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Feedback digs into the first peer-reviewed paper from the Game of Thrones author, and concludes that he may have picked the wrong fictional universe to analyse

Increasing numbers of people believe Earth has probably been visited by aliens. That’s a societal problem, says Tony Milligan

The Chinese firm threatens the dominance of Silicon Valley’s AI elite, and its innovations show the technology could be more affordable and less costly to the environment

Asteroid sampling missions are getting increasingly complex. Recent announcements about the existence of amino acids in the sample OSIRIS-REx returned from Bennu in 2023 will likely result in more interest in studying the small bodies strewn throughout our solar system. Engineering challenges abound when doing so, though, including one of the most important – how to collect a sample from the asteroid. A new paper from researchers at the China Academy of Space Technology looks at a gas-drive sample system they believe could hold the key to China’s future asteroid sample return mission.

There are three main categories of successful asteroid sampling missions – shooting, drilling, and puffing. The original Hayabusa mission in 2010 was an example of the first method – it fired a bullet into the asteroid’s surface after performing a “soft landing.” It used the force of the bullet’s impact to shoot fragments into a collection system. This has the advantage of not requiring the spacecraft to be anchored to the asteroid but isn’t very effective at breaking through hard surfaces.

The puffing method, which OSIRIS-REx used during its visit to Bennu, has the same advantages and disadvantages. Instead of a bullet, it puffed nitrogen at the surface as part of its Touch-and-Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism (TAGSAM). 

Fraser discusses the discovery of amino acids in the Bennu sample.

Rosetta took a shirt approach, though it did not successfully collect any sample from an asteroid due to problems with its lander, Philae. Philae had a drill called the SD2, intended to bore into the surface of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. It also included a sampling tube that extended through the drill to collect the material. This might have worked, but it required significant power and force on the lander.

In the new paper, the researchers took a hybrid approach to developing their regolith sampling system. It utilizes a pneumatic drill that punches a hole in the regolith rather than spinning to drill one directly. After the hole is punched, the system retracts the drill bit and pushes gas down into the hole to force some of the particles up in a sample collector.

According to the team’s simulations and experiments, this method works well in both microgravity and regular gravity environments. It also operated with various granular materials, ranging from hard marble to fine sand. More pressure (i.e., more gas) was needed to collect larger particles, but any future mission can estimate the necessary gas reserves well in advance.

Sampling system test setup.
Credit – Zhao et al.

There is a good chance that a future mission will use a sampling system like this. Much of the paper discusses how China is rapidly becoming a space scientific power and how the country’s interest in asteroid resources is growing. The research was funded by several governmental organizations in China, and the country has already shown an interest in asteroid sample return, with the Tianwen-2 mission planned for launch later this year. This hybrid sampling approach might someday be adopted, though it remains to be seen if it will stand the test of a rendezvous with an actual asteroid.

Learn More:
Zhao et al – Gas-Driven Regolith-Sampling Strategy for Exploring Micro-Gravity Asteroids
UT – The Building Blocks for Life Found in Asteroid Bennu Samples
UT – Asteroid Samples Returned to Earth Were Immediately Colonized by Bacteria
UT – OSIRIS-REx’s Final Haul: 121.6 Grams from Asteroid Bennu

Lead Image:
Image of the regolith sampling system under test.
Credit – Zhao et al.

The post Hybrid Gas/Drill Asteroid Sampler Could Improve Collection Amounts appeared first on Universe Today.

Although I’ve read quite a few books on quantum mechanics—popular books, not books intended for physicists—I still don’t understand it.  That is, I can understand the history, the controversies and some of the phenomena, as well as the various interpretations of quantum mechanics. But when it comes to stuff like entanglement, I’m baffled—not just by its existence, but what it really means physically and how it could be possible.

Sean Carroll (the physicist) has just published a paper in Nature that is about as clear an explanation of the weirdness of quantum mechanics as I can imagine.  I still don’t understand entanglement, but Carroll does point out why people like me have difficulty grasping some of the concepts and predictions.

