Tag Archives: space and astronomy

Science

Lackluster supernova reveals a rare pair of stars in the Milky Way

Leave a comment

Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more.



CNN
 — 

An unusual star system created more of a fizz and less of a bang when it exploded in a supernova.

The lackluster explosion, known as an “ultra-stripped” supernova, led researchers to discover the two stars 11,000 light-years away from Earth.

It’s the first confirmed detection of a star system that will one day create a kilonova – when neutron stars collide and explode, releasing gold and other heavy elements into space. The rare stellar pair is believed to be one of only about 10 like it in the Milky Way galaxy.

The discovery was a long time coming.

In 2016, NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory detected a large flash of X-ray light, which originated from the same region in the sky where a hot, bright Be-type star was located.

Astronomers were curious if the two could potentially be linked, so data was captured using the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory’s 1.5-meter telescope in northern Chile.

One of those interested in using this data to learn more about the star was Dr. Noel D. Richardson, now an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.

In 2019, Clarissa Pavao, an undergraduate student at the university, approached Richardson while taking his astronomy class to ask if he had any projects she could work on to gain experience with astronomy research. He shared the telescope data with her and throughout the pandemic, Pavao learned how to work with the data from the telescope in Chile and clean it up to reduce distortion.

“The telescope looks at a star and it takes in all the light so that you can see the elements that make up this star — but Be stars tend to have disks of matter around them,” Pavao said. “It’s hard to see directly through all that stuff.”

She sent her initial results — which resembled something like a scatterplot — to Richardson, who recognized that she had pinned down an orbit for the double-star system. Follow-up observations helped them verify the orbit of the binary star system, named CPD-29 2176.

But that orbit wasn’t what they were expecting. Typically, binary stars whirl around one another in an oval-shaped orbit. In CPD-29 2176, one star orbits the other in a circular pattern that repeats about every 60 days.

The two stars, a larger one and a smaller one, were whirling around one another in a very close orbit. Over time, the larger star had begun to shed its hydrogen, releasing material onto the smaller star, which grow from 8 or 9 times the mass of our sun to 18 or 19 times the mass of our sun, Richardson said. For comparison’s sake, our sun’s mass is 333,000 times that of Earth.

The main star became smaller and smaller while building up the secondary star — and by the time it had exhausted all of its fuel, there wasn’t enough to create a massive, energetic supernova to release its remaining material into space.

Instead, the explosion was like lighting a dud firework.

“The star was so depleted that the explosion didn’t even have enough energy to kick (its) orbit into the more typical elliptical shape seen in similar binaries,” Richardson said.

What remained after the ultra-stripped supernova was a dense remnant known as a neutron star, which now orbits the rapidly rotating massive star. The stellar pair will remain in a stable configuration for about 5 to 7 million years. Because both mass and angular momentum were transferred to the Be star, it releases a disk of gas to maintain balance and make sure it doesn’t rip itself apart.

Eventually, the secondary star will also burn through its fuel, expand and release material like the first one did. But that material can’t be easily piled up on the neutron star, so instead, the star system will release the material through space. The secondary star will likely experience a similar lackluster supernova and turn into a neutron star.

Over time — that is, likely a couple billion years — the two neutron stars will merge and eventually explode in a kilonova, releasing heavy elements like gold into the universe.

“Those heavy elements allow us to live the way that we do. For example, most gold was created by stars similar to the supernova relic or neutron star in the binary system that we studied. Astronomy deepens our understanding of the world and our place in it,” Richardson said.

“When we look at these objects, we’re looking backward through time,” Pavao said. “We get to know more about the origins of the universe, which will tell us where our solar system is headed. As humans, we started out with the same elements as these stars.”

A study detailing their findings published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

Richardson and Pavao also worked with physicist Jan J. Eldridge at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, an expert on binary star systems and their evolution. Eldridge reviewed thousands of binary star models and estimated there are likely only 10 in the entirety of the Milky Way galaxy similar to the one in their study.

Next, the researchers want to work on learning more about the Be star itself, and hope to conduct follow-up observations using the Hubble Space Telescope. Pavao is also setting her sights on graduating — and continuing to work on space physics research using the new skills she has acquired.

“I never thought I would be working on the evolutionary history of binary star systems and supernovas,” Pavao said. “It’s been an amazing project.”

Read original article here

Science

Green comet will swing by Earth for the first time in 50,000 years

Leave a comment

Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more.



CNN
 — 

A recently discovered green comet will soon zip by Earth for the first time in 50,000 years. It was last visible in the night sky during the Stone Age.

Discovered on March 2, 2022, by astronomers using the Zwicky Transient Facility’s wide-field survey camera at the Palomar Observatory in San Diego County, California, the comet made its closest approach to the sun on January 12, according to NASA.

Named C/2022 E3 (ZTF), the comet has an orbit around the sun that passes through the outer reaches of the solar system, which is why it’s taken such a long route — and long time — to swing by Earth again, according to The Planetary Society.

The icy celestial object will make its closest pass by Earth between February 1 and February 2, around 26 million miles to 27 million miles (42 million kilometers to 44 million kilometers) away, according to EarthSky.

Even during its closest approach, the comet will still be more than 100 times the moon’s distance away from Earth, according to EarthSky.

As the comet nears Earth, observers will be able to spot it as a faint green smudge near the bright star Polaris, also called the North Star. Comets reflect different colors of light due to their current positions in orbit and chemical compositions.

