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James Webb Space Telescope captures strikingly crisp images of Neptune and its rings
“It has been three decades since we last saw these faint, dusty rings, and this is the first time we’ve seen them in the infrared,” said Heidi Hammel, a Neptune expert and interdisciplinary scientist on the Webb project, in a news release.
In addition to several crisp, narrow rings, the Webb images show Neptune’s fainter dust bands. Some of the rings haven’t been observed since NASA’s Voyager 2 got the first photographic proof of the existence of Neptune’s rings during its flyby in 1989.
Dark, cold and whipped by supersonic winds, Neptune is the most distant planet in our solar system. The planet and its neighbor Uranus are known as “ice giants” because their interiors are made up of heavier elements than the gas giants Jupiter and Saturn, which are richer in hydrogen and helium.
In the new images, Neptune looks white, as opposed to the typical blue appearance it has in views captured at visible wavelengths of light. This is because gaseous methane, part of the planet’s chemical makeup, doesn’t appear blue to Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam).
Also visible in the images are methane-ice clouds — bright streaks and spots that reflect sunlight before it is absorbed by methane gas. It’s also possible to spot a bright, thin line circling the planet’s equator, which could be “a visual signature of global atmospheric circulation that powers Neptune’s winds and storms,” according to the release.
Webb also captured seven of Neptune’s 14 known moons, including its largest moon, Triton, which moves around the planet at an unusual backward orbit. Astronomers think Triton was perhaps an object in the Kuiper Belt — a region of icy objects at the edge of the solar system — that fell into Neptune’s gravitational grasp. Scientists plan to use Webb to further study Triton and Neptune in the coming years.
Located 30 times farther from the sun than Earth, Neptune moves through its solar orbit in the remote, dark region of the outer solar system. At that distance, the sun is so small and faint that noon on Neptune is similar to a dim twilight on Earth, the news release said.
Webb is a more than 10-year mission run by NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency.
Compared with other telescopes, the space observatory’s massive mirror can see fainter galaxies that are farther away and has the potential to enhance scientists’ understanding of the origins of the universe. However, it’s also using its stable and precise image quality to illuminate our own solar system, with images of Mars, Jupiter and now Neptune.
Asteroid flew strikingly close to the Earth without astronomers seeing
An asteroid the size of a refrigerator came within 3000 kilometres of the Earth without scientists knowing.
Asteroid 2021 UA1 is the third-closest asteroid that has ever approached our planet, passing over Antarctica on Sunday at a higher altitude than the International Space Station, but lower than the communication satellites that orbit the Earth.
The celestial object had a diameter of only two meters, meaning that if it had come closer to our planet it would have likely been burned up in our atmosphere.
“The reason the planet’s fly-by was so surprising was because it was behind the sun, coming from the daytime sky, so it was undiscoverable prior to closest approach”, Tony Dunn, an astronomer who runs the website Orbitsimulator, tweeted.
There are only two asteroids that have come closer in Earth’s history: one was asteroid 2020 QG, which came just 1,830 miles over the southern Indian Ocean – but was also small enough not to pose a threat to Earth – and asteroid 2020 VT4, which flew by a few hundred miles away on Friday the 13th.
Although these asteroids are too small to affect the Earth, the possibility of a larger one causing considerable harm to the planet is one that many scientists are preparing for.
In May, Nasa conducted a simulation over the course of a week in order to prepare for such an eventuality but concluded that there is no technology on Earth that could stop it happening.
The only response would be to evacuate the area before the asteroid hit, however the impact zone was across large parts of North Africa and Europe.
Chinese researchers have considered send more than 20 rockets that could stop a giant asteroid.
China’s National Space Science Centre found in simulations that 23 Long March 5 rockets, which weigh 900 tonnes when they leave the planet, hitting simultaneously could divert an asteroid from its original path by nearly 9,000 kilometres – 1.4 times the Earth’s radius.
Babbling Baby Bats Sound Strikingly Similar to Human Infants
Mother-pup pair of the neotropical bat species Saccopteryx bilineata in the day-roost. The Pup is attached to the mothers´ belly. Credit: Michael Stifter
More than anything else, language defines human nature. Speech, the vocal output of language, requires precise control over our vocal articulators, including tongue, lips and the jaw. Every infant faces the challenge of gaining precise control over the vocal articulators to produce speech sounds. This control is gained during babbling when infants start to produce first utterances resembling speech sounds. Typical child development involves babbling, irrespective of the culture and language to be learned and is thus characterized by universal features.
Much knowledge about human language acquisition is gained through comparative research on vocal ontogenetic processes in non-human animals, especially those capable of vocal imitation, one of the key components of human language. However, babbling behavior is rare in the animal kingdom; so far, this phenomenon has been described almost exclusively in songbirds. While research on songbirds has provided us with important insights about speech development in children, it is partly difficult to fully translate the results to humans because songbirds and humans differ anatomically — birds have a syrinx, we have a larynx — and in their brain organization.
