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The James Webb Space Telescope May Have Already Found The Oldest Galaxy Ever Seen

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Just a week after its first images were shown to the world, the James Webb Space Telescope may have found a galaxy that existed 13.5 billion years ago, a scientist who analyzed the data said Wednesday.

 

Known as GLASS-z13, the galaxy dates back to 300 million years after the Big Bang, about 100 million years earlier than anything previously identified, Rohan Naidu of the Harvard Center for Astrophysics told AFP. 

“We’re potentially looking at the most distant starlight that anyone has ever seen,” he said.

The more distant objects are from us, the longer it takes for their light to reach us, and so to gaze back into the distant universe is to see into the deep past.

Though GLASS-z13 existed in the earliest era of the Universe, its exact age remains unknown as it could have formed any time within the first 300 million years.

GLASS-z13 was spotted in so-called “early release” data from the orbiting observatory’s main infrared imager, called NIRcam – but the discovery was not revealed in the first image set published by NASA last week.

 

When translated from infrared into the visible spectrum, the galaxy appears as a blob of red with white in its center, as part of a wider image of the distant cosmos called a “deep field”.

Naidu and colleagues – a team totaling 25 astronomers from across the world – have submitted their findings to a scientific journal.

For now, the research is posted on a preprint server, so it comes with the caveat that it has yet to be peer-reviewed – but it has already set the global astronomy community abuzz.​

“Astronomy records are crumbling already, and more are shaky,” tweeted NASA’s chief scientist Thomas Zurbuchen.

“Yes, I tend to only cheer once science results clear peer review. But, this looks very promising,” he added.

Naidu said another team of astronomers led by Marco Castellano that worked on the same data has achieved similar conclusions, “so that gives us confidence”.

‘Work to be done’

One of the great promises of Webb is its ability to find the earliest galaxies that formed after the Big Bang, 13.8 billion years ago.

Because these are so distant from Earth, by the time their light reaches us, it has been stretched by the expansion of the Universe and shifted to the infrared region of the light spectrum, which Webb is equipped to detect with unprecedented clarity.

 

Naidu and colleagues combed through this infrared data of the distant Universe, searching for a telltale signature of extremely distant galaxies.

Below a particular threshold of infrared wavelength, all photons – packets of energy – are absorbed by the neutral hydrogen of the Universe that lies between the object and the observer.

By using data collected through different infrared filters pointed at the same region of space, they were able to detect where these drop-offs in photons occurred, from which they inferred the presence of these most distant galaxies.

“We searched all the early data for galaxies with this very striking signature, and these were the two systems that had by far the most compelling signature,” said Naidu.

One of these is GLASS-z13, while the other, not as ancient, is GLASS-z11.

“There’s strong evidence, but there’s still work to be done,” said Naidu.

In particular, the team wants to ask Webb’s managers for telescope time to carry out spectroscopy – an analysis of light that reveals detailed properties – to measure its precise distance.

“Right now, our guess for the distance is based on what we don’t see – it would be great to have an answer for what we do see,” said Naidu.

Already, however, the team have detected surprising properties.

For instance, the galaxy is the mass of a billion Suns, which is “potentially very surprising, and that is something we don’t really understand” given how soon after the Big Bang it formed, Naidu said.

Launched last December and fully operational since last week, Webb is the most powerful space telescope ever built, with astronomers confident it will herald a new era of discovery.

© Agence France-Presse

 



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Monster Hydrothermal Field Discovered in The Dark Depths of The East Pacific

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A massive field of hydrothermal vents on the seafloor in the dark depths of the East Pacific ocean is the hottest and largest discovered in the region yet.

Not only that, but it’s in a place scientists didn’t expect to find active vents, never mind an entire system of them, hundreds of meters from the axis of a volcanic ridge.

 

The discovery, scientists say, could have a significant impact on our understanding of vent systems, and the role they play in ocean ecosystems.

The field was discovered by a team of scientists using autonomous underwater vehicles to map the seafloor at depths inhospitable to human explorers.

In data obtained from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution’s AUV Sentry, the team saw a region of huge spires, standing up to three stories tall at depths of 2,560 (8,400 feet) meters below the surface – in the silent, permanently dark bathypelagic depths.

A vent monitored with a temperature logger. (WHOI/NDSF/ROV Jason/NSF)

Initially, the team thought the vents were extinct, but a closer look revealed otherwise.

“We were astounded that not only was the field very active, but it is larger in area and hotter in origin temperature than any other hydrothermal vent field known along this portion of the East Pacific Rise that has been studied for the past 30 years,” says marine geologist Daniel Fornari of WHOI.

