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Astronomers have just found one of the youngest planets ever. At only 3 million years old, planet TIDYE-1b (also known as IRAS 04125+2902 b) is practically in its infancy. By comparison, Earth is 4.5 billion years old: that’s 1500 times older. The discovery of a planet this young can teach scientists a lot about the early stages of planet formation, and the peculiarities of this particular one have scientists re-evaluating their models of planetary birth.

“Astronomy helps us explore our place in the Universe — where we came from and where we might be going. Discovering planets like this one allows us to look back in time, catching a glimpse of planetary formation as it happens,” said Madyson Barber, lead author of a new paper and graduate student at UNC-Chapel Hill.

Barber discovered TIDYE-1b using the transit method, where a planet passes in front of its star, dimming the light and revealing itself to the observer – in this case, NASA’s TESS telescope. Previously, more than a dozen young planets in the 10-40 million-year-old range have been found via transit, but TIDYE-1b surpasses them all.

It’s a rare find because, under normal circumstances, such young planets are usually obscured by gas and dust that make up the ‘protoplanetary disc’, a debris field orbiting a star like a ring, out of which new planets are built.

“Planets typically form from a flat disk of dust and gas, which is why planets in our Solar System are aligned in a ‘pancake-flat’ arrangement,” explains Andrew Mann, associate professor at UNC-Chapel Hill. “But here, the disk is tilted, misaligned with both the planet and its star — a surprising twist that challenges our current understanding of how planets form.” 

Since TIDYE-1b orbits its star at a different angle than the main protoplanetary disc, it was visible despite its youth. It can often take more than five million years for such a disc to clear out in a young star system, so this was a lucky break without which the astronomers would not have been able to see the planet.

The planet is very close to its star, orbiting around it about once every nine days. The researchers believe it is a young example of what will someday become a ‘super-Earth or a ‘sub-Neptune, a planet type missing in our solar system but which seems common in the wider Milky Way galaxy. TIDYE-1b is not as dense as the Earth is, but it is about 11 times larger in diameter.

The discovery provides conclusive evidence that planets can form earlier than previously known – the lack of examples of planets younger than 10 million years found so far is not because they don’t exist. It’s just because they tend to be hidden from view.

The post Astronomers Find a 3 Million Year Old Planet appeared first on Universe Today.

To understand the practical challenges of indoor augmented reality applications on smartphones, researchers conducted 113 hours of extensive experiments and case studies over 316 patterns to determine the factors that degrade localization accuracy in real-world indoor environments. Landmarks for vision systems, LiDAR, and the IMU were evaluated. To solve the identified problems, the researchers suggest radio-frequency-based localization as a potential solution for practical augmented reality applications.

To understand the practical challenges of indoor augmented reality applications on smartphones, researchers conducted 113 hours of extensive experiments and case studies over 316 patterns to determine the factors that degrade localization accuracy in real-world indoor environments. Landmarks for vision systems, LiDAR, and the IMU were evaluated. To solve the identified problems, the researchers suggest radio-frequency-based localization as a potential solution for practical augmented reality applications.

Here’s Bill Maher’s 8½-minute comedy/news video from yesterday’s “Real Time”; the plaint is that people are going to let politics screw up the holidays. Note that his guests are Donna Brazile, Andrew Sullivan and Neil deGrasse Tyson (see this tweet).  Now that the election is over, we’re more divisive than ever, with Republicans gloating and Democrats seething, wondering what went wrong. It’s all a recipe for Holiday Hatred, and Maher mocks and decries that tribalism and calls for comity.

The money line: “Family isn’t like gender: you can’t fix it by cutting off members.”

Earth and Mars were very similar in their youth. Four billion years ago, both planets had vast, warm seas. But while Earth retained its oceans, the waters of Mars evaporated away or froze beneath its dusty surface. Exactly why these two worlds took such divergent paths is unclear, though it may lie in the origins of their water.

