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We are often told to wear SPF throughout the year – but the science behind this advice is nuanced. The truth may depend on where you live

Our skin is host to a thriving community of bacteria, some of which help to restore and protect our epidermis. The hunt is now on for treatments that make the most of these allies

Within nearly every galaxy is a supermassive black hole. The beast at the heart of our galaxy contains the mass of millions of suns, while some of the largest supermassive black holes can be more than a billion solar masses. For years, it was thought that these black holes grew in mass over time, only reaching their current size after a billion years or more. But observations from the Webb telescope show that even the youngest galaxies contain massive black holes. So how could supermassive black holes grow so large so quickly? The key to the answer could be the powerful jets black holes can produce.

Although it seems counterintuitive, it is difficult for a black hole to consume matter and grow. The gravitational pull of a black hole is immensely strong, but the surrounding matter is much more likely to be trapped in orbit around the gravitational well than to fall directly in. To enter a black hole, material needs to slow down enough to fall inward. When a black hole has a jet of material speeding away from its polar region, this high-velocity plasma can pull rotational motion from the surrounding material, thus allowing it to fall into the black hole. For this reason, black holes with powerful jets also undergo the most powerful growth.

We can see many fast-growing black holes in the distant Universe as quasars, or active galactic nuclei. We know, then, that in the middle age of the cosmos, many supermassive black holes were gaining mass rapidly. One idea is that the youngest supermassive black holes also had active jets, which would allow them to gain a million solar masses or more quite quickly. But proving this is difficult.

The problem is that it’s extremely difficult to observe jets from the earliest period of the cosmos. Light from that distant time is so redshifted that their once brilliant beacon has become dim radio light. Before this recent study, the most distant jet we observed had a redshift of z = 6.1, meaning it traveled for nearly 12.8 billion years to reach us. In this new study, the team discovered a blazar with a redshift of z = 7.0, meaning it comes from a time when the Universe was just 750 million years old.

A blazar occurs when the jet of a supermassive black hole is lined up to be pointed directly at us. Since we’re looking directly into the beam, we see the jet at its most powerful. Blazars normally allow us to calculate the true intensity of a jet, but in this case, the redshift is so strong that our conclusions must be a bit more subtle.

How distant jets could be Doppler magnified. Credit: Bañados, et al

One possibility is that the jet of this particular supermassive black hole really is pointed directly our way. Based on this, the black hole is growing so quickly that it would easily gain more than a million solar masses within the first billion years of time. But it would be extremely rare for a black hole jet to point directly at us from that distance. So statistically, that would mean there are many more early black holes that are just as active and growing just as quickly. They just aren’t aligned for us to observe.

Another possibility is that the blazar isn’t quite aligned in our direction, but the cosmic expansion of space and time has focused its energy toward us over 12.9 billion years. In other words, the blazar may appear more energetic than it actually is, thanks to relativistic cosmology. But if that is the case, then the jet of this black hole is less energetic but still powerful. And statistically, that would mean most early black holes are equally powerful.

So this latest work tells us that either there was a fraction of early black holes that grew to beasts incredibly fast, or that most black holes grew quickly, beginning at a time even earlier than we can observe. In either case, it is clear that early black holes created jets, and these jets allowed the first supermassive black holes to appear early in cosmic time.

Reference: Bañados, Eduardo, et al. “A blazar in the epoch of reionization.” Nature Astronomy (2024): 1-9.

The post How Did Black Holes Grow So Quickly? The Jets appeared first on Universe Today.

It’s been called to my attention that the John Templeton Foundation (JTF) is up to mischief again. I haven’t written about it for a long time, largely because I thought it had reformed. It had largely stopped giving the $1+ million Templeton Prize to theologians and clerics, and awarding it to scientists instead—albeit scientists friendly to religion.  Further, the science that JTF was funding didn’t seem that bad or that connected to religion.

On the other hand, you’ll never see an explicitly atheist scientist get a Templeton Prize. That’s because of the history of the Foundation: John Templeton intended the billions he earned from his mutual fund to to show that science gave evidence for God. Ergo, for most of the JTF’s lifetime, the science it funded had a numinous or supernatural aspects to it. As Wikipedia notes:

The John Templeton Foundation (Templeton Foundation) is a philanthropic organization that reflects the ideas of its founder, John Templeton. Templeton became wealthy as a contrarian investor, and wanted to support progress in religious and spiritual knowledge, especially at the intersection of religion and science.

Well, the bad old days seem to be back again.  If you click on the screenshot below, you’ll see the areas that the JTF is funding in life sciences, which appear to be areas that involve infusions into biology and evolution of goal-directedness and purpose. If those things do exist in evolution, it would constitute (or so JTF thinks) evidence for God.

The JTF, as the site above stipulates, is accepting proposals in three areas of biology, so if you want a pile of dosh and are willing to sell your soul, go ahead and send in proposals on these things:

This year we would like to receive project ideas in the following topic areas:

1.) Science of purpose. We are looking for experimental and theoretical research projects that will provide insight into the purposive, goal-directed, or agential behaviors that characterize organisms and various components of living systems. Researchers who have familiarity with our ongoing work in this area are especially encouraged to apply.

2.) Epigenetic inheritance. We are interested in funding projects that elucidate fundamental genetic and epigenetic mechanisms that regulate inter- and trans-generational transmittance of biological information and health outcomes. We are particularly interested in how early life choices and environmental exposures causally impact development and the early onset of disease, and diagnostic platforms that may predict generational disease susceptibility.

3.) Other areas of interest. We also remain open to innovative ideas in other areas of basic research in the biological sciences, such as also origins of life, complexity, emergence, evolution, human development, plant resilience, and ecological health and interventions.

