Summary: A new test that measures dopamine levels in biological fluids could help with the detection of depression, Parkinson’s disease, and other disordered marked by abnormal dopamine levels.
Source: Wiley
Altered levels of the neurotransmitter dopamine are apparent in various conditions, such as Parkinson’s disease and depression.
In research published in ChemistrySelect, investigators describe a quick, sensitive, and simple test to determine dopamine levels in biological fluids.
The method could help clinicians spot abnormal blood levels of dopamine in patients, potentially allowing for earlier disease detection.
The method relies on what are called carbon quantum dots, a type of carbon nanomaterial with photoluminescence properties, and ionic liquid, which is comprised of several mineral anions and organic cations existing in liquid form at room temperature.
The method could help clinicians spot abnormal blood levels of dopamine in patients, potentially allowing for earlier disease detection. Image is in the public domain
“The proposed electrochemical sensor could be an exceptional step forward in dopamine detection and pave the way for the molecular diagnosis of neurological illnesses,” the authors wrote.
About this dopamine research news
Author: Sara Henning-Stout Source: Wiley Contact: Sara Henning-Stout – Wiley Image: The image is in the public domain
Original Research: Open access. “An Electrochemical Sensor Based on Carbon Quantum Dots and Ionic Liquids for Selective Detection of Dopamine” by Zahra Nazari et al. ChemicalSelect
Abstract
An Electrochemical Sensor Based on Carbon Quantum Dots and Ionic Liquids for Selective Detection of Dopamine
See also
Dopamine (DA) as a neurotransmitter has a pivotal role in the central nervous system. Because of altered levels of DA in various neuroscience diseases, development of a quick, sensitive, and simple analytical approach to determine DA in biological fluids could be very applicable.
In this research, a novel electrochemical sensor based on a carbon paste electrode (CPE) modified with ionic liquid (IL) and carbon quantum dots (CQDs) for measuring DA with uric acid and ascorbic acid was developed. IL and CQDs were synthesized and characterized for their specific properties such as composition, emission, size distribution, and morphology structure.
Then, the modified CPE and different DA concentration was determined via cyclic voltammetry. The modified electrode exhibited great electrocatalytic activity for DA oxidation.
Under optimal conditions, the calibration diagram for DA was linear within the range of 0.1–50 μM in phosphate buffer (pH=7.4) and limit of detection was 0.046 μM. The electrode was successfully used in the determination of DA in real samples and generated acceptable outputs.
The proposed electrochemical sensor could be an exceptional step forward in DA detection and pave the way for the molecular diagnosis of neurological illnesses.
“We are getting close to an era where [patients] may no longer respond” to the drug, said Dr. Katherine Hsu, medical director of the division of STD Prevention and HIV/AIDS at the Massachusetts Department of Public Health.
The discovery comes as sexually transmitted infections, especially gonorrhea, are soaring nationwide, and the ability of many microbes to outsmart the drugs used to kill them is a growing worry.
“We are down to very few – very few – options. The concern is we’ll get to a place where there are no options,” said Dr. Helen Boucher, chief academic officer of the Tufts Medicine health system and a member of the Presidential Advisory Council on Combating Antibiotic Resistant Bacteria. “This is a common infection in young healthy people. … There’s only one thing, and that one thing may not work any more.”
Dr. Ruanne Barnabas, chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases at Massachusetts General Hospital, called the strain’s discovery “significant.”
“But given how mobile we are as a global community, it is not surprising,” she said.
The Massachusetts news should serve as a heads-up to doctors and patients to take gonorrhea seriously and watch for signs of resistance, said Dr. Laura Bachmann, chief medical officer of the CDC’s Division of STD Prevention.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and state health officials both sent alerts to providers Thursday afternoon. The Massachusetts alert said the finding is a warning that gonorrhea “is becoming less responsive to a limited arsenal of antibiotics.”
“The message to providers is, ‘hey, we’ve got to keep an eye on this,’” Bachmann said. “Antimicrobial resistance is an important and urgent public health threat.”
Still, the CDC has not changed its recommendations for testing and treatment of gonorrhea. Bachmann called it “reassuring” that both Massachusetts patients were cured with standard treatment, a one-time injection of ceftriaxone.
The strain is circulating in the Asia-Pacific region, and 10 cases were recently identified in the United Kingdom. The UK patients were also cured with ceftriaxone.
Should ceftriaxone stop working, there are alternative drugs but they have greater risks, or are less effective, doctors say.
“We want to maintain the options we have,” Barnabas said.
She added that a potential vaccine is in development.
A few new antibiotics that might work are also in the pipeline but “economic realities” have slowed progress, with companies that work on them going out of business, Boucher said.