Since, as Carroll notes, Heisenberg “first put forward a comprehensive version of quantum mechanics” in 1925, it is in one sense the 100th anniversary of quantum theory:

Click below to read for free:

I’ll give a few quotes under headings that I’ve made up:

Why quantum mechanics is qualitatively different from classical mechanics. 

The failure of the classical paradigm can be traced to a single, provocative concept: measurement. The importance of the idea and practice of measurement has been acknowledged by working scientists as long as there have been working scientists. But in pre-quantum theories, the basic concept was taken for granted. Whatever physically real quantities a theory postulated were assumed to have some specific values in any particular situation. If you wanted to, you could go and measure them. If you were a sloppy experimentalist, you might have significant measurement errors, or disturb the system while measuring it, but these weren’t ineluctable features of physics itself. By trying harder, you could measure things as delicately and precisely as you wished, at least as far as the laws of physics were concerned.

Quantum mechanics tells a very different story. Whereas in classical physics, a particle such as an electron has a real, objective position and momentum at any given moment, in quantum mechanics, those quantities don’t, in general, ‘exist’ in any objective way before that measurement. Position and momentum are things that can be observed, but they are not pre-existing facts. That is quite a distinction. The most vivid implication of this situation is Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, introduced in 1927, which says that there is no state an electron can be in for which we can perfectly predict both its position and its momentum ahead of time.

On entanglement.

The appearance of indeterminism is often depicted as their [people like Einstein and Schrödinger’s] major objection to quantum theory — “God doesn’t play dice with the Universe”, in Einstein’s memorable phrase. But the real worries ran deeper. Einstein in particular cared about locality, the idea that the world consists of things existing at specific locations in space-time, interacting directly with nearby things. He was also concerned about realism, the idea that the concepts in physics map onto truly existing features of the world, rather than being mere calculational conveniences.

Einstein’s sharpest critique appeared in the famous EPR paper of 1935 — named after him and his co-authors Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen — with the title ‘can quantum-mechanical description of physical reality be considered complete?’. The authors answered this question in the negative, on the basis of a crucial quantum phenomenon they highlighted that became known as entanglement.

If we have a single particle, the wavefunction assigns a number to every possible position it might have. According to Born’s rule, the probability of observing that position is the square of the number. But if we have two particles, we don’t have two wavefunctions; quantum mechanics gives a single number to every possible simultaneous configuration of the two-particle system. As we consider larger and larger systems, they continue to be described by a single wavefunction, all the way up to the wavefunction of the entire Universe.

As a result, the probability of observing one particle to be somewhere can depend on where we observe another particle to be, and this remains true no matter how far apart they are. The EPR analysis shows that we could have one particle here on Earth and another on a planet light years away, and our prediction for what we would measure about the faraway particle could be ‘immediately’ affected by what we measure about the nearby particle.

The scare quotes serve to remind us that, according to the special theory of relativity, even the concept of ‘at the same time’ isn’t well defined for points far apart in space, as Einstein knew better than anyone. Entanglement seems to go against the precepts of special relativity by implying that information travels faster than light — how else can the distant particle ‘know’ that we have just performed a measurement?

Yes, I know that this cannot be understood in terms of everyday observation, but what I fail to understand—and perhaps some reader can explain this to me—is exactly what properties of a particle can be affected by ascertaining properties of another particle light years away.

I’ll leave you to read the various interpretations of quantum theory, the most trenchant involving whether it actually represents physical reality or is merely a theory meant to explain experimental results.  I’m not sure where Carroll fits on this spectrum, but I do see that while he describes another interpretation, the “Everttian or many-worlds interpretation,” I thought that Carroll used to favor this explanatin, which of course is  deeply, deeply, weird, creating a new but unobservable universe each time an observer measures something. His summary of the state of the field is this:

So, physicists don’t agree on what precisely a measurement is, whether wavefunctions represent physical reality, whether there are physical variables in addition to the wavefunction or whether the wavefunction always obeys the Schrödinger equation. Despite all this, modern quantum mechanics has given us some of the most precisely tested predictions in all of science, with agreement between theory and experiment stretching to many decimal places.