Based on geological studies, we know that Earth’s water cycle seemed to have stabilized early. From about 4.5 billion years ago to today, water has had a stable presence on Earth. For Mars, things are less clear. Clay minerals cover about 45% of the Martian surface and date to what is known as the Noachian period, which ranges from 4.1 to 3.7 billion years ago. We also see evidence of water flows from 3.7 to 3.0 billion years ago, in what’s known as the Hesperian period. During the Amazonian period, which dates from 3 billion years ago to today, Mars seems to have been mostly dry. We have little evidence of the earliest period of Mars, known as the pre-Noachian. But a new study peels back the Martian ages to give us a glimpse of the first epoch of Mars, and it comes from a Martian meteorite known as Black Beauty.

Black Beauty, or NWA 7034, is a Martian meteorite thought to have formed at a time when the Red Planet harbored a magnetic field. Credit: C Agee, Institute of Meteoritics, UNM; NASA

There are about 200 meteorites known to have come from Mars, and they are currently the only physical samples of Mars we have on Earth. One of the larger meteorites, Northwest Africa 7034, was discovered in Western Sahara in 2011 and is nicknamed “Black Beauty” because of its rich black coloring. It’s made of material that’s about 4.4 billion years old and contains more water than any other Martian meteorite. But since it was only ejected from Mars 1.5 billion years ago, it is difficult to determine whether Black Beauty formed in a wet environment or if it gained water during the Noachian or Hesperian period.

This new study doesn’t focus on Black Beauty as a whole, but rather on small crystals of zircon embedded within it. These crystals can be dated to 4.48–4.43 billion years, meaning they formed in the Pre-Noachian period. What’s interesting is that the crystals have layers of iron, aluminum, and sodium in a pattern known as oscillatory zoning. Since zircon is igneous in origin, this kind of banding is almost unheard of in zircon crystals. On Earth, there is only one place where such a pattern occurs, which is in hydrothermal geysers such as those found in Yellowstone National Park.

The presence of these crystals in Black Beauty proves not only that Mars was wet during the Pre-Noachian period, but that it was geologically active with warm thermal vents. Similar vents on Earth may have triggered the formation of life on our world. Whether life ever existed on Mars is still an unanswered question, but it is clear that the conditions for life on Mars did exist in its earliest history.

Reference: Gillespie, Jack, et al. “Zircon trace element evidence for early hydrothermal activity on Mars.” Science Advances 110.47 (2024)

The post There was Hot Water on Mars 4.45 Billion Years Ago appeared first on Universe Today.

For a long time astronauts have been tested by subjected them to short “zero-gravity” conditions using “reduced-gravity aircraft“. These planes fly up and down on a parabolic flight path, creating a free-fall condition for part of the flight:

Initially, the aircraft climbs with a pitch angle of 45 degrees using engine thrust and elevator controls. The sensation of weightlessness is achieved by reducing thrust and lowering the nose to maintain a neutral, or “zero lift”, configuration such that the aircraft follows the same path that an object in free fall, with no air resistance, would follow. Engine thrust is used to exactly compensate for drag. Weightlessness begins while ascending and lasts all the way “up-and-over the hump,” until the aircraft reaches a downward pitch angle of around 30 degrees.

But of course the first question an ailurophile would ask is, “Well, what about falling cats?”  We all know that a cat held up and dropped to the floor only a foot above the ground will nevertheless right itself and land on its feet.  And SCIENCE has also learned how cats do this, using a clever evolved pathway called “the righting reflex“:

They can turn themselves the right way around during the fall to land safely on their feet. The vestibular apparatus inside a cat’s ear is used for balance and orientation and this enables cats to quickly figure out which way is up, and rotate their head so the body can follow.

Cats also have incredibly unique skeletal structures: they have no collarbone and a very flexible backbone with 30 vertebrae. This flexible spine means that they can correct themselves easily and quickly during a fall. Their back arches, the feet go underneath the body and bring their forepaws close to the face to protect it. Their low body to weight ratio also helps cats to land on their feet as it manages to slow their velocity while falling.

Cats develop the righting reflex very early on and is first seen in kittens as early as 3 weeks old, and by 7 weeks it is fully developed.

Here’s Destin from “Smarter Every Day” showing the normal righting reflex, which involves an initial determination of “down” and then twisting the front and back halves of their bodies in opposite directions:

But what happens to a cat released in zero gravity, when there is no cue to tell up and down? The article below explains: the cats go haywire:

An excerpt:

The first experiments were conducted on board a Convair C-131 Samaritan, and yes, there is absolutely video of the proceedings. A similar experiment involved releasing pigeons inside the C-131 during parabolic flight. The humans seem to have had a somewhat cavalier attitude towards having eyes.