Now there is a one mammal, which at first sight holds very little resemblance to humans, and may seem rather unusual for comparative research on vocal development: the greater sac-winged bat Saccopteryx bilineata. Pups of this extraordinary bat species are capable of vocal imitation and engage in a conspicuous vocal practice behavior during ontogeny which strongly resembles human infant babbling.
A team of scientists from the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, Ahana A. Fernandez, Lara S. Burchardt, Martina Nagy and Mirjam Knörnschild, studied the babbling behavior of 20 pups in their natural habitat in Panama and Costa Rica. To collect data, the bats were habituated to the presence of the researchers in close vicinity of their roosts, thus allowing daily acoustic recordings and accompanying video recordings from birth until weaning (the point in time when mothers stop nursing their pups).
“Working with wild bat pups is a unique opportunity because it allows observing and recording a complex behavior in a completely natural undisturbed setting” explains Ahana Fernandez.
During their ontogeny, S. bilineata pups spend on average seven weeks engaging in daily babbling behavior. Pup babbling is characterized by long multisyllabic vocal sequences which include syllable types of the adult vocal repertoire.
“Pup babbling is a very conspicuous vocal behavior, it is audible at a considerable distance from the roost and babbling bouts have a duration of up to 43 minutes” says Martina Nagy, “and while babbling, pups learn the song of the adult males.”
Back in Germany, the acoustic recordings were analyzed to investigate the characteristics of pup babbling. The researchers found that pup babbling is characterized by the same eight features as human infant babbling.
“For example, pup babbling is characterized by reduplication of syllables, similar to the characteristic syllable repetition — /dadada/ — in human infant babbling,” says Lara Burchardt. Moreover, pup babbling is rhythmic and occurs in both male and female pups – which stands in strong contrast to songbirds where only young males babble.
“It is fascinating to see these compelling parallels between the vocal practice behavior of two vocal learning mammals,” says Mirjam Knörnschild. “Our study is contributing to the interdisciplinary field of biolinguistics, which focusses on the biological foundations of human language to study its evolution.” Work on a vocal learning, babbling bat species may ultimately give us another piece of the puzzle to better understand the evolutionary origin of human language.
Reference: “Babbling in a vocal learning bat resembles human infant babbling” by Ahana A. Fernandez, Lara S. Burchardt, Martina Nagy and Mirjam Knörnschild, 20 August 2021, Science.
DOI: 10.1126/science.abf9279
Apollo 15 landing site is strikingly clear in image captured from Earth
Scientists captured this striking image of the Apollo 15 landing site by shooting a powerful radar signal from Earth into space and bouncing it off the lunar surface.
The thin, meandering channel running through the middle of the image is the Hadley Rille, a scar left on the moon after past volcanic activity, likely a collapsing lava tube, according to a statement from the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO). The circular dent pictured near the rille is Hadley C, a crater about 3.7 miles (6 kilometers) in diameter.
Scientists spent two years developing the technology to take these detailed images of the moon from Earth, and now, they can capture snapshots of lunar objects as small as 16.4 feet (5 meters) across from about 238,855 miles (384,400 kilometers) away. In the future, the researchers plan to develop the technology further, to the point where they can throw radar signals out to the far reaches of the solar system and capture images of Uranus and Neptune, which at their closest are 1.6 billion miles (2.6 billion km) and 2.7 billion miles (4.3 billion km) from Earth, respectively, according to Space.com.
Related: Supermoon photos: Full moon rises across the globe
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“The planned system will be a leap forward in radar science, allowing access to never-before-seen features of the solar system from right here on Earth,” Karen O’Neil, site director of the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia, said in the NRAO statement.
But how does the new technology work? Scientists attached a radar transmitter to the Green Bank Telescope (GBT), the largest fully steerable radio telescope on Earth. Thus equipped and aimed at the moon, the telescope could transmit radar signals to the lunar surface. These signals then ricocheted back toward Earth, where they were caught by the NRAO’s Very Long Baseline Array, a network of observation stations with large antenna dishes scattered around the U.S.
The NRAO, the Green Bank Observatory and Raytheon Intelligence & Space, the company that developed the radar transmitter, captured the new images of the Apollo 15 landing site in November 2020, while running a proof-of-concept test of the technology. They are now finalizing a plan to develop an even more powerful radar system that can snap high-resolution images of both near-Earth objects and the solar system’s outermost planets.
“We’ve participated before in important radar studies of the Solar System, but turning the GBT into a steerable planetary radar transmitter will greatly expand our ability to pursue intriguing new lines of research,” Tony Beasley, director of the NRAO and vice president for Radio Astronomy at Associated Universities, Inc., said in the statement.
Originally published on Live Science.