This is the first of two posts on the area “the science of purpose”, an area that is, frankly, nuts.  Evolution does not produce adaptations that are purposive and goal-directed, save for the production in some organisms of mentation and consciousness that can, psychologically, enact deliberately purposive behavior. But that’s limited only to a few groups of organisms  And, as you’ll see, that’s not all the JTF or the biologists it funds are talking about. What they’re referring to is the recent drive to impute a kind of teleology to nature, as if the evolution of organisms was somehow driven externally to achieve adaptive ends, and driven not by natural selection but. . . . well, by various poorly explained mechanisms. A group of biologists dedicated to non-Darwinian adaptation, and a group that contains many of the people who purport to have deposed the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis, can be seen at the site “The Third Way” (Its list of members, by invitation only, can be seen here). Not all of the researchers there have bought into the teleological aspects of evolutionary biology, but some have, and as a whole they haven’t contributed much to the advances of evolutionary biology.  Here’s what the Third Way is said to represent:

The vast majority of people believe that there are only two alternative ways to explain the origins of biological diversity. One way is Creationism that depends upon intervention by a divine Creator. That is clearly unscientific because it brings an arbitrary supernatural force into the evolution process. The commonly accepted alternative is Neo-Darwinism, which is clearly naturalistic science but ignores much contemporary molecular evidence and invokes a set of unsupported assumptions about the accidental nature of hereditary variation. Neo-Darwinism ignores important rapid evolutionary processes such as symbiogenesis, horizontal DNA transfer, action of mobile DNA and epigenetic modifications. [JAC: My response to the preceding sentence is “No it doesn’t!”] Moreover, some Neo-Darwinists have elevated Natural Selection into a unique creative force that solves all the difficult evolutionary problems without a real empirical basis. Many scientists today see the need for a deeper and more complete exploration of all aspects of the evolutionary process.

By funding these alternatives, Templeton hopes that people will, by thinking that modern evolutionary theory, or “neo-Darwinism” has been rejected, be more likely to see the hand of god in science. And although the Third Way also rejects “arbitrary supernatural forces”, many take the third way to be actions of the numinous (Intelligent Design advocates love it.)

In fact, a lot of the speculation of “Third Way” theories borders on the teleological, though religion doesn’t play an explicit role. Or, rather, the “religion” involved is to depose a neo-Darwinism seen as dogmatic and constricting. To see how close some of the “Third Way” biology comes to invoking teleology, see this short take by Larry Moran on the ideas of a Third Way member, James Shapiro (Moran had a longer review of Shapiro’s ideas in a book review, but it’s no longer online.) One excerpt from the shorter Moran:

James Shapiro is one of those scientist who think that evolutionary theory is due for a “paradigm shift.” His schtick is that mutations often involve genome rearrangements and that reorganization of the genome may be a sort of “natural genetic engineering” that cells use to direct evolution. It’s hard to figure out what Shapiro actually means and even harder to figure out his motives. I posted an earlier comment from him that suggests he is looking for a middle ground between science and Intelligent Design Creationism. Here’s part of that earlier post: The Mind of James Shapiro.

“Natural genetic engineering” is in fact teleological.

Why Templeton loves the “science of purpose,” and throws a ton of money at research in this area, is because it supposedly shows that there is more to the origin of adaptations than mutation and natural selection, and a lot more more to evolutionary change than just change in genes or regulatory sequences of DNA (ergo the emphasis on “epigenetic inheritance” above).  And that feeds into the JTF’s original aim of showing that science points to God, renamed by them as “agency” or “purpose” in the new proposals.

In fact, meet the old proposals: same as the new proposals. Below is a grant given to a group of scientists for three years by the JTF, ending in August of this year. Click to read, though I give a summary below. Note that the grant awarded amounted to $14.5 million, a huge amount of money.  JTF is rich because John Templeton was a very wealthy manager of a mutual fund, and his eponymous Foundation has plenty of money (an endowment of over $3.3 billion in 2015) to fund his desire to find purpose and God in nature. Sadly, there are too many scientists eager to glom onto this money. After all, NSF and NIH grants are hard to get these days, and so what’s the issue if, by getting JTF money, you become just another prize stallion in the Templeton stable?

Here is that grant (click to go to it):

Here’s what, according to the JTF, the $14.6 million went for. Bolding is mine:

Although biologists often use descriptive language that imputes purposiveness to living systems, many have argued that these conceptions are at best heuristic, and at worst egregious errors. However, there is a growing recognition that biological phenomena which suggest agency, directionality, or goal-directedness demand new conceptual frameworks that can translate into rigorous theoretical models and discriminating empirical tests. This project addresses the demand through a novel, interdisciplinary, large-scale program that combines philosophers, theoreticians, and experimentalists to: (i) articulate more precise concepts related to function and purpose, (ii) develop innovative formal models of agency, (iii) operationalize notions of goal-directedness for accurate measurement, and (iv) trial and implement methods and platforms to detect and manipulate directionality in living systems. Seven clusters composed of multiple distinct research groups under the leadership of a coordinator will undertake collaborative activities that include within-team investigative tasks (e.g., conceptual analysis, formal modeling, and experimental inquiry), within-cluster workshops and briefings, and across-project conferences with strategic writing enterprises and outside commentators. These collaborative activities leverage the fact that each cluster is organized around key concepts (e.g., function and goal-directedness), modeling practices, and distinctive phenomena at diverse temporal and spatial scales—behavior, development, ecology, genomics, and macroevolution—and will result in conceptual, theoretical, and empirical outputs comprising foundations for a multidisciplinary science of purpose. These foundations will foster new lines of scientific research based on an increased array of conceptual possibilities, distinctive formal modeling strategies, and next-generation experimental platforms for the discovery, observation, and manipulation of purposive phenomena.

Note that, contra the Templetonian mishgass, there is no “purpose” or “goal” of evolution, whether it be by natural selection or other mechanisms like meiotic drive or genetic drift. If natural selection operates (and that’s the only process we know that can create adaptations), then there is no ultimate goal because natural selection has no foresight. Rather, mutations that leave more copies of themselves—often by improving the ability of their carriers to thrive in their environments—outcompete other gene forms that aren’t so prolific. Evolution by natural selection is a step-by-step process that has no ultimate goal, even if a well-adapted organism, like a woodpecker, looks as if was designed. That’s why evolution can go backwards, as it did several times when land animals, which evolved from fish, returned to the seas as whales and seals.

It was in fact Darwin’s great achievement to explain the illusion of design by a Creator as the results of a materialistic step-by-step process that had no ultimate goal. Given the way selection works, how could there be a “goal”? How could there be a “purpose”?

But, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, and comrades: purpose and goals are back again. Templeton has funded their study, and apparently intends to continue to funding their study.

In the next post, which will be either today or tomorrow depending on how much other work I get done, I’ll call your attention to a new paper that highlights why injecting “purpose” and “goal directedness” into evolution is intellectually vacuous and empirically unproductive.  Although I’m not surprised that Templeton is pushing this area, I am surprised at the number of scientists who are willing to jump on the purpose bus. I can explain this only by observing that one of the best ways you can get noticed in science is to depose an existing paradigm.

