What do astronomers eat for breakfast on the day that their $10 billion telescope launches into space? Their fingernails.

You work for years and it all goes up in a puff of smoke, said Marcia Rieke of the University of Arizona.

Dr. Rieke admits her fingers will be crossed on the morning of Dec. 24 when she tunes in for the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope. For 20 years, she has been working to design and build an ultrasensitive infrared camera that will live aboard the spacecraft. The Webb is the vaunted bigger and more powerful successor to the Hubble Space Telescope. Astronomers expect that it will pierce a dark curtain of ignorance and supposition about the early days of the universe, and allow them to snoop on nearby exoplanets.

After $10 billion and years of delays, the telescope is finally scheduled to lift off from a European launch site in French Guiana on its way to a point a million miles on the other side of the moon. (Late on Tuesday, NASA delayed the launch at least two days).

An informal and totally unscientific survey of randomly chosen astronomers revealed a community sitting on the edges of their seats feeling nervous, proud and grateful for the team that has developed, built and tested the new telescope over the last quarter-century.

I will almost certainly watch the launch and be terrified the entire time, said Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, a professor of physics and gender studies at the University of New Hampshire.

And there is plenty to be anxious about. The Ariane 5 rocket that is carrying the spacecraft has seldom failed to deliver its payloads to orbit. But even if it survives the launch, the telescope will have a long way to go.

Over the following month it will have to execute a series of maneuvers with 344 single points of failure in order to unfurl its big golden mirror and deploy five thin layers of a giant plastic sunscreen that will keep the telescope and its instruments in the cold and dark. Engineers and astronomers call this interval six months of high anxiety because there is no prospect of any human or robotic intervention or rescue should something go wrong.

But if all those steps succeed, what astronomers see through that telescope could change everything. They hope to spot the first stars and galaxies emerging from the primordial fog when the universe was only 100 million years or so old, in short the first steps out of the big bang toward the cozy light show we inhabit today.

The entire astronomy community, given the broad range of anticipated science returns and discovery potential, has skin in the game with the telescope, said Priyamvada Natarajan, an astrophysicist at Yale. We are all intellectually and emotionally invested.

But the telescope has been snake bitten during its long development with cost overruns and expensive accidents that have added to the normal apprehension of rocket launches.

Michael Turner, a cosmologist at the Kavli Foundation in Los Angeles and past president of the American Physical Society, described the combination of excitement and terror, he expected to feel during the launch.

The next decade of astronomy and astrophysics is predicated on J.W. being successful, Dr. Turner said, referring to the James Webb Space Telescope, and U.S. prestige and leadership in space and science are also on the line. That is a heavy burden to carry, but we know how to do great things.

That opinion was echoed by Martin Rees of Cambridge University and the Astronomer Royal for the British royal households.

Any failure of JWST would be disastrous for NASA, he wrote in an email. But if the failure involves a mechanical procedure unfurling a blind, or unfolding the pieces of the mirror this will be a mega-catastrophic and embarrassing P.R. disaster. Thats because it would involve a failure of something seemingly simple that everyone can understand.

Dr. Natarajan, who will use the Webb to search for the origins of supermassive black holes, said, I am trying to be Zen and not imagine disastrous outcomes.

But in describing the stakes, she compared the telescope to other milestones of human history.

Remarkable enduring achievements of human hand and mind, be it the temples of Mahabalipuram, the pyramids of Giza, the Great Wall or the Sistine Chapel have all taken time and expense, she said. I truly see JWST as one such monument of our times.

Alan Dressler of the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, who was chair of a committee 25 years ago that led to the Webb project, responded with his own question when asked how nervous he was.

When you know someone is about to have critical surgery, would you sit around and have a conversation about what if it fails? he wrote. He added that his colleagues know there is no certainty here, and it does no good for any of us to ruminate about it.

Another astronomer who has been involved with this project from the beginning, Garth Illingworth of the University of California, Santa Cruz, said in an email that he was optimistic about the launch despite his reputation of being a glass is half empty kind of guy.

The deployments are complex but my view is that all that is humanly possible has been done! he wrote. He said that even if there were surprises in the telescopes deployment, he did not expect these to be either major or mission terminating not at all.

Other respondents to my survey also took refuge from their nervousness in the skill and dedication of their colleagues.

Andrea Ghez of the University of California, Los Angeles, who won the Nobel Prize in 2020 for her observations of the black hole in the center of our galaxy, said she kept herself sane by trusting that really smart people have worked really hard to get things right.

That thought was seconded by Tod Lauer, an astronomer at NOIRLab in Tucson, Ariz., who was in the thick of it when the Hubble Space Telescope was launched and found to have a misshapen mirror, which required repair visits by astronauts on the now-retired space shuttles. He said his feelings regarding the upcoming launch were all about the engineers and technicians who built the Webb telescope.

