Tag Archives: Natural sciences

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A 319-million-year-old brain has been discovered. It could be the oldest of its kind

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CNN
 — 

A scan of the skull of a 319-million-year-old fossilized fish has led to the discovery of the oldest example of a well-preserved vertebrate brain, shining a new light on the early evolution of bony fish.

The fossil of the skull belonging to the extinct Coccocephalus wildi was found in a coal mine in England more than a century ago, according to researchers of the study published in the journal Nature on Wednesday.

The fossil is the only known specimen of the fish species so scientists from the University of Michigan in the US and the University of Birmingham in the UK used the nondestructive imaging technique of computed tomography (CT) scanning to look inside its skull and examine its internal bodily structure.

Upon doing so, came a surprise. The CT image showed an “unidentified blob,” a University of Michigan press release said.

The distinct, 3D object had a clearly defined structure with features found in vertebrate brains: It was bilaterally symmetrical, contained hollow spaces similar in appearance to ventricles and had extending filaments that resembled cranial nerves.

“This is such an exciting and unanticipated find,” study coauthor Sam Giles, a vertebrate paleontologist and senior research fellow at the University of Birmingham, told CNN Thursday, adding that they had “no idea” there was a brain inside when they decided to study the skull.

“It was so unexpected that it took us a while to be certain that it actually was a brain. Aside from being just a preservational curiosity, the anatomy of the brain in this fossil has big implications for our understanding of brain evolution in fishes,” she added.

C. wildi was an early ray-finned fish – possessing a backbone and fins supported by bony rods called “rays” – that is thought to have been 6 to 8 inches long, swum in an estuary, and ate small aquatic animals and aquatic insects, according to the researchers.

The brains of living ray-finned fish display structural features not seen in other vertebrates, most notably a forebrain consisting of neural tissue that folds outward, according to the study. In other vertebrates, this neural tissue folds inward.

C. wildi lacks this hallmark feature of ray-finned fish, with the configuration of a part of its forebrain called the “telencephalon” more closely resembling that of other vertebrates, such as amphibians, birds, reptiles and mammals, according to the study authors.

“This indicates that the telencephalon configuration seen in living ray-finned fishes must have emerged much later than previously thought,” lead study author Rodrigo Tinoco Figueroa, a doctoral student at the University of Michigan’s Museum of Paleontology, said.

He added that “our knowledge on the evolution of the vertebrate brain is mostly restricted to what we know from living species,” but “this fossil helps us fill important gaps in the knowledge, that could only be obtained from exceptional fossils like this.”

Unlike hard bones and teeth, scientists rarely find brain tissue – which is soft – preserved in vertebrate fossils, according to the researchers.

However, the study noted that C. wildi’s brain was “exceptionally” well preserved. While there are invertebrate brains up to 500 million years old that have been found, they are all flattened, said Giles, who added that this vertebrate brain is “the oldest three-dimensional fossil brain of anything we know.”

The skull was found in layers of soapstone. Low oxygen concentration, rapid burial by fine-grained sediment, and a very compact and protective braincase played key roles in preserving the brain of the fish, according to Figueroa.

The braincase created a chemical micro-environment around the enclosed brain that could have helped to replace its soft tissue with dense mineral that maintained the fine details of the brain’s 3D structures.

Giles said: “The next steps are to figure out exactly how such delicate features as the brain can be preserved for hundreds of millions of years, and look for more fossils that also preserve the brain.”

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New Map Shows All the Matter in the Universe

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Researchers used data from the Dark Energy Survey and the South Pole Telescope to re-calculate the total amount and distribution of matter in the universe. They found that there’s about six times as much dark matter in the universe as there is regular matter, a finding consistent with previous measurements.

But the team also found that the matter was less clumped together than previously thought, a finding detailed in a set of three papers, all published this week in Physical Review D.

The Dark Energy Survey observes photons of light at visible wavelengths; the South Pole Telescope looks at light at microwave wavelengths. That means the South Pole Telescope observes the cosmic microwave background—the oldest radiation we can see, which dates back to about 300,000 years after the Big Bang.

The team presented the datasets from the respective surveys in two maps of the sky; they then overlaid the two maps to understand the full picture of how matter is distributed in the universe.

“It seems like there are slightly less fluctuations in the current universe than we would predict, assuming our standard cosmological model anchored to the early universe,” said Eric Baxter, an astronomer at the University of Hawai’i and a co-author of the research, in a university release. “The high precision and robustness to sources of bias of the new results present a particularly compelling case that we may be starting to uncover holes in our standard cosmological model.”