Early morning skies, once the moon has set after midnight for those in the Northern Hemisphere, are optimal for viewing the comet. The space object will be more difficult to see for those in the Southern Hemisphere.

Depending on its brightness, C/2022 E3 (ZTF) may even be visible to the unaided eye in dark skies, but binoculars or a telescope will make the comet easier to see.

The comet can be distinguished from stars by its streaking tails of dust and energized particles, as well as the glowing green coma surrounding it.

The coma is an envelope that forms around a comet as it passes close to the sun, causing its ice to sublimate, or turn directly to gas. This causes the comet to look fuzzy when observed through telescopes.

After passing by Earth, the comet will make its closest approach of Mars on February 10, according to EarthSky.

If clouds or inclement weather get in the way of skywatching, The Virtual Telescope Project will share a livestream of the comet in the skies above Rome. And don’t miss the other celestial events to see in 2023.

Read original article here

Science

Orbiter captures image of a bear’s face on Mars

Leave a comment

Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more.



CNN
 — 

As a NASA orbiter turned its camera to the Martian surface, the face of a bear seemed to be looking back.

A camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, called the High Resolution Imaging Experiment, or HiRISE, captured an image of the unusual geological feature in December.

A circular fracture pattern on the Martian surface shapes the head, while two craters resemble eyes. A V-shaped collapse structure creates the illusion of the nose of a bear.

The circular fracture might be due to the settling of a deposit on top of a buried impact crater that had been filled in with lava or mud. The noselike feature is possibly a volcanic vent or a mud vent.

The University of Arizona, which developed the camera with Ball Aerospace, shared the image on January 25.

The photo is reminiscent of another celestial “face” glimpsed by a NASA space observatory in October 2022, when the sun appeared to smile due to dark spots called coronal holes.

And last March, the Curiosity rover spotted a rock formation that resembled a flower on Mars.

The HiRISE camera has been taking images of Mars since 2006, when the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter began circling the red planet. The powerful camera was designed to capture detailed images of the Martian surface, including features as small as 3 feet (1 meter).

The orbiter circles Mars every 112 minutes, flying from about 160 miles (255 kilometers) above the south pole to 200 miles (320 kilometers) over the north pole.

The spacecraft and its suite of instruments help NASA scientists study the Martian atmosphere, weather and climate, and how they change over time. The orbiter searches for evidence of water, ice and complex terrain and scouts future landing sites for other missions.

Most recently, the orbiter returned stunning images of what winter looks like on Mars.

Read original article here

Science

CNN Exclusive: Secretive process to select astronauts for NASA’s next moon mission

Leave a comment

Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more.



CNN
 — 

Sometime this spring, NASA will make one of the biggest announcements in its history when it names the initial four-person crew for its flagship Artemis program to return astronauts to the moon for the first time in 50 years.

Scheduled to launch in 2024, Artemis II will be the program’s first crewed mission to orbit the moon, flying farther into space than any humans since the Apollo program and paving the way for the Artemis III crew to walk on the moon in 2025 — all aboard the most powerful rocket ever built and at a price tag that by then will approach $100 billion.

Yet, as publicized as the Artemis II mission is, the process of how its crew will be chosen is so secretive that it remains a mystery even for many on the inside. Other than announcing the astronauts’ nationalities — three Americans, one Canadian — NASA has said almost nothing publicly about who will be selected or how that decision will be made.

CNN spoke with nearly a dozen current and former NASA officials and astronauts to pull back the curtain on the secretive selection process. Based on those interviews, CNN not only gained exclusive insights into how the crew will be selected — it has also whittled down the list of candidates those insiders say are generating the most buzz at NASA.

At the top of everyone’s list for the first Artemis crew is Reid Wiseman, a 47-year-old decorated naval aviator and test pilot who was first selected to be a NASA astronaut in 2009. Wiseman stepped down as chief of the astronaut office in November, a prestigious job historically responsible for selecting the initial crew assignment for each mission, but which also comes with a big catch — the chief isn’t eligible to fly in space.

“Being chief is a crummy, lousy job,” former NASA astronaut Garrett Reisman told CNN. “No one wants it, especially now.”

While it may be a job that few astronauts want ahead of the Artemis crew assignments, it does come with one big advantage.

“Historically, the one benefit of being chief is that, when you did step down, you gave yourself the best flight assignment available at the time. That was kind of an acknowledged perk,” Reisman said. “You did this horrible job on our behalf. Thank you for doing that. Here’s your reward. You get to put yourself in the best seat around.”

Without question, the best open seat right now is on Artemis II — a high-pressure, high-visibility mission that will send four astronauts on a roughly 10-day mission around the moon and back.

INTERACTIVE: Trace the path Artemis I will take around the moon and back

Before stepping down as chief in November, just two days before the launch of Artemis I, the program’s first successful uncrewed test flight, Wiseman made another consequential move in August, when he reversed a previous NASA decision to select the Artemis crew from an initial core group of just 18 astronauts previously deemed the “Artemis Team.”

Instead, Wiseman expanded the group of candidates to all 41 active NASA astronauts.

“The way I look at it, any one of our active astronauts is eligible for an Artemis mission,” Wiseman said at the time. “We just want to assemble the right team for this mission.”

