Tag Archives: neighboring

‘Full chaos’: Over 100,000 Russians flood neighboring countries to flee army call-up

September 28, 2022 Admin Leave a comment

TBILISI, Georgia — Georgia and Kazakhstan said Tuesday that tens of thousands of Russians had flooded into their countries from neighboring Russia since the announcement of a partial military mobilization to fight in Ukraine.

Russian President Vladimir Putin last week announced the call-up of thousands of reservists, sparking protests across the country and a rush among Russian men for the borders.

Fyodor said he had fled to Russia’s border with Kazakhstan spooked by reports that even the infirm and elderly were being called up to fight.

Like other people AFP spoke to, he asked not to provide his full name.

“There is full chaos [in Russia],” the 24-year-old said. “We don’t understand what will happen.”

He decided to leave for Kazakhstan on Saturday morning “as a precautionary measure” to “take a head start, just in case.”

Russians arrive in Kazakhstan outside the railway station in the city of Uralsk (Oral) on September 27, 2022. (AFP)

On Tuesday Kazakhstan said around 98,000 Russians had entered the country since mobilization was announced.

It took Fyodor about 48 hours, including a five-kilometer (three-mile) walk to the border and a six-hour queue, before he reached the northern Kazakh city of Oral.

“It was raining, it was cold, but six hours of wait… well, that was still reasonable given the circumstances,” he said.

Vladislav, a 25-year-old bartender, found shelter in the Kazakh capital of Astana on Monday evening.

In Russia, he said, “I could go to work or to do the groceries and never come back… I don’t want to die.”

“A week ago, I could not imagine I’d be in Kazakhstan,” he told AFP, adding that he “wanted to thank the Kazakh people for welcoming him so nicely.”

Russians arrive in Kazakhstan at the Syrym border crossing point on September 27, 2022. (AFP)

Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev said on Tuesday his country would ensure the safety of Russians fleeing “a hopeless situation.”

“This is a political and humanitarian issue,” Tokayev said.

“The territorial integrity of states must be unshakeable,” Tokayev added.

Kazakhstan has condemned Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine and called for respect of territorial integrity, as Russia held annexation referendums in four Ukrainian regions. The votes were widely derided as a sham.

Russians also flocked to the Black Sea nation of Georgia.

People carrying luggage walk past vehicles with Russian license plates on the Russian side of the border toward the Nizhniy Lars customs checkpoint between Georgia and Russia near the town of Vladikavkaz, on September 25, 2022. (AFP)

On Tuesday, Georgia said the number of Russians arriving each day has nearly doubled since the draft was announced.

“Four to five days ago 5,000-6,000 [Russians] were arriving in Georgia daily. The number has grown to some 10,000 per day,” Interior Minister Vakhtang Gomelauri told journalists.

Georgia and its neighbor Armenia, which do not require visas for Russians, have been major destinations for Russians fleeing since the war began on February 24.

Over the first four months of the war, nearly 50,000 Russians fled to Georgia and another 40,000 to Armenia.

On Tuesday, the local interior ministry in a Russian region that borders Georgia said there was a tailback of around 5,500 cars waiting to cross the Georgian border, calling the situation “extremely tense.”

Ukrainian soldiers fire a mortar launcher at a position along the front line in the Donetsk region on September 26, 2022, amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. (ANATOLII STEPANOV / AFP)

The ministry added that a mobile draft office will be set up at the border in the “near future.”

The White House said Tuesday that Russians fleeing the war could seek asylum in the US.

“We believe that regardless of their nationality, they may apply for asylum in the United States,” White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said.

Arrivals will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis, she said.

On Monday, a young man shot a Russian military officer at an enlistment office to protest the army call-up.

There have also been scattered arson attacks against enlistment offices and protests in Russian cities that have resulted in at least 2,000 arrests.

Russia is seeking to bolster its military as its Ukraine offensive has bogged down and sapped its forces, and Kyiv has reclaimed swathes of territory in a blistering counter-offensive.

