- Star Trek Discovery showrunner says that they will be following up a 30-year-old mystery that was never addressed: “You don’t just let that go” Gamesradar
- Star Trek: Discovery Ends an Era With Season 5 IGN
- Recap/Review: ‘Star Trek: Discovery’ Returns With New Vitality And A Lore-Fueled Quest In “Red Directive” TrekMovie
- ‘Star Trek: Discovery’ Star Sonequa Martin-Green on the Show’s Unexpected Final Season, the ‘Pressure’ of Representation and Taking the ‘Trek’ Cruise Variety
- ‘Star Trek: Discovery’ season 5 episode 2 sows the seeds of seasonal plot threads (Under the Twin Moons recap) Space.com
Tag Archives: 30yearold
The prime minister of New Zealand flies in a 30-year-old plane and prepared a spare plane for his trip to China in case the old one breaks down – Yahoo News
- The prime minister of New Zealand flies in a 30-year-old plane and prepared a spare plane for his trip to China in case the old one breaks down Yahoo News
- New Zealand leader’s plane so prone to breakdowns he takes a backup on China trip The Associated Press
- China, New Zealand should be ‘partners, not adversaries’, Xi tells Hipkins South China Morning Post
- New Zealand foreign minister confirms ‘very robust’ meeting with Beijing Yahoo News
- New Zealand PM heads to China with two air force jets due to breakdown fears Times of India
- View Full Coverage on Google News
30-Year-Old With $110K Student Debt Wanted PSLF; Balance Keeps Growing
- Kjerstin Laine, 30, owes over $110,000 in student debt from undergraduate and graduate programs.
- Laine’s career in the nonprofit sector, in theory, offers a path to forgiveness.
- But interest means she’s barely paid it off, and Biden’s forgiveness is just a drop in the bucket.
Like millions of student-loan borrowers, Kjerstin Laine is in loan-relief limbo.
For Laine, a 30-year-old who has over $110,000 in student debt, the $20,000 in forgiveness she’s set to get from President Joe Biden’s plan is just a drop in the bucket. As a first-generation college student whose debt has shaped the trajectory of her career, she fears her balance will balloon even more after pandemic-era payment pauses end and interest starts accruing again.
“I never miss a payment, always on time, and yet my balances never go down,” Laine told Insider. “I don’t understand how people can’t see that there is something wrong with that picture.”
Despite working through college and taking measures to cut down on the cost, Laine completed her degree in 2014 with a grand total of $98,000 in debt from her undergraduate and graduate studies. In the eight years since, accruing interest has brought her balance to today’s amount, despite her consistent repayment.
Laine chose her job in communications for an education-advocacy nonprofit because it was a good fit for her skills — and because it could set her up for Public Service Loan Forgiveness, which forgives student debt for government and nonprofit workers after 10 years of qualifying payments.
But that program has historically been riddled with flaws, and she recently paused that strategy to take a marketing-agency job with a salary that brings her much closer to the $90,000 the federal government estimated she needed to make a year to afford to pay back her debt. She’s also paying off medical debt.
“I also had to leave the nonprofit sector to get anywhere near that, obviously,” she said. “So it’s like that Catch-22.”
Laine is one of many millions of US borrowers stuck in an untenable situation. She’s grateful for the relief she’s set to get — though the legality of Biden’s forgiveness is still under scrutiny — but she’s not sure she’ll be able to afford monthly payments when they restart in January.
Her situation points to the larger structural issues underpinning the student debt crisis, where first-generation and lower-income students take on huge debt burdens to get ahead and up their earnings but still find themselves buried under ever-growing balances. Many, like Laine, have shaped their lives around the hope of assistance — now that it’s here in some form, it may not be enough.
“The hardest thing is that I trusted in this system that I was told from a very young age was going to be my path to prosperity or a decent — not anything exorbitant — but a decent middle-class life where I could give back to the community that helped raise me and supported me through education programs, meal programs, things like that,” Laine said. “And it feels like that’s a big broken promise now.”
Interest on student loans can balloon, meaning balances don’t go down — and could go up
As a college student in California, Laine worked at several jobs in places like restaurants and grocery stores. She took classes at her local community college and at her university in the summer and winter to try and reduce her expenses. She graduated in 2012, a semester early to cut down on costs, racking up nearly $18,000 in debt total for her undergraduate degree in journalism.
