National Botanical Conservatories collected in the 1990s and early 2000s.
The researchers compared these old flowers with new ones from across the French countryside. After growing the new and old seeds side by side in the lab under identical conditions, they discovered that selfing had increased 27 percent since the 1990s.
Image
A close-up view of a bumblebee alighting on a pansy flower.
A bumblebee on a field pansy during the study. Researchers believe that repeated selfing may have introduced changes that made the flowers less attractive to bumblebees.Credit...Samson Acoca-Pidolle
The researchers also compared the anatomy of the plants. Although the new field pansies had not changed in their overall size, their flowers had shrunk by 10 percent and produced 20 percent less nectar.
The researchers suspected that these changes made the new field pansies less attractive to bumblebees. To test that idea, they placed bumblebee hives inside enclosures with old and new field pansies. Sure enough, the bees paid more visits to the old plants than to the new ones.
As bumblebee populations have declined, Dr. Cheptou said, the cost of producing nectar and big, attractive flowers may have become a burden on the flowers. Instead of investing energy into luring pollinators, he speculated, field pansies are having more success by directing it to growth and resisting diseases.
The researchers suspect that many other flowers face the same challenge to their survival, and they may also be evolving in the same direction. “There’s no reason to think that other plants have not evolved,” Dr. Cheptou said.
If that’s true, the plants may be making a bad situation worse for pollinating insects. Many pollinators depend on nectar as food; if the plants make less, the insects will go hungry.
Pollinators and flowers may be locked in a downward spiral. Less nectar will drive down populations of insects even more, making sexual reproduction even less rewarding for the plants.
The spiral will not be bad for just the insects, Dr. Cheptou warned. If some plants eventually give up on sexual reproduction altogether, it is unlikely that they will be able to regain that ability again.
In the long term, the genetic limitations of selfing could put plants at risk of extinction. “They will not be able to adapt, so extinction will become more likely,” Dr. Cheptou said.
The results were “impressive, if disheartening,” said Susan Mazer, a botanist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who was not involved in the research.
Dr. Mazer said that the spiral might even be worse than Dr. Cheptou’s research suggested. Along with a decline of pollinators, flowering plants are facing other challenges that may be driving them to abandon sexual reproduction.
Global warming, for example, is speeding up the growth of flowers. It may be shrinking the window of time before flowers wilt in which they can offer pollinators nectar.
But Sasha Bishop, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Michigan who was not involved in the study, said that some flowers might respond to the decline of pollinators in the opposite way.
In a study on morning glories in the southern United States, she and her colleagues found that between 2003 and 2012, the flowers became bigger, not smaller. The scientists see that shift as a strategy to keep attracting bees as they become less common.
“They could invest in selfing, or they could invest in attracting pollinators,” Dr. Bishop said. “Both outcomes are perfectly reasonable.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/04/scie ... 778d3e6de3
A study in France of field pansies found that the flowers were more often selfing, or using their own pollen to fertilize their seeds, over the last few decades.Credit...Samson Acoca-Pidolle
Every spring, trillions of flowers mate with the help of bees and other animals. They lure the pollinators to their flowers with flashy colors and nectar. As the animals travel from flower to flower, they take pollen with them, which can fertilize the seeds of other plants.
A new study suggests that humans are quickly altering this annual rite of spring. As toxic pesticides and vanishing habitats have driven down the populations of bees and other pollinators, some flowers have evolved to fertilize their own seeds more often, rather than those of other plants.
Scientists said they were surprised by the speed of the changes, which occurred in just 20 generations. “That’s rapid evolution,” said Pierre-Olivier Cheptou, an evolutionary ecologist at the University of Montpellier in France who led the research.
Dr. Cheptou was inspired to carry out the study when it became clear that bees and other pollinators were in a drastic decline. Would flowers that depend on pollinators for sex, he wondered, find another way to reproduce?
The study focused on a weedy plant called the field pansy, whose white, yellow and purple flowers are common in fields and on roadsides across Europe.
Field pansies typically use bumblebees to sexually reproduce. But they can also use their own pollen to fertilize their own seeds, a process called selfing.
Selfing is more convenient than sex, since a flower does not have to wait for a bee to drop by. But a selfing flower can use only its own genes to produce new seeds. Sexual reproduction allows flowers to mix their DNA, creating new combinations that may make them better prepared for diseases, droughts and other challenges that future generations may face.
To track the evolution of field pansies in recent decades, Dr. Cheptou and his colleagues took advantage of a cache of seeds that France’s National Botanical Conservatories collected in the 1990s and early 2000s.
The researchers compared these old flowers with new ones from across the French countryside. After growing the new and old seeds side by side in the lab under identical conditions, they discovered that selfing had increased 27 percent since the 1990s.
Image
A close-up view of a bumblebee alighting on a pansy flower.
A bumblebee on a field pansy during the study. Researchers believe that repeated selfing may have introduced changes that made the flowers less attractive to bumblebees.Credit...Samson Acoca-Pidolle
The researchers also compared the anatomy of the plants. Although the new field pansies had not changed in their overall size, their flowers had shrunk by 10 percent and produced 20 percent less nectar.
The researchers suspected that these changes made the new field pansies less attractive to bumblebees. To test that idea, they placed bumblebee hives inside enclosures with old and new field pansies. Sure enough, the bees paid more visits to the old plants than to the new ones.
As bumblebee populations have declined, Dr. Cheptou said, the cost of producing nectar and big, attractive flowers may have become a burden on the flowers. Instead of investing energy into luring pollinators, he speculated, field pansies are having more success by directing it to growth and resisting diseases.
The researchers suspect that many other flowers face the same challenge to their survival, and they may also be evolving in the same direction. “There’s no reason to think that other plants have not evolved,” Dr. Cheptou said.
If that’s true, the plants may be making a bad situation worse for pollinating insects. Many pollinators depend on nectar as food; if the plants make less, the insects will go hungry.
Pollinators and flowers may be locked in a downward spiral. Less nectar will drive down populations of insects even more, making sexual reproduction even less rewarding for the plants.
The spiral will not be bad for just the insects, Dr. Cheptou warned. If some plants eventually give up on sexual reproduction altogether, it is unlikely that they will be able to regain that ability again.
In the long term, the genetic limitations of selfing could put plants at risk of extinction. “They will not be able to adapt, so extinction will become more likely,” Dr. Cheptou said.
The results were “impressive, if disheartening,” said Susan Mazer, a botanist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who was not involved in the research.
Dr. Mazer said that the spiral might even be worse than Dr. Cheptou’s research suggested. Along with a decline of pollinators, flowering plants are facing other challenges that may be driving them to abandon sexual reproduction.
Global warming, for example, is speeding up the growth of flowers. It may be shrinking the window of time before flowers wilt in which they can offer pollinators nectar.
But Sasha Bishop, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Michigan who was not involved in the study, said that some flowers might respond to the decline of pollinators in the opposite way.
In a study on morning glories in the southern United States, she and her colleagues found that between 2003 and 2012, the flowers became bigger, not smaller. The scientists see that shift as a strategy to keep attracting bees as they become less common.
“They could invest in selfing, or they could invest in attracting pollinators,” Dr. Bishop said. “Both outcomes are perfectly reasonable.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/04/scie ... 778d3e6de3
Re: Articles of Interest in Science
NextShark
Japanese scientists capture plants communicating with each other on video
Bryan Ke
Tue, January 16, 2024 at 4:00 PM CST·
A group of Japanese scientists has successfully filmed plants communicating and warning others about potential dangers in real-time, making a breakthrough in an observation first documented in the early 1980s.
What they observed: Published in the journal Nature Communications in October 2023, the research team, led by molecular biologist Masatsugu Toyota from Japan's Saitama University, successfully captured undamaged plants sending defense responses to nearby plants after sensing volatile organic compounds (VOCs), which are produced by other plants in response to mechanical damages or insect attacks.
How the study was conducted: The team, which included Yuri Aratani, a Ph.D. student at the university, and Takuya Uemura, a postdoctoral researcher, attached an air pump to a container filled with leaves and caterpillars and to another chamber containing Arabidopsis thaliana, a common weed from the mustard family. The Arabidopsis was genetically modified to make their cells fluoresce green after detecting calcium ions, which serve as stress messengers. The team then used a fluorescence microscope to monitor the signals the undamaged plants released after receiving VOCs from the damaged leaves.
Why it matters: Plant communication was first observed in a study in 1983, igniting discussions in the scientific community since.
“We have finally unveiled the intricate story of when, where and how plants respond to airborne 'warning messages' from their threatened neighbors,” Toyota said of their recent study. “This ethereal communication network, hidden from our view, plays a pivotal role in safeguarding neighboring plants from imminent threats in a timely manner.”
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/ja ... 21424.html
Japanese scientists capture plants communicating with each other on video
Bryan Ke
Tue, January 16, 2024 at 4:00 PM CST·
A group of Japanese scientists has successfully filmed plants communicating and warning others about potential dangers in real-time, making a breakthrough in an observation first documented in the early 1980s.
What they observed: Published in the journal Nature Communications in October 2023, the research team, led by molecular biologist Masatsugu Toyota from Japan's Saitama University, successfully captured undamaged plants sending defense responses to nearby plants after sensing volatile organic compounds (VOCs), which are produced by other plants in response to mechanical damages or insect attacks.
How the study was conducted: The team, which included Yuri Aratani, a Ph.D. student at the university, and Takuya Uemura, a postdoctoral researcher, attached an air pump to a container filled with leaves and caterpillars and to another chamber containing Arabidopsis thaliana, a common weed from the mustard family. The Arabidopsis was genetically modified to make their cells fluoresce green after detecting calcium ions, which serve as stress messengers. The team then used a fluorescence microscope to monitor the signals the undamaged plants released after receiving VOCs from the damaged leaves.
Why it matters: Plant communication was first observed in a study in 1983, igniting discussions in the scientific community since.
“We have finally unveiled the intricate story of when, where and how plants respond to airborne 'warning messages' from their threatened neighbors,” Toyota said of their recent study. “This ethereal communication network, hidden from our view, plays a pivotal role in safeguarding neighboring plants from imminent threats in a timely manner.”
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/ja ... 21424.html
Re: Articles of Interest in Science
Scientists make Alzheimer’s breakthrough
A simple blood test could detect biological markers of the disease 15 years before symptoms develop, researchers say
Scientists make Alzheimer’s breakthrough
Scientists have hailed a potentially ‘revolutionary’ breakthrough in the early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s, after a team of Swedish researchers found that a commercially available blood test can detect biological markers of the disease about ten to 15 years before symptoms develop.
In a study of 768 people in their fifties, sixties, and seventies over an eight-year period conducted by the University of Gothenburg, it was found that the test – which detects the presence of tau proteins in blood – was 97% accurate in assessing if a subject was liable to develop the disease.
The results of the study, published in the JAMA Neurology journal on Monday, have been hailed as a breakthrough in early screening tests for the disease well in advance of the onset of symptoms.
Alzheimer’s, which causes the brain to shrink and its cells to eventually die, is the most common form of dementia, and is characterized by a decline in cognitive function, as well as behavior and social skills.
The research “adds to a growing body of evidence that this particular test has huge potential to revolutionize diagnosis for people with suspected Alzheimer’s,” Sheona Scales, the director of research at Alzheimer’s Research UK, said, according to The Times on Monday.
She added that the testing is “superior to a range of other tests currently under development,” and preferable to more invasive methods currently used by medical practitioners, such as lumbar punctures.
David Curtis of the UCL Genetics Institute said that the findings of the Swedish team of scientists “could potentially have huge implications.”
“Everybody over 50 could be routinely screened every few years, in much the same way as they are now screened for high cholesterol,” he added. “It is possible that currently available treatments for Alzheimer’s disease would work better in those diagnosed early this way.”
The developer of the blood test, Californian company ALZpath, has said that it hopes to make the test widely available for clinical use in the first quarter of this year.
About 1 in 9 people (10.7%) aged 65 or over has the disease, according to data from the Alzheimer’s Association. This is expected to rise substantially in the next 25 years, the group says on its website, “barring the development of medical breakthroughs to prevent or cure Alzheimer’s disease.”
https://www.rt.com/news/591108-alzheime ... akthrough/
A simple blood test could detect biological markers of the disease 15 years before symptoms develop, researchers say
Scientists make Alzheimer’s breakthrough
Scientists have hailed a potentially ‘revolutionary’ breakthrough in the early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s, after a team of Swedish researchers found that a commercially available blood test can detect biological markers of the disease about ten to 15 years before symptoms develop.
In a study of 768 people in their fifties, sixties, and seventies over an eight-year period conducted by the University of Gothenburg, it was found that the test – which detects the presence of tau proteins in blood – was 97% accurate in assessing if a subject was liable to develop the disease.
The results of the study, published in the JAMA Neurology journal on Monday, have been hailed as a breakthrough in early screening tests for the disease well in advance of the onset of symptoms.
Alzheimer’s, which causes the brain to shrink and its cells to eventually die, is the most common form of dementia, and is characterized by a decline in cognitive function, as well as behavior and social skills.
The research “adds to a growing body of evidence that this particular test has huge potential to revolutionize diagnosis for people with suspected Alzheimer’s,” Sheona Scales, the director of research at Alzheimer’s Research UK, said, according to The Times on Monday.
She added that the testing is “superior to a range of other tests currently under development,” and preferable to more invasive methods currently used by medical practitioners, such as lumbar punctures.
David Curtis of the UCL Genetics Institute said that the findings of the Swedish team of scientists “could potentially have huge implications.”
“Everybody over 50 could be routinely screened every few years, in much the same way as they are now screened for high cholesterol,” he added. “It is possible that currently available treatments for Alzheimer’s disease would work better in those diagnosed early this way.”
The developer of the blood test, Californian company ALZpath, has said that it hopes to make the test widely available for clinical use in the first quarter of this year.
About 1 in 9 people (10.7%) aged 65 or over has the disease, according to data from the Alzheimer’s Association. This is expected to rise substantially in the next 25 years, the group says on its website, “barring the development of medical breakthroughs to prevent or cure Alzheimer’s disease.”
https://www.rt.com/news/591108-alzheime ... akthrough/
World's first white rhino IVF pregnancy may offer way to save subspecies
A 3D model of a 70-days-old southern white rhinoceros foetus is displayed during a press conference, following the world's first successful embryo transfer through the gut into a southern white rhinoceros female cow, which is a breakthrough for a team of international scientists in their work to save the northern white rhino from extinction, at Tierpark Zoo in Berlin, Germany January 24, 2024.
Thomas Hildebrandt, Head of Department of Reproduction Management at the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (Leibniz-IZW), presents a 3D model of a 70-days-old southern white rhinoceros foetus during a press conference, following the world's first successful embryo transfer through the gut into a southern white rhinoceros female cow, which is a breakthrough for a team
Thomas Hildebrandt, Head of Department of Reproduction Management at the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (Leibniz-IZW), addresses a press conference, following the world's first successful embryo transfer through the gut into a southern white rhinoceros female cow, which is a breakthrough for a team of international scientists in their work to save the northern white rhino from..
Jan Stejskal, Director of International Projects and Communications at Dvur Kralove Zoo, attends a press conference, following the world's first successful embryo transfer through the gut into a southern white rhinoceros female cow, which is a breakthrough for a team of international scientists in their work to save the northern white rhino from extinction, at Tierpark Zoo in Berlin, Germany
Andreas Knieriem, Director of Tierpark Berlin, attends a press conference, following the world's first successful embryo transfer through the gut into a southern white rhinoceros female cow, which is a breakthrough for a team of international scientists in their work to save the northern white rhino from extinction, at Tierpark Zoo in Berlin, Germany January 24, 2024. The world's only two known
BERLIN, Jan 24 (Reuters) - Scientists in Berlin on Wednesday announced the first successful embryo transfer in a white rhinoceros using a method that offers hope for saving the critically endangered northern white rhino subspecies from extinction.
The white rhinoceros includes two distinct subspecies, northern and southern. The last male northern white rhino died in 2018, with only two female members remaining. Neither are able to carry a calf to term. Southern white rhinos are more abundant.
The scientists turned to in-vitro fertilization, harvesting the eggs of female northern white rhinos and using sperm from dead male rhinos of the subspecies to produce embryos that eventually will be transferred to southern white rhino surrogate mothers.
By way of proof of concept, the scientists said they transferred the embryo of a southern white rhino into a surrogate mother of that subspecies at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya on Sept. 24, 2023.
The international BioRescue team, backed by the German government, confirmed on Wednesday that the procedure had produced a successful pregnancy of 70 days, with a well-developed 6.4 cm (2.5 inch)-long male embryo.
"We achieved together something which was not believed to be possible," said Thomas Hildebrandt, who heads the reproduction management department at the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research, speaking to reporters at a press conference at Berlin's Tierpark zoo.
"That is really a milestone to allow us to produce northern white rhino calves in the next two, two and a half years," Hildebrandt said.
Northern white rhinos, which despite their name are actually grey, used to roam freely in several countries in east and central Africa, but their numbers fell sharply due to widespread poaching for their horns.
The BioRescue consortium has been racing against time to save the subspecies.
The proof of concept allows them to now safely move to the transfer of northern white rhino embryos, the scientists said.
https://www.reuters.com/business/enviro ... 778d3e6de3
Re: Articles of Interest in Science
CNN
Earth’s moon is shrinking. Here’s what scientists say that could mean
Jacopo Prisco, CNN
Wed, January 31, 2024 at 5:50 PM CST·
A region of the moon that’s at the center of a new international space race because it may contain water ice could be less hospitable than once thought, new research has found.