Times of Israel staff contributed to this report.

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Science

Scientists Detect a Neighboring Galaxy Filled With Dark Matter

September 27, 2022 Admin Leave a comment

By Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe
September 27, 2022

A small satellite galaxy (green globe on the bottom left) of the Milky Way – called Sagittarius – has been observed from Earth through giant lobes of gamma radiation (aka the Fermi bubbles, purple areas below and above the galaxy). Although Sagittarius is stuffed with dark matter, this is unlikely to be the cause of the observed emission. Credit: Kavli IPMU

Researchers have used gamma rays to detect a small neighboring galaxy.

According to a new study recently published in the journal Nature Astronomy, an international team of researchers has discovered a small satellite galaxy of the

These radiation lobes are known as Fermi bubbles, and they are patched with a few mysterious substructures of very bright gamma-ray emission. The Fermi cocoon, one of the brightest regions in the southern lobe (magnified inset in the image below), was once believed to be the result of previous outbursts from the galaxy’s supermassive

Figure 2. Gamma-ray image of the Fermi bubbles (blue) overlaid on a map of RR Lyrae stars (red) observed by the GAIA telescope. The shape and orientation of the Sagittarius (Sgr) dwarf match perfectly well those of the Fermi cocoon – a bright substructure of gamma-ray radiation in the southern part of the Fermi bubbles. This is strong evidence that the Fermi cocoon is due to energetic processes occurring in Sagittarius, which from our perspective, is located behind the Fermi bubbles. Credit: Crocker, Macias, Mackey, Krumholz, Ando, Horiuchi et al. (2022)

This satellite galaxy of the Milky Way is seen through the Fermi Bubbles from our position on Earth (image 1). Due to its tight orbit around our Galaxy and previous passages through the galactic disk, it has lost most of its interstellar gas and many of its stars have been ripped from its core into elongated streams.

Given that Sagittarius was quiescent — with no gas and no stellar nurseries — there were only a few possibilities for its gamma-ray emission, including: i) a population of unknown millisecond pulsars or ii) dark matter annihilations.

Millisecond pulsars are remnants of certain types of stars, significantly more massive than the Sun, that are in close binary systems, but now blast out cosmic particles as a result of their extreme rotational energies. The electrons fired by millisecond pulsars collide with low-energy photons of the Cosmic Microwave Background propelling them to high-energy gamma radiation.

The researchers demonstrated that the gamma-ray cocoon could be explained by millisecond pulsars in the Sagittarius dwarf, therefore disfavoring the dark matter explanation.

Their discovery sheds light on millisecond pulsars as efficient accelerators of highly-energetic electrons and positrons, and also suggests that similar physical processes could be ongoing in other dwarf satellite galaxies of the Milky Way.

“This is significant because dark matter researchers have long believed that an observation of gamma rays from a dwarf satellite would be a smoking gun signature for dark matter annihilation.”

“Our study compels a reassessment of the high energy emission capabilities of quiescent stellar objects, such as dwarf spheroidal galaxies, and their role as prime targets for dark matter annihilation searches,” said Macias.

Reference: “Gamma-ray emission from the Sagittarius dwarf spheroidal galaxy due to millisecond pulsars” by Roland M. Crocker, Oscar Macias, Dougal Mackey, Mark R. Krumholz, Shin’ichiro Ando, Shunsaku Horiuchi, Matthew G. Baring, Chris Gordon, Thomas Venville, Alan R. Duffy, Rui-Zhi Yang, Felix Aharonian, J. A. Hinton, Deheng Song, Ashley J. Ruiter, and Miroslav D. Filipović, 5 September 2022, Nature Astronomy.
DOI: 10.1038/s41550-022-01777-x

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Yellowstone Park flooding: Parts may reopen to tourists on Monday, but flooding has been a disaster for neighboring towns

June 16, 2022 Admin Leave a comment

The park’s northern region, which bore the brunt of the flood damage, is expected to be closed for a “substantial length of time,” which will likely go through the end of the season, the park said in a release Tuesday.

