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Several people sent batches of photographs in, and many thanks to them. We have enough for about a week.

Today’s Sunday, which means that we have photos from biologist John Avise, who has moved from birds to lepidopterans. John’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them:

Butterflies in North America, Part 2 

This week continues the series on butterflies that I have photographed in North America.  I’m continuing to go down my list of species in alphabetical order by common name.

Atala (Eumaeus atala), underwing:

Atlantis Fritillary (Speyeria atlantis):

Baltimore Checkerspot (Euphydryas phaeton):

Baltimore Checkerspot, underwing:

Barred Sulphur (Phoebis philea) underwing:

Behr’s Metalmark (Apodemia virgulti), topwing:

Behr’s Metalmark underwing:

Bernadino (square-spotted) Blue (Euphilotes allyni), male topwing:

Bernardino Blue, female:

Bernardino Blue, underwing:

Eastern Black Swallowtail (Papilio polyxenes), male:

Black Swallowtail, underwing:

In 2018, NASA mission planners selected the Jezero Crater as the future landing site of the Perseverance rover. This crater was a natural choice, as it was once an ancient lake bed, as evidenced by the delta fan at its western edge. On Earth, these features form in the presence of flowing water that gradually deposits sediment over time. Combined with the fact that the Jezero Crater’s delta feature is rich in clays, this makes the region a prime target to search for biosignatures – evidence of past (and maybe present) life on Mars!

In recent news, NASA announced that the Perseverance rover had reached the top of Jezero Crater’s rim at a location the science team calls “Lookout Hill.” The rover spent the previous three and a half months climbing the rim, covering a distance of 500 vertical meters (1,640 vertical feet) and making science observations along the way. Now that it has crested the rim, Perseverance can begin what the mission team calls its “Northern Rim” campaign. Over the next year, the rover is expected to drive 6.4 km (4 mi) and visit up to four sites of interest where it will obtain geological samples.

Since it landed in the Jezero Crater in February 2021, Perseverance has completed four science campaigns. This includes the “Crater Floor,” “Fan Front,” “Upper Fan,” and “Margin Unit” based on where the rover was obtaining samples from. During the first campaign, the rover visited features around its landing site – like the Máaz formation – where it obtained several rock and atmospheric samples, and some witness samples for contamination assessment. The two campaigns that followed saw the rover explore different sections of Jezero’s delta fan and obtain samples of rock and clay.

The fourth campaign, meanwhile, consisted of the rover examining marginal carbonate rocks that circle the upper edge of the Jezero Crater. The science team calls Perseverance’s fifth campaign the “Northern Rim” because its route covers the northern part of the southwestern section of Jezero’s rim. The site was selected so that the rover could explore a region of Mars, unlike anything it has investigated before. Ken Farley, a project scientist for Perseverance at Caltech, explained in a NASA press release:

“The Northern Rim campaign brings us completely new scientific riches as Perseverance roves into fundamentally new geology. It marks our transition from rocks that partially filled Jezero Crater when it was formed by a massive impact about 3.9 billion years ago to rocks from deep down inside Mars that were thrown upward to form the crater rim after impact. These rocks represent pieces of early Martian crust and are among the oldest rocks found anywhere in the solar system. Investigating them could help us understand what Mars — and our own planet — may have looked like in the beginning.”

Now that Perseverance has crested and moved on from Lookout Hill, the rover is heading to a rocky outcrop about 450 m (1,500 feet) on the other side of the rim known as “Witch Hazel Hill.” Said Candice Bedford, a Perseverance scientist from Purdue University:

“The campaign starts off with a bang because Witch Hazel Hill represents over 330 feet [~100 m] of layered outcrop, where each layer is like a page in the book of Martian history. As we drive down the hill, we will be going back in time, investigating the ancient environments of Mars recorded in the crater rim. Then, after a steep descent, we take our first turns of the wheel away from the crater rim toward ‘Lac de Charmes,’ about 2 miles [3.2 km] south.”

Located on the plains beyond the rim, the Lac de Charmes region is of interest to the mission team because it is less likely to have been affected by the impact that led to the Jezero Crater. Beyond that, the rover will travel about 1.6 km (1 mi) back up the rim to investigate an outcropping of blocks (megabreccia) that may be the remains of ancient bedrock broken by another impact. This was the Isidis impact, which occurred 3.9 billion years ago and led to the formation of the Isidis Planitia basin in the Northern Lowlands.

