- Israel-Hamas war death toll spirals over 1,100 as Gaza Strip is bombed and gun battles rage for a third day CBS News
- People in Gaza are facing “severe drastic conditions” as Israeli air strikes continue Al Jazeera English
- Israel says military has retaken control around Gaza; death toll passes 1,200: Live updates CNBC
- An Israeli airstrike kills 19 members of the same family in a southern Gaza refugee camp The Associated Press
- Israel denounces Hamas ‘war crimes’ as deaths rise further – DW – 10/09/2023 DW (English)
- View Full Coverage on Google News
Tag Archives: spirals
Etsy refund for $200 plastic cup spirals into angry, viral TikToks – Insider
- Etsy refund for $200 plastic cup spirals into angry, viral TikToks Insider
- ‘Congratulations, Starbucks, on wasting my time for an entire month’: Customer slams Starbucks for Life, says she won nothing after playing 5 times a day msnNOW
- An Etsy customer’s refund request for a broken $200 plastic cup spiraled into a furious exchange that went viral on TikTok Yahoo News
- ‘Congratulations, Starbucks, on wasting my time for an entire month’: Customer slams Starbucks for Life, says she won nothing after playing 5 times a day The Daily Dot
- View Full Coverage on Google News
Webb Telescope Spots Ancient Galaxy Built Like the Milky Way
The Webb Space Telescope’s latest target is one previously imaged by Hubble: the distant barred spiral galaxy EGS23205. Targets like this one will boost our understanding of the early universe and how ancient stars and galaxies took form.
The two images above show EGS23205 as seen by Hubble and Webb. Hubble’s image of the galaxy (taken in near-infrared) is much noisier, and the structure of the galaxy is harder to discern. But Webb’s image (at mid-infrared wavelengths) is much crisper, revealing a clear bar of stars stretching out from the galactic center.
Stellar bars are huge galactic cross-sections composed of countless stars. The bars play an important role in galactic evolution; they push gas toward the galactic center, helping fuel star formation and feed the supermassive black holes that lie within galactic nuclei. Our own Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy.
Analysis of the image was submitted to the preprint server arXiv last year. Webb has imaged many ancient galaxies in its mere six months of scientific operations.
Some of Webb’s targets are among the earliest galaxies yet seen, and they appear to Webb as they were just several hundred million years after the Big Bang (the universe is now close to 14 billion years old).
EGS23205 is seen as it was about 11 billion years ago. The image reveals that even early galaxies had well-defined bars (spiral galaxies were previously thought to be much later arrivals in the universe).
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“The bars hardly visible in Hubble data just popped out in the JWST image, showing the tremendous power of JWST to see the underlying structure in galaxies,” said Shardha Jogee, an astronomer at UT Austin and co-author of the research, in a press release.
Webb has previously imaged other objects once captured by Hubble. In October, the new $10 billion observatory beheld the Pillars of Creation, huge plumes of gas and dust in the Eagle Nebula. In the same month, the Webb team produced an image of merging galaxies 270 million light-years from Earth, imaged by Hubble back in 2008.
The two space telescopes observe at different wavelengths for the most part—Hubble primarily at visible wavelengths and Webb primarily in the infrared and near-infrared. Webb’s vivid handiwork is built on the mechanical shoulders of Hubble. Side-by-side image comparisons show the differences in these impressive observatories, and what’s possible with the newest technology.
More: The Year Ahead in Astronomy
Doomed exoplanet will be obliterated as it spirals into a star
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Astronomers have come across an exoplanet with a gloomy future, spiraling closer to its host star until eventually it will be obliterated.
The exoplanet, called Kepler-1658b, was identified in 2019, a decade after the Kepler Space Telescope discovered it as a planet candidate.
The planet is considered to be a “hot Jupiter,” or a type of exoplanet similar in size to Jupiter — but scorching in temperature. Kepler-1658b closely orbits its aging star, completing a single orbit every 3.85 days.
But the orbit is decaying, causing the planet to move incrementally closer to its star. Eventually, this movement will lead to a collision and the planet’s obliteration. The Astrophysical Journal Letter published a study detailing the findings on Monday.
“We’ve previously detected evidence for exoplanets inspiraling toward their stars, but we have never before seen such a planet around an evolved star,” said lead study author Shreyas Vissapragada, a 51 Pegasi b fellow at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, in a statement.
“Theory predicts that evolved stars are very effective at sapping energy from their planets’ orbits, and now we can test those theories with observations.”
After years of observations with both space and ground-based telescopes, researchers calculated that the planet’s orbit is decreasing at a rate of 131 milliseconds per year. The telescopes watched for dips in brightness of the star as the planet passed in front of it. The intervals between these dips, called transits, have steadily decreased as the orbit has decayed.