But while the southern loop reopening may provide relief to some tourism industry workers, those bordering the northern entrance are still left to wait.

In the south Montana city of Gardiner, which acts as a gateway into Yellowstone’s northern entrance, hotel owners are already feeling the impact.

“There’s nobody here,” Keri Huesing, owner of Yellowstone Gateway Inn, told CNN. “We were booked solid for a year.”

Now, she says, all but one of her visitors are gone, following the flooding, and one neighboring hotel has shut down completely and sent its employees home.

“It’s a Yellowstone town, and it lives and dies by tourism,” Park County Commissioner Bill Berg said of Gardiner.

In Cody, which lies east of the park, tourism industry workers were eager for answers from Sholly on the southern loop reopening, the Casper Star-Tribune reported. Sholly hopes gateway communities and park staff can determine how to sustain local businesses without attracting more visitors than the park can host, the paper reported.

The dangerous flooding fueled by heavy rainfall and snowmelt began to inundate the park and several surrounding communities Monday, overtaking essential roadways and bridges, and making it dangerous or impossible for some people to evacuate.

As some communities became completely surrounded by water, at times without power or drinking water, search and rescue teams worked to evacuate residents. The Montana National Guard this week carried out 87 rescues by helicopter, it said Wednesday on Facebook.

In Montana’s Park County, which includes Gardiner, water has been receding, and access to the communities that had been surrounded by floodwater has been restored for emergency vehicles at a minimum, Greg Coleman, the county’s emergency services manager, said Wednesday morning.

Park temporarily closed as locals try to recover

All five entrances to Yellowstone will remain closed through at least the weekend, the park said in a release Tuesday, and the northern roads of the park will likely be closed for an extended period due to “severely damaged, impacted infrastructure.”

The battering floodwaters wiped away entire segments of paved road near the northern entrance, downed trees and triggered multiple mudslides.

Communities surrounding Yellowstone are also reeling from the catastrophic damage. Quickly moving waters compromised several roads and bridges, submerged cars, and even swept away homes as the underlying foundations became completely worn away.

In Park County, at least two homes collapsed into the intruding Yellowstone River early this week, and numerous homes and businesses were flooded, said Coleman, the county emergency official.

Video from witnesses showed one building in Gardiner collapsing into the river on Monday. Gardiner was isolated by water Monday and into Tuesday as flooding rendered roads and bridges impassable.

Aerial video captured by CNN shows one Montana home hanging precariously over the edge of a severely eroded embankment. Photos of the aftermath in the city of Red Lodge, Montana, on Tuesday, show several streets piled with rocks and debris as water still runs over the sidewalks.

Region braces for more potential flooding

The record flooding was caused by a combination of heavy rainfall and snowmelt from high elevations over the weekend in the Beartooth and Absaroka mountain ranges, which stretch across the Montana-Wyoming state line.

The level of runoff is comparable to the region receiving two to three times a normal June’s precipitation in only three days, according to CNN meteorologists.

A flood wave moved east Tuesday and Wednesday along the Yellowstone River, the National Weather Service said, leading to reports of major flooding in Billings, which is about a 175-mile drive east of Gardiner. By Tuesday afternoon, the river at Billings had surged well above its previous record of 15 feet, according to the weather service.

The flooding prompted city officials to shut down the city water plant late Tuesday night, the city’s public works department said.

The plant resumed operations at a low level Wednesday afternoon, and by Thursday morning it was working at full capacity, city officials said.

Even as water levels began to recede in areas on Tuesday and Wednesday, park officials and residents in the region are bracing for the possibility of more flooding in the coming days.

More snow could soon melt in the mountains of Wyoming and Montana, and that, coupled with more rain this weekend, could cause river levels to rise again, the National Weather Service’s office in Billings said.

Warm air is expected to move over the mountains Thursday night, keeping the low temperatures above freezing. This, along with plenty of sunshine during the day, should get snow melting. “Temperatures will be in the 50s and 60s in the high country both Friday and Saturday afternoon,” the weather service said.