The route NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover took (in blue) as it climbed the western rim of Jezero Crater. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

Investigating this site could provide valuable insight into a major surface-reshaping event that took place during the Noachian Period on Mars. This geological epoch saw extensive erosion by flowing water, as indicated by the many river valley networks dated to the period. It is also during the Noachian that the Tharsis Bulge is believed to have formed, indicating that Mars was still geologically active. As always, the ultimate goal is to find biosignatures from this “warmer, wetter” period that indicate that Mars could have had life (similar to Earth at the time).

The Perseverance science team also shared information on the rover, their science operations, and future plans at a media briefing on Thursday, December 12th, during the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in Washington. As Steven Lee, the deputy project manager for the Perseverance mission at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said during the briefing:

“During the Jezero Crater rim climb, our rover drivers have done an amazing job negotiating some of the toughest terrain we’ve encountered since landing. They developed innovative approaches to overcome these challenges — even tried driving backward to see if it would help — and the rover has come through it all like a champ. Perseverance is ‘go’ for everything the science team wants to throw at it during this next science campaign.”

Further Reading: NASA

The post NASA’s Perseverance Rover Reaches the Top Rim of the Jezero Crater appeared first on Universe Today.

Reader Debra says “Farbsy is a comedian on Instagram who pretends to run a customer service line for cats.” That is, the animals call in to beef.

Click the picture or here to see the video on Instagram, and sound up:

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There’s a new cat movie called “Flow”, made in Latvia, which gets an unheard-of rating for both critics and audience on Rotten Tomatoes:

And the NYT review, archived here, is also excellent, especially if you’re an ailurophile:

“Flow,” an animated adventure film with a touch of magical realism, is a welcome entrant in the cat-movie canon, exuding a profound affection for our four-legged friends.

Its hero, a plucky black cat with round, expressive eyes, doesn’t speak a word of dialogue, and acts more or less like a domestic house cat, but under the Latvian director Gints Zilbalodis’s doting gaze, he’s as well-developed as Atticus Finch, a noble character you can’t help but root for. Purring, scratching and scrabbling up walls, this cat virtually leaps off the screen.

“Flow,” written by Zilbalodis and Matiss Kaza, concerns the cat’s survival during a flood of almost biblical proportions. The story, simple but compelling, unfolds as a kind of feline picaresque, as he clambers aboard a passing sailboat that drifts from one scenic exploit to another. He soon encounters other stranded animals, including a guileless Labrador retriever and a benevolent secretary bird, who tag along to form what eventually resembles a charming, ragtag menagerie. Their adventures together range from hair raising, as when a thunderstorm threatens to capsize their ship, to endearingly mundane, like when a rotund capybara helps a lemur gather a collection of knickknacks.

It sounds saccharine, but Zilbalodis largely avoids the sort of whimsy and sentimentality that might plague, say, a Disney movie with the same premise. The animals act like real animals, not like cartoons or humans, and that restraint gives their adventure an authenticity that, in moments of both delight and peril, makes the emotion that much more powerful. With the caveat that I’m a cat lover, I was deeply moved.

The trailer:

The film also has a Wikipedia entry (it also summarizes the plot, which you may want to avoid before you see it), and it details the movie’s encomiums:

Flow (Latvian: Straume) is a 2024 animated fantasy adventure film directed by Gints Zilbalodis and written by Zilbalodis and Matīss Kaža. The film is notable for containing no dialogue.

Upon premiering at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, the film received critical acclaim and won numerous film and animation awards, including the Best Animated Film awards at the European Film Awards, the New York Film Critics Circle Awards, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association Awards, and the National Board of Review Awards.  The film was selected as the Latvian entry for Best International Feature Film at the 97th Academy Awards.

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And here’s a five-minute video compilation of cats in the snow:

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h/t: Laura, Jez

Interview with Noah Lugeons; News Items: Have We Achieved AGI, Coming Bird Flu, Weekend Warrior Exercise, Theoretical Technosignature, Simulation Again; Who's That Noisy; Your Questions and E-mails: Blood Thicker than Water; Science or Fiction

Getting places in space quickly has been the goal of propulsion research for a long time. Rockets, our most common means of doing so, are great for providing lots of force but extraordinarily inefficient. Other options like electric propulsion and solar sailing are efficient but offer measly amounts of force, albeit for a long time. So scientists have long dreamed of a third method of propulsion – one that could provide enough force over a long enough time to power a crewed mission to another star in a single human lifetime. And that could theoretically happen using one of the rarest substances in the universe – antimatter.