Tidal interactions, or the gravitational relationship between Kepler-1658b and its star, are to blame for the planet’s inward draw. Astronomers are still learning about the gravitational interactions between orbiting bodies, such as Earth and the moon, but this planetary system could shed light on such dynamics.
The new research also helped researchers potentially explain why Kepler-1658b seems even hotter and brighter than expected. The same gravitational tug between the planet and its star may also be releasing extra energy from the planet.
“What we realized during this study is that the planet could be bright because it’s much hotter than previously anticipated, which could happen if the same effects driving the decay of the planet’s orbit are also heating it up,” Vissapragada said in an email. “I’m excited to study this possibility further: are we witnessing the last breath of a condemned planet?”
It’s not unlike Jupiter’s moon Io, the most volcanic place in our solar system. Jupiter’s strong gravitational influence is melting Io’s interior, causing lava to erupt from hundreds of volcanoes on this moon’s surface. The Juno mission will conduct multiple flybys of Io in the next year and a half to learn more about this volatile relationship.
Meanwhile, the aging star that Kepler-1658b orbits is expanding and entering its subgiant phase before becoming a red giant, a dying star in the final stages of life. The findings could potentially preview the fate of planets in our own solar system that may one day find themselves too close to the sun.
“In five billion years or so, the sun will evolve into a red giant star,” Vissapragada said. “It seems certain that Mercury and Venus will be engulfed during this process, but what happens to the Earth is less clear.”
Researchers believe more exoplanets are in danger of dying in the fiery light of their respective host stars, and observations of them may be right around the corner using TESS, or the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, which studies the light of nearby stars.
“The Kepler-1658 system can serve as a celestial laboratory in this way for years to come,” Vissapragada said, “and with any luck, there will soon be many more of these labs.”
Spirals Of Blue Light Appear In New Zealand Sky, Experts Point To SpaceX Launch
The blue spiral appeared in the night sky above New Zealand on Sunday.
The stargazers in New Zealand were surprised by strange, spiralling light formations in the night sky on Sunday night. The photos were widely shared on social media, with many New Zealanders comparing them to some sort of “wormhole”. But experts said these “wacky looking clouds” were caused by Falcon 9 rocket carrying a Globalstar DM15 satellite.
The extraordinary sight was first captured by residents of Nelson, a city in New Zealand’s North Island, and was visible 750 km south to Stewart Island.
“Does anyone know if there was a satellite put into orbit over NZ tonight or maybe an Australian satellite, saw something like the picture I posted at about 1920hrs tonight looking slightly west at a high elevation Rangiora Canterbury,” Facebook user Inch Justin posted in Astronomy in New Zealand group.
“The picture I have posted up is just an example of what I saw. Didn’t manage to get a picture of it just grabbed my binos and watched what appeared to be a satellite in the middle of the spiral heading north at a great rate of knots,” the user further said.
Users flooded the group with comments. “Yes, several of us saw it from Hawke’s Bay, near the tail of Canis major, then moving north east,” a user commented.
“It’s definitely cool,” said another.
Prof Richard Easther, a physicist at Auckland University, explained the reason behind the phenomenon. Clouds of that nature sometimes occurred when a rocket carried a satellite into orbit, he told The Guardian.
“When the propellant is ejected out the back, you have what’s essentially water and carbon dioxide – that briefly forms a cloud in space that’s illuminated by the sun,” Professor Easther said. “The geometry of the satellite’s orbit and also the way that we’re sitting relative to the sun – that combination of things was just right to produce these completely wacky looking clouds that were visible from the South Island.”
The New Plymouth Astronomical Society said on Facebook that it was “most likely a “fuel dump” or “exhaust plume” from a SpaceX rocket launch”, as similar effects have been seen before.
According to Professor Easther, the rocket in question was Falcon 9, which SpaceX used to send a satellite into low-earth orbit on Sunday.
SpaceX chief Elon Musk congratulated the Falcon team for the launches. “Congrats to SpaceX Falcon team for executing 3 flawless launches in 2 days!” he said on Twitter.
Spirals of blue light in New Zealand night sky leave stargazers ‘kind of freaking out’ | New Zealand
New Zealand stargazers were left puzzled and awed by strange, spiralling light formations in the night sky on Sunday night.
Around 7.25pm Alasdair Burns, a stargazing guide on Stewart Island/Rakiura, received a text from a friend: go outside and look at the sky. “As soon as we actually went outside, it was very obvious what it was he was referring to,” Burns said.
He saw a huge, blue spiral of light amid the darkness. “It looked like an enormous spiral galaxy, just hanging there in the sky, and slowly just drifting across,” Burns said. “Quite an eerie feeling.”
