This view compares a lucky imaging view of Jupiter from VISIR (left) at infrared wavelengths with a very sharp amateur image in visible light from about the same time (right). Credit: ESO/L.N. Fletcher/Damian Peach
Based partly on data from generations of
Jupiter’s troposphere has a lot in common with Earth’s: It’s where clouds form and storms churn. To understand this weather activity, scientists need to study certain properties, including wind, pressure, humidity, and temperature. They have known since NASA’s Pioneer 10 and 11 missions in the 1970s that, in general, colder temperatures are associated with Jupiter’s lighter and whiter bands (known as zones), while the darker brown-red bands (known as belts) are locations of warmer temperatures.
These infrared images of Jupiter with color added were obtained by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in 2016 and contributed to the new study. The colors represent temperatures and cloudiness: The bluer areas are cold and cloudy, and the orange areas are warmer and cloud-free. Credit: ESO / L.N. Fletcher
However, not enough data sets were available to understand how temperatures vary over the long term. The new research, published on December 19 in the journal Nature Astronomy, breaks ground by studying images of the bright infrared glow (invisible to the human eye) that rises from warmer regions of the atmosphere, directly measuring Jupiter’s temperatures above the colorful clouds. The scientists collected these images at regular intervals over three of Jupiter’s orbits around the Sun, each of which lasts 12 Earth years.
In the process, they discovered that Jupiter’s temperatures rise and fall following definite periods that aren’t tied to the seasons or any other cycles scientists know about. Because Jupiter has weak seasons – the planet is tilted on its axis only 3 degrees, compared to Earth’s jaunty 23.5 degrees – scientists didn’t expect to find temperatures on Jupiter varying in such regular cycles.
Jupiter is the fifth planet from the sun and the largest planet in the solar system. It is a gas giant with a mass about two and a half times that of all the other planets in the solar system combined. Jupiter has a thick atmosphere made up mostly of hydrogen and helium, and it has a number of distinctive features, including dark bands called “belts” and light bands called “zones.” The most famous feature of Jupiter is the Great Red Spot, a giant storm that has been raging for hundreds of years. Jupiter has 80 known moons, the four largest of which are called the Galilean moons in honor of their discoverer, Galileo Galilei. These moons are Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto. Jupiter also has a number of rings, though they are much less prominent than the rings of
“We’ve solved one part of the puzzle now, which is that the atmosphere shows these natural cycles,” said co-author Leigh Fletcher of the University of Leicester in England. “To understand what’s driving these patterns and why they occur on these particular timescales, we need to explore both above and below the cloudy layers.”
One possible explanation became apparent at the equator: The study authors found that temperature variations higher up, in the stratosphere, seemed to rise and fall in a pattern that is the opposite of how temperatures behave in the troposphere, suggesting changes in the stratosphere influence changes in the troposphere and vice versa.
Decades of Observations
Orton and his colleagues began the study in 1978. For the duration of their research, they would write proposals several times a year to win observation time on three large telescopes around the world: the
Then came the hard part – combining multiple years’ worth of observations from several telescopes and science instruments to search for patterns. Joining these veteran scientists on their long-duration study were several undergraduate interns, none of whom had been born when the study began. They are students at Caltech in Pasadena, California; Cal Poly Pomona in Pomona, California; Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio; and Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts.
Scientists hope the study will help them eventually be able to predict weather on Jupiter, now that they have a more detailed understanding of it. The research could contribute to climate modeling, with computer simulations of the temperature cycles and how they affect weather – not just for Jupiter, but for all giant planets across our solar system and beyond.
“Measuring these temperature changes and periods over time is a step toward ultimately having a full-on Jupiter weather forecast, if we can connect cause and effect in Jupiter’s atmosphere,” Fletcher said. “And the even bigger-picture question is if we can someday extend this to other giant planets to see if similar patterns show up.”
Reference: “Unexpected long-term variability in Jupiter’s tropospheric temperatures” by Glenn S. Orton, Arrate Antuñano, Leigh N. Fletcher, James A. Sinclair, Thomas W. Momary, Takuya Fujiyoshi, Padma Yanamandra-Fisher, Padraig T. Donnelly, Jennifer J. Greco, Anna V. Payne, Kimberly A. Boydstun and Laura E. Wakefield, 19 December 2022, Nature Astronomy.