A new paper from Sawsan Ammar Omira and Abdel Hamid I. Mourad at the United Arab Emirates University looks at the possibilities of developing a space drive using antimatter and what makes it so hard to create. Antimatter was initially discovered in 1932 when physicist Carl David Anderson observed positrons – the antimatter form of an electron – in cosmic rays by passing them through a cloud chamber. He won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1936 for his discovery. It took 20 years to create it artificially for the first time.

Since then, antimatter has been poked and prodded in as many ways as scientists could think of – including literally, but that causes the thing that antimatter is most famous for – self-annihilation. When an antimatter proton comes into contact with protons or neutrons of normal matter, they annihilate one another and release a combination of energy (typically in the form of gamma rays) and also high-energy short-lived particles, known as pion and kaon, which happen to be traveling at relativistic speeds.

So, in theory, a ship could contain enough antimatter to intentionally create this annihilation explosion, using the relativistic particles as a form of thrust and potentially using the gamma rays as a source of power. The overall amount of energy released from a gram of antiprotons being annihilated is 1.8×1014, 11 orders of magnitude more energy than rocket fuel and even 100 times greater energy density than a nuclear fission or fusion reactor. As the paper puts it, “one gram of antihydrogen could ideally power 23 space shuttles.”

All this begs the question – why don’t we have these awesome propulsions systems yet? The simple answer is that antimatter is tricky to work with. Since it will self-annihilate with anything it touches, it must be suspended in an advanced electromagnetic containment field. The longest scientists have been able to do that was for about 16 minutes at CERN in 2016, and even that was only on the order of a few atoms – not the grams or kilograms needed to support an interstellar propulsion system.

Additionally, it takes absurd amounts of energy to create antimatter, which makes it expensive. The Antiproton Decelerator, a massive particle accelerator at CERN, makes about ten nanograms of antiprotons a year at a cost of several million dollars. Extrapolating that out, producing one gram of antimatter would require something like 25 million kWh of energy—enough to power a small city for a year. It would also cost over $4M at average electricity rates, making it one of the most expensive substances on Earth.

Fraser discusses techniques to protect relativistic ships (such as those powered by antimatter) from dust in the interstellar medium.

Given this expense and the massive scale of the infrastructure needed to do it, antimatter research is relatively limited. Around 100-125 papers per year are produced on the subject, dramatically increasing from around 25 in 2000. However, that compares to around 1000 papers per year on large language models, one of the more popular forms of algorithms powering the current AI boom. In other words, the overall expense and relative long-term horizon over any payout limit the amount of funding and, therefore, advancements in antimatter creation and storage.

That means it will probably be quite some time before we end up with an antimatter ship drive. We might even need to create some preliminary energy-producing technologies like fusion that could significantly lower the cost of energy and even enable the research that would eventually get us there. However, the possibility of traveling at near-relativistic speeds and potentially getting actual humans to another star within a single lifetime is an ambitious goal that space and exploration enthusiasts everywhere will continue to pursue, no matter how long it takes.

Learn More:
Sawsan Ammar Omira & Abdel Hamid I. Mourad – Future of Antimatter Production, Storage, Control, and Annihilation Applications in Propulsion Technologies
UT – It’s Official, Antimatter Falls Down in Gravity, Not Up
UT – Are There Antimatter Galaxies?
UT – Spectrum of Antimatter Observed for First Time

Lead Image:
Artist’s conception of an antimatter rocket system.
Credit – NASA/MFSC

The post Antimatter Propulsion Is Still Far Away, But It Could Change Everything appeared first on Universe Today.

Exomoons are a hot topic in the science community, as none have been confirmed with astronomers finding new and creative ways to identify them. But while astronomers have searched for exomoons orbiting exoplanets around single stars like our Sun, could exomoons exist around exoplanets orbiting binary stars? This is what a recent study submitted to The Astrophysical Journal hopes to address as a team of researchers from Tufts University investigated the statistical likelihood of exomoons orbiting exoplanets with two stars, also known as circumbinary planets (CBPs). This study holds the potential to help researchers better understand methods needed for identifying exomoons in a variety of exoplanetary systems.