You very quickly respect the team nature of doing anything in space, and your dependence on scientists and engineers that you may never even know to get it all right, he said. Nobody wants it to fail, and I have yet to meet anyone in this who didnt take their part seriously.

He added that astronomers had to trust their colleagues in rocket and spacecraft engineering to get it right.

Someone who knows how to fly a $10 billion spacecraft on a precision trajectory is not going to be impressed by an astronomer, who never took an engineering course in his life, cowering behind his laptop watching the launch, Dr. Lauer said. You feel admiration and empathy for those people, and try to act worthy of the incredible gift that they are bringing to world.

And if anything does go wrong, some astronomers said they would keep in perspective that its only hardware, not people, at stake.

Should anything bad happen, I will be heartbroken, Dr. Prescod-Weinstein said. I am glad that at least human lives arent on the line.

There was also a lot to look forward to if everything works as intended, said Dr. Rieke, who worked on the telescopes infrared imaging device.

When the camera turns on well have another party, she said.

Read more here:

James Webb Space Telescope Launch Is Making Astronomers Very Anxious - The New York Times

What do astronomers eat for breakfast on the day that their $10 billion telescope launches into space? Their fingernails.You work for years, and it all goes up in a puff of smoke, said Marcia Rieke of the University of Arizona.

Rieke admits her fingers will be crossed on the morning of Dec. 24 when she tunes in for the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope. For 20 years, she has been working to design and build an ultrasensitive infrared camera that will live aboard the spacecraft. The Webb is the vaunted bigger and more powerful successor to the Hubble Space Telescope. Astronomers expect that it will pierce a dark curtain of ignorance and supposition about the early days of the universe and allow them to snoop on nearby exoplanets.

After $10 billion and years of delays, the telescope is finally scheduled to lift off from a European launch site in French Guiana on its way to a point 1 million miles on the other side of the moon.

An informal and totally unscientific survey of randomly chosen astronomers revealed a community sitting on the edges of their seats feeling nervous, proud and grateful for the team that has developed, built and tested the new telescope over the last quarter-century.

I will almost certainly watch the launch and be terrified the entire time, said Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, a professor of physics and gender studies at the University of New Hampshire.

And there is plenty to be anxious about. The Ariane 5 rocket that is carrying the spacecraft has seldom failed to deliver its payloads to orbit. But even if it survives the launch, the telescope will have a long way to go.

Over the following month it will have to execute a series of maneuvers with 344 single points of failure in order to unfurl its big golden mirror and deploy five thin layers of a giant plastic sunscreen that will keep the telescope and its instruments in the cold and dark. Engineers and astronomers call this interval six months of high anxiety because there is no prospect of any human or robotic intervention or rescue should something go wrong.

But if all those steps succeed, what astronomers see through that telescope could change everything. They hope to spot the first stars and galaxies emerging from the primordial fog when the universe was only 100 million years or so old in short, the first steps out of the big bang toward the cozy light show we inhabit today.

The entire astronomy community, given the broad range of anticipated science returns and discovery potential, has skin in the game with the telescope, said Priyamvada Natarajan, an astrophysicist at Yale. We are all intellectually and emotionally invested.

But the telescope has been snake bitten during its long development with cost overruns and expensive accidents that have added to the normal apprehension of rocket launches.

Michael Turner, a cosmologist at the Kavli Foundation in Los Angeles and past president of the American Physical Society, described the combination of excitement and terror he expected to feel during the launch.

The next decade of astronomy and astrophysics is predicated on J.W. being successful, Turner said, referring to the James Webb Space Telescope, and U.S. prestige and leadership in space and science are also on the line. That is a heavy burden to carry, but we know how to do great things.

That opinion was echoed by Martin Rees of Cambridge University and the Astronomer Royal for the British royal households.

Any failure of JWST would be disastrous for NASA, he wrote in an email. But if the failure involves a mechanical procedure unfurling a blind, or unfolding the pieces of the mirror this will be a mega-catastrophic and embarrassing P.R. disaster. Thats because it would involve a failure of something seemingly simple that everyone can understand.

Natarajan, who will use the Webb to search for the origins of supermassive black holes, said, I am trying to be Zen and not imagine disastrous outcomes.

But in describing the stakes, she compared the telescope to other milestones of human history.

Remarkable enduring achievements of human hand and mind, be it the temples of Mahabalipuram, the pyramids of Giza, the Great Wall or the Sistine Chapel have all taken time and expense, she said. I truly see JWST as one such monument of our times.

Alan Dressler of the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, who was chair of a committee 25 years ago that led to the Webb project, responded with his own question when asked how nervous he was.

When you know someone is about to have critical surgery, would you sit around and have a conversation about what if it fails? he wrote. He added that his colleagues know there is no certainty here, and it does no good for any of us to ruminate about it.