Burns snapped a few images of the lights on long exposure, capturing the spiral from his phone. “We quickly banged on the doors of all our neighbours to get them out as well. And so there were about five of us, all out on our shared veranda looking up and just kind of, well, freaking out just a little bit.”
The country’s stargazing and amateur astronomy social media groups lit up with people posting photographs and questions about the phenomenon, which was visible from most of the South Island. Theories abounded – from UFOs to foreign rockets to commercial light displays.
“Premonition from our orbital black hole,” said one stargazer. “Aliens at it again,” commented another.
The reality was likely a little more prosaic, said Prof Richard Easther, a physicist at Auckland University, who called the phenomenon “weird but easily explained”.
Clouds of that nature sometimes occurred when a rocket carried a satellite into orbit, he said.
“When the propellant is ejected out the back, you have what’s essentially water and carbon dioxide – that briefly forms a cloud in space that’s illuminated by the sun,” Easther said. “The geometry of the satellite’s orbit and also the way that we’re sitting relative to the sun – that combination of things was just right to produce these completely wacky looking clouds that were visible from the South Island.”
Easther said the rocket in question was likely the Globalstar launch from SpaceX, which the company sent into low-earth orbit off Cape Canaveral in Florida on Sunday.
Burns had guessed the spiral was likely a rocket, having read about a similar phenomenon in 2009, when a Russian missile launch caused huge blue spirals over Norway. Even knowing the likely source, he said, it was a confronting sight. “None of us had ever seen anything like that before. It was spectacular.”
Jay Powell says Fed ready to intervene if US inflation spirals out of control
Jay Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, said the US central bank was ready to intervene if inflation spiralled out of control, but stressed that he expected price increases to ease later in the year.
“Inflation has increased notably and will likely remain elevated in coming months before moderating,” Powell told the House of Representatives financial services committee during a hearing on Wednesday.
He added that the Fed “would be prepared to adjust the stance of monetary policy as appropriate if we saw signs that the path of inflation or longer-term inflation expectations were moving materially and persistently beyond levels consistent with our goal”.
Powell’s comments came in the wake of data showing the US consumer price index rose 5.4 per cent in June compared with a year ago, which revived concerns that the US economy may be overheating.
The figures could raise pressure on the US central bank to more rapidly begin the process of slowing the large doses of monetary support it delivered to the economy during the pandemic, starting with a reduction of the $120bn in monthly asset purchases.
Although Powell noted the higher inflation figures and insisted the Fed would not be complacent about rising prices, he stuck to his view that the inflation surge was largely temporary, which is shared by many central bank officials.
“Inflation is being temporarily boosted by base effects, as the sharp pandemic-related price declines from last spring drop out of the 12-month calculation,” Powell said.
“In addition, strong demand in sectors where production bottlenecks or other supply constraints have limited production has led to especially rapid price increases for some goods and services, which should partially reverse as the effects of the bottlenecks unwind.
“Prices for services that were hard hit by the pandemic have also jumped in recent months as demand for these services has surged with the reopening of the economy,” he added.
During the hearing, top Republicans on the panel pressed Powell to explain the Fed’s position on inflation. Republicans are increasingly criticising the White House and Democrats for fuelling rising inflation and higher living costs due to the $1.9tn stimulus legislation passed in March.
Some have also accused the Fed of being complacent in the face of higher prices, calling for the rapid removal of monetary stimulus.
In one pointed criticism, Ann Wagner, a Missouri Republican, said families and businesses in her district were not feeling that inflation was “very temporary”. Powell replied that price spikes were coming from a “small group” of goods and services tied to economic reopening, but the Fed was “monitoring the situation very carefully”.
The Fed’s Beige Book report — which offers anecdotal evidence collected by the central bank’s regional counterparts about the economy — underscored the urgency behind the inflation debate.
Businesses described “broad-based” price pressures, with the most “acute” impact felt across a hospitality sector hampered by “limited supplies of materials and workers”, according to the report, which was released during the congressional hearing.
“While some contacts felt that pricing pressures were transitory, the majority expected further increases in input costs and selling prices in the coming months,” the report noted.
Still, Fed officials are wary of moving too quickly to pull back their support for the US economy. The US labour market is still far short of its pre-pandemic employment levels, and fallout from the coronavirus crisis on a global scale could still pose risks for the American economy.
During its June meeting, the Fed launched a debate about the timing and conditions of trimming its asset purchases, but Powell suggested a decision was not imminent. The Federal Open Market Committee said it would need to see “substantial further progress” compared to last December on its full employment and price stability goals to start dialling back the stimulus.