DOI: 10.1038/s41550-022-01839-0
Only 14% of diagnosed cancers in the US are detected by screening, report says
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A small proportion – 14.1% – of all diagnosed cancers in the United States are detected by screening with a recommended screening test, according to a new report.
The remaining diagnosed cancers tend to be found when someone has symptoms or seeks imaging or medical care for other reasons, suggests the report, posted online Wednesday by researchers at the nonprofit research organization NORC at the University of Chicago.
“I was shocked that only 14% of cancers were detected by screening. I think, for many people, we talk so much about cancer screening that we imagine that that’s how all cancers are diagnosed. We talk about mammograms and colonoscopies all the time,” said Caroline Pearson, an author of the report and senior vice president at the organization.
Yet “the vast majority of cancer types don’t have screening tests available,” Pearson said.
The technical report notes that just four types of cancer – breast, cervical, colorectal and lung – have screening tests recommended for use by the US Preventive Services Task Force, and the percent of cancers detected by screening varies across those types: 61% of breast, 52% of cervical, 45% of colorectal and 3% of lung cancers. The report also includes data on prostate cancer, even though screening for prostate cancer is not broadly recommended, and the data suggests that 77% of prostate cancers are detected by screening.
The report, which has not been published in a peer-reviewed journal, is based on data from 2017. But Pearson said that since then, studies have shown that the rates of cancer screenings declined during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic. She suspects that the percentage of cancers detected by screening could now be even lower than what was found in the new report.
“I definitely think that the percent of cancers detected by screening would have been lower as a result of the pandemic. We know that people missed a tremendous number of recommended screenings, and we are seeing those cancers showing up at later stages in clinical settings,” Pearson said. “So with the reduction in screenings, we get fewer cancers diagnosed that way, and that is certainly something that we would pick up in the data.”
For the new report, Pearson and her colleagues developed a model to calculate the percentage of cancers detected by screening, using data from the National Cancer Institute on the incidence of diagnosed cancers, national screening rates from the National Health Interview Survey, testing rates from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, and several studies on the rate at which cancers are detected.
There has not been much data in the medical literature on cancers that are detected by screening, she said, adding that she hopes the report draws attention to the importance of cancer screening, the need for more tests and the need for more data on how cancers are diagnosed, including the important role that screening tests play in catching cancers early.
“We would benefit from much more robust data and analysis to really understand how cancer is affecting different populations and how we can improve equity,” Pearson said. “For the researchers of the world, I would love for people to dig into some of these estimates and some of the geographic variations that we’re seeing to understand how we can begin to shape the public policy environment to improve treatment across the country and improve screening across the country.”
Dr. Otis Brawley, an oncology professor at Johns Hopkins University, said he was not surprised by the findings in the new report – especially because some cancer screening tests can be improved in their performance.
“Everyone has been led to believe that screening is better than it actually is,” said Brawley, who was not involved in the new report. “We need to invest in research to try to find better tests.”
In the case of breast cancer, for instance, “clinical trials tell us screening prevents 25% of those destined to die of breast cancer from dying of breast cancer,” he said. “In the US, about 60% of women aged 50 to 70 get screened. That means we can only prevent about 15% of the deaths destined to occur. It also means a lot of patients are diagnosed with cancer after a negative screening test.”
People in the United States could benefit from following cancer prevention measures – such as getting screened and maintaining a healthy lifestyle – but the public can also benefit from better screening tests themselves, Brawley said.
“We spend so much time pushing screening and pushing screening tests – yes, they do save lives, but we need to be able to save more lives,” he said. “We need better.”
JWST Breaks Record For Most Distant Galaxy Ever Detected : ScienceAlert
Light that has traveled for over 13.4 billion years to reach our neighborhood of space has been confirmed as originating from the earliest, most distant galaxy detected yet.
That places the most distant of these four very young objects at the very dawn of the Universe, just a short time after the Big Bang – a time period when the Universe was still foggy and bleary and the first rays of light were penetrating the darkness.