Here’s the header of the JTF’s homepage. Are those praying hands I see? And is that the robe of a Buddhist monk?

A large number of damaging and deadly hurricanes, volcanic eruptions, wildfires, floods and droughts this year were photographed from land, air and space

Understanding how stress can affect your skin could lead to reductions in conditions like acne and eczema

Smoke lofted into the upper atmosphere on towering pyrocumulonimbus clouds can spread around the globe and affect the climate

In the quest for better skin, we are faced with an overwhelming choice of creams and serums to enhance our appearance. Here's what works – and what doesn't

The latest flap over drone sightings in New Jersey and other states in the North East appears to be – essentially nothing. Or rather, it’s a classic example of a mass panic. There are reports of “unusual” drone activity, which prompts people to look for drones, which results in people seeing drones or drone-like objects and therefore reporting them, leading to more drone sightings. Lather, rinse, repeat. The news media happily gets involved to maximize the sensationalism of the non-event. Federal agencies eventually comment in a “nothing to see here” style that just fosters more speculation. UFO and other fringe groups confidently conclude that whatever is happening is just more evidence for whatever they already believed in.

I am not exempting myself from the cycle either. Skeptics are now part of the process, eventually explaining how the whole thing is a classic example of some phenomenon of human self-deception, failure of critical thinking skills, and just another sign of our dysfunctional media ecosystem. But I do think this is a healthy part of the media cycle. One of the roles that career skeptics play is to be the institution memory for weird stuff like this. We can put such events rapidly into perspective because we have studied the history and likely been through numerous such events before.

Before I get to that bigger picture, here is a quick recap. In November there were sightings in New Jersey of “mysterious” drone activity. I don’t know exactly what made them mysterious, but it lead to numerous reportings of other drone sightings. Some of those sightings were close to a military base, Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, and some were concerned of a security threat. Even without the UFO/UAP angle, there is concern about foreign powers using drones for spying or potentially as a military threat. This is perhaps enhanced by all the reporting of the major role that drones are playing in the Russian-Ukraine war. Some towns in Southern New Jersey have banned the use of drones temporarily, and the FAA has also restricted some use.

A month after the first sightings Federal officials have stated that the sightings that have been investigated have all turned out to be drones, planes mistaken for drones, and even stars mistaken for drones. None have turned out to be anything mysterious or nefarious. So the drones, it turns out, are mostly drones.

Also in November (which may or may not be related) a CT police officer came forward and reported a “UFO” sighting he had in 2022. Local news helpfully created a “reenactment” of the encounter (to accompany their breathless reporting), which is frankly ridiculous. The officer, Robert Klein, did capture the encounter on his smart phone video. The video shows – a hovering light in the distance. That is all – 100% consistent with a drone.

So here’s the bigger picture – as technology evolves, so does sightings to match that technology. Popular expectations also match the sightings. Around the turn of the century it was anticipated that someone would invest a flying machine, so there were lots of false sightings of such machines. After the first “flying saucer” was reported in 1947, UFO sightings often looked like flying saucers. As military aircraft increased in number and capability, sightings would track along with them, being more common near military air bases. When ultralight aircraft became a thing, people reports UFOs of silent floating craft (I saw one myself and was perplexed until I read in the news what it was). As rocket launches become more common, so do sightings of rocket launches mistaken for “UFOs”. There was the floating candle flap from over a decade ago – suddenly many people were releasing floating candles for celebrations, and people were reporting floating candle “UFOs”.

And now we are seeing a dramatic increase in drone activity.  Drones are getting better, cheaper, and more common, so we should be having more drone sightings. This is not a mystery.

Interestingly there is one technological development that does not lead to more sightings but does lead to more evidence – smart phones. Most people are now walking around all the time with a camera and video. Just like with the CT cop, we not only have his sensational report but an accompanying video. What does this dramatic increase in photo and video evidence show? Mundane objects and blurry nothings. What do they not show? Unambiguous alien spacecraft. This is the point at which alien true-believers insert some form of special pleading to explain away the lack of objective evidence.

This pattern, of sightings tracking with technology, goes beyond alien activity. We see the same thing with ghost photos. It turns out that the specific way in which ghosts manifest on photographic film is highly dependent on camera technology. What we are actually seeing is different kinds of camera artifacts resulting from specific camera technology, and those artifacts being interpreted as ghosts or something paranormal. So back in the day when it was possible to accidentally create a double-exposure, we had lots of double-exposure ghosts. Those cameras that can create the “golden door” illusion because of their shutter created golden door phenomena. Those cameras with camera straps create camera strap ghosts. When high-powered flashes became common we started to see lots of flashback ghosts. Now we are seeing lots of AI generated fakes.

All of this is why it is important to study and understand history. Often those enamored of the paranormal or the notion of aliens are seeing the phenomenon in a tiny temporal bubble. It seems like this is all new and exciting, and major revelations are right around the corner. Of course it has seemed this way for decades, or even hundreds of years for some phenomena. Meanwhile it’s the same old thing. This was made obvious to me when I first read Sagan’s 1972 book, UFOs: A Scientific Debate. I read this three decades after it was first published – and virtually nothing had changed in the UFO community. It was deja vu all over again. I had the same reaction to the recent Pentagon UFO thing – same people selling the same crappy evidence and poor logic.

New cases are occasionally added, and as I said as the technology evolves so does some of the evidence. But what does not change is people, who are still making the same poor arguments based on flimsy evidence and dodgy logic.

 

 

The post The Jersey Drones Are Likely Drones first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.

The songs of male humpback whales seem to become more complex in the months before they look for a mate, suggesting a rehearsal period may be important for good performance

The geometric Langlands conjecture poses deep questions for mathematicians, and a 1000-page proof published this year has left them both celebrating and puzzled

I wish I didn't have to write this post, but the press won't stop referring to RFK Jr. as a "vaccine skeptic." He is not. He is antivax.

The post Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is NOT a “vaccine skeptic.” He is antivax. Period. first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

The black hole information paradox has puzzled physicists for decades. New research shows how quantum connections in spacetime itself may resolve the paradox, and in the process leave behind a subtle signature in gravitational waves.

For a long time we thought black holes, as mysterious as they were, didn’t cause any trouble. Information can’t be created or destroyed, but when objects fall below the event horizons, the information they carry with them is forever locked from view. Crucially, it’s not destroyed, just hidden.