Determining the “right team” for a mission to space has always been a mysterious process, going all the way back to the 1950s. That’s when NASA was making its first flight assignments for its initial Mercury missions, made famous by Tom Wolfe’s book “The Right Stuff.”

Though the criteria may have changed, the process remains incredibly secretive. CNN has learned the decision for who gets to go to the moon will be made by three key people at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, where every US astronaut has lived and trained since 1961.

The first person in the decision process is the chief astronaut, a role currently filled on an acting basis by Wiseman’s deputy, Drew Feustel. Sources told CNN that the chief, whether it’s Feustel or someone else, will take their initial recommendations to the head of the Flight Operations Directorate, Norm Knight, and then on to the director of Johnson Space Center, Vanessa Wyche, who is responsible for signing off on the final four selections.

Cracking the code on how that decision is made is as complex as spaceflight itself.

“To this day, it’s a dark area,” former NASA astronaut Mike Mullane told CNN. “It’s terra incognita (unknown territory). Nobody knows! At least not in our era they didn’t.”

What is known is that NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, a former Democratic senator from Florida, will have no role in the process, something he confirmed for the first time to CNN earlier in January when he said that the space agency’s Washington leadership will “stay out of the selection” of the Artemis II crew.

“That is done by the people at the Johnson Space Center. They will make the decision,” Nelson told CNN. “I do not know if they’ve decided who the crew is, nor should I.”

The only thing set in stone is that the Artemis II crew will consist of three American astronauts and one Canadian, terms that were cemented in a 2020 treaty between the two countries. From the beginning, NASA has also emphasized the need for a program named after Apollo’s twin sister in Greek mythology, Artemis, to have a crew with a heavy mix of gender, racial and professional diversity.

NASA has a far more diverse pool of astronauts to choose from now than during the Mercury program, when all seven astronauts were White, male, military test pilots. More than a third of the Artemis generation’s 41 astronauts are women and 12 are people of color.

The Artemis generation of astronauts is also professionally diverse, with only 16 pilots in its ranks. The rest are “mission specialists” with expertise in biology, geography, oceanography, engineering and medicine.

Nearly a dozen current and former NASA officials and astronauts told CNN they anticipated multiple test pilots being named to the crew of Artemis II, since the mission marks the first crewed test flight to the moon since the Apollo program.

“Just having the courage to go in there and be the first ones and be cool about it, that does take a certain amount of skill and experience and maturity,” said Reisman, the former astronaut. “We’re going beyond Low Earth Orbit for the first time in a very long time, on only the second flight of this vehicle.”

If Wiseman, a White man, is selected, that means the other spots will almost certainly need to go to at least one woman and at least one person of color.

People familiar with the process tell CNN that along with Wiseman, there are a handful of other candidates atop the list. Among them is Victor Glover, a 46-year-old naval aviator who returned to Earth from his first spaceflight in 2021 after piloting the second crewed flight of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft and spending nearly six months aboard the International Space Station. The veteran of four spacewalks earned a master’s in engineering while moonlighting as a test pilot.

Randy Bresnik, 55, is also a decorated naval aviator and test pilot who flew combat missions in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom. He has flown two missions to the International Space Station: one on the Space Shuttle, another on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft. Bresnik is often mentioned as a top contender for Artemis because, since 2018, he has overseen the astronaut office’s development and testing of all rockets and spacecrafts that will be used in the Artemis missions.

There are four women who people familiar with the process tell CNN are atop the list of likely candidates. Among them are Christina Koch and Jessica Meir, both of whom made history in 2019 when together they performed the first all-female spacewalk.

The 43-year-old Koch, a veteran of six spacewalks, also holds the record for the longest single spaceflight by a woman, with a total of 328 days in space. Koch, an electrical engineer, and Meir, a 45-year-old biologist, were both selected as mission specialists in NASA’s 2013 astronaut class after stints at remote scientific bases in polar regions. That experience of surviving in hostile climates and uncomfortable environments is critical for a crew who will be cramped inside a 17-foot-wide (5-meter-wide), gumdrop-shaped capsule for roughly 10 days.

“We pride ourselves on expeditionary behavior: being a good teammate, emptying the trash can when it’s full, cleaning out the dishwasher when your parents ask you. Those sorts of things,” Wiseman said in August. “That’s really what we’re looking for in those first Artemis missions. Technical expertise. Team player.”

Anne McClain is a decorated army pilot and West Point graduate who flew more than 200 combat missions in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom and went on to graduate from the US Naval Test Pilot School in 2013, the same year she was selected to be a NASA astronaut. After launching on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft in 2018, the 43-year-old spent more than 200 days in space at the International Space Station and served as lead spacewalker on two spacewalks.

Stephanie Wilson is the most senior astronaut on this list. The 56-year-old was selected to be an astronaut more than a quarter century ago in the class of 1996. Wilson served as a mission specialist on three Space Shuttle flights, including the first flight after the 2003 Columbia disaster, which killed seven astronauts.

The final seat on the Artemis II crew will be filled by a Canadian, and Jeremy Hansen is the most buzzed about astronaut with the Canadian Space Agency. Hansen was selected to be an astronaut almost 14 years ago, but he’s still waiting for his first flight assignment. The 47-year-old fighter pilot recently became the first Canadian to be put in charge of training for a new class of NASA astronauts.