Gonorrhea is a common and fast-spreading sexually transmitted infection. Its incidence increased 45 percent from 2016 to 2020, and more than half of those infected are between the ages of 15 and 24. In Massachusetts, laboratory-confirmed cases of gonorrhea have quadrupled from a low of 1,976 cases in 2009 to 8,133 in 2021. The bacteria that cause it infect the mucous membranes of the reproductive tract and the urethra in women and men, as well as the mouth, throat, eyes, and rectum.
In many cases, infected people have no symptoms, which is why the CDC recommends screening tests for sexually active people. When symptoms do occur, they can include painful urination and urethral or vaginal discharge.
If it goes untreated, gonorrhea can lead to pelvic inflammatory disease and infertility in women, and inflammation in the scrotum of men. In time it can spread to the blood and cause inflammation of tendons, joints, the brain or the heart.
The Massachusetts cases were discovered as part of a routine testing process. A primary care doctor conducted a standard test to identify gonorrhea and also had the sample cultured. After the culture identified the infection as gonorrhea, an isolate of the organism was sent to the State Laboratory, which performed further testing for drug resistance.
The sample showed signs of resistance, so the state sent it to the CDC for more advanced testing, which identified the worrisome genetic pattern: the bacteria were resistant to ciprofloxacin, penicillin, and tetracycline and had reduced susceptibility to ceftriaxone, cefixime, and azithromycin.
That prompted the health department to ask clinical laboratories in the same region to send it additional samples from around the same time period. Further testing at the CDC turned up the second case.
Health officials found no connection between the two cases, and Barnabas said there are surely more than two people infected with the new strain. But there is no information to indicate how widespread the new bug may be. A similar strain that was not quite as resistant was identified in Nevada in 2019 but never seen again.
“We cannot be sure without scaling up on our surveillance efforts,” Hsu said, and now is “pivotal proactive moment for public health.”
It’s possible that the strain is circulating elsewhere, Bachmann said. “This is why it’s so important for providers to have on their radar and public health departments to keep an eye out for treatment failures.”
“To prevent resistance,” Bachmann said, “it’s really important to identify gonorrhea quickly and treat it appropriately with the right drug at the right time and the right amount. That requires providers to be in tune to screening guidelines and appropriate treatment.”
The Massachusetts health department is asking providers to treat gonorrhea with high doses of ceftriaxone, perform cultures from symptomatic gonorrhea cases and follow protocols for submitting samples to the state lab, and test to make sure patients are cured after treatment. Additionally regular screening is recommended for sexually active women ages 24 and younger, women who are at increased risk, and sexually active men who have sex with men.
As for what individuals can do, Public Health Commissioner Margret Cooke offered this advice in a statement: “We urge all sexually active people to be regularly tested for sexually transmitted infections and to consider reducing the number of their sexual partners and increasing their use of condoms when having sex.”
Felice J. Freyer can be reached at felice.freyer@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @felicejfreyer.
This artist’s illustration shows the location and size of a hypothetical cloud of dust surrounding our solar system. Credit: NASA, ESA, Andi James (STScI)
Exhaust from Infalling Comets Makes Space a Dusty Place
Imagine walking into a room at night, turning off all the lights, and closing the shades. Yet an eerie glow comes from the walls, ceiling, and floor. The faint light is barely enough to see your hands before your face, but it persists.
Sounds like a scene out of “Ghost Hunters?” No, for astronomers this is the real deal. However, looking for something that’s close to nothing is not easy. Astronomers searched through 200,000 archival images from Hubble Space Telescope and made tens of thousands of measurements on these images to look for any residual background glow in the sky. Like turning out the lights in a room, they subtracted the light from stars, galaxies, planets, and even the zodiacal light. (Zodiacal light is a faint glow of diffuse sunlight scattered by interplanetary dust.) Surprisingly, a ghostly, feeble glow was left over. It’s equivalent to the steady light of ten fireflies spread across the entire sky.
Where’s that coming from?
One possible explanation is that a shell of dust envelops our solar system all the way out to
This artist’s illustration shows the location and size of a hypothetical cloud of dust surrounding our solar system. Astronomers searched through 200,000 images and made tens of thousands of measurements from Hubble Space Telescope to discover a residual background glow in the sky. Because the glow is so smoothly distributed, the likely source is innumerable comets – free-flying dusty snowballs of ice. They fall in toward the Sun from all different directions, spewing out an exhaust of dust as the ices sublimate due to heat from the Sun. If real, this would be a newly discovered architectural element of the solar system. Credit: NASA, ESA, Andi James (STScI)
Hubble Space Telescope Detects Ghostly Glow Surrounding Our Solar System
Aside from a tapestry of glittering stars, and the glow of the waxing and waning Moon, the nighttime sky looks inky black to the casual observer. But how dark is dark?
