Earth’s crust is dripping “like honey” into our planet’s hot interior beneath the Andes mountains, scientists have discovered.
By setting up a simple experiment in a sandbox and comparing the results to actual geological data, researchers have found compelling evidence that Earth’s crust has been “avalanched away” across hundreds of miles in the Andes after being swallowed up by the viscous mantle.
The process, called lithospheric dripping, has been happening for millions of years and in multiple locations around the world — including Turkey’s central Anatolian Plateau and the western United States’ Great Basin — but scientists have only learned about it in recent years. The researchers published their findings about the Andean drip June 28 in the journal Nature: Communications Earth & Environment (opens in new tab).
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“We have confirmed that a deformation on the surface of an area of the Andes Mountains has a large portion of the lithosphere [Earth’s crust and upper mantle] below avalanched away,” Julia Andersen, a researcher and doctoral candidate in Earth sciences at the University of Toronto, said in a statement. “Owing to its high density, it dripped like cold syrup or honey deeper into the planetary interior and is likely responsible for two major tectonic events in the Central Andes — shifting the surface topography of the region by hundreds of kilometres and both crunching and stretching the surface crust itself.”
The outer regions of the Earth’s geology can be broken down into two parts: a crust and upper mantle that form rigid plates of solid rock, the lithosphere; and the hotter, more pressurized plastic-like rocks of the lower mantle. Lithospheric (or tectonic) plates float on this lower mantle, and its magmatic convection currents can pull the plates apart to form oceans; rub them against one another to trigger earthquakes; and collide them, slide one under the other, or expose a gap in the plate to the mantle’s fierce heat to form mountains. But, as scientists have begun observing, these aren’t the only ways that mountains can be formed.
Lithospheric dripping takes place when two collided and crumpled up llithospheric plates warm to such a point that they thicken, creating a long, heavy droplet that oozes into the lower part of the planet’s mantle. As the droplet continues to seep downward, its growing weight tugs on the crust above, forming a basin on the surface. Eventually, the droplet’s weight becomes too great for it to remain intact; its long lifeline snaps, and the crust above it springs upward across hundreds of miles — making mountains. In fact, researchers have long suspected that such subsurface stretching may have contributed to the formation of the Andes.
The Central Andean Plateau consists of the Puna and Altiplano plateaus — a roughly 1,120-mile-long (1,800 kilometers), 250-mile-wide (400 km) expanse that stretches from northern Peru through Bolivia, southwestern Chile and northwestern Argentina. It was created by the subduction, or the slipping beneath, of the heavier Nazca tectonic plate under the South American tectonic plate. This process deformed the crust above it, pushing it thousands of miles into the air to form mountains.
But subduction is only half of the story. Prior studies also point to features on the Central Andean Plateau that can’t be explained by the slow and steady upward push of the subduction process. Instead, parts of the Andes look like they sprung from sudden upward pulses in the crust throughout the Cenozoic era — Earth’s current geological period, which began roughly 66 million years ago. The Puna plateau is also higher than the Altiplano and holds volcanic centers and big basins such as the Arizaro and Atacama.
These are all signs of lithospheric dripping. But to be sure, the scientists needed to test that hypothesis by modeling the plateau’s ground. They filled a plexiglass tank with materials that simulated Earth’s crust and mantle, using polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS), a silicon polymer around 1,000 times thicker than table syrup, for the lower mantle; a mixture of PDMS and modeling clay for the upper mantle; and a sand-like layer of tiny ceramic spheres and silica spheres for the crust.
“It was like creating and destroying tectonic mountain belts in a sandbox, floating on a simulated pool of magma — all under incredibly precise sub-millimetre measured conditions,” Andersen said.
To simulate how a drip might form in Earth’s lithosphere, the team created a small, high-density instability just above the lower mantle layer of their model, recording with three high-resolution cameras as a droplet slowly formed and then sagged into a long, distended drip.”The dripping occurs over hours, so you wouldn’t see much happening from one minute to the next,” Andersen said. “But if you checked every few hours, you would clearly see the change — it just requires patience.”
By comparing the images of their model’s surface to aerial images of the Andes’ geological features, the researchers saw a marked similarity between the two, strongly suggesting that the features in the Andes had indeed been formed by lithospheric drip.
“We also observed crustal shortening with folds in the model as well as basin-like depressions on the surface, so we’re confident that a drip is very likely the cause of the observed deformations in the Andes,” Andersen said.
The researchers said their new method not only provides solid evidence for how some key features of the Andes formed but also highlights the significant role of geological processes other than subduction in the molding of Earth’s landscapes. It may also prove effective for spotting the effects of other kinds of subsurface dripping elsewhere in the world.
Jupiter, the fifth planet in our solar system and by far most massive, is a treasure trove of scientific discovery. Last year a pair of studies found that the planet’s iconic Great Red Spot is 40 times deeper than the Mariana Trench, the deepest location on Planet Earth. In April authors of a paper in the journal Nature Communications studied a double ridge in Northwest Greenland with the same gravity-scaled geometry as those found on Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons, and concluded that the probability of life on Europa is greater than expected.
Now scholars believe they have cracked another great Jupiter mystery — namely, why it lacks the spectacular rings flaunted by its celestial neighbor, Saturn. As a very massive gas giant with similar composition, the evolution of the two planets is believed to be similar — meaning the reason that one has a prominent ring system and the other doesn’t has always been something of a puzzle.
RELATED: A giant planet may have “escaped” from our solar system, study finds
With results that are currently online and will soon be published in the journal Planetary Science, researchers from the University of California–Riverside used modeling to determine that Jupiter’s enormous moons nip the creation of possible rings right in the bud.
