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Mars Rover Appears to Catch “Dark Beast” Roaming the Surface of Mars

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That doesn’t look like a rock.

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The Mars rovers have sent back countless amazing images of the surface of the red planet, and occasionally some of these pictures make the news because they look so strange. But whether the rovers appear to have uncovered doorways, mice, or humanoids on the red planet, it’s always ended up being a case of our minds trying to recreate the familiar in these pictures of an alien world. This tendency is called “pareidolia” and is the human brain’s ability to see patterns or lifelike figures in random shapes in nature. If you’ve ever looked for pictures in clouds, or agreed that constellations do indeed look like belts or water dippers, you can thank your sense of pareidolia.

But is that what is going on in this viral video claiming to have been taken on Mars? Let’s investigate.

Click here to watch the video.

This video says the picture was taken in August of this year, and purports to show a strange, four legged “beast” in a photo taken by an unnamed Mars rover. Looking around the web, though it’s easy to spot dozens of news articles about the other strange photos sent back by mars rovers, I could only find one mention of this particular photograph. In a YouTube video, posted three months ago (i.e., in August), the picture is marked as having been taken by the rover known as Opportunity.

One problem though: Opportunity lost contact with NASA back in 2018. It’s not sending back pictures anymore.

Is this picture real? Is it even of Mars? One would think that if so, there would have been news stories about it, like there were of every other strange photo. But even if so, this most likely just shows shadows cast by yet another red rock.

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20 Quadrillion Ants Are Roaming Earth Right Now, Scientists Calculate

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When Mark Wong set out to analyze 489 entomological studies spanning every continent, major habitat and biome on Earth, he had a simple goal: Count the ants. The journey to a final answer was long, and often tedious. Then, one day, Wong and fellow ant experts came out on the other side. 

According to a new paper published Monday in the journal PNAS, the international team of scientists suggests there are a whopping 20 quadrillion ants roaming our planet right now. That’s 20,000,000,000,000,000 of those six-legged worker insects you catch pollinating plants, dispersing seeds like little gardeners and salivating at the aftermath of a toasted bagel.

“We further estimate that the world’s ants collectively constitute about 12 megatons of dry carbon,” said Wong, an ecologist at the University of Western Australia’s School of Biological Sciences. “Impressively, this exceeds the biomass of all the world’s wild birds and mammals combined.”

To put that staggering quantity into perspective, multiply the team’s ant biomass estimate by five. The number you get equals just about the entirety of human biomass on Earth — and this might be a conservative estimate. Each of the 489 global studies was quite thorough — employing tens of hundreds of booby trap tactics like catching runaway ants in small plastic container ditches and gently shaking leaves to learn how many take shelter in crunchy homes. But as with most research endeavors, caveats remained. 

Sampling locations, Wong explains, were unevenly distributed across geographic regions, for instance, and the vast majority were collected from the ground layer. “We have very little information about ant numbers in trees or underground,” he said. “This means our findings are somewhat incomplete.”

Why worry about counting ants?

Despite their diminutive size, ants carry quite a bit of might. 

Aside from tunneling seeds into the ground for dinner and accidentally blooming plants from their leftovers, these buggers are integral to maintaining our ecosystem’s delicate balance. They’re prey for larger animals, predators of many others, soil churners and scavengers, to name just a few of their accolades. So considering the sheer amount of them gracing Earth, they’re a pretty big deal. “This enormous bulk of ants on Earth heavily underscores their ecological value, as ants can punch above their weight in providing key ecological functions,” Wong said.

But when it comes to counting ants specifically, as Wong did, there’s an urgency stemming from the rate at which our climate is changing. Scientists must quantify how many ants, as well as other animals and insects, exist on Earth because the climate crisis — a threat exacerbated by human activity — is forcing global temperatures to rise and therefore putting these organisms at risk of extinction.

“We need people to rigorously and repeatedly survey and describe the ecological communities of different habitats before they are lost,” Wong said, emphasizing that the team’s recent work provides an important baseline for ant populations, so we know how these insects’ communities might change in tandem with a warming climate.