To find out, astronomers decided to sort through 200,000 images from
This photo shows the zodiacal light as it appeared on March 1, 2021, in Skull Valley, Utah. The Pleiades star cluster is visible near the top of the light column. Mars is just below that. Credit: NASA/Bill Dunford
The researchers say that one possible explanation for this residual glow is that our inner solar system contains a tenuous sphere of dust from comets that are falling into the solar system from all directions, and that the glow is sunlight reflecting off this dust. If real, this dust shell could be a new addition to the known architecture of the solar system.
This idea is bolstered by the fact that in 2021 another team of astronomers used data from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft to also measure the sky background. New Horizons flew by Pluto in 2015, and a small Kuiper belt object in 2018, and is now heading into interstellar space. The New Horizons measurements were done at a distance of 4 billion to 5 billion miles from the Sun. This is well outside the realm of the planets and asteroids where there is no contamination from interplanetary dust.
New Horizons detected something a bit fainter that is apparently from a more distant source than Hubble detected. The source of the background light seen by New Horizons also remains unexplained. There are numerous theories ranging from the decay of dark matter to a huge unseen population of remote galaxies.
“If our analysis is correct there’s another dust component between us and the distance where New Horizons made measurements. That means this is some kind of extra light coming from inside our solar system,” said Tim Carleton, of Arizona State University (ASU).
“Because our measurement of residual light is higher than New Horizons we think it is a local phenomenon that is not from far outside the solar system. It may be a new element to the contents of the solar system that has been hypothesized but not quantitatively measured until now,” said Carleton.
Hubble veteran astronomer Rogier Windhorst, also of ASU, first got the idea to assemble Hubble data to go looking for any “ghost light.” “More than 95% of the photons in the images from Hubble’s archive come from distances less than 3 billion miles from Earth. Since Hubble’s very early days, most Hubble users have discarded these sky-photons, as they are interested in the faint discrete objects in Hubble’s images such as stars and galaxies,” said Windhorst. “But these sky-photons contain important information which can be extracted thanks to Hubble’s unique ability to measure faint brightness levels to high precision over its three decades of lifetime.”
A number of graduate and undergraduate students contributed to project SKYSURF, including Rosalia O’Brien, Delondrae Carter and Darby Kramer at ASU, Scott Tompkins at the University of Western Australia, Sarah Caddy at Macquarie University in Australia, and many others.
The team’s research papers are published in The Astronomical Journal and The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
References:
“SKYSURF: Constraints on Zodiacal Light and Extragalactic Background Light through Panchromatic HST All-sky Surface-brightness Measurements: II. First Limits on Diffuse Light at 1.25, 1.4, and 1.6 µm” by Timothy Carleton, Rogier A. Windhorst, Rosalia O’Brien, Seth H. Cohen, Delondrae Carter, Rolf Jansen, Scott Tompkins, Richard G. Arendt, Sarah Caddy, Norman Grogin, Scott J. Kenyon, Anton Koekemoer, John MacKenty, Stefano Casertano, Luke J. M. Davies, Simon P. Driver, Eli Dwek, Alexander Kashlinsky, Nathan Miles, Nor Pirzkal, Aaron Robotham, Russell Ryan, Haley Abate, Hanga Andras-Letanovszky, Jessica Berkheimer, Zak Goisman, Daniel Henningsen, Darby Kramer, Ci’mone Rogers and Andi Swirbul, 4 October 2022, The Astronomical Journal. DOI: 10.3847/1538-3881/ac8d02
“SKYSURF: Constraints on Zodiacal Light and Extragalactic Background Light through Panchromatic HST All-sky Surface-brightness Measurements. I. Survey Overview and Methods” by Rogier A. Windhorst, Timothy Carleton, Rosalia O’Brien, Seth H. Cohen, Delondrae Carter, Rolf Jansen, Scott Tompkins, Richard G. Arendt, Sarah Caddy, Norman Grogin, Anton Koekemoer, John MacKenty, Stefano Casertano, Luke J. M. Davies, Simon P. Driver, Eli Dwek, Alexander Kashlinsky, Scott J. Kenyon, Nathan Miles, Nor Pirzkal, Aaron Robotham, Russell Ryan, Haley Abate, Hanga Andras-Letanovszky, Jessica Berkheimer, John Chambers, Connor Gelb, Zak Goisman, Daniel Henningsen, Isabela Huckabee, Darby Kramer, Teerthal Patel, Rushabh Pawnikar, Ewan Pringle, Ci’mone Rogers, Steven Sherman, Andi Swirbul and Kaitlin Webber, 15 September 2022, The Astronomical Journal. DOI: 10.3847/1538-3881/ac82af
“SKYSURF-3: Testing Crowded Object Catalogs in the Hubble eXtreme Deep Field Mosaics to Study Sample Incompleteness from an Extragalactic Background Light Perspective” by Darby M. Kramer, Timothy Carleton, Seth. H. Cohen, Rolf Jansen, Rogier A. Windhorst, Norman Grogin, Anton Koekemoer, John W. MacKenty and Nor Pirzkal, 18 November 2022, The Astronomical Journal Letters. DOI: 10.3847/2041-8213/ac9cca