So detailed are the JWST’s long spectroscopic observations that researchers can not only measure the distance the light of these galaxies has traveled, they can also infer some of the galaxies’ properties.
“For the first time, we have discovered galaxies only 350 million years after the Big Bang, and we can be absolutely confident of their fantastic distances,” says astronomer Brant Robertson from the University of California Santa Cruz.
“To find these early galaxies in such stunningly beautiful images is a special experience.”
To be able to peer earlier into the Universe than we’ve ever seen before was one of the biggest hopes pinned on the JWST. Our understanding of the first billion years after the Big Bang is extremely limited, and finding earlier and earlier objects can help shed light on this crucial time of formation.
We have models that describe how events unfolded. We believe that, before the first stars were born, the Universe was filled with opaque matter; any light scattered off free electrons and was unable to stream freely.
These particles gradually combined to form neutral hydrogen; when the stars started to form, they ionized the hydrogen, and light shone. This process was complete by about 1 billion years after the Universe popped into being.
The light from these objects is very faint, having traveled from so very far away. And, due to the expansion of the Universe, it’s been significantly stretched into the longer, redder end of the spectrum, a phenomenon known as redshifting.
The JWST is the most powerful telescope ever launched into space, and it specializes in infrared and near-infrared light – designed for detecting this redshifted light, to the best of our ability.
To obtain a confident redshift, the light needs to be broken down into its constituent wavelengths, a technique known as spectroscopy. A team of researchers broke down the light from the JWST’s NIRCam into nine wavelength ranges, focusing on four galaxies with high redshifts, two of which were first identified by Hubble.
The new JWST data confirms that these two galaxies are indeed among the most distant ever detected – and the two others are even farther away.
“It was crucial to prove that these galaxies do, indeed, inhabit the early Universe. It’s very possible for closer galaxies to masquerade as very distant galaxies,” says astronomer Emma Curtis-Lake of the University of Hertfordshire in the UK.
“Seeing the spectrum revealed as we hoped, confirming these galaxies as being at the true edge of our view, some further away than Hubble could see! It is a tremendously exciting achievement for the mission.”
The two Hubble galaxies have redshifts of 10.38 and 11.58. The JWST’s new discoveries have redshifts of 12.63 and 13.20 – the latter of which is equivalent to about 13.5 billion light-years.
Other candidates at higher redshifts are currently under investigation, but are yet to be confirmed. Given that JWST hasn’t even been operational for six months yet, it probably won’t be too long before the record is broken.
But there’s plenty to be getting on with in the meantime. The observations that gave us these distant galaxies as part of the the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES) collected a total of 28 hours’ worth of data from a region of space in and around the famous Hubble Ultra Deep Field.
This light will be able to tell us a lot about the conditions in the early Universe, and how the first stars and galaxies formed.
“With these measurements, we can know the intrinsic brightness of the galaxies and figure out how many stars they have,” Robertson says.
“Now we can start to really pick apart how galaxies are put together over time.”
The researchers will be presenting their findings at the STScI’s First Science Results from JWST conference. The two preprint papers can be read here and here.
Massive eruption from icy volcanic comet detected in solar system
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A bizarre, volcanic comet has violently erupted, spewing out more than 1 million tons of gas, ice and the “potential building blocks of life” into the solar system.
The volatile comet, known as 29P/Schwassmann-Wachmann (29P), is around 37 miles (60 kilometers) wide and takes around 14.9 years to orbit the sun. 29P is believed to be the most volcanically active comet in the solar system. It is one of around 100 comets, known as “centaurs,” that have been pushed from the Kuiper Belt — a ring of icy comets that lurk beyond Neptune — into a closer orbit around the sun between those of Jupiter and Neptune, according to NASA (opens in new tab).
On Nov. 22, an amateur astronomer named Patrick Wiggins noticed that 29P had drastically increased in brightness, according to Spaceweather.com (opens in new tab). Subsequent observations made by other astronomers revealed that this spike in luminosity was the result of a massive volcanic eruption — the second largest seen on 29P in the last 12 years, according to the British Astronomical Association (opens in new tab) (BAA). The largest eruption during this time was a huge outburst in September 2021.