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Dark matter is something in the universe that we cannot observe directly. We know it’s there because of its gravitational effects, but otherwise we can’t see it. Dark matter makes up about 27% of the universe, according to CERN. (Ordinary matter is about 5% of the universe’s total content.) The remaining 68% is made up of dark energy, a hitherto uncertain category that is evenly distributed throughout the universe and responsible for the universe’s accelerating expansion.

The Dark Energy Survey still has three years of data to be analyzed, and a new look at the cosmic microwave background is currently being undertaken by the South Pole Telescope. Meanwhile, the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (high in the Chilean desert of the same name) is currently taking a high-sensitivity survey of the background. With newly precise data to probe, researchers may be able to put the standard cosmological model to a difficult test.

In 2021, the Atacama telescope helped scientists come up with a newly precise measurement for the age of the universe: 13.77 billion years. More querying of the cosmic microwave background could also help researchers deal with the Hubble tension, a disagreement between two of the best ways for measuring the expansion of the universe. (Depending on how it’s measured, researchers land on two different figures for the rate of that expansion.)

As means of observation get more precise, and more data is collected and analyzed, that information can be fed back into grand cosmological models to determine where we’ve been wrong in the past and lead us to new lines of investigation.

More: Antimatter Could Travel Through Our Galaxy With Ease, Physicists Say

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Webb Telescope Captures Countless Galaxies in New Image

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The European Space Agency has released its image of the month for January, and it is (perhaps unsurprisingly) a stunning shot from the Webb Space Telescope.

At the bottom of the image is LEDA 2046648, a spiral galaxy over one billion light-years from Earth in the constellation Hercules. Behind LEDA is a field of more distant galaxies, ranging from spiral shapes to pinpricks of light in the distant universe.

Webb launched from French Guiana in December 2021; its scientific observations of the cosmos began in July. Webb has imaged distant galaxies, exoplanets, and even shed new light on worlds in our local solar system.

Though this image was only just released, it was taken during the commissioning process for one of Webb’s instruments, the Near-Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph (NIRISS), according to an ESA release. While NIRISS was focused on a white dwarf—the core remnant of a star—Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) turned its focus to LEDA 2046648 and its environs in the night sky.

One of Webb’s primary objectives in looking at the distant universe is to better understand how the first stars and galaxies formed. To that end, the telescope is looking at some of the most ancient light in the universe, primarily through its instruments NIRCam and MIRI.

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The image does contains hundreds of light sources our eye can perceive, but the infrared data from which the image was formed certainly records many more galaxies.

Webb’s deep field imagery is what enables scientists to see some of the most ancient light in the universe, often capitalizing on gravitational lensing (the magnification of distant light due to the gravitational warping of spacetime) to see particularly ancient sources.

Though this shot of LEDA 2046648 is not a deep field, it evokes a similar feeling: awe, at the huge scale of the cosmos, and (if only briefly) the realization that our minds can only comprehend a fraction of it.

More: Zoom in on Webb Telescope’s Biggest Image Yet

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Cat-size primate relatives lived in the Arctic 52 million years ago

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CNN
 — 

Analysis of fossils found in the far north of Canada has revealed that two previously unknown species of ancient near-primates lived above the Arctic Circle some 52 million years ago, according to new research.

The now-extinct creatures belonged to a part of the primate family tree that branched off before the ancestors of lemurs diverged from the common ancestors of monkeys, apes and humans, said study coauthor Dr. Chris Beard, a distinguished foundation professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Kansas and senior curator at the university’s Biodiversity Institute and Natural History Museum.

The two sister species lived on what is now Ellesmere Island in northern Canada. They are the first known primatomorphans, or primate relatives, to have lived in latitudes north of the Arctic Circle, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal PLOS ONE.

The two species have been named Ignacius mckennai and Ignacius dawsonae.

“To get an idea of what Ignacius looked like, imagine a cross between a lemur and a squirrel that was about half the size of a domestic cat,” Beard said. “Unlike living primates, Ignacius had eyes on the sides of its head (instead of facing forward like ours) and it had claws on its fingers and toes instead of nails.”

When researchers analyzed the fossil fragments, the jawbones and teeth of Ignacius seemed different from other primatomorphans that lived in North America’s more southerly reaches.