“SKYSURF-4: Panchromatic Full Sky Surface Brightness Measurement Methods and Results” by Rosalia O’Brien, Timothy Carleton, Rogier A. Windhorst, Rolf A. Jansen, Delondrae Carter, Scott Tompkins, Sarah Caddy, Seth H. Cohen, Haley Abate, Richard G. Arendt, Jessica Berkheimer, Annalisa Calamida, Stefano Casertano, Simon P. Driver, Connor Gelb, Zak Goisman, Norman Grogin, Daniel Henningsen, Isabela Huckabee, Scott J. Kenyon, Anton M. Koekemoer, Darby Kramer, John Mackenty, Aaron Robotham and Steven Sherman, 13 October 2022, Astrophysics > Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics. arXiv:2210.08010
The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and ESA. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland, conducts Hubble and Webb science operations. STScI is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, in Washington, D.C.
The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Mars Express orbiter may be old — it launched back in 2003 — but it’s still uncovering new clues.
Equipped with a new software upgrade to its Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionosphere Sounding (MARSIS) instrument, the veteran spacecraft has now taken a deeper look into Phobos, one of Mars’ moons whose origins remain an enigma to astronomers.
“We are still at an early stage in our analysis,” said Andrea Cicchetti, a MARSIS team member from Italy’s National Institute for Astrophysics, in a press release. “But we have already seen possible signs of previously unknown features below the moon’s surface. We are excited to see the role that MARSIS might play in finally solving the mystery surrounding Phobos’ origin.”
Mysterious Moon
Phobos, along with Deimos, are Mars’ two diminutive moons, ominously named after the Greek gods of fear and panic.
Neither, it’s worth noting, is particularly moon-like. They’re both small, with Phobos being less than 17 miles in diameter, and look more like lumpy asteroids than a spherical moon like Earth’s.
These strange but fascinating characteristics, along with their suspected asteroid-like compositions, have long split astronomers on their origins.
“Whether Mars’ two small moons are captured asteroids or made of material ripped from Mars during a collision is an open question,” said Mars Express scientist Colin Wilson in the release. “Their appearance suggests they were asteroids, but the way they orbit Mars arguably suggests otherwise.”
Moonlighting
That’s where MARSIS comes in. With an antenna over 130 feet long, MARSIS is capable of shooting low frequency radio waves that can penetrate deep into Phobos’ core. While many of the waves don’t make it past the surface, the ones that do make it bounce between the internal structures and boundaries of differing materials in the mini-moon’s interior.
Examining these reflections, captured in a “radargram,” could paint scientists a better picture of Phobos’ sub-surface structures, as well as its overall composition. Bright lines in the radargram indicate more or less innocuous surface reflections, but the scientists say there’s evidence of fainter, “lower reflections” that could be signs of subterranean structures.
To get to the bottom of this mystery, the ESA will be collaborating with the Japanese Space Agency to collect samples from Phobos’ surface in the Martian Moon Exploration (MMX) mission, currently set to launch in 2024.
More on Mars: Scientists Searching Mars for Good Caves for Astronauts to Live In
The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Mars Express orbiter may be old — it launched back in 2003 — but it’s still uncovering new clues.
Equipped with a new software upgrade to its Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionosphere Sounding (MARSIS) instrument, the veteran spacecraft has now taken a deeper look into Phobos, one of Mars’ moons whose origins remain an enigma to astronomers.
“We are still at an early stage in our analysis,” said Andrea Cicchetti, a MARSIS team member from Italy’s National Institute for Astrophysics, in a press release. “But we have already seen possible signs of previously unknown features below the moon’s surface. We are excited to see the role that MARSIS might play in finally solving the mystery surrounding Phobos’ origin.”
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Mysterious Moon
Phobos, along with Deimos, are Mars’ two diminutive moons, ominously named after the Greek gods of fear and panic.
Neither, it’s worth noting, is particularly moon-like. They’re both small, with Phobos being less than 17 miles in diameter, and look more like lumpy asteroids than a spherical moon like Earth’s.
These strange but fascinating characteristics, along with their suspected asteroid-like compositions, have long split astronomers on their origins.
