News Feeds

What happens when a spiral and an elliptical galaxy collide? To celebrate the second anniversary of the “first light” for the Webb telescope, NASA released an amazing infrared view of two galaxies locked in a tight dance. They’re called the Penguin and the Egg and their dance will last hundreds of millions of years.

“In just two years, Webb has transformed our view of the universe, enabling the kind of world-class science that drove NASA to make this mission a reality,” said Mark Clampin, director of the Astrophysics Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Webb is providing insights into longstanding mysteries about the early Universe.”

Webb Witnesses a Galactic Dance

The telescope targeted a collision scene named Arp 142 containing both galaxies—a scene that the Hubble Space Telescope has also explored. They lie about 326 million light-years away. Their first close encounter began somewhere between 25 and 75 million years ago. That’s when two partner galaxies had the first of many passages that will distort their shapes more than they already appear here.

The Hubble Space Telescope captured visible light when observing Arp 142, nicknamed the Penguin and the Egg, in 2013. The Webb view (right) shows the near-infrared view. Courtesy NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI

Webb’s observations, which combine near- and mid-infrared light from Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) and MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument), respectively, clearly show that a hazy cloud of gas and stars (blue) links them together. The close approach also set off tremendous bursts of star birth in the colliding clouds of gas and dust.

Eventually, after several close approaches in their cosmic dance, these two galaxies will merge completely. Observers hundreds of millions of years in the future will look at Arp 142 and see one massive elliptical galaxy.

Interestingly, Webb’s sharp infrared eyes also picked out very distant galaxies. Some lie beyond this cosmic collision, although at least one lies about a hundred million light-years closer to Earth. It bristles with hot, young, newborn stars.

How The Arp 142 Galaxies Experience a Merger

The Penguin and Egg galaxies lie about 100,000 light-years apart but they affect each other. The Egg’s gravitational pull distorts the spiral and that interaction is “sculpting” the Penguin. The core makes up the eye of a penguin. The slowly unwinding spiral arms form a beak, head, backbone, and tail.

Webb’s infrared view reveals otherwise unseen activity between the two. For example, the Penguin is rich in dust. Webb’s view shows us how gravitational interactions pull that dust away from the Penguin. There are also scads of new stars in the galaxy, surrounded by what looks like smoke. Webb’s view shows this hydrogen cloud. It’s rich in carbon-based molecules called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). These are incredibly abundant in the Universe and astronomers find them just about everywhere they point a telescope.

Webb’s mid-infrared MIRI image shows the Egg as a small teal oval. Mid-infrared light predominantly shows the oldest stars in the elliptical galaxy, which has lost or used up most of its gas and dust. This is why the view is so different from the combined image, which includes near-infrared light. Courtesy: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI

By contrast, in Webb’s view, the Egg looks like it’s hardly been touched—it’s still an egg-shaped elliptical. It has much older stars than the Penguin. Past epochs of star birth have pretty much used up the available star-making material. So, even though the two galaxies have about the same mass, the Egg just doesn’t have as much material to get stretched out or turned into stars.

Zeroing in on Webb’s Two Views

If you look at both of Webb’s infrared views of the galaxy collision, you can see marked differences in them. That’s because each one prioritizes a different set of infrared wavelengths. In the mid-infrared view, the egg looks tiny and washed out. That’s because the instrument sees only the old stars in the Egg. By contrast, the Penguin’s distorted core and spiral arms are brimming with young stars embedded in the PAH-rich hydrogen clouds.

The combined near- and mid-infrared view shows more of the gas clouds as the Egg tears them away from the Penguin. These regions will glitter in the future with the light of newly formed stars. For now, however, only cooler, older stars are visible in the combined image. The younger ones are there, but the mid-infrared-sensitive instrument doesn’t spot them.

Here’s a flythrough visualization of Arp 142. NASA, ESA, CSA, Ralf Crawford (STScI), Joseph DePasquale (STScI), Christian Nieves (STScI), Joseph Olmsted (STScI), Alyssa Pagan (STScI), Frank Summers (STScI), Greg Bacon (STScI) Why Does Webb Study Galaxy Collisions?

By studying this galactic collision site, the Webb telescope further probes the activity as galaxies evolve. Collisions are an integral part of this process. Our Milky Way Galaxy will dance with the nearby Andromeda Galaxy, starting in about 5 billion years. Images and data from observations of other galaxies doing the same thing give astronomers a chance to understand the process and forecast the distant future when something called “Milkdromeda” will contain the stars and planets of two spirals that once were close neighbors.