“What I’ve been doing the past couple of years is trying to understand what they were eating, and if they were eating different materials than their middle-latitude counterparts,” said lead study author Kristen Miller, a doctoral student at the University of Kansas’ Biodiversity Institute and Natural History Museum.

The Arctic primatomorphans evolved special features in their jaws and teeth to chomp on harder foods, like nuts and seeds, as opposed to their preferred diet of ripe fruit. This physical adaptation was likely because for half of the year, the species lived in the darkness of Arctic winter, when food was much more difficult to find.

“That, we think, is probably the biggest physical challenge of the ancient environment for these animals,” Beard said.

These findings could also be used to understand how animals adapt and evolve amid periods of climate change — as with species facing the human-driven climate crisis today.

Researchers believe the primatomorphans descended from an ancestor species that trekked north from the more southerly regions of North America. Similar fossils have been found across Wyoming, Texas, Montana and Colorado, according to Miller.

“No primate relative has ever been found at such extreme latitudes,” Miller said. “They’re more usually found around the equator in tropical regions. I was able to do a phylogenetic analysis, which helped me understand how the fossils from Ellesmere Island are related to species found in midlatitudes of North America.”

The common ancestor of the two Ignacius species likely reached Ellesmere Island around 51 million years ago, Beard said. At the time, it was a peninsula jutting into the Arctic Sea from adjacent parts of North America.

Ignacius mckennai and Ignacius dawsonae are named in part after two of Beard’s former colleagues and mentors, he explained: the late paleontologists Dr. Mary Dawson of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh and Dr. Malcolm McKenna of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, both of whom worked extensively on Ellesmere Island.

During these ancient times, the Arctic Circle was a warmer, more hospitable place for life. Global warming had caused the region to be much warmer and wetter, with a swamplike environment. The warmer temperatures during this period likely encouraged Igancius’ ancestor to venture north.

“Winter temperatures may have gotten as low as freezing for short periods of time, but we know that there were hardly ever any sustained freezing temperatures because crocodilians have been found on Ellesmere Island, and they cannot survive long freezes,” Beard said. “In the summertime, temperatures reached about 70 degrees Fahrenheit.”

Despite the warmer temperatures, the primatomorphans still had to adapt to survive in their unique northern ecosystem. They grew bigger than their southern relatives, who resembled squirrels; such growth commonly happens in mammals living in northern latitudes because it helps them maintain the needed core body temperature, Beard said.

“(The findings) tells us to expect dramatic and dynamic changes to the Arctic ecosystem as it transforms in the face of continued warming,” Beard said. “Some animals that don’t currently live in the Arctic will colonize that region, and some of them will adapt to their new environment in ways that parallel Ignacius. Likewise, we can expect some of the new colonists to diversify in the Arctic, just as Ignacius did.”

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Trilobites armed with tridents could be the earliest known example of sexual combat

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CNN
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From a deer’s elaborate branching antlers to the fiddler crab’s oversize claw, the animal kingdom is full of flashy features used in combat to help secure a mate.

A team of researchers announced last week that it has found the earliest known evidence of sexual combat in the form of a trident-headed trilobite that scuttled the seafloor 400 million years ago.

Trilobites were one of the earliest arthropods, the group of invertebrates containing insects, spiders, lobsters, crabs and other organisms with exoskeletons, segmented bodies and jointed limbs. These pill bug-like sea creatures first emerged 521 million years ago and died out 252 million years ago in the mass extinction that gave way to the dinosaurs.

There were over 22,000 species of trilobite, some reaching lengths of more than 2 feet, but the type that caught the eye of paleontologist Alan Gishlick was more modest in size, around 2 to 3 inches. He recalls seeing specimens of Walliserops at fossil trade shows and marveling at the trident-shaped protrusion branching off the trilobites’ heads.

“That’s the type of structure that has to have a function. You don’t put that much biological energy into something that doesn’t do something,” said Gishlick, an associate professor of paleontology at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania.

Researchers have proposed various uses for these forking protrusions, including defense, hunting and attracting mates.

In a paper published January 17 in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Gishlick and coauthor Richard Fortey delved into these hypotheses, ruling out the trident as a means of defense or a hunting tool based on how the trilobite would have been able to move it. The trident wouldn’t be of much use against predators attacking from above or behind, and while it could have been used to spear prey, the trilobite would then be stuck with its meal just out of reach.

What made the most sense to Gishlick and Fortey, a paleontologist at the Natural History Museum in London, was that Walliserops used the trident to fight among each other.