Hydrothermal vents are home to some of the most fascinating ecosystems on Earth. They are openings on the seafloor where heat and chemicals are vented from our planet’s crust, usually associated with volcanic activity.

 

The vent plumes themselves can be scorchingly hot, over 400 degrees Celsius (750 Fahrenheit), yet life thrives in their immediate proximity.

Most life on Earth relies on a photosynthetic food web, but down in the bathypelagic darkness, life takes a different route. The chemicals deposited by the vents feed a food web based on chemosynthesis, harnessing chemical reactions for energy rather than sunlight.

Not only is this an amazing testament to “life finds a way”, but it reveals a mechanism whereby life might exist on other worlds, such as the icy Solar System moons Enceladus and Europa.

They’re also deeply important to the ocean as a whole, supplying a transport system from Earth’s interior that helps regulate ocean chemistry and temperature. But, because they’re often found at depths that aren’t particularly hospitable to humans, our understanding of them is really incomplete.

Usually, searches for hydrothermal vent systems in the East Pacific are concentrated near ridge axes, and loci of volcanic activity.

Here, a team led by chemical oceanographer Jill McDermott of Lehigh University was seeking to better map the area west and east of the East Pacific Rise axial trough, using Sentry‘s sonar to generate three-dimensional maps of the seafloor.

A spectacular vent chimney at the site. (WHOI/NDSF/ROV Jason/NSF)

“The mapping work provides a detailed picture of the seafloor so that we can monitor and quantify changes that occur when the next volcanic eruption happens along this portion of the East Pacific Rise ridge axis,” McDermott explains.

It was during this survey that the team saw the pinnacles of a huge vent field, 750 meters east of the ridge axis, and 5 to 7 kilometers north of the closest known active on-axis vents.

 

Sampling of nine of the vents revealed temperatures of 368 degrees Celsius, with elements whose presence suggested origin temperatures even higher – a minimum of 437 degrees Celsius for the observed iron-manganese ratio.

In all, the field covered an area equivalent to a football field, the team said. Its proximity to a fault line suggests that it is controlled by tectonic activity.

The scientists believe that the vents may help re-seed nearby hydrothermal ecosystems following volcanic eruptions. Two eruptions have occurred on the East Pacific Rise in recent decades; one from 1991 to 1992, and another in 2005 to 2006. Another is expected to occur in a few years, the researchers said.

Wider exploration of the deep seafloor may reveal more vent fields in unexpected locations, which in turn can further our understanding of how these almost-alien ecosystems work.

“There is much still left to be discovered about deep-sea vents along the global mid-ocean ridge, both in terms of where they are located as well as their geological, geochemical and biological characteristics,” McDermott says.

“I hope our study will motivate future research efforts to target mapping off-axis areas along the global mid-ocean ridge crest to better quantify the extent of off-axis versus on-axis hydrothermal venting.”

The research has been published in PNAS (link not yet live at time of writing).

 

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Science

Plants Appear to Be Self-Medicating by Producing Their Own Aspirin When Stressed

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You might find yourself reaching for a painkiller when a headache strikes, and it seems plants do something similar: when under stress from hazards around them, plants are capable of producing their own aspirin.

 

A new study takes a closer look at this particular self-defense mechanism in plants, and how the production of the active metabolite of aspirin – salicylic acid – is regulated. 

Where salicylic acid has been used by humans for centuries as a treatment for pain and inflammation, in plants, it plays a fundamental role in signaling, regulation, and pathogen defense.

Produced in chloroplasts (the tiny green organelles where the process of photosynthesis is carried out), it is typically generated in response to stress.

“It’s like plants use a painkiller for aches and pains, just like we do,” says plant biologist Wilhelmina van de Ven from the University of California, Riverside (UCR).

To better understand the complex chain of reactions that plants perform when under stress, van de Ven and her team performed biochemical analyses on plants mutated to block the effects of key stress signaling pathways.

Environmental stresses produce reactive oxygen species (ROS) in all living organisms. One example you might be familiar with is sunburn on your skin if you spend too long exposed to direct sunlight without any sunscreen.

 

In the case of plants, these stresses include unfriendly insects, drought, and excessive heat. While high levels of ROS in plants can be lethal, smaller amounts have an important safety function – and so regulation is key.

Researchers used Rockcress or Arabidopsis as the model plant for the experiments. They focused on an early warning molecule called MEcPP, which has also been seen in bacteria and malaria parasites.

It seems that as MEcPP is accumulated in a plant, it triggers a chemical reaction and response, which includes salicylic acid.