For More Information

Vivid Portrait of Interacting Galaxies Marks Webb’s Second Anniversary
Galaxy Evolution

The post Webb Completes Its Second Year of Operations appeared first on Universe Today.

Here we have a 55-minute on-on-one conversation between Richard Dawkins and Kathleen Stock conducted during the “Dissident Dialogues” conference in NYC last May.  Here’s a précis of Stock’s background from Wikipedia:

Kathleen Mary Linn Stock OBE is a British philosopher and writer. She was a professor of philosophy at the University of Sussex until 2021. She has published academic work on aesthetics, fiction, imagination, sexual objectification, and sexual orientation.

Her views on transgender rights and gender identity have become a contentious issue. In December 2020, she was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in recognition of services to higher education, a decision which was subsequently criticised by a group of over 600 academic philosophers who argued that Stock’s “harmful rhetoric” contributed to the marginalisation of transgender people. In October 2021, she resigned from the University of Sussex.  This came after a student campaign took place calling for her dismissal and the university trade union accused the university of “institutional transphobia.” A group of over 200 academic philosophers from the UK signed an open letter in support of Stock’s academic freedom.

After tons of opprobrium and threats, Stock resigned from Sussex in 2021. The book that caused a lot of the trouble is Stock’s Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism. I haven’t read it, but it’s a work of gender-critical feminism, and the topic itself ensured that Stock would be ostracized and deplatformed. I suspect that it’s not a work of “transphobia,” but, like Helen Joyce’s Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality, which I have read, a defense of preserving some spaces for biological women but a work that doesn’t demonize trans people themselves.

I won’t go into the details, but the discussion is largely about sex (she accepts the biological definition based on gametes, which produces a binary) as well as gender. (She also considers a “cluster definition”, in which one combinse secondary sex characteristics, chromosomes, gametes, and other traits to come up with a multivariate definition of “sex”, but properly concludes that it doesn’t work.)

They go on to discussing gender, and Stock dissects the many meanings of that elusive word.  As far as “trans” people go, she says (referring to Jan Morris), Stock says that Morris’s account of what it’s like being a woman was unconvincing (I agree; as it’s based largely on stereotypes). Stock does agree that females transition because they’re unhappy as males, but doesn’t agree that a transwoman is “a woman inside.” She adds that “she has no ambition to stop adults who’ve been through a proper period of reflection” to transition from one gender identity to another; but doesn’t agree that someone who has not medically transitioned should be allowed to define themselves as a member of their non-natal sex.

Stock discusses the “suicide myth”: the idea that girls not allowed to transition have a higher risk of suicide than those who do transition. This is a “myth” because the cohort of adolescent females who want to transition do indeed have a higher rate of suicide, but it could be because of other mental issues and, in fact, there’s no evidence that actual transitioning reduces that risk.

I’ll let you listen to the rest, which includes puberty blockers, the Cass Review, transracialism and so on.

My one disagreement with Stock is that she seems to equate almost all trans women as those who have a “male fetish”: autogynephilia.  I am not an expert, but I suspect that male-to-female transitioning can be caused by a variety of reasons, only one of which is autogynephilia.

In the end, Stock doesn’t seem to be a “transphobe”—someone who hates trans people—but, like others tarred with that slur, she seems pretty reasonable.  She is opposed to the prevalence of affirmative care and to the premature dispensation of hormones and surgery to children or adolescents, as well as to social acceptance of someone who identifies as a member of their non-natal sex as identical to members of that non-natal sex. The latter allows trans females, for example, to compete against biological women in athletics, to occupy cells in women’s prisons, and to display their penises in locker rooms.  In other words, I see her as not hateful, but reasonable and anxious to prevent harm to young people who don’t fully understand the consequences of premature decisions.  And she largely blames adults for this harm.

We hear a lot about the “war crimes of Israel and the IDF”; in fact, that’s about all we hear on campus regarding the war.  And it is these “war crimes” that have brought the world’s opprobrium down on Israel, even though they are not war crimes. Yes, an odd IDF soldier might commit a war crime occasionally (I know of none), but I take issue with the claim that Israel is guilty of war crimes in general.

In contrast, there is no doubt that Hamas and other Palestinian terror groups are guilty of multiple war crimes. Yet we don’t hear about them much, and the world certainly isn’t outraged by them. That is a curious situation.

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) has formalized the possibility that Israel could be committing genocide, and though it hasn’t yet concluded it is, even the possibility seems ludicrous to me, for Israel is certainly not bent on eliminating all Palestinians—just Hamas. The care that the IDF takes to avoid killing civilians when possible, Israel’s provision of humanitarian aid to non-combatant Gazans, and the warnings and “safe areas” that the IDF provides to non0-combatants—all of this argues against the claim of genocide, as has the big population increase in Gaza in recent years. And yet how often do we hear that among all armies of the world, the IDF is the most careful to avoid harming civilians?