An eruption of this size is “pretty rare,” Cai Stoddard-Jones (opens in new tab), a doctoral candidate at Cardiff University in the U.K. who took a follow-up image of 29P’s eruption, told Live Scence. “It’s [also] difficult to say why this one is so big.”.
The explosion was followed by two smaller outbursts on Nov. 27 and Nov. 29, according to BAA.
Related: Watch the biggest-ever comet outburst spray dust across the cosmos
Unlike volcanoes on Earth, which eject scalding-hot magma and ash from the mantle, 29P spits out extremely cold gases and ice from its core. This unusual type of volcanic activity is known as cryovolcanism, or “cold volcanism.”
Cryovolcanic bodies, which include a handful of other comets and moons in the solar system such as Saturn’s Enceladus, Jupiter’s Europa and Neptune’s Triton, have a surface crust surrounding a mainly solid icy core, Richard Miles (opens in new tab), a BAA astronomer who has studied 29P, told Live Science. Over time, radiation from the sun can cause the comets’ icy interiors to sublime from solid to gas, which causes a buildup of pressure beneath the crust. When radiation from the sun also weakens the crust, that pressure causes the outer shell to crack, and cryomagma shoots out into space.
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The cryomagma from comets like 29P is mainly composed of carbon monoxide and nitrogen gas, as well as some icy solids and liquid hydrocarbons, which “may have provided some of the raw materials from which life originated on Earth,” NASA representatives wrote.
The ejecta from the most recent eruption of 29P stretched up to 34,800 miles (56,000 km) away from the comet and is traveling at speeds of up to 805 mph (1,295 km/h), according to BAA. The plume “probably comprised more than one million tons of ejecta,” Miles added.
Photographs of the erupting comet also show that the plume formed an irregular Pac-Man-like shape, which suggests the eruption originated from a single point or region on the comet’s surface, according to Spaceweather.com.
These observations back up previous research that suggests 29P’s eruptions are linked to its rotation. Miles and Stoddard-Jones believe that the comet’s slower rotation causes solar radiation to absorb more unevenly on the comet, triggering the eruptions. So far eruptions from the comet tend to match up with its 57-day rotation period, the researchers said.
Related: Volcanic eruptions on the moon happened much more recently than we thought
Researchers also suspect that 29P’s most explosive eruptions follow a cycle based on its orbit around the sun. A number of large eruptions were detected between 2008 and 2010, and now two massive explosions have occurred within the last two years, Miles said. It is therefore likely that there will be least one more major eruption from 29P by the end of 2023, he added.
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However, it is less clear how this longer eruption cycle is occurring, because unlike most other comets, which get closer to the sun during a specific period of their orbits, 29P has a largely circular orbit, meaning it never gets much closer to the sun than its average distance, Stoddard-Jones said.
29P has largely been ignored by the astronomical community since its discovery in 1927, but as new evidence emerges about its unusual volcanic activity it is starting to be taken more seriously, Miles said. “Clearly there is something new to be discovered in studying 29P.”
The James Webb Space Telescope is scheduled to take a closer look at 29P early next year, he added.
Bright Flash Detected in February Was a Black Hole Jet Pointed Straight at Earth
On February 11, astronomers saw a distant flash of light that seemed to come from a source as bright as a quadrillion suns. They alerted other scientists to the event, and several telescopes quickly pivoted to focus on the flash. Now, two teams of researchers have identified its source: a black hole feasting in the distant universe.
Black holes are famously dark; their gravitational pull is so strong that even light cannot escape their event horizons. In this case, the bright flash was caused by how energetically the black hole consumed its meal, a star that had passed too close to the ravenous compact object. Details of this luminous feast were published today in papers in Nature and Nature Astronomy.
“This particular event was 100 times more powerful than the most powerful gamma-ray burst afterglow,” said Dheeraj Pasham, an astrophysicist at MIT and lead author of the Nature Astronomy paper, in a press release. “It was something extraordinary.”