Interest in the lunar south pole spiked last year, when India’s Chandrayaan-3 mission made the first successful soft landing in the area, just days after Russia’s Luna-25 spacecraft crashed en route to attempt the same feat. NASA has selected the region as the landing site for its Artemis III mission, which could mark the return of astronauts to the moon as soon as 2026, and China also has plans to create future habitats there.
But now a study funded by NASA is ringing an alarm bell: As the moon’s core gradually cools and shrinks, its surface develops creases — like a grape shriveling into a raisin — that create “moonquakes” that can last for hours, as well as landslides. Much like the rest of the natural satellite’s surface, the area of the south pole that is the subject of so much interest is prone to these seismic phenomena, potentially posing a threat to future human settlers and equipment.
“This is not to alarm anyone and certainly not to discourage exploration of that part of the south pole of the moon,” said the study’s lead author, Thomas R. Watters, a senior scientist emeritus in the National Air and Space Museum’s Center for Earth and Planetary Studies, “but to raise the caution that the moon is not this benign place where nothing is happening.”
Finding the source of moonquakes
The moon has shrunk by about 150 feet in circumference over the last few million years — a significant number in geological terms but too small to cause any ripple effect on Earth or to tidal cycles, according to researchers.
On the lunar surface, however, it’s a different story. Despite what its appearance might suggest, the moon still has a hot interior, which makes it seismically active.
“There is an outer core that’s molten and is cooling off,” Watters said. “As it cools, the moon shrinks, the interior volume changes and the crust has to adjust to that change — it’s a global contraction, to which tidal forces on the Earth also contribute.”
Because the moon’s surface is brittle, this pulling generates cracks, which geologists call faults. “The moon is thought of as being this geologically dead object where nothing has happened for billions of years, but that couldn’t be more far from the truth,” Watters said. “These faults are very young and things are happening. We’ve actually detected landslides that have occurred during the time that the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has been in orbit around the moon.”
NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LRO, launched in 2009, and it’s mapping the moon’s surface with various instruments. In the new study, published January 25 in The Planetary Science Journal, Watters and his colleagues used data collected by LRO to link a powerful moonquake — detected with instruments left by Apollo astronauts more than 50 years ago — to a series of faults in the lunar south pole.
“We knew from the Apollo seismic experiment, which were four seismometers that operated for a period of about seven years, that there were these shallow moonquakes, but we didn’t really know what the source was,” Watters added. “We also knew that the largest of the shallow moonquakes detected by the Apollo seismometers was located near the south pole. It kind of became a sort of a detective story to try to figure out what the source was, and it turns out that these young faults are the best suspect.”
The strongest recorded quake was the equivalent of magnitude 5.0. On Earth, that would be considered moderate, but the moon’s lower gravity would make it feel worse, Watters said.
“On the Earth, you have a much stronger gravity keeping you attached to the surface. On the moon, it’s much smaller, so even a little bit of ground acceleration is going to potentially pop you off your feet, if you’re walking along,” he said. “That kind of shaking can really start throwing things around in a low G environment.”
Moonquakes: Short-term vs. long-term implications
The findings of the study will not affect the Artemis III landing region selection process, and that’s due to the scope and duration of the mission, according to study coauthor and NASA planetary scientist Renee Weber.
“This is because estimating how often a specific region experiences a moonquake is difficult to do accurately, and like earthquakes, we can’t predict moonquakes,” Weber said. “Strong shallow moonquakes are infrequent and pose a low risk to short-term missions on the lunar surface.”
NASA has identified 13 Artemis III candidate landing regions near the lunar south pole, she added, using criteria such as the ability to land safely in the region, the potential to meet science objectives, launch window availability and conditions such as terrain, communications and lighting. As part of the mission, two astronauts will spend about a week living and working on the lunar surface.
However, Weber said, for a long-term human presence on the moon, the site selection process could indeed factor in geographic characteristics such as proximity to tectonic features and terrain.
Like flashlights in the moon
Moonquakes could indeed be a problem for future manned landing missions, said Yosio Nakamura, a professor emeritus of geophysics at the University of Texas at Austin, who was among the researchers who first looked at the data collected by the Apollo seismic stations.
However, Nakamura, who was not involved with the study, disagrees about the cause of the quakes, and said Apollo data shows the phenomena originate tens of kilometers below the surface.
“We still don’t know what causes shallow moonquakes, but it is not the sliding fault near the surface,” he said. “Regardless of what causes those quakes, it is true that they pose a potential threat to future landing missions, and we need more data about them.”
Regardless of the underlying cause, the potential danger moonquakes pose to astronauts will be limited by the fact that — at least in the near future — humans will be on the moon for short periods of time, a few days at most, according to Allen Husker, a research professor of geophysics at the California Institute of Technology who was also not involved with the study.
“It is very unlikely that a large moonquake will happen while they are there. However, it is good to know that these seismic sources (causing the quakes) exist. They can be an opportunity to better study the moon as we do on the Earth with earthquakes,” Husker said. “By the time there is an actual moon base, we should have a much better idea of the actual seismic hazard with upcoming missions.”
That sentiment is shared by Jeffrey Andrews-Hanna, an associate professor of planetary science at the University of Arizona, who also didn’t participate in the work. “Moonquakes are an incredible tool for doing science,” he said in an email. “They are like flashlights in the lunar interior that illuminate its structure for us to see. Studying moonquakes at the south pole will tell us more about the Moon’s interior structure as well as its present-day activity.”
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/mo ... 30789.html
Earth’s moon is shrinking. Here’s what scientists say that could mean
Jacopo Prisco, CNN
Wed, January 31, 2024 at 5:50 PM CST·
A region of the moon that’s at the center of a new international space race because it may contain water ice could be less hospitable than once thought, new research has found.
Interest in the lunar south pole spiked last year, when India’s Chandrayaan-3 mission made the first successful soft landing in the area, just days after Russia’s Luna-25 spacecraft crashed en route to attempt the same feat. NASA has selected the region as the landing site for its Artemis III mission, which could mark the return of astronauts to the moon as soon as 2026, and China also has plans to create future habitats there.
But now a study funded by NASA is ringing an alarm bell: As the moon’s core gradually cools and shrinks, its surface develops creases — like a grape shriveling into a raisin — that create “moonquakes” that can last for hours, as well as landslides. Much like the rest of the natural satellite’s surface, the area of the south pole that is the subject of so much interest is prone to these seismic phenomena, potentially posing a threat to future human settlers and equipment.
“This is not to alarm anyone and certainly not to discourage exploration of that part of the south pole of the moon,” said the study’s lead author, Thomas R. Watters, a senior scientist emeritus in the National Air and Space Museum’s Center for Earth and Planetary Studies, “but to raise the caution that the moon is not this benign place where nothing is happening.”
Finding the source of moonquakes
The moon has shrunk by about 150 feet in circumference over the last few million years — a significant number in geological terms but too small to cause any ripple effect on Earth or to tidal cycles, according to researchers.
On the lunar surface, however, it’s a different story. Despite what its appearance might suggest, the moon still has a hot interior, which makes it seismically active.
“There is an outer core that’s molten and is cooling off,” Watters said. “As it cools, the moon shrinks, the interior volume changes and the crust has to adjust to that change — it’s a global contraction, to which tidal forces on the Earth also contribute.”
Because the moon’s surface is brittle, this pulling generates cracks, which geologists call faults. “The moon is thought of as being this geologically dead object where nothing has happened for billions of years, but that couldn’t be more far from the truth,” Watters said. “These faults are very young and things are happening. We’ve actually detected landslides that have occurred during the time that the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has been in orbit around the moon.”
NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LRO, launched in 2009, and it’s mapping the moon’s surface with various instruments. In the new study, published January 25 in The Planetary Science Journal, Watters and his colleagues used data collected by LRO to link a powerful moonquake — detected with instruments left by Apollo astronauts more than 50 years ago — to a series of faults in the lunar south pole.
“We knew from the Apollo seismic experiment, which were four seismometers that operated for a period of about seven years, that there were these shallow moonquakes, but we didn’t really know what the source was,” Watters added. “We also knew that the largest of the shallow moonquakes detected by the Apollo seismometers was located near the south pole. It kind of became a sort of a detective story to try to figure out what the source was, and it turns out that these young faults are the best suspect.”
The strongest recorded quake was the equivalent of magnitude 5.0. On Earth, that would be considered moderate, but the moon’s lower gravity would make it feel worse, Watters said.
“On the Earth, you have a much stronger gravity keeping you attached to the surface. On the moon, it’s much smaller, so even a little bit of ground acceleration is going to potentially pop you off your feet, if you’re walking along,” he said. “That kind of shaking can really start throwing things around in a low G environment.”
Moonquakes: Short-term vs. long-term implications
The findings of the study will not affect the Artemis III landing region selection process, and that’s due to the scope and duration of the mission, according to study coauthor and NASA planetary scientist Renee Weber.
“This is because estimating how often a specific region experiences a moonquake is difficult to do accurately, and like earthquakes, we can’t predict moonquakes,” Weber said. “Strong shallow moonquakes are infrequent and pose a low risk to short-term missions on the lunar surface.”
NASA has identified 13 Artemis III candidate landing regions near the lunar south pole, she added, using criteria such as the ability to land safely in the region, the potential to meet science objectives, launch window availability and conditions such as terrain, communications and lighting. As part of the mission, two astronauts will spend about a week living and working on the lunar surface.
However, Weber said, for a long-term human presence on the moon, the site selection process could indeed factor in geographic characteristics such as proximity to tectonic features and terrain.
Like flashlights in the moon
Moonquakes could indeed be a problem for future manned landing missions, said Yosio Nakamura, a professor emeritus of geophysics at the University of Texas at Austin, who was among the researchers who first looked at the data collected by the Apollo seismic stations.
However, Nakamura, who was not involved with the study, disagrees about the cause of the quakes, and said Apollo data shows the phenomena originate tens of kilometers below the surface.
“We still don’t know what causes shallow moonquakes, but it is not the sliding fault near the surface,” he said. “Regardless of what causes those quakes, it is true that they pose a potential threat to future landing missions, and we need more data about them.”
Regardless of the underlying cause, the potential danger moonquakes pose to astronauts will be limited by the fact that — at least in the near future — humans will be on the moon for short periods of time, a few days at most, according to Allen Husker, a research professor of geophysics at the California Institute of Technology who was also not involved with the study.
“It is very unlikely that a large moonquake will happen while they are there. However, it is good to know that these seismic sources (causing the quakes) exist. They can be an opportunity to better study the moon as we do on the Earth with earthquakes,” Husker said. “By the time there is an actual moon base, we should have a much better idea of the actual seismic hazard with upcoming missions.”
That sentiment is shared by Jeffrey Andrews-Hanna, an associate professor of planetary science at the University of Arizona, who also didn’t participate in the work. “Moonquakes are an incredible tool for doing science,” he said in an email. “They are like flashlights in the lunar interior that illuminate its structure for us to see. Studying moonquakes at the south pole will tell us more about the Moon’s interior structure as well as its present-day activity.”
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/mo ... 30789.html
Re: Articles of Interest in Science
ABC News
Odysseus moon landing updates: Nova-C makes first successful commercial lunar landing
GINA SUNSERI, MARY KEKATOS and LEAH SARNOFF
Thu, February 22, 2024 at 5:46 PM CST·
The Odysseus moon landing has been a success!
Despite technical issues nearly causing a delay, Odysseus reached the surface of the moon at approximately 6:23 p.m. ET.
"We can confirm without a doubt the equipment is on the moon," Dr. Tim Crane said on the NASA broadcast. "Odysseus has a new home."
High-resolution photos of the moon landing are expected to be released at a later time, according to the agency.
Intuitive Machines' lander, named Odysseus, launched last week from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida and entered lunar orbit on Wednesday. This is the first commercial landing in U.S. history.
This landing marked the first by a U.S.-built spacecraft in more than 50 years.
The lander is carrying five NASA instruments, including a radio beacon meant to transmit precise geolocation and cameras that capture how the surface of the moon changes from interactions with the engine plume of the spacecraft, as well as commercial cargo.
Odysseus -- nicknamed "Odie" by employees -- will have seven days before darkness descends on the landing site, which will prevent the spacecraft's solar panels from gathering energy from sunlight and bringing freezing temperatures.
Intuitive Machines was one of several companies approved by NASA under Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) contracts to build private lunar landers that the federal space agency, among others, would use to send instruments into space.
Steve Altemus, president and CEO of Intuitive Machines, said the company's employees' names are engraved into the footer to permanently stamp their names on the lunar surface.
"I had everyone's name etched on the bottom of the landing gear so that their names will be indelibly printed on the moon when we touch down softly," he told ABC News.
This is the third attempt to land on the moon this year. In early January, the Peregrine lunar lander, built by Astrobotic, developed a critical fuel leak, forcing it to return to Earth and burn upon re-entry.
Meanwhile, Japan launched a rocket to the moon in September 2023 and landed on Jan. 19, becoming the fifth country to do so. However, the lunar lander landed upside down and could not deploy its solar arrays.
"There's reduced gravity There's very little atmosphere, lot of dust, and so the engineers have to speculate how a spacecraft would behave in that type of environment, right? And it doesn't exist here on Earth," Regina Blue, NASA's CLPS deputy program manager, told ABC News, explaining why it's so difficult to land on the moon.
"So they have to spend lots of hours testing and testing and doing more testing and even that, getting into that environment there is a good amount of unpredictability, so that makes it very, very hard," she continued.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/att/cm/ ... 00449.html
Odysseus moon landing updates: Nova-C makes first successful commercial lunar landing
GINA SUNSERI, MARY KEKATOS and LEAH SARNOFF
Thu, February 22, 2024 at 5:46 PM CST·
The Odysseus moon landing has been a success!
Despite technical issues nearly causing a delay, Odysseus reached the surface of the moon at approximately 6:23 p.m. ET.
"We can confirm without a doubt the equipment is on the moon," Dr. Tim Crane said on the NASA broadcast. "Odysseus has a new home."
High-resolution photos of the moon landing are expected to be released at a later time, according to the agency.
Intuitive Machines' lander, named Odysseus, launched last week from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida and entered lunar orbit on Wednesday. This is the first commercial landing in U.S. history.
This landing marked the first by a U.S.-built spacecraft in more than 50 years.
The lander is carrying five NASA instruments, including a radio beacon meant to transmit precise geolocation and cameras that capture how the surface of the moon changes from interactions with the engine plume of the spacecraft, as well as commercial cargo.
Odysseus -- nicknamed "Odie" by employees -- will have seven days before darkness descends on the landing site, which will prevent the spacecraft's solar panels from gathering energy from sunlight and bringing freezing temperatures.
Intuitive Machines was one of several companies approved by NASA under Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) contracts to build private lunar landers that the federal space agency, among others, would use to send instruments into space.
Steve Altemus, president and CEO of Intuitive Machines, said the company's employees' names are engraved into the footer to permanently stamp their names on the lunar surface.
"I had everyone's name etched on the bottom of the landing gear so that their names will be indelibly printed on the moon when we touch down softly," he told ABC News.
This is the third attempt to land on the moon this year. In early January, the Peregrine lunar lander, built by Astrobotic, developed a critical fuel leak, forcing it to return to Earth and burn upon re-entry.
Meanwhile, Japan launched a rocket to the moon in September 2023 and landed on Jan. 19, becoming the fifth country to do so. However, the lunar lander landed upside down and could not deploy its solar arrays.
"There's reduced gravity There's very little atmosphere, lot of dust, and so the engineers have to speculate how a spacecraft would behave in that type of environment, right? And it doesn't exist here on Earth," Regina Blue, NASA's CLPS deputy program manager, told ABC News, explaining why it's so difficult to land on the moon.
"So they have to spend lots of hours testing and testing and doing more testing and even that, getting into that environment there is a good amount of unpredictability, so that makes it very, very hard," she continued.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/att/cm/ ... 00449.html
Moon Lander Is Lying on Its Side but Still Functional, Officials Say
The Odysseus spacecraft was drifting horizontally as it set down, and a landing strut may have hit an obstacle on the surface.
A screen grab from a NASA TV update on the Odysseus lander, showing an image the lander took during its descent to the moon on Thursday, about 10 kilometers above the surface.Credit...Intuitive Machines, via NASA TV
One day after its historic landing, the first private spacecraft on the moon is in good condition but has toppled over, the company that built it reported on Friday.
The spacecraft, named Odysseus, set down in the moon’s south pole region on Thursday evening, the first U.S. vehicle to land softly on the moon since Apollo 17 in 1972.
“The vehicle is stable near or at our intended landing site,” Steve Altemus, the chief executive of Intuitive Machines said during a NASA news conference on Friday. “We do have communications with the lander.”
He added, “That’s phenomenal to begin with.”
But the landing did not go perfectly. Because the spacecraft fell over, its antennas are not pointed directly at Earth, limiting the amount of information that can go back and forth.
Odysseus has not sent back any photographs since landing, although Mr. Altemus did show one that was taken while the spacecraft was descending to the surface. “You see how shadowed and undulating the terrain is,” he said.
Engineers at Intuitive Machines are still trying to extract more information from the spacecraft.
Mr. Altemus and Tim Crain, the chief technology officer, also described unforeseen glitches that nearly doomed the mission. The landing was salvaged through serendipity and frantic work, they said.
When Odysseus arrived at the moon on Wednesday, it was supposed to enter a circular orbit about 62 miles above the surface. But because of inaccuracies in its trajectory, the spacecraft ended up in an elliptical orbit. An added engine burn placed Odysseus in a better orbit.