A worst case scenario of not counting up our fellow Earthling friends is sometimes called “dark extinction,” or anonymous extinction. It’s simply the worry that many species might disappear under the radar as the climate crisis worsens due to things like habitat loss or inhabitability. 

Those animals on the road to extinction might not even be documented, let alone studied in detail. 

In this regard, the team’s PNAS study opens with an apt quote from American biologist and ant specialist Edward O. Wilson: “Ants make up two-thirds of the biomass of all the insects. There are millions of species of organisms and we know almost nothing about them.”

Going forward, this is why Wong believes it’s important to regularly survey ant populations, and even expedite the process by outsourcing it to anyone able and willing to participate. “Things like counting ants,” he said, “taking photographs of the insects they encounter in their backyard and noting observations of interesting things that plants and animals are doing can go a long way.   

“It would be great to have — as the eminent ant biologist E. O. Wilson once proposed — simply ‘more boots on the ground.'”

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NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope Just Detected a Possible Roaming Black Hole Out in the Milky Way

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supermassive black hole in the galaxy

ClaudioVentrella / Getty

Outside of life on Earth, there’s a whole universe filled with mysteries that scientists are steadily uncovering each day. Thanks to NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers got one step closer to understanding the inner-workings of our galaxy. The telescope detected a moving black hole in the Milky Way for the first time ever.

These roaming black holes appear when stars at least 20 times bigger than the sun explode. This black hole appeared to be flying through space at a rapid rate, Smithsonian Magazine reports. Scientists believe this out-of-this-world object is over 5,000 light years away and moving between 67,000 and 100,000 miles per hour, according to CNN.

“Our discovery of a black hole is consistent with the theoretical calculations which suggest that there should be about 100 million black holes in our galaxy,” Kailash Sahu, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute, told Newsweek. “Then, assuming black holes follow [a] similar distribution as stars, one expects, statistically, that the nearest black hole may be about 80 light years away.”

Related: Scientists Just Captured the First Image Ever Taken of the Black Hole at the Heart of the Milky Way

Scientists, however, are still trying to figure out if this black hole is actually a black hole. University of California, Berkeley and Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore researchers looked into the data from the telescope and pointed out a compact object. The Space Telescope Science Institute estimated the mass at seven solar masses, meaning it would be a black hole, NASA reports. On the other hand, the University of California, Berkeley team estimated the mass between 1.6 and 4.4 solar masses, meaning it would be a neutron star.

“As much as we would like to say it is definitively a black hole, we must report all allowed solutions,” Jessica Lu of the University of California, Berkeley said in the statement. “This includes both lower mass black holes and possibly even a neutron star.”

Black holes and neutron stars both occur after a star explosion. (Roaming black holes will appear after a huge star explosion, though.) This discovery overall is notable, particularly because of how it was uncovered. “This is the first free-floating black hole or neutron star discovered with gravitational microlensing,” Lu said in the statement. “With microlensing, we’re able to probe these lonely, compact objects and weigh them. I think we have opened a new window onto these dark objects, which can’t be seen any other way.”

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NASA’s Hubble Telescope spies possible black hole roaming the Milky Way

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New findings from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope likely confirm the existence of a black hole in our galaxy. 

The mass of nothingness is believed to be 5,000 light years away in the Carina-Sagittarius spiral arm of the Milky Way galaxy. However, its discovery over the last six years of research has led scientists to believe there is a closer black hole, only about 80 light years away. Don’t fret just yet—neither are anywhere near sucking up the Earth. But the discovery is a first for scientists and a milestone for Hubble. 

“Detections of isolated black holes will provide new insights into the population of these objects in our Milky Way,” said Kailash Sahu of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore in a NASA press release about the discovery. 

Sahu led one of two teams that used observations from Hubble to identify the potential black hole. Sahu’s team believes the object is definitely a black hole, while another team led by Casey Lam of the University of California-Berkeley thinks it could either be a black hole or neutron star about to implode. 

“Whatever it is, the object is the first dark stellar remnant discovered wandering through the galaxy, unaccompanied by another star,” Lam said.

These observations show what NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope observed to help scientists determine the existence of a roaming black hole in our galaxy.