Another astronomer who has been involved with this project from the beginning, Garth Illingworth of the University of California, Santa Cruz, said in an email that he was optimistic about the launch despite his reputation of being a glass is half empty kind of guy.

The deployments are complex but my view is that all that is humanly possible has been done! he wrote. He said that even if there were surprises in the telescopes deployment, he did not expect these to be either major or mission terminating not at all.

Other respondents to my survey also took refuge from their nervousness in the skill and dedication of their colleagues.

Andrea Ghez of the University of California, Los Angeles, who won the Nobel Prize in 2020 for her observations of the black hole in the center of our galaxy, said she kept herself sane by trusting that really smart people have worked really hard to get things right.

That thought was seconded by Tod Lauer, an astronomer at NOIRLab in Tucson, Arizona, who was in the thick of it when the Hubble Space Telescope was launched and found to have a misshapen mirror, which required repair visits by astronauts on the now-retired space shuttles. He said his feelings regarding the upcoming launch were all about the engineers and technicians who built the Webb telescope.

You very quickly respect the team nature of doing anything in space, and your dependence on scientists and engineers that you may never even know to get it all right, he said. Nobody wants it to fail, and I have yet to meet anyone in this who didnt take their part seriously.

He added that astronomers had to trust their colleagues in rocket and spacecraft engineering to get it right.

Someone who knows how to fly a $10 billion spacecraft on a precision trajectory is not going to be impressed by an astronomer, who never took an engineering course in his life, cowering behind his laptop watching the launch, Lauer said. You feel admiration and empathy for those people, and try to act worthy of the incredible gift that they are bringing to world.

And if anything does go wrong, some astronomers said they would keep in perspective that its only hardware, not people, at stake.

Should anything bad happen, I will be heartbroken, Prescod-Weinstein said. I am glad that at least human lives arent on the line.

There was also a lot to look forward to if everything works as intended, said Rieke, who worked on the telescopes infrared imaging device.

When the camera turns on well have another party, she said. [Science Times; Out There]

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Go here to see the original:

Why the worlds astronomers are very, very anxious right now - Kathimerini English Edition

Kenneth Hicks| Special to The Columbus Dispatch USA TODAY NETWORK

In the world of astronomy, all eyes are on the launch of the James Webb space telescope.If successful, the James Webbwillbringus into a new realm ofknowledge, much like the Hubble space telescope did back in 1990.

At the time of writing, that launchhasyet to happen.So,Ill turn to a different topic.

Soon, Christmas will have come and gone.Children will have looked up in the sky and wondered whether they couldsee Santas sleigh. But the night sky appears much different to children in the city and those in the country.

If youve ever seen the night sky out in the country, away from bright city lights, its a scene that you wont forget.In the city, you willsee only a few of the brightest stars, due to the glare of the city lights. In the country, you can see thousands of stars on a pitch-black sky. Itsa sight to behold.

Atthe time of the birth of Jesus, there were no city lights and the stars held a special place in the hearts and minds of people livingthen.There was no understanding of science, so those who studied stars werereallydoing astrology, which is, of course, very different from astronomy.

Many people believe that the three wise men, as described in the Bible,were astrologers. Theystudied the movements of the planets (called wandering stars back then, since the planets change position relative to the fixedbackgroundof the stars) and other changes to the night sky.

The Bethlehem star could have been a supernova oranother event, like the merging of two neutron stars, and the astrologers of the time would interpret this as heralding a momentous occasion.

Today, wenowknow that the night sky holds the secrets to many thingsthatwe scientists are still too ignorant to understand.It is humbling to think that we have the technology to send a telescope into space that will look back to the beginning of time, yet we still dont understand the nature of dark matter or the ephemeral dark energy.

Together,dark matter and dark energy make up about 95% of the mass of the universe.

If you couldhibernateand wake up 1,000 years from now, you would probably find that our current understanding of the universe is reallyveryprimitive.Just like the three wise men, who could not have foreseen our current knowledge of astronomy, it is hard to predict the future explanation of dark matter and dark energy.

But the key to future progress is bright young people who have a natural curiosity of what goes on in the night sky.

Kenneth Hicks is a professor of physics and astronomy at Ohio University in Athens.

hicks@ohio.edu

Read more here:

Astronomy: Just as in the Bible story of the three wise men, there is today still much to ponder in the night sky - The Columbus Dispatch

In late March, Grant Tremblay was sitting at his computer at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, listening in on a Zoom meeting, when he saw a string of emails pop up in his inbox. The title of each email read: Cycle 1 JWST Notification Letter.

He knew immediately that this was the day he and his colleagues in the astronomy community had been eagerly awaiting: it was Blacker Friday.

Blacker Friday, to be clear, didnt have anything to do with discounts, or Fridays. (It was a Tuesday.) It was the day that Tremblay, an astrophysicist at the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and other astronomers around the world, would learn if they would receive a small amount of time to use the James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST, one of the most powerful space telescopes ever created.