To check how close the spacecraft was getting to the moon’s surface, flight controllers turned on the laser range finders, instruments that could measure the spacecraft’s altitude during landing by firing laser pulses at the moon’s surface.
But when controllers checked the data the next morning — just hours before the planned landing on Thursday — they discovered that one laser had not fired. It was then discovered that the safety switches on the two range finder lasers were still enabled when Odysseus went to space.
There was no way to flip the switches — they could not be bypassed through software — now that the spacecraft was more than 200,000 miles away.
“I can laugh about it now,” Mr. Altemus said at the news conference.
“Tim was on console as the mission director, and I said, ‘Tim, We’re going to have to land without laser range finders,’” he said. “And his face got absolutely white, because it was like a punch in the stomach, that we were going to lose the mission.”
They were brainstorming possible workarounds when Dr. Crain realized that Odysseus actually had a handy backup onboard.
It was also carrying an experimental instrument called the Navigation Doppler Lidar, which NASA wanted to test — essentially a more sophisticated instrument with three laser beams that measure not just altitude but the velocity of the spacecraft during its descent.
That instrument could provide the missing readings.
Image
A crowd cheers and raises arms in the air. They are illuminated in bluish light by a screen off-camera.
Intuitive Machines employees cheered during a watch party in Houston during the landing on Thursday.Credit...Raquel Natalicchio/Houston Chronicle, via Associated Press
“It sounds easy in retrospect,” Dr. Crain said. All the engineers had to do was patch the spacecraft’s software in order for the NASA instrument to provide its readings to the guidance, navigation and control computer.
“In normal software development for a spacecraft, this is the kind of thing that would have taken a month,” Dr. Crain said. “Our team basically did that in an hour and a half.”
That Odysseus arrived at the moon in the wrong orbit turned out to be lucky. Without the need to check the orbit, the laser altimeter would not have been turned on until an hour before landing. At that point, it would have been too late to find a solution to the locked range finders, and Odysseus almost certainly would have crashed.
“We would have probably been five minutes to landing before we would have realized that those lasers weren’t working, if we had not had that fortuitous event,” Dr. Crain said. “So serendipity is absolutely the right word.”
There was still one more problem.
Installing the software changes in Odysseus required rebooting the onboard computer. An attempt to do that in a sophisticated test simulation indicated that the spacecraft would drift off course. So controllers had to figure out a way to reboot the computer without dooming the spacecraft.
“We had to work feverishly,” Mr. Altemus said. “That was the one that had us all biting our nails just a little bit.”
The extra orbit added two hours for them to finish.
The jury-rigged navigation software worked.
Despite it all, something did not work quite right as the spacecraft touched down. The lander was descending faster than expected and still moving sideways at two miles per hour, when the motion should have been perfectly vertical.
One of the six landing legs might have snagged the surface, toppling the spacecraft. “We might have fractured that landing gear and tipped over gently,” Mr. Altemus said.
A Japanese spacecraft also tipped over while landing on the moon in January. That spacecraft, known as Smart Lander for Investigating Moon, or SLIM, was also still in working condition after its tumble.
The engineers at Intuitive Machines are still working to speed up communications with Odysseus and determine what scientific tasks can still be performed. That includes a small camera system built by students at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Fla., that was supposed to eject when Odysseus was about 100 feet above the ground and capture pictures of the landing.
There was not enough time to include the deployment of the camera in the patched landing software, so it remains attached to Odysseus. But Mr. Altemus said Odysseus might still be able to eject the camera, which could then take some photographs of the area.
The Odysseus mission is likely to end by next weekend. “We know at this landing site the sun will move beyond our solar arrays, in any configuration, in approximately nine days,” Dr. Crain said.
The spacecraft is not designed to survive the frigid temperatures of the two-week-long lunar night, although perhaps Odysseus will revive when the sun rises again.
“We’ll just see if our electronics made it through,” Dr. Crain said. “We’ll take a look. We’ll take a listen.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/23/scie ... -nasa.html
A screen grab from a NASA TV update on the Odysseus lander, showing an image the lander took during its descent to the moon on Thursday, about 10 kilometers above the surface.Credit...Intuitive Machines, via NASA TV
One day after its historic landing, the first private spacecraft on the moon is in good condition but has toppled over, the company that built it reported on Friday.
The spacecraft, named Odysseus, set down in the moon’s south pole region on Thursday evening, the first U.S. vehicle to land softly on the moon since Apollo 17 in 1972.
“The vehicle is stable near or at our intended landing site,” Steve Altemus, the chief executive of Intuitive Machines said during a NASA news conference on Friday. “We do have communications with the lander.”
He added, “That’s phenomenal to begin with.”
But the landing did not go perfectly. Because the spacecraft fell over, its antennas are not pointed directly at Earth, limiting the amount of information that can go back and forth.
Odysseus has not sent back any photographs since landing, although Mr. Altemus did show one that was taken while the spacecraft was descending to the surface. “You see how shadowed and undulating the terrain is,” he said.
Engineers at Intuitive Machines are still trying to extract more information from the spacecraft.
Mr. Altemus and Tim Crain, the chief technology officer, also described unforeseen glitches that nearly doomed the mission. The landing was salvaged through serendipity and frantic work, they said.
When Odysseus arrived at the moon on Wednesday, it was supposed to enter a circular orbit about 62 miles above the surface. But because of inaccuracies in its trajectory, the spacecraft ended up in an elliptical orbit. An added engine burn placed Odysseus in a better orbit.
To check how close the spacecraft was getting to the moon’s surface, flight controllers turned on the laser range finders, instruments that could measure the spacecraft’s altitude during landing by firing laser pulses at the moon’s surface.
But when controllers checked the data the next morning — just hours before the planned landing on Thursday — they discovered that one laser had not fired. It was then discovered that the safety switches on the two range finder lasers were still enabled when Odysseus went to space.
There was no way to flip the switches — they could not be bypassed through software — now that the spacecraft was more than 200,000 miles away.
“I can laugh about it now,” Mr. Altemus said at the news conference.
“Tim was on console as the mission director, and I said, ‘Tim, We’re going to have to land without laser range finders,’” he said. “And his face got absolutely white, because it was like a punch in the stomach, that we were going to lose the mission.”
They were brainstorming possible workarounds when Dr. Crain realized that Odysseus actually had a handy backup onboard.
It was also carrying an experimental instrument called the Navigation Doppler Lidar, which NASA wanted to test — essentially a more sophisticated instrument with three laser beams that measure not just altitude but the velocity of the spacecraft during its descent.
That instrument could provide the missing readings.
Image
A crowd cheers and raises arms in the air. They are illuminated in bluish light by a screen off-camera.
Intuitive Machines employees cheered during a watch party in Houston during the landing on Thursday.Credit...Raquel Natalicchio/Houston Chronicle, via Associated Press
“It sounds easy in retrospect,” Dr. Crain said. All the engineers had to do was patch the spacecraft’s software in order for the NASA instrument to provide its readings to the guidance, navigation and control computer.
“In normal software development for a spacecraft, this is the kind of thing that would have taken a month,” Dr. Crain said. “Our team basically did that in an hour and a half.”
That Odysseus arrived at the moon in the wrong orbit turned out to be lucky. Without the need to check the orbit, the laser altimeter would not have been turned on until an hour before landing. At that point, it would have been too late to find a solution to the locked range finders, and Odysseus almost certainly would have crashed.
“We would have probably been five minutes to landing before we would have realized that those lasers weren’t working, if we had not had that fortuitous event,” Dr. Crain said. “So serendipity is absolutely the right word.”
There was still one more problem.
Installing the software changes in Odysseus required rebooting the onboard computer. An attempt to do that in a sophisticated test simulation indicated that the spacecraft would drift off course. So controllers had to figure out a way to reboot the computer without dooming the spacecraft.
“We had to work feverishly,” Mr. Altemus said. “That was the one that had us all biting our nails just a little bit.”
The extra orbit added two hours for them to finish.
The jury-rigged navigation software worked.
Despite it all, something did not work quite right as the spacecraft touched down. The lander was descending faster than expected and still moving sideways at two miles per hour, when the motion should have been perfectly vertical.
One of the six landing legs might have snagged the surface, toppling the spacecraft. “We might have fractured that landing gear and tipped over gently,” Mr. Altemus said.
A Japanese spacecraft also tipped over while landing on the moon in January. That spacecraft, known as Smart Lander for Investigating Moon, or SLIM, was also still in working condition after its tumble.
The engineers at Intuitive Machines are still working to speed up communications with Odysseus and determine what scientific tasks can still be performed. That includes a small camera system built by students at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Fla., that was supposed to eject when Odysseus was about 100 feet above the ground and capture pictures of the landing.
There was not enough time to include the deployment of the camera in the patched landing software, so it remains attached to Odysseus. But Mr. Altemus said Odysseus might still be able to eject the camera, which could then take some photographs of the area.
The Odysseus mission is likely to end by next weekend. “We know at this landing site the sun will move beyond our solar arrays, in any configuration, in approximately nine days,” Dr. Crain said.
The spacecraft is not designed to survive the frigid temperatures of the two-week-long lunar night, although perhaps Odysseus will revive when the sun rises again.
“We’ll just see if our electronics made it through,” Dr. Crain said. “We’ll take a look. We’ll take a listen.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/23/scie ... -nasa.html
Scientists Discover 100 New Marine Species in New Zealand
The findings, from the largely uncharted waters of Bounty Trough, show that “we’ve got a long way to go in terms of understanding where life is found in the ocean,” a researcher said.
A potentially new species of elusive deep-sea squid found by scientists who were working to identify new marine life as part of the Ocean Census project.Credit...Ocean Census/NIWA
A team of 21 scientists set off on an expedition in the largely uncharted waters of Bounty Trough off the coast of the South Island of New Zealand in February hoping to find a trove of new species.
The expedition paid off, they said on Sunday, with the discovery of 100 new species, a number that was likely to grow, said Alex Rogers, a marine biologist who was a leader of the expedition.
“I expect that number to increase as we work through more and more of the samples,” Dr. Rogers said. “I think that number is going to be in the hundreds instead of just 100.”
Dozens of mollusks, three fish, a shrimp and a cephalopod that is a type of predatory mollusk were among the new species found in the expedition, which was led by Ocean Census, a nonprofit dedicated to the global discovery of ocean life, the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research in New Zealand, and the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa.
One creature that caused a “lot of head-scratching” is a star-shaped animal, about a centimeter across, but researchers have not managed to identify it, Dr. Rogers said. They believe it may possibly be a coral.
Two million-plus species are estimated to live in the oceans, but only 10 percent of ocean life is known. It is vital to learn more about the aquatic life because marine ecosystems carry out functions that support life on Earth, such as creating food for billions, storing carbon and regulating climate, Dr. Rogers said.
“We’re dealing with a situation where we know marine life is in decline,” he said. “In order to try to manage human activities to prevent this continuing decline, we need to understand the distribution of marine life better than we currently do.”
Ocean Census was founded last year by the Nippon Foundation, a Japanese philanthropic organization, and the U.K.-based ocean exploration foundation Nekton. When it began its work, Ocean Census set a goal of finding at least 100,000 new marine species in a decade.
The group is focused on exploring some of the most under-sampled bodies of water.
In the February expedition, researchers first mapped the area with an imaging system and video cameras to check that it would be safe for their equipment and to ensure that there were no vulnerable animal communities that potentially could be harmed.
Then, they deployed what is known as the Brenke sled, a sampling device that has two nets, one close to the seabed, and the other a meter above it. As it drags along the floor, it churns up animals living close to the sea floor. To find larger animals, the researchers used other methods, such as baited nets.
Trawling the depths at 4,800 meters — or roughly the equivalent to Mont Blanc, the highest peak in the Alps — researchers collected 1,791 samples.
Given its depth, Bounty Trough is not of great interest to fisheries and therefore is poorly sampled, Dr. Rogers said. Geologists have surveyed this area but biologists have not.
Worldwide, about 240,000 marine species have been discovered and named to date but only 2,200 species are discovered each year on average, according to Ocean Census.
In many bodies of water there is still a lot that scientists have to learn, Dr. Rogers said.
“It’s probably the equivalent of a space mission,” he said. “We’re still in early days, but the number of species that we found in the Bounty Trough really indicates to us that we’ve got a long way to go in terms of understanding where life is found in the ocean.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/10/scie ... 778d3e6de3
A potentially new species of elusive deep-sea squid found by scientists who were working to identify new marine life as part of the Ocean Census project.Credit...Ocean Census/NIWA
A team of 21 scientists set off on an expedition in the largely uncharted waters of Bounty Trough off the coast of the South Island of New Zealand in February hoping to find a trove of new species.
The expedition paid off, they said on Sunday, with the discovery of 100 new species, a number that was likely to grow, said Alex Rogers, a marine biologist who was a leader of the expedition.
“I expect that number to increase as we work through more and more of the samples,” Dr. Rogers said. “I think that number is going to be in the hundreds instead of just 100.”
Dozens of mollusks, three fish, a shrimp and a cephalopod that is a type of predatory mollusk were among the new species found in the expedition, which was led by Ocean Census, a nonprofit dedicated to the global discovery of ocean life, the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research in New Zealand, and the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa.
One creature that caused a “lot of head-scratching” is a star-shaped animal, about a centimeter across, but researchers have not managed to identify it, Dr. Rogers said. They believe it may possibly be a coral.
Two million-plus species are estimated to live in the oceans, but only 10 percent of ocean life is known. It is vital to learn more about the aquatic life because marine ecosystems carry out functions that support life on Earth, such as creating food for billions, storing carbon and regulating climate, Dr. Rogers said.
“We’re dealing with a situation where we know marine life is in decline,” he said. “In order to try to manage human activities to prevent this continuing decline, we need to understand the distribution of marine life better than we currently do.”
Ocean Census was founded last year by the Nippon Foundation, a Japanese philanthropic organization, and the U.K.-based ocean exploration foundation Nekton. When it began its work, Ocean Census set a goal of finding at least 100,000 new marine species in a decade.
The group is focused on exploring some of the most under-sampled bodies of water.
In the February expedition, researchers first mapped the area with an imaging system and video cameras to check that it would be safe for their equipment and to ensure that there were no vulnerable animal communities that potentially could be harmed.
Then, they deployed what is known as the Brenke sled, a sampling device that has two nets, one close to the seabed, and the other a meter above it. As it drags along the floor, it churns up animals living close to the sea floor. To find larger animals, the researchers used other methods, such as baited nets.
Trawling the depths at 4,800 meters — or roughly the equivalent to Mont Blanc, the highest peak in the Alps — researchers collected 1,791 samples.
Given its depth, Bounty Trough is not of great interest to fisheries and therefore is poorly sampled, Dr. Rogers said. Geologists have surveyed this area but biologists have not.
Worldwide, about 240,000 marine species have been discovered and named to date but only 2,200 species are discovered each year on average, according to Ocean Census.
In many bodies of water there is still a lot that scientists have to learn, Dr. Rogers said.
“It’s probably the equivalent of a space mission,” he said. “We’re still in early days, but the number of species that we found in the Bounty Trough really indicates to us that we’ve got a long way to go in terms of understanding where life is found in the ocean.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/10/scie ... 778d3e6de3
Re: Articles of Interest in Science
SpaceX mega rocket lost in final phase of ‘successful’ test flight
AFP Published March 14, 2024 Updated about 9 hours ago
The SpaceX Starship Flight 3 Rocket launches at the Starbase facility in Brownsville, Texas, US on March 14. — AFP
Starship, the world’s most powerful rocket, flew further and faster than ever before during its third test flight on Thursday, although it was eventually lost as it re-entered the atmosphere over the Indian Ocean, SpaceX said.
Lift-off from the company’s Starbase in Boca Chica, Texas came around 8:25am local time (1325 GMT) and was carried live on a webcast that was watched by millions on social media platform X.
The sleek mega rocket is vital to Nasa’s plans for landing astronauts on the Moon later this decade — and Elon Musk’s hopes of colonising Mars someday.
“Congrats to @SpaceX on a successful test flight!” tweeted Nasa administrator Bill Nelson following the test.
All eyes were on Thursday’s launch after two prior attempts ended in spectacular explosions. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing: The company has adopted a rapid trial-and-error approach to accelerate development and the strategy has brought it numerous successes in the past.
Objectives met
When the two stages of Starship are combined, the rocket stands 397 feet (121 metres) tall — beating the Statue of Liberty by a comfortable 90 feet.
Its Super Heavy Booster produces 16.7 million pounds (74.3 Meganewtons) of thrust, almost double that of the world’s second most powerful rocket, Nasa’s Space Launch System — though the latter is now certified, while Starship is still a prototype.
Starship’s third launch test in its fully stacked configuration was its most ambitious yet and the company said it was able to meet many of its objectives.
These included opening and closing Starship’s payload door to test its ability to deliver satellites into orbit.
High-definition footage from an onboard camera showed Starship coasting in space, with the curve of the Earth visible in the background. It hit a top speed of more than 26,000 kilometres per hour and achieved an altitude of more than 200km above sea level.
Starship flew halfway around the globe, then began its descent over the Indian Ocean, with engineers cheering as its heat shield composed of 18,000 hexagonal tiles glowed red hot.
But ground control stopped receiving signals and announcers declared the vessel “lost” before it could achieve its final goal of splashing down. The lower-stage booster also failed to make a successful water landing, and as a result, the Federal Aviation Administration said it was opening a “mishap” investigation.
“Starship will make life multi-planetary,” Musk, the company’s billionaire founder, posted on X afterwards, emphasising the progress made.