Using a computer simulation that accounted for the orbits of each of Jupiter’s four moons, astrophysicist Stephen Kane and graduate student Zhexing Li realized that those moons’ gravity would alter the orbit of any ice that might come from a comet and ultimately prevent their accumulation in such a way as to form rings, as happened with Saturn. Instead the moons would either fling the ice away from the planet’s orbit or pull the ice toward a collision course with themselves.
This not only explains why Jupiter only has the paltriest of rings at present; it suggests that it likely never had large rings.
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There is more at stake here than merely understanding why the aesthetics of Jupiter differ from the aesthetics of Saturn. As Kane explained in a statement, a planet’s rings contain many clues about that planet’s history. They can help scientists understand what objects might have collided with a planet in the past, or perhaps the type of event that formed them.
“For us astronomers, they are the blood spatter on the walls of a crime scene. When we look at the rings of giant planets, it’s evidence something catastrophic happened to put that material there,” Kane explained.
The scientists say they do not plan on ending their astronomical investigation at Jupiter; their next stop is Uranus, which also has paltry rings. The researchers speculate that Uranus, which appears to be tipped on its side, may lack rings because of a collision with another celestial body.
Technically, Jupiter does have a ring system, it is just incredibly small and faint. Indeed, Jupiter’s rings are so small that scientists did not even discover them until 1979, when the space probe Voyager passed by the gas giant. There are three faint rings, all of them made of dust particles emitted by the nearby moons — a main flattened ring that is 20 miles thick and 4,000 miles wide, an inner ring shaped like a donut that is more than 12,000 miles thick and a so-called “gossamer” ring that is actually comprised of three much smaller rings comprised of microscopic debris from the nearby moons.
NASA itself has expressed wonderment at the wispy rings that accompany our solar system’s most conspicuous behemoth — in particular, at the size of the particles that comprise them.
“These grains are so tiny, a thousand of them put together are only a millimeter long,” NASA writes. “That makes them as small as the particles in cigarette smoke.”
By contrast, the rings of Saturn are famously beautiful, and some of the particles in those rings are “as large as mountains.” When the space probe Cassini finally got an up-close look at Saturn’s rings, it found “spokes” longer than the diameter of Earth and potentially made of ice — as well as water jets from the Saturnian moon Enceladus, which would provide much of the material in the planet’s E ring.
In the 1800s, as American settlers pushed westward into the Great Plains, stories began to emerge of formerly stable people becoming depressed, anxious, irritable, and even violent with “prairie madness.” And there is some evidence in historical accounts or surveys, which suggested a rise in cases of mental illness in the mid-1800’s to early 1900’s, particularly in the Great Plains. “An alarming amount of insanity occurs in the new prairie States [sic] among farmers and their wives,” wrote journalist Eugene Smalley in The Atlantic in 1893.
Both fictional and historical accounts of this time and place often blame “prairie madness” on the isolation and bleak conditions the settlers encountered. But many also mention something unexpected: the sounds of the prairie. Smalley wrote that during winter “the silence of death rests on the vast landscape.” And a character in Manitoba settler Nellie McClung’s story “The Neutral Fuse” writes a poem about the droning soundtrack of the plains, “I hate the wind with its evil spite, and it hates me with a hate as deep, and hisses and jeers when I try to sleep.”
These details caught the imagination of Alex D. Velez, a paleoanthropologist with State University of New York at Oswego who studies the evolution of human hearing, and made him wonder: is there any truth to this idea? Now, a new paper by Velez published in Historical Archaeology suggests this eerie soundscape—the silence and the howling wind—could indeed have contributed to mental illness in settlers. It’s not much of a leap: research with modern subjects has shown that what we hear can exacerbate not only sleep, stress, and mental health problems, but even cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes.
To determine how the sounds of the prairie differ in frequency from those of more urban environments, the study’s author, Alex D. Velez, compared recordings from places like Mexico City to recordings from the Great Plains. ProtoplasmaKid, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Velez wanted to understand if there was anything special about the soundscape of the prairie. He couldn’t go back in time to record, unfortunately, but Velez could gather more recent recordings from the plains in Nebraska and Kansas, which captured noises like the wind and rain, and from urban areas like Barcelona or Mexico City, which featured weather sounds as well as the din of traffic and pedestrians. He ran the recordings into a program that created visual representations of the spectrum of sound frequencies in the recordings and compared the results to each other and a map of sound frequencies that the human ear can pick up and hear.
Velez found that, while all the landscapes contained plenty of sounds humans would naturally be able to hear, the sounds of the city were more diverse, spreading more across the range of human hearing and forming something like white noise. But out on the prairie, there was little to none of that background din. And what sounds there were coincided with a particularly sensitive part of the human hearing range the brain notices more readily.
“The way I can describe it is: it’s very quiet until, suddenly, the noise that you do hear, you can’t hear anything but that,” says Velez.
So one could imagine how a newly arrived settler, used to the sounds of a relatively more urban, small-town, or forested environment, might come to find every chicken cluck that breaks the prairie silence—every frog croak or drip of rainwater—to be as dreadfully distinct (and aggravating) as a clicking pen in a quiet library.
For Adrian KC Lee, an auditory brain scientist at the University of Washington who was not involved in the study, the description of the Great Plains soundscape is reminiscent of being in an anechoic chamber—a room designed to stop echoes. Mihaelawojcik, CC BY 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons
The description of the Great Plains soundscape reminds Adrian KC Lee, an auditory brain scientist at the University of Washington who was not involved in Velez’s study, of sensory deprivation or being in an anechoic chamber—a room designed to stop echoes. In those cases, even the smallest sound, like the rustle of clothing or even your own heartbeat, can become impossible to ignore. As Lee pointed out, the human brain will naturally adapt to its environment, essentially turning up or down the volume to better distinguish what’s going on.