“Whether Mars’ two small moons are captured asteroids or made of material ripped from Mars during a collision is an open question,” said Mars Express scientist Colin Wilson in the release. “Their appearance suggests they were asteroids, but the way they orbit Mars arguably suggests otherwise.”
Moonlighting
That’s where MARSIS comes in. With an antenna over 130 feet long, MARSIS is capable of shooting low frequency radio waves that can penetrate deep into Phobos’ core. While many of the waves don’t make it past the surface, the ones that do make it bounce between the internal structures and boundaries of differing materials in the mini-moon’s interior.
Examining these reflections, captured in a “radargram,” could paint scientists a better picture of Phobos’ sub-surface structures, as well as its overall composition. Bright lines in the radargram indicate more or less innocuous surface reflections, but the scientists say there’s evidence of fainter, “lower reflections” that could be signs of subterranean structures.
To get to the bottom of this mystery, the ESA will be collaborating with the Japanese Space Agency to collect samples from Phobos’ surface in the Martian Moon Exploration (MMX) mission, currently set to launch in 2024.
More on Mars: Scientists Searching Mars for Good Caves for Astronauts to Live In
The post Probe Detects “Unknown Features” Inside Martian Moon Phobos appeared first on Futurism.
NASA scientists, using a tool designed to study how dust affects climate, have identified more than 50 spots around the world emitting major levels of methane, a development that could help combat the potent greenhouse gas.
”Reining in methane emissions is key to limiting global warming,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a press release on Tuesday.
”This exciting new development will not only help researchers better pinpoint where methane leaks are coming from, but also provide insight on how they can be addressed – quickly.”
NASA said its Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation (EMIT) is designed to foster understanding of the effects of airborne dust on climate.
But EMIT, which was installed on the International Space Station in July and can focus on areas as small as a soccer field, has also shown the ability to detect the presence of methane.
A 4.8 kilometer long methane plume south of Tehran, Iran. (NASA/JPL-Caltech)
NASA said more than 50 “super-emitters” of methane gas in Central Asia, the Middle East, and the southwestern United States have been identified so far. Most of them are connected to the fossil-fuel, waste or agriculture sectors.
Kate Calvin, NASA’s chief scientist and senior climate advisor, said EMIT’s “additional methane-detecting capability offers a remarkable opportunity to measure and monitor greenhouse gases that contribute to climate change.”
”Exceeds our expectations”
Methane is responsible for roughly 30 percent of the global rise in temperatures to date.
While far less abundant in the atmosphere than CO2, it is about 28 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas on a century-long timescale. Over a 20-year time frame, it is 80 times more potent.
Methane lingers in the atmosphere for only a decade, compared to hundreds or thousands of years for CO2.
This means a sharp reduction in emissions could shave several tenths of a degree Celsius off of projected global warming by mid-century, helping keep alive the Paris Agreement goal of capping Earth’s average temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius, according to the UN Environment Programme (UNEP).
”EMIT will potentially find hundreds of super-emitters – some of them previously spotted through air-, space-, or ground-based measurement, and others that were unknown,” NASA said.
Andrew Thorpe, a research technologist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory leading the EMIT methane effort, said some of the methane plumes detected by EMIT are among the largest ever seen.
”What we’ve found in a just a short time already exceeds our expectations,” Thorpe said.
NASA said a methane plume about 2 miles (3.3 kilometers) long was detected southeast of Carlsbad, New Mexico, in the Permian Basin, one of the largest oilfields in the world.
It said 12 plumes from oil and gas infrastructure were identified in Turkmenistan, east of the Caspian Sea port city of Hazar.
A methane plume at least 3 miles (4.8 kilometers) long was detected south of Tehran from a major waste-processing complex, NASA said.
The Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation (EMIT) identified more than 50 methane hotspots around the world.
NASA scientists, using a tool designed to study how dust affects climate, have identified more than 50 methane-emitting hotspots around the world, a development that could help combat the potent greenhouse gas.
NASA said on Tuesday that its Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation (EMIT) had identified more than 50 methane “super-emitters” in Central Asia, the Middle East and the southwestern United States since it was installed in July onboard the International Space Station.
The newly measured methane hotspots — some previously known and others just discovered — include sprawling oil and gas facilities and large landfill sites. Methane is responsible for roughly 30 percent of the global rise in temperatures to date.
“Reining in methane emissions is key to limiting global warming,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a statement, adding that the instrument will help “pinpoint” methane super-emitters so that such emissions can be stopped “at the source”.