But then Stephen Hawking discovered that black holes aren’t entirely black. They emit a small amount of radiation and eventually evaporate, disappearing from the cosmic scene entirely. But that radiation doesn’t carry any information with it, which created the famous paradox: when the black hole dies, where does all its information go?

One solution to this paradox is known as non-violent nonlocality. This takes advantage of a broader version of quantum entanglement, the “spooky action at a distance” that can tie together particles. But in the broader picture, aspects of spacetime itself become entangled with each other. This means that whatever happens inside the black hole is tied to the structure of spacetime outside of it.

Usually spacetime is only altered during violent processes, like black hole mergers or stellar explosions. But this effect is much quieter, just a subtle fingerprint on the spacetime surrounding an event horizon.

If this hypothesis is true, the spacetime around black holes carries tiny little perturbations that aren’t entirely random; instead, the variations would be correlated with the information inside the black hole. Then when the black hole disappears, the information is preserved outside of it, resolving the paradox.

In a recent paper appearing in the journal preprint server arXiv, but not yet peer-reviewed, a pair of researchers at Caltech investigated this intriguing hypothesis to explore how we might be able to test it.

The researchers found that these signatures in spacetime also leave an imprint in the gravitational waves when black holes merge. These imprints are incredibly tiny, so small that we are not yet able to detect them with existing gravitational wave experiments. But they do have a very unique structure that stands on top of the usual wave pattern, making them potentially observable.

The next generation of gravitational wave detectors, which aim to come online in the next decade, might have enough sensitivity to tease out this signal. If they see it, it would be tremendous, as it would finally point to a clear solution of the troubling paradox, and open up a new understanding of both the structure of spacetime and the nature of quantum nonlocality.

The post Quantum Correlations Could Solve the Black Hole Information Paradox appeared first on Universe Today.

In April 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration made history when it released the first-ever image of a black hole. The image captured the glow of the accretion disk surrounding the supermassive black hole (SMBH) at the center of the M87 galaxy, located 54 million light-years away. Because of its appearance, the disk that encircles this SMBH beyond its event horizon (composed of gas, dust, and photons) was likened to a “ring of fire.” Since then, the EHT has been actively imaging several other SMBH, including Sagittarius A* at the center of the Milky Way!

In addition, the EHT has revealed additional details about M87, like the first-ever image of a photon ring and a picture that combines the SMBH and its relativistic jet emanating from its center. Most recently, the EHT released the results of its latest observation campaign. These observations revealed a spectacular flare emerging from M87’s powerful relativistic jet. This flare released a tremendous amount of energy in multiple wavelengths, including the first high-energy gamma-ray outburst observed in over a decade.

The EHT is an international collaboration of researchers from thirteen universities and institutes worldwide that combines data from over 25 ground-based and space-based telescopes. The research, which was recently published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, was conducted by the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration, the Event Horizon Telescope- Multi-wavelength science working group, the Fermi Large Area Telescope Collaboration, the H.E.S.S. Collaboration, the MAGIC Collaboration, the VERITAS Collaboration, and the EAVN Collaboration.

The observatories and telescopes that participated in the 2018 multiband campaign to detect the high-energy gamma-ray flare from the M87* black hole. Credits: EHT Collaboration/Fermi-LAT Collaboration/H.E.S.S. Collaboration/MAGIC Collaboration/VERITAS Collaboration/EAVN Collaboration

The study presents the data from the second EHT observational campaign conducted in April 2018 that obtained nearly simultaneous spectra of the galaxy with the broadest wavelength coverage ever collected. Giacomo Principe, the paper coordinator, is a researcher at the University of Trieste associated with the Instituto Nazionale di Astrofisica (INAF) and the Institute Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN). As he explained in a recent EHT press release:

“We were lucky to detect a gamma-ray flare from M87 during this EHT multi-wavelength campaign. This marks the first gamma-ray flaring event observed in this source in over a decade, allowing us to precisely constrain the size of the region responsible for the observed gamma-ray emission. Observations—both recent ones with a more sensitive EHT array and those planned for the coming years—will provide invaluable insights and an extraordinary opportunity to study the physics surrounding M87’s supermassive black hole. These efforts promise to shed light on the disk-jet connection and uncover the origins and mechanisms behind the gamma-ray photon emission.”

The second EHT and multi-wavelength campaign leveraged data from more than two dozen high-profile observational facilities, including NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope-Large Area Telescope (Fermi-LAT), the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR), the Chandra X-ray Observatory, and the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory. This was combined with data from the world’s three largest Imaging Atmospheric Cherenkov Telescope arrays – the High Energy Stereoscopic System (H.E.S.S.), the Major Atmospheric Gamma-Ray Imaging Cherenkov (MAGIC), and the Very Energetic Radiation Imaging Telescope Array System (VERITAS).

During the campaign, the Fermi space telescope gathered data indicating an increase in high-energy gamma rays using its LAT instrument. Chandra and NuSTAR followed by collecting high-quality data in the X-ray band, while the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) and the East Asia VLBI Network (EAVN) obtained data in radio frequencies. The flare these observations revealed lasted approximately three days and occupied a region roughly three light-days in size, about 170 times the distance between the Sun and the Earth (~170 AU).

Light curve of the gamma-ray flare (bottom) and collection of quasi-simulated images of the M87 jet (top) at various scales obtained in radio and X-ray during the 2018 campaign. Credits: EHT Collaboration/Fermi-LAT Collaboration/H.E.S.S. Collaboration/MAGIC Collaboration/VERITAS Collaboration/EAVN Collaboration

The flare itself was well above the energies typically detected around black holes and showed a significant variation in the position angle of the asymmetry of the black hole’s ‘event horizon’ and its position. As Daryl Haggard, a professor at McGill University and the co-coordinator of the EHT multi-wavelength working group, explained, this suggests a physical relation between these structures on very different scales:

“In the first image obtained during the 2018 observational campaign, we saw that the emission along the ring was not homogeneous, instead it showed asymmetries (i.e., brighter areas). Subsequent observations conducted in 2018 and related to this paper confirmed that finding, highlighting that the asymmetry’s position angle had changed.”

“How and where particles are accelerated in supermassive black hole jets is a long-standing mystery,” added University of Amsterdam professor Sera Markoff, another EHT multi-wavelength working group co-coordinator. “For the first time, we can combine direct imaging of the near event horizon regions during gamma-ray flares caused by particle acceleration events and thus test theories about the flare origins.”

This discovery could create opportunities for future research and lead to breakthroughs in our understanding of the Universe.