All eight astronauts on CNN’s list of top contenders are highly qualified overachievers in the prime of their careers. But sometimes the deciding factor can come down to something frustratingly small.

“The problem is it can be influenced by trivial things, like what size spacesuit you wear. If there is only a medium and a large and you need the extra-large, you’re screwed. You’re not going to get assigned to the mission,” said Reisman, the former astronaut and veteran of three spacewalks. “It can be crazy, little things that dictate how it all comes out and it’s not always the most equitable or transparent process.”

Typically, NASA also strives for a professionally diverse crew with a healthy blend of rookies and veterans, aiming for a mix of military pilots and citizen scientists — doctors, engineers, astrophysicists, biologists and geologists — with a range of strengths.

“Not all astronauts are created equal when it comes to how good they do the job. Not all astronauts are equally as good at doing spacewalks. Not all astronauts are equally as good at doing robotics,” Reisman said. “The standard line is, if you’re qualified, you’re qualified. If you pass the test, then it shouldn’t matter. But when you have really tricky missions, it does matter, and you do want to put your best team forward.”

That is especially true for the crew of Artemis II, which will be riding on a rocket that’s only had one successful test flight.

As secretive as the crew selection process is for Artemis, it used to be even more confusing. That was especially true during the early days of the Space Shuttle program when, for the first and only time in NASA’s history, a non-astronaut had near total control over who flied and who stayed behind on Earth: George Abbey.

“George didn’t operate by committee any more than Josef Stalin had. His was the only voice that counted,” wrote Mullane, the retired astronaut, in his memoir, “Riding Rockets,” about the former director of the Johnson Space Center. “Everything about the most important aspect of our career — flight assignments — was as unknown to us as the dark matter of space was to astrophysicists.”

By the time former NASA astronaut Scott Kelly, who famously spent a year in space, was selected in 1996, the power had shifted back to the chief astronaut. Kelly described the flight assignment process as still “shrouded in mystery,” though he did recall a push toward more transparency by then-Chief of the Astronaut Office Bob Cabana, the current associate administrator of NASA.

“Bob put a big board in his office. He had all the shuttle flights lined up and certain people’s names would be penciled in next to them,” Kelly said. “Reid (Wiseman) did something similar. He was more of an open book. He would tell people what he was thinking.”

Now, Wiseman is on the other side, waiting along with every other active astronaut for the announcement of a lifetime, which the NASA administrator said would come “later in the spring.”

For those who don’t make the cut, Artemis is far from the only game in town. NASA astronauts are currently training and flying to the International Space Station for long-duration spaceflights on the SpaceX Crew Dragon and Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft. A third option, Boeing’s Starliner, is slated to fly astronauts for the first time this spring. The expectation is that every active astronaut will eventually be assigned to a flight. But only eight will get to fly to the moon on either Artemis II or Artemis III.

“This is a special and unique opportunity and, frankly, I’m going to be super jealous of whoever they pick,” Reisman said.

Read original article here

Science

Earth’s inner core may have stopped turning and could go into reverse, study suggests

Leave a comment

Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more.



CNN
 — 

The rotation of Earth’s inner core may have paused and it could even go into reverse, new research suggests.

The Earth is formed of the crust, the mantle and the inner and outer cores. The solid inner core is situated about 3,200 miles below the Earth’s crust and is separated from the semi-solid mantle by the liquid outer core, which allows the inner core to rotate at a different speed from the rotation of the Earth itself.

With a radius of almost 2,200 miles, Earth’s core is about the size of Mars. It consists mostly of iron and nickel, and contains about about one-third of Earth’s mass.

In research published in the journal Nature Geoscience on Monday, Yi Yang, associate research scientist at Peking University, and Xiaodong Song, Peking University chair professor, studied seismic waves from earthquakes that have passed through the Earth’s inner core along similar paths since the 1960s to infer how fast the inner core is spinning.

What they found was unexpected, they said. Since 2009, seismic records, which previously changed over time, showed little difference. This, they said, suggested that the inner core rotation had paused.

“We show surprising observations that indicate the inner core has nearly ceased its rotation in the recent decade and may be experiencing a turning-back,” they wrote in the study.

“When you look at the decade between 1980 and 1990 you see clear change but when you see 2010 to 2020 you don’t see much change,” added Song.

The spin of the inner core is driven by the magnetic field generated in the outer core and balanced by the gravitational effects of the mantle. Knowing how the inner core rotates could shed light on how these layers interact and other processes deep in the Earth.

However, the speed of this rotation, and whether it varies, is debated, said Hrvoje Tkalcic, a geophysicist at the Australian National University, who was not involved in the study,

“The inner core doesn’t come to a full stop,” he said. The study’s finding, he said, “means that the inner core is now more in sync with the rest of the planet than a decade ago when it was spinning a bit faster.”

“Nothing cataclysmic is happening,” he added.

Song and Yang argue that, based on their calculations, a small imbalance in the electromagnetic and gravitational forces could slow and even reverse the inner core’s rotation. They believe this is part of a seven-decade cycle, and that the turning point prior to the one they detected in their data around 2009/2010 occurred in the early 1970s.

Tkalcic, who is the author of “The Earth’s Inner Core: Revealed by Observational Seismology,” said the study’s “data analysis is sound.” However, the study’s findings “should be taken cautiously” as “more data and innovative methods are needed to shed light on this interesting problem.”