Every so often, an unlucky star is caught up in the inescapable gravity of a black hole. The spinning black hole tears the star limb from metaphorical limb, until the star’s material is just a superheated swirl around the black hole. These feedings can give off lots of light. AT 2022cmc is the brightest and most distant tidal disruption event yet-known; its source is a supermassive black hole about 8.5 billion light-years away.
Tidal disruption events are useful for astrophysicists; they can reveal how fast black holes are spinning and the rate at which the behemoth objects are feeding. They also can reveal how supermassive black holes grow and shape the galaxies that ensconce them.
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Sometimes—and astronomers think they might now know exactly how often— the black hole spews superheated jets of material out into space. The energized jets are accelerated to nearly the speed of light and can be very difficult to see unless they’re pointed directly at us. Which was the case for 2022cmc.
Because the black hole’s jet is pointed at Earth, it appears much brighter to us than it would otherwise. That helped the two research teams observe the light source, despite its extraordinary distance.
Twenty-one telescopes around the world viewed the jet in the X-ray, radio, optical, and ultraviolet wavelengths. It’s the first time a jetted tidal disruption event has been seen at optical wavelengths, the region of the electromagnetic spectrum that the human eye can see.
The X-ray emissions fluctuated dramatically over the course of the observations. The researchers suspect this may be due to a period in which the black hole accreted (i.e. collected) a ton of material around itself.
Comparing the light from this event to other luminous happenings in the cosmos, the teams determined that a jetted tidal disruption event was the sole possible culprit.
“The universe is truly full of surprises and we have to be ready to catch them,” Andreoni said. “Developing more tools and new technology is surely a pathway to discovery, but also persistence and really the wish to be thrilled by the sky at any time when we least expect it.”
Pasham added that other sky surveys could reveal more tidal disruptions in the future, which could then be scrutinized by space-based observatories like the Webb Telescope.
Tools like the LSST Camera—which will be the world’s largest digital camera when it’s mounted at the Rubin observatory in Chile—will be a remarkable resource for regularly imaging the night sky and all the dynamic events in it.
More: Behold: The First Image of Our Galaxy’s Central Black Hole
Eerie green fireball detected hours before smashing into Lake Ontario in the dead of night
At half past 3:00 a.m. (EST) on Nov. 19, a bright green fireball streaked through the sky over the northeastern United States and southeastern Canada. Witnesses reported seeing a helicopter-like object cruising silently through the air before lighting up huge swathes of the night like an enormous lightning bolt. After about 10 seconds, it was gone.
This fireball was a small meteor, detected by astronomers just three hours before it tumbled through Earth‘s atmosphere, caught fire and broke up into hundreds of pieces. Most of those pieces likely smacked straight into Lake Ontario, though some small chunks may have impacted land on the lake’s southern shore, according to NASA.
Seven observatories around the world watched the meteor make its early morning death dive, and at least 59 people in New York, Maryland, Pennsylvania and the nearby province of Ontario, Canada reported seeing the fireball on the International Meteor Organization‘s meteor-watching database.
One witness — Dereck Bowen of Brantford, Ontario (a town located about 60 miles, or 97 kilometers, west of the New York border) — managed to capture the fireball’s descent with a GoPro camera set to automatically record the sky at night. A spectacular 30-second exposure of the sky shows the moment the meteor soared overhead, with the rock’s bright green trail plunging down toward the Earth and lighting up the clouds around it.
Another camera set up outside the nearby CN Tower — a 1,815-foot-tall (553 meters) communications tower in Toronto — also captured the meteor’s bright passage across the sky.
Well, here’s a BEAUTIFUL view of the bolide from the camera that looks up at the Tower… pic.twitter.com/cxl1lrVeM8November 19, 2022
Fireballs are exceptionally bright meteors that typically originate from asteroids or pieces of comets that orbit the sun, according to NASA.
The Nov. 19 fireball — now officially named 2022 WJ1 — was likely a small asteroid measuring no more than 3.2 feet (1 m) in diameter. When space rocks like these enter Earth’s atmosphere, they heat up and slow down from the intense friction, producing a visible wake of fiery light behind them. Depending on a meteor’s composition, it may also glow green as it tumbles to its doom.