That knowledge could help us modify plants to be more resistant to environmental hazards in the future.

“At non-lethal levels, ROS are like an emergency call to action, enabling the production of protective hormones such as salicylic acid,” says plant geneticist Jin-Zheng Wang from UCR. “ROS are a double-edged sword.”

“We’d like to be able to use the gained knowledge to improve crop resistance. That will be crucial for the food supply in our increasingly hot, bright world.”

There’s still a lot that we don’t know about the MEcPP molecule and its function, but understanding how this mechanism works could help scientists harness it for their own use: producing plants that are better able to cope with stresses and strains.

 

We know that plants, as well as animals, are under an increasing amount of pressure from a warming world, and it’s not clear how many species are going to be able to survive as average temperatures keep on climbing.

As the researchers point out, the stresses examined in this study – reactions to high heat, constant sunlight, and a lack of water – are all being experienced by plants out in the world right now… and of course, if plants are in trouble, so are we.

“Those impacts go beyond our food,” says molecular biochemist Katayoon Dehesh from UCR.

“Plants clean our air by sequestering carbon dioxide, offer us shade, and provide habitat for numerous animals. The benefits of boosting their survival are exponential.”

The research has been published in Science Advances.

 

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A Wasp, Flower, And Fly Trapped in Amber Reveal 30-Million-Year Old Microcosm

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A newly-discovered plant, a recently-discovered wasp, and a developing fly larva have been found trapped in amber, in an exquisitely-preserved moment of prehistoric ecology. 

If the image of an insect trapped in amber seems familiar, you have George Poinar, Jr. – the entomologist who made this discovery – to thank. His early work extracting insect DNA from Dominican amber directly inspired the premise of Jurassic Park.

 

His latest study documents the first fossil record of the plant genus Plukenetia, and the first record of the plant genus on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola.

“Fossil flowers of members of this family are quite rare,” said Poinar. “I could only find one previously known fossil, from sedimentary deposits in Tennessee.”

The famed Dominican amber is a fossilized form of resin from the extinct Hymenaea protera tree, which scientists think once grew in a moist tropical forest ecosystem, based on the variety of life forms its resin entombed. 

(George Poinar, Jr., 2022, Historical Biology)

This particular specimen was mined from la Cordillera Septentrional mountain range. 

There is debate over the age of Dominican amber fossils, with conflicting theories based on the microorganisms used for dating specimens. 

Some say that the presence of foraminifera – single-celled protists sometimes referred to as ‘armored amoebae’ – indicate the amber was formed roughly 20-15 million years ago.

Others suggest a date of 45-30 million years ago, based on the presence of coccoliths – plates of calcium carbonate formed by single-celled phytoplankton called coccolithophores.

 

Poinar notes this is further complicated because the amber was swished about and redeposited in turbulent sediment that later solidified into rock. What’s more, similar amber specimens discovered in Puerto Rico and Jamaica are dated to the Oligocene (33.9-23 million years ago) and the Maastrichtian-Palaeocene (72.1-66 million years ago), respectively.

He estimates this specimen to be 30 million years old.

The fossil reveals not only a new plant species but also a whole ecological microcosm, which Poinar thinks may include pollination, predation, and even parasitism.

Modern members of the Euphorbia genus (the fossilized plant’s living relatives) are indeed pollinated by small wasps, so it’s possible this wasp played a similar ecological role. 

The fossilized wasp – Hambletonia dominicana, discovered and named by Poinar in 2020 – is an encyrtid wasp, a group of parasites known for laying their offspring with the eggs or larvae of smaller insects, which become a meal for the developing young wasps.

Using high-resolution imaging, Poinar noticed a tiny gall gnat (Cecidomyiidae) larva within one of the flower’s developing seeds and the damage to the ovary capsule the gnat inhabits.

 

He thinks the wasp could have been attracted to the infected flower to lay an egg that, after hatching, would have soon parasitized the gall gnat larva. 

Of course, the wasp’s devious plot was interrupted when a blob of sticky resin abruptly froze all three organisms in the tableau they’ve been stuck in for millions of years. 

Poinar was so taken with the beauty of this fossilized moment that he compared its appearance to 20th-century art movements, with the flower’s “elegant curves” and “long lines” reminding him of Art Nouveau styles, and the wasp’s “dancing”, “decorative” shapes and “sharp angles” evoking Art Deco design.

“Based on interests, background, and current environment, everybody has their own way of interpreting visual images in the natural world,” Poinar said.

“An organism can be described, given a scientific name, and then stored away in a taxonomic hierarchy.”

