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Wherever the JWST looks in space, matter and energy are interacting in spectacular displays. The Webb reveals more detail in these interactions than any other telescope because it can see through dense gas and dust that cloak many objects.

In a new image, the JWST spots a young protostar only 100,000 years old.

The star is named L1527, and at this young age, it’s still ensconced in the molecular cloud that spawned it. This is one of the reasons NASA built the JWST (with help from the ESA and the CSA.) The telescope can see through dust and gas to reveal the earliest stages of star formation.

This image was captured with MIRI, the Mid-Infrared Instrument. The young protostar is at the heart of it all, and it’s still growing. It’s accumulating mass from the protoplanetary disk that surrounds it. The disk is the tiny dark horizontal line at the image’s center.

The protostar isn’t a main-sequence star, so it’s not undergoing fusion like the Sun is. There may be a small amount of deuterium fusion in its core, but it generates energy in a different way. As the star’s gravitational power draws material nearer, the material is compressed and heats up. More energy comes from shockwaves generated by incoming material that collides with existing gas. This is the energy that lights up the star and its surroundings inside the giant molecular cloud that spawned it.

As young protostars accumulate mass, they generate powerful magnetic fields. Combined with the star’s rotation, these fields drive matter away from the star. So, as a protostar acquires mass, it also ejects some of it back into space in spectacular hourglass-shaped jets that come from the star’s poles. These jets create visible bow shocks in the matter around the star, which are the filamentary structures.

There are polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) in the star’s environment. They’re organic compounds abundant throughout the Universe that may have contributed to the appearance of life. They glow blue in the image, including in the filamentary structures.

The red region in the center is a thick layer of gas and dust surrounding the young star, lit up by the star’s energy. The white region between the red and the blue is a mixture of materials. There are more PAHs here, as well as ionized gases like neon and other hydrocarbons.

This isn’t the first time the JWST has examined L1527. In 2022, it observed the protostar with its Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam).

The JWST captured this image of L1527 with its Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam). The upper central region displays bubble-like shapes due to stellar “burps,” or sporadic ejections. The different colours are from layers of dust. The more dust there is, the less blue light escapes. So, the orange/red regions are thicker dust than the blue regions. Image Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI. Image processing: J. DePasquale, A. Pagan, and A. Koekemoer (STScI)

This beautiful display of matter and energy interacting is transient. Over time, the protostar’s powerful outflows will clear its surroundings of much of the gas and dust, though it’ll still have its protoplanetary disk. Eventually, the star will become a main sequence star, easily seen without its veil of gas and dust. By that time, the star’s planetary system will be taking shape.

There are unanswered questions about protostar formation, and one of the JWST’s main science goals is star formation. For example, astrophysicists don’t know exactly how and when fusion is triggered, and a protostar becomes a main-sequence star.

Though astronomers know there are powerful magnetic fields around protostars, they don’t know exactly how they form and what role they play in the star’s collapse and rotation.

The JWST has made some headway on this question. It recently confirmed that jets from young stars are aligned because of the star’s rotation and magnetic fields, something supported by theory but not confirmed by observations until now.

There are also uncertainties about how binary stars form. Do they form the same way solitary stars do? Why are so many stars binaries?

The exact nature of the events that trigger star formation is also unclear. Shockwaves from supernovae can trigger star birth, but what about in other cases? Is it just a matter of density?

The answers to these questions will be incremental. With its ability to see more detail in the young stars and the clouds of swirling gas and dust that enshroud them, the JWST is making progress one image at a time.

The post Webb Sees a Star in the Midst of Formation appeared first on Universe Today.

Amy the Library Duck returned to her window this year, but fortunately she didn’t nest there. (We had a hard time with her last year, finally having to remove her ducklings after they hatched and jumped and to take them to rehab after mom didn’t know how to get to the nearest water since Botany Pond was dry. The water is a long way away, across several busy roads, and we tried to show her the way.)

But there’s better news this year: a squirrel, presumably a female, has built a nest on the same ledge where Amy nested. And in this case we don’t have to do anything, for baby squirrels don’t have to walk 1.5 miles to get to water. The ledge is isolated and well protected, and the squirrel has been adding leaves, dried and fresh, to the nest.

The squirrel has been named Snoozy, as she sleeps through the heat of the day.  If you bookmark this webcam, look in once in a while as I’m pretty sure you’re shortly going to see baby squirrels: a vantage that few people get. And baby squirrels are adorable!