The big remaining problem. If you read even a bit about quantum physics, you’ll know this:

Then, there is the largest problem of all: the difficulty of constructing a fundamental quantum theory of gravity and curved space-time. Most researchers in the field imagine that quantum mechanics itself does not need any modification; we simply need to work out how to fit curved space-time into the story in a consistent way. But we seem to be far away from this goal.

What good is quantum mechanics? But of course quantum mechanics, even if not comprehensible by the standards of everyday experience, has been immensely useful, for we’ve long known that its predictions match observations about as closely as any theory can. Here are the benefits:

Meanwhile, the myriad manifestations of quantum theory continue to find application in an increasing number of relatively down-to-Earth technologies. Quantum chemistry is opening avenues in the design of advanced pharmaceuticals, exotic materials and energy storage. Quantum metrology and sensing are enabling measurements of physical quantities with unprecedented precision, up to and including the detection of the tiny rocking of a pendulum caused by a passing gravitational wave generated by black holes one billion light-years away. And of course, quantum computers hold out the promise of performing certain calculations at speeds that would be impossible if the world ran by classical principles.

And don’t ask me what “quantum chemistry” is, as I know it not.

These are just small excerpts. Go read about the theory in its centenary year.

Lawrence Krauss has edited a volume of essays and articles by 39 scientists writing about current threats to science, including censorship, ideological corruption, and so on. It also includes a revision of my paper with Luana Maroja on the ideological subversion of biology. The volume will be out this year, and that’s all I can say about it except that Richard Dawkins has published part of his contribution on his Substack “The Poetry of Reality”. You can read this part for free by clicking on the headline below.  You can guess what the answer to his title question is, and it’s correct.

The essay begins by recounting what prompted its publication online: the kerFFRFLE with the Freedom from Religion Foundation (FFRF) that led them to cancel my article on their website Freethought Now! discussing the binary nature of sex, an article that took issue with another piece on that site by an FFRF employee maintaining that “A woman is whoever she says she is.” (The original article is still there; my own critique was removed by the FFRF but you can read it here, here, here or here).  This act of censorship—I wasn’t even informed about it in advance—led me to resign from the FFRF’s Honorary Board, followed by the resignations of Richard and Steve Pinker, and then the dissolving of the entire Honorary Board by the FFRF. Freethought Now indeed!

As Richard notes at the outset:

It makes me particularly sad that [Annie Laurie Gaylor and Dan Barker, co-Presidents of the FFRF] have chosen to stray so far from their stated mission of promoting freedom from religion and the separation of church and state. They seem to think that opposition to militant trans ideology is necessarily associate with the religious Right. That is false. If it were true, it would be an indictment of the rest of us for neglecting our duty to uphold scientific truth. In fact there is strong opposition from feminists concerned for the welfare of women and girls.1 Also from within the gay and especially lesbian communities2, giving the lie to the myth of  a monolithic “LGBT.” “LGB” represents a coherent constituency within which “T” is regarded by many as an interloper. Most relevant here, cogent opposition comes from biological science – and that, after all, was the whole point of Professor Coyne’s censored article.

FFRF does not lack support. Indeed, among the secular / atheist / agnostic / sceptical / humanist communities of America, the  Center for Inquiry (CFI), with which is incorporated the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science (RDFRS), is now the only major organization still standing unequivocally for scientific truth.

This lamentable affair is what has provoked me into posting the following critique on my Substack. It is an abbreviated extract from my article called Scientific Truth Sands Above Human Feelings and Politics, commissioned by Lawrence Krauss for a multi-authored volume on The War on Science, to be published in 2025 by Posthill Press3.  The full article makes a comparison with the debauching of science by TD Lysenko in Soviet Russia in the 1940s..