“Expect a few days of melting of what is still a substantial snowpack in the mountains.”

Showers and thunderstorms are expected to hit the area Saturday night and Sunday.

The weather service’s latest river forecasts predict substantial rises due to the melt. Still, the levels are predicted to be well under flood stage, because the rainfall amounts look very light. River projections show this new rise in water peaking over the weekend around Yellowstone and in Billings on Monday.

“By the time slightly more substantial precipitation arrives Sunday night into Monday, temperatures drop into the 30s, and snow is probable above 8,500 feet Sunday night,” the weather service said.

“That said, those with interests near waterways in the western foothills should pay attention to the forecasts through the weekend in case the forecast changes significantly,” the service added.

The intense rainfall and rapid snow melt already experienced by the park and nearby communities are consistent with projections laid out in a climate assessment report released last year from scientists with the US Geological Survey, Montana State University and the University of Wyoming.

The climate crisis is already driving more annual precipitation and runoff from melting snowpack in the Greater Yellowstone Area, and the trend will continue in the coming years, the report said.

CNN’s Judson Jones, Nick Watt, Chris Boyette, Julia Jones, Sara Smart, Maegan Vazquez, Paradise Afshahar and Rachel Ramirez contributed to this report.

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World

Bakhmut: Russians are on the verge of capturing key Ukrainian city. In neighboring town those with nowhere else to go brace for their arrival

June 12, 2022 Admin Leave a comment

As we drove into the city in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine on a warm sunny morning, men in orange vests tend to the roses. The tall trees shading the streets are thick with leaves.

Traffic is light because of fuel shortages, so many residents get around on bicycles.

This peaceful façade, however, is deceptive. Explosions regularly echo over Bakhmut: the blasts of outgoing and incoming artillery and rockets outside, and occasionally inside, the city.

Our first stop was a municipal building where volunteers were handing out bread. With cooking gas no longer available, bakeries have stopped working. Every day a truck arrives after a 10-hour journey with 10,000 loaves of bread, handed out free — two loaves per person.

Lyilya has brought her two grandchildren to pick up bread. “We support them,” she says, explaining what she does to keep their minds at ease. “We tell them there are some guys playing with tanks. What else can I tell them? How can I damage their mental health? You can’t do that. It’s impossible.”

Just as the last words come out of her mouth the air shakes with multiple blasts. She turns to her grandchildren with gentle words of reassurance.

On a nearby forested hill, thin threads of black smoke curl into the sky where the blasts came from — most likely a Ukrainian rocket launcher.

No one flinches. No one runs for cover.

Tetyana volunteers with the bread distribution. A stocky woman with an easy smile, she exchanges pleasantries as she hands out the bread.

When I ask if she intends to stay in Bakhmut if Russian forces push closer, her demeanor changes. She shakes her head.

“We love our town. Our graves are here. Our parents lived her. We won’t go anywhere,” she insists, her voice quivering. Tears well up in her eyes. “It’s our land. We won’t give it up to anyone. Even if it’s destroyed, we’ll rebuild. Everything will be…” and here she gives two thumbs up.

Bakhmut sits by the main road leading to the twin cities of Lysychansk and Severodonetsk, now the epicenter of fighting in eastern Ukraine. The latter has been the scene of intense street-to-street combat between Ukrainian and Russian forces. For weeks Russian forces have bombarded the road, and Bakhmut, in what is seen as an attempt to cut the twin cities off from the rest of Ukrainian-controlled territory.

Ukrainian officials say most of Severodonetsk is now under Russian control. If that city and Lysychansk fall, Bakhmut, it is feared, will be next.

Unlike in some other parts of the country, there is no sense here in the east that the worst of this war is over. Russian forces have made slow but steady progress there.

The head of Ukrainian intelligence recently told The Guardian that for every one artillery piece possessed by the Ukrainian military, Russian has between 10 and 15. Others, including President Vlodymyr Zelensky, claim that every day as many as 100 Ukrainian soldiers are killed, and around 500 wounded.