Israel’s “war crimes” are also the basis of the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) pending indictment against Prime Minister Netanyahu and Defense Minister Gallant, who will be charged with crimes against humanity. To be sure, though, the ICC has said that there are reasonable grounds for charging three Hamas leaders (Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Diab Ibrahim Al-Masri,  and Ismail Haniyeh) with the following war crimes (Mohammed Diab, known as Mohammed Deif, was just subject to an attack by the IDF, but we don’t know if he’s alive):

• Extermination as a crime against humanity, contrary to article 7(1)(b) of the Rome Statute;
• Murder as a crime against humanity, contrary to article 7(1)(a), and as a war crime, contrary to article 8(2)(c)(i);
• Taking hostages as a war crime, contrary to article 8(2)(c)(iii);
• Rape and other acts of sexual violence as crimes against humanity, contrary to article 7(1)(g), and also as war crimes pursuant to article 8(2)(e)(vi) in the context of captivity;
• Torture as a crime against humanity, contrary to article 7(1)(f), and also as a war crime, contrary to article 8(2)(c)(i), in the context of captivity;
• Other inhumane acts as a crime against humanity, contrary to article 7(l)(k), in the context of captivity;
• Cruel treatment as a war crime contrary to article 8(2)(c)(i), in the context of captivity; and
• Outrages upon personal dignity as a war crime, contrary to article 8(2)(c)(ii), in the context of captivity.

I will add a few more war crimes committed by Hamas, some of which were described (but NOT identified as war crimes, by a recent piece in the New York Times, as noted by the Elder of Ziyon):

• Hiding among civilians while acting as a combatant
• Dressing as civilians while fighting
• Using civilian homes for military purposes
• Purposefully hiding among civilians and firing rockets from civilian neighborhoods
• Recruiting children to do military activities
• Hiding soldiers in hospitals

In fact it was the NYT article that described Hamas’s war crimes—without labeling them as such—that angered me to the point that I had to write this post. But of course this post may be superfluous since everyone seems to ignore Hamas’s war crimes; and the world is certainly neither emphasizing these crimes nor coming down on Hamas for committing them.

And here are two more violations by Hamas:

• Firing missiles at civilian populations in Israel
• Using terrorism as an act of war: attacks in Israel on civilians

These are palpable and arrant war crimes of Hamas, and one can’t deny that they were committed. In fact, these are the usual tactics of Hamas.  My question is this: why does the world ignore them? You don’t see encampments by Jewish or non-Palestinian students protesting Hamas’s war crimes; you hear very little about them as war crimes in the media; and the NYT article is one example about how Hamas’s normal battle tactics are completely ignored as genuine war crimes. As the Elder of Ziyon says about this article:

While the NYT describes all of these violations of the laws of war, the only time it mentions that fact is saying more than 50 paragraphs into the report that “International law requires combatants to avoid using ‘civilian objects,’ which include homes, schools, hospitals and mosques, for military objectives.” The article should have been written many months ago, and it should have emphasized that Hamas’ actions are not only illegal but also the cause of so much suffering of the innocent in Gaza.

This is one example, but perhaps the most blatant one, about how a double standard is applied to Hamas and the IDF in the war. Hostage-taking alone should enrage the world.

I’ll leave it to readers to hypothesize why this double standard exists.

We have one batch of photos left besides today’s, so this feature will become sporadic as of tomorrow.  You know what to do!

But John Avise has come through again with some bird photos from California.  John’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them. 

The July Doldrums 

Here in Southern California, mid-summer is not the most ideal time for avian photography.  The excitement of the spring migration in April and May is but a distant memory, and the start of autumn migration in late August is still more than a month away.  Most of the ducks have long since departed for far more northerly climes for nesting, and the few remaining resident ducks are in their dull eclipse plumage.   About the only avian excitement here in the hot weather is the welcome appearance of chicks representing the next generation for resident species.  This week’s post shows chicks (and their parents) of several bird species that do nest locally.  All of these pictures were taken near my home in July.