Fossil studies do often focus on individual organisms and their place in the timeline of the tree of life, perhaps because it is rare to come across complete specimens, let alone such a clear indication of multispecies interaction. 

“In many cases, unrelated organisms become entombed together in amber just by chance,” Poinar said.

“But I feel that in this case, the wasp was attracted to the flower, either for obtaining nectar or in attempts to deposit an egg on the capsule that contains the fly larva.”

The paper was published in Historical Biology. 

 

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Scientists Have Found a Way to Save Energy And Boil Water More Efficiently

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Water gets boiled a lot – whether it’s a cup of tea brewing in a kitchen or a power plant generating electricity. Any improvements in the efficiency of this process will have a huge impact on the overall amount of energy used for it every day.

 

One such improvement could come with a newly developed treatment for surfaces involved in heating and evaporating water. The treatment improves two key parameters that determine the boiling process: the heat transfer coefficient (HTC) and the critical heat flux (CHF).

Most of the time, there’s a trade-off between the two – as one improves, the other gets worse. After years of investigation, the research term behind the technique has found a way of enhancing both.

“Both parameters are important, but enhancing both parameters together is kind of tricky because they have intrinsic trade-off,” says bioinformatics scientist Youngsup Song from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California.

“If we have lots of bubbles on the boiling surface, that means boiling is very efficient, but if we have too many bubbles on the surface, they can coalesce together, which can form a vapor film over the boiling surface.”

Any vapor film between the hot surface and the water introduces resistance, lowering the heat transfer efficiency and the CHF value. To get around the issue, the researchers devised three different kinds of surface modification.

 

First, a series of microscale tubes are added. This array of 10-micrometer-wide tubes, spaced about 2 millimeters apart, controls bubble formation and keeps the bubbles pinned to the cavities. That prevents a vapor film from forming.

At the same time, it reduces the concentration of bubbles on the surface, reducing boiling efficiency. To tackle that, the researchers introduced an even smaller-scale treatment as the second modification, adding bumps and ridges just nanometers in size within the surface of the hollow tubes. That increases the available surface area and promotes evaporation rates.

Lastly, the microscale cavities were housed in the center of a series of pillars on the material surface. These pillars speed up the drawing-off process for the liquid by adding more surface area. In combination, the boiling efficiency is significantly increased.

(Song et al.)

Above: A slowed-down video of the researchers’ set-up shows water boiling on a specially treated surface that causes bubbles to form at specific separate points.

As the nanostructures also promote evaporation under the bubbles, and the pillars keep up a steady supply of liquid to that bubble base, a layer of water between the boiling surface and the bubbles can be maintained – enhancing the maximum heat flux.

 

“Showing that we can control the surface in this way to get enhancement is a first step,” says mechanical engineer Evelyn Wang from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Then the next step is to think about more scalable approaches.”

“These kinds of structures we’re making are not meant to be scaled in their current form.”

Taking the work from a small-scale laboratory setting into something that can be used in commercial industries won’t be all that straightforward, but the researchers are confident that it can be done.

One challenge is going to be finding ways of creating the surface textures and the three “tiers” of modifications. The good news is that there are different approaches that can be explored, and the procedure should work for different kinds of liquids too.

“Those kinds of details can be changed, and that can be our next step,” says Song.

The research has been published in Advanced Materials.

 

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Health

We Lose One Crucial Feature of Consciousness While We Sleep, an 8-Year Study Reveals

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When we dream, something mysterious happens within our brains – we experience something similar to being awake, and yet also very different to being awake, and scientists are still trying to unpick exactly what’s going on in that in-between state.

 

Now another clue has been discovered. A new study has found that one crucial feature of consciousness – the ability to be aware of sounds or to identify them – actually gets switched off while we’re asleep, and it could help us figure out how our brains dream.

Mapping the brains of living people while both awake and asleep isn’t easy – few of us would want electrodes implanted in our skulls during our day-to-day activities – but here the team took advantage of medical research being carried out on epilepsy patients.

“We were able to utilize a special medical procedure in which electrodes were implanted in the brains of epilepsy patients, monitoring activity in different parts of their brain for purposes of diagnosis and treatment,” says neuroscientist Yuval Nir, from Tel Aviv University in Israel.

“The patients volunteered to help examine the brain’s response to auditory stimulation in wakefulness versus sleep.”

The electrodes enabled the researchers to see the differences in the response of the cerebral cortex when patients were in different stages of sleep compared to when they were awake – right down to individual neurons.

 

For the purposes of the study, the researchers played a variety of sounds through speakers at the bedsides of the volunteers. Data on over 700 neurons (about 50 per patient) were collected across the course of eight years.