Further Reading: EHT, Astronomy & Astrophysics

The post M87 Releases a Rare and Powerful Outburts of Gamma-ray Radiation appeared first on Universe Today.

Almost every large galaxy has a supermassive black hole churning away at its core. In most cases, these black holes spin in concert with their galaxy, like the central hub of a cosmic wagon wheel. But on December 18, 2024, NASA researchers announced they had discovered a galaxy whose black hole appears to have been turned on its side, spinning out of alignment with its host galaxy.

The galaxy, NGC 5084, was discovered centuries ago by German astronomer William Herschel, but it took new techniques, recently developed at NASA’s Ames Research Center, to reveal the unusual properties of the black hole.

The new method is called SAUNAS (Selective Amplification of Ultra Noisy Astronomical Signal). It enables astronomers to tease out low-brightness X-ray emissions that were previously drowned out by other radiation sources.

When the team put their new technique to the test by combing through old archival data from the Chandra X-ray observatory – a space telescope that acts as the X-ray counterpart to Hubble’s visible-light observations – they found their first clue that something unusual was going on in NGC 5084.

Four large X-ray plumes, made visible by the new technique, appeared in the data. These streams of plasma extend out from the centre of the galaxy, two in line with the galactic plane, and two extending above and below.

While plumes of hot, charged gas are not unusual above or below the plane of large galaxies, it is unusual to find four of them, rather than just one or two, and even more unusual to find them in line with the galactic plane.

NGC 5084, as seen by in visible light. Adam Block/Mount Lemmon SkyCenter/University of Arizona.

To make sure that they weren’t just seeing some error or artifact in the Chandra data, they started looking more closely at other images of the galaxy, including both the Hubble space telescope and the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA).

These observations revealed a dusty inner disk spinning in the centre of the galaxy at a 90-degree angle to the rest of NGC 5084.

The team also looked at the galaxy in radio wavelengths using the NRAO’s Expanded Very Large Array. All together, these observations painted a picture of a very strange galactic core.

“It was like seeing a crime scene with multiple types of light,” said Ames research scientist Alejandro Serrano Borlaff, lead author of the paper published this week in The Astrophysical Journal. “Putting all the pictures together revealed that NGC 5084 has changed a lot in its recent past.”

Borlaff’s coauthor and astrophysicist at Ames, Pamela Marcum, added that “detecting two pairs of X-ray plumes in one galaxy is exceptional. The combination of their unusual, cross-shaped structure and the ‘tipped-over,’ dusty disk gives us unique insights into this galaxy’s history.”

The plumes of plasma suggest that the galaxy has been disturbed in some way during its lifetime. It might be explained, for example, by a collision with another galaxy, which caused the black hole to tip on its side.

With this discovery, SAUNAS has demonstrated that it can bring new life to old data, uncovering new surprises in familiar galaxies. This surprise twist on a galaxy we’ve known about since 1785 offers tantalizing hope that there might be other weird and wonderful discoveries to come, even in places we thought we’d seen everything.

Learn more:

“NASA Finds ‘Sideways’ Black Hole Using Legacy Data, New Techniques.” NASA.

Alejandro S. Borlaff et al. “SAUNAS. II. Discovery of Cross-shaped X-Ray Emission and a Rotating Circumnuclear Disk in the Supermassive S0 Galaxy NGC 5084.” The Astrophysical Journal.

The post Astronomers Find a Black Hole Tipped Over on its Side appeared first on Universe Today.

I’ve mentioned before Robert Sapolsky’s recent book Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will, a 528-page behemoth that at times is a bit of a slog and at other times an inspiration. (See here, here, here, and here for previous posts about it.) I found his argument against libertarian free will convincing, but of course I already believed that there is no good argument for libertarian (“you-could-have-done-otherwise”) free will (LFW), so I was on his side from the outset. I’m a hard determinist, and that’s based on seeing that the laws of physics obtain everywhere. But people are still maintaining not just that we can confect some form of free will despite the truth of determinism (these people are called “compatibilists”), but that we have real libertarian free will. They are wrong.

The video below, arguing for LFW, came in an email from Quillette touting their most popular articles of 2024.  But this was a short (4.5-minute) video, not an article, and I don’t think the video was one of the top items. Perhaps the note referred to a Quillette article by Stuart Doyle (below) on which the video is based, but that article was published in 2023.

At any rate, listen to the video first, and then, if you want to see what I consider an unconvincing argument against free will (though it does make some fair criticisms of Determined), click on the headline below to read Doyle’s argument that we have “not disproven free will.”

The narrator of the video isn’t named, but she pretty much parrots what’s in Doyle’s essay, emphasizing an argument for free will that Doyle considers dispositive, but to me seems irrelevant.

You may notice some problems with the “rebuttal” described in the video. For example, it seems irrelevant to argue that “just because a neuron doesn’t have free will doesn’t mean that the bearer of a collection of neurons (a person) doesn’t have free will.”  This is an argument that the emergent property of LFW can still appear even if neurons themselves behave according to physical law (a large argument in Sapolsky’s book).  Also, if quantum physics is truly and fundamentally unpredictable (and we don’t know this for sure), that itself, says the narrator, poses a problem for free will, because it means that, at any given moment, a quantum event may change your behavior.

There are two problems with the quantum-indeterminacy argument. First, nobody ever maintained that quantum events like the movement of an electron can result from one’s volition (“will”), so unpredictability at a given moment does not prove volition. Further, we don’t even know (and many of us doubt) that a quantum event can change human behavior or decisions on a macro level. Some people have calculated that it can’t.  So the whole issue of quantum unpredictability is irrelevant to the main problem: whether, at a given moment, you can, through your own agency, have behaved or decided differently.

This brings up the problem of predictability. The narrator’s (and Doyle’s) argument is that if you cannot predict someone’s behavior or decision—even with perfect knowledge of everything—then we have free will. As I just said, quantum physics may cause such fundamental unpredictability, but doesn’t support the notion that we have LFW  Yet the video and Doyle suggest there is another form of fundamental unpredictability that can cause a lack of predictability despite perfect physical knowledge: computational undecidability. Both the narrator and Doyle accuse Sapolsky of complete ignorance of this concept, which, they say, constitutes “a major flaw in Sapolsky’s argument.”  The narrator says that if human behavior is fundamentally unpredictable, then it supports the idea that free will exists. The premise of this criticism is, of course, is that if you can’t predict human behavior and decisions, even with perfect physical knowledge, then you can’t say that we lack free will. But these arguments using predictability are flimsy arguments against determinism, and, in fact, we’ll never have the perfect knowledge we need to predict behavior.