Click here or on the screenshot below. When you watch, be sure to press the “forward” arrow at the bottom left to see the live action (or lack of action).  You can scroll back to see the squirrel’s activity over the past day. Stuff right now: move the dot all the way to the right.

Snoozy is there right now, and may be there all day. Have a look! (She was gone most of the morning, and you can’t see anything at night.) I took this picture about three minutes ago.

UPDATE: If the camera doesn’t work, nere are the squirrel friend’s instructions:

 I just checked it a minute ago and it was fine. Snoozy is there snoozing away. The operator has it running on the Panopto service that I think is used for class stuff. I noticed it sometimes says “the webcast has ended” and then you have to push play again. Also on my browser it blocks autoplay so you have to push the play button to start it. I’ll put it in the comments below, too.

 

A new technique reveals single atom misfits and could help design better semiconductors used in modern and future electronics.

A new technique reveals single atom misfits and could help design better semiconductors used in modern and future electronics.

A team has discovered that the new organic molecule thienyl diketone exhibits high-efficiency phosphorescence, achieving a rate over ten times faster than traditional materials. This breakthrough provides new guidelines for developing rare metal-free organic phosphorescent materials, promising advancements in applications like organic EL displays, lighting, and cancer diagnostics.

Painting roofs white or covering them with a reflective coating would be more effective at cooling cities like London than vegetation-covered 'green roofs,' street-level vegetation or solar panels, finds a new study led by UCL researchers.

A start-up in Albania, co-founded by a mining industry mogul, backed by a mining industry billionaire, is farming plants to harvest carbon-neutral nickel from the soil while simultaneously removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere

I usually don’t put adverts on this site, and of course I’m not getting any dosh for this, but I thought it was a good deal, and it’s effective only today.  23andMe, the DNA-testing ancestry service I used myself, is having a sale on its “ancestry service” today, which will tell you where your genes come from and, if you want, put your data in a bank that allows you to find your registered relatives.

The usual price is $119, but today only it’s $79: a 33% reducation. I don’t think you’re going to find it much cheaper than that. You can, of course, pay more if you want to learn your chances of getting breast cancer, Alzheimer’s, or many other diseases, but I’m too much of a worrier to do that.

Click on the screenshot below (or here) if you want to find out about your ancestry.  You can get up to three kits at that price.

New Zealand, which is still moving towards integrating science and woo, has combined them again in a new summer fellowship offered by the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Auckland (below) The supervisors are Professor Cate Macinnis-Ng, an ecologist, and Sarah Rewi, a research fellow.

I’m not sure whether these fellowships are funded by the Kiwi government, though I’m guessing they are because the U of A is a state school. This means that the project below is likely funded by NZ taxpayers. Importantly, it combines science with woo, in the form of Mātauranga Māori (MM), the indigenous “way of knowing” that includes some empirical trial-and-error knowledge, tradition, religion, story-telling, ethics, sociology, and sundry forms of spirituality. Co-supervisor Dr. Rewi has studied how MM “informs” the study of sooty shearwaters and grey-faced petrels.  In that study, the contribution of MM apparently included advice from elders on where and when to kill the chicks for food, and, usefully, how to rotate chick harvest among areas. Because MM includes some real empirical knowledge, it’s not all bunk, but there’s no need to meld MM and science when you can simply incorporate the genuine empirical knowledge of MM (which is scant compared to the amount of woo) into science.

See the ad here (scroll down at the link) or click below:

Here’s a description of the position as noted above; bolding is mine:

With interests in mātauranga-based science research on the rise, it is important these forms of research are responsive to Māori community needs. Understanding the impact of land-use, particularly agricultural activity, on groundwater resources is of key concern to Māori. This project will involve field-based work and data analysis researching into spatial patterns of groundwater chemical composition and microbial communities. It will examine how scientific indicators can assist mana whenua in their assessment of the state of the water’s mauri. No specific skills are required but it is recommended that the candidate has an interest in the interface between mātauranga and science. It is a requirement that the student has whakapapa Māori.

Note that no specific skills are required but you have to be willing to meld MM and science (bolding is mine). And you apparently have to be Māori, so in that sense it’s a racially biased ad. As reader Peter said, who found the ad, “Imagine if a student had to prove they had English ancestry to get a grant to study Roman Britain.”