It’s fascinating to watch. The narration for the video says the cats’ “automatic reflex action is almost completely lost under weightlessness”. Almost – but not quite. Although the cats seem disoriented, they are still able to twist and turn their bodies around as they try to figure out where they are going to fall.

That was far from the end of the experiments. A 1957 paper in The Journal of Aviation Medicine documents experimenting with eight kittens in T-33 and F-94 aircraft performing parabolic flights – “not only to satisfy our own curiosity,” wrote Siegfried Gerathewohl and Herbert Stallings of the US Air Force, “but to clarify the role of the otolith organ during weightlessness.”

. . .All these kitty-cat shenanigans helped scientists understand cats. In 1969, mechanicians Thomas Kane and MP Scher of Stanford University published an analysis in the International Journal of Solids and Structures that described the motion of a falling cat as two cylinders that twist in relation to each other in order to right themselves quickly while falling.

The research had implications for humans, too. The same two scientists also wrote a 1969 document for NASA that used mathematical models to better understand the motion and orientation of the human body in freefall.

And of course you’ll want to see a video. But oh, those poor kitties! I hope they got plenty of treats for having to do this. But note the lessons that the cats imparted to human astronauts in zero gravity:

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Here’s a 3½-minute video showing three barn cats doing their job.  Note how well they supervise the goats, keeping them in line. and also ensure that the small d*gs do not engage in bad behavior, giving them a swat for bad behavior.

The cats also walk on tightropes, count barn swallows, consume leftover milk, patrol the fence line, and keep each other company with cuddles.

 

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Finally, Matthew sent me this tweet from Bluesky (I’m now on it) showing the Chinese mountain cat, Felis beiti. As Wikipedia notes:

It is endemic to the Tibetan Plateau of western China, where it lives in grassland above elevations of 2,500 m (8,200 ft). It has been listed as vulnerable on the IUCN Red List since 2002.

Have you ever heard of the Chinese mountain cat?I hadn't until I read Ruth Kamnitzer's piece on this small cat that was only photographed for the first time in the wild in 2007.news.mongabay.com/2024/11/easy…

— Rhett Ayers Butler (@rhettayersbutler.bsky.social) 2024-11-20T04:48:24.473Z

Here’s a photo of a captive cat from Wikipedia. Looks like a household tabby, no?

西宁野生动物园, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Click on the article from Mongabay (below) to read about Chinese scientists who found and studied the cat:

 

From the Mongabay article:

In 2018, Han Xue-song, then a researcher with the Beijing-based Shan Shui Conservation Center, was in the Sanjiangyuan region on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, surveying black-necked cranes (Grus nigricollis). At an elevation of more than 4000 meters (13,000 feet), this is a windswept land of alpine meadows and rolling hills that stretch as far as the eye can see.

On this particular day in mid-September, Han and his colleagues were taking a break by the side of the road when they spotted something on a distant hillside. The animal was difficult to make out, but looked like a red fox (Vulpes vulpes), which are fairly common in the area. Han took out his camera, snapped a couple of pictures with its powerful 400-millimeter lens, and didn’t think much more about it.

But later that evening, when Han downloaded the photos, he was in for a surprise. A strange cat — about twice the size of a domestic cat, with straw-colored fur, tufted ears, a white lower lip, and startling blue eyes — was staring back at him. Beside her was a small kitten. It was only after Han sent the photo to another biologist that he realized the significance of the find.

(From the article): A Chinese mountain cat in winter, in Menyuan county, Qinghai province. Chinese mountain cats are only found on the eastern edge of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, at elevations of 2,000-5,000 m (6,600-16,400 ft). Image courtesy of Kong Yue-qiao.

“Even at that time, when we had the picture in our hands, we didn’t know that’s a Chinese mountain cat,” Han says. “Most of us had never heard of that species.”