Here, Universe Today discusses this incredible research with Benjamin R. Gordon, who is a Master of Science student in Astrophysics at Tufts University and lead author of the study, regarding the motivation behind the study, significant results, potential follow-up studies, the importance of finding exomoons orbiting CBPs, and which known systems are the most promising for identifying exomoons? Therefore, what was the motivation behind this study?

Gordon tells Universe Today, “We were motivated at the start by a couple of ideas, but my biggest source of inspiration was the idea that circumbinary planets are thought to have a farther minimum distance than single star planets, meaning that more circumbinary planets would be likely to lie within the “habitable zone”. Thus, any moon of these circumbinary planets that may have the potential to form life, as they may be similar in size to Earth if a planet is very large. It’s not a trivial question to ask if moons in these chaotic systems of 2 stars and a planet would be stable, so we were eager to find an answer!”

For the study, the researchers used computer models to simulate how exomoons could orbit CBPs under a variety of exoplanetary systems conditions, specifically what’s known as a planet’s hill radius, which is its threshold to have exomoons orbiting them. The researchers conducted the simulations on two populations of CBPs and exomoons: Population 1, which had an unlimited planetary radius to have exomoons; and Population 2, which had a planetary radius between 3x the Earth and the size of the corresponding exoplanet, which have been identified as all gas giants orbiting binary stars. The researchers then conducted 390 computer simulations of the Population 1 planets and 484 computer simulations of the Population 2 planets. So, what were the most significant results from the study?

“One of the main findings is that there is a section of the parameter space of the initial conditions of our system that always results in stable exomoons of circumbinary planets,” Gordon tells Universe Today. “We also found that 30-40% of stable moons are in the habitable zone, which is a very significant fraction. We also show that the disk-driven migration scenario for a circumbinary planet-moon system is a possible formation pathway for long-period circumbinary planets as well as planetary mass objects that float freely through space.”

The goal of exoplanet hunting is to find an Earth-like world whose size, distance from its star, and atmospheric composition could have the right conditions to support life as we know it. Unfortunately, of the 5,806 confirmed exoplanets, only 210 are rocky worlds like our own, with more than half of those confirmed exoplanets being gas giants. Therefore, identifying exomoons orbiting CBPs within their star’s habitable zone could hold promise for potentially identifying Earth-sized exomoons orbiting gas giants larger than Jupiter. So, what follow-up studies are currently in the works and what are Gordon’s thoughts on the importance of potentially finding exomoons orbiting CBPs?

“It would be interesting to investigate the stability of these moons including the effects of inclination and multi-planet systems,” Gordon tells Universe Today. “I am also hoping to apply for telescope time with future missions such as the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope to follow-up on circumbinary systems that are similar to those we see in our simulations with stable exomoons. Currently, there have been no confirmed exomoons, so finding one in general would be remarkable! If we find one specifically orbiting a circumbinary planet, this may be a tremendous candidate for follow up searches for life via JWST.”

As noted, no exomoons have been confirmed to exist, but there are currently almost two dozen exomoon candidates, with two recently being debunked due to exoplanet transit data but those findings were subsequently refuted only a few months later as likely candidates (Kepler 1625b and Kepler 1708b), along with two potentially being volcanically-active exomoons each orbiting a “hot Jupiter” (WASP-49b and HD 189733b). Of those four, HD 189733b resides in a binary star system with the primary star hypothesized to be an orange dwarf star—which HD 189733b orbits—and the secondary star hypothesized to be a red dwarf star.

With this, the question then becomes what about habitable exomoons, since several moons within our solar system exhibit evidence for containing the building blocks for life as we know it, specifically Europa, Titan, and Enceladus, and all of which orbit gas giants, though far outside of our Sun’s habitable zone. If worlds like these exist within our own solar system, then similar exomoons could orbit gas giants in other solar systems, as well. Then the question becomes could we find exomoons orbiting within their star’s respective habitable zone? For instance, could a gas giant that orbits within its star’s habitable zone possess exomoons similar to Earth? Therefore, according to Gordon, which known systems are the most promising for identifying exomoons?