What do the Māori words mean in the ad? Remember, even most Māori don’t speak the language fluently, and many don’t speak it at all, while European descendants of “colonists” have the language forced upon them without translation, probably because of sacralization of all things Māori. At any rate, here are translations:

Mana whenua, as defined in the Māori dictionary, means this:

(noun) territorial rights, power from the land, authority over land or territory, jurisdiction over land or territory – power associated with possession and occupation of tribal land. The tribe’s history and legends are based in the lands they have occupied over generations and the land provides the sustenance for the people and to provide hospitality for guests.

Apparently the ad means that the research is aimed at helping local people lean some stuff about groundwater, like what spirits it embodies. But things really go into the weeds when we look at the definition of mauri:

Mauri (noun) life principle, life force, vital essence, special nature, a material symbol of a life principle, source of emotions – the essential quality and vitality of a being or entity. Also used for a physical object, individual, ecosystem or social group in which this essence is located.

As Nick Matzke, an American scientist working in New Zealand, noted here, here and here, mauri is simple vitalism, the view that all objects are imbued with some undefined “life force”.  In a letter to the New Zealand Herald, Nick correctly noted that mauri, which is worming itself into the NZ science curriculum, is simple pseudoscience:

Unfortunately, the concept of ‘life force’ is a well-known pseudoscience, known as vitalism. Vitalism was experimentally debunked by chemists in the 1800s. Having a government agency force it back into the chemistry curriculum by political fiat — while steamrolling the vehement and informed objections of science teachers — is a huge problem. Vitalism is a pseudoscientific error on the same level as asserting that the Earth is flat, or that the world is only 6,000 years old. If vitalism is right, then all of chemistry and biochemistry is wrong.

And so is biology! (See my post on the incursion of mauri into chemistry and electrical engineering.)

To say that the funding will help the locals assess “the state of the water’s mauri“, then, is to say nothing; it’s like saying the project will help assess the state of the water’s Christianity. There is no mauri that we know of, so this is a funded search for nothing.

Finally, what is the single qualification to get the money and do this “science”? The student must have “whakapapa Māori”, which apparently means Māori ancestry. Here’s the definition of the first word (Māori, of course, are the indigenous people, descended from voyaging Polynesians):

Whakapapa. (noun) genealogy, genealogical table, lineage, descent – reciting whakapapa was, and is, an important skill and reflected the importance of genealogies in Māori society in terms of leadership, land and fishing rights, kinship and status. It is central to all Māori institutions. There are different terms for the types of whakapapa and the different ways of reciting them including: tāhū (recite a direct line of ancestry through only the senior line); whakamoe (recite a genealogy including males and their spouses); taotahi (recite genealogy in a single line of descent); hikohiko (recite genealogy in a selective way by not following a single line of descent); ure tārewa (male line of descent through the first-born male in each generation).

In other words, unless I’m mistaken, the only requirement for this fellowship is that the student has Māori ancestry. This, of course, is ethnicity-based hiring, eliminating all requirements for the position save one’s ancestry, which must be indigenous.  This would be illegal in America, but it’s both legal and encouraged in New Zealand.

I’ve given up hope for the future of science in New Zealand, a country with a proud scientific past. In a misguided effort to incorporate indigenous “ways of knowing” into science, of which this ad is one example, the NZ government is busy ruining science education in the country. I had hoped that the newish Luxon government would do better then the damaged wrought by the Ardern administration, but the opprobrium towards criticizing anything indigenous seems permanently engrained.

So-called “cool roofs” would bring down the average air temperature in cities like London during a heatwave more than green roofs, trees or solar panels do

A 20-year analysis of almost 400,000 generally healthy adults shows that vitamins do not help you live longer.

The post No Benefit to Daily Multivitamin Use first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

A snorkelling tourist in East Timor has filmed a pygmy blue whale calf drinking its mother’s milk for the first time

A simple experiment and mathematical model suggest that when you snack on pistachios, you may need a surprisingly large bowl to accommodate the discarded shells

A quantum phenomenon that muddles the rules of cause and effect could make quantum computers better at performing certain operations

A grass-green snake from Vietnam with yellow eyes, blue lips and a brick-red tail has been identified as a distinct species

Giving AI systems the ability to focus on particular brain regions can make them much better at reconstructing images of what a monkey is looking at from brain recordings

Mercury puts on one of its best apparitions for 2024 this month.

