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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):

Dark matter is curious stuff! As the name suggests, it’s dark making it notoriously difficult to study. Although it’s is invisible, it influences stars in a galaxy through gravity. Now, a team of astronomers have used the Hubble Space Telescope to chart the movements of stars within the Draco dwarf galaxy to detect the subtle gravitational pull of its surrounding dark matter halo. This 3D map required studying nearly two decades of archival data from the Draco galaxy. They found that dark matter piles up more in the centre, as predicted by cosmological models.

Dark matter comprises approximately 27% of the all the mass and energy in the universe but interacts only gravitationally, emitting no light. The idea first – ahem, came to light to explain discrepancies in the rotation curves of galaxies and is detected through its gravitational effects on visible matter. Despite extensive research,  the nature of dark matter remains elusive. Understanding dark matter is crucial for comprehending the composition and evolution of the universe.

Astronomers are getting a new tool to help them in the hunt for Dark Matter. This is a rendering of the BREAD design, which stands for Broadband Reflector Experiment for Axion Detection. The ‘Hershey’s Kiss’-shaped structure funnels potential dark matter signals to the copper-colored detector on the left. The detector is compact enough to fit on a tabletop. Image courtesy BREAD Collaboration

Dark matter has often been described as the invisible ‘glue’ that holds galaxies together. Although galaxies are mostly composed of dark matter, understanding its distribution within them provides an opportunity to understand its nature and relevance to the evolution of the galaxy. Computer simulations predict a dense concentration of dark matter at the core of the galaxy, forming a density cusp. However, numerous observations have shown that dark matter appears more uniformly spread throughout galaxies, contradicting these simulations. 

To study dark matter within galaxies, scientists can analyse the movements of stars, which are influenced primarily by the gravitational pull of dark matter. One common method involves using the Doppler Effect to measure the speed of objects in space—observing changes in the wavelength of light as stars move closer to or further from Earth. Along with moving toward or away from us, stars can also move across the sky. This proper motion, when combined with line of sight measurements allow for the creation of the movement of a star in 3D.

Astronomers have employed NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to study the dynamics of stars within the Draco dwarf galaxy, located about 250,000 light-years from Earth. The Draco galaxy was used because, as a dwarf galaxy, it is relatively small and is believed to have a higher proportion of dark matter than other types of galaxy.

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope flies with Earth in the background after a 2002 servicing mission. Credit: NASA.

Over 18 years of observational data from 2004 to 2022 were examined and they painstakingly mapped the precise three-dimensional motions of these stars, drawing from extensive archival data collected by Hubble. This effort has yielded the most accurate understanding to date of how stars move within this small galaxy. Understanding precisely how stars move in galaxies allows for precise maps of dark matter to be created. 

The technique the team have developed is not only of use for the Draco dwarf galaxy but for other galaxies too. The Sculptor dwarf galaxy is already being analysed using the same technique along with the Ursa Minor dwarf galaxy.

Source : NASA’s Hubble Traces Dark Matter in Dwarf Galaxy Using Stellar Motions

The post Mapping the Stars in a Dwarf Galaxy to Reveal its Dark Matter appeared first on Universe Today.

When massive stars detonate as supernovae, they leave often behind a pulsar. These fast rotating stellar corpses have fascinated scientists since their discovery in 1967. One nearby pulsar turns 174 times a second and now, its size has been precisely measured. An instrument on board the International Space Station was used to measure x-ray pulses  from the star. A supercomputer was then used to analyse its properties and found it was 1.4 times the mass of the Sun and measured only 11.4 km across!

The death of a massive stars leads to one of a number of objects but two of them are closely related, the neutron star and the pulsar. Both are formed during the core collapse and supernova explosion that marks the death of a star. All of the components of the atom are squashed together removing all the space between the neutrons to form one MASSIVE neutron. Pulsars are rotating neutron stars with strong magnetic fields that emit beams of electromagnetic radiation from their magnetic poles. These beams become visible from Earth when aligned with our line of sight, creating a pulsating effect, hence the term “pulsar.”

Artist’s illustration of a bright and powerful supernova explosion. (Credit: NASA/CXC/M.Weiss)

One of the nearest pulsars, PSR J0437-4725 lies at 510 light years in the constellation Pictor. It rotates 174 times per second which means it rotates once in just 5.75 milliseconds. Perhaps more mind blowing than its rotational velocity is its size. Imagine 1.4 times the mass of the Sun squashed up into a ball just 11.4 kilometres across – the Sun is 1.39 million kilometres across by comparison! 