In this grinding war of attrition, Russia, far bigger and better armed, is pressing its advantage.

All of this is no secret here. In a city-run dormitory, Lyudmila is preparing lunch for her two children, frying onions and boiling potatoes. She fled her town outside Bakhmut in March to escape the shelling. “Home” now is a small, cramped room. Her husband died before the war.

She says she has nowhere else to go, and barely any money, and asks with an edge of irritation, what is the point? The Russians are coming. “It’s the same everywhere,” she says. “When they [the Russians] are done here, they’ll go further.”

She shrugs and walks away down the dark corridor. “That’s all I have to say” she shouts back over her shoulder.

Thursday morning Russian aircraft struck a complex of agricultural warehouses on the edge of Bakhmut. It was the third strike on the complex in recent weeks. A gaping hole in the pavement shows where one bomb hit, spraying shrapnel in every direction, ripping holes in a warehouse of wheat.

Plump pigeons circle overhead, ready to feast on the grain. The weather has been good this year. The wheat harvest is just weeks away. Yet the war threatens to cut production by a third.

Bakhmut police Major Pavlo Diachenko spends his days documenting the aftermath of air and artillery strikes. He knows only too well how random they seem. Strikes, he tells me with a sigh, can happen “anytime. In the morning, in the evening. We don’t [know] when.”

A small group of people gathers mid-morning in a parking lot next to a municipal building, waiting for a volunteer-run bus to take them to the relative safety of the city of Dnipro, a four-hour drive to the west.

Igor, a beekeeper in peacetime, is startled by a large blast as he stands in the shade. He’s leaving with his cat, Simon Simonyonich, who frowns through the bars of his blue and white pet carrier.

Simon Simonyonich has been out of sorts since Bakhmut came under fire, remarks Igor.

“I left everything here — my bees and my house with all my belongings,” he says, holding Simon’s cage as he prepares to board the bus.

Moments later, another blast shakes the ground. Soon the bus is loaded, the passengers sitting in their seats.

“Is anyone here with the army?” the driver asks. The bus is strictly for civilians. A sardonic chuckle ripples among the passengers. Most are well past military age.

The door slams shut. The bus begins to move.

After one final blast, the bus pulls out of the parking lot.

CNN’s Ghazi Balkiz contributed to this report.

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World

More than 1.5 million people have crossed from Ukraine into neighboring countries

March 6, 2022 Admin Leave a comment

Humanitarian corridors in the southeastern Ukrainian cities of Mariupol and Volnovakha will be opened again today, according to Russian state news agency TASS.

Some skepticism over the routes has grown after Ukrainian authorities paused evacuations of civilians Saturday, citing Russian violations of a ceasefire.

“In the morning, humanitarian corridors will again be opened both in Mariupol and Volnovakha,” Eduard Basurin, deputy head of the so-called People’s Militia of the Donetsk People’s Republic told reporters, TASS reported.

Civilians in the battered Ukrainian port city of Mariupol are trapped without power and water and unable to recover their dead, its mayor said Saturday, as he accused Russia of trying to “choke” the city by shutting off agreed evacuation routes.

Russia agreed to a ceasefire on Saturday to allow civilians to safely leave Mariupol and Volnovakha, where residents have endured days of heavy, indiscriminate shelling.

But evacuations were paused, with Ukrainian authorities accusing Russia of violating the agreement by resuming its attacks, leaving thousands of civilians trapped in what people on the ground describe as increasingly dire conditions.

Another attempt to open a humanitarian corridor for civilians in the city of Mariupol will begin at 12 p.m. local (5 a.m. ET), the Governor of the Donetsk region, Pavlo Kyrylenko, said Sunday on his official Twitter account.

A ceasefire will be in effect from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. local time Sunday, Kyrylenko said.