Their thinking was bolstered by an unusual specimen of Walliserops with a deformed trident bearing four prongs instead of the usual three. If the trident was a vital part of day-to-day survival, they reasoned, then the trilobite probably wouldn’t have lasted for long with a malformed one.

Bolstered with the evidence for Walliserops’ trident being used to win mates, the researchers turned to the closest analogue they could find in the modern world. “The structure reminds me a heck of a lot of beetle horns,” Gishlick said.

The researchers used a technique called landmark-based geometric morphometrics, which Gishlick described as a means of comparing complex shapes in a statistically robust way, to analyze the surface-level similarity of trilobite tridents and horns of rhinoceros beetles. They found that the trilobite tridents’ shape had a lot in common with the horns of beetles that flip their dueling partners in a “shoveling” motion, as opposed to other species whose horns are better for fencing or grasping.

Gishlick said he believes that, like in beetles, trilobites’ tridents were “sexual weapons” used by males sparring to win mates. “This is the earliest known structure that we can point to and say, ‘Yeah, I’m pretty sure that this is an animal weapon used in reproductive competition,’ ” he said.

Furthermore, Gishlick explained: “Generally, organisms that are involved in interspecific combat over mates are highly dimorphic” — varying in appearance from one sex to the other — “because only one does the competition, and generally in the animal world that’s the male.”

Growing features such as big combat-ready horns requires a lot of energy, and female animals already have to expend lots of it to produce eggs.

If the trilobites’ tridents are the first evidence of sexual weapons, then they could also be the earliest known evidence of sexual dimorphism. There’s one problem with this hypothesis, however: Scientists have no definitive means of telling which Walliserops are male and which are female, and no trident-less Walliserops have been discovered.

That might be due to bias by fossil collectors, who Gishlick said often prioritize bigger, flashier specimens, or because the females might be labeled as entirely different species. “This to me makes it very clear that you better be looking for females,” Gishlick said.

Erin McCullough, an assistant professor of biology at Clark University in Massachusetts, said she agrees with the researchers’ conclusion that the trilobite tridents were likely used for interspecies combat. However, she’s not sold on their argument that this was a trait only possessed by males.

“In general, if there’s going to be an extravagant trait that’s used for fighting for mates, usually, it’s the males that have the extravagant trait, but biology is fun because there’s always exceptions — female reindeer have antlers,” said McCullough, who was not involved with the study (but whose beetle analyses Gishlick and Fortey drew upon for their work).

“If they are arguing that these are male weapons that are used to gain access to females, it would have been a stronger story to me if they had evidence that the females don’t have weapons.”

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Striking new images reveal beauty of forgotten, and largest, amber fossil of a flower

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CNN
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Almost 40 million years ago a flower bloomed in a Baltic conifer forest. Dripping tree resin encased the petals and pollen, forever showcasing an ephemeral moment in our planet’s past.

Scientists have taken a fresh look at the unique amber fossil, which was first documented in 1872 as belonging to a pharmacist called Kowalewski in what’s now Kaliningrad, Russia.

The striking fossil had been languishing largely forgotten in the collection of the Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources in Berlin (BGR), according to Eva-Maria Sadowski, a postdoctoral researcher at the Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin’s natural history museum, and author of the new study.

She said she heard about the fossilized flower, officially known as specimen X4088, in passing from a retired colleague, who she thought was exaggerating.

“He told me that he once visited the BGR and that (he) saw the most amazing and largest amber flower in their collection. I was not aware that they had an amber collection. So I asked the curator of the BGR collection if I could come to see their collection – and there I found the specimen X4088,” she said via email.

“I was more than surprised to see such a large flower inclusion.”

At 28 millimeters (1.1 inches) across, it’s the largest known flower to be fossilized in amber – three times the size of similar fossils.

Sadowski extracted and examined pollen from the amber. She found that the flower had been misidentified when it was first studied.

“The original genus name of this specimen was Stewartia of the plant family Theaceae. But we could show in our study that this was not correct, mainly based on the pollen morphology. But when the specimen was first studied in the 19th century, they (had) not discovered or studied the pollen,” she said.

The flower is closely related to a genus of flowering plants common in Asia today known as Symplocos – shrubs or trees that sport white or yellow flowers.

Originally named Stewartia kowalewskii, the authors propose a new name for the flower of Symplocos kowalewskii.