While the brain’s response to sound remained largely switched on during sleep, there was a rise in the level of alpha-beta waves – waves associated with attention and expectation. It seems incoming sounds are being analyzed, but not passed to the consciousness.

This goes against previous thinking: that during sleep, sound-related signals quickly decay in the brain. In fact, they stay stronger and richer than we thought, it’s just that there’s one significant difference in the way they’re processed while we’re snoozing.

“The strength of brain response during sleep was similar to the response observed during wakefulness, in all but one specific feature, where a dramatic difference was recorded: the level of activity of alpha-beta waves,” says first author, neuroscientist Hanna Hayat, from Tel Aviv University.

These alpha-beta waves (10-30Hz) are controlled by feedback from higher up in the brain – this feedback (including whether or not sounds are new) helps our minds work out which sounds are important and need to be listened to.

A similar sort of upward shift in alpha-beta wave patterns has previously been observed in patients under anesthetic, but it hasn’t been seen in people sleeping. The researchers describe it as one way of grasping the “fascinating enigma” of how the conscious brain differs from the unconscious brain.

This also gives scientists a quantitative and reliable method of measuring if someone really is unconscious or not: during hospital operations, in comatose individuals, when checking for signs of dementia, and so on.

“Our findings have wide implications beyond this specific experiment,” says Nir. “In future research we intend to further explore the mechanisms responsible for this difference.”

The research has been published in Nature Neuroscience.

 

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On a Scale of 1 to 10, Here’s How Worried You Should Be About The COVID Variant BA.5

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There’s a new coronavirus variant traveling around this summer at a record clip.

It’s a variant of Omicron called BA.5, and it’s causing a stir largely because it has evolved even further away than other Omicron variants did from the coronavirus we already knew. 

 

Previously, getting infected with Omicron meant you probably had some protection against reinfection for a few months.

But BA.5 is strategically evading our built-up defenses against prior versions of the virus. This all means that reinfections – even in vaccinated and recently infected people – are up, way up.

So, yes, BA.5 is easier to catch than other variants have been, and it may feel like it’s lurking everywhere right now, infecting anyone, whether or not you’ve already had a vaccine, a booster shot, and/or a recent bout of COVID-19.

“If you were infected with BA.1, you really don’t have a lot of good protection against BA.4/5,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the US’s top infectious-disease expert, said Tuesday.

We asked four top public-health experts to help us figure out how worried we should be about this new, extra-stealthy Omicron subvariant. 

Telling us how concerned to be about new infectious-disease threats is typically what these people do for a living. But rating BA.5 gave them some pause.

“I can’t answer that,” Dr. Celine Gounder, an infectious-disease expert and the editor at large for public health at Kaiser Health News, said. “Because it depends on your vaccination status, your age, your health, your occupation, your living situation, etc., etc.”

Others did give hard numbers, but there was variation in their answers based on where you may live or who you are. 

 

If you’re up to date on vaccines, one expert says your worry scale should register at ‘3 out of 10’

Dr. Preeti Malani, an infectious-disease physician at the University of Michigan, was willing to give a hard and fast number. “I’d say 3 out of 10,” she said, expressing mild concern about the new variant. 

“BA.5 is everywhere, and if you haven’t gotten it yet, the odds are pretty” good you will,” Malani said, adding: “But if you are up to date on vaccines, the illness should be mild and without major medical consequences.”

While there’s a “high risk of exposure” to this variant, she said there were also “lots of reasons to be hopeful.” Early treatment with Paxlovid is now free for all Americans who may need it.

“With home testing and rapid connection to treatment (for those at risk of complicated infection), COVID is manageable,” Malani said.

Older adults without booster shots should be more worried 

In the UK, which is at least a few weeks ahead of the US in terms of variant spread, national health-security experts have assessed that the protection offered by vaccines against BA.5 “likely remains comparable to that observed previously,” which means vaccinated and boosted people, while certainly at risk of getting sick with BA.5, likely won’t end up in the hospital or dead. 

For those who aren’t up to date on shots, and who don’t have a COVID-19 action plan, outcomes could be bad.

 

The European Union earlier this week released new recommendations for a second booster for all adults 60 and older, in line with what the US already recommends. 

“We are currently seeing increasing COVID-19-case notification rates and an increasing trend in hospital and ICU admissions and occupancy in several countries, mainly driven by the BA.5 sublineage of Omicron,” Dr. Andrea Ammon, the director of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, said. 

“There are still too many individuals at risk of severe COVID-19 infection whom we need to protect as soon as possible,” she added. 