Song and Yang agreed that more research was needed.

Tkalcic, who dedicates an entire chapter of his book to the inner core rotation, suggested the inner core’s cycle is every 20 to 30 years, rather than the 70 proposed in the latest study. He explained why such variations occur and why it was so difficult to understand what happens in the innermost reaches of the planet.

“The objects of our studies are buried thousands of kilometers beneath our feet,” he said.

“We use geophysical inference methods to infer the Earth’s internal properties, and caution must be exercised until multi-disciplinary findings confirm our hypotheses and conceptual frameworks,” he explained

“You can think of seismologists like medical doctors who study the internal organs of patients’ bodies using imperfect or limited equipment. So, despite progress, our image of the inner Earth is still blurry, and we are still in the discovery stage.”

Read original article here

Science

Earth’s inner core may have stopped turning and could go into reverse, study suggests

Leave a comment

Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more.



CNN
 — 

The rotation of Earth’s inner core may have paused and it could even go into reverse, new research suggests.

The Earth is formed of the crust, the mantle and the inner and outer cores. The solid inner core is situated about 3,200 miles below the Earth’s crust and is separated from the semi-solid mantle by the liquid outer core, which allows the inner core to rotate at a different speed from the rotation of the Earth itself.

With a radius of almost 2,200 miles, Earth’s core is about the size of Mars. It consists mostly of iron and nickel, and contains about about one-third of Earth’s mass.

In research published in the journal Nature Geoscience on Monday, Yi Yang, associate research scientist at Peking University, and Xiaodong Song, Peking University chair professor, studied seismic waves from earthquakes that have passed through the Earth’s inner core along similar paths since the 1960s to infer how fast the inner core is spinning.

What they found was unexpected, they said. Since 2009, seismic records, which previously changed over time, showed little difference. This, they said, suggested that the inner core rotation had paused.

“We show surprising observations that indicate the inner core has nearly ceased its rotation in the recent decade and may be experiencing a turning-back,” they wrote in the study.

“When you look at the decade between 1980 and 1990 you see clear change but when you see 2010 to 2020 you don’t see much change,” added Song.

The spin of the inner core is driven by the magnetic field generated in the outer core and balanced by the gravitational effects of the mantle. Knowing how the inner core rotates could shed light on how these layers interact and other processes deep in the Earth.

However, the speed of this rotation, and whether it varies, is debated, said Hrvoje Tkalcic, a geophysicist at the Australian National University, who was not involved in the study,

“The inner core doesn’t come to a full stop,” he said. The study’s finding, he said, “means that the inner core is now more in sync with the rest of the planet than a decade ago when it was spinning a bit faster.”

“Nothing cataclysmic is happening,” he added.

Song and Yang argue that, based on their calculations, a small imbalance in the electromagnetic and gravitational forces could slow and even reverse the inner core’s rotation. They believe this is part of a seven-decade cycle, and that the turning point prior to the one they detected in their data around 2009/2010 occurred in the early 1970s.

Tkalcic, who is the author of “The Earth’s Inner Core: Revealed by Observational Seismology,” said the study’s “data analysis is sound.” However, the study’s findings “should be taken cautiously” as “more data and innovative methods are needed to shed light on this interesting problem.”

Song and Yang agreed that more research was needed.

Tkalcic, who dedicates an entire chapter of his book to the inner core rotation, suggested the inner core’s cycle is every 20 to 30 years, rather than the 70 proposed in the latest study. He explained why such variations occur and why it was so difficult to understand what happens in the innermost reaches of the planet.

“The objects of our studies are buried thousands of kilometers beneath our feet,” he said.

“We use geophysical inference methods to infer the Earth’s internal properties, and caution must be exercised until multi-disciplinary findings confirm our hypotheses and conceptual frameworks,” he explained

“You can think of seismologists like medical doctors who study the internal organs of patients’ bodies using imperfect or limited equipment. So, despite progress, our image of the inner Earth is still blurry, and we are still in the discovery stage.”

Read original article here

Science

17-pound meteorite in Antarctica discovered by scientists

Leave a comment

Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more.



CNN
 — 

During a recent excursion to the icy plains of Antarctica, an international team of researchers discovered five new meteorites — including one of the largest ever found on the continent.

The rare meteorite is about the size of a cantaloupe but weighs a hefty 17 pounds (7.7 kilograms). The specimen is one of only about 100 that size or larger discovered in Antarctica, a prime meteroite-hunting location where more than 45,000 space rocks have been tracked down.

Now, the exceptional find is heading to the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels, where it will be studied. And Maria Valdes, a research scientist at Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History and the University of Chicago who was part of the expedition team, has kept some of the material for her own analysis.

Valdes’ area of focus is cosmochemistry. That “broadly means that we use meteorites to study the origin and evolution of the solar system through chemical methods,” she told CNN. She’ll take her samples and use strong acids to dissolve them before using a process called calibrated chemistry to isolate various elements that make up the rock.

“Then I can start to think about the origin of this rock, how it evolved over time, what kind of parent body it came from, and where in the solar system that parent body formed,” Valdes said. “Those are kind of the big questions that we try to address.”

Meteorites strike Earth evenly across its surface, so Antarctica is not home to a disproportionately large concentration of them, Valdes noted. But the pure white ice is an ideal backdrop for spotting the jet black rocks.