Fireballs are generally considered to be harmless, as most of their pieces burn up in the atmosphere before impacting Earth. However, there may be some rare exceptions. On Nov. 5, a man in California claimed that a fireball set his house on fire after it appeared in the sky moments earlier. Experts from the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection are still investigating the cause of the blaze.
Wormholes May Already Have Been Detected, Physicists Say : ScienceAlert
Hypothetical bridges connecting distant regions of space (and time) could more or less look like garden variety black holes, meaning it’s possible these mythical beasts of physics have already been seen.
Thankfully however, if a new model proposed by a small team of physicists from Sofia University in Bulgaria is accurate, there could still be a way to tell them apart.
Play around with Einstein’s general theory of relativity long enough, it’s possible to show how the spacetime background of the Universe can form not only deep gravitational pits where nothing escapes – it can form impossible mountain peaks which can’t be climbed.
Unlike their dark cousins, these glowing hills would shun anything that drew near, potentially belching out streams of particles and radiation that had no hope of ever turning back.
Setting aside the distinct possibility the Big Bang looks just like one of these ‘white holes’, nothing of it’s like has ever been observed. Nonetheless, they remain an interesting concept for exploring the edges of one of the greatest theories in physics.
In the 1930s, a colleague of Einstein’s named Nathan Rosen showed there was nothing to say the deeply curved spacetime of a black hole couldn’t connect to the steep peaks of a white hole to form some kind of bridge.
In this corner of physics, our everyday expectations on distance and time go out the window, meaning such a theoretical link could traverse vast stretches of the cosmos.
Under the right circumstances, it might even be possible for matter to ride this cosmic tube and come out the other end with its information more or less intact.
So to determine what this black hole with a butthole might look like to observatories like the Event Horizon Telescope, the Sofia University team developed a simplified model of a wormhole’s ‘throat’ as a magnetized ring of fluid, and made various assumptions on how matter would circle it prior to being swallowed.
Particles caught up in this furious maelstrom would produce powerful electromagnetic fields that would roll and snap in predictable patterns, polarizing any light emitted by the heated material with a clear signature. It was the tracing of polarized radio waves that gave us the first stunning images of M87* in 2019, and Sagittarius A* earlier this year.
A typical wormhole’s smoking hot lips, it turns out, would be hard to distinguish from the polarized light emitted by the swirling disc of chaos surrounding a black hole.
By that logic, M87* could very well be a wormhole. In fact, wormholes could be lurking at the end of black holes everywhere, and we would have no easy way of knowing.
That’s not to say there’s no way of knowing at all.
If we were to strike it lucky and stitch together an image of a candidate wormhole as seen indirectly through a decent gravitational lens, subtle properties that distinguish wormholes from black holes just might become apparent.
This would require a conveniently placed mass in between us and the wormhole to distort its light sufficiently to magnify the small differences, of course, but it would at least give us a means of confidently spotting which dark patches of emptiness have a back exit.
There is one other means, one that also requires a good dose of fortune. Were we to spot a wormhole at the perfect angle, light traveling across its gaping entrance towards us would have its signature enhanced even further, giving us a clearer indication of a gateway through the stars and beyond.
Further modeling could reveal other characteristics of light waves that help sift wormholes out of the night sky without the need of lensing or perfect angles, a possibility the researchers are now turning their attention to.
Putting further constraints on the physics of wormholes could reveal new avenues for exploring not just general relativity, but the physics that describes the behavior of waves and particles.
Beyond that, lessons learned from predictions such as these could reveal where general relativity breaks down, opening a few holes of its own to make bold new discoveries that could give us a whole new way of seeing the cosmos.
This research was published in Physical Review D.
Mysterious ‘Large Object’ Detected Near Titanic Wreck Finally Identified
An unexpected sonar “blip” first detected in 1998 near the wreck of the Titanic has finally been identified.
“We didn’t know what we would discover,” veteran explorer PH Nargeolet, who first spotted the blip, said in a news release. “On the sonar, this could have been any number of things including the potential of it being another shipwreck. I’ve been seeking the chance to explore this large object that appeared on sonar so long ago.”