This astonishing result of the pulsars diminutive size are the results of precision measurements by a team fo astronomers at the University of Amsterdam. The scientists used data from the NICER X-ray telescope on the ISS, combining it with a method called pulse profile modelling. The data was fed into Snellius, the Dutch national supercomputer and complex statistical models were created. This allowed them to calculate the star’s radius, assisted by mass measurements from Daniel Reardon (Swinburne University of Technology, Australia) and his colleagues at the Parkes Pulsar Timing Array. Not only were the team able to identify precise dimensions, they were also able to map the temperature distribution of the magnetic poles.

The NICER payload, shown here on the outside of the International Space Station. Credit: NASA

The lead researcher, Devarshi Choudhury was very happy with the results ”Before, we were hoping to be able to calculate the radius accurately. And it would be great if we could show that the hot magnetic poles are not directly opposite each other on the stellar surface. And we just managed to do both!”

The team’s paper reports something known as a softer equation of state. This means there is a smaller increase of pressure for a change in density. This implies that the maximum mass of neutron stars is likely lower than previous theories have predicted. An observation that sits well with gravitational wave observations from neutron stars.

Source : Nearest millisecond pulsar has radius of 11.4 kilometres and is 1.4x as heavy as the sun

The post A Close Pulsar Measures 11.4 km Across appeared first on Universe Today.

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.

Two for two! A duo of interacting galaxies commemorates the second science anniversary of NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, which takes constant observations, including images and highly detailed data known as spectra. Its operations have led to a 'parade' of discoveries by astronomers around the world.

A new technique enables huge machine-learning models to efficiently generate more accurate quantifications of their uncertainty about certain predictions. This could help practitioners determine whether to trust the model when it is deployed in real-world settings.

A new study finds that AI enhances creativity by boosting the novelty of story ideas as well as the 'usefulness' of stories -- their ability to engage the target audience and potential for publication. However, AI was not judged to enhance the work produced by more creative writers and the study also warns that while AI may enhance individual creativity it may also result in a loss of collective novelty, as AI-assisted stories were found to contain more similarities to each other and were less varied and diverse.

Two recent studies published in The Astrophysical Journal discuss findings regarding solar flare properties and a new classification index and the Sun’s magnetic field, specifically what’s called solar magnetic reconnection. These studies hold the potential to help researchers better understand the internal processes of the Sun, specifically pertaining to solar flare activity and space weather. Here, Universe Today discusses these two studies with both lead authors regarding the motivation behind the studies, significant results, and implications on our understanding regarding solar flares and space weather.

The first study discusses new insights into solar flare properties and presents a new solar flare classification index that builds off previous classification indices along with scientific advancements in our understanding of solar flares. So, what was the motivation behind this study?

“The inception of our interest in this study was inspired by work that my advisor, Prof. Adam Kowalski, has done in the last decade in classifying stellar flares using a similar index,” Cole Tamburri, who is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Astrophysical & Planetary Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder) and lead author of the study, tells Universe Today. “Traditionally, solar flares are classified according to the peak flux in GOES soft X-ray. However, as our understanding of flare physics has advanced, we’ve learned that there’s much more diversity between flare events which is not captured by the GOES classification system – for example, two events with the same peak intensity might occur over much different time periods (a few minutes, to even a few hours!), which is indicative of significant differences in the physical mechanism.”

The GOES soft X-ray currently classifies solar flares ranging from lowest intensity to highest using classes labeled as A, B, C, M, and X. This data is gathered from the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) system of four active spacecraft currently in a geosynchronous orbit and operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in the United States. This data is plotted in real-time on the GOES X-ray flux interface available on the NOAA website where users can watch live solar activity while viewing which class the solar flares correspond to on the plot, with the data being updated every 10 minutes.

For the study, the researchers sought to expand upon and improve the GOES classification index by measuring what’s known as impulsiveness, which Tamburri refers to as a “suddenness” of energy release. During a 4-year period between 2010 and 2014, the researchers obtained impulsiveness measurements using Solar Dynamics Observatory/Extreme Ultraviolet Experiment for 1,368 solar flares, categorizing their impulsiveness as low, mid, and high. So, what were the most significant results from this study?