The problem is that quantum mechanics can in principle wreck perfect predictability of behavior, but that possibility doesn’t support free will. So does “computational undecidability”, another thing that impedes prediction, leave room for free will? I don’t think so (see below).

 

The essay by Stuart Doyle on which this video is based can be accessed by clicking the link below, or you can find it (archived here). Doyle is a graduate student in psychology at the University of Kansas.

Let me start by saying that Doyle’s essay, while it makes its points clearly and strongly, seems almost mean, as if Doyle takes great joy in telling us how stupid Sapolsky is.  And this is coming from someone (me) who’s been accused of the same thing. (I plead not guilty, at least for my published work.). But for a scholar publishing a rebuttal on a major site, it seems to me uncharitable to say stuff like this:

Sapolsky’s conclusions about morality and politics stand on nothing beyond his personal tastes. His book was marketed with such authoritative headlines as “Stanford scientist, after decades of study, concludes: We don’t have free will.” In contrast to the hype, Determined is ultimately a collection of partial arguments, conjoined incoherently. And Robert Sapolsky is to blame.

Sapolsky is to blame? Well, yes, of course he is, he’s the author, but the concept of blaming someone for writing a book they don’t like, and and accusing them of incoherence (I disagree) is not civil discourse. But let’s move on.

The observation that every object in the universe obeys physical law does directly imply that there is no amorphous “will” that can affect the laws of physics, something that physicist Sean Carroll (a compatibilist) has emphasized. To me, this puts the onus on those who accept LFW to tell us what aspect of human volition is independent of the laws of physics.What form of nonphysical magic can change the output of our neurons? So far, nobody has done this.  Thus, to a large extent, I think, one can tentatively accept determinism simply from knowing that every physical object obeys well-known laws and, as Carroll has written, “The laws underlying the physics of everyday life are completely understood.”  Carroll:

All we need to account for everything we see in our everyday lives are a handful of particles — electrons, protons, and neutrons — interacting via a few forces — the nuclear forces, gravity, and electromagnetism — subject to the basic rules of quantum mechanics and general relativity. You can substitute up and down quarks for protons and neutrons if you like, but most of us don’t notice the substructure of nucleons on a daily basis. That’s a remarkably short list of ingredients, to account for all the marvelous diversity of things we see in the world.

So yes, Carroll is a determinist in a way that refutes libertarian free will, but in the link saying he’s a compatibilist, you’ll see that he says that we have a sort of free will instantiated in the emergent properties of humans acting as agents and expressing preferences. (Of course our tastes and preferences are also formed in our brain by the laws of physics.) Well, there is no real emergence that defies the laws of physics: emergence may not be predictable from lower-level phenomena, but it is consistent and derives from  lower-level phenomena. Saying, as Doyle does, that “The ‘mechanism’ that produces deliberative choices is the whole person” is to say nothing that refutes determinism.

As I reread Doyle’s paper, I realized that although he does point out some contradictions in Sapolsky’s arguments, Doyle does nothing to dispel determinism.  What appears to be the central contention of his essay is that there is another way that physical objects can behave unpredictably beyond quantum mechanics, and that way is computational decidability. But that supports LFW no more than does any unpredictability of quantum mechanics.

Here’s what Doyle says:

So what could give us the ability to surprise Laplace’s demon? Computational undecidability. This is a term describing a system that cannot be predicted, given complete knowledge of its present state. This fundamental unpredictability shows up in algorithmic computation, formal mathematical systems, and dynamical systems. Though an unpredictable dynamical system may evoke the concept of chaos, undecidability is a different sort of unpredictability. As described by one of the greatest living information theorists, C.H. Bennett:

For a dynamical system to be chaotic means that it exponentially amplifies ignorance of its initial condition; for it to be undecidable means that essential aspects of its long-term behavior—such as whether a trajectory ever enters a certain region—though determined, are unpredictable even from total knowledge of the initial condition.

If a system exhibits undecidability, then it is unpredictable even to Laplace’s demon, while a system that is merely chaotic is perfectly predictable to the demon. Chaos is only unpredictable because the initial conditions are not perfectly known. So it would be fair to dismiss that kind of unpredictability as mere ignorance—an epistemological issue, not an ontological reality. But the delineation between the epistemic and the ontic falls apart when we talk about what Laplace’s demon can’t know. An issue is “merely” epistemological when there is a fact of the matter, but the fact is unknowable. There actually is no fact about how an undecidable system will behave until it behaves. For a fact to exist, it must be in reference to some aspect of reality. But nothing about present reality could ground a fact about the future behavior of an undecidable system. In contrast, the exact actual state of present reality grounds facts about the future of chaotic systems. We just can’t know the exact actual state of present reality, thus unpredictability is “merely” epistemological in the case of chaos, but not in the case of undecidability.

Arguably, human behavior is undecidable, not just chaotic. And that would mean that human choice is free in exactly the way we’d want it to be; determined—by our own whole selves, with no fact of the matter of what we’ll choose before we choose it. But Sapolsky seems unaware of undecidability as a concept. He mislabels cellular automata as chaotic, rather than recognizing the truth that they exhibit undecidability. This is a major factual error on Sapololsky’s part.

First of all, from what I’ve read of computational undecidability, it is a phenomenon not of physical objects, but of  philosophy combined with mathematical concepts and models. As Wikipedia says (and yes, I’ve read more than that article):

There are two distinct senses of the word “undecidable” in contemporary use. The first of these is the sense used in relation to Gödel’s theorems, that of a statement being neither provable nor refutable in a specified deductive system. The second sense is used in relation to computability theory and applies not to statements but to decision problems, which are countably infinite sets of questions each requiring a yes or no answer. Such a problem is said to be undecidable if there is no computable function that correctly answers every question in the problem set. The connection between these two is that if a decision problem is undecidable (in the recursion theoretical sense) then there is no consistent, effective formal system which proves for every question A in the problem either “the answer to A is yes” or “the answer to A is no”.

Two points here. First, Doyle gives not one example of a biological system in which “computational undecidability” would obtain.  If there was one, why didn’t he mention it? It seems to me solely a mathematical/logical concept, and my (admittedly cursory) readings have turned up nothing in biology or physics that seems “computationally undecidable”, much less in a way that would give us free will.