Methane is far more effective than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in Earth’s atmosphere. Our new @NASAClimate EMIT mission, designed to measure atmospheric dust, has mapped more than 50 methane “super-emitters” around the planet: https://t.co/d4OhBwIeOQ pic.twitter.com/9QLxDMN0nW
— NASA (@NASA) October 25, 2022
Circling Earth every 90 minutes from its perch onboard the space station some 400km (250 miles) high, EMIT is able to scan vast tracts of the planet dozens of kilometres across while also focusing in on areas as small as a football field.
The instrument, called an imaging spectrometer, was built primarily to identify the mineral composition of dust blown into Earth’s atmosphere from deserts and other arid regions, but it has proven adept at detecting large methane emissions.
“Some of the [methane] plumes EMIT detected are among the largest ever seen — unlike anything that has ever been observed from space,” said Andrew Thorpe, a Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) research technologist leading the methane studies.
Examples of the newly-imaged methane super-emitters showcased by JPL on Tuesday included a cluster of 12 plumes from oil and gas infrastructure in Turkmenistan, some plumes stretching more than 32 km (20 miles).
Scientists estimate the Turkmenistan plumes collectively spew methane at a rate of 50,400kg (111,000 pounds) per hour, rivalling the peak flow from the 2015 Aliso Canyon gas field blowout near Los Angeles that ranks as one of the largest accidental methane releases in US history.
Two other large emitters were an oilfield in New Mexico and a waste-processing complex in Iran, emitting nearly 29,000kg (60,000 pounds) of methane per hour combined. The methane plume south of the Iranian capital Tehran was at least 4.8km (3 miles) long.
JPL officials said neither site were previously known to scientists.
“As it continues to survey the planet, EMIT will observe places in which no one thought to look for greenhouse-gas emitters before, and it will find plumes that no one expects,” Robert Green, EMIT’s principal investigator at JPL, said in a statement.
A by-product of decomposing organic material and the chief component of natural gas used in power plants, methane accounts for a fraction of all human-caused greenhouse emissions but has about 80 times more heat-trapping capacity pound-for-pound than carbon dioxide.
Compared with CO2, which lingers in the atmosphere for centuries, methane persists for only about a decade, meaning that reductions in methane emissions have a more immediate effect on planetary warming.
Scientists have used spectroscopic observations of ultraviolet light from quasars to detect and map the Magellanic Corona, a diffuse halo of hot, supercharged gas surrounding the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds. Shown in purple, the corona stretches more than 100,000 light-years from the main mass of stars, gas, and dust that make up the Magellanic Clouds, intermingling with the hotter and more extensive corona that surrounds the Milky Way. Credit: NASA, ESA, Leah Hustak (STScI)
Researchers confirm the existence of the elusive Magellanic Corona, a protective halo of hot, ionized gas previously known only in theory.
For billions of years, the
Using a combination of the unique ultraviolet vision of the
Nearly 200,000 light-years from Earth, the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, floats in space, in a long and slow dance around our galaxy. As the Milky Way’s gravity gently tugs on its neighbor’s gas clouds, they collapse to form new stars. In turn, these light up the gas clouds in a kaleidoscope of colors, visible in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Credit: NASA, ESA, Acknowledgment: Josh Lake
For billions of years, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds – the Milky Way’s largest satellite galaxies – have followed a perilous journey. Orbiting one another as they are pulled in toward our home galaxy, they have begun to unravel, leaving behind trails of gaseous debris. And yet these dwarf galaxies remain intact, with ongoing vigorous star formation, leaving astronomers baffled.
“A lot of people were struggling to explain how these streams of material could be there,” said Dhanesh Krishnarao, assistant professor at Colorado College. “If this gas was removed from these galaxies, how are they still forming stars?”
A team of astronomers led by Krishnarao has finally found the answer, with the help of data from
However, while covering a huge portion of the southern sky and extending more than 100,000 light-years from the Magellanic clouds, the corona is effectively invisible. In fact, mapping it required scouring through 30 years of archived data for suitable measurements.
Scientists think that a galaxy’s corona is a remnant of the primordial cloud of gas that collapsed to form the galaxy billions of years ago. Although coronas have been seen around more distant dwarf galaxies, astronomers had never before been able to probe one in as great of detail as this.
“There’re lots of predictions from computer simulations about what they should look like, how they should interact over billions of years, but observationally we can’t really test most of them because dwarf galaxies are typically just too hard to detect,” said Krishnarao. Because they are right on our doorstep, the Magellanic Clouds provide a fantastic opportunity to study how dwarf galaxies interact and evolve.
In search of direct evidence of the Magellanic Corona, the research team sifted through the Hubble and FUSE archives for ultraviolet observations of quasars located billions of light-years behind it. Quasars are the extremely bright cores of galaxies containing massive active black holes. Although the scientists reasoned that although the corona would be too dim to see on its own, they thought that it should be visible as a sort of fog obscuring and absorbing distinct patterns of bright light from quasars in the background. Hubble observations of quasars were used in the past to map the corona surrounding the Andromeda galaxy.