“During this project, we developed and statistically analyzed the impulsiveness of a large number of flares in the extreme ultraviolet 304 Angstrom line,” Tamburri tells Universe Today. “Magnetic reconnection is the process that occurs when two oppositely oriented magnetic field structures interact to form new field lines, resulting in an intense outflow of energy from the region where reconnection is occurring, the effects of which we then observe in the lower solar atmosphere as a solar flare. We found that impulsiveness, interestingly, has a moderately strong correlation with the peak rate of magnetic reconnection. This suggests that the details of the magnetic field present during a solar flare may indeed be related to the energetics of the flare itself (magnitude and duration).” 

As noted above, this study builds off initial research from Dr. Adam Kowalski, which Tamburri notes published a 2013 study discussing a connection between M-class solar flares and stellar properties. This work involving impulsiveness was further expanded upon by another advisor of Tamburri’s, Dr. Maria Kazachenko, who published a 2017 study discussing a new catalog of flare ribbon properties. Finally, two 2022 studies (Dahlin et al. 2022 and Qiu et al. 2022) discussed a potential connection between solar flare impulsiveness and the behavior of the Sun’s magnetic field when a solar flare occurs. According to Tamburri, the goal of this recent study was to expand upon the discussion of impulsiveness by sampling many solar flares.

Image of solar activity emanating from the Sun. (Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/Solar Dynamics Observatory)

Regarding future work, Tamburri tells Universe Today that there are three research directions they can go from here: 1) Expanding the impulsiveness index to include various wavelengths since that determines the accuracy of solar flare and impulsiveness measurements; 2) After identifying a satisfactory wavelength, a comparison of solar flares to stellar flares is planned to be made; 3) Using models to simulate and identify the origins and physics behind impulsiveness activity.

Observations and studies of solar flares date back to the mid-19th century, with the first recorded solar flare observation being conducted by two amateur astronomers, Richard Carrington and Richard Hodgson, using an optical telescope. Further studies occurred by accident using radio observations during World War II by British radio operators in February 1942, with their findings not being made public until after the war ended in 1945.

After the Space Age began, it was discovered that space telescopes would be best suited for observing solar flares due to the Earth’s atmosphere blocking large amounts of solar radiation, limiting ground-based telescope observations. This has allowed near unobscured observations of solar activity, resulting in better understanding of solar flares. Therefore, what implications could this new impulsiveness index have on our understanding of solar flares?

“At this point, we don’t fully understand the fast, intense initial phase (the impulsive phase) of a flare,” Tamburri tells Universe Today. “Ultimately, an accurate, complete picture of the flaring process must tie together the flare process in all regimes – the magnetic field in the low-density corona, the high-energy processes in the dense chromosphere, and even what lies below, in the photosphere.  While we’re a far way from that, connecting what we see during a solar flare to what we can infer about the magnetic field in an active region before, during, and after an event can help to create this unified picture.”

Solar flare activity falls under the category of space weather, which is the activity on the Sun’s surface that can influence activity both on Earth’s surface and in orbit. While this often results in the beautiful auroral displays seen at high northern and southern latitudes, this harsh solar radiation can potentially damage satellites and electronic ground stations, causing widespread electrical and communication blackouts around the world.

The most revered incident of solar activity causing widespread damage to the earth’s surface is known as the Carrington Event, which occurred between September 1-2, 1859, during the most intense solar storm on record. The result was massive incidents of sparks and fires occurring at telegraph stations across the globe and auroral observations reported around the world, as well. Therefore, what implications could this new impulsiveness index have on our understanding of space weather and how to protect against it?

Tamburri tells Universe Today, “In a sense, one of the real dangers of solar flares/storms as they relate to space weather is the uncertainty regarding the specific characteristics of an event while it’s happening – much like two snowflakes, no two solar flares are exactly the same! There are still many vagaries in flare prediction, despite decades of research; even once a flare begins, it’s hard to tell exactly how energetic a flare will be, or how long it will last. If we are able to clearly tie the impulsiveness index to distinct signatures in the magnetic field topology (from which we can infer stored energy), this could possibly tell us a little more about how intense we expect a flare to be, using which knowledge we can mitigate the effects of a flare on technology on and around Earth.”

Tamburri tells Universe Today that this work was supported by the National Science Foundation through the DKIST Ambassadors program, along with being administered by the National Solar Observatory and the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., with thanks also to the University of Colorado Boulder and the George Ellery Hale Graduate Fellowship.

The second study discusses new insights into the properties of solar magnetic reconnection, which is the primary process during solar storms that converts magnetic energy into thermal energy (heat), kinetic energy (motion), and particle acceleration. While studying this phenomenon could help scientists better understand the mechanisms behind solar storms, a lack of high-resolution data has prevented in-depth observations from being made until now. Therefore, what is the specific motivation behind this study involving solar magnetic reconnection?