NASA, ESA, and Kailash Sahu (STScI); Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI)

The discovery was made through a basic principle called atrometric microlensing, which is easy enough to explain but harder to identify in deep space. A black hole is possibly found when telescopes on Earth observe stars that temporarily appear brighter or dimmer. Similar to how a fish-eye lens distorts an image, this happens when the black hole passes between the Earth and a star, making it appear different. Here’s NASA’s explanation: 

Over the last six years, scientists on both teams used Hubble to dig further into these atrometric microlensing observations made from telescopes on Earth. In doing so, they found the first-ever evidence of a lone black hole drifting through the universe, according to NASA. 

Scientists predict there to be thousands of black holes floating in space. 



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A Rogue Black Hole Roaming Our Galaxy May Have Just Been Confirmed

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The first detection of what appears to be a rogue black hole drifting through the Milky Way, revealed earlier this year, just got important validation.

A second team of scientists, conducting a separate, independent analysis, has reached almost the same finding, adding weight to the idea that we’ve potentially identified a rogue black hole wandering the galaxy.

 

Led by astronomers Casey Lam and Jessica Lu of the University of California, Berkeley, the new work has arrived at a slightly different conclusion, however. Given the mass range of the object, it could be a neutron star, rather than a black hole, according to the new study.

Either way, though, this means that we may have a new tool for searching for ‘dark’, compact objects that are otherwise undetectable in our galaxy, by measuring the way their gravitational fields warp and distort the light of distant stars as they pass in front of them, called gravitational microlensing.

“This is the first free-floating black hole or neutron star discovered with gravitational microlensing,” Lu says.

“With microlensing, we’re able to probe these lonely, compact objects and weigh them. I think we have opened a new window onto these dark objects, which can’t be seen any other way.”

Black holes are theorized to be the collapsed cores of massive stars that have reached the ends of their lives and ejected their outer material. Such black hole precursor stars – bigger than 30 times the mass of the Sun – are thought to live relatively short lives.

 

According to our best estimates, therefore, there should be as many as 10 million to 1 billion stellar-mass black holes out there, drifting peacefully and quietly through the galaxy.

But black holes are called black holes for a reason. They emit no light that we can detect, unless material is falling onto them, a process that generates X-rays from the space around the black hole. So if a black hole is just hanging out, doing nothing, we have almost no way of detecting it.

Almost. What a black hole does have is an extreme gravitational field, so powerful that it warps any light that travels through it. For us, as observers, that means we might see a distant star appear brighter, and in a different position, than how it appears normally.

On 2 June 2011, that’s exactly what happened. Two separate microlensing surveys – the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE) and Microlensing Observations in Astrophysics (MOA) – independently recorded an event that ended up peaking on July 20.

This event was named MOA-2011-BLG-191/OGLE-2011-BLG-0462 (shortened to OB110462), and because it was unusually long and unusually bright, scientists homed in for a closer look.

 

“How long the brightening event lasts is a hint of how massive the foreground lens bending the light of the background star is,” Lam explains.

“Long events are more likely due to black holes. It’s not a guarantee, though, because the duration of the brightening episode not only depends on how massive the foreground lens is, but also on how fast the foreground lens and background star are moving relative to each other.

“However, by also getting measurements of the apparent position of the background star, we can confirm whether the foreground lens really is a black hole.”

Illustration showing how Hubble views a microlensing event. (NASA, ESA, STScI, Joseph Olmsted)

In this case, observations of the region were taken on eight separate occasions using the Hubble Space Telescope, up until 2017.

From a deep analysis of this data, a team of astronomers led by Kailash Sahu of the Space Telescope Science Institute concluded that the culprit was a microlensing black hole clocking in at 7.1 times the mass of the Sun, at a distance of 5,153 light-years away.

 

Lu and Lam’s analysis now adds more data from Hubble, as recently captured as 2021. Their team found that the object is somewhat smaller, between 1.6 and 4.4 times the mass of the Sun.

This means that the object could be a neutron star. That’s also the collapsed core of a massive star, one that started out between 8 and 30 times the mass of the Sun.