She went on to a “dream school” for a master’s in journalism, still working part time and leaving with an additional $80,000 in debt in 2014. At the end of her time in school, she was hospitalized for dehydration after she said she ran herself ragged.
Despite consistent payments, the years since graduation have seen Laine’s debt grow. It comes down to the issue of interest capitalization, which is when accrued interest tacks on to a borrower’s principal balance and can lead to debt loads being much larger than what was initially borrowed.
Biden’s administration has taken steps to prevent interest capitalization. In July, it released a proposal to end the practice in every instance that isn’t required under the Higher Education Act, like forbearance periods, but those changes won’t be implemented until next year. And borrowers are still struggling to stay on top of their payments.
For borrowers like Laine, within a few years, interest could cancel out any of Biden’s relief she received.
“I was paying $300 until the pandemic hit. I was paying $300 a month, I think, for three to four years, and my balances never went down,” she said. “They always went up.”
Public servants like Laine can get their debts forgiven — but many can’t even get in touch with their loan servicer
While Laine is a big proponent of public-service loan forgiveness, she said it “has been plagued by its own issues.”
The company that manages the entire Public Service Loan Forgiveness portfolio — MOHELA — isn’t making matters any easier. After a number of loan companies ended their federal contracts last year, all borrowers enrolled in PSLF were transferred over to MOHELA, and the process hasn’t been seamless.
Insider previously spoke with two borrowers who wanted to get simple questions on their PSLF payments answered but ended up spending hours on the phone and never even got connected to a representative who could answer their questions.
“I’m really concerned about MOHELA as a servicer in total,” Laine said.
Paul Morigi/Getty Images for We, The 45 Million
While MOHELA never commented on the hours-long hold times, Scott Buchanan, the executive director of the Student Loan Servicing Alliance — a group that represents federal loan servicers — previously told Insider that the Education Department decided how many resources it gave loan companies, which affects how many customer-support staff they can hire.
But with the PSLF waiver expiring on Monday, which allows past payments, including those previously deemed ineligible, to count toward forgiveness progress, borrowers are in a time crunch to access the expanded relief. The department recently introduced permanent PSLF fixes for after the waiver’s expiration, but that doesn’t eliminate confusion some borrowers may be experiencing with their payment history.
“I’d love nothing more than to be able to dedicate my entire career to serving this sector,” Laine said. “All of my career choices are kind of centered around this debt, and that’s a really tough, not fun place to be in.”
Meet the 30-year-old on the verge of selling his company to Adobe for $20B
Almost overnight, this 30-year-old has become the tech world’s newest titan — and is poised to become one of the world’s youngest billionaires.
Dylan Field, the co-founder and CEO of San Francisco-based Figma, is on the cusp of an epic windfall after Adobe
ADBE,
-3.12%
announced plans to acquire his company for $20 billion this week. Field will stay on with Figma (which makes collaborative design tools), and he reportedly owns a a sizable stake in his company. Forbes estimated it at 10%, which means Field could be looking at a $2 billion payday from the deal. (Field declined to provide details of his ownership share with MarketWatch.)
Considered something of an upstart rival to Adobe, Figma describes itself as a “design platform for teams who build products together.” Its distinguishing factor is that it’s cloud-based, which has made its products especially valuable to designers and other workers separated physically from one another during the pandemic — or to those continuing to collaborate in today’s hybrid work environment.
And Adobe clearly saw value in Figma’s model. The acquisition is said to be the largest in Adobe’s history, although some Wall Street analysts have questioned whether it paid too much. (What’s more, Adobe’s shares tumbled toward their worst week since 2002 in light of the news.) But Adobe chief executive Shantanu Narayen advised investors that the deal will “significantly expand our reach and market opportunity.”
Either way, it’s a mighty leap for Field, who started Figma with Evan Wallace, a one-time Brown University classmate, in 2012. As a Wall Street Journal story noted, Field was living in a gritty San Francisco apartment just four years ago, and buying dollar cups of coffee on his way to work.
““I had a very small sip of Champagne last night.” ”
On Friday, MarketWatch caught up with Field, who grew up in northern California, to learn more about the Adobe deal — and how it will change his life. Here is some of what he had to say (some comments have been edited for brevity and clarity):
On how Field’s life may change with the payout from Adobe: While Field wouldn’t discuss the specifics of what he’ll earn from the deal, he doesn’t deny he stands to benefit significantly. He says he’s not thinking about much beyond his company and its next chapter. “Right now, I’m just all in on Figma and trying to think about how to make Figma successful, especially in this new context,” he says. In other words, he’s not yet planning on colonizing Mars with his riches a la Elon Musk.