By analyzing patterns in ultraviolet light from 28 quasars, the researchers were able to detect and characterize the material surrounding the Large Magellanic Cloud and confirm that the corona exists. As predicted, the quasar spectra are imprinted with the distinct signatures of carbon, oxygen, and silicon that make up the halo of hot
“Anything that tries to pass into the galaxy has to pass through this material first, so it can absorb some of that impact,” explained Krishnarao. “In addition, the corona is the first material that can be extracted. While giving up a little bit of the corona, you’re protecting the gas that’s inside the galaxy itself and able to form new stars.”
Reference: “Observations of a Magellanic Corona” by Dhanesh Krishnarao, Andrew J. Fox, Elena D’Onghia, Bart P. Wakker, Frances H. Cashman, J. Christopher Howk, Scott Lucchini, David M. French and Nicolas Lehner, 28 September 2022, Nature. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-022-05090-5
The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and ESA (European Space Agency). NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland, conducts Hubble science operations. STScI is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy in Washington, D.C.
The Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer (FUSE) was a project of international cooperation between NASA, CSA (Canadian Space Agency), and CNES (French Space Agency), and was in operation between 1999 and 2007.
Scientists have used spectroscopic observations of ultraviolet light from quasars to detect and map the Magellanic Corona, a diffuse halo of hot, supercharged gas surrounding the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds. Shown in purple, the corona stretches more than 100,000 light-years from the main mass of stars, gas, and dust that make up the Magellanic Clouds, intermingling with the hotter and more extensive corona that surrounds the Milky Way. Credit: NASA, ESA, Leah Hustak (STScI)
Researchers confirm the existence of the elusive Magellanic Corona, a protective halo of hot, ionized gas previously known only in theory.
For billions of years, the
Using a combination of the unique ultraviolet vision of the
Nearly 200,000 light-years from Earth, the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, floats in space, in a long and slow dance around our galaxy. As the Milky Way’s gravity gently tugs on its neighbor’s gas clouds, they collapse to form new stars. In turn, these light up the gas clouds in a kaleidoscope of colors, visible in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Credit: NASA, ESA, Acknowledgment: Josh Lake
For billions of years, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds – the Milky Way’s largest satellite galaxies – have followed a perilous journey. Orbiting one another as they are pulled in toward our home galaxy, they have begun to unravel, leaving behind trails of gaseous debris. And yet these dwarf galaxies remain intact, with ongoing vigorous star formation, leaving astronomers baffled.
“A lot of people were struggling to explain how these streams of material could be there,” said Dhanesh Krishnarao, assistant professor at Colorado College. “If this gas was removed from these galaxies, how are they still forming stars?”
A team of astronomers led by Krishnarao has finally found the answer, with the help of data from
However, while covering a huge portion of the southern sky and extending more than 100,000 light-years from the Magellanic clouds, the corona is effectively invisible. In fact, mapping it required scouring through 30 years of archived data for suitable measurements.
Scientists think that a galaxy’s corona is a remnant of the primordial cloud of gas that collapsed to form the galaxy billions of years ago. Although coronas have been seen around more distant dwarf galaxies, astronomers had never before been able to probe one in as great of detail as this.
“There’re lots of predictions from computer simulations about what they should look like, how they should interact over billions of years, but observationally we can’t really test most of them because dwarf galaxies are typically just too hard to detect,” said Krishnarao. Because they are right on our doorstep, the Magellanic Clouds provide a fantastic opportunity to study how dwarf galaxies interact and evolve.
In search of direct evidence of the Magellanic Corona, the research team sifted through the Hubble and FUSE archives for ultraviolet observations of quasars located billions of light-years behind it. Quasars are the extremely bright cores of galaxies containing massive active black holes. Although the scientists reasoned that although the corona would be too dim to see on its own, they thought that it should be visible as a sort of fog obscuring and absorbing distinct patterns of bright light from quasars in the background. Hubble observations of quasars were used in the past to map the corona surrounding the Andromeda galaxy.
By analyzing patterns in ultraviolet light from 28 quasars, the researchers were able to detect and characterize the material surrounding the Large Magellanic Cloud and confirm that the corona exists. As predicted, the quasar spectra are imprinted with the distinct signatures of carbon, oxygen, and silicon that make up the halo of hot
“Anything that tries to pass into the galaxy has to pass through this material first, so it can absorb some of that impact,” explained Krishnarao. “In addition, the corona is the first material that can be extracted. While giving up a little bit of the corona, you’re protecting the gas that’s inside the galaxy itself and able to form new stars.”