The Chinese mountain cat (Felis bieti) is China’s only endemic felid, and one of the least-known small cats in the world. Historically, most records came from skins or museum specimens of dubious origins. It wasn’t until 2004 that scientists figured out the cat has a very confined distribution along the eastern edge of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, and it was another three years before biologists captured the first photographs in the wild. The species is classified as vulnerable to extinction on the IUCN Red List, but until very recently, almost nothing was known about its distribution, habitat use, or threats.

. . .In 2020, Liu Yan-lin, a professor at Qinghai Normal University, undertook the first comprehensive survey of Chinese mountain cats in and around the newly established Qilian Mountain National Park, a 50,200-square-kilometer (19,400-square-mile) protected area on the northern edge of the cat’s range.

. . . . Liu found that the Chinese mountain cat lived on the southern side of the Qilian range, and it appeared to be particularly abundant in Menyuan county, a high-elevation basin between the Qilian and Daban mountains. The county is a mix of small- and large-scale agriculture and tree plantations, as well as native shrubland and grassland. It’s inhabited by Han Chinese, pastoral Hui and ethnic Tibetans, and Liu says he was surprised that it appeared to be a stronghold for the cats.

“At the beginning, before I did the survey, my impression was that the cats live in remote areas, far away from people. But after the survey in the Qilian mountain [my impression] changed,” Liu says. “So, it’s actually living nearby people, even with the people.”

To figure out what was going on in Menyuan county, Kong Yue-qiao, a doctoral candidate at Peking University co-supervised by Liu, took on the first ecological study of the Chinese mountain cat in the wild. {JAC: Sadly, the article is in Chinese]

Kittens!:

(From article): A female Chinese mountain cat with kitten outside their den in the Sanjiangyuan region of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. By setting up camera traps outside the den site, researchers were able to record photos and videos of the female and her two kittens, in the first ever observations of an active Chinese mountain cat den. Image courtesy of Han Xue-song.

More kittens:

(From paper): Chinese mountain cat kittens playing outside their den in Menyuan county, Qinghai province. Image courtesy of Kong Yue-qiao.

But they are introgressing with domestic cats. That is BAD!

In 2021, Luo co-authored a study that found there was ongoing and recent genetic introgression between Chinese mountain cats and domestic cats. Genetic introgression is  the transfer of genetic material from one species into the gene pool of another, which happens when two species interbreed over numerous generations.

Those findings were worrying, Luo says, but only based on genetic samples from four Chinese mountain cats. To figure out the full extent of the problem, they needed more samples.

Over several years, Luo and her team managed to collect samples from 51 Chinese mountain cats on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. Luo and her colleagues haven’t yet published the results of their analysis, but she says they found evidence of a greater degree of introgression, with gene flow going both ways.

For example, Luo sampled one cat that had most of the markings of a Chinese mountain cat, except for a small patch of white on one paw and slightly-darker-than-usual stripes; the genetic analysis revealed about one-third genetic introgression from domestic cats.

Here’s a hybrid:

From the paper: A hybrid Chinese mountain cat with about one-third genomic introgression from domestic cats. Note the white toes on the right front paw and darker stripes, both morphological features of domestic cats. The photo was taken at Xining Zoo, Qinghai province, of a rescued animal born in the wild. Image courtesy of Luo Shu-jin/Peking University.

Dogs and cars are also a danger to these cats, but the scientists are hopeful that now that we know more about this threatened species, better conservation measures will be applied.

Like this one:

(From paper): A sign alerting motorists to the presence of Chinese mountain cats. During her two-year field study, Kong Yue-qiao identified vehicle strikes as a major threat to the Chinese mountain cat. To reduce the threat, she designed and placed signs asking drivers to slow down in high-risk areas. Image courtesy of Kong Yue-qiao.