Artist’s illustration of an Earth-like exomoon orbiting a gas giant exoplanet in a star’s habitable zone. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

“In my opinion, I do think that single star systems would be the easiest to confirm an exomoon,” Gordon tells Universe Today. “This is because the data used for various proposed detection methods is much more complex for binary systems than for single stars, as an extra star provides another source of dynamical interactions. For example, there is already an issue with finding circumbinary planets using the transit method, as the transits do not phase fold due to transit timing variations from interactions with the binary.”

Gordon continues by telling Universe Today, “Trying to find a moon on a circumbinary planet light-curve would make a hard problem even more difficult, whereas a single star exoplanetary light-curve would provide a cleaner starting point where each of the candidates so far have been spotted (Kepler-1625b and Kepler-1708b). For circumbinary exomoons, our research shows that it would be best to search in systems that have a wide binary separation, as stable moons were able to orbit at up to 10% of their planet’s hill radius (for context, our moon orbits at around 26% of the Earth’s hill radius).”

As astronomers continue searching the heavens for definitive evidence of an exomoon potentially orbiting an exoplanet or CBP, the technology and techniques used to search for exomoons will only improve in the future, specifically with the aforementioned Nancy Grace Roman Telescope (commonly referred to as Roman), which is due to launch between Fall 2026 and May 2027. Along with searching for exoplanets using the gravitational microlensing method, Roman will also study cosmic structures, dark energy, general relativity, and the space-time curvature, all while being stationed in a Sun-Earth L2 orbit, which is located on the opposite side of the Earth’s orbit from the Sun.

How many exomoons orbiting circumbinary planets will researchers make in the coming years and decades? Only time will tell, and this is why we science!

As always, keep doing science & keep looking up!

The post Could Planets Orbiting Two Stars Have Moons? appeared first on Universe Today.

A newly developed tool that harnesses computer vision and artificial intelligence (AI) may help clinicians from around the globe rapidly evaluate placentas at birth, potentially improving neonatal and maternal care. Early identification of placental infection could help mothers and babies receive antibiotics. The tool would be helpful for doctors in low-resource areas with no pathology labs or specialists to quickly spot issues. And in well-resourced hospitals, it could help doctors determine which placentas need a closer look.

What was the Milky Way like billions of years ago? One way we can find out is by looking at the most distant galaxies in the observable Universe. Seeing those far galaxies is one goal of the James Webb Space Telescope. It has revealed some surprising facts about early galaxies, and now it is starting to reveal the story of our own.

Most of the galaxies Webb has observed so far have been larger than we expected, which led to some speculation that perhaps the Big Bang was wrong, which isn’t the case. The bias toward large galaxies is partly because there are some surprisingly large ones in the early cosmos, but also because smaller galaxies are more difficult to see. But a chance alignment of a galaxy cluster has allowed us to see one small early galaxy that is quite similar to what the Milky Way may have appeared.

The galaxy has been nicknamed Firefly Sparkle, and we see it from a time when the Universe was just 600 million years old. Its light traveled for more than 13 billion years to reach us and would have been too dim even for Webb to see were it not for a trick of light. Since Firefly Sparkle is behind a large cluster of galaxies, its light is gravitationally lensed. Just as a glass lens can make an object appear larger and brighter than it actually is, so can a gravitational lens. In this case, the foreground galaxy cluster magnified the light of Firefly Sparkle making it bright enough for Webb to see.

Firefly Sparkle compared to the hypothetical evolution of the Milky Way. Credit: Mowla, et al

Gravitational lensing also highly distorts our view of a distant galaxy, so astronomers have to trace the paths of light to reconstruct the true shape of the galaxy. Normally, that would be a problem, but in this case, the distortion was a surprise blessing. Rather than appearing as a single fuzzy blob, Firefly Sparkle appears as a string of glowing jewels. When viewed in the infrared, it gives us a kind of exploded view of the galaxy. Thanks to gravitational lensing the research team was able to show how Firefly Sparkle is in the early stages of becoming a true galaxy. They found clumps of active star-forming regions and that these regions are illuminated diffuse light from more mature stars. From the spectra of this galaxy, the team also found that star formation is happening in stages, not all at once. It gives us a rich view of early galaxies.

