- Ultra-rare merging of two lifeforms sparks exciting evolutionary prediction: ‘We just haven’t noticed’ Yahoo News Australia
- Scientists Discover First Nitrogen-Fixing Organelle – Berkeley Lab – Berkeley Lab News Center Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (.gov)
- The Once-In-An-Eon Event That Gave Earth Plants Has Happened Again IFLScience
- Two lifeforms merge in once-in-a-billion-years evolutionary event New Atlas
- Scientists discover once-in-a-billion-year event — 2 lifeforms merging to create a new cell part Livescience.com
Tag Archives: ultrarare
An Ultra-Rare Cosmic Object Was Just Detected in The Milky Way, Astronomers Report
A new member of a category of star so rare we can count the known number of them on our fingers and toes has just been discovered in the Milky Way.
It’s called MAXI J1816-195, located no greater than 30,000 light-years away. Preliminary observations and investigations suggest that it’s an accreting X-ray millisecond pulsar – of which only 18 others are known, according to a pulsar database compiled by astronomer Alessandro Patruno.
When numbers are that low, any new object represents an extremely exciting find that can yield important statistical information about how those objects form, evolve, and behave.
The discovery really is hot off the presses. X-ray light emanating from the object was first detected on 7 June by the Japanese Space Agency’s Monitor of All-sky X-ray Image (MAXI) instrument mounted on the outside of the ISS.
In a notice posted to The Astronomer’s Telegram (ATel), a team headed by astrophysicist Hitoshi Negoro of Nihon University in Japan posted that they’d identified a previously uncatalogued X-ray source, located in the galactic plane between the constellations of Sagittarius, Scutum, and Serpens. It was, they said, flaring relatively brightly, but they hadn’t been able to identify it based on the MAXI data.
It wasn’t long before other astronomers piled on. Using the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, a space-based telescope, astrophysicist Jamie Kennea of Pennsylvania State University and colleagues homed in on the location to confirm the detection with an independent instrument, and localize it.
Swift saw the object in X-rays, but not optical or ultraviolet light, at the location specified by the MAXI observations.
“This location does not lie at the location of any known catalogued X-ray source, therefore we agree that this is a new transient source MAXI J1816-195,” they wrote in a notice posted to ATel.
“In addition, archival observations by Swift/XRT of this region taken in 2017 June 22, do not reveal any point source at this location.”
Curiouser and curiouser.
Next up was the Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER), an X-ray NASA instrument also mounted to the ISS, in an investigation led by astrophysicist Peter Bult of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
And this is where things started to get really interesting. NICER picked up X-ray pulsations at 528.6 Hz – suggesting that the thing is spinning at a rate of 528.6 times per second – in addition to an X-ray thermonuclear burst.
“This detection,” they wrote, “shows that MAXI J1816-195 is a neutron star and a new accreting millisecond X-ray pulsar.”
So what does that mean? Well, not all pulsars are built alike. At the very basic level, a pulsar is a type of neutron star, which is the collapsed core of a dead massive star that has gone supernova. These objects are very small and very dense – up to around 2.2 times the mass of the Sun, packed into a sphere just 20 kilometers (12 miles) or so across.
To be classified as a pulsar, a neutron star has to… pulse. Beams of radiation are launched from its poles; because of the way the star is angled, these beams sweep past Earth like the beams from a lighthouse. Millisecond pulsars are pulsars that spin so fast, they pulse hundreds of times a second.
Some pulsars are powered purely by rotation, but another type is powered by accretion. The neutron star is in a binary system with another star, their orbit so close that material is siphoned from the companion star and onto the neutron star. This material is channeled along the neutron star’s magnetic field lines to its poles, where it falls down onto the surface, producing hotspots that flare brightly in X-rays.
In some cases, the accretion process can spin up the pulsar to millisecond rotational speeds. This is the accreting X-ray millisecond pulsar, and it appears that MAXI J1816-195 belongs to this rare category.
The thermonuclear X-ray burst detected by NICER was likely the result of the unstable thermonuclear burning of material accumulated by the companion star.
Since the discovery is so new, observations in multiple wavelengths are ongoing. Follow-up has already been conducted using Swift, and the 2m Liverpool Telescope on the Canary Island of La Palma in Spain was employed to look for an optical counterpart, although none was detected. Other astronomers are also encouraged to climb aboard the MAXI J1816-195 train.
Meanwhile, a full pulsar timing analysis is being conducted, and will, Bult and his team said, be circulated as more data becomes available. You can follow along on ATel.
Scientists detect ultra-rare ‘transitioning red quasar’ from the dawn of the universe
Astronomers have discovered a dusty, red object 13 billion light-years from Earth that may be the earliest known ancestor of a supermassive black hole.