But Field admits he’s still pretty buzzed about the events of the past week. “It’s very cool though, I’m not going to lie,” he says.
On how he celebrated the deal: Field is known to love wine, but he says he hasn’t been drinking much in the last few weeks because he’s been so focused on his work and the deal. Nevertheless, he says, “I had a very small sip of Champagne last night” with the Figma team.
On Figma’s value proposition: Put simply, it’s all about the ability to work together via the cloud. “We’re able to make it collaborative,” says Field of the tools that Figma offers. “So, if you’re a designer and I’m an engineer, no longer do we have to exchange files back and forth… We can make edits together. We can riff off each other’s ideas. That collaboration mattered to a lot of our customers.”
A newer product that Figma offers is FigJam, which Field describes as a “whiteboard solution.” The thought behind it, Field explains, is “that we can help people go from ideation and brainstorming into the design process and all the way to production.”
On why and how the Adobe deal came together: Field notes that when he co-founded the company there was a serious question as to whether the world had enough designers to make Figma a viable entity. “We weren’t sure there’s a big enough market here,” he says. But with the world going ever more digital — and, by extension, tapping increasingly into digital design tools — the design community has flourished, and the need for good design has become ubiquitous. “Every company has to care about design,” he says.
““Adobe’s mission is creativity for all, Figma’s mission has been to make design accessible for all. Those are two sides of the same coin in some ways.””
Thus, Adobe’s desire to tap into what Figma offers its customers as a leading-edge digital design platform, Field explains. And not just tap into it, but also help Figma expand its platform through adding different tools and capabilities — not only for the designer audience, but also for the broader creative audience. “That got us really excited, because it accelerates the impact that we already wanted to have, but also scales the impact,” Field says.
On Figma’s image as an “Adobe killer”: Yes, Figma has been described as that. And Field once even tweeted, “Our goal is to be Figma not Adobe.” Field says he still stands by the remark in that the two companies are distinct in certain respects, although he also notes they ultimately share similar goals: “Adobe’s mission is creativity for all; Figma’s mission has been to make design accessible for all. Those are two sides of the same coin in some ways.” He adds that both companies are aligned “around craftsmanship and community” and “there’s so much we can do together.”
On Field’s views about education: Much has been made of the fact that Field didn’t graduate from college — he attended Brown University, but left in his junior year to start his entrepreneurial career (he got accepted for a fellowship program run by financier Peter Thiel). Field says he is not anti-college per se. “I care a lot about learning, and (going to) a university can be a great way to do that in a structured fashion.” But he also says there are other ways to gain knowledge, pointing to online courses that are readily available. As a result, Field finds it hard to fathom that a lot of companies still require college degrees of applicants. “I think they’re missing out on a lot of great talent,” he says.
Biologists May Have Solved a 30-Year-Old Mystery on Why Touch Stresses Plants Out
Scientists have long known that touching plants can set off a stress reaction in them – but until now it hasn’t been exactly clear how that worked at a molecular level, something that a new study hopes to shed light on.
The researchers behind the study have identified certain genetic keys inside plants that lead to two separate signaling pathways, explaining why plants react so strongly to being touched.
Understanding more about how this process works at a fundamental level could help researchers in a variety of different areas, from improving plant health to getting higher harvest yields from the same crop.
“We exposed the plant thale cress to soft brushing, after which thousands of genes were activated and stress hormones were released,” says biologist Olivier Van Aken from Lund University in Sweden.
“We then used genetic screening to find the genes that were responsible for this process.”
The genetic screening searched for mutant forms of the plant, ones known to respond in various ways to repeated physical touches. Past research on their anatomy, especially their roots, indicated special protein channels responded to distortions in the cell membranes by facilitating chemical signals.
Less was known about how this process worked in other parts of the plant, such as their leaves. There were hints compounds like jasmonic acid played a critical role in transforming those early chemical signals into behavioral or growth changes, but there were also plenty of gaps that needed to be filled in.
The researchers spotted six individual genes that played a role in touch response, three for the signaling pathway related to jasmonic acid, and three on a separate signaling pathway.
That gives biologists a lot more to work with when it comes to understanding how and why this response happens and gets us further towards potentially manipulating it in the future.