“Being adaptive is really for survival,” says Lee. “Now, if you adapt to a very low-sound environment and all of the sudden there’s a loud sound coming on, of course it’s going to give you trouble.”
Jacob Friefeld, is a research historian at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum who’s written extensively on the Homestead Act, one of the great drivers of westward expansion. He says he has not come across the phenomenon of prairie madness in his own work, but notes that the modern recordings Velez used may be missing some sounds early settlers would have heard, like the howl of wolves or the rumbling of millions-strong herds of American bison. And if settlers were living in sod houses or dugouts, they may have also been treated to the regular sound of insects or other creatures living in the dirt walls.
In addition to the lack of 19th century recordings, studying the symptoms of mental illness in a population of people who lived over 100 years ago is also very difficult. As Velez notes, the specific language or names used for conditions can change, records may be inconsistent, and diagnoses can be affected by societal attitudes—ideas around gender roles or prejudice against certain groups, for example.
Jacob Friefeld, a historian unaffiliated with the study, wonders if it is possible to accurately account for all the sounds settlers would have heard, including the insects and other creatures that lived in the walls of their dirt homes. Nebraska State Historical Society, nbhips 10216
Similarly, it may be impossible to untangle how much any one episode of irritability or depression came from the soundscape and how much it was a reaction to the stress or the isolation, the latter of which may have been particularly jarring. Whereas further East people may have lived in more small, close-knit communities, once out in the plains neighbors were often miles away. The transition may have been hardest for women, who were often tasked with staying home, limiting their already meager prospects for stimulation and socialization. Add on to that the fear of freezing, or crop failure, or monetary ruin inherent in homesteading and it’s little wonder some folks were stressed.
In the end, Velez’s work can’t prove how much prairie madness really affected settlers, but it did finally give him an answer to the question that captured his imagination: there may indeed be something in the soundscape of the plains – in Smalley’s silence and McClung’s hateful wind – that may have affected the settler’s minds.
It’s a reminder of how sounds have the power to shape our lives, even today and even outside the Great Plains. Lee said many scientists wonder if the changing soundscapes of the pandemic—due lockdowns and the transition to working from home—had effects on physical and mental well-being.
Pushing even further, he notes that sounds don’t travel as well in the thin atmosphere of Mars as they do on Earth. If the soundscape of the prairie leads to anxiety and depression for some, does that mean that one day, when humans get to Mars, settlers will once again curse the silence?
Inside the target chamber at the US National Ignition Facility, scientists focus 192 laser beams on a gold capsule containing deuterium and tritium, in an attempt to achieve nuclear fusion.Credit: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory/Science Photo Library
Nearly one year ago, scientists at the world’s largest laser-fusion facility announced a landmark achievement: it had shattered all records and produced, if only for a fraction of a second, an energetic fusion reaction of the kind that powers stars and thermonuclear weapons. Yet efforts to replicate that experiment have fallen short. Nature has learnt that, earlier this year, researchers at the California facility changed direction, moving to rethink their experimental design.
The turn of events has renewed debate about the future of the National Ignition Facility (NIF), a US$3.5-billion device that is housed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and overseen by the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), a branch of the US Department of Energy that manages nuclear weapons. The NIF’s primary mission is to create high-yield fusion reactions, and to inform maintenance of the US weapons stockpile.
By some measures, the record-setting laser shot on 8 August 2021 proved that the facility, which has cost much more and yielded much less than originally promised, has at last accomplished its main mission. Repeat attempts, however, yielded at best 50% of the energy produced late last year. Researchers didn’t expect smooth sailing while trying to replicate the experiment, because the massive device is now operating at the cusp of fusion ‘ignition’, where tiny, inadvertent differences from one experiment to another can have huge impacts on output. Nonetheless, for many, the failure to reproduce last August’s experiment underscores researchers’ inability to understand, engineer and predict experiments at these energies with precision.
Source: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Omar Hurricane, chief scientist for Livermore’s inertial-confinement fusion programme, has advocated pressing forwards with the existing experimental design to probe this energy regime, rather than stepping back to regroup. “The fact that we have done it is kind of existence proof that we can do it,” he says. “Our issue is doing it repeatedly and reliably.” However, he says, the programme leadership made the decision to halt replication experiments and to focus on next steps that could push the NIF well beyond the fusion threshold and into an entirely new — and more predictable — regime, where yields are significantly larger than in the August experiment.
Some researchers in the community had long questioned the NIF’s usefulness, and for them, the entire episode highlights the facility’s remarkable achievements — as well as its fundamental limitations. “I think they should call it a success and stop,” says Stephen Bodner, a physicist who formerly headed the laser-fusion programme at the US Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC. Bodner says the NIF is a technological dead end, and that it is time to prepare for a next-generation laser that could open the door to fusion energy.
Chasing ignition
The NIF opened in 2009 with the promise of achieving fusion ignition, which the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) has defined as an experiment that generates more energy than it consumes. After missing the initial deadline of achieving ignition in 2012, Livermore scientists began a decade-long effort to fine-tune the system (see ‘The road to ignition’). Finally, last August, after a series of adjustments to aspects of the facility including the laser and the ignition target — a gold capsule containing a frozen pellet of the hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium — they had their breakthrough moment.
In less than 4 billionths of a second, 192 laser beams delivered 1.9 megajoules of energy to the target. As the capsule collapsed, hydrogen isotopes at the core of the pellet began to fuse into helium, releasing a torrent of energy and creating a cascade of reactions that ultimately released more than 1.3 megajoules of energy — around 8 times the previous record and a 1,000-fold improvement on the earliest experiments.
Although it didn’t meet the NAS definition of ignition, the shot did result in a high-yield fusion reaction that safely qualified as ignition according to the criteria used by scientists at the NIF. Hurricane calls it a “Wright brothers moment”, and even the NIF’s harshest critics, Bodner included, tipped their hats.