Second, even if there is a fundamental and non-quantum form of unpredictability in physics and biology, that doesn’t open up the possibility of free will. That would depend on whether our “will” could, in some non-physical way, affect the behavior of molecules. If it cannot happen with quantum mechanics, then how can it happen with computational undecidability? Unless Doyle tells us how this mathematical/logical idea can somehow affect our behavior according to our “will”, he has no argument against determinism and thus has no argument for free will.

Now it’s true that belief in “physical determinism—folding into that term quantum and other unpredictable effects not affected by our volition)—is largely a conclusion from observing nature. But just because we cannot absolutely prove determinism of behavior from science, we can still increase determinism’s priors by various experiments. These include recent studies showing that you can predict, using brain scanning, binary decisions that people make before they are conscious of having made them. For example, if people are given a choice of adding or subtracting two numbers, scanning their brains shows that you can, with substantial probability (60-70%), predict whether they’ll add or subtract up to ten seconds before they are conscious of having made a choice. And this is from crude methods of measuring brain activity (e.g., fMRI). Perhaps by measuring individual neurons or groups of neurons we could predict even better. But the experiments so far imply that decisions are made before people are conscious of them, and that raises the Bayesian priors that people’s behaviors are determined by physics, not by their “will”.

And there are various other experiments showing that you can both increase or decrease people’s sense of volition.  Electrical stimulation of the brain can make people think that they made a decision when in fact it’s purely the result of stimulating certain neurons. This causes people to make up stories of why they did things like raise their hand when a part of their brain is stimulated (“I decided to wave at that nurse”). But that sense of volition is bogus. This kind of post facto confabulation, which occurs very soon after you decide something or do something, is what makes us think what we have LFW. Further, there may be evolutionary reasons why we think we have libertarian free will, but I won’t get into those. Suffice it to say that I think that our feeling of having LFW is merely a very powerful illusion—an illusion that may have been installed in our brains by natural selection.

On the other hand, you can make people think that they didn’t have volition when in fact they did. A Ouija board is one example: people unconsciously move the “cursor” around to make words when they think that it’s moving independently of their will.  There are other experiments like these, all showing that you can either strengthen or weaken people’s sense of volition and will using various psychological tricks.  And they all go to refute the idea of libertarian free will

So yes, I think Sapolsky is right. His determinism agrees with nearly all the scientists (including compatibilists) who think that the notion of libertarian free will is bogus. To think otherwise is to believe that there is some kind of non-physical mental magic that can change the laws of physics.

One final point. Arguments about free will are not just philosophical wheel-spinning, for they play directly into an important part of society: reward and punishment—especially punishment. If the legal system truly embraced determinism of behavior, we could still have punishment, but it would be very different. We would punish to keep bad people off the streets, to give people a chance for rehabilitation (if they can be rehabilitated), and to deter others.  But what we would not have is retributive punishment: punishment for having made the wrong choice.

Legal systems are grounded on the notion that we are morally responsible, but under determinism we’re not. Yes, we can be responsible for an act, but “moral” responsibility is intimately connected with libertarian free will; it’s the idea that we have the ability, at any given time, to act either morally or immorally (or make any any other alternative decision, even if it doesn’t involve morality). Yes, I know there are some who think that the justice system already implicitly accepts determinism, but they are wrong. For if it did, we wouldn’t have any form of retributive punishment, including capital punishment.

As for rewarding good behavior, well, yes, you couldn’t have done otherwise than, say, saved a drowning person. But rewarding people who do good is a spur for other people to do good.  Even if the rewarded people don’t “deserve” plaudits in the sense that their accomplishments didn’t come from LFW, handing out rewards for things that society approves of is simply a good thing to do—for society.

Oh, a p.s.  Because people feel so strongly that they do have libertarian free will, I have faced more opposition when touting determinism than when touting the truth of evolution. As I always say, “It’s much harder to convince a free-willer of the truth of determinism than to convince a creationist of the truth of evolution.”  People feel so strongly that they have LFW that I have suffered two unpleasant consequences for touting determinism. I’ve told these stories before, but a big jazz musician nearly attacked me for implying that his solos were not truly extemporaneous, and that he could not have played a different solo, and on another occasion an old friend kicked me out of his house because he couldn’t abide the notion of determinism. No creationist has ever treated me in those ways!

This being Sunday, John Avise is here with some pictures, and remember that he’s moved on to butterflies. John’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

First, I’d like to wish all WEIT readers a Merry Christmas, a Happy Hanukkah, a Joyous Coynezaa, or whatever else you may be celebrating during this special season.  This week continues the series on butterflies that I’ve photographed in North America.  I’m continuing to go down my list of species in alphabetical order by common name.

Bramble Green Hairstreak (Callophrys dumetorum):

Brazilian Skipper (Calpodes ethlius), underwing:

Brown Elfin, Callophrys augustinus:

Cabbage White (Pieris rapae), male:

Cabbage White, female:

Cabbage White, underwing:

California Dogface (Zerene eurydice), male underwing:

JAC: This butterfly was on a stamp:

Bureau of Engraving and Printing. Designed by Stanley Galli., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

California Dogface female underwing:

California Dogface, male upperwing:

California Dogface, female upperwing:

California Dogface, larvae on False Indigo Bush (Amorpha fruticosa):

California Hairstreak (Satyrium californica):

California Ringlet (Coenonympha california), dark morph:

California Ringlet, light morph:

California Ringlet, mating pair:

If pro-RFK Jr. propaganda wins the day, I am confident we will soon find out a tough truth- MAHA is all about RFK and has everything to do with vaccines.

The post Dr. Joseph Marine: “MAHA is More Than RFK and Has Little to do With Vaccines” first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

Through the Artemis Program, NASA will send the first astronauts to the Moon since the Apollo Era before 2030. They will be joined by multiple space agencies, like the ESA and China, who plan to send astronauts (and “taikonauts”) there for the first time. Beyond this, all plan to build permanent habitats in the South Pole-Aitken Basin and the necessary infrastructure that will lead to a permanent human presence. This presents many challenges, the most notable being those arising from the nature of the lunar environment.

Aside from the extremes in temperature, a 14-day diurnal cycle, and the airless environment, there’s the issue of lunar regolith (aka moondust). In addition to being coarse and jagged, lunar regolith sticks to everything because it is electrostatically charged. Because of how this dust plays havoc with astronaut health, equipment, and machinery, NASA is developing technologies to mitigate dust buildup. Seven of these experiments will be tested during a flight test using a Blue Origin New Shepard rocket to evaluate their ability to mitigate lunar dust.