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Lagniappe.  I initially had trouble getting this one, but perhaps you won’t. Give it a try.

h/t: Ginger K., Merilee, Matthew

Today we have bird photos from reader Rodney Graetz of Canberra, Australia, who has contributed several times before. Rodney’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

A Backyard Year

Because we live in a leafy suburb in an intentionally leafy city, our very ordinary backyard occasionally hosts interesting native wildlife.  In January, the first appearance of this juvenile (yellow/buff chest feathers) and very ragged and grubby Kookaburra (Dacelo sp.) Why so?  Kookaburras, along with 50+ parrot species, nest only in tree hollows.  Consequently, the competition for nesting sites is incessant and fierce.  For Kookaburras, the competition within a nest is also fierce, sometimes lethally so.  Driven by food and space conditions, aggressive nestlings are known to kill one another (Siblicide): usually the last born or smallest is killed first.  So, this grubby (sex unknown) bird may well have had a tough upbringing, including a killing:

The same bird in late September, now well-groomed and obviously in good condition.  It returns irregularly and we hear it more often than we see it.

This pair of Magpie Larks (Grallina cyanoleuca) appeared last year and have remained ever since.  The male is standing, and the post-bath female is squatting (deformed foot).  It is a widespread species that we include here as part of a larger story later.

Now (November), both birds have begun harvesting mud and grass for nest building, ferrying high up into the street tree, beak full by beak full.

This is the nest that they made last year in October.  It is a substantial, thick-walled cup nest, built, beak full by beak full.  It failed during a heavy rainstorm.  The current nest under construction is nearby:

Though slight birds, both male and female birds will display and fight over territory, here the birdbath.  We include this (Trap) photograph because it revealed the mesmerising underwing feather patterning of the Satin Bowerbird (Ptilonorhynchus violaceus), none of which is visible when the wings are folded:

In early September, this young Grey Butcherbird (Cracticus torquatus) arrived, a first.  Note the sharply hooked beak.  Its bathing technique is to get completely sodden, as here, then spend 10 minutes or so, meticulously grooming.  Its song is delightful.  Lately, we hear the bird more than we see it.

I add this borrowed photo to illustrate how they earned their common name Butcherbirds.  Like in a butcher shop – remember them? – surplus prey is hung or wedged, as here, or spiked on a thorn.  I’ve yet to personally see this in the wild.

A likely male (black eye) Sulphur-crested Cockatoo (Cacatua galerita) contemplating a drink, a lengthy process similar to a winetaster at work.  A very common bird everywhere in Canberra, visually and noisily.  I include the photo to illustrate how large this parrot is (750+ gm, 1.8 lb) and to note that it will readily bathe in aviary captivity but rarely in the wild.  Most likely because a wet bird this size would require considerable effort to get airborne from the ground.  They do ‘sponge bath’.  During rain, they select a tree canopy with dense pendulous leaves, as Eucalypts mostly are, and fly into them, hanging upside down and flapping their wings to get them wet, particularly the wing underside – wing pits?  Their raised crest signals are similar to human eyebrows in showing surprise, fright and rage.

In early November, a first, both of sighting and visit, a female Pacific Koel (Eudynamys orientalis), a migratory Cuckoo species.  Two interesting aspects: the first being the probable migration distance travelled from northern tropical Australia, or even Indonesia, to Canberra in southern Australia.  The second is that, like all the Cuckoo family, they are brood parasites.

The female Koel has turned to call loudly after a departing (all black) male Koel, thus displaying her intricate feather patterning.  The behaviour of the two birds suggested there was a mating event.  If so, she and all other gravid female Koels in Canberra, will stay feeding and begin searching for susceptible birds’ nests in which to deposit their egg(s).

National bird experts list the local bird species vulnerable to Koel Brood Parasitism, among them being the Magpie Lark.  Copied from a national bird book, this painting illustrates the closeness in egg appearance between that of a Koel and a Magpie Lark, a pair of which birds are busy making a mud cup nest in our street tree.  We live in interesting times:

Dark matter made out of axions may have the power to make space-time ring like a bell, but only if it is able to steal energy from black holes, according to new research. 

An intriguing possibility for a candidate for the mysterious dark matter is that it might be an axion. Originally predicted to exist decades ago to explain some strange properties of the strong nuclear force, axions have yet to be detected in the laboratory or in any experiments. However, this elusiveness would make them a perfect candidate for dark matter, since by definition dark matter hardly if ever interacts with normal matter.

If the dark matter is an axion, or of a kind of particle related to the axion, then it would have very strange properties. It would be the lightest particle ever known, in some models no bigger than a billionth the mass of the electron. The incredible lightweight nature of this particle means that it would behave in very strange ways in the cosmos. It would be so light that its quantum wave nature would manifest on very large scales, meaning that it would tend to act more like a wave than a particle.