Hunting for meteroids is “really low tech and less complicated than people might think,” Valdes said. “We’re either walking around or driving on a snowmobile, looking on the surface.”

But the team did have an idea of where to look. A January 2022 study used satellite data to help narrow down locations where meteorites were most likely to be found.

“Meteorites themselves are too small to detect from space with satellites,” Valdes explained. “But this study used satellite measurements of surface temperature, surface slope, surface velocity, ice thickness — things like this. And it plugged (the data) into a machine learning algorithm to tell us where the highest probabilities of finding meteorite accumulation zones are.”

Distinguishing a meteorite from other rocks can be a tricky process, Valdes said. Researchers look for fusion crust, a glassy coating that forms as the cosmic object plummets through the Earth’s atmosphere.

“A lot of rocks can seem like they’re meteorites, but they’re not,” she said. “We call these meteor-wrongs.”

Another distinguishing characteristic is the potential specimen’s weight. A meteorite will be much heavier for its size than a typical Earth rock because it’s packed with dense metals.

The conditions the researchers endured were grueling. Though Valdes and three other scientists carried out their mission during the continent’s “summer,” which offered 24 hours of daylight, temperatures still hovered around 14 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 10 degrees Celsius), according to a news release from the Field Museum.

The research team spent about a week and a half with a polar field guide, living in tents pitched on the icy terrain. However, Valdes said she and her colleagues also spent time at a Belgian research station near Antarctica’s coast, where they enjoyed warm, cheesy foods, such as fondue.

When it comes to future research, the good news, Valdes added, is that the five meteorites she and her colleagues discovered on this expedition are just the tip of the iceberg.

“I’m eager to go back there, for sure,” she said. “Based on the satellite study, there are 300,000 meteorites, at least, waiting to still be collected in Antarctica. And the larger the (number of) samples that we have, the better we can understand our solar system.”

The excursion was led by Vinciane Debaille, a professor at the Université Libre de Bruxelles in Brussels. She and Valdes were joined by Maria Schönbächler, a professor at Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zurich, and doctoral student Ryoga Maeda of Vrije Universiteit Brussel and the Université Libre de Bruxelles.

Read original article here

Science

Webb telescope peers into the frozen heart of a space cloud

Leave a comment

Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more.



CNN
 — 

The James Webb Space Telescope peered inside a wispy molecular cloud located 630 light-years away and spied ices made of different elements.

Molecular clouds are interstellar groupings of gas and dust where hydrogen and carbon monoxide molecules can form. Dense clumps within these clouds can collapse to form young stars called protostars.

The Webb telescope focused on the Chamaeleon I dark molecular cloud, which appears blue in the new image. A young protostar, called Ced 110 IRS 4, glows in orange to the left. The journal Nature Astronomy published a study including the image on Monday.

More orange dots represent light from stars in the background, piercing through the cloud. The starlight helped astronomers determine the diverse range of frozen molecules within the Chamaeleon I dark molecular cloud, which is forming dozens of young stars.

The Webb telescope views the universe through infrared light, which is invisible to the human eye. Infrared light can reveal previously hidden aspects of the cosmos and pierce dense clusters of gas and dust that would otherwise obscure the view.

Astronomers have used the space observatory to discover a diverse range of some of the coldest ices in the darkest regions of a molecular cloud to date. During a survey of the cloud, the international research team identified water ice, as well as frozen forms of ammonia, methanol, methane and carbonyl sulfide.

These icy molecules could contribute to the formation of stars and planets — and even the building blocks of life.

Ices can supply planets with carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and sulfur, which could lead to the formation of a habitable planet like Earth, where they are used in planetary atmospheres as well as amino acids, sugars and alcohols.

“Our results provide insights into the initial, dark chemistry stage of the formation of ice on the interstellar dust grains that will grow into the centimeter-sized pebbles from which planets form in disks,” said lead study author Melissa McClure, an astronomer and assistant professor at Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands, in a statement. McClure is the principal investigator of the observing program.

“These observations open a new window on the formation pathways for the simple and complex molecules that are needed to make the building blocks of life.”

In addition to simple molecules, the researchers saw evidence of more complex molecules.

“Our identification of complex organic molecules, like methanol and potentially ethanol, also suggests that the many star and planetary systems developing in this particular cloud will inherit molecules in a fairly advanced chemical state,” said study coauthor Will Rocha, an astronomer and postdoctoral fellow at Leiden Observatory, in a statement.

“This could mean that the presence of precursors to prebiotic molecules in planetary systems is a common result of star formation, rather than a unique feature of our own solar system.”

Astronomers used starlight filtering through the cloud to search for chemical fingerprints and identify the elements.

“We simply couldn’t have observed these ices without Webb,” said study coauthor Klaus Pontoppidan, Webb project scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, in a statement.

“The ices show up as dips against a continuum of background starlight. In regions that are this cold and dense, much of the light from the background star is blocked, and Webb’s exquisite sensitivity was necessary to detect the starlight and therefore identify the ices in the molecular cloud.”

Read original article here

Science

Dan Levitt’s ‘What’s Gotten Into You’ traces atoms’ long trip from the big bang to the human body

Leave a comment

Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more.



CNN
 — 

In its violent early years, Earth was a molten hellscape that ejected the moon after a fiery collision with another protoplanet, scientists now suspect. Later, it morphed from a watery expanse to a giant snowball that nearly snuffed out all existing life.