Marcel Corchado-Albelo, who is also a PhD student in the Department of Astrophysical & Planetary Sciences at CU Boulder and lead author of the study, tells Universe Today, “Currently, our methods to measure the solar magnetic field are usually constrained to the solar surface or photosphere, or in the scarce cases in which the magnetic field has been measured from higher solar atmospheric layers the measurement lacks the temporal cadence to track the evolution of reconnection processes. Therefore, scientists have been using proxy measurements involving flare ribbons to calculate magnetic reconnection properties like magnetic reconnection flux.”

Corchado-Albelo continues, “Extensive statistical work has shown that these flare ribbon derived measurements are well correlated with other flare variables like the strength of the solar flare. These results motivated us to examine how the solar magnetic reconnection flux changed in time during solar flares. When examining the rate of change of the magnetic reconnection flux we discovered that a large number of flares exhibited bursts that reminisce complex oscillatory features commonly found in multi-wavelength emission, called quasi-periodic pulsations (QPPs).”

For the study, the researchers analyzed high-resolution imaging data from a set of M-class and X-class solar flares and statistical analyses on 73 solar flares ranging from C-class to X-class using a known flare ribbon computer database to ascertain QPP properties. Better understanding the mechanisms responsible for QPPs will provide greater insight into solar flare energy and activity within the Sun’s atmosphere and the relationship they have with solar magnetic reconnection. Previous research into QPPs include observing QPPs using the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton space telescope, examining their relationship with recurrent jets, and conducting comprehensive analyses of QPPs. Therefore, what were the most significant results from this study?

“Our results showed that indeed the burst in the magnetic reconnection rate can be described as QPPs with similar characteristics as the ones found in X-ray emission of the same solar flares,” Corchado-Albelo tells Universe Today. “This result suggests that the process through which the magnetic reconnection flux described by flare ribbons is modulated is related, if not the same, to the process through which the X-ray QPPs are formed.”

Corchado-Albelo continues, “Further evidence from the morphological evolution of the flare ribbon, when observations were available, suggest that the solar plasma in the magnetic reconnection region (called the current sheet) undergoes some plasma instability. Our results were inconclusive in what process leads to the co-observation of QPPs in the magnetic reconnection flux and X-ray emission.”

Along with the above description, solar magnetic reconnection also involves the Sun’s massive magnetic field, also called the solar dynamo. Despite its much larger size than the Earth’s magnetic field, its behavior can be just as erratic, as the Earth’s magnetic field is known to experience variations due to its interaction with solar wind that the Sun emits daily. Unlike the Earth, the Sun’s surface is constantly changing since it’s essentially a massive ball of plasma and causes even more erratic behavior within its magnetic field.

This behavior often results in the Sun’s magnetic field lines literally becoming tangled as the Sun rotates, and specifically as its surface continuously rotates, resulting in periodic sunspots and solar activity, including solar flares. Therefore, what implications could this study have on our understanding of the Sun’s magnetic field?

A diagram conveying the Sun’s magnetic field lines overlaid on an image of the Sun obtained by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory on March 12, 2016. (Credit: NASA/SDO/AIA/LMSAL)

“The results of this study suggest that the plasma contained within the region where magnetic reconnection occurs during solar flare are involved in highly complex dynamics,” Corchado-Albelo tells Universe Today. “Understanding the origin of these dynamics can help us diagnose properties of the solar magnetic fields involved in flare reconnection. Properties that could help us possibly constrain the flaring magnetic field geometry, as well as potentially the strength of the field in the reconnection region. These properties are of much value in our endeavors to better constrain our models of solar flares, and in cases where the underlying physics of the solar flares are comparable to those of the Sun, stellar flares.”

Like the first study discussed earlier, this research corresponds to better understanding solar flare activity and space weather, with the latter having direct influence regarding space-based and ground-based activities, ranging from communications to electricity. Better understanding solar flare activity could help scientists better predict space weather, specifically since the Sun goes through what’s known as solar cycles every 11 years when the Sun’s magnetic field flips, which results in increased sunspots and other solar activity, including space weather. Therefore, what implications could this study have on our understanding of solar flares and space weather?

Corchado-Albelo tells Universe Today, “The QPPs in the X-ray emission are a well-known, and common feature of solar and stellar flares. Yet, there is no full consensus to the process through which the X-ray QPPs form. Our results provide direct evidence that these QPPs are at least related to processes that modulated the dynamic evolution of the flaring magnetic fields. It is a step forward towards understanding the details connecting how plasma particles within the reconnection region are accelerated and give rise to the QPPs observed in solar flares.”