From the clumps of star-forming regions, the team could also estimate the overall mass of Firefly Sparkle, which is very similar to the hypothetical mass of the Milky Way at that age. The young galaxy even has a couple of companion dwarf galaxies, similar to the Magellanic clouds of the Milky Way. Overall, this gives us a much better understanding of how our galaxy might have formed.

Reference: Mowla, Lamiya, et al. “Formation of a low-mass galaxy from star clusters in a 600-million-year-old Universe.” Nature 636.8042 (2024): 332-336.

The post Webb Weighs an Early Twin of the Milky Way appeared first on Universe Today.

The galaxy M87, located in the Virgo constellation, provided the first-ever photo of a black hole in 2019, when the Event Horizon Telescope captured an image of the supermassive black hole at the galaxy's center. An international research team has now observed a teraelectronvolt gamma-ray flare seven orders of magnitude -- tens of millions of times -- larger than the event horizon, or surface of the black hole itself. A flare of this intensity -- which has not been observed in over a decade -- can offer crucial insights into how particles, such as electrons and positrons, are accelerated in the extreme environments near black holes.

A new prototype device demonstrates an innovative approach to producing ammonia -- a key component of fertilizer -- that could transform an industry responsible for about one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Geologists estimate Earth contains several trillion tonnes of natural hydrogen that could be used as a clean fuel, but a global search for large reserves hasn’t delivered so far

A new study points to why, and how, Io became the most volcanic body in the solar system.

New radio astronomy observations of a planetary system in the process of forming show that once the first planets form close to the central star, these planets can help shepherd the material to form new planets farther out. In this way each planet helps to form the next, like a line of falling dominos each triggering the next in turn.

We might all be able to breathe a bit easier thanks to copper nanoclusters that can help us reduce carbon emissions through an electrochemical reaction.

A new screening method that combines laser analysis with a type of AI is the first of its kind to identify patients in the earliest stage of breast cancer, a study suggests.

A new screening method that combines laser analysis with a type of AI is the first of its kind to identify patients in the earliest stage of breast cancer, a study suggests.

A new AI image tool could aid the development of algorithms to analyse wildlife images to help improve understanding of how species around the world are responding to climate change, a study suggests.

Neutron stars are so named because in the simplest of models they are made of neutrons. They form when the core of a large star collapses, and the weight of gravity causes atoms to collapse. Electrons are squeezed together with protons so that the core becomes a dense sea of neutrons. But we now know that neutron stars aren’t just gravitationally bound neutrons. For one thing, neutrons are comprised of quarks, which have their own interactions both within and between neutrons. These interactions are extremely complex, so the details of a neutron star’s interior are something we don’t fully understand.

The bulk properties of neutron matter are best described by the Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff (TOV) equation of state. Based on this, the upper mass limit for a neutron star should be around 2.2 to 2.6 solar masses, which seems to agree with observation. The TOV equation also assumes that the neutrons within the neutron star remain neutrons. In atomic nuclei, you can’t have a sea of free quarks because of the nature of the strong nuclear force, so this seems like a reasonable assumption. But some physicists and astronomers have argued that within the dense heart of a neutron star, quarks might break free to create a quark star. Some have even suggested that quarks within a neutron star might interact so strongly that strange quarks appear, making them strange quark stars.

One way to explore these ideas is to look at pulsars. Since pulsars are rotating neutron stars where their magnetic pole sweeps in our direction, we can measure the rate of rotation by timing the radio pulses from a pulsar. So if a pulsar flashes every three seconds, we know that’s how long it takes for the neutron star to rotate once. Pulsars are how we first learned that neutron stars are, well, neutron stars, because the rate of an object’s rotation tells you the minimum density the object must have.

The shape of a neutron star at different frequencies. Credit: Gärtlein, et al

You can think of it like a playground merry-go-round. If you let a few children climb on, then spin the merry-go-round really fast, you can watch the kids fly off one by one as they lose their grip. This is one of the reasons playground merry-go-rounds are so rare these days. Since stars are held together by gravity, there is an upper limit on how fast a star can rotate. Any faster and gravity would lose its grip and the star would fly apart. So when we measure the rotation of a pulsar, we know it must be below that upper limit, known as the Kepler frequency. Since the surface gravity of a star depends on its density, the rotation frequency tells us the minimum density of the star. When astronomers first discovered pulsars rotating several times a second, they knew the density of the pulsar was greater than a white dwarf, so it had to be a neutron star.