“Our results solve a scientific mystery that has eluded the world’s molecular biologists for 30 years,” says biologist Essam Darwish from Lund University.
“We have identified a completely new signaling pathway that controls a plant’s response to physical contact and touch. Now the search for more paths continues.”
From knife cuts to animal bites to torrents of rain, every touch that a plant gets leads to a defensive molecular response – although these responses can be quite varied. They can lead to plants becoming more stress-resistant and flowering later in the year, for example.
The idea to try and harness this response isn’t new: scientists are already looking into how carefully managed “mechanical wounding” can make for sturdier crops and harvests that are more plentiful, because the plants build up more of a resistance to stress.
As climate change puts even more pressure on agriculture and wheat production, those processes are becoming even more important – and this latest piece of research gives scientists vital information about how this is all controlled.
“Given the extreme weather conditions and pathogen infections that climate change leads to, it is of utmost importance to find new ecologically responsible ways to improve crop productivity and resistance,” says Van Aken.
The research has been published in Science Advances.
Israel reports second case of monkeypox, in 30-year-old man
Israel has confirmed a second case of the rare monkeypox virus, in a 30-year-old man who recently returned from an overseas trip.
The man was hospitalized on Friday at the Sheba Medical Center in Tel Aviv, and was released after a short while. He was confirmed to be infected with the virus on Saturday.
The new infection came just over a week after Israel discovered its first case of the virus, in a man in his 30s who had returned from a trip to western Europe.
Last Sunday, the Health Ministry announced that two additional suspected cases were ruled out by doctors.
Symptoms of the disease include fever, muscle aches, swollen lymph nodes, chills, exhaustion and a chickenpox-like rash on the hands and face.
Since the United Kingdom reported its first case on May 7, the World Health Organization has reported 200 cases across several countries around the world. The virus is endemic across west and central Africa.
Sylvie Briand, Director of Pandemic and Epidemic Diseases Department at the World Health Organization, outside the UN agency’s headquarters on May 12, 2020 in Geneva (Fabrice COFFRINI / AFP)
Addressing the World Health Assembly on Friday, Sylvie Briand, director of the Pandemic and Epidemic Diseases Department at the WHO, said experts did not know if the outbreak had reached the “peak of the iceberg [or] if there are many more cases that are undetected in communities.”
While warning that more cases were likely on the way, she urged the public not to panic, explaining that the condition was “not a disease the general public should be worried about. It is not COVID or other diseases that spread fast.”
On Thursday, a top epidemiologist at the WHO said more cases are expected to be detected in countries where monkeypox does not usually circulate.
Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove said in a Q&A on social media: We expect more cases to be detected. We are asking countries to increase surveillance. This is a containable situation. It will be difficult, but it’s a containable situation in the non-endemic countries.”
She urged countries to “increase surveillance” but affirmed that the outbreak is a “containable situation.”
“It will be difficult, but it’s a containable situation in the non-endemic countries,” Van Kerkhove explained.
Israeli health officials have also played down the risk of the virus. In a phone briefing last Sunday, the Health Ministry’s head of public health services, Dr. Sharon Alroy-Preis, urged calm and said the recent outbreak of the virus was not a major risk to public health.
Monkeypox usually clears up after two to four weeks, according to the WHO.
A case of the virus was diagnosed in Israel in 2018, and no known community infections resulted from it.
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30-year-old female founder’s billion-dollar bet on CRISPR gene editing
Janice Chen (C) and her Mammoth Biosciences co-founders Trevor Martin (L) and Lucas Harrington (R). CRISPR gene editing pioneer and Nobel Prize winner Jennifer Doudna is also a co-founder.
Along Highway 101 north of the San Francisco Airport, a break-out biotech start-up named Mammoth Biosciences co-founded by Nathan Chen’s sister Janice in 2018 is fast emerging in the revolutionary field of CRISPR technology.
While not high profile like her gold medal-winning, ice skating brother — or Mammoth co-founder Jennifer Doudna, who won a Nobel Prize in chemistry for her work on CRISPR — Chen’s bioscience work in gene editing technology is in the forefront of medical discoveries from identifying bacterial and viral infections to early cancer detection.
CRISPR, or clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats, effectively cuts genomes and slices DNA to treat genetic diseases.