Black-necked Stilt (Himantopus mexicanus), adult:

Black-necked Stilt chick:

American Avocet (Recurvirostra americana), adult:

American Avocet chick:

Another American Avocet chick:

Least Tern (Sternula antillarum), adult on nest:

Least Tern chick:

Pied-billed Grebe (Podilymbus podiceps), proud parents:

Pied-billed Grebe chicks:

Pied-billed Grebe parent with chick;

Pied-billed Grebe chick clambering on board:

Pied-billed Grebe with chick on back (yes, young grebe chicks often ride on the backs of their parents):

Gadwall (Mareca strepera) hen with two chicks:

Mallard (Anas platyrhynchos) hen;

Mallard hen head portrait:

Mallard chick:

The Heritage Foundation’s COVID-19 Commission Calls for Chinese “Accountability” for US Pandemic Damage

The post Heritage Covid Commission Wants China Accountable… What About Trump? first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

Look at most spiral or barred spiral galaxies and you will see multiple regions where stars are forming. These star forming regions are comprised of mostly hydrogen gas with a few other elements for good measure. The first galaxies in the Universe had huge supplies of this star forming gas. Left unchecked they could have burned through the gas quickly, generating enormous amounts of star formation. Life fast though and die young for such an energetic burst of star formation would soon fizzle out leaving behind dead and dying stars. In some way it seems, galaxies seem to regulate their star formation thanks to supermassive black holes at their centre. 

The first galaxies formed about 400 to 700 million years after the Big Bang, during the Epoch known as Reionization. These early galaxies were small and faint, mostly composed of hydrogen and helium, and contained dense clusters of massive, short-lived Population III stars (the first generation of stars.) The intense radiation from these stars ionised the surrounding gas, clearing the fog that permeated space making the universe transparent for the first time. These primordial galaxies began merging and interacting, laying the foundation for the galaxy types seen today.

A new study published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society explores why galaxies are not as large as astronomers would expect. The research suggests that galaxies, even those that formed first, avoid an early death because they have mechanisms similar to “heart and lungs,” which regulate their “breathing”. Without these regulatory processes our bodies, and galaxies would have aged much faster, resulting in massive galaxies filled with dead and dying stars and devoid of new star formation.

Observations show that galaxies are not so big and full of dying stars having outgrown themselves. It seems something limits their ability to allow gas to form into stars. Astrophysicists at the University of Kent believe they may have the answer: galaxies could be controlling their growth rate through a process not too dissimilar to “breathing.” They compare the supermassive black hole at the centre of a galaxy to a heart and the supersonic jets emerging from the poles with the radiation and gas they emit to airways feeding a pair of lungs.

The supermassive black holes seem to pulse just like a heart. These pulses cause a shock front to oscillate along the jets like a diaphragm inflating and deflating the lungs. This process transmits energy along the jet slowly counteracting the pull of gravity and slowing gas accretion and star formation. The idea was developed by PhD student Carl Richards and his simulations showed a black hole pulsing like a heart. 

Assisted by magnetic fields, a spiraling wind helps the supermassive black hole in galaxy ESO320-G030 grow. In this illustration, the core of the galaxy is dominated by a rotating wind of dense gas leading outwards from the (hidden) supermassive black hole at the galaxy’s center. The motions of the gas, traced by light from molecules of hydrogen cyanide, have been measured with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array. Image credit: M. D. Gorski/Aaron M. Geller, Northwestern University, CIERA, the Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics.

Richards explains “We realised that there would have to be some means for the jets to support the body – the galaxy’s surrounding ambient gas – and that is what we discovered in our computer simulations,” He continued “The unexpected behaviour was revealed when we analysed the computer simulations of high pressure and allowed the heart to pulse.”

Evidence of ripples just like those in Richards’ simulations, in extra-galactic media have been found in galaxy clusters like the Perseus cluster. These ripples are thought to sustain a galaxy’s environment, though their generation mechanism was unclear. Conventional simulations fail to explain gas flows into galaxies, but the work of the team from the University of Kent may well have answered the question.

Source : How the ‘heart and lungs’ of a galaxy extend its life.

The post Galaxies Regulate their Own Growth so they Don’t Run Out of Star Forming Gas appeared first on Universe Today.

Here’s Bill Maher’s 10-minutes Real Time segment that constitutes his video “op-ed”. This is one of the best such segments I’ve seen.

As the title indicates, Maher thinks that Biden should make a hasty exit. The bad news is that he’s quite enthusiastic about Kamala Harris as his replacement, a choice that I don’t agree with. But the good news is that he also think she’s too unpopular to win. He also likes Gavin Newsom, despite his “slickness” (Maher even suggests a slogan: “I’m havin’ Gavin”).  Further, he’s a fan of Gretchen Whitmer (my favorite candidate) and Mayor Pete (my former favorite candidate). He also suggests five governors who are younger and liberal but not “crazy woke”.

h/t: Rosemary

Robot Suicide; News Items: Mars Settlement Simulation, HIV Prevention, COVID Protection Gene, Nuclear Pasta, Eyeball Planet; Who's That Noisy; Your Questions and E-mails: Hydrogen Water; Science or Fiction

Well, we have three batches of photos left, and that leaves two after this post. Don’t make me beg!