There are some pulsars that have very high rotation frequencies. The fastest observed pulsars, known as millisecond pulsars, can have frequencies above 700 Hz. It’s pretty astonishing when you think about it. An object with nearly twice the mass of the Sun, but only a few kilometers across and making hundreds of rotations a second. Millisecond pulsars rotate so quickly that they aren’t even spherical. They bulge out around their equators to become oblate spheroids. This means the density in their polar regions must be much higher than near the equator. This raises the question of whether neutrons in the polar regions might undergo a phase transition into quark matter.

A comparison of mass and Kepler frequencies for neutron stars and hybrid neutron stars. Credit: Gärtlein, et al

To explore this idea, a team looked at various models of neutron stars. They modeled the equation of state for traditional neutron stars and compared them to so-called hybrid stars, where the interior is a mix of neutrons and quark matter. From this, they calculated the Kepler frequency as it relates to the overall mass of the star. They found that while all the currently observed millisecond pulsars can be described by the traditional model, the hybrid model is a better fit for the fastest pulsars. They also calculated that hybrid stars would push the upper limit closer to 1,000 rotations a second. So if we find pulsars in the 800 Hz or higher range, we know they likely contain quark matter in their cores.

Another way to test the hybrid neutron star model would be to find more millisecond pulsars with a wide range of masses. This would allow us to look at how the rotation frequency varies with mass at the upper limit to see if Kepler frequencies agree more strongly with a hybrid or traditional model.

Reference: Gärtlein, Christoph, et al. “Fastest spinning millisecond pulsars: indicators for quark matter in neutron stars?” arXiv preprint arXiv:2412.07758 (2024).

The post Do the Fastest Spinning Pulsars Contain Quark Matter? appeared first on Universe Today.

The bit in quotes in the title may be a bit mean, but it’s the title an anonymous reader gave in an email linking to several articles from a New Zealand site (here, here, and here). The articles describe a new set of standards for registered nurses in the country, standards that I read in the official government document (see below).

Why this seems “asylum-ish” is because the standards are almost entirely directed to prioritizing and catering to the indigenous Māori population of the country, even though they are in a minority of the population (16.5%) compared to Europeans (70%) but also very close in numbers to Asians (15.3%, with most of the remainder being Pacific Islanders).  The standards direct New Zealand nurses to become “culturally competent”, which is okay if it means being sensitive to differences in psychology of different groups, but is not okay if it means medically treating those groups in different ways, or having to become politicized by absorbing the Treaty of Waitangi or learning about intersectionality.  And that is in fact the case with the new standards, which also prompt NZ nurses to engage in untested herbal and spiritual healing, including prayers.  The whole thing is bonkers, but it takes effect in January.

As one of the articles says, “critics argue that these changes prioritise ideology over practical skills.” And I suspect you’ll agree after you read the relatively short set of official standards given below. Here’s an excerpt from one of the articles in the news:

The updated Standards of Competence require nurses to demonstrate kawa whakaruruhau (Māori cultural safety) by addressing power imbalances in healthcare settings and working collaboratively with Māori to support equitable health outcomes.

The standards place a strong emphasis on cultural competency, including the need for nurses to establish therapeutic relationships with individuals, whānau [Māori extended families], and communities. They must also recognise the importance of whanaungatanga (building relationships) and manaakitanga (hospitality and respect) in fostering collective wellbeing.

One of the more significant additions involves requiring nurses to “describe the impact of colonisation and social determinants on health and wellbeing.” Additionally, nurses must advocate for individuals and whānau by incorporating cultural, spiritual, physical, and mental health into whakapapa-centred care (care focused on family and ancestral connections).

The new Standards of Competence have faced sharp criticism from some nurses, who argue the requirements impose ideological perspectives and unnecessarily complicate training processes.

However, none were willing to speak on the record for fear that voicing their concerns could jeopardise their employment.

The standards are unbelievable, so extreme in their catering to indigenous peoples that they seem racist against everyone else. But don’t take my word for it: simply click on the document below and look it over. It’s no wonder that many nurses are flummoxed by the new directive, which, as usual, is heavily larded with indigenous jargon that many (including Māori) don’t understand.  The language is simple virtue flaunting.