Outside of a close circle of colleagues, few knew Nathan was her sibling until she excitedly posted on social media about his gold medal victory as her family watched the televised games from her San Francisco home. Chen recalls being with her family in Seoul four years ago and watching him compete in the 2018 Winter Olympics. During breaks, she was busy contacting lawyers to start the process of setting up the company.
Since the pandemic in 2020, the biotech start-up has fast accelerated. The company nabbed approximately $100 million in contracts with Bayer and Vertex Pharmaceuticals and government grants, grew the employee count from 30 to 130, and is hiring at least 55 more. Its valuation soared to $1 billion, with $150 million in a venture deal last September that included Amazon, famed Silicon Valley VC firm Mayfield and Apple’s Tim Cook.
The exit strategy isn’t an acquisition, as Chen sees it.
“Our intention is not to build and sell it but to become a $100 billion company in next-generation CRISPR technology. There are so many creative building opportunities, and new technology that can come out of discovery in gene editing,” said Chen. “Identifying the business strategy has meant that I needed to step out of the lab and scale the company,” added Chen, who worked remotely during Covid, but is now back at the company’s Brisbane, California, headquarters, where its distinct green and white elephant-shaped signage is highly visible.
Salt Lake City roots, Silicon Valley growth
Growing up in Salt Lake City as one of five siblings (Nathan, 22, is the youngest), her parents, immigrants from China in 1988, encouraged “us to reach our potential and become what is best for us,” Chen, now 30, said. Chen learned to play the violin, competed in chess tournaments, and excelled in dance performance. In chess competitions, where she was often the youngest and the only female, she said she learned “how to lose and how to win strategies.”
She discovered her passion for bioscience while at her father’s small biotech business in Utah.
To relieve the stress of scaling up Mammoth Biosciences, Chen has recently taken up running in San Francisco’s hills, near her home. She got up to speed for on-the-job managerial challenges by reading “The Founder’s Dilemma.” She also sought the advice of an executive coach who has helped in determining “what kind of leader do I want to be,” she said, adding, “I want to help myself and others reach full potential. It’s about understanding each person’s motivations, what they want to try and learn, and making them part of the company ecosystem.”
Mammoth Biosciences is built on core technology Chen worked on at Doudna’s UC Berkeley lab. Chen earned her PhD as a graduate student researcher in this hotbed of innovation.
As a mentor, Doudna encouraged Chen to set up her own business upon graduation rather than to work at a major biotech company. “She told me I wasn’t shooting high enough,” said Chen, who has academic credentials from Harvard Medical School and Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, as well as an internship at a HIV research institute in Durban, South Africa.
“She’s a leader of the technical team and an overall strategist who has deep scientific knowledge and creativity, and can see where this technology is going,” said Doudna, whose UC Berkeley lab has been immersed in an ongoing patent battle over ownership of the biomedical technology. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office recently determined in favor of the Broad Institute, a partnership of MIT and Harvard University. This decision impacts licensing for several CRISPR companies, but doesn’t extend to the particular gene editing system that Mammoth Biosciences uses. Doudna is also a co-founder of publicly traded CRISPR company Intellia Therapeutics.
At the age of 26, right after graduation, Chen had ventured out with fellow student and lab researcher Lucas Harrington to co-start a company. They set up shop at a biotech incubator in the up-and-coming Dogpatch neighborhood of San Francisco. “Janice and I split our time working in the lab and doing prototypes, and pitching venture capitalists,” recalled Harrington. Her husband, a scientist in San Francisco that she met at Johns Hopkins, “understands the journey” and devotion to starting this game-changing company. “It’s my life right now,” she said.
They met Mayfield partner Ursheet Parikh through a connection with Doudna. Parikh was advising Stanford PhD graduate Trevor Martin on launching a diagnostics testing start-up. The venture investor brought Martin, Doudna, Harrington and Chen together, and the team formed Mammoth Biosciences. Martin is CEO, Harrington is chief scientific officer, Doudna is chair of the Scientific Advisory Board while Chen is CTO.
“She’s a multi-faceted person and clearly a genius,” said Mayfield’s Parikh, a board member and serial investor in her company.
VC investing in gene editing reaches billions
Since 2014, CRISPR start-ups have attracted $3 billion in venture capital, according to Chris Dokomajilar, founder and CEO of biopharma database company DealForma. An analysis by GlobalData’s Pharma Intelligence Center shows 74 VC deals for CRISPR technology companies since 2012, with Mammoth Biosciences in the lead of most well-funded. The start-up has raised $265 million in four financings from at least 15 VC firms and angel investors.