Today we have some lovely bird photos, including DUCKS, from Damon Williford in Bay City, Texas. Damon’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Here are several bird photos that I captured at a local park back, Resoft County Park, in April. Resoft County Park is located in the southern portion of the Houston Metropolitan area of Texas. It’s a nice place for photography due to the presence of several ponds, an active heron rookery, and the fact that most of the birds are accustomed to humans.

Male Wood Duck (Aix sponsa):

Female Wood Duck:

A pair of Wood Ducks:

A pair of Black-bellied Whistling-ducks (Dendrocygna autumnalis). This is a Neotropical species that has undergone rapid expansion within Texas since the 1980s:

The Egyptian Goose (Alopochen aegyptiaca) is a non-native species that has become established in several cities and towns in Texas:

A pair of Egyptian geese:

An adult Egyptian goose with goslings:

The park hosts both wild and domestic Mallards (Anas platyrhynchos). The bird pictured might be a drake of the wild type. I’m not good at differentiating wild mallards from wild-domestic hybrids or the breeds that are closer to the wild type:

Domestic Mallard:

American Coot (Fulica americana):

Western Cattle Egret (Bubulcus ibis):

An adult Great Egret (Ardea alba) with nestlings:

Eastern Bluebird (Sialia sialis):

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sciencesalon/mss447_Jay_Bhattacharya_2024_07_13.mp3 Download MP3

Jay Bhattacharya is a Professor of Health Policy at Stanford University and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economics Research. He directs Stanford’s Center for Demography and Economics of Health and Aging. Dr. Bhattacharya’s research focuses on the health and well-being of vulnerable populations, with a particular emphasis on the role of government programs, biomedical innovation, and economics. Dr. Bhattacharya’s recent research focuses on the epidemiology of COVID-19 as well as an evaluation of policy responses to the epidemic.

He became famous—or infamous in some circles—for his co-authorship, with Sunetra Gupta of the University of Oxford and Martin Kulldorff of Harvard, of the Great Barrington Declaration, which advocated lifting COVID-19 restrictions on lower-risk groups to develop herd immunity through widespread infection, “while promoting the fringe notion that vulnerable people could be simultaneously protected from the virus.” (Wikipedia) In a private email to Anthony Fauci, NIH director Francis Collins called the authors of the declaration “fringe epidemiologists” and said that “(it) seems to be getting a lot of attention — and even a co-signature from Nobel Prize winner Mike Leavitt at Stanford. There needs to be a quick and devastating published take down of its premises.”

That is when he became known as a “fringe epidemiologist”.

In fact, he has published 135 articles in top peer-reviewed scientific journals in medicine, economics, health policy, epidemiology, statistics, law, and public health among other fields. He holds an MD and a PhD in economics, both earned at Stanford University.

Shermer and Bhattacharya discuss:

• loss of trust in medical and scientific institutions (Anthony Fauci, Francis Collins)
• overall assessment of what went right and wrong with the COVID-19 pandemic
• testing, masking, social isolation
• Is the cure worse than the disease?
• closing of schools, restaurants, salons, parks, beaches, hiking trails, etc.
• the cost to the economy of the shut downs
• the cost to the education of children of the shut downs
• Precautionary Principle
• comparative method: which countries and states did better or worse?
• Lab Leak hypothesis vs. Zoonomic hypothesis
• living with SARS-CoV-2 and its variants
• RFK, Jr. and his conspiracy theories
• debating anti-vaxxers (Rogan and elsewhere)
• treatments: hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, remdesivir, Vitamin D, Paxlovid, Tamiflu, retroviral medicines, monoclonal antibodies
• high risk vs. low risk groups; age, sex, race, pregnancy, weight, preconditions, immune compromised
• myocarditis, Robert Malone, mRNA vaccines, Joe Rogan, RFKJ, Peter Hotez
• The Great Barrington Declaration (“focused protection” of the people most at risk)
• Wall Street Journal OpEd: “Is the Coronavirus as Deadly as They Say?”, which argued there was little evidence to support shelter-in-place orders and quarantines
• In March 2021, Bhattacharya called the COVID-19 lockdowns the “biggest public health mistake we’ve ever made” and argued that “The harm to people is catastrophic”. Blacklisted by Twitter.

If you enjoy the podcast, please show your support by making a $5 or $10 monthly donation.