Real-world testing
The first so-called “integrated” test came in April 2023. SpaceX was forced to blow up Starship within a few minutes of launch because the two stages failed to separate.
The rocket disintegrated into a ball of fire and crashed into the Gulf of Mexico, sending a dust cloud over a town several miles away.
The second test in November 2023 fared slightly better: The booster separated from the spaceship, but both then exploded over the ocean, in what the company euphemistically called a “rapid unscheduled disassembly”.
It currently costs SpaceX around $90m to build each Starship, according to a report by the research company Payload published in January.
SpaceX’s strategy of carrying out tests in the real world rather than in labs has paid off in the past.
Its Falcon 9 rockets have come to be workhorses for Nasa and the commercial sector, its Dragon capsule sends astronauts and cargo to the International Space Station, and its Starlink internet satellite constellation now covers dozens of countries.
But the clock is ticking for SpaceX to be ready for Nasa’s planned return of astronauts to the Moon in 2026, using a modified Starship as the lander vehicle.
China is approaching in the rearview mirror, targeting 2030 to land its first crew on the Moon.
Not only does SpaceX need to prove it can launch, fly and land Starship safely — it must eventually also show it can send multiple “Starship tankers” into orbit to refuel, at supercooled temperatures, a main Starship for its onward journey to the Moon.
https://www.dawn.com/news/1821478/space ... est-flight
AFP Published March 14, 2024 Updated about 9 hours ago
The SpaceX Starship Flight 3 Rocket launches at the Starbase facility in Brownsville, Texas, US on March 14. — AFP
Starship, the world’s most powerful rocket, flew further and faster than ever before during its third test flight on Thursday, although it was eventually lost as it re-entered the atmosphere over the Indian Ocean, SpaceX said.
Lift-off from the company’s Starbase in Boca Chica, Texas came around 8:25am local time (1325 GMT) and was carried live on a webcast that was watched by millions on social media platform X.
The sleek mega rocket is vital to Nasa’s plans for landing astronauts on the Moon later this decade — and Elon Musk’s hopes of colonising Mars someday.
“Congrats to @SpaceX on a successful test flight!” tweeted Nasa administrator Bill Nelson following the test.
All eyes were on Thursday’s launch after two prior attempts ended in spectacular explosions. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing: The company has adopted a rapid trial-and-error approach to accelerate development and the strategy has brought it numerous successes in the past.
Objectives met
When the two stages of Starship are combined, the rocket stands 397 feet (121 metres) tall — beating the Statue of Liberty by a comfortable 90 feet.
Its Super Heavy Booster produces 16.7 million pounds (74.3 Meganewtons) of thrust, almost double that of the world’s second most powerful rocket, Nasa’s Space Launch System — though the latter is now certified, while Starship is still a prototype.
Starship’s third launch test in its fully stacked configuration was its most ambitious yet and the company said it was able to meet many of its objectives.
These included opening and closing Starship’s payload door to test its ability to deliver satellites into orbit.
High-definition footage from an onboard camera showed Starship coasting in space, with the curve of the Earth visible in the background. It hit a top speed of more than 26,000 kilometres per hour and achieved an altitude of more than 200km above sea level.
Starship flew halfway around the globe, then began its descent over the Indian Ocean, with engineers cheering as its heat shield composed of 18,000 hexagonal tiles glowed red hot.
But ground control stopped receiving signals and announcers declared the vessel “lost” before it could achieve its final goal of splashing down. The lower-stage booster also failed to make a successful water landing, and as a result, the Federal Aviation Administration said it was opening a “mishap” investigation.
“Starship will make life multi-planetary,” Musk, the company’s billionaire founder, posted on X afterwards, emphasising the progress made.
Real-world testing
The first so-called “integrated” test came in April 2023. SpaceX was forced to blow up Starship within a few minutes of launch because the two stages failed to separate.
The rocket disintegrated into a ball of fire and crashed into the Gulf of Mexico, sending a dust cloud over a town several miles away.
The second test in November 2023 fared slightly better: The booster separated from the spaceship, but both then exploded over the ocean, in what the company euphemistically called a “rapid unscheduled disassembly”.
It currently costs SpaceX around $90m to build each Starship, according to a report by the research company Payload published in January.
SpaceX’s strategy of carrying out tests in the real world rather than in labs has paid off in the past.
Its Falcon 9 rockets have come to be workhorses for Nasa and the commercial sector, its Dragon capsule sends astronauts and cargo to the International Space Station, and its Starlink internet satellite constellation now covers dozens of countries.
But the clock is ticking for SpaceX to be ready for Nasa’s planned return of astronauts to the Moon in 2026, using a modified Starship as the lander vehicle.
China is approaching in the rearview mirror, targeting 2030 to land its first crew on the Moon.
Not only does SpaceX need to prove it can launch, fly and land Starship safely — it must eventually also show it can send multiple “Starship tankers” into orbit to refuel, at supercooled temperatures, a main Starship for its onward journey to the Moon.
https://www.dawn.com/news/1821478/space ... est-flight
Re: Articles of Interest in Science
CNN
Beyond totality: Rare phenomena to watch out for during the solar eclipse
Ashley Strickland, CNN
Mon, April 1, 2024 at 8:07 PM CDT·
When the total solar eclipse traces a path across Mexico, the United States and Canada on April 8, spectators can anticipate a multitude of awe-inspiring moments.
During a total solar eclipse, the moon completely blocks the face of the sun for a brief period known as totality — and 32 million people in the US who are located along the 115-mile-wide (185-kilometer-wide) path of totality for April’s event will have a chance to enjoy this full expression of the celestial spectacle.
It’s worth taking some time to stop and take in this historic celestial event because a total solar eclipse won’t be visible across the contiguous US again until August 2044 and an annular eclipse, in which the moon can’t completely block the sun, won’t appear across this part of the world again until 2046.
“Until you’ve actually seen (a total eclipse), it’s almost impossible to describe,” said Dr. John Mulchaey, Carnegie Institution for Science’s deputy for science and the director and Crawford H. Greenewalt Chair of the Carnegie Observatories. “When you see totality, you can see how it’s had such a huge impact on humans through thousands of years. It’s one of the most beautiful things most people will ever experience.”
The sun's corona, or hot outer atmosphere, is visible as the moon passes in front of the sun during a total solar eclipse at Big Summit Prairie ranch in Oregon's Ochoco National Forest on August 21, 2017. - Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images
But the phases surrounding totality — including a couple phenomena stunning enough to have earned their own names — are pretty memorable, too, eclipse experts say. Here’s what to look out for.
What to watch for during the eclipse
The moon doesn’t suddenly appear between Earth and the sun — the event begins with a partial eclipse, in which the moon appears to take a “bite” out of the sun. Depending on your location, the partial eclipse can last between 70 and 80 minutes, according to NASA.
For those living outside of the path of totality, a crescent-shaped partial eclipse, rather than a total eclipse, will be the main event.
Within the path, the partial eclipse is the longest phase, but as the time for totality nears, look for changes in the sky’s appearance.
“About 15 to 20 minutes before totality, the sky starts getting this really weird gloomy color,” Mulchaey said. “It’s almost like a gray because the sun’s way high in the sky, but it’s almost entirely blocked out. It’s not like twilight, sunset or sunrise when (the sun is) low in the sky. It’s above you. And all of a sudden, you’re losing most of the sun’s light, and it feels very weird.”
The eerily darkening sky is a cue for skywatchers that the stellar show is about to begin. Just make sure you have eclipse glasses handy to safely view the sun before the event gets underway.
Two breathtaking phases occur within the final moments before totality, Mulchaey said.
When the moon begins to cross in front of the sun, the star’s rays will shine around valleys on the moon’s horizon, creating glowing drops of light around the moon called Baily’s beads. The phenomenon was named for English astronomer Francis Baily, who noted them during an annular eclipse on May 15, 1836.
Baily's beads can be seen shining around the left side of the moon just a second before it completely covers the sun. - Heinz-Peter Bader/X00316/Reuters
As totality nears, Baily’s beads will quickly disappear and make way for the “diamond ring,” a nickname for how it looks when a single point of light remains — like a glistening giant diamond ring.
Both of these phases last less than a minute, Mulchaey said. Then, it’s time for totality.
Prepare for totality
The totality phase of the April 8 eclipse is expected to last twice as long as it did in 2017 because the moon is currently closer to the sun. Those squarely along the center line of the path will see a total eclipse that lasts between 3½ and 4 minutes, according to NASA.
“All of a sudden, totality happens, and the corona shows up,” Mulchaey said. “Even though it’s dark out, it’s somehow glorious.”
The corona is the sun’s ultrahot outer atmosphere, which emits a glow that can be seen around the moon during the eclipse. Typically, the corona is hard to see because the sun’s surface is so much brighter. During the total eclipse, the corona will resemble white streams of light, according to NASA.
During the 2017 eclipse, the sun was approaching solar minimum, or the quiet phase of our star’s 11-year activity cycle. Now, the sun is nearing solar maximum, when the sun is exceptionally active, Mulchaey said. The corona will likely appear brighter and fuller, and there may be a chance to spot flaring loops of solar activity resembling streamers within the corona during the eclipse.
Spectators may also be able to see a region of the solar atmosphere called the chromosphere, which will appear as a thin, pink circle around the moon.
Bright stars or planets like Venus may shine in the dark sky, and the air temperature will drop as the sun disappears. The sudden darkness also causes animals to behave in unusual ways.
“We may start to see nocturnal behavior, like crickets chirping or bats emerging, and animals stopping daytime behaviors, like birds going to roost or flying insects landing,” said Dr. Andrew Farnsworth, visiting scientist at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.
After totality ends, the diamond ring and Baily’s beads will briefly reappear before the partial eclipse returns as the moon slowly moves across the sun.
Why we have eclipses on Earth
It has only been six years since a total eclipse crossed the US, the path of the April 8 eclipse is a very different one, trekking from west to east.
On average, an eclipse occurs in the same place every 375 years, Mulchaey said.
And we’re living at the right time to truly enjoy the sight of a total eclipse on Earth, he said.
While eclipses occur throughout the solar system, none of them are exactly like the ones experienced on our world.
The moon is about 400 times smaller than the sun, but the moon is also about 400 times closer to Earth than the sun is, creating a “beautiful coincidence” that results in eclipses when the three celestial bodies align, Mulchaey said.
This alignment is called syzygy, or when three objects line up in space.
In the distant past, the moon was much closer to Earth, which means totality likely didn’t appear as it does now. And within another 60 million years or so, the moon will be so far away that it will never cover the sun, making this a rare moment in time, Mulchaey said.
For more CNN news and newsletters create an account at CNN.com
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/sy ... 43279.html
Beyond totality: Rare phenomena to watch out for during the solar eclipse
Ashley Strickland, CNN
Mon, April 1, 2024 at 8:07 PM CDT·
When the total solar eclipse traces a path across Mexico, the United States and Canada on April 8, spectators can anticipate a multitude of awe-inspiring moments.
During a total solar eclipse, the moon completely blocks the face of the sun for a brief period known as totality — and 32 million people in the US who are located along the 115-mile-wide (185-kilometer-wide) path of totality for April’s event will have a chance to enjoy this full expression of the celestial spectacle.
It’s worth taking some time to stop and take in this historic celestial event because a total solar eclipse won’t be visible across the contiguous US again until August 2044 and an annular eclipse, in which the moon can’t completely block the sun, won’t appear across this part of the world again until 2046.
“Until you’ve actually seen (a total eclipse), it’s almost impossible to describe,” said Dr. John Mulchaey, Carnegie Institution for Science’s deputy for science and the director and Crawford H. Greenewalt Chair of the Carnegie Observatories. “When you see totality, you can see how it’s had such a huge impact on humans through thousands of years. It’s one of the most beautiful things most people will ever experience.”
The sun's corona, or hot outer atmosphere, is visible as the moon passes in front of the sun during a total solar eclipse at Big Summit Prairie ranch in Oregon's Ochoco National Forest on August 21, 2017. - Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images
But the phases surrounding totality — including a couple phenomena stunning enough to have earned their own names — are pretty memorable, too, eclipse experts say. Here’s what to look out for.
What to watch for during the eclipse
The moon doesn’t suddenly appear between Earth and the sun — the event begins with a partial eclipse, in which the moon appears to take a “bite” out of the sun. Depending on your location, the partial eclipse can last between 70 and 80 minutes, according to NASA.
For those living outside of the path of totality, a crescent-shaped partial eclipse, rather than a total eclipse, will be the main event.
Within the path, the partial eclipse is the longest phase, but as the time for totality nears, look for changes in the sky’s appearance.
“About 15 to 20 minutes before totality, the sky starts getting this really weird gloomy color,” Mulchaey said. “It’s almost like a gray because the sun’s way high in the sky, but it’s almost entirely blocked out. It’s not like twilight, sunset or sunrise when (the sun is) low in the sky. It’s above you. And all of a sudden, you’re losing most of the sun’s light, and it feels very weird.”
The eerily darkening sky is a cue for skywatchers that the stellar show is about to begin. Just make sure you have eclipse glasses handy to safely view the sun before the event gets underway.
Two breathtaking phases occur within the final moments before totality, Mulchaey said.
When the moon begins to cross in front of the sun, the star’s rays will shine around valleys on the moon’s horizon, creating glowing drops of light around the moon called Baily’s beads. The phenomenon was named for English astronomer Francis Baily, who noted them during an annular eclipse on May 15, 1836.
Baily's beads can be seen shining around the left side of the moon just a second before it completely covers the sun. - Heinz-Peter Bader/X00316/Reuters
As totality nears, Baily’s beads will quickly disappear and make way for the “diamond ring,” a nickname for how it looks when a single point of light remains — like a glistening giant diamond ring.
Both of these phases last less than a minute, Mulchaey said. Then, it’s time for totality.
Prepare for totality
The totality phase of the April 8 eclipse is expected to last twice as long as it did in 2017 because the moon is currently closer to the sun. Those squarely along the center line of the path will see a total eclipse that lasts between 3½ and 4 minutes, according to NASA.
“All of a sudden, totality happens, and the corona shows up,” Mulchaey said. “Even though it’s dark out, it’s somehow glorious.”
The corona is the sun’s ultrahot outer atmosphere, which emits a glow that can be seen around the moon during the eclipse. Typically, the corona is hard to see because the sun’s surface is so much brighter. During the total eclipse, the corona will resemble white streams of light, according to NASA.
During the 2017 eclipse, the sun was approaching solar minimum, or the quiet phase of our star’s 11-year activity cycle. Now, the sun is nearing solar maximum, when the sun is exceptionally active, Mulchaey said. The corona will likely appear brighter and fuller, and there may be a chance to spot flaring loops of solar activity resembling streamers within the corona during the eclipse.
Spectators may also be able to see a region of the solar atmosphere called the chromosphere, which will appear as a thin, pink circle around the moon.
Bright stars or planets like Venus may shine in the dark sky, and the air temperature will drop as the sun disappears. The sudden darkness also causes animals to behave in unusual ways.
“We may start to see nocturnal behavior, like crickets chirping or bats emerging, and animals stopping daytime behaviors, like birds going to roost or flying insects landing,” said Dr. Andrew Farnsworth, visiting scientist at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.
After totality ends, the diamond ring and Baily’s beads will briefly reappear before the partial eclipse returns as the moon slowly moves across the sun.
Why we have eclipses on Earth
It has only been six years since a total eclipse crossed the US, the path of the April 8 eclipse is a very different one, trekking from west to east.
On average, an eclipse occurs in the same place every 375 years, Mulchaey said.
And we’re living at the right time to truly enjoy the sight of a total eclipse on Earth, he said.
While eclipses occur throughout the solar system, none of them are exactly like the ones experienced on our world.
The moon is about 400 times smaller than the sun, but the moon is also about 400 times closer to Earth than the sun is, creating a “beautiful coincidence” that results in eclipses when the three celestial bodies align, Mulchaey said.
This alignment is called syzygy, or when three objects line up in space.
In the distant past, the moon was much closer to Earth, which means totality likely didn’t appear as it does now. And within another 60 million years or so, the moon will be so far away that it will never cover the sun, making this a rare moment in time, Mulchaey said.
For more CNN news and newsletters create an account at CNN.com
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/sy ... 43279.html
Re: Articles of Interest in Science
Reuters
Total solar eclipse: North Americans celebrate with cheers, music and matrimony
Brendan McDermid and Joseph Ax
Updated Mon, April 8, 2024 at 5:42 PM CDT·
Watch the total solar eclipse in Mazatlán, MexicoScroll back up to restore default view.
By Brendan McDermid and Joseph Ax
NIAGARA FALLS, New York (Reuters) -Throngs of skywatchers across North America gazed upward at a blackened sun in the midday dusk on Monday, celebrating with cheers, music and matrimony the first total solar eclipse to darken the continent in seven years.
From a Mexican beach resort close to where the eclipse made landfall to the banks of the Ohio River and farther north beyond the roaring cascades of Niagara Falls at the U.S.-Canadian border, spellbound crowds reacted to the sight of "totality" with jaw-dropping expressions of awe and joy.
In Russellville, Arkansas, a town of roughly 30,000 residents near the state's only nuclear power plant, almost 400 couples tied the knot by the shadow of the moon in a mass wedding event dubbed "Elope and the Eclipse."
At least two weddings and one marriage proposal were known to have taken place among roughly 2,000 people who assembled at Niagara Falls State Park despite overcast skies.
The dreary weather subdued the experience until clouds momentarily parted to reveal the last 30 seconds of totality, and the crowd went wild, cheering and shouting, "It's so beautiful."