In September, leaders of the inertial-confinement fusion programme crafted a plan for three experiments to determine whether the August result could be repeated. The experiments began in October and yielded only 400–700 kilojoules of energy. Although those results still represent a step-change in the NIF’s operation, they did not come close to the August breakthrough — nor did they surpass what the NIF scientists describe as the ignition threshold.
Hurricane says the team’s analysis of those experiments indicates that inconsistencies in the fabrication of the target and inevitable shifts in the laser’s performance owing to its age produced minute, but important, differences in the shape of the implosion. “We understand why the repeat shots performed the way they did,” he says, “but we’re still trying to pin down what exactly about these engineering aspects we need to control better.”
In light of those results, Hurricane advocated for additional repeat experiments that could be used to better understand the shot-to-shot variability. Programme leaders opted to move on, however, and Hurricane says the team is now looking at ways to boost the laser energy by upwards of 10%, as well as to modify targets that could make more efficient use of that energy.
Mark Herrmann, Livermore’s deputy director for fundamental weapons physics, says the lab got a lot of feedback from the more than 100 scientists involved in the programme. But he emphasizes that the long-term goal is to achieve yields that are two orders of magnitude higher than those managed even last August. “As long as we’re doing good, careful, systematic scientific study, that’s what’s most important from my perspective,” he adds.
A critical report
To some extent, the lab’s failure to replicate the August experiment was to be expected, because the laser is now operating at the ‘ignition cliff’, says Riccardo Betti, who heads the laser-fusion centre at the University of Rochester in New York and provides independent assessments of experiments at the NIF. “If you are on one side of the cliff, you can get a lot of fusion output, and if you are on the other side of the cliff, you get very little,” he says. The lab doesn’t yet have the experimental accuracy to predict on which side a given experiment will land, he says.
Questions about fundamental science and predictive capacity were at the centre of a classified review of the NIF’s scientific contributions to the US nuclear-weapons programme provided to the NNSA last year by JASON, an independent scientific panel that advises the US government. In an unclassified executive summary of the report, obtained by Nature under the US Freedom of Information Act, the panel acknowledged the NIF’s abilities, but stated that the facility is unlikely to achieve “predictable, reproducible ignition” in the next several years.
The report was completed and released to NNSA four months before the August shot, and Hurricane and others have argued that it was ill-timed and too pessimistic.
The JASON panellists advocated a fundamental rethinking of the programme in their report, and that discussion has already begun in the broader laser-fusion community. Scientists at the NIF and elsewhere are examining ways to reconfigure the current laser, whereas others are pushing for entirely new designs that could provide more practical avenues towards fusion energy.
For his part, Hurricane is in no hurry. He maintains that the device is now operating in a crucial fusion regime that will be useful for understanding and predicting the reliability of nuclear weapons.
“Once we get more energy and more predictability, you have kind of skipped over the interesting physics,” Hurricane says. “If understanding and being better scientists and stewards [of the nuclear stockpile] is your objective, this is the regime to work in.”
A NASA safety advisory panel has warned that the agency may not be able to transition from the International Space Station to commercial space stations in time to avoid leaving a gap in America’s presence in low Earth orbit, or LEO.
NASA laid out its plans earlier this year to operate the International Space Station (ISS) through the end of this decade, at which point it will deorbit it in a fiery death. NASA is currently supporting the development of commercial stations to maintain U.S. access to orbit, but there are concerns that these will not be ready by the time the ISS is retired.
According to a SpaceNews report (opens in new tab) citing a July 21 meeting of NASA’s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP), the panel is now warning of a “precarious trajectory” in which there might not be enough time or resources to transition before the ISS is retired. “This is an area of concern for us,” said Patricia Sanders, chair of the ASAP panel who spent decades at the Department of Defense.
Related: International Space Station photo tour
One of the issues threatening to create a gap between the ISS and commercial stations that might follow is the funding that such a transition would require. It also is unclear how NASA would be able to guarantee that there would be enough initial business to fully fund the stations’ activities through commercial investment alone.
If interest is low, NASA may have to find funding to serve as a “bridge” while the commercial stations begin their operations. “NASA really needs to acknowledge and plan for the underlying reality that maintaining a continuous human presence on orbit now and into the future is going to require significant government investment,” said ASAP panel member Amy Donahue, who is also provost at the Coast Guard Academy in Connecticut, Spacenews reports.
In December 2021, NASA awarded three contracts totaling $415.6 million to Blue Origin, Nanoracks LLC and Northrop Grumman as part of a program aimed at funding and developing commercial space stations. The agency hopes to reach the preliminary design review stages on each of the proposed space station concepts, including discussing their potential customers and destinations, by the end of fiscal year 2025, in September 2025.
NASA has already partnered with Axiom Space to launch commercial modules to the ISS, the first of which will launch in 2024 if the proposed schedule holds, and eventually detach to fly solo.
These are not the first concerns NASA advisors have voiced over the risk of a gap between the ISS and whatever might come next. And NASA has painful experience with such gaps in its operations before, something the agency wishes to avoid repeating.
“We did experience a gap in our transportation system when we retired the shuttle that we do not wish to repeat with our U.S. human presence in low Earth orbit,” said Robyn Gatens, NASA’s director for the ISS, during a hearing in September 2021.
“This is why NASA is committed to an orderly transition from ISS operations in LEO to U.S. commercially provided destinations in low Earth orbit,” she added. “We cannot have a gap in American human spaceflight in low Earth orbit.”.
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This afternoon, SpaceX successfully launched its 32nd Falcon 9 mission of 2022, officially breaking the company’s own record for orbital launches conducted in a single year. And since it’s only July, there’s still plenty of year left to push that record even higher.