Corchado-Albelo continues, “All of these details need to be reproduced by flaring models in order to be a realistic representation of the process occurring in the Sun, which can then be used to forecast solar flares and their properties. This is an invaluable first step to forecast space weather in a reliable manner.”

Like the first study, this study was also funded by the National Science Foundation through the DKIST Ambassadors program with support also from the CU Boulder’s Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences.

What new discoveries about solar flares and solar activity will scientists 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 Solar Flares and Solar Magnetic Reconnection Get New Spotlight in Two Blazing Studies appeared first on Universe Today.

In a new movie titled “Fly Me to the Moon,” a marketing consultant played by Scarlett Johansson uses Tang breakfast drink, Crest toothpaste and Omega watches to give a publicity boost to NASA’s Apollo moon program.

The marketing consultant may be totally fictional. And don’t get me started on the fake moon landing that’s part of the screwball comedy’s plot. But the fact that the makers of Tang, Crest and Omega allied themselves with NASA’s brand in the 1960s is totally real.

More than 50 years later, those companies are still benefiting from the NASA connection, says Richard Jurek, a marketing and public relations executive in the Chicago area who’s one of the authors of “Marketing the Moon: The Selling of the Apollo Lunar Program.”

In the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast, Jurek says Tang sold poorly when it was introduced in the late 1950s. “But once it was announced that it was being used in the space program and marketed that way, it became a huge bestseller for them, and in fact, still sells more overseas — and is a multibillion-dollar brand today,” he says.

NASA also got something out of the arrangements: The easy-to-use Tang powder was well-suited for the astronauts to mix with water during their flights. The Crest team helped NASA come up with a type of toothpaste that astronauts could swallow rather than spit. And Omega made one heck of a chronograph for the astronauts.

But Jurek says the marketing campaign’s main players were contractors like Boeing, Martin Marietta and North American Rockwell. Those contractors, rather than NASA itself, gave the biggest commercial push to the Apollo program.

“There was a war going on,” he explains. “There were a lot of missile manufacturers who didn’t want to come home and talk to their families about, ‘Yeah, we built another missile that was being used in the war.’ But through the marketing of Apollo and marketing of what they were doing for NASA, they could come home and talk about, ‘Look, we’re helping Neil Armstrong, we’re helping NASA, we’re helping America get to the moon.’ And that was a feel-good message.”

NASA and its commercial partners rode a tsunami-scale wave of enthusiasm in the buildup to the first moon landing in 1969. But in the wake of the life-and-death drama that surrounded the crippled Apollo 13 mission in 1970, that wave quickly crashed. “It shifted from an adventure story and a geopolitical story into one that really was a geology story, about rocks and the formation of the Earth, and it became a much harder sell,” Jurek says.

Jurek says that could serve as a cautionary tale for future crewed missions to the moon, like the ones that NASA is planning for the latter half of the 2020s as part of its Artemis campaign (which is named after the twin sister of Apollo in Greek mythology).

“There’s a lot of enthusiasm for space travel,” he says. “You see it in the SpaceX launches, and some of the gimmicks of whether you fly a Tesla into space — and you have all these GoPros around and everybody’s oohing and ahhing over the images. But then it becomes a very real thing when you ask somebody to actually pay for it, and pay for it with their tax dollars.”

For taxpayers who may be tempted to turn from oohing to booing, the lesson of the Apollo era is that many of the space program’s benefits are indirect and pay dividends over the course of decades.

“We’re benefiting from the Apollo program today, from those fundamental investments that were made in basic research and science and infrastructure … back in the ’60s and ’70s,” Jurek says. The advances in microcircuitry and satellite technology required for the Apollo program made it possible for Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk to create multibillion-dollar businesses, he says.

And what can NASA learn? Jurek says the space agency is doing a good job of adapting to a media marketplace that’s more “tribe-focused and niche-focused” than it was during the Apollo era, due to the rise of the internet and social media. But he adds that NASA’s efforts to engage with the public “could maybe gain a lot more from having a bit more of that private-enterprise management of digital marketing, elevated beyond just social media.”

Richard Jurek is chief marketing and communication officer and executive vice president of The Inland Real Estate Group, and the co-author of “Marketing the Moon.”