Blacker Friday is named after Brett Blacker, who co-runs the science policies group at the Space Telescope Science Institute, or STScI. Each year, the institute is responsible for selecting which astronomers will get time to use NASAs Hubble Space Telescope. And each year, after a lengthy decision-making process, Blacker would send out a flurry of emails to hopeful astronomers, all on the same day at the same time, informing them if their proposals to use the telescope had been accepted or rejected. Thus, Blacker Friday also sometimes known as the Blacker Apocalypse was born.

This year the stakes were even higher on Blacker Friday because, for the first time ever, astronomers were being informed if they would get time with JWST, a brand-new space observatory that is significantly larger and more powerful than Hubble. Set to launch to deep space at the end of December, the nearly $10 billion NASA-built telescope promises the ability to peer into the recesses of the Universe like never before. Ahead of JWSTs launch, STScI had the daunting task of figuring out which of the 1,173 proposals for the observatorys first year of life known as Cycle 1 should get time with the telescope. How do you prioritize what the most advanced piece of space equipment in the world should do when it first turns on?

Well, the science has to be nothing short of revolutionary.

What is deemed most interesting is science that is considered transformational that will change our view of the universe, Klaus Pontoppidan, an astronomer and JWST project scientist at STScI, tells The Verge. We dont want the observatory to do things a little better than what has been done before. We wanted to answer fundamental questions that cannot be answered any other way.

NASA plans to launch JWST the day before Christmas. But for the astronomy community, the launch is the real holiday. JWST is one of the most anticipated space science missions of the 21st century, as it has the ability to reshape astronomy and astrophysics as we know it.

Thats because the telescope is the closest thing we have to a time machine. Sporting a 21-foot-wide gold-plated mirror, JWST will be able to see in the infrared with incredible sensitivity. Itll be able to see objects that are 10 to 100 times fainter than what the Hubble Space Telescope can see, and itll be capable of seeing things in 10 times better detail. It will gather light from stars and galaxies located up to 13.6 billion light-years away light that has taken 13.6 billion years to reach the telescopes mirrors. Since the Universe is thought to be roughly 13.8 billion years old, the galaxies that JWST will be observing likely formed just 100 to 250 million years after the Big Bang. Our Universe was in its infancy then, and JWST will be providing us with the baby photos.

In addition to peering back in time, the telescope will help us understand the large-scale structure of the Universe, and perhaps tell us if it will go on expanding forever. It will peer into the centers of galaxies, finding supermassive black holes and helping astronomers learn how these enigmatic objects have evolved over time. It will observe the births and deaths of stars. It will even look back at our own Solar System to study the faintest objects at the edge of our cosmic neighborhood. And it will be able to look at the edges of worlds orbiting around distant stars. Nearly every area of astronomy that you can think of will be addressed, Christine Chen, an associate astronomer at STScI, tells The Verge.

The promise of JWST has always been just over the horizon. Since an iteration of the telescope was first conceived in 1989, the road to the launchpad has been paved with cost overruns and technical issues. Naively, NASA originally envisioned a launch between 2007 and 2011, for a total cost between $1 billion and $3.5 billion. But JWST continued to miss one target launch date after next, while its total cost ballooned to $9.7 billion.

As everyone waited for JWST to materialize, the world of astronomy blossomed. An entirely new field has emerged since the 1990s, one that revolves around the study of planets outside our Solar System, or exoplanets. Since the first detection of an exoplanet was confirmed in 1992, weve discovered thousands of these far-off worlds orbiting alien stars. In 2017, astronomers shocked the world when they announced the discovery of an entire alien solar system, consisting of seven planets roughly the size of Earth all orbiting around a dwarf star. And three of the seven planets, known as the TRAPPIST-1 system, sit in the stars habitable zone, where temperatures are thought to be just right so that water can pool on a planets surface.

After discovering such a bounty of exoplanets, astronomers are now eager to find what is referred to as Earth 2.0: a planet thats the size of our world, orbiting a star like our Sun at the right distance for liquid water to form. But exoplanets are incredibly faint, and traditional methods for detecting them like watching stars dim ever so slightly as planets pass in front of them cant tell us what might be lurking on their surfaces. JWST, however, is powerful enough that it may be able to detect light passing directly through the atmospheres of some alien worlds and use that light to say what kinds of chemicals are present in the atmosphere. Perhaps, it could even detect signs of life.

Its a capability no one really envisioned when JWST was first being designed, but now its considered one of the more exciting areas of science that the telescope will touch upon. It also means there are even more people who are very eager to get just a few hours with the most advanced space telescope ever built.

All of our transformational leaps in observational astronomy are enabled by making ever larger pieces of glass, right? says Tremblay. And when you make a damn piece of glass thats large enough and especially when you launch it into space the discovery space for that observatory grows with time. It doesnt diminish.