He then gives a long and very clear explanation, in classic Dawkinsian prose, of why biologists say that sex is binary and how the binary-ness evolved.I’ll give three short extracts, but do read the whole thing (for me, at least, it’s a pleasure to read anything Dawkins writes, not just for clarity but as a model of popular scientific writing). Below you can read about as clear an explanation that a human can produce. Sadly, clarity and truth do not lead to enlightenment among a certain ideologically recalcitrant moiety of Anglophones.  The piece also has sections on “transracialism” and “the theology of woke.”

How can I be so sure that there are only two sexes. Isn’t it just a matter of opinion? Sir Ed Davey, leader of the British Liberal Democrat party, said that women “quite clearly” can have a penis. Words are our servants not our masters. One might say, “I define a woman as anybody who self-identifies as a woman, therefore a woman can have a penis.6” That is logically unassailable in the same way as, “I define “flat” to mean what you call “round”, therefore the world is flat.” I think it’s clear that if we all descended to that level of sophistry, rational discourse would soon dig itself into the desert sand. I shall make the case that redefinition of woman as capable of having a penis, if not downright perverse, is close to that extreme. I shall advocate instead what I shall call the Universal Biological Definition (UBD), based on gamete size. Biologists use the UBD as the only definition that applies all the way across the animal and plant kingdoms, and all the way through evolutionary history.

. . . It is no idle whim, no mere personal preference, that leads biologists to define the sexes by the UBD. It is rooted deep in evolutionary history. The instability of isogamy, leading to extreme anisogamy, is what brought males and females into the world in the first place. Anisogamy has dominated reproduction, mating systems, social systems, for probably two billion years. All other ways to define the sexes fall afoul of numerous exceptions. Sex chromosomes come and go through evolutionary time. Profligate gamete-spewing into the sea gives over to paired-off copulation and vice versa. Sex organs grow and shrink and grow again as the aeons go by, or as we jump from phylum to phylum across the animal kingdom. Sometimes one sex exclusively cares for the young, seldom the other, often both, often neither. Harem systems change places with faithful monogamy or rampant promiscuity. Psychological concomitants of sexuality change like the wind. Amid a rainbow of sexual habits, parental practices, and role reversals, the one thing that remains steadfastly constant is anisogamy. One sex produces gametes that are much smaller, and much more numerous, than the other. That is all ye know of sex differences and all ye need to know, as Keats might have only slightly exaggerated if he’d been an evolutionary biologist.

. . . . Relative gamete size is the only way in which the male / female distinction is defined universally across all animal phyla. All other ways to define maleness versus femaleness are bedevilled by numerous exceptions. Especially those based on sex chromosomes, where you can’t even speak of a rule, let alone exceptions to it. In mammals, sex is determined by the XX XY chromosome system, the male sex having unequal sex chromosomes. Birds and Lepidoptera have the same system, but in the opposite direction and therefore presumably evolved independently. It’s the females who have unequal chromosomes. How do we know? Couldn’t you define males as the sex with unequal chromosomes? Well you could, but then you’d to have to say it’s the male bird that lays the eggs, the females that fight over males, etc. You’d lose every one of the 14 explanations I discussed earlier. Far better to stick with the UBD and say birds use sex chromosomes to determine sex, but it evolved independently of the mammal system. Birds are descended from dinosaur reptiles, and most modern reptiles don’t have sex chromosomes at all. Reptiles often determine sex by incubation temperature. In some cases higher temperatures favour males, in other cases, females. In yet other reptiles, extremes of temperature, high or low, favour females, males developing at intermediate temperatures. Many snakes, some lizards and a few terrapins use sex chromosomes, but they vary which sex has unequal sex chromosomes. Amidst all this variation, the only reliable discriminator is gamete size.

The way the sexes are defined (the UBD, universal and without exception) is, therefore, separate from the way an individual’s sex is determined during development (variable and far from universal). How we in practice recognize the sex of an individual is yet a third question, distinct from the other two. In humans, one look at a newborn baby is nearly always enough to clinch it. Even if it occasionally isn’t, the UBD remains unshaken.