Amber fossils offer a tantalizing, three dimensional look at the past. As well as plants and flowers, a dinosaur tail, a crab, a hell ant, a spider mom and her young, an ancient bird’s foot and a lizard’s skull have been found entombed in globs of tree resin.

The study was published in the journal Scientific Reports on Thursday.

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Astronomers Find the Edge of Our Galaxy

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The Andromeda Galaxy captured by the NASA Galaxy Evolution Mapper in 2012.
Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech

In the quest to find the outer limits of our galaxy, astronomers have discovered over 200 stars that form the Milky Way’s edge, the most distant of which is over one million light-years away—nearly halfway to the Andromeda galaxy.

The 208 stars the researchers identified are known as RR Lyrae stars, which are stars with a brightness that can change as viewed from Earth. These stars are typically old and brighten and dim at regular intervals, which is a mechanism that allows scientists to calculate how far away they are. By calculating the distance to these RR Lyrae stars, the team found that the farthest of the bunch was located about halfway between the Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxy, one of our cosmic next-door neighbors.

“This study is redefining what constitutes the outer limits of our galaxy,” said Raja GuhaThakurta in a press release. GuhaThakurta is professor and chair of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of California Santa Cruz. “Our galaxy and Andromeda are both so big, there’s hardly any space between the two galaxies.”

Illustration: NASA, ESA, AND A. FEILD (STSCI)

The Milky Way galaxy consists of a few different parts, the primary of which is a thin, spiral disk about 100,000 light-years across. Our home solar system sits on one of the arms of this disk. An inner and outer halo surround the disk, and these halos contain some of the oldest stars in our galaxy.

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Previous studies have placed the edge of the outer halo at 1 million light-years from the Milky Way’s center, but based on the new work, the edge of this halo should be about 1.04 million light-years from the galactic center. Yuting Feng, a doctoral student at the university working with GuhaThakurta, led the study and is presenting the findings this week at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle.

“We were able to use these variable stars as reliable tracers to pin down the distances,” said Yuting Feng, a doctoral student at the university working with GuhaThakurta. “Our observations confirm the theoretical estimates of the size of the halo, so that’s an important result.”

Space is vast and lonely—but we can feel a bit cozier knowing that our galactic neighbor is closer than we thought.

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Webb Telescope Spots Ancient Galaxy Built Like the Milky Way

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The Webb Space Telescope’s latest target is one previously imaged by Hubble: the distant barred spiral galaxy EGS23205. Targets like this one will boost our understanding of the early universe and how ancient stars and galaxies took form.

The two images above show EGS23205 as seen by Hubble and Webb. Hubble’s image of the galaxy (taken in near-infrared) is much noisier, and the structure of the galaxy is harder to discern. But Webb’s image (at mid-infrared wavelengths) is much crisper, revealing a clear bar of stars stretching out from the galactic center.

Stellar bars are huge galactic cross-sections composed of countless stars. The bars play an important role in galactic evolution; they push gas toward the galactic center, helping fuel star formation and feed the supermassive black holes that lie within galactic nuclei. Our own Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy.

Analysis of the image was submitted to the preprint server arXiv last year. Webb has imaged many ancient galaxies in its mere six months of scientific operations.

Some of Webb’s targets are among the earliest galaxies yet seen, and they appear to Webb as they were just several hundred million years after the Big Bang (the universe is now close to 14 billion years old).

Webb telescope reveals Milky Way–like galaxies in young universe

EGS23205 is seen as it was about 11 billion years ago. The image reveals that even early galaxies had well-defined bars (spiral galaxies were previously thought to be much later arrivals in the universe).

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“The bars hardly visible in Hubble data just popped out in the JWST image, showing the tremendous power of JWST to see the underlying structure in galaxies,” said Shardha Jogee, an astronomer at UT Austin and co-author of the research, in a press release.

Webb has previously imaged other objects once captured by Hubble. In October, the new $10 billion observatory beheld the Pillars of Creation, huge plumes of gas and dust in the Eagle Nebula. In the same month, the Webb team produced an image of merging galaxies 270 million light-years from Earth, imaged by Hubble back in 2008.

The two space telescopes observe at different wavelengths for the most part—Hubble primarily at visible wavelengths and Webb primarily in the infrared and near-infrared. Webb’s vivid handiwork is built on the mechanical shoulders of Hubble. Side-by-side image comparisons show the differences in these impressive observatories, and what’s possible with the newest technology.