One of the ways this wave nature would manifest would be around rotating black holes. Through a process known as super-radiance, this kind of dark matter could steal angular momentum from the black hole. This would prevent the dark matter from falling through the event horizon, and instead it would pile up around the black hole like an invisible shroud.

But once no more new energy could be extracted from the black hole, the dark matter would evaporate away. In the process, according to new research, the dark matter would ring space-time like a bell, sending out an enormous amount of gravitational waves.

These gravitational waves would have a distinct signature from the ones known through black hole mergers. And even though they would be far weaker, they would be in the frequency ranges of detectability for existing and planned gravitational wave observatories.

The researchers proposed that we comb through existing data to hunt for any potential signatures of this kind of dark matter collecting around black holes. And if we don’t find what we looking for, we could still fine-tune upcoming experiments to hunt for this surprising signal.

The post Axion Dark Matter May Make Spacetime Ring appeared first on Universe Today.

Interview with Kevin Folta; News Items: Sense of Self in Robots, New Energy Secretary, Finding Planet Nine, Stress and Paranormal Belief; Who's That Noisy; Your Questions and E-mails: Dumb Idioms; Science or Fiction

If you associate yourself with Sensible Medicine, you are anti-vaccine no matter how you describe yourself.

The post Any Doctor Who Enabled RFK Jr. In Any Way Is Anti-Vaccine No Matter How They Describe Themselves first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

Most of the time the Sun is pretty well-mannered, but occasionally it’s downright unruly. It sometimes throws extremely energetic tantrums. During these events, a solar flare or a shock wave from a coronal mass ejection (CME) accelerates protons to extremely high velocities. These are called Solar Particle Events or Solar Proton Events (SPEs).

However, the exact timing of these events can be difficult to ascertain. New research has determined the date of one of the most powerful SPEs to strike Earth during the Holocene.

No one alive today has witnessed the Sun’s extreme power. But ancient people did. In the last 14,500 years, there have been several solar storms and SPEs powerful enough to damage living things and create aurorae at middle latitudes, even at the equator. Understanding the timing of these ancient events is a key part of understanding the Sun.

Powerful outbursts from the Sun are becoming a more significant threat as we expand our presence in space. They can damage satellites and pose a radiation threat to astronauts. Even the Earth’s surface isn’t safe from the most powerful SPEs which can knock out technological infrastructure like power grids and communications networks.

“If they happened today, they would have cataclysmic effects on communication technology.”

Irina Panyushkina, University of Arizona

The Sun’s most powerful outbursts seem to occur during solar maximum, the period of greatest activity during the Sun’s 11-year cycle. But there’s some uncertainty, and since SPEs can be so damaging, there’s a need to understand them better, beginning with their timing.

Only six SPEs have left their mark on Earth in about the last 14,500 years. Historical accounts can open a window into the timing of ancient SPEs, but they’re plagued by inaccuracies and inconsistencies. Fortunately, these natural events leave a trace in the natural world.

These solar outbursts create what are called Miyaki Events after the Japanese physicist Fusa Miyake. Miyake discovered that they create a sharp rise in cosmogenic isotopes due to increased cosmic rays striking Earth’s upper atmosphere. The events create carbon-14 (14C), a radioactive isotope that is present in tree rings. The events also create other isotopes like Beryllium-10 (10Be)and Chlorine-36 (36Cl) that are present in ice cores.

In new research published in Nature Communications Earth and Environment, researchers pinpointed the timing of the last SPE to strike Earth. It’s titled “The timing of the ca-660 BCE Miyake solar-proton event constrained to between 664 and 663 BCE.” The lead author is Irina Panyushkina from the University of Arizona’s Laboratory for Tree-Ring Research.

There have been several Miyake events depending on how they’re defined.

“Thanks to radiocarbon in tree-rings, we now know that six Miyake events happened over the last 14,500 years,” Panyushkina said. “If they happened today, they would have cataclysmic effects on communication technology.”