SpaceX has been steadily increasing its launch cadence each year — aside from a dip in 2019. For 2021, the company pulled off 31 launches, the most it had ever done, which also made SpaceX the most prolific American launch provider by far.
At the beginning of 2022, SpaceX set an incredibly ambitious goal of launching 52 missions over the course of the year. That number was revealed by a NASA safety advisory panel in January, with a word of caution that SpaceX should still strive to maintain safety amid the increased pace. “NASA and SpaceX will have to be watchful during 2022 that they’re not victims of their success,” Sandy Magnus, a former NASA astronaut and member of NASA’s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, said during the January meeting.
But so far, SpaceX has been sticking to its schedule, with nothing but seamless missions this year. Ironically, SpaceX had originally hoped to launch today’s missions on Thursday but stopped the countdown short after an abort was triggered less than a minute before takeoff. It was a rare abort for SpaceX, which hasn’t had to cut a countdown short in many months due to a technical issue. The company was able to get off the ground today, however, after an uninterrupted countdown.
One key factor that allows for such a busy launch schedule is that, in a majority of SpaceX’s launches this year, SpaceX is serving as its own customer. The company is using these launches to flesh out its massive internet-from-space Starlink constellation, lofting batches of up to 53 satellites at a time (though the numbers vary from launch to launch). Today’s flight out of Vandenberg Space Force Base in California put up an additional 46 Starlink satellites. The company currently has roughly 2,600 Starlink satellites in orbit.
Even without the Starlink launch, SpaceX has had plenty of other missions to keep the company busy. Thanks to its partnership with NASA, SpaceX periodically sends Dragon capsules — carrying cargo and people — to the International Space Station. The company also has its Transporter missions, in which various small satellites are packed together and deployed during a single mission. All of that, on top of SpaceX’s commercial customers and launches for the Defense Department, create a busy manifest.
Nearly all of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rockets that have launched this year have been vehicles that have previously flown before, as the company continues to master landing and reusing its rockets. SpaceX is also exclusively flying on the Block 5 version of its Falcon 9, which is optimized for reuse. Today’s rocket did successfully land on one of SpaceX’s drone ships after takeoff, marking the 125th overall landing of the company’s Falcon 9 rocket.
Now that SpaceX has beat its record, the company is still moving full steam ahead. There’s already another mission set for Sunday, July 24th, out of Florida, to launch another batch of Starlink satellites.
Japanese, Italian, Ukrainian, Swahili, Tagalog and dozens of other spoken languages cause the same “universal language network” to light up in the brains of native speakers. This hub of language processing has been studied extensively in English speakers, but now neuroscientists have confirmed that the exact same network is activated in speakers of 45 different languages representing 12 distinct language families.
“This study is very foundational, extending some findings from English to a broad range of languages,” senior author Evelina Fedorenko, an associate professor of neuroscience at MIT and a member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research, said in a statement (opens in new tab).
“The hope is that now that we see that the basic properties seem to be general across languages, we can ask about potential differences between languages and language families in how they are implemented in the brain, and we can study phenomena that don’t really exist in English,” Fedorenko said. For example, speakers of “tonal” languages, such as Mandarin, convey different word meanings through shifts in their tone, or pitch; English isn’t a tonal language, so it might be processed slightly differently in the brain.
The study, published Monday (July 18) in the journal Nature Neuroscience (opens in new tab), included two native speakers of each language, who underwent brain scans as they performed various cognitive tasks. Specifically, the team scanned the participants’ brains using a technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which tracks the flow of oxygenated blood through the brain. Active brain cells require more energy and oxygen, so fMRI provides an indirect measure of brain cell activity.
Related: ‘Secret code’ behind key type of memory revealed in new brain scans
During the fMRI scans, the participants listened to passages from Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” (better known as “Alice in Wonderland”) read in their native languages. In theory, all of the listeners should use the same language network to process stories read in their native tongues, the researchers hypothesized.
The participants also listened to several recordings that, theoretically, wouldn’t activate this language network. For example, they listened to recordings in which the native speaker’s words were distorted beyond recognition and to passages read by a speaker of an unfamiliar language. In addition to completing these language-related tests, the participants were asked to do math problems and perform memory tasks; like the incoherent recordings, neither the math nor the memory tests should activate the language network, the team theorized.
“Language areas [of the brain] are selective,” first author Saima Malik-Moraleda, a doctoral student in the Speech and Hearing Bioscience and Technology program at Harvard University, said in the statement. “They shouldn’t be responding during other tasks, such as a spatial working memory task, and that was what we found across the speakers of 45 languages that we tested.”
In native English speakers, the brain areas that activate during language processing appear mostly in the left hemisphere of the brain, primarily in the frontal lobe, located behind the forehead, and in the temporal lobe, located behind the ear. By constructing “maps” of brain activity from all their subjects, the researchers revealed that these same brain areas activated regardless of the language being heard.
The team did observe slight differences in brain activity among the individual speakers of different languages. However, the same, small degree of variation has also been seen among native English speakers.
These results aren’t necessarily surprising, but they lay a critical foundation for future studies, the team wrote in their report. “Although we expected this to be the case, this demonstration is an essential foundation for future systematic, in-depth and finer-grained cross-linguistic comparisons,” they wrote.
Like Pink Floyd, a new NASA-funded commercial mission will see us on the ‘dark’ side of the moon.
The agency announced (opens in new tab) Thursday (July 21) it will task a team led by Draper to carry a suite of science and technology payloads to Schrödinger Crater (opens in new tab), an impact basin on the moon’s far side. Touchdown of the Draper SERIES-2 lander is scheduled for 2025.
The $73 million Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) contract, if successfully executed, will represent the first time NASA science has touched down on the far side of the moon. (This is the eighth CLPS contract announced so far and also, the first CLPS mission to target the far side.)