The very start of the standards promotes the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi (“Te Tiriti o Waitangi”)—an agreement between some (not all) Māori tribes and the British governance that established three principles. First, Māori would become British citizens with all the rights attending thereto. Second, the governance of New Zealand would remain in the hands of Britain and British settlers (“the Crown’). Finally, the Māori would be able to keep their lands and possessions and retain “chieftainship” of their lands.

Even though this agreement was never signed by all indigenous tribes on the island, it has assumed almost a sacred status in New Zealand, with a newer interpretation that goes something like this: “The Māori get at least half of everything afforded by the government, and their ‘ways of knowing’ would be considered coequal to modern knowledge (including in science and medicine). Further, Māori, as ‘sacred victims’, would get priority in educational opportunities and, in this case, medical treatment.”

If you read The treaty of Waitangi, you’ll see it says nothing of the sort. It simply establishes rights of governance and possession in a deal between Europeans and Māori. But the Māori have used it to inflict considerable guilt on the non-Māori population, to the extent that you simply cannot question the interpretation of the treaty above, or of the increasing forms of “affirmative action” for Māori, because people who raise those questions, like the baffled nurses above, risk losing their jobs. This is the reason that virtually every academic and citizen who writes to me from New Zealand about the fulminating and debilitating wokeness of the country asks me to keep their names confidential.   The fear of questioning what’s happening in that country is almost worse than the burgeoning affirmative action towards a small moiety of the population. Granted, the Māori have been discriminated against and had it bad for a while, but those days are really over now, and it’s time to treat everyone according to the same rules. And of course nurses know that they have to have different bedside manners towards different patients. But that doesn’t mean that they must treat some of them with chants and prayers.

Well, on to the rules. And they begin, in the very first directive, by emphasizing the importance of the Treaty of Waitangi!. I’ll post screenshots as well as text, and will highlight some bits in red. Here’s the first page of “standards of competence”. Te Tiriti doesn’t take long to appear!

“Pou” are “standards”. Here are the first two. Note that the introduction to the document doesn’t say explicitly that these standards are culture-directed and a subset of other standards of nursing skill. No, these are just “the standards.”

Pou one: Māori health. Reflecting a commitment to Māori health, registered nurses must support, respect and protect Māori rights while advocating for equitable and positive health outcomes. Nurses are also required to demonstrate kawa whakaruruhau by addressing power imbalances and working collaboratively with Māori.

Pou two: Cultural safety Cultural safety in nursing practice ensures registered nurses provide culturally safe care to all people. This requires nurses to understand their own cultural identity and its impact on professional practice, including the potential for a power imbalance between the nurse and the recipient of care.

The two pou expanded, which are directives about how registered nurses are supposed to behave.

Under standard (pou) #4, called “Pūkengatanga [expertise] and evidence-informed nursing practice”, we see this.

What is Rongoā? Ask the Museum of New Zealand, which describes it as “Māori medicine”, characterizing it like this:

In traditional Māori medicine, ailments are treated in a holistic manner with:

• spiritual healing
• the power of karakia [prayers of incantations]
• the mana [supernatural essence] of the tohunga (expert)
• by the use of herbs.

In other words, nurses are supposed to allow patients to choose their own therapy, even if it includes untested herbal remedies, spiritual healing, supernatural power, and prayers. Is it any wonder that nurses are both confused and opposed to this?

It goes on and on in this vein, consistently outlining standards of care that favor Māori, and then ending with a glossary heavily laden with woke and postmodern terms, Again, these are being given to registered nurses (no, not shamans) to tell them how they must behave. A few items from the glossary, which have no clear connection with nursing:

 

Again, as far as I can determine, these are not just standards for nurses to become culturally sensitive, but appear to be general standards for nurses that want to be qualified as nurses. And the standards have become so ideological and political that—and I don’t say this lightly—they seem pretty racist, favoring one group over another and telling nurses to afford indigenous people care and treatment that others don’t get. Is there to be no cultural sensitivity towards Asians, who have their own form of indigenous herbal medicine?

Here are some sentiments expressed by Jenny Marcroft, the Health Spokesperson for the New Zealand First political party.

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It goes without saying that it nurses must do all this stuff to practice their skills, many might be compelled to leave New Zealand and practice overseas, something that the country can’t afford to happen. And so, because opponents of this stuff are silenced, the country, immersed in wokeness, continues to go downhill.

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