The resulting object is supported by something called neutron degeneracy pressure, whereby neutrons don’t want to occupy the same space; this prevents it from completely collapsing into a black hole. Such an object has a mass limit of around 2.4 times the mass of the Sun.

Interestingly, no black holes have been detected below around 5 times the mass of the Sun. This is referred to as the lower mass gap. If the work of Lam and her colleagues is correct, that means we could have the detection of a lower mass gap object on our hands, which is very tantalizing.

The two teams came back with different masses for the lensing object because their analyses returned different results for the relative motions of the compact object and the lensed star.

Sahu and his team found that the compact object is moving at a relatively high velocity of 45 kilometers per second, as the result of a natal kick: a lopsided supernova explosion can send the collapsed core speeding away.

Lam and her colleagues got 30 kilometers per second, however. This result, they say, suggests that perhaps a supernova explosion is not necessary for the birth of a black hole.

Right now, it’s impossible to draw a firm conclusion from OB110462 about which estimate is correct, but astronomers expect to learn a lot from the discovery of more of these objects in the future.

“Whatever it is, the object is the first dark stellar remnant discovered wandering through the galaxy unaccompanied by another star,” Lam says.

The research has been accepted into The Astrophysical Journal, and is available on arXiv.

 

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Fred the Mastodon’s Tusks Reveal a Life of Fighting and Roaming

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Over 13,000 years ago, an American mastodon roamed what is today the American Midwest. Year after year, he returned to an area in northeast Indiana — believed to be a mating ground. It was there that he died in battle.

Where the mastodon spent his life and how he died were all recovered by studying chemical signatures recorded in his tusk, scientists reported Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Their techniques offer new insight into one of several ancient elephant relatives that roamed North America before going extinct.

Scientists studied the Buesching mastodon, named for the family farm where it was found in 1998, and now on display at the Indiana State Museum. Also known as Fred, his tusks, like those of modern elephants, record an animal’s entire life history and enable scientists to glean information from specific days, weeks or years. Thus, the scientists could specifically sample areas within its tusk from its adolescence and adulthood and determine how its migration changed over time.

This migratory detective work focused on strontium and oxygen isotopes in the tusks. Joshua Miller, a paleoecologist from the University of Cincinnati and an author of the study, described strontium isotopes as leaving signals all over the landscape.

Strontium isotopes leach from rocks into surrounding soil and water. As plants absorb those nutrients, they incorporate “those isotopic signatures,” he explained. Our hungry mastodon would come along and eat those plants, stamping that geographic fingerprint into his tusks.

Interpreting these geographical references and matching them onto the landscape takes one more step: a map of how strontium isotopes change across terrain. The authors built upon the work of other scientists, including Brooke E. Crowley, also of Cincinnati and one of the study’s co-authors, who had created such a map.

Oxygen isotopes helped to uncover the seasons in which Fred migrated. Each time it rained, atmospheric isotopes recording the season were incorporated into local bodies of water and ingested when he drank from nearby ponds and streams.

Together with complex statistical modeling, the team was able to determine the movement of this animal.

Things drastically changed for this mastodon from his 29th through his 32nd years. Suddenly, he was moving over great distances with signs of repeated injury. But he kept returning to northeast Indiana every year — a location, the authors noted, that he never explored in his adolescent years. There, in late spring and early summer, he suffered injuries, an important clue that it might have been a mating ground.

Daniel Fisher, a paleontologist at the University of Michigan and also an author of the study, explained that pits on the surface of a mastodon’s tusk are just one trace injuries leave behind. Those injuries leave an internal mark as well.

“It turns out that those pits form in places where the tusk, at some point in its growth history, was jammed into the back of its bony socket,” Dr. Fisher said. When male proboscideans thrust their tusks at opponents, the tusk jams back into the socket where it grows out of the skull. This affects internal growth within the tusk, leaving signs of which season the injury occurred in.

That these injuries consistently reoccurred in spring and summer within an adult male mastodon led the team to suspect he was going through musth, a time of aggression associated with reproduction seen in modern male elephants, where sparring with other males is a frequent occurrence.

The mortal craniofacial injury he sustained took place during that same season at that same mating ground.