While JWST is ultimately a NASA mission, its the Space Telescope Science Institutes job to determine what JWST actually does in space. You can think of us as sort of the software part of the observatory, Pontoppidan says, whereas NASA is the hardware part.

However, STScI had to wait a long time before figuring out the schedule for JWSTs first year, and there were a few false starts along the way. When it seemed like the telescope would be ready to launch in 2019, the Institute called on astronomers to submit their proposals by March 2018. Then just a week before the deadline, NASA announced that the telescope wouldnt launch until 2020 at the earliest. STScI abruptly postponed the deadline until a more concrete launch date was determined.

Another postponement came again in March 2020, due to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, astronomers turned in their proposals by November 24th, 2020, two days before Thanksgiving. Then it was time for STScI to sift through the more than 1,000 ideas that had been submitted.

STScI knew that it couldnt handle this process alone. The Institute created a Time Allocation Committee including astronomers and astrophysicists from around the world. They were separated into 18 panels, each one consisting of about 10 people tasked with looking over proposals for different areas of space science and ranking them based on three important criteria: how much the proposal will impact knowledge within a subfield, how much it will advance astronomy in general, and whether the proposed idea requires the unique capabilities of JWST to be successful. Given just how many people want to use JWST, the Institute didnt want to allot time to an observation that could be done with any of the other telescopes currently online.

With all of these benchmarks in mind, the committee got to work evaluating all of the proposals. To try to eliminate as much bias as possible from the selection process, the process was dual anonymous. That means that the people writing the proposals had no idea who would be evaluating them, and the people on the committee had no idea whose proposals they were analyzing. As a result, 30 percent of the winning proposals are helmed by women, and scientists studying for their PhDs also saw more success in getting their ideas approved. Now since nobody knows who wrote the proposal, students can be just as successful as their mentors, Chen says.

After painstaking debate, the committee selected the proposals it found to be the most transformative. It then gave each proposal a certain number of hours of observation time. Ultimately, STScI selected a total of 266 proposals, submitted by scientists from 41 countries around the globe.

Tremblay, the Harvard astrophysicist, had submitted nine proposals for JWSTs first year. On Blacker Friday, nine new emails sat in his inbox. (The emails dont come from Blacker anymore but from the Science Mission Office at STScI). He quickly clicked through them and read one after the next:

Dear Dr. Tremblay,

We regret to inform you...

He read the phrase nine times in total.

It was a disappointment but definitely not a shock. I wasnt broken up by not getting time this year, Tremblay tells The Verge. I knew it would be immensely, immensely competitive for Cycle 1, as it should be. And its okay. Well resubmit again.

Nearly 2,000 miles away, Caitlin Casey, an astronomer at the University of Texas, was having a very different kind of Blacker Friday. She was at home in Austin, holding her sleeping two-month-old baby in her lap, while scrolling her phone. Thats when she saw the email pop up in her inbox.

Dear Dr. Casey,

We are pleased to inform you...

The ambitious project she and her team had proposed, called Cosmos Web, had just been approved. And the Institute was giving Casey a whopping 208 hours with JWST to fulfill her project, the most of anyone who had submitted proposals. The project will stare at a particularly large patch of sky the size of three full Moons, an area that spans up to 63 million light years across. Doing so will create a portrait of the young universe similar to the Hubbles iconic Hubble Deep Field, which showcased some of the earliest galaxies we could observe at the time. With JWSTs enhanced capability, the team will be imaging galaxies that are even older at even greater levels of detail. If the Hubble Deep Field were printed on an eight-and-a-half by 11 sheet of paper, Cosmos Web would be like a 16-foot by 16-foot mural on the side of a building, says Casey.

Staying silent so as not to wake her sleeping child, Casey jubilantly logged into Slack and messaged her colleague and co-principal investigator on the project, Jeyhan Kartaltepe, an astrophysicist at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

All I had to say was, We got it, Casey tells The Verge. She was dumbfounded, too. And I think for the rest of that day, both her and I, we could not even [focus]. It was a flurry of excitement and just overwhelmed with that news.

Aside from Cosmos Web, the seven-planet TRAPPIST-1 system will be getting a lot of attention during JWSTs first year, with up to seven different programs dedicated to studying this strange cluster of worlds. JWST will be looking in the atmospheres of these planets, as well as dozens more weve found throughout the Universe, hoping to determine if these places might be suitable for life as we know it. And there are hundreds more targets that JWST will observe, including galaxies, quasars, black holes, and more.

While the committee tried to be as logical as possible with their final decisions, everyone agrees that serendipity does come into play. Probably there were a lot of amazing programs similar to ours that were also up for consideration, says Casey. Theres always a little element of luck in the final selection process. Maybe someone on the panel just liked the specific way we presented some information.