And that is all ye need to know. You’ll have to wait for Richard’s full article, which I’ve read as I contributed to the book, as it has a nice section on censorship in biology as promoted by Lysenko and Stalin.

I still like my list of questions to ask people who claim that sex in humans (or other animals) is not binary but a spectrum. (The proportion of individuals who are exceptions to the gametic definition given above is minuscule, ranging from 1/5600 to 1/20,000):

1. How many sexes are there in nonhuman animals likes cats, horses, hyenas, ducks, or sharks?
2. If “two,” Is there a universal way to tell them apart? (the answer, of course, is “two” and “gamete type”)
3. Now how many sexes are there in humans?
4. If answer to #3 differs from that to question #1, Why is that the case, how many sexes are there in humans, then, and then how do you tell these more-than-two sexes apart?

Good luck getting an extreme gender ideologue to answer these questions!

A huge study of ancient DNA reveals the origins of the Yamna, who spread across Eurasia around 5000 years ago, showing they came from a mixing of populations north of the Black Sea

Mice have neurons that can be controlled to stop them eating - and people probably have them too

A newly analysed fossil skull settles a palaeontological debate over Vegavis iaai, confirming it as a relative of ducks and geese that lived 69 million years ago

Two-thirds of US cannabis is grown indoors, requiring lights and temperature control that produce a vast amounts of emissions

The odd superconductivity found in layered graphene may bring us closer to understanding room-temperature superconductors

Neuroscientist-turned-entrepreneur Emilė Radytė is using brain stimulation to explore how things like premenstrual syndrome and period pain impact the brain

A papyrus scroll carbonised by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius two millennia ago is slowly being read once again thanks to X-ray imaging and machine learning

Documentaries can be powerful. They can use the mature art-form of cinema in order to convey a specific narrative. The viewer can get drawn into that narrative, unaware they are being exposed to a very one-sided or limited take on a complex topic. I recently, for example, participated in a fun review of the Earthing Movie which was basically propaganda for the […]

The post The Telepathy Tapes – More FC Pseudoscience first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

Hunting for meteorites can be a high-octane race as private collectors and scientists go head-to-head, reveals a new book by New Scientist features editor Joshua Howgego

What happens when one galaxy shoots a bigger galaxy right through the heart? Like a rock thrown into a pond, the smashup creates a splash-up of starry ripples. At least that’s what happened to the Bullseye galaxy, which is the focus of observations made by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and the Keck Observatory in Hawaii.

In a study published today by The Astrophysical Journal Letters, a research team led by Yale University’s Imad Pasha identifies nine visible ring-shaped ripples in the structure of the galaxy, formally known as LEDA 1313424. The galaxy is 567 million light years from Earth in the constellation Pisces.

The Bullseye now holds the record for the most rings observed in a galaxy. Previous observations of other galaxies showed a maximum of two or three rings.

“This was a serendipitous discovery,” Pasha said in a news release. “I was looking at a ground-based imaging survey and when I saw a galaxy with several clear rings, I was immediately drawn to it. I had to stop to investigate it.”

Eight separate rings could be spotted in the image captured by Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys. The ninth ring was identified in data from the Keck Observatory. Follow-up observations also helped the team figure out which galaxy plunged through the Bullseye’s core. It’s the blue dwarf galaxy visible to the center-left of LEDA 1313424 in the Hubble image.

This illustration pinpoints the nine rings in the Bullseye galaxy. Credit: NASA, ESA, Ralf Crawford (STScI)

Researchers say the current view captures the state of the Bullseye about 50 million years after the blue dwarf blasted through its core. Even though the two galaxies are separated by 130,000 light-years, a thin trail of gas still links them together. “We’re catching the Bullseye at a very special moment in time,” said Yale Professor Pieter G. van Dokkum, a study co-author. “There’s a very narrow window after the impact when a galaxy like this would have so many rings.”

The multi-ringed shape conforms to the mathematical models for a headlong galaxy-on-galaxy collision. The blue dwarf’s impact caused galactic material to move both inward and outward, sparking multiple waves of star formation along the lines of the ripples — almost exactly as the models predicted.