The ancient object shows characteristics that fall between dusty, star-forming galaxies and brightly glowing black holes known as quasars, according to the authors of a new study, published April 13 in the journal Nature. Born just 750 million years after the Big Bang, during an epoch called the “cosmic dawn,” the object appears to be the first direct evidence of an early galaxy weaving stardust into the foundations of a supermassive black hole.
Objects like these, known as transitioning red quasars, have been theorized to exist in the early universe, but they have never been observed — until now.
Related: The universe may have been filled with supermassive black holes at the dawn of time
“The discovered object connects two rare populations of celestial objects, namely dusty starbursts and luminous quasars,” lead study author Seiji Fujimoto, a postdoctoral fellow at the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen, said in a statement. “[It] thereby provides a new avenue toward understanding the rapid growth of supermassive black holes in the early universe.”
Twinkle, twinkle, little quasar
Quasars (short for “quasi-stellar objects”) are extremely bright objects powered by supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies. With masses millions to tens of billions of times greater than that of Earth‘s sun, these monster black holes suck in everything around them at blinding speed. Gas spiraling into these black holes heats up due to friction, creating a bright glow that’s comparable to starlight.
Prior research has shown that quasars existed within the first 700 million years of the universe, the study authors wrote; however, it’s unclear exactly how these supermassive objects formed so quickly after the Big Bang. Simulations suggest that some sort of fast-growing transition phase occurs in dusty, star-dense galaxies.
“Theorists have predicted that these black holes undergo an early phase of rapid growth: a dust-reddened compact object emerges from a heavily dust-obscured starburst galaxy,” study co-author Gabriel Brammer, an associate professor at the Niels Bohr Institute, said in the statement.
In their new paper, the researchers claim to have detected one of these rare transitional objects — officially named GNz7q — while studying an ancient, star-forming galaxy with the Hubble Space Telescope.
The team caught the early galaxy in the midst of a stellar baby boom, with the galaxy seemingly churning out new stars 1,600 times faster than the Milky Way does today. All those newborn stars produced an immense amount of heat, which warmed the galaxy’s ambient gas and caused it to glow brightly in infrared wavelengths. The galaxy became so hot, in fact, that its dust shines brighter than any other known object from the cosmic dawn period, the researchers said.
Amid that brightly glowing dust, the researchers detected a single red point of light — a large, compact object tinged by the enormous fog of dust around it. According to the researchers, this red dot’s luminosity and color perfectly match the predicted characteristics of a transitioning red quasar.
“The observed properties are in excellent agreement with the theoretical simulations and suggest that GNz7q is the first example of the transitioning, rapid growth phase of black holes at the dusty star core, an ancestor of the later supermassive black hole,” Brammer said.
The team probably didn’t just stumble upon this object by dumb luck; there are likely many, many others like it just waiting to be discovered by telescopes that can peer even further back, into the earliest eras of the universe. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, which launched on Dec. 25, 2021, will be able to hunt for these elusive objects with much greater clarity than Hubble, the researchers wrote, hopefully shedding a bit more light onto the dusty cosmic dawn.
Originally published on Live Science.
Fisherman catches ‘ultra-rare’ crab that looks like a pastry
That’s one delicious–looking crab.
A fisherman caught a rare crab off the coast of England that has a unique look to it. From some angles, the animal’s shell coating makes it look less like a sea creature and more like a pastry dish.
sponge coated crab caught
Ian Jepson caught a rare type of crab that locals have nicknamed the “sponge-coated” crab during a trip off the coast of Cornwall, Southwest News Service (SWNS) reports. He was about six miles off the coast when the creature was first spotted.
FISHERMAN CATCHES DEER HALF-MILE OFF COAST
“We do get a few weird things now and again and it is great to see. It certainly makes the day more enjoyable out here,” Jepson explained to SWNS. “We caught it six miles off Perranporth and were delighted. You don’t see them often, so it was lovely to see. Afterwards we carefully and slowly returned it so the sponge remained on its back”
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sponge coated crab
(SWNS)
According to Jepson, the crabs carve out a piece of sponge and fit it over their backs. From the right angle, the animal looks like a baked pastry. Jepson compared it to a local dish, called a pasty, which is a baked pastry filled with meats and vegetables.
While these types of crabs are generally rare, Jepson says that he’s seen an uptick in sightings recently.
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“I’m not too sure if they are actually called sponge crabs, but we have always called them that,” Jepson said. “They seem to carve out a piece of sponge which is loose fitting on their backs. We only usually get one every year or two, but this summer we have had five already. I don’t know if the increase is down to global warming, but I am now trying to find out how far they have spread.”