As the skies began to brighten again, a band played out the retreating lunar shadow with a rendition the R.E.M.'s 1992 hit song "Man on the Moon.
Across the river in Niagara Falls, Ontario, 309 people - some from as far away as Singapore and London - came dressed up as the sun, setting a new world record for the largest group to wear solar costumes in one place, contest organizers said. The previous record was set in 2020 by 287 participants in China.
SHADOWS AND LIGHT
Where clear skies prevailed, observers along the direct path of the eclipse were treated to the rare spectacle of the moon appearing as a dark orb creeping in front of the sun, briefly blocking out all but a brilliant halo of light, or corona, around, the sun's outer edge. (Reuters live coverage)
It was first total eclipse to sweep across a large swath of North America since 2017, and will be the last one visible from the contiguous United States until 2044.
As totality unfolded at a campground in North Hudson in upstate New York, hundreds of people shrieked with excitement.
"Oh my God!" some said, as the air cooled and automatic outdoor lights on a nearby building flicked on, fooled by the darkness.
Mexico's beachside resort town of Mazatlan was the first major viewing spot for totality. Thousands in solar-safe eyewear perched in deck chairs along the coastal promenade, and an orchestra played the "Star Wars" movie theme as skies darkened under the approaching lunar shadow.
The crowds burst into cheers, applause and whistles when the eclipse reached totality.
The period of totality, lasting up to 4-1/2 minutes depending the observer's location, was ushered in by a number of other eerie eclipse effects. Some stars twinkled at midday as dusk abruptly descended, sending temperatures dipping and faint waves of "shadow bands" flickering over the landscape. Birds and other wildlife sometimes fall silent and still.
Eclipse fans traveled from far and wide hoping to glimpse the phenomenon somewhere along the "path of totality" stretching 2,500 miles (4,000 km) from Mexico's Pacific Coast through Texas and across 14 other U.S. states into Canada. The moon's shadow exited continental North America in Newfoundland.
A partial eclipse, in which the moon obscures only a portion of the sun, was visible across most of the continental United States outside the path of totality, where weather permitted.
Lourdes Corro, 43, said she traveled 10 hours by car to reach Mazatlan, Mexico, for an event widely considered one of nature's greatest wonders.
"The last one I saw was when I was 9 years old," Corro said. "There are a few clouds but we can still see the sun."
'COMPLETE SENSORY EXPERIENCE'
Overcast skies across much of the United States added an extra challenge for many.
Laura and Brian Uzzle awaited the eclipse on the banks of the Ohio River between Indiana and Kentucky on Monday after cloudy forecasts prompted the Denver-based couple to abandon initial plans to view it from Texas and book last-minute flights and rental cars several hundred miles (km) away.
Laura Uzzle, 56, said she was excited to experience the eclipse by a riverbank teeming with birds and insects.
"Even the wildlife changes," she said. "It's a complete sensory experience."
The surge in eclipse enthusiasts taking to roadways in Indiana prompted the state police to announce it was shutting down highway rest stops once they reached capacity and kept them closed for the duration.
At up to 4 minutes and 28 seconds, Monday's total eclipse surpassed the duration of the 2017 event, which lasted upwards of 2 minutes and 42 seconds. According to NASA, solar eclipse totalities can range from 10 seconds to about 7-1/2 minutes.
Monday's total eclipse rolled through more densely populated regions than seven years ago, a corridor averaging 115 miles (185 km) wide encompassing such major cities as San Antonio, Austin and Dallas, Texas; Indianapolis, Indiana; Cleveland, Ohio; Erie, Pennsylvania; and Montreal, Quebec.
About 32 million people in the United States live within the path of totality, with federal officials having predicted another 5 million people would travel to be there.
It took about 80 minutes from the moment the moon first began to cover the sun to the moment of totality, then another 80 minutes to complete the process in reverse.
The last remaining bit of brilliant sunlight before totality creates a "diamond ring effect," with a single bright spot glaring from one side of the lunar shadow while the sun's corona still encircles the rest of the moon.
Some suggested the experience might have a lingering effect on human social behavior, if only temporarily.
In Burlington Vermont, where hotels were booked months in advance, Mayor Emma Mulvaney-Stanak said the thousands of visitors who gathered in her city exuded the mood of a midsummer festival.
"It was a really chill vibe. People were appreciating the momentousness of the occasion," Mulvaney-Stanak, who was sworn into office on April 1, told reporters afterward.
Asked if she believed the communal experience might help heal some of society's festering political and social divisions, the mayor said: "I really think it will."
"Truly, this felt like another huge surge of optimism," she said.
(Reporting by Joseph Ax in North Hudson; Rosalba O'Brien in Oswego, New York; Henry Romero in Mazatlan, Mexico, Brad Brooks in Longmont, Colorado, Julia Harte in New York and Daniel Trotta in Carlsbad, California; Writing by Brad Brooks, Jonathan Allen and Steve Gorman; Editing by Will Dunham, Paul Thomasch and Sandra Maler)
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/mi ... 47020.html
Total solar eclipse: North Americans celebrate with cheers, music and matrimony
Brendan McDermid and Joseph Ax
Updated Mon, April 8, 2024 at 5:42 PM CDT·
Watch the total solar eclipse in Mazatlán, MexicoScroll back up to restore default view.
By Brendan McDermid and Joseph Ax
NIAGARA FALLS, New York (Reuters) -Throngs of skywatchers across North America gazed upward at a blackened sun in the midday dusk on Monday, celebrating with cheers, music and matrimony the first total solar eclipse to darken the continent in seven years.
From a Mexican beach resort close to where the eclipse made landfall to the banks of the Ohio River and farther north beyond the roaring cascades of Niagara Falls at the U.S.-Canadian border, spellbound crowds reacted to the sight of "totality" with jaw-dropping expressions of awe and joy.
In Russellville, Arkansas, a town of roughly 30,000 residents near the state's only nuclear power plant, almost 400 couples tied the knot by the shadow of the moon in a mass wedding event dubbed "Elope and the Eclipse."
At least two weddings and one marriage proposal were known to have taken place among roughly 2,000 people who assembled at Niagara Falls State Park despite overcast skies.
The dreary weather subdued the experience until clouds momentarily parted to reveal the last 30 seconds of totality, and the crowd went wild, cheering and shouting, "It's so beautiful."
As the skies began to brighten again, a band played out the retreating lunar shadow with a rendition the R.E.M.'s 1992 hit song "Man on the Moon.
Across the river in Niagara Falls, Ontario, 309 people - some from as far away as Singapore and London - came dressed up as the sun, setting a new world record for the largest group to wear solar costumes in one place, contest organizers said. The previous record was set in 2020 by 287 participants in China.
SHADOWS AND LIGHT
Where clear skies prevailed, observers along the direct path of the eclipse were treated to the rare spectacle of the moon appearing as a dark orb creeping in front of the sun, briefly blocking out all but a brilliant halo of light, or corona, around, the sun's outer edge. (Reuters live coverage)
It was first total eclipse to sweep across a large swath of North America since 2017, and will be the last one visible from the contiguous United States until 2044.
As totality unfolded at a campground in North Hudson in upstate New York, hundreds of people shrieked with excitement.
"Oh my God!" some said, as the air cooled and automatic outdoor lights on a nearby building flicked on, fooled by the darkness.
Mexico's beachside resort town of Mazatlan was the first major viewing spot for totality. Thousands in solar-safe eyewear perched in deck chairs along the coastal promenade, and an orchestra played the "Star Wars" movie theme as skies darkened under the approaching lunar shadow.
The crowds burst into cheers, applause and whistles when the eclipse reached totality.
The period of totality, lasting up to 4-1/2 minutes depending the observer's location, was ushered in by a number of other eerie eclipse effects. Some stars twinkled at midday as dusk abruptly descended, sending temperatures dipping and faint waves of "shadow bands" flickering over the landscape. Birds and other wildlife sometimes fall silent and still.
Eclipse fans traveled from far and wide hoping to glimpse the phenomenon somewhere along the "path of totality" stretching 2,500 miles (4,000 km) from Mexico's Pacific Coast through Texas and across 14 other U.S. states into Canada. The moon's shadow exited continental North America in Newfoundland.
A partial eclipse, in which the moon obscures only a portion of the sun, was visible across most of the continental United States outside the path of totality, where weather permitted.
Lourdes Corro, 43, said she traveled 10 hours by car to reach Mazatlan, Mexico, for an event widely considered one of nature's greatest wonders.
"The last one I saw was when I was 9 years old," Corro said. "There are a few clouds but we can still see the sun."
'COMPLETE SENSORY EXPERIENCE'
Overcast skies across much of the United States added an extra challenge for many.
Laura and Brian Uzzle awaited the eclipse on the banks of the Ohio River between Indiana and Kentucky on Monday after cloudy forecasts prompted the Denver-based couple to abandon initial plans to view it from Texas and book last-minute flights and rental cars several hundred miles (km) away.
Laura Uzzle, 56, said she was excited to experience the eclipse by a riverbank teeming with birds and insects.
"Even the wildlife changes," she said. "It's a complete sensory experience."
The surge in eclipse enthusiasts taking to roadways in Indiana prompted the state police to announce it was shutting down highway rest stops once they reached capacity and kept them closed for the duration.
At up to 4 minutes and 28 seconds, Monday's total eclipse surpassed the duration of the 2017 event, which lasted upwards of 2 minutes and 42 seconds. According to NASA, solar eclipse totalities can range from 10 seconds to about 7-1/2 minutes.
Monday's total eclipse rolled through more densely populated regions than seven years ago, a corridor averaging 115 miles (185 km) wide encompassing such major cities as San Antonio, Austin and Dallas, Texas; Indianapolis, Indiana; Cleveland, Ohio; Erie, Pennsylvania; and Montreal, Quebec.
About 32 million people in the United States live within the path of totality, with federal officials having predicted another 5 million people would travel to be there.
It took about 80 minutes from the moment the moon first began to cover the sun to the moment of totality, then another 80 minutes to complete the process in reverse.
The last remaining bit of brilliant sunlight before totality creates a "diamond ring effect," with a single bright spot glaring from one side of the lunar shadow while the sun's corona still encircles the rest of the moon.
Some suggested the experience might have a lingering effect on human social behavior, if only temporarily.
In Burlington Vermont, where hotels were booked months in advance, Mayor Emma Mulvaney-Stanak said the thousands of visitors who gathered in her city exuded the mood of a midsummer festival.
"It was a really chill vibe. People were appreciating the momentousness of the occasion," Mulvaney-Stanak, who was sworn into office on April 1, told reporters afterward.
Asked if she believed the communal experience might help heal some of society's festering political and social divisions, the mayor said: "I really think it will."
"Truly, this felt like another huge surge of optimism," she said.
(Reporting by Joseph Ax in North Hudson; Rosalba O'Brien in Oswego, New York; Henry Romero in Mazatlan, Mexico, Brad Brooks in Longmont, Colorado, Julia Harte in New York and Daniel Trotta in Carlsbad, California; Writing by Brad Brooks, Jonathan Allen and Steve Gorman; Editing by Will Dunham, Paul Thomasch and Sandra Maler)
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/mi ... 47020.html
Re: Articles of Interest in Science
Futurism
Former Naval Officer Raises Alarm About “World-Changing” Underwater UFO Captured on Video
Noor Al-Sibai
Updated Wed, April 17, 2024 at 1:33 PM CDT·
A report about a strange craft that appeared to defy both aerial and aquatic physics is apparently making a splash among the ex-military set.
Tim Gallaudet, an oceanographer and former Naval rear admiral who served as the author of a March white paper about so-called "unidentified submerged objects" or USOs, told Fox News this week that he considers it both "scientifically valid" and critical to national security to study these phenomena.
Released by the newly-convened Sol Foundation, a think tank dedicated to studying what the military calls "unidentified anomalous phenomena" (UAPs), the 29-page report centers on a 2019 video taken aboard the Omaha off the coast of San Diego.
The video, which was leaked to filmmaker Jeremy Corbell and verified by the Pentagon as a legit instance of Naval-recorded UAP in 2021, raises more questions than it answers — and in both his interview and the Sol Foundation report, Gallaudet suggests that the strange craft should be treated as a threat.
"Pilots, credible observers, and calibrated military instrumentation have recorded objects accelerating at rates and crossing the air-sea interface in ways not possible for anything made by humans," Gallaudet wrote in the think tank's first report.
https://twitter.com/Dagnum_PI/status/16 ... 2119232512
Dark Ocean
While nobody can explain what exactly is going on in the USS Omaha video, the capabilities of the craft it documented could jeopardize American maritime security, Gallaudet told Fox, "which is already weakened by our relative ignorance about the global ocean."
"The fact that unidentified objects with unexplainable characteristics are entering US water space and the [Department of Defense] is not raising a giant red flag is a sign that the government is not sharing all it knows about all-domain anomalous phenomena," the former Naval officer continued, perhaps referencing the Pentagon's UAP-hunting All-domain Anomalous Resolution Office (AARO).
While UFOs generally get most of the attention — be it from the government, academia, or conspiracy theorists — Gallaudet and others consider USOs to be equally threatening as their flying counterparts, if not more so.
Scot Christenson, the director of the US Naval Institute, wrote in a 2022 editorial for Naval History Magazine that although there has to date been "no documented damage to a plane caused by a UFO," mysterious sea creatures and other USOs "have presented the Navy with the greatest hazard."
While there's a wide gap between little green men and the storied krakens of the deep, the military's main priority when it comes to unidentified objects or creatures in the air or in the sea is safety — and if there's video footage out there of "world-changing" crafts, as Gallaudet put it in his report, that's definitely something that's going to concern the Pentagon.
"To meet the security and scientific challenges," he continued in the Sol Foundation report, "transmedium UAP and USOs should be elevated to national ocean research priorities."
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/fo ... 27618.html
Former Naval Officer Raises Alarm About “World-Changing” Underwater UFO Captured on Video
Noor Al-Sibai
Updated Wed, April 17, 2024 at 1:33 PM CDT·
A report about a strange craft that appeared to defy both aerial and aquatic physics is apparently making a splash among the ex-military set.
Tim Gallaudet, an oceanographer and former Naval rear admiral who served as the author of a March white paper about so-called "unidentified submerged objects" or USOs, told Fox News this week that he considers it both "scientifically valid" and critical to national security to study these phenomena.
Released by the newly-convened Sol Foundation, a think tank dedicated to studying what the military calls "unidentified anomalous phenomena" (UAPs), the 29-page report centers on a 2019 video taken aboard the Omaha off the coast of San Diego.
The video, which was leaked to filmmaker Jeremy Corbell and verified by the Pentagon as a legit instance of Naval-recorded UAP in 2021, raises more questions than it answers — and in both his interview and the Sol Foundation report, Gallaudet suggests that the strange craft should be treated as a threat.
"Pilots, credible observers, and calibrated military instrumentation have recorded objects accelerating at rates and crossing the air-sea interface in ways not possible for anything made by humans," Gallaudet wrote in the think tank's first report.
https://twitter.com/Dagnum_PI/status/16 ... 2119232512
Dark Ocean
While nobody can explain what exactly is going on in the USS Omaha video, the capabilities of the craft it documented could jeopardize American maritime security, Gallaudet told Fox, "which is already weakened by our relative ignorance about the global ocean."
"The fact that unidentified objects with unexplainable characteristics are entering US water space and the [Department of Defense] is not raising a giant red flag is a sign that the government is not sharing all it knows about all-domain anomalous phenomena," the former Naval officer continued, perhaps referencing the Pentagon's UAP-hunting All-domain Anomalous Resolution Office (AARO).
While UFOs generally get most of the attention — be it from the government, academia, or conspiracy theorists — Gallaudet and others consider USOs to be equally threatening as their flying counterparts, if not more so.
Scot Christenson, the director of the US Naval Institute, wrote in a 2022 editorial for Naval History Magazine that although there has to date been "no documented damage to a plane caused by a UFO," mysterious sea creatures and other USOs "have presented the Navy with the greatest hazard."
While there's a wide gap between little green men and the storied krakens of the deep, the military's main priority when it comes to unidentified objects or creatures in the air or in the sea is safety — and if there's video footage out there of "world-changing" crafts, as Gallaudet put it in his report, that's definitely something that's going to concern the Pentagon.
"To meet the security and scientific challenges," he continued in the Sol Foundation report, "transmedium UAP and USOs should be elevated to national ocean research priorities."
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/fo ... 27618.html
Re: Articles of Interest in Science
A comment in connection to above post:
By Janny57
During my 20 year service in the U.S. Navy, I was stationed at three aircraft carriers in Norfolk, Virginia, one combat supply ship (10 months of the year spent at sea), and one submarine tender in Sardinia, Italy. During all that time I had spent many hours, months, and years observing international oceans for signs of aircraft, ships, and underwater objects to report anything to our security teams. I did in fact observed blue rotating lights under water on several occasions. Sometimes these lights were dismissed as our allie submarines making their rounds. But many times there was no way that the lights I observed were from submarines. I would report them and the reports would just go routinely documented or ignored. The lights were usually blue and so they could easily be mistaken for glowing planktons in the water at night. But these lights were round, rotating in patterns and would rise up to the surface and then disappear underwater very quickly. My fear was if they were actually Russian or Chinese crafts sent to spy and infiltrate our waters. If they were extraterrestrial, then most likely they are studying us.