Roughly 10,000 hours of observing time is allotted to different groups for JWSTs first year of life. About 6,000 hours were given to the scientists who submitted proposals around the world, while nearly 4,000 hours were already set aside for scientists who helped design and build JWST and its instruments. The STScI also has about 460 hours of discretionary time which have been allotted for what is known as Early Release Observations. Data from these hours, scheduled to be done in the first five months of science, will become public immediately, so that anyone even those who did not get time with the telescope can analyze the observations and write their own studies.

Anyone who does the math will realize that 10,000 hours is actually more than the number of hours in a calendar year. STScI purposefully overprescribed JWSTs time to account for any snafus. STScI will be scheduling JWSTs observations in two-week increments, during which time the observatory will point at its intended targets autonomously. However, its possible that JWST will fail to execute some commands properly from time to time. If that happens, JWST will simply go on to the next observation. And the Institute wants to make sure the telescope has fallback plans when such errors occur. We dont want to get to the end of the year, and then run out of observations, Pontoppidan says.

STScI is also planning to carve out time for targets we dont know about yet. These are events like the explosive destruction of a star, known as a supernova, or when two particularly dense stars come together in a cataclysmic merger, known as a kilonova. If astronomers spot a particularly juicy supernova occurring in the sky, JWSTs operators are prepared to reorient the schedule so that they can quickly observe the aftermath of the eruptive event.

The prioritization of JWSTs observations will be determined by the time of the year, and where things are positioned in the sky. But as for the very first observation the telescope will do, NASA knows what it is but wont tell. Its supposed to be a surprise.

While flexibility is going to be key for JWST Cycle 1, STScI guarantees that all the proposals that have been approved will occur. Because each target in the sky is in JWSTs view twice a year, if for some reason a target is missed, there is a second opportunity to observe it six months later. If a target isnt observed in the first year, it might simply bleed over into next year. Basically, everything that gets through the committee recommended and approved will execute on the telescope, Chen says, as long as the telescope, you know, works.

If everything goes well with the telescopes launch, NASA plans to conduct at least five and a half years of science with it, and hopefully up to 10 years. Ultimately, the observatorys lifetime is dictated by its limited fuel reserves, which are needed to help reorient JWST in space. Whenever that fuel runs out, JWSTs mission will end.

That finality is still quite a ways off. First, JWST must launch and actually survive its trip through space. Once it reaches its final home 1 million miles from Earth, JWST will undergo six months of commissioning when scientists meticulously test out the instruments on board before the real science begins.

And then, after a period of transformational science has passed, itll be time to submit another round of proposals. Though Tremblay will be involved with one JWST proposal for Cycle 1 as a collaborator rather than the principal investigator, he does plan to submit his ideas again for Cycle 2. And hell understand if it doesnt get accepted.

As an astronomer we get professionally used to rejections; I could wallpaper my hallway with rejections that Ive received, Tremblay says. Its just a reflection of the fact that the community has immense demand for the telescope. And I think its a great thing.

Update December 20th, 1:50PM ET: This article was updated to clarify the principal investigators on Cosmos Web.

See the rest here:

How astronomers decided where to point NASA's James Webb Space Telescope - The Verge

The Shanghai Astronomy Museum, the largest in the world devoted to the celestial sciences, has been equipped with Meyer Sound immersive audio systems in its two main venues.

Designed by Ennead Architects of New York, the 39,000 square metre museum, with its curvilinear exterior devoid of any straight lines or right angles, encloses three main exhibition zones Home, Cosmos, and Odyssey with the free-flowing architecture encompassing three dominant architectural features: Oculus, Inverted Dome, and Sphere.

Occupying the interior of the Sphere is an 8K Dome Theater, which hosts an audience of 250 for a 20-minute all-enveloping spectacle covering 4.6 billion years of cosmic evolution. Designed using Meyer Sounds MAPP 3D system design and prediction tool, the theatres immersive audio system comprises 32 Meyer Sound UPJ-1P loudspeakers that encircle the 20-meter dome in three tiers.

A cluster of four 900-LFC subwoofers delivers low-frequency emphasis, while three-dimensional spatial sound trajectories are created using the Spacemap feature in CueStation. Up to 64 tracks of audio program source are available from the DWTRX recording/playback module of the D-Mitri digital audio platform.

An Optical Planetarium, nestled inside the Home Zone, combines recreations of constellations and planetary movements with a film about nature and the universe. Here the audio system encircles the audience with 36 UPJunior loudspeakers on four levels, again augmented by four 900-LFC subwoofers for low-frequency effects. Loudspeaker optimization is provided by one GALAXY 408 and two GALAXY 816 Network Platforms.

The Shanghai Astronomy Museum is currently the largest museum focused on the astronomical sciences in the world, and we are honoured to be part of the project, says Zhu Sihai, managing director of Shanghai Broad Future Electro Technology which supplied the audio system.