The company’s work expanded rapidly during the pandemic in 2020. Among seven firms granted $249 million for rapid tests of Covid-19 from the National Institutes of Health, the firm scaled up its patented DetectR test for commercial labs diagnosing the virus. In a collaboration with GSK Consumer Healthcare in Warren, New Jersey, a handheld device that can perform rapid diagnostic tests of the coronavirus is being created. Additionally, Mammoth Biosciences teamed up in early 2021 with Agilent Technologies in Santa Clara to develop CRISPR testing systems for labs to expand and speed up detection of the coronavirus disease.
“She has a rare skill set to conceptualize the future and what this technology can do for humanity,” said another of her investors, Harsh Patel, co-founder and managing director at Wireframe Ventures. “She can turn incredible science in a lab into commercial technology products. It’s a big leap away from the lab.”
More developments came in rapid-fire sequence later in 2021 and into this year. Vertex Pharmaceuticals in Boston paid $41 million to the start-up to expand cell and genetic therapy tools, which could lead to $650 million in royalties. Bayer AG in Berlin paid $40 million to Mammoth Biosciences to focus on tests and cures for liver diseases, with royalties that could mount to $1 billion. Moreover, this January, the FDA granted the company emergency use authorization for a CRISPR-based molecular diagnostic testing of the coronavirus.
The accomplishments have tested Chen’s strength as an innovator and business leader, but investors say she is imperturbable. “I’ve never seen her frazzled in board meetings. She has strong opinions and she backs it up not by arguing, but by data,” said Omri Amirav-Drory, general partner at venture firm NFX, an investor and advisor. “I’m never selling my shares, I will give it to my kids. There’s a huge amount of IP in the company.”
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NASA space telescope spots most powerful light ever seen on Jupiter, helps solve 30-year-old mystery
NASA has detected the most energetic light ever seen on Jupiter and, in the process, solved a 30-year-old mystery.
In a new study, researchers using NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) space observatory were able to spot the highest-energy light ever seen on Jupiter. The light, which is X-ray radiation, is also the highest-energy light ever seen on a planet in our solar system other than Earth.
But this finding isn’t just an incredible observation; it’s also helping scientists to understand why NASA’s Ulysses sun-studying mission mysteriously saw no X-rays from Jupiter when it flew by the planet in 1992.
In photos: Juno’s amazing views of Jupiter
This is not the first time that X-rays have been spotted at Jupiter; NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory as well as the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton observatory have both observed low-energy X-rays coming from auroras on the giant planet.
Jupiter’s auroras, which occur at the planet’s north and south poles, are created by ions coming from the planet’s volcanic moon Io that are accelerated by the planet’s magnetic field toward the poles. There, the ions interact with Jupiter’s atmosphere and release light, creating aurora light shows. NASA’s Juno spacecraft, which arrived at Jupiter in 2016, found that electrons from Io also interact with the planet’s magnetic field.
Scientists have suspected that these electrons from Io could create even more powerful X-rays than the planet’s auroras. With the NuSTAR observations, researchers have confirmed for the first time that Io’s electrons are indeed creating high-energy X-rays.
NuSTAR, which launched to space in 2012, is a space-based X-ray telescope that studies the cosmos in high-energy X-rays.
“It’s quite challenging for planets to generate X-rays in the range that NuSTAR detects,” Kaya Mori, an astrophysicist at Columbia University and lead author of the new study, said in a statement. “But Jupiter has an enormous magnetic field, and it’s spinning very quickly. Those two characteristics mean that the planet’s magnetosphere acts like a giant particle accelerator, and that’s what makes these higher-energy emissions possible.”
By spotting these high-energy X-rays, the researchers in this study may also have solved an ongoing mystery. In 1992, the TK agency’s Ulysses spacecraft, launched in 19TK to do TKTK, flew by Jupiter but didn’t detect any X-rays of any kind — which has puzzled scientists since.
According to the researchers behind the new study, Ulysses likely didn’t spot any X-rays because, due to the mechanism that brings this light about, the X-rays become fainter at higher energies. And so, in Ulysses’ detection range, they suspect Jupiter’s X-rays were simply too faint to see.
This work was described in a new study published Thursday (Feb. 10) in the journal Nature Astronomy.
Email Chelsea Gohd at cgohd@space.com or follow her on Twitter @chelsea_gohd. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.