“It is immensely gratifying to confirm this longstanding prediction with the Bullseye galaxy,” van Dokkum said.

The models suggest that the first two rings in the Bullseye formed quickly and spread out in wider circles. The timing for the formation of additional rings was staggered as the blue dwarf plowed through the bigger galaxy’s core. The research team suspects that there was once a 10th ring to the galaxy, but that it faced out and is no longer detectable. That ring might have been as much as three times farther out than the widest ring seen in the Hubble image.

This artist’s conception shows our Milky Way galaxy at left, and the Bullseye galaxy at right. Credit: NASA, ESA, Ralf Crawford (STScI)

Compared to our own Milky Way galaxy, the Bullseye is a big target. It’s about 250,000 light-years wide, as opposed to 100,000 light-years for the Milky Way.

Billions of years from now, the Milky Way and the neighboring Andromeda galaxy are due to collide, but computer simulations suggest that the dynamics of that collision will be more complex than merely dropping a cosmic rock into a pond, or shooting an arrow through a bull’s-eye.

Fortunately, astronomers won’t have to wait billions of years to see more spot-on galactic collisions. “Once NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope begins science operations, interesting objects will pop out much more easily,” van Dokkum said. “We will learn how rare these spectacular events really are.”

In addition to Pasha and van Dokkum, the authors of the Astrophysical Journal Letters study, “The Bullseye: HST, Keck/KCWI, and Dragonfly Characterization of a Giant Nine-Ringed Galaxy,” include Qing Liu, William P. Bowman, Steven R. Janssens, Michael A. Keim, Chloe Neufeld and Roberto Abraham.

The post Bullseye! Hubble Spots Ripples in Space From a Galaxy Collision appeared first on Universe Today.

The ESA’s Gaia mission mapped the positions and velocities of stars with extreme precision by measuring about one billion stars multiple times. It created a massive 3D map of the Milky Way that will pay scientific dividends for years to come. Gaia is based on astrometry, the study of the positions and movements of celestial objects.

Gaia also tentatively detected some planets, and new radial velocity studies have now confirmed the existence of one of them. The planet is an important outlier in exoplanet science.

Gaia wasn’t designed to be a planet finder, but it found some anyway. Since the spacecraft was built to measure stars, the planets it found are massive, and they orbit low-mass stars. These planets tug on their stars, and Gaia can detect the way the stars wobble. However, follow-up observations were required to confirm them.

Now, researchers have used the NEID spectrograph on the WIYN 3.5-meter Telescope at the NSF’s Kitt Peak National Observatory to measure these stellar wobbles and the planet and brown dwarf that cause them via radial velocity. Their results are in a paper published in The Astronomical Journal. Its title is “Gaia-4b and 5b: Radial Velocity Confirmation of Gaia Astrometric Orbital Solutions Reveal a Massive Planet and a Brown Dwarf Orbiting Low-mass Stars.” The lead author is Gudmundur Stefansson from the Anton Pannekoek Institute for Astronomy at the University of Amsterdam.

“Gaia is more than living up to its promise of detecting planetary companions to stars with highly precise astrometry…”

Jayadev Rajagopal, co-author, NSF NOIRLab

The most recent Gaia data release contains a list of Gaia AStrometric Objects of Interest (Gaia-ASOIs). They’re stars that appear to be moving as if influenced by an exoplanet.

In a press release, lead author Stefansson said, “However, the motion of these stars is not necessarily due to a planet. Instead, the ‘star’ might be a pair of stars that are too close together for Gaia to recognize them as separate objects. The tiny shifts in position that appear to be due to a planet might actually result from the nearly perfect cancellation of the larger shifts in position of the two stars.”

Follow-up spectroscopy can do what Gaia can’t and determine if the objects are binary stars or stars and their orbiting planets. The researchers used the NEID spectrograph and two others—the Habitable-zone Planet Finder and the FIES Spectrograph to perform follow-up observations. In radial velocity, spectrographs measure the blue-shifted and red-shifted light from stars as nearby planets tug on them and make them wobble. It takes extreme precision to do this, and all three spectrographs are capable of it.