More: The Year Ahead in Astronomy

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Rare evidence that dinosaurs feasted on mammals uncovered

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Sometime during the Cretaceous Period, 120 million years ago, a dinosaur wolfed down its last meal — a small mammal the size of a mouse. And it’s still there.

A researcher with a sharp eye spotted the mammal’s foot preserved inside the guts of a fossilized Microraptor zhaoianus, a feathered therapod less than a meter (3 feet) long.

“At first, I couldn’t believe it. There was a tiny rodent-like mammal foot about a centimeter (0.4 inch) long perfectly preserved inside a Microraptor skeleton,” said Hans Larsson, a professor of biology at McGill University’s Redpath Museum in Montreal. Larsson came across the fossil while visiting museum collections in China.

“These finds are the only solid evidence we have about the food consumption of these long extinct animals — and they are exceptionally rare,” Larsson said in a news release.

The research, which was published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology on December 20, said this was only the 21st known example of a fossilized dinosaur with its last meal preserved.

It’s rarer still to find that a mammal was on the menu; there’s only one other such example currently in the fossil record.

“We already know of Microraptor specimens preserved with parts of fish, a bird, and a lizard in their bellies. This new find adds a small mammal to their diet, suggesting these dinosaurs were opportunistic and not picky eaters,” Larsson, a coauthor of the study, said in a statement.

“Knowing that Microraptor was a generalist carnivore puts a new perspective on how ancient ecosystems may have worked and a possible insight into the success of these small, feathered dinosaurs,” he explained.

Generalist predators, like foxes and crows, are important stabilizers in today’s ecosystems because they can feed on several species, the news release said. According to the research, the Microraptor is the first known example of a generalist carnivore in a dinosaur era.

It was possible that other dinosaurs from the therapod family, which included the Tyrannosaurus rex, might also have shared a similarly unfussy diet, the study said.

The Microraptor fossil was discovered in the rich fossil deposits in Liaoning in northeastern China in the early 2000s. The specimen, which features plumage on its arm wings and legs, was one of the first feathered dinosaurs to be unearthed.

“While this mammal would absolutely not have been a human ancestor, we can look back at some of our ancient relatives being a meal for hungry dinosaurs,” said study coauthor Dr. David Hone, a reader in zoology at Queen Mary University of London, in a statement.

“This study paints a picture of a fascinating moment in time — one of the first record(s) of a dinosaur eating a mammal — even if it isn’t quite as frightening as anything in ‘Jurassic Park.’”

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A Software Glitch Forced the Webb Space Telescope Into Safe Mode

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The Webb Space Telescope’s instruments have been in safe mode intermittently since December 7, but scientific operations resumed earlier this week, NASA said in a press release on Wednesday.

Webb was in safe mode—during which all the observatory’s nonessential systems are turned off, which means no scientific operations—multiple times in the last two weeks, the release stated. Though NASA says the issue is resolved and “the observatory and instruments are all in good health,” the agency also did not report the glitch until yesterday.

Webb is a $10 billion space observatory that images the cosmos at infrared and near-infrared wavelengths. It is a state-of-the-art telescope that has captured our attention in its first six months of scientific observations, revealing iconic structures like the Pillars of Creation in new light.

The NASA release says the “software fault triggered in the attitude control system,” the apparatus that guides where the observatory is pointing. That’s most directions, except that the telescope was turned away from the micrometeoroid avoidance zone in the spring, to protect the telescope’s mirrors. That maneuver came following a space rock strike that damaged one of the mirror panels.

The pauses added up to several days that the telescope could not do observations this month, NASA said. Now, science is fully back underway, and the Webb team is working to reschedule the observations affected by the glitch.

Yesterday, Webb posted the cosmic equivalent of a holiday card: an image of the spiral galaxy NGC 7469, which bears a resemblance to a wreath. The galaxy is 220 million light-years away and looks distinctly serene in Webb’s eye. Sharp diffraction spikes spread from the galactic center, where a supermassive black hole resides.

Besides seeing known objects in new ways, Webb has imaged light from the earliest corners of the universe, light which was too faint for older observatories to see.

One of Webb’s core scientific goals is to inspect ancient light sources—the earliest stars and galaxies—to understand how those objects emerged and evolved in deep time.

In other words, it’d be really nice if Webb could avoid safe mode, for the sake of science. But better safe than sorry, and now that the telescope is back to business, let’s hope it stays that way.

More: Webb Telescope Brings a Once-Fuzzy Galaxy Into Focus

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