By Janny57
During my 20 year service in the U.S. Navy, I was stationed at three aircraft carriers in Norfolk, Virginia, one combat supply ship (10 months of the year spent at sea), and one submarine tender in Sardinia, Italy. During all that time I had spent many hours, months, and years observing international oceans for signs of aircraft, ships, and underwater objects to report anything to our security teams. I did in fact observed blue rotating lights under water on several occasions. Sometimes these lights were dismissed as our allie submarines making their rounds. But many times there was no way that the lights I observed were from submarines. I would report them and the reports would just go routinely documented or ignored. The lights were usually blue and so they could easily be mistaken for glowing planktons in the water at night. But these lights were round, rotating in patterns and would rise up to the surface and then disappear underwater very quickly. My fear was if they were actually Russian or Chinese crafts sent to spy and infiltrate our waters. If they were extraterrestrial, then most likely they are studying us.
Re: Articles of Interest in Science
There is a related thread about UFO ALIEN at: viewtopic.php?t=7710
Re: Articles of Interest in Science
NY Post
Space laser transmission strikes Earth from 140 million miles away: NASA
Ben Cost
Mon, April 29, 2024 at 10:11 AM CDT·
Earth just received a laser transmission from a world (and perhaps universe) record-breaking 140 million miles away -- which could have major implications for the future of space travel.
This redefined a long-distance call.
However, this correspondence wasn’t extraterrestrial in origin: It was actually sent by NASA’s Psyche spacecraft, which is currently located approximately 1.5 times the distance between Earth and the sun.
“This represents a significant milestone for the project by showing how optical communications can interface with a spacecraft’s radio frequency comms system,” Meera Srinivasan, the project’s operations lead at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, said in a statement.
This major breakthrough was achieved by using a Psyche feature called Deep Space Optical Communications, or DSOC, one of the droid’s several tasks per Space.com. Its main directive is exploring 16 Psyche, the asteroid from which it takes its name.
NASA wanted to show the potential for laser communications to be conducted across interstellar distances, allowing for high bandwidth and a much speedier connection — from 10 to 100 times faster than what’s available today — between humans and the probes they send into space.
This achievement was particularly significant as, along with sending the laser message a record-breaking distance, NASA managed to transmit actual data gathered from the spacecraft.
“We downlinked about 10 minutes of duplicated spacecraft data,” explained Srinivasan. “Until then, we’d been sending test and diagnostic data in our downlinks from Psyche.”
To wit, in November last year, Psyche sent back to Earth from 10 million miles away, but it was pre-loaded test data and not any “real” info.
This watershed moment provides a taste of how spacecraft like Psyche “could use optical communications in support of humanity’s next giant leap: sending humans to Mars,” NASA wrote. NASA/Ben Smegelsky
This marked the culmination of a series of messages sent by the probe since it launched on October 13 atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy Rocket.
During a dry run in December, Psyche beamed data back from 19 million miles away, sending it at the system’s maximum rate of 267 megabits per second.
This correspondence — which included footage of an orange tabby cat named Taters — took just over a minute and a half to reach Earth, which is comparable to broadband internet speeds.
By contrast, this latest DSOC transmission was only 25 megabits. This was due to the fact that Psyche was seven times farther away, reducing the speed at which it could send and receive messages.
Despite the comparatively syrupy speed, this nonetheless eclipsed the project’s goal of “proving at least 1 Mbps was possible at that distance,” per the release.
This watershed moment provides a taste of how spacecraft “could use optical communications in support of humanity’s next giant leap: sending humans to Mars,” NASA wrote.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/tech/sp ... 08551.html
Space laser transmission strikes Earth from 140 million miles away: NASA
Ben Cost
Mon, April 29, 2024 at 10:11 AM CDT·
Earth just received a laser transmission from a world (and perhaps universe) record-breaking 140 million miles away -- which could have major implications for the future of space travel.
This redefined a long-distance call.
However, this correspondence wasn’t extraterrestrial in origin: It was actually sent by NASA’s Psyche spacecraft, which is currently located approximately 1.5 times the distance between Earth and the sun.
“This represents a significant milestone for the project by showing how optical communications can interface with a spacecraft’s radio frequency comms system,” Meera Srinivasan, the project’s operations lead at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, said in a statement.
This major breakthrough was achieved by using a Psyche feature called Deep Space Optical Communications, or DSOC, one of the droid’s several tasks per Space.com. Its main directive is exploring 16 Psyche, the asteroid from which it takes its name.
NASA wanted to show the potential for laser communications to be conducted across interstellar distances, allowing for high bandwidth and a much speedier connection — from 10 to 100 times faster than what’s available today — between humans and the probes they send into space.
This achievement was particularly significant as, along with sending the laser message a record-breaking distance, NASA managed to transmit actual data gathered from the spacecraft.
“We downlinked about 10 minutes of duplicated spacecraft data,” explained Srinivasan. “Until then, we’d been sending test and diagnostic data in our downlinks from Psyche.”
To wit, in November last year, Psyche sent back to Earth from 10 million miles away, but it was pre-loaded test data and not any “real” info.
This watershed moment provides a taste of how spacecraft like Psyche “could use optical communications in support of humanity’s next giant leap: sending humans to Mars,” NASA wrote. NASA/Ben Smegelsky
This marked the culmination of a series of messages sent by the probe since it launched on October 13 atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy Rocket.
During a dry run in December, Psyche beamed data back from 19 million miles away, sending it at the system’s maximum rate of 267 megabits per second.
This correspondence — which included footage of an orange tabby cat named Taters — took just over a minute and a half to reach Earth, which is comparable to broadband internet speeds.
By contrast, this latest DSOC transmission was only 25 megabits. This was due to the fact that Psyche was seven times farther away, reducing the speed at which it could send and receive messages.
Despite the comparatively syrupy speed, this nonetheless eclipsed the project’s goal of “proving at least 1 Mbps was possible at that distance,” per the release.
This watershed moment provides a taste of how spacecraft “could use optical communications in support of humanity’s next giant leap: sending humans to Mars,” NASA wrote.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/tech/sp ... 08551.html
Re: Articles of Interest in Science
Pakistan’s ‘historic’ lunar mission to be launched on Friday aboard China lunar probe
APP Published April 30, 2024 Updated 2 days ago
The Chang’e 6 lunar probe and the Long March-5 Y8 carrier rocket combination sit atop the launch pad at the Wenchang Space Launch Site in Hainan province, China, April 27. — Reuters
The Institute of Space Technology on Tuesday said Pakistan’s “historic” lunar mission iCube-Q will be launched on May 3 at 12:50pm on board China’s Chang’e 6 lunar probe from Hainan, China.
According to the Institute of Space Technology (IST), the satellite ICUBE-Q has been designed and developed by IST in collaboration with China’s Shanghai University SJTU and Pakistan’s national space agency Suparco.
ICUBE-Q orbiter carries two optical cameras to image the lunar surface.
Following successful qualification and testing, iCube-Q has now been integrated with the Chang’e 6 mission.
Chang’e 6 is the sixth in a series of China’s lunar exploration missions.
The launch activity will be telecast live on the IST website and IST social media platforms.
China’s lunar mission will touch down on the moon’s far side to collect samples from the surface and return to Earth for research.
The mission holds significance for Pakistan as it will also take a CubeSat Satellite iCube-Q, developed by IST.
CubeSats are miniature satellites typically characterised by their small size and standardised design.
They are constructed in a cubic shape, consisting of modular components that adhere to specific size constraints.
These satellites often weigh no more than a few kilogrammes and were deployed in space for various purposes.
The primary purpose of CubeSats was to facilitate scientific research, technology development, and educational initiatives in space exploration.
These satellites were utilised for a wide range of missions, including Earth observations, remote sensing, atmospheric research, communications, astronomy and technology demonstration.
Due to their compact size and relatively low cost compared to traditional satellites, CubeSats offered opportunities for universities, research institutions and commercial entities to participate in space missions and gather valuable data for scientific advancement and innovation.
They serve as platforms for testing new technologies and concepts, enabling access to space for a broader range of users and promoting collaboration within the space community.
Last year in August, India became the first nation to land a craft near the Moon’s south pole, a historic triumph for its ambitious, cut-price space programme.
https://www.dawn.com/news/1830608/pakis ... unar-probe
APP Published April 30, 2024 Updated 2 days ago
The Chang’e 6 lunar probe and the Long March-5 Y8 carrier rocket combination sit atop the launch pad at the Wenchang Space Launch Site in Hainan province, China, April 27. — Reuters
The Institute of Space Technology on Tuesday said Pakistan’s “historic” lunar mission iCube-Q will be launched on May 3 at 12:50pm on board China’s Chang’e 6 lunar probe from Hainan, China.
According to the Institute of Space Technology (IST), the satellite ICUBE-Q has been designed and developed by IST in collaboration with China’s Shanghai University SJTU and Pakistan’s national space agency Suparco.
ICUBE-Q orbiter carries two optical cameras to image the lunar surface.
Following successful qualification and testing, iCube-Q has now been integrated with the Chang’e 6 mission.
Chang’e 6 is the sixth in a series of China’s lunar exploration missions.
The launch activity will be telecast live on the IST website and IST social media platforms.
China’s lunar mission will touch down on the moon’s far side to collect samples from the surface and return to Earth for research.
The mission holds significance for Pakistan as it will also take a CubeSat Satellite iCube-Q, developed by IST.
CubeSats are miniature satellites typically characterised by their small size and standardised design.
They are constructed in a cubic shape, consisting of modular components that adhere to specific size constraints.
These satellites often weigh no more than a few kilogrammes and were deployed in space for various purposes.
The primary purpose of CubeSats was to facilitate scientific research, technology development, and educational initiatives in space exploration.
These satellites were utilised for a wide range of missions, including Earth observations, remote sensing, atmospheric research, communications, astronomy and technology demonstration.
Due to their compact size and relatively low cost compared to traditional satellites, CubeSats offered opportunities for universities, research institutions and commercial entities to participate in space missions and gather valuable data for scientific advancement and innovation.
They serve as platforms for testing new technologies and concepts, enabling access to space for a broader range of users and promoting collaboration within the space community.
Last year in August, India became the first nation to land a craft near the Moon’s south pole, a historic triumph for its ambitious, cut-price space programme.
https://www.dawn.com/news/1830608/pakis ... unar-probe
Re: Articles of Interest in Science
Comet Fragment Explodes in Dark Skies Over Spain and Portugal
A brilliant flash of blue, green and white on Saturday night came from a shard of an as yet unidentified comet that was moving around 100,000 miles per hour, experts said.
Video id 100000009476873
A bright object broke up in Earth’s atmosphere on Saturday night, illuminating night skies over parts of Spain and Portugal. Experts say it was a fragment of a comet, perhaps only a few feet in size.CreditCredit...ESA/PDO/AMS82 - AllSky7 via Reuters
On Saturday, revelers across Spain and Portugal ventured into the temperate springtime evening, hoping for a memorable night. None were expecting a visitor from outer space exploding above their heads.
At 11:46 p.m. in Portugal, a fireball streaked across the sky, leaving a smoldering trail of incandescent graffiti in its wake. Footage shared on social media shows jaws dropping as the dark night briefly turns into day, blazing in shades of snowy white, otherworldly green and arctic blue.
Rocky asteroids cause sky-high streaks as they self-destruct in Earth’s atmosphere with some frequency. But over the weekend, the projectile was plunging toward Earth at a remarkable speed — around 100,000 miles per hour, more than twice that expected by a typical asteroid. Experts say it had a strange trajectory, not matching the sort normally taken by nearby space rocks.
That’s because the interloper wasn’t an asteroid. It was a fragment of a comet — an icy object that may have formed at the dawn of the solar system — that lost its battle with our planet’s atmosphere 37 miles above the Atlantic Ocean. None of the object is likely to have made it to the ground, the European Space Agency said.
“It’s an unexpected interplanetary fireworks show,” said Meg Schwamb, a planetary astronomer at Queen’s University Belfast.
It is not rare for comets to create shooting stars. “We have notable meteor showers throughout the year, which are the result of the Earth crossing debris clouds of specific comets,” Dr. Schwamb said. For example, the Perseids, which occur every August, are the result of our world’s sweeping through litter left behind by Comet Swift-Tuttle.
These meteor showers, and the lone shard over the weekend, light up the sky in a similar manner. Air in front of the objects is compressed and heats up, which cooks, erodes, cracks open and obliterates the debris. That destructive process releases light — and, if the projectile is big enough, a powerful shock wave when it surrenders its immense kinetic energy into the sky.
The weekend’s “chunk is likely a bit bigger than a good fraction of the meteors we see during meteor showers, so this just made a bigger light show,” Dr. Schwamb said.
In addition to its flashy performance, the comet fragment’s breakup served as a dry run for experts hoping to defend the planet from large killer asteroids.
One tenet of planetary defense is to find space rocks before they find us; that way, the planet’s protectors can try to do something about them. But the shard over Portugal and Spain was not spied before its demise.
“It would have been great to detect the object prior to colliding with the Earth,” said Juan Luis Cano, a member of the Planetary Defence Office at the European Space Agency.
The worry is that an object just a little larger than Saturday’s missile could again escape detection and explode with lethal effect over an unaware, unwarned city. The meager, 55-foot meteor that exploded above the Russian city of Chelyabinsk in 2013, for example, wasn’t identified before its arrival, either — and its airborne blast, equivalent to nearly 500,000 tons of TNT, caused widespread damage, which injured at least 1,200 people.
But with improved technology on the ground and in space, the hope is that even tiny, harmless objects from around the solar system (like the weekend’s icy visitor, which experts estimate was a few feet across) can be spotted, providing practice for planetary defense researchers searching the heavens for the common but elusive football-field-size rocks that could destroy a city.
Fortunately, a series of next-generation observatories are set to come online in the next few years — including one named after an American astronomer, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, which will spot millions of faint and previously undiscovered asteroids .
For now, the spectacle in Spain and Portugal reminds us that Earth is a participant in the solar system’s never-ending game of planetary billiards, and that working to find as many killer space rocks as possible is a task of the utmost importance.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/19/scie ... spain.html
A brilliant flash of blue, green and white on Saturday night came from a shard of an as yet unidentified comet that was moving around 100,000 miles per hour, experts said.
Video id 100000009476873
A bright object broke up in Earth’s atmosphere on Saturday night, illuminating night skies over parts of Spain and Portugal. Experts say it was a fragment of a comet, perhaps only a few feet in size.CreditCredit...ESA/PDO/AMS82 - AllSky7 via Reuters
On Saturday, revelers across Spain and Portugal ventured into the temperate springtime evening, hoping for a memorable night. None were expecting a visitor from outer space exploding above their heads.
At 11:46 p.m. in Portugal, a fireball streaked across the sky, leaving a smoldering trail of incandescent graffiti in its wake. Footage shared on social media shows jaws dropping as the dark night briefly turns into day, blazing in shades of snowy white, otherworldly green and arctic blue.
Rocky asteroids cause sky-high streaks as they self-destruct in Earth’s atmosphere with some frequency. But over the weekend, the projectile was plunging toward Earth at a remarkable speed — around 100,000 miles per hour, more than twice that expected by a typical asteroid. Experts say it had a strange trajectory, not matching the sort normally taken by nearby space rocks.
That’s because the interloper wasn’t an asteroid. It was a fragment of a comet — an icy object that may have formed at the dawn of the solar system — that lost its battle with our planet’s atmosphere 37 miles above the Atlantic Ocean. None of the object is likely to have made it to the ground, the European Space Agency said.
“It’s an unexpected interplanetary fireworks show,” said Meg Schwamb, a planetary astronomer at Queen’s University Belfast.
It is not rare for comets to create shooting stars. “We have notable meteor showers throughout the year, which are the result of the Earth crossing debris clouds of specific comets,” Dr. Schwamb said. For example, the Perseids, which occur every August, are the result of our world’s sweeping through litter left behind by Comet Swift-Tuttle.
These meteor showers, and the lone shard over the weekend, light up the sky in a similar manner. Air in front of the objects is compressed and heats up, which cooks, erodes, cracks open and obliterates the debris. That destructive process releases light — and, if the projectile is big enough, a powerful shock wave when it surrenders its immense kinetic energy into the sky.
The weekend’s “chunk is likely a bit bigger than a good fraction of the meteors we see during meteor showers, so this just made a bigger light show,” Dr. Schwamb said.
In addition to its flashy performance, the comet fragment’s breakup served as a dry run for experts hoping to defend the planet from large killer asteroids.
One tenet of planetary defense is to find space rocks before they find us; that way, the planet’s protectors can try to do something about them. But the shard over Portugal and Spain was not spied before its demise.
“It would have been great to detect the object prior to colliding with the Earth,” said Juan Luis Cano, a member of the Planetary Defence Office at the European Space Agency.
The worry is that an object just a little larger than Saturday’s missile could again escape detection and explode with lethal effect over an unaware, unwarned city. The meager, 55-foot meteor that exploded above the Russian city of Chelyabinsk in 2013, for example, wasn’t identified before its arrival, either — and its airborne blast, equivalent to nearly 500,000 tons of TNT, caused widespread damage, which injured at least 1,200 people.
But with improved technology on the ground and in space, the hope is that even tiny, harmless objects from around the solar system (like the weekend’s icy visitor, which experts estimate was a few feet across) can be spotted, providing practice for planetary defense researchers searching the heavens for the common but elusive football-field-size rocks that could destroy a city.
Fortunately, a series of next-generation observatories are set to come online in the next few years — including one named after an American astronomer, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, which will spot millions of faint and previously undiscovered asteroids .