“While reaching the standard of ‘substantial further progress’ is still a ways off, participants expect that progress will continue,” the Fed chair said in his prepared remarks. “We will continue these discussions in coming meetings. As we have said, we will provide advance notice before announcing any decision to make changes to our purchases.”
Powell also suggested that while inflation was now well above the Fed’s average 2 per cent target, central bankers would have a better picture of the dynamic by the end of the year in order to assess policy. “The question will be, where does this leave us in six months or so when inflation as we expect does move down,” he said.
US government debt extended its rally as Powell testified, with the yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury note trading more than 0.05 percentage points lower on the day to 1.36 per cent. The yield on the ultra-long 30-year bond dropped by roughly the same magnitude to steady below 2 per cent.
Short-dated Treasuries, which are more sensitive to policy adjustments, also gained. Yields on the two-year note slipped almost 0.03 points to 0.23 per cent. US stocks, meanwhile, eked out gains in afternoon trading. The S&P 500 edged up 0.1 per cent.
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Papua New Guinea forced to wait for vaccines as coronavirus crisis spirals out of control | World news
Papua New Guinea will not get its first Covid-19 vaccines until next month at the earliest, despite an uncontrolled coronavirus outbreak spiralling across the country, hospitals shutting their doors to patients, and an already vulnerable healthcare system on the verge of collapse.
At Port Moresby’s general hospital, 40% of the mothers in the labour ward tested for Covid-19 returned positive results, but could not be separated from other mothers because there is no isolation labour ward for them.
And the crisis could worsen further still: the burial ceremony of PNG’s first prime minister, and its grand chief, Sir Michael Somare, is expected to attract tens of thousands to the northern coastal city of Wewak later this week, an occasion that could serve as a super-spreader event, in turn seeding the virus all over the archipelago.
By global standards, the number of confirmed cases in PNG is low: 1,670. But fewer than 50,000 tests have been carried out across PNG – population nearly 9 million – for the entire pandemic, and the actual rate of infection is factors higher.
In many places outside of the capital Port Moresby, there is no testing at all. PNG government sources say the actual case rate could be 10 times the official figure.
Late Tuesday, the government announced it had sourced 200,000 AstraZeneca doses from Australia, and 70,000 from India.
“We are now in the process of getting the vaccine across, hopefully by April,” the prime minister, James Marape, said.
“Health workers will be vaccinated first as we are seeing a growing number of health workers who are getting infected in the line of their work.”
The government is fighting not only burgeoning infections, but entrenched resistance to vaccinations, with conspiracy theories abundant through WhatsApp groups and social media, and intransigent widespread beliefs such as that “Melanesians are immune to coronavirus”.
Crowded Port Moresby has been the epicentre of PNG’s outbreak, but there are concerns too with growing case numbers in Western Province, which shares a porous border with West Papua, where infection rates are amongst the highest in Melanesia.
The governor of Oro province, Gary Juffa, recently recovered from Covid-19 himself, said the number of infections across PNG was far higher than official figures because many people were not being tested despite showing symptoms. He said “years of neglect” and corruption inside PNG’s healthcare system was “now uncovering a grim reality”.
“I believe that the situation is fast becoming serious and Papua New Guinea’s health system is under serious constraints.”
Prof Glen Mola, head of Port Moresby General’s obstetrics and gynaecology ward, told the Guardian vaccines were needed urgently.
“We have Covid-19 cases everywhere, about 40% of the mothers brought in to the labour ward [and tested for coronavirus]… tested Covid-19 positive,” he said. “But we can’t isolate them because there is no isolation labour ward.
“We are trying our best to help these mothers but they are bringing in Covid-19 from their communities and infecting health workers.”
The hospital – PNG’s largest – has been forced to close entire sections of the hospital after 40 staff members tested positive. The hospital is also running short of gloves and other personal protective equipment.
Other hospitals around the country – including Mount Hagen – have also shut their doors because of swingeing budget cuts. Some hospitals have received only one-third of the money needed to remain open, and have been forced to shut down services, just as Covid cases surge.
St John Ambulance commissioner Matt Cannon said that, without intervention, PNG faced an uncontrollable outbreak.
“We are not at the tipping point now – the tipping point was three weeks ago,” he said. “We are anticipating hundreds more cases, and potentially this will increase to thousands. We are at alert level. There are big alarms going off. Health workers are being affected.”
“We are now not working towards elimination; we are now at the stage that we can only try to slow the spread and protect as many lives as possible.”
Allan Bird, governor of East Sepik province, said the delay in rolling out a vaccine to Papua New Guineans would cost lives across the country.
“PNG did not order or pay for any vaccines in 2020, so we are not entitled to any vaccines,” he said. “The only vaccines available to us are donated by friendly governments. There is already a long waiting list for vaccines.”