Where have all of the planets gone? The late evening fall of dusk in early July also sees a sky seemingly vacant of familiar naked eye planets. Mars, Jupiter and Saturn are now denizens of dawn, and will stay that way for most of the remainder of 2024.

But two challenging planets are now emerging low to the west at dusk: Mercury and Venus. The two interior worlds are now mounting a slow return, as the hunt is now on the recover the two after sunset.

Mercury’s July apparition in particular is an interesting one, and one of the best of six for observers worldwide. This is mainly because the planet is headed towards aphelion 0.4667 Astronomical Units (AU) from the Sun on July 27th, just five days after greatest elongation. At greatest elongation on July 22nd , Mercury will display an 8” diameter 45% illuminated disk, shining at a respectable magnitude +0.3.

To be sure, Mercury doesn’t look like much more than a dot in a telescope, even at high power… but part of the thrill of finding the illusive world lies in knowing what your actually seeing.

Mercury, Venus and the Moon on July 8th. Credit: Stellarium. Exploring Mercury

To be sure, Mercury has been known of since antiquity and isn’t at all that hard to see, if you know exactly where and when to look for it. A low flat horizon looking west at dusk certainly helps.

The often told tale that Nicolas Copernicus never saw Mercury is probably apocryphal. Looking at the diminutive world through the telescope reveals a cycle of Moon-like phases… and not much else. Mercury’s distinction as the innermost world in the solar system always assures that it always lingers low down in the murk of the atmosphere at dusk or dawn. This makes it too blurry to glimpse much in terms of surface detail. It wasn’t until the advent of space exploration that we knew much more about Mercury. NASA’s Mariner 10 made two brief flybys past the planet in 1974 and 1975, revealing an airless, cratered world 1.4 times the size of our Moon. Since then NASA’s Mercury MESSENGER revealed the planet in greater detail, becoming the first spacecraft to enter orbit around the world in 2011. Meanwhile, the joint ESA/JAXA BepiColombo mission has thus far made three flybys past Mercury, and will enter orbit in late 2025.

One of the most amazing views of Mercury in recent memory came from the Big Bear Solar Observatory during the May 9th, 2016 transit of Mercury:

…And Venus Makes Two

Meanwhile, Venus is also joining the evening scene. Though brighter at magnitude -3.9, (almost 100 times brighter than Mercury) Venus is also lower to the horizon in July. Venus typically makes a slower comeback into the evening. This is because it’s approaching us from the farside of the Sun. Think of Venus as a runner, trying to catch the Earth on the inside track of the solar system. Venus spends the remainder of 2024 in the evening sky. The planet reaches greatest eastern elongation 47 degrees from the Sun on January 10th, 2025.

The sky scene becomes ever more dynamic as the month continues. On July 6th, Mercury actually transits (passes in from of) the Beehive Cluster (Messier 44). Use binoculars to catch +4th magnitude dwarf planet 4 Vesta nearby. Venus also meets Messier 44 on July 18th, though the event is much lower to the horizon.

Mercury crosses M44 on July 6th. Credit: Stellarium.

Mercury reaches greatest elongation 27 degrees east of the Sun at dusk on July 22nd.

The Moon joins the scene on the evenings of July 7th and July 8th as a waxing crescent. The crescent Moon always adds a three-dimensional look to the scene. This is because the nighttime side is dimly illuminated by the Earth in what’s termed Earthshine.

Mercury, Venus and the Moon on July 7th.

If you’ve never seen Mercury for yourself, this month is a good time to try and check the innermost world off of your life list.

The post Meeting Mercury at Dusk in July appeared first on Universe Today.

Drosophila -- known as fruit flies -- are a valuable model for human heart pathophysiology, including cardiac aging and cardiomyopathy. However, a choke point in evaluating fruit fly hearts is the need for human intervention to measure the heart at moments of its largest expansion or its greatest contraction to calculate cardiac dynamics. Researchers now show a way to significantly cut the time needed for that analysis while utilizing more of the heart region, using deep learning and high-speed video microscopy.

A new study offers new insights into the evolution of foldable proteins.

After 100,000 orbits and almost 23 years on Mars, NASA’s Mars Odyssey orbiter has seen a lot. The spacecraft was sent to map ice and study its geology, but along the way, it’s captured more than 1.4 million images of the planet.