For now, the spectacle in Spain and Portugal reminds us that Earth is a participant in the solar system’s never-ending game of planetary billiards, and that working to find as many killer space rocks as possible is a task of the utmost importance.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/19/scie ... spain.html
Re: Articles of Interest in Science
The Telegraph
I’d like to believe the Moon landings were faked – the alternative is far bleaker
Mary Harrington
Sun, July 7, 2024 at 1:00 PM CDT·
In September 2002, the astronaut Buzz Aldrin – the second man to walk on the Moon – was confronted in Beverly Hills by a camera crew led by Bart Sibrel. Sibrel, the creator of several documentaries alleging that the Moon landings never happened, shoved a Bible at Aldrin and demanded he swear on it that he wasn’t lying about walking on the Moon, before calling him “a coward and a liar”.
In response Aldrin, then 72, punched Sibrel in the face. Aldrin’s angry reaction didn’t reassure anyone, though, and just fuelled a new wave of conspiracy theories. The central claim: the Apollo landings were a gigantic scam, perpetrated on the whole world by the American government.
Humans first landed on the Moon on July 20 1969. More than half a billion people watched on television as Neil Armstrong and Aldrin took their first steps on the arid surface. They left behind an American flag, a patch honouring the fallen crew of Apollo 1, and a plaque that read: “We came in peace for all mankind.” The sixth Apollo mission to land humans on the Moon concluded three years later. The Moon has not been visited by astronauts since December 1972.
By 1976, doubts were already creeping in. That year, Bill Kaysing, a former US Navy officer who had worked for one of Nasa’s rocket manufacturers, self-published a pamphlet titled We Never Went to the Moon: America’s 30 Billion Dollar Swindle. In it, Kaysing pointed to unexplained optical anomalies – the absence of dust clouds or blast craters around the lunar module, and the lack of stars in surface photographs – to suggest that the footage was created in a studio.
Such hypotheses have proliferated into a body of literature that shades into hallucinatory weirdness: theories on the demonic nature of UFOs, astral projection, ancient aliens genetically engineering the human race, and other oddities.
The hoax is of such a vintage that it’s become a staple of popular culture. Already in 1971, James Bond was depicted stumbling upon a Nasa film set made to look like the lunar surface, before giving chase in a Moon buggy, in Diamonds Are Forever. In this month’s Fly Me to the Moon, Scarlett Johansson plays a marketing genius hired by Nasa to film a fake landing in case the Apollo 11 mission fails.
With that kind of pedigree, the Moon-landing hoax can’t just be explained away as a form of modern-day “fake news” that blooms and fades on social media. Scepticism about the Apollo space programme was swirling long before the advent of the internet, beginning almost immediately after the landings themselves.
In turn, a great deal of effort has been expended over the decades trying to use evidence to dispel the conspiracy theories. But attempting to debunk them logically is to misunderstand what such claims are communicating.
Today, one in eight Americans think the Moon landings were staged – as do one in 11 Britons. Why won’t we all just accept the facts? Perhaps because most people aren’t interested in or persuaded by facts alone. We need only recall how, when Covid broke out, the educated classes demanded officials discard the existing pandemic action plan to see this extends well beyond those routinely accused of ignorance and emotional reasoning. Conspiracy theories make most sense when understood not as factual claims but as emotional stories – allegories – that exist in oblique relation to empirical reality. They convey diffuse, and sometimes prophetic, intuitions about the world.
The pandemic illustrates this again. Among the many conspiracies that circulated concerning the Covid vaccination programme, one common claim was that vaccines were really a covert programme to inject each of us with a microchip that would allow Bill Gates to track our whereabouts or even control our minds.
This is, we can safely say, not true. Conversely, though, the vaccination programme really was accompanied by the international rollout of digital “vaccine passports”, which link vaccination status to other biomedical data, as well as official state identifiers. And while it’s no longer in active use, this architecture now enables states potentially to track individuals’ movements, and to index freedoms previously taken for granted – such as travel or access to public spaces – to co-operation with who-knows-what future mandatory medical interventions.
However, this probably isn’t a sinister plot, whatever the conspiracists may say. It does nevertheless prompt us to read the conspiracy differently – poetically – interpreting “Bill Gates” as personifying a fusion of tech and governance interests, and the “microchip injection” as symbolic shorthand for the discomfiting sense that unknown technologies wielded by this figurative “Bill Gates” increasingly intrude into our physical, embodied lives. It’s fancifully expressed, but is it really so far from the truth?
The Moon-hoax conspiracy also makes sense as allegory, when we consider what the Moon landings symbolised in mid-century American culture and international politics. The “space race” between America and Russia stood, symbolically, for the competition between capitalist West and communist East: that is, between two ways of organising a mass industrial civilisation. Which social framework was better at delivering rapid, ambitious advances in real-world engineering and technological progress? The race to reach the Moon served as a proxy for this competition, by virtue of the sheer immensity of the goal, as well as its technical demands. For a living human being to leave the Earth’s protective envelope for the emptiness of space and walk on the surface of a celestial body took extraordinary financial, organisational and technical resources, not to mention tremendous courage and ambition.
Winning the space race, then, served as proof positive that the Land of the Free was a more fertile home for this kind of ambition and innovation than any command-and-control socialist regime. Putting the first man on the Moon wasn’t just a “giant leap for mankind”, as Neil Armstrong famously said. It was also a watershed moment in the Cold War.
What, then, to make of the sceptics who appeared in the midst of that mid-century American triumphalism to cast aspersions on its veracity? It perhaps reflects an early intuition that America’s long, slow drift away from the material and sociocultural conditions that enabled the space race had already begun at the moment it was won.
To build the lunar landers, the Apollo programme drew on American engineering talent and heavy industry that has since been shredded by globalisation, outsourcing and changing educational priorities. By the last Apollo flight, this process was well under way: US manufacturing was already declining from its 1957 peak of more than a quarter of American GDP – and today it languishes at about 11 per cent.
Meanwhile, the sense of common American purpose that drove the project has also fractured. In a 2001 interview, Armstrong praised the mission’s low rate of engineering failure, which he attributed to a sense of common endeavour and striving towards excellence spread across the “hundreds of thousands” of engineers, makers and fitters involved in the mission. Among this number, he said, “every guy in the project, every guy at the bench building something, every assembler, every inspector, every guy that’s setting up the tests, cranking the torque wrench, and so on, is saying, man or woman, ‘If anything goes wrong here, it’s not going to be my fault, because my part is going to be better than I have to make it.’”
Since the Moon landings, though, the sense of civic unity that enabled this degree of co-ordinated striving towards excellence has become increasingly contested. No longer taken for granted as core American attributes, instead national pride and cultural homogeneity have come increasingly to be seen as actively inimical to American values. And this has occurred, the historian Christopher Caldwell argues in The Age of Entitlement (2020), as a consequence of the many state-mandated measures to impose equality by fiat, which have mushroomed since the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Though he does not endorse the segregation the act sought to dismantle, in Caldwell’s view its ratification in effect created a “rival Constitution”, which implicitly treats civic unity and patriotism not as necessary preconditions for high civilisation, but as obstacles to radical equality.
Other distractions have displaced the 20th-century drive for industrial innovation: though there are exceptions, such as Elon Musk’s SpaceX, there has been a notable shift away from trying to reach outer space towards a preoccupation with virtual worlds. Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley investor, argues that this has been enabled by the digital revolution, whose advances serve, in his view, as a distraction from the stagnation and decline of real-world technological progress. In his notorious formulation: “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.”
Understood against this backdrop, the eruption of scepticism about the Moon landings can be read as an early intuition that even at America’s crowning civilisational moment, the enabling conditions for that moment were already under threat. Deindustrialisation had already begun; the germinal form of “diversity, equity and inclusion” was already written into American law; the precursors of the internet were spreading.
Earlier this year, Bart Sibrel himself appeared on the wildly popular Joe Rogan Experience podcast. It’s not difficult to see how modern America might struggle to believe that their forebears were capable of the kind of engineering inventiveness, courage and large-scale co-operation required to make the Apollo missions a reality.
At its peak, Apollo involved some 400,000 people, across thousands of institutions. Even the rockets were built across multiple locations. It was an extraordinary feat of co-ordination, achieved in an age before modern computer-design programmes or tools for instantaneous communication. By contrast, when in the 2000s California invited bids for construction of a high-speed rail line through the state, the French rail firm SNCF tendered a proposal – only to withdraw it in 2011 to work on a similar project in Morocco, whose government, the SNCF engineers declared, was less politically dysfunctional than California’s. Morocco’s high-speed railway began operating in 2018. California’s is still not completed.
It is unlikely that the America of today could muster the degree of co-ordination and industrial resources that put Armstrong and Aldrin on the Moon in 1969. Were I an American raised on the conviction that progress moves only in one direction, I too might conclude that, logically, these feats could not have been achievable half a century ago.
The most comforting conclusion, in other words, might be that the Moon landings were a hoax. The alternative is far bleaker: that the achievements of mid-20th-century America were the achievements of a different civilisation, one now as distant and mysterious as the Moon.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/enterta ... 00599.html
I’d like to believe the Moon landings were faked – the alternative is far bleaker
Mary Harrington
Sun, July 7, 2024 at 1:00 PM CDT·
In September 2002, the astronaut Buzz Aldrin – the second man to walk on the Moon – was confronted in Beverly Hills by a camera crew led by Bart Sibrel. Sibrel, the creator of several documentaries alleging that the Moon landings never happened, shoved a Bible at Aldrin and demanded he swear on it that he wasn’t lying about walking on the Moon, before calling him “a coward and a liar”.
In response Aldrin, then 72, punched Sibrel in the face. Aldrin’s angry reaction didn’t reassure anyone, though, and just fuelled a new wave of conspiracy theories. The central claim: the Apollo landings were a gigantic scam, perpetrated on the whole world by the American government.
Humans first landed on the Moon on July 20 1969. More than half a billion people watched on television as Neil Armstrong and Aldrin took their first steps on the arid surface. They left behind an American flag, a patch honouring the fallen crew of Apollo 1, and a plaque that read: “We came in peace for all mankind.” The sixth Apollo mission to land humans on the Moon concluded three years later. The Moon has not been visited by astronauts since December 1972.
By 1976, doubts were already creeping in. That year, Bill Kaysing, a former US Navy officer who had worked for one of Nasa’s rocket manufacturers, self-published a pamphlet titled We Never Went to the Moon: America’s 30 Billion Dollar Swindle. In it, Kaysing pointed to unexplained optical anomalies – the absence of dust clouds or blast craters around the lunar module, and the lack of stars in surface photographs – to suggest that the footage was created in a studio.
Such hypotheses have proliferated into a body of literature that shades into hallucinatory weirdness: theories on the demonic nature of UFOs, astral projection, ancient aliens genetically engineering the human race, and other oddities.
The hoax is of such a vintage that it’s become a staple of popular culture. Already in 1971, James Bond was depicted stumbling upon a Nasa film set made to look like the lunar surface, before giving chase in a Moon buggy, in Diamonds Are Forever. In this month’s Fly Me to the Moon, Scarlett Johansson plays a marketing genius hired by Nasa to film a fake landing in case the Apollo 11 mission fails.
With that kind of pedigree, the Moon-landing hoax can’t just be explained away as a form of modern-day “fake news” that blooms and fades on social media. Scepticism about the Apollo space programme was swirling long before the advent of the internet, beginning almost immediately after the landings themselves.
In turn, a great deal of effort has been expended over the decades trying to use evidence to dispel the conspiracy theories. But attempting to debunk them logically is to misunderstand what such claims are communicating.
Today, one in eight Americans think the Moon landings were staged – as do one in 11 Britons. Why won’t we all just accept the facts? Perhaps because most people aren’t interested in or persuaded by facts alone. We need only recall how, when Covid broke out, the educated classes demanded officials discard the existing pandemic action plan to see this extends well beyond those routinely accused of ignorance and emotional reasoning. Conspiracy theories make most sense when understood not as factual claims but as emotional stories – allegories – that exist in oblique relation to empirical reality. They convey diffuse, and sometimes prophetic, intuitions about the world.
The pandemic illustrates this again. Among the many conspiracies that circulated concerning the Covid vaccination programme, one common claim was that vaccines were really a covert programme to inject each of us with a microchip that would allow Bill Gates to track our whereabouts or even control our minds.
This is, we can safely say, not true. Conversely, though, the vaccination programme really was accompanied by the international rollout of digital “vaccine passports”, which link vaccination status to other biomedical data, as well as official state identifiers. And while it’s no longer in active use, this architecture now enables states potentially to track individuals’ movements, and to index freedoms previously taken for granted – such as travel or access to public spaces – to co-operation with who-knows-what future mandatory medical interventions.
However, this probably isn’t a sinister plot, whatever the conspiracists may say. It does nevertheless prompt us to read the conspiracy differently – poetically – interpreting “Bill Gates” as personifying a fusion of tech and governance interests, and the “microchip injection” as symbolic shorthand for the discomfiting sense that unknown technologies wielded by this figurative “Bill Gates” increasingly intrude into our physical, embodied lives. It’s fancifully expressed, but is it really so far from the truth?
The Moon-hoax conspiracy also makes sense as allegory, when we consider what the Moon landings symbolised in mid-century American culture and international politics. The “space race” between America and Russia stood, symbolically, for the competition between capitalist West and communist East: that is, between two ways of organising a mass industrial civilisation. Which social framework was better at delivering rapid, ambitious advances in real-world engineering and technological progress? The race to reach the Moon served as a proxy for this competition, by virtue of the sheer immensity of the goal, as well as its technical demands. For a living human being to leave the Earth’s protective envelope for the emptiness of space and walk on the surface of a celestial body took extraordinary financial, organisational and technical resources, not to mention tremendous courage and ambition.
Winning the space race, then, served as proof positive that the Land of the Free was a more fertile home for this kind of ambition and innovation than any command-and-control socialist regime. Putting the first man on the Moon wasn’t just a “giant leap for mankind”, as Neil Armstrong famously said. It was also a watershed moment in the Cold War.
What, then, to make of the sceptics who appeared in the midst of that mid-century American triumphalism to cast aspersions on its veracity? It perhaps reflects an early intuition that America’s long, slow drift away from the material and sociocultural conditions that enabled the space race had already begun at the moment it was won.
To build the lunar landers, the Apollo programme drew on American engineering talent and heavy industry that has since been shredded by globalisation, outsourcing and changing educational priorities. By the last Apollo flight, this process was well under way: US manufacturing was already declining from its 1957 peak of more than a quarter of American GDP – and today it languishes at about 11 per cent.
Meanwhile, the sense of common American purpose that drove the project has also fractured. In a 2001 interview, Armstrong praised the mission’s low rate of engineering failure, which he attributed to a sense of common endeavour and striving towards excellence spread across the “hundreds of thousands” of engineers, makers and fitters involved in the mission. Among this number, he said, “every guy in the project, every guy at the bench building something, every assembler, every inspector, every guy that’s setting up the tests, cranking the torque wrench, and so on, is saying, man or woman, ‘If anything goes wrong here, it’s not going to be my fault, because my part is going to be better than I have to make it.’”
Since the Moon landings, though, the sense of civic unity that enabled this degree of co-ordinated striving towards excellence has become increasingly contested. No longer taken for granted as core American attributes, instead national pride and cultural homogeneity have come increasingly to be seen as actively inimical to American values. And this has occurred, the historian Christopher Caldwell argues in The Age of Entitlement (2020), as a consequence of the many state-mandated measures to impose equality by fiat, which have mushroomed since the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Though he does not endorse the segregation the act sought to dismantle, in Caldwell’s view its ratification in effect created a “rival Constitution”, which implicitly treats civic unity and patriotism not as necessary preconditions for high civilisation, but as obstacles to radical equality.
Other distractions have displaced the 20th-century drive for industrial innovation: though there are exceptions, such as Elon Musk’s SpaceX, there has been a notable shift away from trying to reach outer space towards a preoccupation with virtual worlds. Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley investor, argues that this has been enabled by the digital revolution, whose advances serve, in his view, as a distraction from the stagnation and decline of real-world technological progress. In his notorious formulation: “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.”
Understood against this backdrop, the eruption of scepticism about the Moon landings can be read as an early intuition that even at America’s crowning civilisational moment, the enabling conditions for that moment were already under threat. Deindustrialisation had already begun; the germinal form of “diversity, equity and inclusion” was already written into American law; the precursors of the internet were spreading.
Earlier this year, Bart Sibrel himself appeared on the wildly popular Joe Rogan Experience podcast. It’s not difficult to see how modern America might struggle to believe that their forebears were capable of the kind of engineering inventiveness, courage and large-scale co-operation required to make the Apollo missions a reality.
At its peak, Apollo involved some 400,000 people, across thousands of institutions. Even the rockets were built across multiple locations. It was an extraordinary feat of co-ordination, achieved in an age before modern computer-design programmes or tools for instantaneous communication. By contrast, when in the 2000s California invited bids for construction of a high-speed rail line through the state, the French rail firm SNCF tendered a proposal – only to withdraw it in 2011 to work on a similar project in Morocco, whose government, the SNCF engineers declared, was less politically dysfunctional than California’s. Morocco’s high-speed railway began operating in 2018. California’s is still not completed.
It is unlikely that the America of today could muster the degree of co-ordination and industrial resources that put Armstrong and Aldrin on the Moon in 1969. Were I an American raised on the conviction that progress moves only in one direction, I too might conclude that, logically, these feats could not have been achievable half a century ago.
The most comforting conclusion, in other words, might be that the Moon landings were a hoax. The alternative is far bleaker: that the achievements of mid-20th-century America were the achievements of a different civilisation, one now as distant and mysterious as the Moon.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/enterta ... 00599.html
Re: Articles of Interest in Science
CNN
Scientists find a molecule never before found outside our solar system on a planet with glass rain
Ashley Strickland, CNN
Mon, July 8, 2024 at 7:26 PM CDT·
An exoplanet the size of Jupiter has long intrigued astronomers because of its scorching temperatures, screaming winds and sideways rain made of glass. Now, data from the James Webb Space Telescope has revealed another intriguing feature of the planet known as HD 189733b: It smells like rotten eggs.