Regional differences in vaccination rates and heat waves may complicate the calculation

Katelyn Jetelina, a public-health expert who runs the popular Your Local Epidemiologist blog wasn’t willing to give a single number for the entire US. She said the risk was too variable right now, based on where you live.

“I’m quite worried about the South,” she said, ranking it a 7 out of 10 because of low rates of booster shots, low Paxlovid usage, low testing, and “everyone going inside for the heat.”

 

The South also had a relatively low number of infections in the recent BA.2.12.1 wave, unlike the Northeast, where Jetelina said people should be at about a 4 out of 10 level of concern.

Bottom line: If you’re boosted, wearing masks when appropriate, and have a test and treatment action plan for if you do get sick, most experts agree this wave should turn out OK for you.

But like all risk calculations, “the number is different based on who it is being applied to,” as Dr. Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, said. 

“If it is a fresh lung-transplant patient, the number would be 10. For a healthy 18-year-old, it would be 0,” he said. “Risk is not one-size-fits-all.”

This article was originally published by Business Insider.

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The Webb Team Just Stealthily Dropped a Picture of Jupiter, And We Can’t Stop Staring

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This morning we were in a frenzy over a sneaky side-glimpse of a galaxy revealed in the first full-color James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) images.

But if you thought that was wild, then wait for this: it turns out JWST has also dropped some stealthy images of Jupiter! And they’re ridiculously beautiful.

 

These images, taken while JWST was being tested, were provided in the JWST commissioning report. 

The images, which you can see in greater detail below, show Jupiter and its rings as well as three of its moons: Europa, Thebe, and Metis.

You can also see the shadow of Europa in the image on the left, just next to the planet’s tumultuous and infamous Great Red Spot.

(NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI)

Above: The image on the left was taken by the JWST Near-Infrared Camera using a filter that highlights short wavelengths. The image on the right is taken with a filter that highlights long wavelengths of light.

The images were taken by JWST’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) and they use two different filters which highlight separate wavelengths of light. 

Part of the test was ensuring that JWST could track fast-moving objects through the Solar System. 

For this, JWST photographed nine targets, and Jupiter was the slowest moving – but, as you can see, one of the most stunning.

 

The test also showed that it’s possible to use JWST to photograph details like moons and rings around a planet as bright as Jupiter.

“Observing a bright planet and its satellites and rings was expected to be challenging, due to scattered light that may affect the science instrument employed, but also the fine guidance sensor must track guide stars near the bright planet,” the commissioning report explains.

“These observations verified the expectation that guide star acquisition works successfully as long as Jupiter is at least 140″ away from the FGS, consistent with pre-flight modeling.”

This is all good news as it means JWST will be useful at tracking things like near-Earth objects and comets.

Overall, the commissioning report shows that JWST is performing even better than expected.

“The key outcome of six months of commissioning is this: JWST is fully capable of achieving the discoveries for which it was built. JWST was envisioned ‘to enable fundamental breakthroughs in our understanding of the formation and evolution of galaxies, stars, and planetary systems’,” the authors write in the report.

“We now know with certainty that it will.”

We’re looking forward to more photo drops in the coming weeks and months!

 



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Five New Incredible Images Released From The JWST

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The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has already expanded humanity’s vision further into time and space than ever before, giving a breathtaking sneak peek of the deepest and sharpest infrared image of the early Universe to date.

 

Now, NASA has just unveiled five more stunning full-color images captured by the most ambitious telescopes humanity has ever built. 

“You ain’t seen nothing yet,” Gregory L. Robinson, James Webb Space Telescope Program Director, teased in the lead-up to the reveal.

And boy was he right! 

The images have of course been colorized during processing, so while they may not be accurate to the naked eye they’re still representing real data and making it easier for scientists to distinguish and understand the complex structures being imaged. These enhancements are purely for science.

Amazingly, what we see here is just five days worth of images from the telescope!! They’re a culmination of decades of hard work from many people around the world and it’s only the beginning. So, feast your eyes on these incredible visions that are clearer and more detailed than ever.

The Southern Ring Nebula

What you can see below are spectacular waves of death from the Southern Ring Nebula – shells of gas shuddered off from dying stars.

The Southern Ring Nebula, AKA NGC 3132, is located around 2,000 light-years away and is a gorgeous, glowing blob in the southern constellation of Vela.

 

There are two stars in its center, clearly visible in the image on the right below. The fainter one is a white dwarf; the collapsed core of a dead star that, during its lifetime, was up to eight times the mass of the Sun. It reached the end of its life, blew off its outer layers, and the core collapsed down into an ultradense object: up to 1.4 times the mass of the Sun, packed into an object the size of Earth. Although it still shines, it’s just from residual heat. Over billions of years, it will cool to a dark, dead object.