Jurek also gives a thumbs-up to the way NASA lets its astronauts build their own brands through social media. He says the space agency could take that a step further — perhaps by following the precedent that was set in the early 1960s, when the Mercury astronauts struck a deal with Life magazine for their personal stories.

“What the movie got right — and what NASA got right in the 1950s and 1960s — was turning the astronauts into the face of the program,” he says.. “By doing so, they personalized the missions, and gave people a personal connection to the astronauts in which they felt like they had a stake in their success.”

Could there be, for example, a Netflix documentary series about the next generation of spacefliers? Oh, wait … there’s already been such a series, focusing on the privately funded Inspiration4 orbital mission.

Jurek says the rise of private-sector space missions could dramatically change the space marketing game over the next five to 10 years.

“You’ll have a lot more commercialization, a lot more individual managing of brands and messaging. Sponsorships, if you will, of missions, and private contractors elevating their brands,” he says. “But I think the bigger question will be the cooperation between the various private organizations and the government entities who in many ways control and regulate access to things. For example, it’s illegal to own a moon rock from the Apollo program. It’s government property.”

If private astronauts start extracting resources from the moon — or if other countries such as China, Russia or India do the same — who decides who gets what? What if China beats the U.S. in the space marketing game?

“How is the access and the engagement internationally in space going to change?” Jurek says. “That, I think, is a bigger question over whether or not Taco Bell or Pizza Hut sponsors a particular spaceflight to go back to the moon.”

Take a look at the original version of this posting on Cosmic Log for links to additional resources on moonshot marketing, plus a roundup of fun facts and celebrity cameos to look for in “Fly Me to the Moon.” For what it’s worth, next week brings the 55th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing.

Stay tuned for future episodes of the Fiction Science podcast via Apple, Spotify, Player.fm, Pocket Casts and Podchaser. If you like Fiction Science, please rate the podcast and subscribe to get alerts for future episodes.

The post ‘Fly Me to the Moon’ Points to the Past and Future of Moonshot Marketing appeared first on Universe Today.

After going eight years and more than 300 launches without a failure, SpaceX had a Falcon 9 rocket launch go awry, resulting in the expected loss of 20 Starlink satellites.

The Federal Aviation Administration said it would oversee an investigation into the anomaly, raising the prospect that dozens of launches could be delayed until the problem is identified and rectified.

As many as 40 Falcon 9 launches are on tap between now and the end of the year — potentially including missions that would carry astronauts to the International Space Station and send the privately funded Polaris Dawn crew into orbit for the world’s first commercial spacewalk.

The problem cropped up during the July 11 launch of a Falcon 9 from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. The rocket’s first stage performed as expected, went through stage separation and returned to Earth for a successful touchdown on a drone ship in the Pacific Ocean.

“Falcon 9’s second stage performed its first burn nominally,” SpaceX said in a mission recap, “however, a liquid oxygen leak developed on the second stage.”

When the second-stage engine was relit to adjust the orbital parameters, it experienced an anomaly and couldn’t complete the burn. In a posting to his X social-media platform, SpaceX founder Elon Musk said the engine went through a “RUD,” or rapid unscheduled disassembly.

The second stage was still able to deploy its batch of 20 satellites for SpaceX’s Starlink broadband internet network. But those satellites were left in an orbit that was lower than planned, where they were subject to significant atmospheric drag.

“At this level of drag, our maximum available thrust is unlikely to be enough to successfully raise the satellites,” SpaceX said. “As such, the satellites will re-enter Earth’s atmosphere and fully demise. They do not pose a threat to other satellites in orbit or to public safety.”

The FAA said in a statement that it would require an investigation into the anomaly, aimed at determining its root cause and identifying corrective actions. The agency would have to approve SpaceX’s final report as well as any license modifications that would be required.

The FAA is also charged with determining when it’s safe for SpaceX to resume flights. Falcon 9 launches were delayed for six months after a failed launch in June 2015. And when a Falcon 9 suffered a launch-pad anomaly in September 2016, it took four months for SpaceX to get the FAA’s go-ahead for a return to flight.

Shift4 Payments CEO Jared Isaacman, who is leading the Polaris Dawn space mission, gave SpaceX a vote of confidence in a posting to X. “I have no doubt they will arrive at a cause quickly and ensure the most cost-effective and reliable launch vehicle keeps delivering payload to orbit,” he wrote. “As for Polaris Dawn, we will fly whenever SpaceX is ready and with complete confidence in the rocket, spaceship and operations.”