Astronomers used the NEID spectrograph on the WIYN 3.5-meter Telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory (KPNO) to confirm the existence of an exoplanet and a brown dwarf first detected by the ESA’s Gaia spacecraft. Image Credit: KPNO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/T. Matsopoulos

The researchers examined 28 separate star systems where Gaia detected candidate exoplanets.

According to the results, 21 of the systems have no substellar companions. Instead, these 21 are binary star systems. Five others are inconclusive and require more observations and data before they can be confirmed or refuted.

However, two of the 21 are confirmed: one is an exoplanet now named Gaia-4b, and one is a brown dwarf named Gaia-5b.

Gaia-4b is a massive exoplanet with about 11.8 Jupiter masses. It follows a 571-day orbit around a star with a mass of 0.644 solar masses. It has the distinction of being the first confirmed exoplanet found by Gaia. It’s also one of the most massive planets that have ever been detected orbiting a low-mass star, reflecting the observational bias inherent in Gaia’s method.

Gaia-4b orbits the star Gaia-4, which is around 244 light-years away. It is about twelve times more massive than Jupiter and has an orbital period of 570 days. It is a relatively cold gas giant planet. This artist’s impression visualizes a portion of the orbital motion as determined by Gaia’s astrometric data. The star and planet are not to scale. Image Credit: ESA/Gaia/DPAC/M. Marcussen

“It is an exciting time for both NEID and Gaia,” said Jayadev Rajagopal, a scientist at NSF NOIRLab and a co-author of the paper. “Gaia is more than living up to its promise of detecting planetary companions to stars with highly precise astrometry, and NEID is demonstrating that its long-term radial velocity precision is capable of detecting low-mass planets around those stars. With more candidate planets to come as roughly the last year of data is analyzed, this work is a harbinger of the future where Gaia discoveries of planets and brown dwarfs will need to be confirmed, or rejected, by NEID data.”

Gaia-5b is a brown dwarf, an object in between planetary mass and stellar mass. Gaia-5b has about 21 Jupiter masses and follows a highly eccentric 358-day orbit around a star with a mass of about 0.34 solar masses.

This study highlights how effective Gaia’s astrometric capabilities are for detecting exoplanets and brown dwarfs. It also exemplifies how different observational techniques—astrometry and radial velocity spectrometry—can work together for more robust results. The combined methods can find a wider range of substellar companion masses and orbital characteristics compared to the transit method, for example.

“If we want to understand how planets are formed, it is necessary to have a vision of how the whole planetary system is composed,” said the ESA’s Ana Heras in a separate press release. “Currently, our vision of most systems is only partial because each detection technique is efficient for a certain range of planet sizes and orbital periods. Being able to combine all techniques and data is critical to understand what planetary systems look like and to put our Solar System in context.”

Gaia-4b is an outlier in exoplanet discoveries. Finding such a massive planet around such a low-mass star is a big test for our planet formation theories. “With respect to stellar host-star mass, the occurrence of massive planets is known to decrease with decreasing stellar mass,” the authors write in their paper. “This has been connected to the fact that less massive stars tend to have less massive protoplanetary disks.” If Gaia and the NEID spectrograph and other facilities can find and confirm more of these massive planets, maybe researchers can make progress in understanding how they form.

This figure from the published study shows the masses of planets and brown dwarfs as a function of stellar host mass for stars with <0.7 solar masses and orbital periods <10,000 days. (a) Companion mass as a function of host-star mass. (b) Histogram of the points in panel (a). (c) Mass ratio as a function of host-star mass. As the figure shows, Gaia-5b and Gaia-4b straddle the Brown Dwarf Limit Line. The Jupiter Desert Region highlights the absence of planets with 1 to 10 Jupiter masses orbiting stars with 0.3 solar masses or less. Image Credit: Stefansson et al. 2025.