For the first time, JWST has been able to reveal this star, cloaked in dust. The brighter star is in an earlier stage of its evolution, and will one day explode into its own nebula.

(NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI)

On the left, Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) reveals bubbly orange hydrogen from newly formed expansions as well as a blue haze of hot ionized gas from the leftover heated core of the dead star.

On the right, in the image captured by Webb’s Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI), blue hydrocarbons form similar patterns to the orange in the previous image, because they gather on the surface of hydrogen dust rings. 

 

“Webb will allow astronomers to dig into many more specifics about planetary nebulae like this one,” explains NASA. “Understanding which molecules are present, and where they lie throughout the shells of gas and dust will help researchers refine their knowledge of these objects.”

To provide context about the new level of detail, here is Hubble’s view of the Southern Ring Nebula, taken in 1998.

(Hubble)

Read more about the image of the Southern Ring Nebula.

The Deep Field Image

We’ve already seen the deep field image of SMACS 0723, filled to the brim with galaxies frozen in time billions of years ago. Today, the Webb team provided some more insight into the image. 

Read more about the Deep Field image.

Exoplanet WASP-96b

One of JWST’s targets was exoplanet WASP-96b, a hot puffy world that’s so close to its star it has just a 3.5 Earth-day orbit. It’s whipping around a Sun-like star 1,150 light-years away.

WASP-96b has a mass less than half that of Jupiter and a diameter 1.2 times greater, so it’s a lot puffier than any gas giant we have in our Solar System – and a lot hotter, too, with a temperature higher than 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit (538 degrees Celsius).

What’s fascinating is that JWST has been able to detect evidence of clouds and haze in the exoplanet’s atmosphere, capturing “the distinct signature of water”.

(NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI)

By observing tiny decreases in the brightness of specific colors of light over a 6.4-hour period on June 21, JWST was able to reveal the presence of specific gas molecules around the planet. This is the most detailed observation of an exoplanet’s atmosphere we’ve ever received.

How does it work? When an exoplanet passes between us and its host star – what is known as a transit – a small, very small, amount of the star’s light ought to pass through the star’s atmosphere, if it has one. Scientists can look at the spectrum of that light to look for brighter or dimmer wavelengths from light that has been absorbed and re-emitted by elements in the atmosphere. This can tell us what those elements are.

 

What’s interesting is that previous observations suggested WASP-96b had a clear atmosphere, with no clouds. So we still have quite a bit to learn about this weird exoplanet.

This isn’t the first time we’ve detected water in an exoplanet’s atmosphere – the Hubble Space Telescope did this in 2013 – but Webb’s detection is faster and far more detailed, and only hints at the potential of what lies ahead for our understanding of alien worlds.

Read more about the WASP-96b observations.

Stephan’s Quintet

Stephan’s Quintet is a group of galaxies locked in a cosmic dance with collisions and new stars exploding into being (the red areas in the image below).

The new JWST image of Stephan’s Quintet is monstrously massive, covering an area of the sky one-fifth of the Moon’s diameter (as seen from Earth) and containing more than 150 million pixels. It was constructed from around 1,000 image files – and it helps us understand how these dramatic galactic interactions shape galaxy evolution. 

(NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI)

In the topmost galaxy in this image, NGC 7319, scientists identified the signs of material swirling around a massive black hole. The light energy it’s putting out from all the material it’s gobbling up is 40 billion times that of our Sun.

While five galaxies are in view, only four of them are actually close together – the one on the left, NGC 7320, is much closer to us at 40 million light years away, whereas the others are around 290 million light years away.

You can compare the JWST image to the 2009 Hubble view.

Read more about the image here.

The Carina Nebula

Last, but in no way the least, is the gorgeous Carina Nebula as we’ve never seen it before – complete with hundreds of brand new stars. This incredible image shows the edge of a nearby young star-forming region, also called NGC 3324.

The staggering detail in the infrared JWST image provides an amazing sense of depth and texture and there are many mysterious new structures to explore. 

(NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI)

Known as the ‘Cosmic Cliffs’, the tallest peak in this image is a staggering 7 light-years high, with blue ionized gas steamed off it by intense radiation.

The top is where newborn stars are exploding into life and the stellar wind they produce pushes the orange-y gasses away, which in turn also ignites new stars or can snuff them out before they’re ever made.

What’s even more incredible is that we’re all composed of the same star stuff we can see in this image.

Read more about the Carina Nebula image.