Reference: “Observations of a Magellanic Corona” by Dhanesh Krishnarao, Andrew J. Fox, Elena D’Onghia, Bart P. Wakker, Frances H. Cashman, J. Christopher Howk, Scott Lucchini, David M. French and Nicolas Lehner, 28 September 2022, Nature. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-022-05090-5
The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and ESA (European Space Agency). NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland, conducts Hubble science operations. STScI is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy in Washington, D.C.
The Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer (FUSE) was a project of international cooperation between NASA, CSA (Canadian Space Agency), and CNES (French Space Agency), and was in operation between 1999 and 2007.
For billions of years, the Milky Way’s largest satellite galaxies—the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds—have followed a perilous journey. Orbiting one another as they are pulled in toward our home galaxy, they have begun to unravel, leaving behind trails of gaseous debris. And yet—to the puzzlement of astronomers—these dwarf galaxies remain intact, with ongoing vigorous star formation.
“A lot of people were struggling to explain how these streams of material could be there,” said Dhanesh Krishnarao, assistant professor at Colorado College. “If this gas was removed from these galaxies, how are they still forming stars?”
With the help of data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and a retired satellite called the Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer (FUSE), a team of astronomers led by Krishnarao has finally found the answer: the Magellanic system is surrounded by a corona, a protective shield of hot supercharged gas. This cocoons the two galaxies, preventing their gas supplies from being siphoned off by the Milky Way, and therefore allowing them to continue forming new stars.
This discovery, which was just published in Nature, addresses a novel aspect of galaxy evolution. “Galaxies envelope themselves in gaseous cocoons, which act as defensive shields against other galaxies,” said co-investigator Andrew Fox of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland.
Astronomers predicted the corona’s existence several years ago. “We discovered that if we included a corona in the simulations of the Magellanic Clouds falling onto the Milky Way, we could explain the mass of extracted gas for the first time,” explained Elena D’Onghia, a co-investigator at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “We knew that the Large Magellanic Cloud should be massive enough to have a corona.”
But although the corona stretches more than 100,000 light-years from the Magellanic clouds and covers a huge portion of the southern sky, it is effectively invisible. Mapping it required scouring through 30 years of archived data for suitable measurements.
Researchers think that a galaxy’s corona is a remnant of the primordial cloud of gas that collapsed to form the galaxy billions of years ago. Although coronas have been seen around more distant dwarf galaxies, astronomers had never before been able to probe one in as much detail as this.
“There’re lots of predictions from computer simulations about what they should look like, how they should interact over billions of years, but observationally we can’t really test most of them because dwarf galaxies are typically just too hard to detect,” said Krishnarao. Because they are right on our doorstep, the Magellanic Clouds provide an ideal opportunity to study how dwarf galaxies interact and evolve.
In search of direct evidence of the Magellanic Corona, the team combed through the Hubble and FUSE archives for ultraviolet observations of quasars located billions of light-years behind it. Quasars are the extremely bright cores of galaxies harboring massive active black holes. The team reasoned that although the corona would be too dim to see on its own, it should be visible as a sort of fog obscuring and absorbing distinct patterns of bright light from quasars in the background. Hubble observations of quasars were used in the past to map the corona surrounding the Andromeda galaxy.
By analyzing patterns in ultraviolet light from 28 quasars, the team was able to detect and characterize the material surrounding the Large Magellanic Cloud and confirm that the corona exists. As predicted, the quasar spectra are imprinted with the distinct signatures of carbon, oxygen, and silicon that make up the halo of hot plasma that surrounds the galaxy.
The ability to detect the corona required extremely detailed ultraviolet spectra. “The resolution of Hubble and FUSE were crucial for this study,” explained Krishnarao. “The corona gas is so diffuse, it’s barely even there.” In addition, it is mixed with other gases, including the streams pulled from the Magellanic Clouds and material originating in the Milky Way.
By mapping the results, the team also discovered that the amount of gas decreases with distance from the center of the Large Magellanic Cloud. “It’s a perfect telltale signature that this corona is really there,” said Krishnarao. “It really is cocooning the galaxy and protecting it.”
How can such a thin shroud of gas protect a galaxy from destruction?
“Anything that tries to pass into the galaxy has to pass through this material first, so it can absorb some of that impact,” explained Krishnarao. “In addition, the corona is the first material that can be extracted. While giving up a little bit of the corona, you’re protecting the gas that’s inside the galaxy itself and able to form new stars.”
Magellanic Stream arcing over Milky Way may be five times closer than previously thought
More information:
Dhanesh Krishnarao et al, Observations of a Magellanic Corona, Nature (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-022-05090-5
Citation:
Hubble detects protective shield defending a pair of dwarf galaxies (2022, September 28)
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