Astronomers expect to find more massive exoplanets and brown dwarfs in Gaia data and confirm some of them with spectrographs like NEID. Due to Gaia’s observational method, there will likely be more “outliers” in the data. These outliers are needed to help us understand planet formation and solar system architecture.

“These detections represent the tip of the iceberg of the planet and brown dwarf yield expected with Gaia in the immediate future, enabling key insights into the masses and orbital architectures of numerous massive planets at intermediate orbital periods,” the authors conclude.

The post Gaia Was Right. It Did Find a Planet. appeared first on Universe Today.

At first glance the large scale structure of the Universe may seem to be a swarming mass of unconnected galaxies. Yet somehow, they are! The ‘cosmic web’ is the largest scale structure of the Universe and consists of vast networks of interconnected filamentary structures that surround empty voids. A team of astronomers have used hundreds of hours of telescope time to capture the highest resolution image ever taken of a single cosmic filament that connects to forming galaxies. It’s so far away from us that we see it as it was when the Universe was just 2 billion years old! 

Dark matter is largely invisible to us, only detectable through its interaction with other phenomenon. It makes up about 85% of the matter in the universe and plays a crucial role in shaping the large-scale structure of the cosmos. It doesn’t emit, absorb, or reflect light hence its name and its gravitational influence holds galaxies together and forms the cosmic web—a vast, interconnected network of filaments composed of dark matter, gas, and galaxies. Scientists have been studying the cosmic web using simulations and gravitational lensing techniques to understand the nature of dark matter and its role in evolution of the universe.

A massive galaxy cluster named MACS-J0417.5-1154 is warping and distorting the appearance of galaxies behind it, an effect known as gravitational lensing. This natural phenomenon magnifies distant galaxies and can also make them appear in an image multiple times, as NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope saw here. Two distant, interacting galaxies — a face-on spiral and a dusty red galaxy seen from the side — appear multiple times, tracing a familiar shape across the sky. NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, V. Estrada-Carpenter (Saint Mary’s University).

One of the biggest challenges that faces astronomers studying the cosmic web is that the gas has mainly been detected through its absorption of light from a more distant object. The results of such studies however do not help us to understand the distribution of gas in the web. Studies that focus on hydrogen which is the most common element in the universe, can only be detected from a very faint glow so that previous attempts to map its distribution have failed. 

In this new paper that was published by a team of researchers that were led by scientists from the University of Milano-Bicocca and included members from the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics. The team employed the use of the Multi-Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) on the Very Large Telescope at the European Southern Observatory in Chile. The instrument was designed to capture 3D data of astronomical objects by combining images and spectroscopic observations across thousands of wavelengths simultaneously. Even with the capabilities of MUSE, the team had to capture data over hundreds of hours to reveal sufficient detail in the filaments of the cosmic web. 

ESO’s Very Large Telescope is composed of four Unit Telescopes (UTs) and four Auxiliary Telescopes (ATs). Seen here is one of the UTs firing four lasers which are crucial to the telescope’s adaptive optics systems. To the right of the UT are two ATs, these smaller telescopes are moveable and work in tandem with the other telescopes to create a unique and powerful tool for observing the Universe.

The team was led by PhD student at the University of Milano-Bicocca Davide Tornotti and they used MUSE to study a filament that measures 3 million light years in length. The filament connects two galaxies, each with a supermassive black hole deep in their core. They were able to demonstrate a new way of mapping the intergalactic filaments, helping to understand more about galactic formation and the evolution of the universe.

Before they were able to start collecting the data, the team were able to run simulations of the emissions from filaments based upon the current model of the universe. They were then able to compare the results and both were remarkably similar. The discovery can help us to learn how galaxies in the cosmic web are fuelled but the team assert that they still need more data. More structures are now being uncovered as the techniques are repeated with the goal to finally reveal how gas is distributed among the cosmic web. 

Source : Researchers capture direct high-definition image of the “Cosmic Web”

The post Our Best Look at the Cosmic Web appeared first on Universe Today.

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