Carbon-14 continuously forms in Earth’s atmosphere because of cosmic radiation. In the atmosphere, it combines with oxygen to form CO2. “After a few months, carbon-14 will have traveled from the stratosphere to the lower atmosphere, where it is taken up by trees and becomes part of the wood as they grow,” said lead author Panyushkina.

During a Miyake event, the amount of carbon-14 spikes, and that spike is reflected in tree rings. There have been several of these events, depending on how they’re defined, and several more awaiting more rigorous confirmation. There rate of occurrence is poorly understood, but the data we have shows that they occur every 400 to 2400 years. One of them occurred around 660 BCE, and that event is the subject of much research.

“The precise positioning of a SPE in real time is extremely important for the parameterization of solar activity and forecasts,” the authors write in their research. “Notably, one of the recently confirmed SPE events does not have an exact calendar date. Multiple radionuclide evidence of an extreme SPE (or ME) event ca. 2610 BP (before 1950) more commonly referenced as ca. 660 BCE, was confirmed with high-resolution 10BE records of three ice cores from Greenland in 2019.”

The circa 660 Miyake event is different from the others. “However, the ca. 660 BCE ME has an unusual structure that is different from the short-term rapid increases in radionuclide production observed at 774–775 CE and 993–994 CE. One proposed explanation is the possible occurrence of consecutive SEPs over up to three years,” the authors explain in their research. If Miyake events can occur in such rapid succession, we need to know about it, for obvious reasons.

In this new research, the team analyzed tree rings for 14C content to generate an accurate date for the ca-660 BCE Miyake event. They focused on larch trees in arctic-alpine biomes, one in the Altai mountains and the other in the Yamal Peninsula. In these regions, larch trees are more sensitive to atmospheric changes and have clearer 14C spikes.

This figure from the research explains some of the research into the ca. 660 BCE Miyake event. a) shows variations of Carbon-14 concentrations measured in tree rings, and b) shows the locations of the samples. Image Credit: Panyushkina et al. 2024.

Panyushkina and her co-researchers examined tree rings from ancient samples, including trees buried in mud and sediment and timbers excavated during archaeological digs and measured the Carbon-14 content. Next, they correlated their findings with other research into Beryllium-10 found in ice sheets and glaciers. Beryllium-10 is also created during Miyake events. It isn’t absorbed by trees, but is deposited in ice.

“If ice cores from both the North Pole and South Pole show a spike in the isotope beryllium-10 for a particular year corresponding to increased radiocarbon in tree-rings, we know there was a solar storm,” Panyushkina said.

This sounds like a nice tidy way to determine the dates of Miyake events, but it’s not so easy. Researchers have struggled to find a pattern. Tree rings are clearly marked by growing seasons, but ice cores are not. There’s also a lag time between the creation of Carbon-14 in the atmosphere and its presence in trees, and in ice. Different trees also absorb the carbon at different times and rates, and they also store and recycle the carbon, which can influence how they serve as recorders of atmospheric CO2. These and other challenges mean that conclusions don’t jump out of the data.

But this research still has value, even if it isn’t the silver bullet when it comes to predicting these powerful solar events. The issue with the 660 BCE event is its complexity. It seems to have several spikes and declines in a short period, suggesting more complex solar behaviour than a simple single-spike storm.

“Our new 14C data defined the two-pulse duration, considerable magnitude, and the precise date of what was previously described as the event ‘around 660 BCE’,” the authors write. “We showed that the double pulse of cosmic radiation during 664—663 BCE produced a nontypical pattern of ME cosmogenic isotope production recorded at multiple locations in northern Eurasia.”

This figure from the study illustrates some of the complexity that makes pinning down the exact date of the circa 660 BCE Miyake event difficult. Different types of trees in different locations have different spikes in Carbon-14. PDF stands for probability distribution function. Image Credit: Panyushkina et al. 2024.

“The impact appears as a 2–3 year rise of Carbon-14 concentrations tailed by a 2–3-year peak (or plateau) before the signal decays,” the authors write. The Carbon-14 production in 664 BCE was 3.5 and 4.8 times greater than the 11-yr average.

What does it all mean?