 



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Science

A Supervolcano in New Zealand Is Rumbling So Much It’s Shifting The Ground Above It

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The vast expanse of Lake Taupō’s sky blue waters, crowned by hazy, mountainous horizons, invokes an extreme sense of tranquility. 

And yet, deep in the ground below, geological unrest is brewing, according to a new paper in the New Zealand Journal of Geology and Geophysics.

 

Lake Taupō is the largest freshwater lake in Australasia, located at the center of New Zealand’s north island. And while it appears peaceful today, the lake has a violent origin story. 

The lake’s waters sit within a prehistoric caldera – a word based on the Spanish for ‘cauldron’ or ‘boiling pot’ – formed during Earth’s most recent supereruption, the Oruanui eruption, 25,400 years ago.

When magma is released from a supervolcano (defined as having released at least 1,000 cubic kilometers of material in any one eruption) in an event like the Oruanui eruption, the depleted magma vents cave in, Earth’s surface sinks, and the landscape is permanently changed into a caldera. 

In the last 12,000 years, the Taupō volcano has been active 25 times. Its most recent eruption in 232 AD is described by authors of the new paper as “one of the Earth’s most explosive eruptions in historic times”. Since then, the volcano has had at least four documented “episodes of unrest”, causing destructive earthquakes and, in 1922, a massive ground subsidence.

It’s the supervolcano’s more modern periods of unrest that the researchers have studied, analyzing up to 42 years of data collected at 22 sites dotted around and across the lake. And there’s evidence that the supervolcano is still rumbling. 

 

“In 1979 [researchers] began a novel surveying technique which uses the lake surface to detect small changes, with four surveys made every year since,” lead author and Victoria University of Wellington seismologist Finn Illsley-Kemp explained. This technique involves the use of a gauge that measures vertical displacement of the lake bed. 

To ensure the data are reliable, these gauges are weighted to reduce the impact of waves, and several measurements are taken for each datapoint, to detect degrees of variation and outliers. A backup gauge is also installed at each site as an insurance against disturbance by other forces.

In the project’s beginning, the measurements were recorded from manual gauges set up at just six stations. Eight more stations were added between August 1982 and July 1983, and during this time, the value of these measurements began to show. 

In early 1983, the system detected rising or falling across different sites. Not long after, a swarm of earthquakes gently shook the region, resulting in the rupturing of several faults that pushed the central Kaiapo fault belt down and caused other areas at the lake’s south end to rise.

 

The 1983 earthquake swarms were only the first of seven discreet episodes of unrest recorded over the past 35 years.

By 1986 routine surveys were being carried out each year with additional sensors, with extra observations in the wake of earthquakes, creating a robust dataset that has only become more detailed over time.

The authors noticed that during periods of geological unrest, the north-eastern end of the lake (which is closest to the volcano’s center and the adjoining fault lines) tended to rise; the lake bed near the fault belt’s center sank; and at the lake’s southern end, there was some minor subsidence.

“Within the lake, near Horomatangi Reefs, the volcano has caused 160 mm [16 cm or 6.3 inches] of uplift, whereas north of the lake the tectonic faults have caused 140 mm [5.5 inches] of subsidence,” Illsley-Kemp said.

He thinks this region, which has very few earthquakes compared to the surrounding areas, is the location of Taupō ‘s magma reservoir, with deep rock that is too hot and molten for earthquakes to occur. 

The researchers say the 16 cm of uplift – which, while not catastrophic, is definitely enough to cause some damage to buildings or pipes – is possibly due to magma moving closer to the surface during periods of unrest.

 

Illsley-Kemp said the research shows Taupō is an active and dynamic volcano, intimately connected with the surrounding tectonics.

The researchers think the northeastern end of the volcano – which has the youngest vents – is more likely to be affected by the expansion of hot magma, pushing the ground upwards. They think the ‘sinking’ center of the Taupō  fault, and the subsidence at the lake’s southern end is likely due to deep magma cooling (and therefore shrinking), a tectonic extension of a rift, or both.

Illsley-Kemp has regularly assured people that while it’s in a state of unrest, there is no evidence the volcano will erupt anytime soon.

“However, Taupō will most likely erupt at some stage over the next few thousand years – and so it’s important that we monitor and understand these unrest periods so that we can quickly identify any signs which might indicate a forthcoming eruption,” he told the New Zealand Herald in a 2021 article.

Ultimately, this research is more about understanding the normal ‘behavior’ of the caldera, and what to look for when things are getting more heated.

This study is published in the New Zealand Journal of Geology and Geophysics and Geophysics.

 

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