A Falcon 9 rocket was due to launch Isaacman and three crewmates into orbit as early as July 31, for a mission that could last as long as five days. The mission aims to go into an unusually high 700-kilometer (435-mile) orbit to test the spacesuits that SpaceX has created for spacewalks, and demonstrate how extravehicular activities can be conducted from SpaceX’s Dragon capsule.

Falcon 9 rockets are also set to launch an uncrewed Northrop Grumman Cygnus cargo ship to the International Space Station, and send NASA’s Crew-9 astronauts to the ISS in a Dragon capsule. Both those missions are scheduled for as early as next month, but both seem likely to launch later than that in the aftermath of this week’s anomaly.

SpaceX isn’t the only company that’s currently facing challenges relating to orbital access: Boeing’s Starliner space taxi and its two NASA crew members are still at the space station, waiting for the go-ahead to return to Earth. The departure has been held up for weeks while NASA and Boeing address concerns about Starliner’s propulsion system.

The post SpaceX’s Rocket Failure Could Cause Delays for Lots of Launches appeared first on Universe Today.

For the weekend, we have a 3.5-minute National Geographic video explaining why cheetahs are so fast (they’ve been clocked at 75 mph or 120 kph: an enormous speed). New slow-motion video has helped us with the answer.

The key is their spine. Look how immobile their heads are while they’re running: they have to keep their eyes on the prize!

Working with a tiny cantilever, physicists managed to violate the second law of thermodynamics, using less energy than expected to change the cantilever’s motion

The skein of human migrations out of Africa is quite tangled.  We of course evolved in Africa, splitting off from the lineage leading to bonobos and chimps about 5-6 million years ago (mya). The first Homo foray out of Africa was probably Homo erectus, which might have left about 1.75 mya and then spread all the way to eastern Asia by 1.5 mya. Then they died off for reasons unknown. (All of this is tentative and subject to revision after future research.)

Our ancestors also split off from a lineage destined to leave again, at various times estimated from 500,000 years ago to 200,000 years ago. That lineage split into the sister subspecies Neanderthals and Denisovans (I consider them subspecies of Homo sapiens), and perhaps into the tiny species H. floresiensis, which lived on the Indonesian island of Flores (dating is wonky here).

The conventional wisdom is that all of these subspecies and species went extinct until “modern” Homo sapiens made its Big Exit into Eurasia about 50,000-60,000 years ago, proceeding to colonize the world.  Now, as Carl Zimmer reports in the NYT (click headline below or find article archived here)  there’s increasing evidence that modern H. sapiens might have left Africa a lot longer ago: about 250,000 years ago. That’s a substantial revision of our migration out of Africa.

I’ve indented excerpts from the article:

Several new studies, including one published on Thursday, argue that the timeline was wrong. According to new data, several waves of modern humans began leaving the continent about 250,000 years ago.

“It wasn’t a single out-of-Africa migration,” said Sarah Tishkoff, a geneticist at the University of Pennsylvania. “There have been lots of migrations out of Africa at different time periods.”

Those earlier migrations went largely overlooked until now, Dr. Tishkoff said, because the people who moved did not leave a clear fossil record of their existence, nor did living people inherit their DNA.

And here’s the evidence that modern H. sapiens left Africa a lot earlier than we think:

Dr. Paabo’s team also discovered that living, non-African people carry fragments of Neanderthal DNA, a signature of interbreeding from long ago. In May, a team of researchers estimated that Neanderthals and modern humans interbred during a short period of time, between 47,000 and 40,000 years ago.

But some Neanderthal DNA does not fit into this neat picture. The Neanderthal Y chromosome, for example, is more similar to the Y chromosome found in living humans than it is to the rest of the Neanderthal genome.

In 2020, researchers offered an explanation: Neanderthal males inherited a new Y chromosome from humans between 370,000 and 100,000 years ago. But that would have made sense only if a wave of Africans had expanded out of the continent much earlier than scientists had thought.

Researchers have recently found evidence for such an early wave in the genomes of living Africans.

Dr. Tishkoff and her colleagues compared the genome of a 122,000-year-old Neanderthal fossil with the genomes of 180 people from 12 populations across Africa. Previous studies had found no sign of Neanderthal DNA in African genomes. But Dr. Tishkoff’s group detected tiny pieces of Neanderthal-like DNA scattered across all 12 of the populations they studied.

When they examined the size and sequence of those genetic fragments, they concluded that Neanderthals inherited them from early Africans. That meant an early wave of Africans expanded into Europe or Asia about 250,000 years ago and interbred with Neanderthals.