Related: Every mission to the moon
Only one country has successfully completed a mission on the moon’s far side, and relatively recently: China’s Chang’e 4 lander carrying the Yutu 2 rover arrived in Von Kármán Crater on Jan. 2, 2019. Complexities in landing on the far side of the moon arise because this side is out of direct radio communication with Earth, which means that all information must be beamed to our planet through satellite relay.
NASA said the uncrewed far-side mission will gather science in a region very different from the crewed Artemis lunar missions, allowing for valuable context. (Astronauts will instead work in the south pole region on the near side of the moon.)
“Understanding geophysical activity on the far side of the moon will give us a deeper understanding of our solar system, and provide information to help us prepare for Artemis astronaut missions to the lunar surface,” Joel Kearns, deputy associate administrator for exploration in NASA’s science mission directorate in Washington, said in the agency statement.
CLPS is an agency program that aims to study the moon’s history and environment using privately developed landers and rovers that carry experiments and equipment to and on the lunar surface.
Draper’s lander design is based on work by a U.S. subsidiary of Tokyo-based ispace, which unveiled the Series 2 robotic moon lander in 2021. To stay in touch with Earth, Draper’s statement (opens in new tab) said the company plans to contract Blue Canyon Technologies for two satellites that will be deployed just before landing.
Advanced Space, the operator of the lunar CAPSTONE mission currently making its way to the moon, will “support the team in the mission planning and operations of the satellites,” the statement added.
The lunar science payloads Draper will ferry, selected in 2019 and 2021, include three packages to probe Schrödinger crater.
One package is the Farside Seismic Suite (FSS), which will bear two seismometers to measure moonquakes — allowing scientists to learn how often the far side is hit by small meteoroids.
The Lunar Interior Temperature and Materials Suite (LITMS) will examine how the moon’s interior may conduct heat and electricity, while the Lunar Surface ElectroMagnetics Experiment (LuSEE) will look for the electrostatic properties behind strange “dancing dust” on the moon’s surface. LuSEE will also examine how the solar wind, or constant stream of charged particles from the sun, interface with the lunar surface and magnetic fields, among other investigations.
Artemis seeks to land humans on the moon no earlier than 2025 to perform crewed science. The program’s first uncrewed test mission, Artemis 1, may launch as soon as Aug. 29 as the team continues working through tasks from a “wet dress rehearsal” launch test earlier in the year.
Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter @howellspace (opens in new tab). Follow uson Twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in new tab)and on Facebook (opens in new tab).
It is a rare delight for a sequel to be as good as the original, but on July 12, the James Webb Space Telescope’s second set of images certainly lived up to expectations set by its extraordinary deep field reveal the prior evening. As a matter of fact, it surpassed it by leaps and bounds.
The unveiling of that first image by President Joe Biden wasn’t exactly impressive, but the image itself? Magnificent. Known as “Webb’s First Deep Field,” it gives astronomers a look at galaxy cluster SMACS 0723.
JWST’s First Deep Field was revealed on July 11.
NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI
What you’re looking at is a minuscule patch of the Southern Hemisphere sky — equivalent to a grain of sand held up to the heavens — yet replete with thousands of galaxies, from spirals and ellipticals to simple pinpricks of light only a few pixels wide. And thanks to a phenomenon known as gravitational lensing, it provides us with the deepest, and oldest, view of the cosmos yet — as well as concrete proof of Albert Einstein’s general relativity. That’s a lot to live up to, right?
Well, even though the images released Tuesday don’t reach quite so far back in space and time, they are undoubtedly profound, equal to the First Deep Field in beauty and delicately woven with exquisite cosmic detail.
Three major images make up the JWST’s first full-color set.
Two focus on nebulas, huge clouds of dust and gas within which stars are sometimes born, and the other analyzes a region known as Stephan’s Quintet, a frightening corner of the cosmos where five galaxies are locked in an ultimately fatal dance.
Then there’s the spectral data of WASP-96 b — a really hot, giant, gassy exoplanet — which reveals the composition of its atmosphere in unprecedented detail. This one isn’t an image like you’d expect, but arguably something even more valuable. It’s a spectral dataset that helps us understand not what a spaceborne object aesthetically looks like but rather what it’d be like to stand on it. And, as they say, the book is often better than the film.
Let’s break down each one and explain why the JWST’s second batch of cosmic goodies is just as groundbreaking as its first peek.
The nebulas
Nebulas are immense clouds of dust and gas that exist at either end of a star’s life. Some are home to fledgling baby stars, while others are created by their explosive deaths. But in both cases, nebulas are responsible for some of the most stunning visuals we have of our cosmos — and through the JWST’s lens, the most powerful infrared imager we’ve ever worked with, their marvel is only enhanced.
You can read exactly how the JWST’s infrared imaging works here, but the basic principle is it can access light — emanating across the cosmos from stars, galaxies and other luminescent objects — that’s stuck in a region of the electromagnetic spectrum invisible to our eyes. And more specifically to nebulas, that “hidden” light, so to speak, happens to be the main kind shooting through their dust clouds from whatever lies inside.
That means our pupils, and even massive telescopes like the Hubble Space Telescope, can’t penetrate nebular curtains of gaseousness. They’re veils that typically obscure our view of the flashy features within — namely, stars just bursting to life or those in the process of dying. The JWST’s instruments, however, easily get past them via infrared imaging to check out what’s going on backstage. Plus, NASA’s next-gen scope offers a much (much) better resolution than a telescope such as Hubble — in effect, catching the internal nebula show as well as external structure with a sophisticated clarity novel to human eyes.
Now that we know what we’re about to look at, let’s get into it.
For its first nebula science discoveries, the JWST focused on two separate stardust clouds: The Carina Nebula, located about 8,500 light-years from Earth, and the Eight Burst Nebula, which is much closer at around 2,000 light-years away.