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Science

Extraordinary Black Hole – Unlike Any Other – Discovered in Neighboring Galaxy

January 25, 2022 Admin Leave a comment

This artist’s impression depicts a black hole. Credit: ESA/Hubble, ESO, M. Kornmesser

The discovery, one of the only confirmed intermediate-mass black holes, lives in an equally rare object known as a low-mass, stripped nucleus.

Astronomers discovered a

The Andromeda galaxy, or M31, is our Milky Way’s largest galactic neighbor. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

The black hole was hidden within B023-G078, an enormous star cluster in our closest neighboring galaxy Andromeda. Long thought to be a globular star cluster, the researchers argue that B023-G078 is instead a stripped nucleus. Stripped nuclei are remnants of small galaxies that fell into bigger ones and had their outer stars stripped away by gravitational forces. What’s left behind is a tiny, dense nucleus orbiting the bigger galaxy and at the center of that nucleus, a black hole.

“Previously, we’ve found big black holes within massive, stripped nuclei that are much bigger than B023-G078. We knew that there must be smaller black holes in lower mass stripped nuclei, but there’s never been direct evidence,” said lead author Renuka Pechetti of Liverpool John Moores University, who started the research while at the U. “I think this is a pretty clear case that we have finally found one of these objects.”

The study was published on January 11, 2022, in The Astrophysical Journal.

The left panel shows a wide-field image of M31 with the red box and inset showing the location and image of B023-G78 where the black hole was found. Credit: Iván Éder, https://www.astroeder.com/; HST ACS/HRC

A decades-long hunch

B023-G078 was known as a massive globular star cluster—a spherical collection of stars bound tightly by gravity. However, there had only been a single observation of the object that determined its overall mass, about 6.2 million solar masses. For years, Seth had a feeling it was something else.

“I knew that the B023-G078 object was one of the most massive objects in Andromeda and thought it could be a candidate for a stripped nucleus. But we needed data to prove it. We’d been applying to various telescopes to get more observations for many, many years and my proposals always failed,” said Seth. “When we discovered a supermassive black hole within a stripped nucleus in 2014, the Gemini Observatory gave us the chance to explore the idea.”

With their new observational data from the Gemini Observatory and images from the (function(d, s, id){ var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0]; if (d.getElementById(id)) return; js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id; js.src = "https://connect.facebook.net/en_US/sdk.js#xfbml=1&version=v2.6"; fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs); }(document, 'script', 'facebook-jssdk'));

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World

Saudi crown prince to visit neighboring Qatar after blockade, yearslong rift

December 9, 2021 Admin Leave a comment

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman visited Qatar on Wednesday in a sign of improving relations between the two Gulf kingdoms years after he helped impose a blockade of the tiny but hugely rich nation.

The visit, which follows a declaration in January by Qatar, Saudi Arabia and other Arab Gulf countries to ease the yearslong rift, is a big climbdown for Saudi Arabia’s de facto leader, who spearheaded the effort to isolate Qatar, accusing it of supporting extremist groups in the region.

“It shows to a large extent the crisis amongst the Gulf states has more or less been addressed,” said Neil Quilliam, an associate fellow at Chatham House, an international affairs think tank in London.

The office of Qatar’s emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, tweeted that he would meet with the crown prince Wednesday evening in Doha.

After a decade of confrontation no one country, or group of countries, has emerged as a winner in the Gulf and they now face similar economic challenges such as the decarbonization of the global economy and recovery from the coronavirus pandemic, Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, a fellow for the Middle East at the Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University, said offering an explanation for the thaw in relations.

The crown prince’s visit to Qatar and tour of the Gulf also speak to a Saudi effort to position him as a regional leader and signal that while he is still a persona non grata in much of the West, that is not the case in the Gulf, Coates Ulrichsen said.

“The Saudis are trying to portray MBS as someone quite different from the image that he generated for himself in the Trump years,” he added, referring to the crown prince by his initials. “They’re showing someone who can work with others, someone who eventually will be king and will be capable of behaving as a king should.”

Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates cut diplomatic, trade and travel ties with Qatar in 2017, separating families and businesses and shattering Gulf unity. The four countries alleged that the Qatari government supported groups like the Muslim Brotherhood, and accused it of close relations with the regional foe, Iran.

The embargo complicated American foreign policy in the Gulf as it frayed ties between important U.S. allies and security partners.

Qatar has deftly expanded its political influence despite its small size, which frustrated the traditional regional dominance of Saudi Arabia. Qatar is home to a major U.S. military base, it hosted U.S.-Taliban talks, and in recent months played an outsize role in American efforts to evacuate tens of thousands of people from Afghanistan.

The Saudi crown prince’s visit is part of a wider tour of Gulf Cooperation Council member states, also including Oman, Bahrain, UAE and Kuwait.

The tour has already turned out to be lucrative as Omani and Saudi firms signed 13 memoranda of understanding valued at $30 billion and comes ahead of the annual summit of the six-nation council this month, according to Reuters.

Qatar’s emir has already visited Saudi Arabia since the agreement to thaw relations was reached in the Saudi desert city of Al-Ula in January.

This time, however, it is the crown prince, widely seen as the power behind the Saudi throne, who will be the guest, a symbolic difference in a region where hosting is an indication that you approve of your guest, said Michael Stephens, an associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute think tank in London.

“This marks a very important step in ending the tensions once and for all,” he said.

The crown prince’s tour comes after French President Emmanuel Macron became the first major Western leader to visit Riyadh since the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018.

In February, the Biden administration released an intelligence report that concludes that the crown prince approved the gruesome killing. The crown prince has denied any involvement.

Saphora Smith is a London-based reporter for NBC News Digital.

The Associated Press and Reuters contributed.

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Science

Is there life at Alpha Centauri? New space telescope to seek out habitable planets around sun’s neighboring star

November 16, 2021 Admin Leave a comment

A new space telescope mission unveiled today (Nov. 16) will look for habitable planets in the Alpha Centauri system, our sun’s closest stellar neighbors.

The new mission, called TOLIMAN after an ancient Arabic-derived name for Alpha Centauri, will carry a novel telescope fitted with a so-called diffractive pupil lens that spreads starlight into a flowerlike pattern. This unique lens will make it easier for astronomers using the scope to detect tiny irregularities in a stars’ movements that are usually caused by the gravitational influence of orbiting planets, according to a statement by Breakthrough Initiatives, which is backing the mission.

“Even for the very nearest bright stars in the night sky, finding planets is a huge technological challenge,” Eduardo Bendek, an optical engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a collaborator on the mission, said in the statement.

“Our TOLIMAN mission will launch a custom-designed space telescope that makes extremely fine measurements of the position of the star in the sky. If there is a planet orbiting the star, it will tug on the star betraying a tiny, but measurable, wobble,” Bendek said.

Related: Mysterious radio signal from Proxima Centauri was definitely not aliens

This image simulates a view of Alpha Centauri, the nearest star system to the sun, as it could be seen by the new planet-hunting space telescope TOLIMAN. (Image credit: Breakthrough Initiatives)

Alpha Centauri is the closest solar system to Earth and it has three stars, two of which are like our sun. The third star is a red dwarf called Proxima Centauri, a cool but long-lived type of a star that is the most common in the universe.

This red dwarf is known to have at least two exoplanets, one of which appears to be fairly similar to Earth.

But so far, this intriguing star system, just four light-years away from us, has avoided detailed scientific scrutiny, despite the fact that the planets around these stars could present the most convenient destination for humankind outside of our own solar system.

While, for now, a human mission to Alpha Centauri remains in the realm of science fiction, the TOLIMAN telescope will at least attempt to answer some of the most fundamental and pressing questions about its planets. Most importantly, scientists hope to use the new scope to investigate whether these far-off worlds might indeed harbor life, or perhaps provide the right conditions for its survival.

“Our nearest stellar neighbors — the Alpha Centauri and Proxima Centauri systems — are turning out to be extraordinarily interesting,” Pete Worden, executive director of the Breakthrough Initiatives, said in the statement. “The TOLIMAN mission will be a huge step toward finding out if planets capable of supporting life exist there.”