OceanGate Expeditions has been sending crews in a submersible to document the condition of Titanic for decades. During one of this year’s trips, a team that included Nargeolet checked out the anomaly near the legendary wreck.
As the video above shows, it was not another shipwreck. Instead, the team discovered an unexpected volcanic formation at a depth of 2,900 meters (9,514 feet) that Nargeolet said was “teeming with so much life.”
OceanGate is calling it the Nargeolet-Fanning Ridge, named for the veteran diver and mission specialist Oisín Fanning.
“We are astonished at the diversity and density of the sponges, bamboo corals, other cold-water corals, squat lobsters and fishes that are thriving at 2900 meters deep in the North Atlantic Ocean,” OceanGate Expeditions chief scientist Dr. Steve W. Ross said in a news release.
Ross, who is also a research professor at the University of North Carolina Wilmington’s Center for Marine Science, added: “Uncovering this previously unknown ecosystem also provides an opportunity to make a comparison to the marine biology on and around Titanic.”
The life found on this natural reef may differ from what is now thriving on the nearby artificial reef that Titanic has become.
Earlier this year, OceanGate released the first-ever 8K footage from Titanic, showing the wreck to be deteriorating.
Along with bringing scientists into the deep, OceanGate offers spots on its expeditions to high-rolling adventure travelers. Seats as a “mission specialist” for next year’s trips to Titanic start at $250,000.
The company has also given spots to the Make-A-Wish Foundation.
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Bright, powerful burst of gamma rays detected
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Multiple space and ground-based telescopes witnessed one of the brightest explosions in space when it reached Earth on October 9. The burst may be one of the most powerful ever recorded by telescopes.
Gamma-ray bursts, or GRBs, are the most powerful class of explosions in the universe, according to NASA. Scientists have dubbed this one GRB 221009A, and telescopes around the world continue to observe its aftermath.
“The exceptionally long GRB 221009A is the brightest GRB ever recorded and its afterglow is smashing all records at all wavelengths,” said Brendan O’Connor, a doctoral student at the University of Maryland and George Washington University in Washington, DC, in a statement.
“Because this burst is so bright and also nearby, we think this is a once-in-a-century opportunity to address some of the most fundamental questions regarding these explosions, from the formation of black holes to tests of dark matter models.”
Scientists believe the creation of the long, bright pulse occurred when a massive star in the Sagitta constellation — about 2.4 billion light-years away — collapsed into a supernova explosion and became a black hole. The star was likely many times the mass of our sun.
Gamma rays and X-rays rippled through the solar system and set off detectors installed on NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory and the Wind spacecraft, as well as ground-based telescopes like the Gemini South telescope in Chile.
Newborn black holes blast out powerful jets of particles that can move at close to the speed of light, releasing radiation in the form of X-rays and gamma rays. Billions of years after traveling across space, the black hole’s detonation finally reached our corner of the universe last week.
Studying an event like this can reveal more details about the collapse of stars, how matter interacts near the speed of light and what conditions may be like in distant galaxies. Astronomers estimate that such a bright a gamma ray burst may not appear again for decades.
The burst’s source sounds distant, but astronomically speaking it’s relatively close to Earth, which is why it was so bright and lasted for so long. The Fermi telescope detected the burst for more than 10 hours.
O’Connor was the leader of a team using the Gemini South telescope in Chile, operated by the National Science Foundation’s National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory, or NOIRLab, to observe the aftermath on October 14.
“In our research group, we’ve been referring to this burst as the ‘BOAT’, or Brightest Of All Time, because when you look at the thousands of bursts gamma-ray telescopes have been detecting since the 1990s, this one stands apart,” said Jillian Rastinejad, a doctoral student at Northwestern University in Illinois who led a second team using Gemini South.
Astronomers will use their observations to analyze the signatures of any heavy elements released by the star’s collapse.
The luminous burst also provided an opportunity for two devices aboard the International Space Station: the NICER (or Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer) X-ray telescope and Japan’s Monitor of All-sky X-ray Image, or MAXI. Combined, the two devices are called the Orbiting High-energy Monitor Alert Network, or OHMAN.