Starting off strong, behold: the Eight Burst Nebula. It’s also known as the Southern Ring Nebula.
On the left is a version of the Southern Ring Nebula taken by JWST’s Nircam and on the right, by MIRI.
NASA
“This is a planetary nebula,” NASA astronomer Karl Gordon said. “It’s caused by a dying star that spilled a large fraction of its mass over in successive waves.” These shockwaves can be clearly seen in the image, they’re the pond-like ripples floating around the center that resembles a biological cell.
On the left, you’ll see them a bit more clearly. That’s because this side is a version of the nebular image taken by the JWST’s Near-Infrared Camera, or Nircam. It’s often considered the telescope’s holy grail imager because it leads the charge in finding pieces of the invisible universe. In this case, Nircam helps illustrate the layers of light that connect to make up this complex system. Like a mixed-media painting, it offers a good deal of texture to showcase different facets of the Southern Ring, including those shockwaves.
And on the right is a version of the image drawn by the JWST’s Mid-Infrared Instrument, or MIRI. Like it’s name, MIRI’s specialty is catching light from the mid-infrared region of the electromagnetic spectrum. Thanks to MIRI, we also get an exciting Easter egg in this photo.
Right in the center of the cosmic eye, there are clearly two stars present. Next to the brighter one, we can see the dying one that caused the nebula — the dot that looks redder on the left. This star duo had been theorized to exist in the past… dancing around one another in an intergalactic waltz. But we hadn’t ever been seen both together before. This is the first time.
MIRI captured both stars present in this nebula for the first time ever.
Screenshot by Monisha Ravisetti/NASA
According to NASA, the brighter star will probably eject its own planetary nebula in the future — but until then, will continue to influence the nebula’s appearance, thus giving us the vivid spectacle we see today. “As the pair continues to orbit one another,” NASA says, “they ‘stir the pot’ of gas and dust, causing asymmetrical patterns.”
Also, on that right-hand image, if you glance toward the top left, you’ll see a mysterious blueish line that appears to have been flung out from the nebula. This little line has its own grand story.
See that blueish streak?
Screenshot by Monisha Ravisetti/NASA
“I made a bet that said ‘It’s part of the nebula,'” Gordon said. “I lost the bet, because then we looked more carefully at both Nircam and MIRI images, and it’s very clearly an edge-on galaxy.” Yep, there’s an entire faraway galaxy lurking in this picture. The JWST has some tricks up its sleeve.
Next up is the Carina Nebula — once again, courtesy of the JWST’s Nircam and MIRI.
NASA
“Honestly, it took me a while to figure out what to call out in this image,” NASA astrophysicist Amber Straughn said. “There’s just so much going on here. It’s so beautiful.”
This astonishing image is technically the edge of a giant cavity within a nebula called NGC 3324, known as the Carina Nebula. It boasts an incredible wealth of emerging stellar nurseries, cosmic cliffs and individual stars that call this nebula their abode. Until now, all those cosmic sparkles and details were completely hidden from our view due to the thick dust and gas surrounding them — but, remember, the JWST infrared cameras can literally pierce that veil of intergalactic secrets and access valuable sights within.
Decoding this image could very well shed light on how stars are formed, what kind of star-making material goes into that formation and even dissect the mechanism of violent, starry winds that affect surrounding space.
And if you’re curious about all those hills, valleys and spikes? So are NASA scientists. They’re kind of puzzles yet to be solved. Or as Straughn puts it, “we see examples of structures that, honestly, we don’t even know what they are.”
Something we do know, though, is the JWST also just gave us a groundbreaking view of an alien world. An exoplanet.
WASP-96 b
The hot, gaseous, giant exoplanet WASP-96 b is a scientific curiosity. Its parent star, WASP-96, lies about 1,120 light-years from Earth, making it the closest object in Webb’s first batch of images. Here it is.
NASA
OK, though this image isn’t what you’d normally think of when hoping for a planetary portrait, it’s incredibly important for the field of astronomy. What you’re looking at is direct spectral data of an exoplanet in a solar system beyond our own.
While we don’t get a view of the planet hanging out in space by its star, this “spectra” clues us in to the ingredients that make up this alien world. What astronomers detected is striking.
The JWST’s spectral analysis of WASP-96 b indicates a telltale signature of water vapor in the planet’s atmosphere as well as evidence of clouds and hazes, which are tiny solid particles that sort of act like pseudo-clouds. And yes, I said water. But before you get too excited about packing up to move to WASP-96 b, a world decked-out in H2O, note this exoplanet is closer to its star than Mercury is to the sun. That means its deathly hot and all its water is not liquid. Oh, and it orbits that star every three and a half Earth days.
This is probably (definitely) not habitable for us Earthlings.
A hypothetical visualization of WASP-96b from NASA’s exoplanet catalog.
Screenshot by Monisha Ravisetti/NASA
Regardless, it’s an intriguing finding because while astronomers have, so far, located over 5,000 worlds outside of our solar system — and studied many of them with Hubble and other space telescopes — WASP-96 b always stood out for its potentially unusual atmosphere. But until now, we didn’t have a good look at that planetary shield, making WASP-96 b a hot topic for debate.
“Most close-in exoplanets that have been studied with Hubble have flat, white spectra, which is taken as evidence that they are very cloudy,” Benjamin Pope, a planetary scientist at the University of Queensland in Australia, said. But such clouds are a nuisance because they prevent astronomers from getting a good feel for the composition of an exoplanet’s atmosphere. That’s not a problem with WASP-96b, so previous data suggested it was basically free of clouds. “It has the clearest skies of any exoplanet we know of,” said Coel Hellier, an astrophysicist at Keele University who was a member of the team that first discovered the planet, prior to the release of the spectra.