This conclusion depends critically not just on the dating of the Y chromosome and other bits of DNA, but also on the date of the migration of the Neanderthal/Denisovan lineage out of Africa. If, for example, the Neanderthal lineage had exchanged genes with the modern H. sapiens lineage in Africa between 370,000 and 250,000 years ago, and THEN the Neanderthal lineage migrated to Europe, we wouldn’t need to invoke an earlier migration of modern humans out of Africa.  I trust that the dating of the Neanderthal migration out of Africa (600,000 years ago or so) is sufficiently accurate that the scenario I invoked wouldn’t have happened. But as far as I can see, the date of Neanderthal migration out of Africa is contested. I’ll punt and take the attitude that “Popppa knows best” since Tischkoff and Paabo are both excellent researchers.

There’s also another study suggesting early migration out of Africa:

Another group of researchers — led by Joshua Akey, a professor of genomics at Princeton University — tackled the same question with its own statistical method. After comparing the genomes of 2,000 people from across the world with three Neanderthal genomes, they reached the same conclusion.

As Dr. Akey and his colleagues reported on Thursday, modern humans expanded out of Africa and interbred with Neanderthals between 200,000 and 250,000 years ago.

But Dr. Akey’s team also found evidence for yet another early wave. By comparing the genomes of young and old Neanderthal fossils, they concluded that another group of people migrated from Africa between 120,000 and 100,000 years ago.

As Steve Gould once said, he always prepared for his class on human evolution by throwing away all his notes from the previous year’s lecture and rewriting his spiel.  This is how fast things change, particularly now that Paabo and colleagues pioneered the study of hominin fossil DNA.

One question remains:  if modern H. sapiens really did leave Africa between 370,000 and 100,000 years ago, what happened to them?  One thing we do know for sure from copious DNA and skeletal and artifact dating is that all modern humans descended from a group of ancestors that left Africa around 60,000 years ago. There’s very little doubt about that.

This means that those earlier migrants didn’t leave descendants; they went extinct and are ex-hominins, singing with the choir invisible. What happened? The article suggests that “African populations built up cultural knowledge that led them to make new inventions, like arrows, and adapt to new places more successfully.”  The older H. sapiens then would have been outcompeted or even killed off by the new arrivals. As usual, we don’t know, nor do we know why the Neanderthals and Denisovans (or, for that matter Homo erectus) went extinct.

It’s a good thing I’ve stopped teaching my lecture on human evolution (I got only 1.5 hours on this in my short Evolution segment), as I’d have trouble keeping up with these changes.  There are few human remains and dating is imperfect, so what’s sure to happen is that the story above is likely to be revised—except for the part that all living humans are brothers and sisters who evolved from a band of ancestors who left Africa a few tens of thousands of years ago.

*********************

Here’s a “classic” Neanderthal skull from Wikipedia, labeled this way:

La Chapelle-aux-Saints 1 (“The Old Man”) is an almost-complete male Neanderthal skeleton discovered in La Chapelle-aux-Saints, France by A. and J. Bouyssonie, and L. Bardon in 1908. The individual was about 40 years of age at the time of his death. He was in bad health, having lost most of his teeth and suffering from bone resorption in the mandible and advanced arthritis.

Neanderthals didn’t live very long. Poor guy!

Luna04, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Researchers have successfully developed an environmentally friendly, microspherical fluorescent material primarily made from citric acid. These microbeads emit various colors of light depending on the illuminating light and the size of the beads, which suggests a wide range of applications. Furthermore, the use of plant-derived materials allows for low-cost and energy-efficient synthesis.

Scientists have developed a tiny 'claw machine' that is able to pick up and drop a marble-sized ball in response to exposure to chemical vapors. The findings point to a technique that can enable soft actuators--the parts of a machine that make it move--to perform multiple tasks without the need for additional costly materials. While existing soft actuators can be 'one-trick ponies' restricted to one type of movement, this novel composite film contorts itself in different ways depending on the vapor that it is exposed to.

A new study presents a method to record the temperature of materials with exceptional temporal resolution, using a Doppler broadening effect in neutron resonance absorption. Using a high-powered laser to generate pulses of neutrons 100 nanoseconds long, a test on samples of silver and tantalum successfully returned characteristic information for both materials and their temperatures.

RNA drugs are the next frontier of medicine, but manufacturing them requires an expensive and labor-intensive process that limits production and produces metric tons of toxic chemical waste. Researchers report a new, enzyme-based RNA synthesis method that can produce strands of RNA with both natural and modified nucleotides without the environmental hazards.