It was the first time the two devices, installed on the space station in April, were able to work together to detect a gamma-ray burst, and meant the NICER telescope was able to observe GRB 221009A three hours after it was detected.
“Future opportunities could result in response times of a few minutes,” said Zaven Arzoumanian, NICER science lead at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, in a statement.
Huge, unusually powerful supernova explosion in space detected by scientists
In space, things frequently go boom.
And recently, on Oct. 9, astronomers observed an extraordinarily colossal boom. NASA’s Swift Observatory, which is specifically designed to spot the most powerful known explosions in the universe today — called gamma-ray bursts — detected an extremely strong such burst. Something wildly potent must produce these jets of energy that travel through space, and scientists say they’re caused by the collapse and explosion of enormous stars, events called supernovae.
For a star to go supernova, it must be quite massive — at least eight times the size of the sun. But for a supernova to produce the strongest type of gamma-ray burst, the star must be some 30 to 40 times the size of the sun. This new powerful detection, so rare that we’ll likely only observe something of this magnitude around once a decade, came from such a mighty star.
“It’s a very unique event,” Yvette Cendes, an astronomer and postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told Mashable.
Huge, mysterious blast detected in deep space
Importantly, you need not worry. This terrific explosion happened in a galaxy 2 billion light-years away. At such a distance, its energy, which has been traveling and spreading through space for eons, poses no danger to us. But we can easily, with satellites, detect it.
“It’s the equivalent of getting front row seats at a fireworks show,” Cendes explained.
(Gamma rays are on the same radiation spectrum as the likes of AM and FM radio, visible light you can see, and x-rays, though gamma rays have the most energy.)
“This is incredibly, incredibly rare.”
Astronomers have never seen a gamma-ray burst in our galactic neighborhood (meaning the local galaxies around us). That’s because stellar explosions themselves aren’t too common. A star in our Milky Way galaxy will go supernova around once a century. But a huge star, the type that’s needed to make an extremely bright and long (on the order of several minutes) gamma-ray burst, only explodes about once every million years in a medium-sized galaxy like ours, noted Cendes.
“This is incredibly, incredibly rare,” said Cendes.
Gamma-ray bursts are detected far away because there are hundreds of billions of galaxies out in the deep cosmos, teeming with stars. There are relatively few opportunities for such an event to happen near us, compared to the wider universe. (What’s more, to detect it you have to be facing the direction of the “funnel” of energy radiated into space by the blast.)
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An artist’s conception of a gamma-ray burst from an exploding star.
Credit: NASA / ESA /. M. Kornmesser
Because these gamma-ray bursts often happen many billions of light-years away, the instruments built to detect these signals are extremely sensitive. That’s another reason this detection, which was relatively “close,” was so intense and “bright.”
“It’s like pointing a telescope at the sun,” Cendes explained. “It saturated the detectors.” The blast “ranks among the most luminous events known,” noted NASA.
You might wonder what now happens to the exploded star after such a dramatic collapse and explosion. It likely transformed into a black hole. “Most black holes form from the remnants of a large star that dies in a supernova explosion,” notes NASA.
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NASA’s Swift telescope captured the “afterflow” of the powerful gamma-ray burst about an hour after the agency detected the event.
Credit: NASA / Swift / A. Beardmore (University of Leicester)
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Black holes are incredibly curious cosmic objects. As Mashable previously reported, black holes are places where matter has been crunched down into an intensely compact area. If Earth was (hypothetically) crushed into a black hole, it would be under an inch across. Yet the object would still be extremely massive, as it would contain the entirety of our planet’s mass. This results in a place with a gravitational pull so strong, not even light can escape. (Things with more mass have stronger gravitational pulls.)
Astronomers like Cendes are now watching the aftermath of the dramatic gamma-ray burst using powerful telescopes, like the Submillimeter Array radio telescope atop Mauna Kea, in Hawaii.
So the universe rolls on. A star dies. A black hole is born. And intelligent life some 2 billion light-years away detects it all happening.