Researchers studying HD 189733b’s atmosphere used Webb’s observation to spot trace amounts of hydrogen sulfide — a colorless gas that releases a strong sulfuric stench and has never been spotted beyond our solar system. The discovery advances what’s known about the potential composition of exoplanets.
The findings, compiled by a multi-institution team, were published Monday in the journal Nature.
An oddball planet with deadly weather
Scientists first discovered HD 189733b in 2005 and later identified the gas giant as a “hot Jupiter” — a planet that has a similar chemical composition to Jupiter, the biggest planet in our solar system, but with sizzling temperatures. Located only 64 light-years from Earth, HD 189733b is the nearest hot Jupiter that astronomers can study as the planet passes in front of its star. For that reason, it’s one of the most well-studied exoplanets.
“HD 189733 b is not only a gas giant planet, but also a ‘giant’ in the field of exoplanets because it is one of the first transiting exoplanets ever discovered,” said lead study author Guangwei Fu, an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins University, in an email. “It is the anchor point for many of our understanding of exoplanet atmospheric chemistry and physics.”
The planet is about 10% larger than Jupiter, but much hotter because it is 13 times closer to its star than Mercury is to our sun. HD 189733b only takes about two Earth days to complete a single orbit around its star, Fu said.
That proximity to the star gives the planet a searing average temperature of 1,700 degrees Fahrenheit (926 degrees Celsius) and strong winds that send glass-like silicate particles raining sideways from high clouds around the planet at 5,000 miles per hour (8,046 kilometers per hour).
A surprising stench
When astronomers decided to use the Webb telescope to study the planet to see what infrared light, which is invisible to the human eye, could reveal in HD 189733b’s atmosphere, they were in for a surprise.
Hydrogen sulfide is present on Jupiter and was predicted to exist on gas giant exoplanets, but evidence of the molecule had been elusive outside our solar system, Fu said.
“Hydrogen sulfide is one of the main reservoirs of sulfur within planetary atmospheres,” Fu said. “The high precision and infrared capability from (the Webb telescope) allow us to detect hydrogen sulfide for the first time on exoplanets, which opens a new spectral window into studying exoplanet atmospheric sulfur chemistry. This helps us to understand what exoplanets are made of and how they came to be.”
Additionally, the team spotted water, carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide in the planet’s atmosphere, Fu said — which means these molecules could be common in other gas giant exoplanets.
While astronomers don’t expect life to exist on HD 189733b because of its scorching temperatures, detecting a building block like sulfur on an exoplanet sheds light on planet formation, Fu said.
“Sulfur is a vital element for building more complex molecules, and — like carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and phosphate — scientists need to study it more to fully understand how planets are made and what they’re made of,” Fu said.
Molecules with distinct smells, like ammonia, have been previously detected within other exoplanet atmospheres.
But Webb’s capabilities enable scientists to identify specific chemicals within atmospheres around exoplanets in greater detail than before.
Planetary heavy metals
In our solar system, ice giants like Neptune and Uranus, though less massive overall, contain more metals than the gas giants Jupiter and Saturn, which are the largest planets, suggesting there could be a correlation between metal content and mass.
Astronomers believe that more ice, rock and metals — rather than gases like hydrogen and helium — were involved in the formation of Neptune and Uranus.
Webb’s data also showed levels of heavy metals on HD 189733b that are similar to those found on Jupiter.
“Now we have this new measurement to show that indeed the metal concentrations (the planet) has provide a very important anchor point to this study of how a planet’s composition varies with its mass and radius,” Fu said. “The findings support our understanding of how planets form through creating more solid material after initial core formation and then are naturally enhanced with heavy metals.”
Now, the team will search for sulfur signatures on other exoplanets and determine whether high concentrations of the compound influence how closely some planets form in relation to their host stars.
“HD 189733b is a benchmark planet, but it represents just a single data point,” Fu said. “Just as individual humans exhibit unique characteristics, our collective behaviors follow clear trends and patterns. With more datasets from Webb to come, we aim to understand how planets form and if our solar system is unique in the galaxy.”
For more CNN news and newsletters create an account at CNN.com
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/ne ... 41714.html
Scientists find a molecule never before found outside our solar system on a planet with glass rain
Ashley Strickland, CNN
Mon, July 8, 2024 at 7:26 PM CDT·
An exoplanet the size of Jupiter has long intrigued astronomers because of its scorching temperatures, screaming winds and sideways rain made of glass. Now, data from the James Webb Space Telescope has revealed another intriguing feature of the planet known as HD 189733b: It smells like rotten eggs.
Researchers studying HD 189733b’s atmosphere used Webb’s observation to spot trace amounts of hydrogen sulfide — a colorless gas that releases a strong sulfuric stench and has never been spotted beyond our solar system. The discovery advances what’s known about the potential composition of exoplanets.
The findings, compiled by a multi-institution team, were published Monday in the journal Nature.
An oddball planet with deadly weather
Scientists first discovered HD 189733b in 2005 and later identified the gas giant as a “hot Jupiter” — a planet that has a similar chemical composition to Jupiter, the biggest planet in our solar system, but with sizzling temperatures. Located only 64 light-years from Earth, HD 189733b is the nearest hot Jupiter that astronomers can study as the planet passes in front of its star. For that reason, it’s one of the most well-studied exoplanets.
“HD 189733 b is not only a gas giant planet, but also a ‘giant’ in the field of exoplanets because it is one of the first transiting exoplanets ever discovered,” said lead study author Guangwei Fu, an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins University, in an email. “It is the anchor point for many of our understanding of exoplanet atmospheric chemistry and physics.”
The planet is about 10% larger than Jupiter, but much hotter because it is 13 times closer to its star than Mercury is to our sun. HD 189733b only takes about two Earth days to complete a single orbit around its star, Fu said.
That proximity to the star gives the planet a searing average temperature of 1,700 degrees Fahrenheit (926 degrees Celsius) and strong winds that send glass-like silicate particles raining sideways from high clouds around the planet at 5,000 miles per hour (8,046 kilometers per hour).
A surprising stench
When astronomers decided to use the Webb telescope to study the planet to see what infrared light, which is invisible to the human eye, could reveal in HD 189733b’s atmosphere, they were in for a surprise.
Hydrogen sulfide is present on Jupiter and was predicted to exist on gas giant exoplanets, but evidence of the molecule had been elusive outside our solar system, Fu said.
“Hydrogen sulfide is one of the main reservoirs of sulfur within planetary atmospheres,” Fu said. “The high precision and infrared capability from (the Webb telescope) allow us to detect hydrogen sulfide for the first time on exoplanets, which opens a new spectral window into studying exoplanet atmospheric sulfur chemistry. This helps us to understand what exoplanets are made of and how they came to be.”
Additionally, the team spotted water, carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide in the planet’s atmosphere, Fu said — which means these molecules could be common in other gas giant exoplanets.
While astronomers don’t expect life to exist on HD 189733b because of its scorching temperatures, detecting a building block like sulfur on an exoplanet sheds light on planet formation, Fu said.
“Sulfur is a vital element for building more complex molecules, and — like carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and phosphate — scientists need to study it more to fully understand how planets are made and what they’re made of,” Fu said.
Molecules with distinct smells, like ammonia, have been previously detected within other exoplanet atmospheres.
But Webb’s capabilities enable scientists to identify specific chemicals within atmospheres around exoplanets in greater detail than before.
Planetary heavy metals
In our solar system, ice giants like Neptune and Uranus, though less massive overall, contain more metals than the gas giants Jupiter and Saturn, which are the largest planets, suggesting there could be a correlation between metal content and mass.
Astronomers believe that more ice, rock and metals — rather than gases like hydrogen and helium — were involved in the formation of Neptune and Uranus.
Webb’s data also showed levels of heavy metals on HD 189733b that are similar to those found on Jupiter.
“Now we have this new measurement to show that indeed the metal concentrations (the planet) has provide a very important anchor point to this study of how a planet’s composition varies with its mass and radius,” Fu said. “The findings support our understanding of how planets form through creating more solid material after initial core formation and then are naturally enhanced with heavy metals.”
Now, the team will search for sulfur signatures on other exoplanets and determine whether high concentrations of the compound influence how closely some planets form in relation to their host stars.
“HD 189733b is a benchmark planet, but it represents just a single data point,” Fu said. “Just as individual humans exhibit unique characteristics, our collective behaviors follow clear trends and patterns. With more datasets from Webb to come, we aim to understand how planets form and if our solar system is unique in the galaxy.”
For more CNN news and newsletters create an account at CNN.com
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/ne ... 41714.html
How Did Roses Get Their Thorns?
The “prickles,” as botanists call them, evolved in roses and other plants thanks to a single gene, a new study found.
Prickles likely arose in many plants as a defense against animals that would devour them, but prickles can serve other purposes, such as for hooking onto surfaces while climbing or attaching seeds onto the fur of passing animals.Credit...Yon Marsh Natural History/Alamy
There is no rose without thorns, the old saying goes. But to botanists, there is no rose with thorns: The spiky outgrowths of a rose stem are called “prickles,” and are biologically distinct from the stiff, woody thorns of other plants.
Prickles are a remarkable example of evolution repeating itself. In the past 400 million years, plants evolved them 28 different times. Roses grow prickles on their stems, whereas others grow them on their leaves or their fruits. Grasses grow tiny prickles on their flowering tufts. Solanum atropurpureum, a wild relative of potatoes that grows in Brazil, has prickles so nasty that they’ve earned it two fearsome nicknames: “Purple devil” and “Malevolence.”
A new study published on Thursday in Science sheds some light on how plants evolved prickles from scratch so many times: Over and over again, each species took advantage of a single gene. The discovery opens up the possibility of altering the DNA of plants to remove their prickles, making some wild plants easier to grow as crops.
Zachary Lippman, a plant geneticist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, got curious about prickles as he studied a group of crops that includes potatoes, tomatoes and eggplants. While the crops are all prickle-free, some of their wild relatives are covered in the little daggers. Early farmers must have bred the prickles out of the wild plants as they started using them for crops.
“Who wants to cultivate eggplants that you can eat if there are these prickles poking you all the time?” he asked.
The loss of prickles led Dr. Lippman and his colleagues to wonder how the spikes had evolved in the first place. It’s likely that prickles arose in many plants as a defense against animals that would devour them. But prickles can serve other purposes, too. Some plants use them to hook onto surfaces while climbing. Some wild grasses use them to hook their seeds onto the fur of passing animals.
ImageA close-up view of very long fearsome thorns of a plant’s stem with some budding yellow flowers off one branch.
Solanum atropurpureum, a wild relative of potatoes whose prickles are so nasty it’s nicknamed “Purple devil” and “Malevolence.”Credit...Adrian Davies/Alamy
Charles Darwin recognized that the same trait can evolve many times over in the history of life — a process known as convergence. Bats and birds, for example, both evolved wings for flying. But they took different evolutionary paths to the same destination: Bat wings evolved as membranes that grew between their fingers, whereas birds evolved wings made of feathers.
To understand how plants converged on prickles, Dr. Lippman and his colleagues crossed one variety of domesticated eggplant with its wild, prickly relative. Some of the hybrids had lots of prickles, while others had none.
Comparing the DNA of the plants, the scientists found that a specific variant of a gene called LOG was only carried by plants with prickles. Botanists had long known that LOG genes help produce a hormone that signals plant cells to grow. But in the wild eggplant, a special version of LOG allowed prickles to grow.
Dr. Lippman ran the same experiment on two other kinds of eggplants, crossing them with their wild relatives. Each time, the researchers discovered a LOG variant was responsible for prickles in the wild plants.
“We found that it was the same gene that had independently accumulated mutations in all three lineages to lose those prickles,” Dr. Lippmann said.
It might seem puzzling that mutating a LOG gene could take away prickles without harming the eggplant as a whole. After all, LOG genes are known to be essential for plants growing at all.
It turns out that plants have evolved many copies of LOG genes over millions of years. Dr. Lippman and his colleagues speculated that one copy of the LOG gene evolved in the wild ancestors of eggplants to make prickles, while the other versions went on with their original job of helping the plants grow.
He and his colleagues wondered if LOG genes were important to prickles in other plants as well. In dozens of species, they discovered evidence of the same link. Blocking a LOG gene in roses, for example, interfered with the development of prickles. “We can make these giant prickles turn into tiny little buds,” Dr. Lippman said.
The new findings could help scientists transform wild plants into domesticated crops, Dr. Lippman said. He and his colleagues tested this possibility on a wild Australian plant sometimes called the desert raisin. The sweet fruit is normally prickly. But after the researchers snipped the LOG gene from its DNA, it became free of prickles.
Vivian Irish, an evolutionary biologist at Yale University who was not involved in the new study, said it showed that convergence can happen in a way that Darwin didn’t envision. Each time prickles arose, plants did not evolve an entirely new way to make them. They just borrowed the same gene again and again.
“Innovation in many cases might simply reflect reusing old genes in new ways,” Dr. Irish said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/01/scie ... 778d3e6de3
Prickles likely arose in many plants as a defense against animals that would devour them, but prickles can serve other purposes, such as for hooking onto surfaces while climbing or attaching seeds onto the fur of passing animals.Credit...Yon Marsh Natural History/Alamy
There is no rose without thorns, the old saying goes. But to botanists, there is no rose with thorns: The spiky outgrowths of a rose stem are called “prickles,” and are biologically distinct from the stiff, woody thorns of other plants.
Prickles are a remarkable example of evolution repeating itself. In the past 400 million years, plants evolved them 28 different times. Roses grow prickles on their stems, whereas others grow them on their leaves or their fruits. Grasses grow tiny prickles on their flowering tufts. Solanum atropurpureum, a wild relative of potatoes that grows in Brazil, has prickles so nasty that they’ve earned it two fearsome nicknames: “Purple devil” and “Malevolence.”
A new study published on Thursday in Science sheds some light on how plants evolved prickles from scratch so many times: Over and over again, each species took advantage of a single gene. The discovery opens up the possibility of altering the DNA of plants to remove their prickles, making some wild plants easier to grow as crops.
Zachary Lippman, a plant geneticist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, got curious about prickles as he studied a group of crops that includes potatoes, tomatoes and eggplants. While the crops are all prickle-free, some of their wild relatives are covered in the little daggers. Early farmers must have bred the prickles out of the wild plants as they started using them for crops.
“Who wants to cultivate eggplants that you can eat if there are these prickles poking you all the time?” he asked.
The loss of prickles led Dr. Lippman and his colleagues to wonder how the spikes had evolved in the first place. It’s likely that prickles arose in many plants as a defense against animals that would devour them. But prickles can serve other purposes, too. Some plants use them to hook onto surfaces while climbing. Some wild grasses use them to hook their seeds onto the fur of passing animals.
ImageA close-up view of very long fearsome thorns of a plant’s stem with some budding yellow flowers off one branch.
Solanum atropurpureum, a wild relative of potatoes whose prickles are so nasty it’s nicknamed “Purple devil” and “Malevolence.”Credit...Adrian Davies/Alamy
Charles Darwin recognized that the same trait can evolve many times over in the history of life — a process known as convergence. Bats and birds, for example, both evolved wings for flying. But they took different evolutionary paths to the same destination: Bat wings evolved as membranes that grew between their fingers, whereas birds evolved wings made of feathers.
To understand how plants converged on prickles, Dr. Lippman and his colleagues crossed one variety of domesticated eggplant with its wild, prickly relative. Some of the hybrids had lots of prickles, while others had none.
Comparing the DNA of the plants, the scientists found that a specific variant of a gene called LOG was only carried by plants with prickles. Botanists had long known that LOG genes help produce a hormone that signals plant cells to grow. But in the wild eggplant, a special version of LOG allowed prickles to grow.
Dr. Lippman ran the same experiment on two other kinds of eggplants, crossing them with their wild relatives. Each time, the researchers discovered a LOG variant was responsible for prickles in the wild plants.
“We found that it was the same gene that had independently accumulated mutations in all three lineages to lose those prickles,” Dr. Lippmann said.
It might seem puzzling that mutating a LOG gene could take away prickles without harming the eggplant as a whole. After all, LOG genes are known to be essential for plants growing at all.
It turns out that plants have evolved many copies of LOG genes over millions of years. Dr. Lippman and his colleagues speculated that one copy of the LOG gene evolved in the wild ancestors of eggplants to make prickles, while the other versions went on with their original job of helping the plants grow.
He and his colleagues wondered if LOG genes were important to prickles in other plants as well. In dozens of species, they discovered evidence of the same link. Blocking a LOG gene in roses, for example, interfered with the development of prickles. “We can make these giant prickles turn into tiny little buds,” Dr. Lippman said.
The new findings could help scientists transform wild plants into domesticated crops, Dr. Lippman said. He and his colleagues tested this possibility on a wild Australian plant sometimes called the desert raisin. The sweet fruit is normally prickly. But after the researchers snipped the LOG gene from its DNA, it became free of prickles.
Vivian Irish, an evolutionary biologist at Yale University who was not involved in the new study, said it showed that convergence can happen in a way that Darwin didn’t envision. Each time prickles arose, plants did not evolve an entirely new way to make them. They just borrowed the same gene again and again.
“Innovation in many cases might simply reflect reusing old genes in new ways,” Dr. Irish said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/01/scie ... 778d3e6de3