Then hyper-hurricanes with waves as high as 300 feet pummeled the newly thawed ocean. But that’s nothing compared with the celestial turmoil and fireworks in the 9 billion years before the birth of our planet.

Science and history documentarian Dan Levitt’s upcoming book, “What’s Gotten Into You: The Story of Your Body’s Atoms, From the Big Bang Through Last Night’s Dinner,” evokes a series of striking and often forceful images in tracing how our cells, elements, atoms and subatomic particles all found their way to our brains and bones and bodies. The book comes out on January 24.

“Now we know that the origin of the universe, the making of elements in stars, the creation of the solar system and Earth and the early history of our planet was incredibly tumultuous,” Levitt told CNN.

The nearly incomprehensible explosions, collisions and temperatures, though, were essential for life.

A disturbance in Jupiter’s orbit, for example, may have sent a hail of asteroids to Earth, seeding the planet with water in the process. And the molten iron forming Earth’s core has created a magnetic field that protects us from cosmic rays.

“So many things happened that could’ve gone another way,” Levitt said, “in which case we wouldn’t be here.”

Reconstructing the epic step-by-step journey of our atoms across billions of years, he said, has filled him with awe and gratitude.

“Sometimes when I look at people, I think, ‘Wow, you are such incredible organisms and our atoms all share the same deep history that goes back to the big bang,’ ” he said. He hopes that readers will recognize “that even the simplest cell is incredibly complex and worthy of great respect. And all people are, too.”

Our bodies contain 60 or so elements, including the torrent of hydrogen unleashed after the big bang and the calcium forged by dying stars known as red giants. As Levitt assembled the evidence for how they and more complex organic molecules made their way to us, he weaved in the tumultuous history of the scientific process itself.

He didn’t initially set out to parallel the turbulence in the universe with upheavals in the scientific world, but it definitely came with the territory. “So many scientific certainties have been overthrown since our great-grandparents were alive,” he said. “That’s part of the fun of the book.”

After Levitt finished his first draft, he realized to his surprise that part of the scientific turmoil was due to various kinds of recurring bias. “I wanted to get into the heads of scientists who made great discoveries — to see their advances as they did and understand how they were received at the time,” he said. “I was surprised that almost every time, the initial reaction to groundbreaking theories was skepticism and dismissal.”

Throughout the book, he pointed out six recurring mental traps that have blinded even brilliant minds, such as the view that it’s “too weird to be true” or that “if our current tools haven’t detected it, it doesn’t exist.”

Albert Einstein initially hated the strange idea of an expanding universe, for example, and had to be persuaded over time by Georges Lemaître, a little known but persistent Belgian priest and cosmologist. Stanley Miller, the “father of prebiotic chemistry” who ingeniously simulated early-Earth conditions in glass flasks, was a notoriously fierce opponent of the hypothesis that life could have evolved in the deep ocean, fueled by mineral-rich enzymes and super-heated vents. And so on.

“The history of science is littered with elder statesmen’s grand pronouncements of certainties that would soon be overturned,” Levitt writes in his book. Thankfully for us, the history of science is also full of radicals and freethinkers who delighted in poking holes in those pronouncements.

Levitt described how many of the leaps forward came about by researchers who never received due credit for their contributions. “I’m drawn to unsung heroes with dramatic stories that people haven’t heard before,” he said. “So, I was pleased that many of the most gripping stories in the book turned out to be about people who I hadn’t known about.”

They are scientists such as Austrian researcher Marietta Blau, who helped physicists see some of the first signs of subatomic particles; Dutch physician and philosopher Jan Ingenhousz, who discovered that sunlit leaves can create oxygen via photosynthesis; and chemist Rosalind Franklin, who was instrumental in working out the three-dimensional structure of DNA.

Wonders of the universe


The lightning spark of new ideas often struck independently around the world. To his surprise, Levitt found that multiple scientists worked out plausible scenarios for how life’s building blocks could have begun assembling.

“Our universe is awash in organic molecules — many of them are precursors to the molecules that we’re made of,” he said. “So I alternate between thinking that it’s just so improbable that creatures like us exist, and thinking that life must exist in many places in the universe.”

Nothing about our own journey from the big bang has been straightforward, though.

“If you try to envision how life evolved from the first organic molecules, it had to have been a herky-jerky process, full of twisted pathways and failures,” Levitt said. “Most of them must have gone nowhere. But evolution has a way of creating winners from countless experiments over long periods of time.”

Nature also has a way of recycling the building blocks to create new life. A nuclear physicist named Paul Aebersold found that “we swap out half of our carbon atoms every one to two months, and we replace a full 98 percent of all our atoms every year,” Levitt writes.

Like a house constantly under renovation, we are ever-changing and replacing old parts with new ones: our water, proteins and even cells, most of which we apparently replace every decade.

Eventually, our own cells will grow quiet, but their parts will reassemble into other forms of life. “Although we may die, our atoms don’t,” Levitt writes. “They revolve through life, soil, oceans, and sky in a chemical merry-go-round.”

Just like the death of stars, in other words, our own destruction opens up another remarkable world of possibility.

Read original article here

Science

Dan Levitt’s ‘What’s Gotten Into You’ traces atoms’ long trip from the big bang to the human body

Leave a comment

Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more.