There’s a lot of complexity. Different trees absorb carbon differently, the stratosphere and troposphere mix differently at different times, and growing seasons can vary significantly. “Finally, the double pulse of the 664–663 BCE ME onset and the prolonged waning of the 14C spike signal implies possible uncertainties complicating the use of this spike signal for single-year dating of archeological timbers and occurrences,” the researchers explain in their conclusion.

However, one thing is clear in all of the data. The Sun has blasted Earth with extreme SPEs in the past that are much more powerful than anything in modern time. “Extreme proton events that are hundreds or thousands of times stronger than those of modern instrumental observations may recur on the timescale of hundreds of years,” the authors write in their conclusion.

Ultimately, the tree rings can shed light on how powerful these solar storms are, but they’re not exact when it comes to dating them.

“Tree-rings give us an idea of the magnitude of these massive storms, but we can’t detect any type of pattern, so it is unlikely we’ll ever be able to predict when such an event is going to happen,” Panyushkina said. “Still, we believe our paper will transform how we search and understand the carbon-14 spike signal of extreme solar proton events in tree rings.”

The post Earth’s Old Trees Keep A Record of Powerful Solar Storms appeared first on Universe Today.

Engineers have found a way to simultaneously mitigate three types of defects in parts produced using a prominent additive manufacturing technique called laser powder bed fusion.

As part of an effort to overcome the long-term energy-storage challenge, engineers have invented a water-soluble chemical additive that improves the performance of a type of electrochemical storage called a bromide aqueous flow battery.

New research has uncovered what may be the oldest direct evidence of ancient hot water activity on Mars, revealing the planet may have been habitable at some point in its past.

I decided to go on both Bluesky and Twitter, and leave Twitter only if it goes belly up. In the meantime, I’m at my usual Twitter site ( https://x.com/Evolutionistrue?lang=en), but now have this one, too:

https://bsky.app/profile/evolutionistrue.bsky.social

And my first tweet was my latest post giving two videos of Molly Tuttle. Notice that Hili is still my avatar. If you don’t like Bluesky, just keep following me (if you do) on Twitter.

Two songs from the immensely talented bluegrass picker and singer Molly Tuttle. whyevolutionistrue.com/2024/11/22/t…

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2024-11-22T19:19:01.851Z

Some time ago I watched a video of Molly Tuttle, who plays a wicked bluegrass guitar and banjo, and has a great country voice. I immediately recognized her immense talent (along with that of her friend Billy Strings, with whom she plays here). And tbat talent has now been recognized multiple times. As Wikipedia notes:

In 2017, Tuttle was the first woman to win the International Bluegrass Music Association’s Guitar Player of the Year award. In 2018 she won the award again, along with being named the Americana Music Association’s Instrumentalist of the Year. In 2023, Tuttle won the Best Bluegrass Album for Crooked Tree and also received a nomination for the all-genre Best New Artist award at the 65th Annual Grammy Awards. Also in 2023, Tuttle and Golden Highway won International Bluegrass Music Awards for album Crooked Tree and the title track in the categories of Album of the Year and Song of the Year, respectively, while Tuttle won Female Vocalist of the Year.

But, as they say, without further ado I’ll let you hear two of her songs (along with her able bandmates), both recorded some time ago. Her musicianship is even better now than in these videos, but I think they’ll suffice.

The first is the old John Hartford song made famous by Glenn Campbell in 1968:

And of course this one’s by Neil Young, and appeared on Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s 1970 album Déjà Vu.

Earthen channels that span more than 640 kilometres show that pre-Mayan Mesoamericans built large-scale fish-trapping facilities earlier than previously thought

A rock that formed around 4.5 billion years ago on Mars before being blasted into space by a meteor strike and making its way to Earth contains telltale evidence that it was formed in the presence of hot water

Researchers developed an efficient approach for training more reliable reinforcement learning models, focusing on complex tasks that involve variability. This could enable the leverage of reinforcement learning across a wide range of applications.

A novel hydrogen sensor offers a promising solution for real-time hydrogen leak detection, addressing safety concerns in industrial applications. This sensor, made with nano-patterned cupric-oxide (CuO) nanowires (NWs) with voids, can detect hydrogen at extremely low concentrations with high response, recovery speed, and precision, significantly improving previous CuO-based sensors. It has the potential to enable safer and more reliable use of hydrogen in clean energy applications.