Another major problem with lunar regolith is how it gets kicked up and distributed by spacecraft plumes. With essentially no atmosphere and lower gravity (16.5% of Earth’s), this dust can remain aloft for extended periods of time. Its jagged nature, resulting from billions of years of meteor and micrometeoroid impacts and a total lack of weathering, is abrasive to any surface it comes into contact with, ranging from spacesuits and equipment to human skin, eyes, and lungs. It will also build up on solar panels, preventing missions from drawing enough power to survive a lunar night.

In addition, it can also cause equipment to overheat as it coats thermal radiators and accumulates on windows, camera lenses, and visors, making it harder to see, navigate, and acquire accurate images. Kristen John, the Lunar Surface Innovation Initiative technical integration lead at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, said in a NASA press release: “The fine grain nature of dust contains particles that are smaller than the human eye can see, which can make a contaminated surface appear to look clean.”

Addressing the Problem

These technologies were developed by NASA’s Game Changing Development program within the agency’s Space Technology Mission Directorate (STMD). The “Lunar Gravity Simulation via Suborbital Rocket” flight test will study regolith mechanics and lunar dust transport in a simulated lunar gravity environment. The payload includes projects for mitigating and cleaning dust using multiple strategies. They include:

ClothBot:
This compact robot is designed to simulate and measure how dust behaves in a pressurized environment, which astronauts could bring back after conducting Extravehicular Activities (EVAs). The robot relies on pre-programmed motions that simulate astronauts’ movements when removing their spacesuits (aka “doffing”), releasing a small dose of lunar regolith simulant. A laser-illuminated imaging system will then capture the dust flow in real-time while sensors record the size and number of particles.

Electrostatic Dust Lofting (EDL):
The EDL will examine how lunar dust is “lofted” (kicked up) when it becomes electrostatically charged to improve models on dust lofting. During the lunar gravity phase of the flight, a dust sample will be released that the EDL will illuminate using a UV light source, causing the particles to become charged. The dust will then pass through a sheet laser as it rises from the surface while the EDL observes and records the results. The EDL’s camera will continue to record the dust until the mission ends, even after the lunar gravity phase ends and the UV light is shut off.

The Lunar Lab and Regolith Testbeds at NASA’s Ames Research Center. Credit: NASA/Uland Wong.

Hermes Lunar-G:
The Hermes Lunar-G project, developed by NASA, Texas A&M, and Texas Space Technology Applications and Research (T-STAR), is based on a facility (Hermes) that previously operated on the International Space Station (ISS). Like its predecessor, the Lunar-G project will rely on repurposed Hermes hardware to study lunar regolith simulants. This will be done using four canisters containing compressed lunar dust simulants. When the flight enters its lunar gravity phase, these simulants will decompress and float around in the canisters while high-speed cameras and sensors capture data. The results will be compared to microgravity data from the ISS and similar flight experiments.

Dust Mitigation Strategies

The data obtained by these projects will provide information on regolith generation rates, transport, and mechanics that will help scientists refine computational models. This will allow mission planners and designers to develop better strategies for dust mitigation for future missions to the Moon and Mars. Already, this challenge informs several aspects of NASA’s technological developments, ranging from In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) and construction to transportation and surface power. Said John:

“Learning some of the fundamental properties of how lunar dust behaves and how lunar dust impacts systems has implications far beyond dust mitigation and environments. Advancing our understanding of the behavior of lunar dust and advancing our dust mitigation technologies benefits most capabilities planned for use on the lunar surface.”

The test flight and vehicle enhancements that will enable the simulation of lunar gravity are being funded through NASA’s Flight Opportunities program.

Further Reading: NASA

The post NASA is Developing Solutions for Lunar Housekeeping’s Biggest Problem: Dust! appeared first on Universe Today.

New research suggests that our best hopes for finding existing life on Mars isn’t on the surface, but buried deep within the crust.

Several years ago NASA’s Curiosity rover measured traces of methane in the Martian atmosphere at levels several times the background. But a few months later, the methane disappeared, only for it to reappear again later in the year. This discovery opened up the intriguing possibility of life still clinging to existence on Mars, as that could explain the seasonal variability in the presence of methane.

But while Mars was once home to liquid water oceans and an abundant atmosphere, it’s now a desolate wasteland. What kind of life could possibly call the red planet home? Most life on Earth wouldn’t survive long in those conditions, but there is a subgroup of Earthly life that might possibly find Mars a good place to live.

These are the methanogens, a type of single-celled organism that consume hydrogen for energy and excrete methane as a waste product. Methanogens can be found in all sorts of otherwise-inhospitable places on Earth, and something like them might be responsible for the seasonal variations in methane levels on Mars.

In a recent paper submitted for publication in the journal AstroBiology, a team of scientists scoured the Earth for potential analogs to Martian environments, searching for methanogens thriving in conditions similar to what might be found on Mars.

The researchers found three potential Mars-like conditions on Earth where methanogens make a home. The first is deep in the crust, sometimes to a depth of several kilometers, where tiny cracks in rocks allow for liquid water to seep in. The second is lakes buried under the Antarctic polar ice cap, which maintain their liquid state thanks to the immense pressures of the ice above them. And the last is super-saline, oxygen-deprived basins in the deep ocean.

All three of these environments have analogs on Mars. Like the Earth, Mars likely retains some liquid water buried in its crust. And its polar caps might have liquid water lakes buried underneath them. Lastly, there has been tantalizing – and heavily disputed – evidence of briny water appearing on crater walls.

In the new paper, the researchers mapped out the temperature ranges, salinity levels, and pH values across sites scattered around the Earth. They then measured the abundance of molecular hydrogen in those sites, and determined where methanogens were thriving the most.

For the last step, the researchers combed through the available data about Mars itself, finding where conditions best matched the most favorable sites on Earth. They found that the most likely location for possible life was in Acidalia Planitia, a vast plain in the northern hemisphere.

Or rather, underneath it. Several kilometers below the plain, the temperatures are warm enough to support liquid water. That water might have just the right pH and salinity levels, along with enough dissolved molecular hydrogen, to support a population of methanogen-like creatures.

Now we just have to figure out how to get there.

The post Where’s the Most Promising Place to Find Martian Life? appeared first on Universe Today.