CNN
 — 

In its violent early years, Earth was a molten hellscape that ejected the moon after a fiery collision with another protoplanet, scientists now suspect. Later, it morphed from a watery expanse to a giant snowball that nearly snuffed out all existing life.

Then hyper-hurricanes with waves as high as 300 feet pummeled the newly thawed ocean. But that’s nothing compared with the celestial turmoil and fireworks in the 9 billion years before the birth of our planet.

Science and history documentarian Dan Levitt’s upcoming book, “What’s Gotten Into You: The Story of Your Body’s Atoms, From the Big Bang Through Last Night’s Dinner,” evokes a series of striking and often forceful images in tracing how our cells, elements, atoms and subatomic particles all found their way to our brains and bones and bodies. The book comes out on January 24.

“Now we know that the origin of the universe, the making of elements in stars, the creation of the solar system and Earth and the early history of our planet was incredibly tumultuous,” Levitt told CNN.

The nearly incomprehensible explosions, collisions and temperatures, though, were essential for life.

A disturbance in Jupiter’s orbit, for example, may have sent a hail of asteroids to Earth, seeding the planet with water in the process. And the molten iron forming Earth’s core has created a magnetic field that protects us from cosmic rays.

“So many things happened that could’ve gone another way,” Levitt said, “in which case we wouldn’t be here.”

Reconstructing the epic step-by-step journey of our atoms across billions of years, he said, has filled him with awe and gratitude.

“Sometimes when I look at people, I think, ‘Wow, you are such incredible organisms and our atoms all share the same deep history that goes back to the big bang,’ ” he said. He hopes that readers will recognize “that even the simplest cell is incredibly complex and worthy of great respect. And all people are, too.”

Our bodies contain 60 or so elements, including the torrent of hydrogen unleashed after the big bang and the calcium forged by dying stars known as red giants. As Levitt assembled the evidence for how they and more complex organic molecules made their way to us, he weaved in the tumultuous history of the scientific process itself.

He didn’t initially set out to parallel the turbulence in the universe with upheavals in the scientific world, but it definitely came with the territory. “So many scientific certainties have been overthrown since our great-grandparents were alive,” he said. “That’s part of the fun of the book.”

After Levitt finished his first draft, he realized to his surprise that part of the scientific turmoil was due to various kinds of recurring bias. “I wanted to get into the heads of scientists who made great discoveries — to see their advances as they did and understand how they were received at the time,” he said. “I was surprised that almost every time, the initial reaction to groundbreaking theories was skepticism and dismissal.”

Throughout the book, he pointed out six recurring mental traps that have blinded even brilliant minds, such as the view that it’s “too weird to be true” or that “if our current tools haven’t detected it, it doesn’t exist.”

Albert Einstein initially hated the strange idea of an expanding universe, for example, and had to be persuaded over time by Georges Lemaître, a little known but persistent Belgian priest and cosmologist. Stanley Miller, the “father of prebiotic chemistry” who ingeniously simulated early-Earth conditions in glass flasks, was a notoriously fierce opponent of the hypothesis that life could have evolved in the deep ocean, fueled by mineral-rich enzymes and super-heated vents. And so on.

“The history of science is littered with elder statesmen’s grand pronouncements of certainties that would soon be overturned,” Levitt writes in his book. Thankfully for us, the history of science is also full of radicals and freethinkers who delighted in poking holes in those pronouncements.

Levitt described how many of the leaps forward came about by researchers who never received due credit for their contributions. “I’m drawn to unsung heroes with dramatic stories that people haven’t heard before,” he said. “So, I was pleased that many of the most gripping stories in the book turned out to be about people who I hadn’t known about.”

They are scientists such as Austrian researcher Marietta Blau, who helped physicists see some of the first signs of subatomic particles; Dutch physician and philosopher Jan Ingenhousz, who discovered that sunlit leaves can create oxygen via photosynthesis; and chemist Rosalind Franklin, who was instrumental in working out the three-dimensional structure of DNA.

Wonders of the universe


The lightning spark of new ideas often struck independently around the world. To his surprise, Levitt found that multiple scientists worked out plausible scenarios for how life’s building blocks could have begun assembling.

“Our universe is awash in organic molecules — many of them are precursors to the molecules that we’re made of,” he said. “So I alternate between thinking that it’s just so improbable that creatures like us exist, and thinking that life must exist in many places in the universe.”

Nothing about our own journey from the big bang has been straightforward, though.

“If you try to envision how life evolved from the first organic molecules, it had to have been a herky-jerky process, full of twisted pathways and failures,” Levitt said. “Most of them must have gone nowhere. But evolution has a way of creating winners from countless experiments over long periods of time.”

Nature also has a way of recycling the building blocks to create new life. A nuclear physicist named Paul Aebersold found that “we swap out half of our carbon atoms every one to two months, and we replace a full 98 percent of all our atoms every year,” Levitt writes.

Like a house constantly under renovation, we are ever-changing and replacing old parts with new ones: our water, proteins and even cells, most of which we apparently replace every decade.

Eventually, our own cells will grow quiet, but their parts will reassemble into other forms of life. “Although we may die, our atoms don’t,” Levitt writes. “They revolve through life, soil, oceans, and sky in a chemical merry-go-round.”

Just like the death of stars, in other words, our own destruction opens up another remarkable world of possibility.

Read original article here

The Ultimate News Site