The proposed Toliman space telescope to seek out habitable planets around Alpha Centauri. (Image credit: Breakthrough Initiatives)

The mission will focus on the habitable zone around the system’s three stars, a region of space in the star’s vicinity where liquid water could exist.

“These nearby planets are where humanity will take our first steps into interstellar space using high-speed, futuristic, robotic probes,” Pete Klupar, chief engineer of Breakthrough Watch, a branch of Breakthrough Initiatives, said in the statement. “If we consider the nearest few dozen stars, we expect a handful of rocky planets like Earth orbiting at the right distance for liquid surface water to be possible.”

Professor Peter Tuthill of the Sydney Institute for Astronomy, who leads the development of the mission, added that TOLIMAN will begin answering the questions about the nature of these intriguing worlds.

“Getting to know our planetary neighbors is hugely important,” Professor Tuthill said. “These next-door planets are the ones where we have the best prospects for finding and analyzing atmospheres, surface chemistry and possibly even the fingerprints of a biosphere — the tentative signals of life.”

This wide-field view of the sky Alpha Centauri star system and its surroundings was created from photographic images forming part of the Digitized Sky Survey 2. Image released Oct. 17, 2012. (Image credit: ESO/Digitized Sky Survey 2)

The team, which also includes experts from Australian space-tech firm Saber Astronautics, began working on the mission in April this year, according to the statement.

The mission received $788,000 ($576,000) from the Australian government and is expected to be ready for science in the mid-2020s.

“Our plan is for an agile low-cost mission that delivers results by about the middle of the decade,” Tuthill said.

Follow Tereza Pultarova on Twitter @TerezaPultarova. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

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Hidden black hole discovered in our neighboring galaxy

November 11, 2021 Admin Leave a comment

Astronomers found it by using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile and observing how the black hole’s gravity influenced the motion of a nearby star, which is about five times the mass of our sun.

It’s the first time this way of detecting a black hole has been used, and it could help researchers uncover other hidden black holes in our Milky Way galaxy and other galaxies.

The more astronomers learn about black holes, the better they can understand how these cosmic objects form and change over time. A paper describing this discovery has been accepted for publication in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

“Similar to Sherlock Holmes tracking down a criminal gang from their missteps, we are looking at every single star in this cluster with a magnifying glass in one hand trying to find some evidence for the presence of black holes but without seeing them directly,” said Sara Saracino, research lead and a member of the faculty of engineering and technology from the Astrophysics Research Institute of Liverpool John Moores University, in a statement.

“The result shown here represents just one of the wanted criminals, but when you have found one, you are well on your way to discovering many others, in different clusters,” Saracino said.

While black holes are tricky to spot, they tend to give away their otherwise invisible presence by their actions. Black holes emit X-rays when they gobble up surrounding matter or create gravitational waves when they crash into one another or collide with dense neutron stars.

But all black holes are not created equal, and this one is smaller than some of the others astronomers have detected. It was only noticeable to the researchers once they saw a star with peculiar motion among so many other stars that weren’t behaving the same way.

“The vast majority (of black holes) can only be unveiled dynamically,” said Stefan Dreizler, study coauthor and professor at the University of Göttingen in Germany, in a statement.

“When they form a system with a star, they will affect its motion in a subtle but detectable way, so we can find them with sophisticated instruments.”

It’s the first time astronomers have found a young black hole in a cluster of stars that are also this young — about 100 million years old, which is infancy when compared with the rest of the universe.

Going forward, astronomers could use this method to find other young black holes to understand their evolution and compare them with larger black holes in older star clusters to see how black holes grow over time.

“Every single detection we make will be important for our future understanding of stellar clusters and the black holes in them,” said Mark Gieles, study coauthor and research professor at the University of Barcelona, Spain, in a statement.

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Record-breaking flare erupts from neighboring star

April 21, 2021 Admin Leave a comment