The linear sound reproduction and immersive technologies offered by Meyer Sound help make the experience here unique and breathtaking. We expect to bring this heightened level of experience to more venues around the country.

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Immersive audio at the world's largest astronomy museum - AV Magazine

The eyes of the astronomy community are firmly on one event this week: The launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, the brand-new space observatory from NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Canadian Space Agency, which will be the worlds most powerful space telescope and the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope. But that launch doesnt mean that Hubble will be going away, as the older telescope will continue to be used to capture beautiful images of space in the visible light spectrum, while James Webb will focus primarily on capturing data in the infrared wavelength.

This weeks image from the Hubble Space Telescope is an example of the striking visuals it is still possible to capture with this 30-year-old technology. It shows the galaxy NGC 3568, a barred spiral galaxy (like our Milky Way) which is located around 57 million light-years away in the constellation of Centaurus.

One distinct feature of this galaxy is that it was the location of a huge supernova, when a star reached the end of its life and exploded in a dramatic cosmic event. The light from this supernova reached Earth in 2014 and, unusually, was spotted not by professional astronomers but by a team of amateur astronomy enthusiasts who watch for supernovas from their backyards.

While most astronomical discoveries are the work of teams of professional astronomers, this supernova was discovered by amateur astronomers who are part of the Backyard Observatory Supernova Search in New Zealand, the European Space Agency writes. Dedicated amateur astronomers often make intriguing discoveries particularly of fleeting astronomical phenomena such as supernovae and comets.

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Hubble captures the site of an epic supernova, spotted by amateur astronomers - Digital Trends

Air Force School, Sulur, organised a workshop on astronomy for school students and teachers reently. A release said the workshop included slides and videos to explain the celestial objects. This was followed by a science exhibition and stargazing using telescope.

The Good Shepherd Health Education Centre and Dispensary organised a seminar on empowerment of women here recently. A release said District Social Welfare Officer P. Thangamani inaugurated the event, which was attended by community development experts, academicians and community organisation members from Chennai, Coimbatore, Madurai, Tiruchi and New Delhi.

Minister for Information and Publicity M.P. Saminathan and Minister for Adi Dravidar and Tribal Welfare N. Kayalvizhi Selvaraj on Friday participated in the groundbreaking ceremony for construction works in Tiruppur Corporation under the Namakku Naame scheme. A release said the works to construct a storm water drain and a mini-bridge at Thanthai Periyar Nagar in Ward No. 57 (Zone-IV) at 60 lakh began. The Ministers also accepted petitions from the public following the event, a release said.

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Workshop on astronomy - The Hindu

By far my favourite thing about my job as an astronomer is those rare moments when I get to see beautiful distant galaxies, whose light left them millions to billions of years ago. Its a combination of pure awe and scientific curiosity that excites me about galaxy hunting.

In astronomy today, much of our work is handling enormous amounts of data by writing and running programmes to work with images of the sky. A downside to this is that we dont always have that hands-on experience of looking at every square inch of the universe while we study it.

Im going to show you, though, how I get my fix of wonder by looking at galaxies that only a select few people will ever have seen, until now. In just our observable universe we estimate there are over 2 trillion galaxies!

Only a few decades ago astronomers had to tediously examine photographic plates after a long, cold and lonely night of observing. In the 21st century, we have access to information any time, anywhere via the internet.

Automatic telescopes and surveys now provide us with so much data we require machines to help us analyse it. In some cases, human eyes will only ever look at what the computers have deemed is interesting! Massive amounts of data are hosted online, just waiting to be admired, for free.

Aladin Lite is one of the greatest online tools available to look at our universe through the eyes of many different telescopes. Here we can scan the entire sky for hidden galaxies, and even decipher information about their stellar populations and evolution.

Lets start our universal tour by searching for one of the most visually stunning galaxies out there, the Cartwheel Galaxy. In the Aladin interface, you can search for both the popular name of an object (like cartwheel galaxy) or known co-ordinates. The location will be centred in the interface.

The first image of the Cartwheel Galaxy we see is from optical imaging by the Digitised Sky Survey. The colours we see represent different filters from this telescope. However, these are fairly representative of what the galaxy would look like with our own eyes.

Also read: NASA's James Webb Space Telescope launched on daring quest to behold first stars

A general rule of thumb as an astronomer is that colour differences within galaxies are because of physically different environments. Its important to note that things that look blue (shorter wavelengths) are generally hotter than things that look red (longer wavelengths).

In this galaxy, the outer ring appears to be more blue then the centre red section. This might hint at star formation and stellar activity happening in the outer ring, but less so in the centre.