Webb’s shown that, with better data, we’ve been able to resolve some of the questions around WASP-96b. Like… maybe it does have clouds!
But in the grand scheme of things, this spectral data can be thought of as proof of concept that the JWST works as we hoped. Which means it will be able to assess the composition of many planets’ atmospheres in the future. “[WASP-96 b] is nothing like our solar system planets,” Knicole Colon, an astrophysicist at NASA said. “But that’s okay because what we’re seeing is, again, the first exoplanet data from Webb. This is just the beginning.”
While astronomers have long used Hubble, and other telescopes, to gather data about exoplanets and their atmospheres, there’s just nothing like the James Webb Space Telescope. “JWST is just going to be so much better for this,” notes Pope.
Only time will tell what comes next.
Moving on — what can Webb teach us about galaxies? As it turns out, quite a bit. Say hello to your new galactic muses.
Stephan’s Quintet
Last but absolutely not least for NASA’s Tuesday JWST image release is the breathtaking glimpse we got of Stephan’s Quintet.
This dramatic grouping of five individual galaxies was discovered in the 19th century, long before the first space telescopes — well, even the first satellites — made it to orbit. It’s a bright region of space, made up of five galaxies and home to a huge shockwave, courtesy of two galaxies colliding at extreme speed.
Of today’s image releases, the Quintet is the farthest from Earth, with the galaxies located between 39 and 340 million light-years from our planet (one of the galaxies, NGC 7320, is much closer than the other four). We’ve been observing it from the ground for almost 150 years, and Hubble has also captured striking images of the grouping. But we’ve never seen it like this.
NASA
In this gigantic scene, the JWST revealed the Quintet with so much detail that we can literally see individual stars speckling the galaxies. The one on the left, in particular, is a starry spectacle fit for a fairytale universe.
But perhaps the most incredible aspect of this photo has to do with the top-most galaxy that appears violent, yet awfully serene. This duality is because it turns out to hold one of the most terrifying, yet majestic, features of the universe. A black hole.
The JWST confirmed that this galaxy has an active galactic nucleus — that is, a supermassive black hole 24 million times the mass of our sun, sitting at its center. It’s a void that’s simultaneously pulling in material and spitting out light energy equivalent to the burn of 40 billion suns.
A close-up of a star-spotted galaxy, courtesy of NASA’s JWST.
Screenshot by Monisha Ravisetti/NASA
The JWST’s Nirspec and MIRI teamed up to dissect the features of this abyss, offering proof of matter swirling around it.
The composition of gas around the black hole in Stephan’s Quintet.
Screenshot by Monisha Ravisetti/NASA
And if you zoom out and peruse the background of the JWST’s depiction of Stephan’s Quintet, you’ll catch sight of throngs of other galaxies dotting the dark canvas of space. Believe it or not, that’s kind of a happy accident — one we might want to get used to.
The JWST is so powerful and precise it’s nearly impossible for it to take an image of what we’d consider “blank space.” It can’t help but serendipitously capture cosmic treasures. Every time.
It’s just… too good.
It’s also extremely efficient, which is why we can expect an unending influx of images and spectral data as incredible as the JWST’s first full set, on a regular basis. “This is just the beginning,” was a sentiment repeatedly brought up during NASA’s Tuesday broadcast, and for good reason. This is the first page of astronomy’s next grand chapter.
“Hubble’s extreme deep field was two weeks of continuous work,” Bill Nelson, NASA administrator said of probably the most famous image taken by the JWST’s predecessor. “Imaging with Webb, we took that image before breakfast. The amazing thing about Webb is the speed at which we can churn out discoveries”
What this means is that even though Tuesday’s release of JWST images was encapsulated in pomp and announced to the sound of champagne glasses clinking, everything we’ve seen took something like a week to put together. “We’re going to be doing discoveries like this every week,” Nelson said.
Hubble and James Webb Space Telescope Images Compared: See the Difference
Update: This article was updated to reflect the successful launch.
SpaceX made it through its second attempt to launch 46 satellites on Friday (July 22), breaking a record along the way.
The two-stage Falcon 9 rocket, which induced a scrub at T-46 seconds on Thursday (July 21), lifted off successfully from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California Friday.
Liftoff took place at 1:40 p.m. EDT (1740 GMT or 10:40 a.m. local time at the launch site) amid severely foggy conditions on the west coast.
The launch allowed SpaceX to surpass its 31 record launches of 2021 with a 32nd record launch in 2022, and still counting.
Related: Falcon 9: SpaceX’s workhorse rocket
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in flight during a launch of Starlink satellites July 22, 2022. (Image credit: SpaceX)
Falcon 9’s first stage also completed its mission, landing atop the “Of Course I Still Love You” droneship in the Pacific Ocean as planned, about 8.5 minutes after launch.
Prior to this effort, SpaceX most recently launched a set of Starlinks from Vandenberg on July 11. On that occasion, another set of 46 Starlink satellites made it to space and the rocket landed successfully upon the droneship.
SpaceX has launched far more Starlink batches from the U.S. East coast, most recently from Cape Canaveral Space Force Base in Florida on Sunday (July 17).
SpaceX’s Falcon 9 first stage makes a safe touchdown atop the droneship Of Course I Still Love You on July 22, 2022. (Image credit: SpaceX)
Starlink has more than 2,800 individual Starlink satellites (opens in new tab) launched to orbit as the company seeks to build out its satellite-internet service. Group 3-2 was SpaceX’s fourth Starlink launch in July alone.
SpaceX aims to build out the constellation quickly. It has regulatory approval to send 12,000 Starlink craft to orbit. The company is also asking an international regulator to approve 30,000 satellites after that.
Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter @howellspace (opens in new tab). Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in new tab) and on Facebook (opens in new tab).