A recent image captured the Solar System’s tallest mountain and volcano, Olympus Mons.

This image won’t win any photography contests, but that’s not what this is about. Scientists are experts at extracting information and images like this hold information that’s part of the overall Mars puzzle.

In this image, Odyssey is taking a horizontal look at Mars. The spacecraft usually points down at the surface and captures images in long strips, which is why the image has such an unusual shape. But this horizontal viewpoint is part of an effort to use Odyssey and its Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) camera to capture high-altitude images of Mars’ horizon.

“Normally, we see Olympus Mons in narrow strips from above, but by turning the spacecraft toward the horizon, we can see in a single image how large it looms over the landscape,” said Odyssey’s project scientist, Jeffrey Plaut of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, which manages the mission. “Not only is the image spectacular, it also provides us with unique science data.”

Dust storms typically begin during Martian fall, and the blue layer on the bottom is dust in Mars’ atmosphere. Above that is a purplish layer. It’s where red dust from the planet’s surface is mixed with bluish water ice. The top blue-green layer is where water ice clouds reach 50 km (31 miles) into the sky. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU

Odyssey captured its first horizontal horizon image in late 2023, and it took engineers three months to get the operation right. THEMIS is fixed in position and points straight down. For these images, the entire spacecraft had to tilt 90 degrees. But it also had to maintain a position where the Sun could strike its solar panels. To accomplish that, Mars Odyssey used its thrusters to orient itself so that its antennae pointed away from Earth. As a result, the spacecraft couldn’t communicate with Earth for the duration of the maneuver.

Orbiters like Odyssey, MRO, and Mars Express have imaged the Martian surface in great detail and given us a vast archive of images. But these images are different. They give scientists a different look at the Martian sky, its clouds, and its dust.

THEMIS is an infrared camera and is designed to sense temperature changes on Mars’ surface. It can differentiate between sand, rock, ice, and dust. By pointing at the sky, THEMIS can measure the presence of ice and dust in Mars’ atmosphere.

This is Odyssey’s first of the Martian atmosphere from a horizontal perspective. It was taken from about 250 miles above the Martian surface – about the same altitude at which the International Space Station orbits Earth. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU

Odyssey personnel first realized they could point the spacecraft at the horizon when other missions were landing on the Martian surface. When Curiosity landed in 2012, Odyssey played a key role by relaying information about the landing back to Earth. To do that, it had to orient itself differently, pointing its antenna at the rover’s landing ellipse. While positioning the antenna for that job, scientists realized that THEMIS was pointing at the horizon.

“We just decided to turn the camera on and see how it looked,” said Odyssey’s mission operations spacecraft engineer, Steve Sanders of Lockheed Martin. Lockheed Martin built Odyssey and helps conduct day-to-day operations alongside the mission leads at JPL. “Based on those experiments, we designed a sequence that keeps THEMIS’ field-of-view centered on the horizon as we go around the planet.”

Odyssey has been a definite success by any measure, and it’s still going strong. In fact, it’s the longest continually active mission around another planet. But that feat takes careful planning and operation.

“Physics does a lot of the hard work for us,” Sanders said. “But it’s the subtleties we have to manage again and again.” The spacecraft is solar-powered, and it’s out of direct sunlight for several minutes in each orbit, but the instruments have to be kept in a certain range to remain operational, which means juggling energy demands.

Odyssey also has a limited amount of hydrazine fuel for its thrusters. With no fuel gauge, engineers have to recalculate the amount remaining after each maneuver. One way they do this is by applying heat to the two propellant tanks to see how long they take to heat up. In March 2023, NASA said that the spacecraft has enough fuel to last at least until the end of 2025.

An artist’s impression of the Odyssey orbiter around Mars. Image Credit: NASA

“It takes careful monitoring to keep a mission going this long while maintaining a historical timeline of scientific planning and execution — and innovative engineering practices,” said Odyssey’s project manager, Joseph Hunt of JPL. “We’re looking forward to collecting more great science in the years ahead.”

Odyssey can change its orbit, so there’s no way to calculate exactly how many orbits it has left. But it’s completed over 100,000 in almost 23 years, and it’s likely to complete several hundred more before its hydrazine runs out.

The post A New View of Olympus Mons appeared first on Universe Today.