“The methods that they’re using are part of a broader trend in Quaternary vertebrate paleontology to add a lot more detail to the behavior and the ecology of these animals,” said Chris Widga, a vertebrate paleontologist and head curator at the Gray Fossil Site in Tennessee, who was not involved in the research. “And it’s the first time that we have had this data, which is really, really good.”

Whether the migration patterns and injuries are representative of all male American mastodons is a question for future research. The team hopes to study more male and female mastodon fossils.

For now, the study opens the door to more questions: How did the migration patterns of female mastodons differ? Were there separate mating grounds for the various proboscideans that coexisted at that time? Or, Dr. Miller pondered, “Did they go to the same place, and this is just a crazed region of hormonally-charged proboscideans?”

Whatever the broader possibilities about mastodons as a species, Dr. Miller returned to the team’s discoveries about the Buesching specimen.

“To be at a point in geochemistry, modeling and paleobiology in general that we can start to grasp at some of these foundational aspects of the biology of an individual,” he said, “I think it’s just so deeply, deeply exciting.”

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Astronomers discover dozens of “rogue planets” roaming the galaxy without a star

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It’s not the first time astronomers have discovered so-called “rogue planets” — free-floating planets that wander aimlessly through space without a host star to orbit. But they thought it was a somewhat rare phenomenon, until now.

According to new research published in the journal Nature Astronomy, scientists have recently discovered an impressive number of these elusive exoplanets: 70 or more. It marks the largest such group ever spotted roaming the Milky Way — and it may be a crucial step in understanding the origins of the “mysterious galactic nomads,” scientists say. 

“We did not know how many to expect and are excited to have found so many,” Núria Miret-Roig, the first author of the study, said in a press release. 

This artist’s impression shows an example of a rogue planet detected in the Rho Ophiuchi region, where ESO observations have recently helped uncover at least 70 of these objects. Rogue planets have masses comparable to those of the planets in our solar system but do not orbit a star, instead roaming freely on their own. 

ESO/M. Kornmesser


Most exoplanets are spotted using observations of their host stars, so finding these orphaned planets is considerably more difficult. But using decades of research, the group of scientists saw infrared energy emitted by between 70 and 170 of the gas giants, young enough to still emit a detectable heat glow. 

“We measured the tiny motions, the colors and luminosities of tens of millions of sources in a large area of the sky,” explains Miret-Roig. “These measurements allowed us to securely identify the faintest objects in this region, the rogue planets.”

The planets were discovered using a series of telescopes, located both on Earth and in space, including the European Space Agency’s Very Large Telescope and Gaia satellite. The planets, with masses comparable to that of Jupiter, are located within the Scorpius and Ophiuchus constellations. 


Artist’s animation of a rogue planet in Rho Ophiuchi by
European Southern Observatory (ESO) on
YouTube

“We used tens of thousands of wide-field images from ESO facilities, corresponding to hundreds of hours of observations, and literally tens of terabytes of data,” said project leader Hervé Bouy. 

The findings indicate that there could be a treasure trove of cosmic wanderers just waiting to be found, Bouy added. “There could be several billions of these free-floating giant planets roaming freely in the Milky Way without a host star.” 

This image shows the locations of 115 potential rogue planets, highlighted with red circles, recently discovered by a team of astronomers in a region of the sky occupied by Upper Scorpius and Ophiucus. The exact number of rogue planets found by the team is between 70 and 170, depending on the age assumed for the study region. This image was created assuming an intermediate age, resulting in a number of planet candidates in between the two extremes of the study.

ESO/N. Risinger (skysurvey.org)


And finding more of these types of celestial travelers will help scientists understand their origins. Some hypothesize that they form from the collapse of a gas cloud that is too small to form a star companion, while others believe they could have been booted from their original parent system. 

Astronomers hope to continue their research using the forthcoming Extremely Large Telescope, or ELT, currently under constriction in Chile’s Atacama Desert. 

“These objects are extremely faint and little can be done to study them with current facilities,” said Bouy. “The ELT will be absolutely crucial to gathering more information about most of the rogue planets we have found.”

Sophie Lewis

Sophie Lewis is a social media producer and trending writer for CBS News, focusing on space and climate change.

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