To confirm our suspicions of star formation we can select to look at data from different surveys, in different wavelengths. When young stars are forming, vast amounts of UV radiation are emitted. By changing the survey to GALEXGR6/AIS, we are now looking at only UV wavelengths, and what a difference that makes! The whole centre section of the galaxy seems to disappear from our image. This suggests that section is likely home to older stars, with less active stellar nurseries.

Aladin is home to 20 different surveys. They provide imaging of the sky from optical, UV, infrared, X and gamma rays.

When I am wandering the universe looking for interesting galaxies here, I generally start out in optical and find ones that look interesting to me. I then use the different surveys to see how the images change when looking at specific wavelengths.

Now youve had a crash course in galaxy hunting, let the game begin! You can spend hours exploring the incredible images and finding interesting-looking galaxies. I recommend looking at images from DECalS/DR3 for the highest resolution and detail when zooming further in.

The best method is to just drag the sky atlas around. If you find something interesting, you can find out any information we have on it by selecting the target icon and clicking on the object. To help you on your galactic expedition here are my favourite finds of the different types of objects you might see.

Spiral galaxies typically have a central rotating disc with large spiral arms curving out from the denser central regions. They are incredibly beautiful. Our own Milky Way is a spiral galaxy.

Also read: India celebrates birth anniversary of Srinivasa Ramanujam

Elliptical galaxies are largely featureless and less flat then spirals, with stars occupying almost a 3D ellipse at times. These type of galaxies tend to have older stars and less active star-forming regions compared to spiral galaxies.

Lenticular galaxies appear like cosmic pancakes, fairly flat and featureless in the night sky. These galaxies can be thought of as the in between of spiral and elliptical galaxies. The majority of star formation has stopped but lenticular galaxies can still have significant amounts of dust in them.

There are also other amazing types of galaxies, including mergers and lenses, which are just waiting for you to find them.

(Sara Webb, Swinburne University of Technology Melbourne)

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How to explore the universe from our home? - BusinessLine

A region within Mars's Valles Marineris (pictured) called the Candor Chaoshad a large amount of hydrogen about a meter below the surface. European Space Agency

Located below the Red Planet's equator, the Valles Marineris isone of the largest known series of canyonsin the solar system. About a meter beneath the valley's surface, astronomers have now detected a large amount of hydrogen, reports Michelle Starr forScience Alert. The discovery, published in the journalIcarus,may allow future astronauts to access water on Mars easily.

While water has been previously known to exist on Mars, most of it is found as ice caps near the poles.Water and ice havenever been found at the surface near the equator, however,because temperatures are not cold enough for it to be stable, per astatement. Other missions have looked for surface water hidden as ice on dust particles or locked within minerals.

Researchers at the European Space Agency and the Russian Space Research Institute found evidence of water underneath the cosmic tectonic fracture using the ESA-Roscosmos ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) probe, reports Alex Wilkins forNew Scientist.

Launched in 2016, TGO detected and mapped hydrogen in the top meter of Martian soil using an instrument dubbed Fine Resolution Epithermal Neutron Detector (FREND), reports Meghan Bartels forSpace.com. By detecting neutrons instead of light, the instrument peers through the Red Planet's dust to search for water reservoirs not picked up by other equipment. FREND can measure the hydrogen content of Mars'soil up to a meter below the surface,Science Alertreports.

"Neutrons are produced when highly energetic particles known as 'galactic cosmic rays' strike Mars; drier soils emit more neutrons than wetter ones, and so we can deduce how much water is in a soil by looking at the neutrons it emits," saysco-author Alexey Malakhov, a sceintist at the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, in a statement.

Using TGO's datafrom May 2018 toFebruary 2021, the team found a large amount of hydrogen beneath the surface ofMars'version of the Grand Canyon, called Candor Chaos. If all of that hydrogen is bound into water molecules, a subsurface regionabout the size of the Netherlandscould beabout 40 percent water, explains the study's lead author Igor Mitrofanov of the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, who is principal investigator of FREND, in a statement.

"We found a central part of Valles Marineris to be packed full of water far more water than we expected," Malakhov said in a statement. "This is very much like Earth's permafrost regions, where water ice permanently persists under dry soil because of the constant low temperatures."

The water, however, does not appear as abundant liquid lakes found on Earth. Instead, scientists suspectthe Martian dustis riddled with ice or water bonded to minerals,CNN'sAshley Strickland reports. Minerals in this region, however, are not know to contain much water. While ice may seem more likely based on what researchers know about other potential sources of hydrogen on Mars, the temperatures and pressure conditions in the Valles Marineris, situated just below the Martian equator, prohibit the formation of these types of water preserves,Science Alertreports.

There may be special geologic conditions that allow the water to be replenished and remain in this region, CNN reports. Researchers plan on deciphering what type of water lies within the canyon's grooves and how it remains by planning future missions that will focus on lower latitudes in this region.

"Knowing more about how and where water exists on present-day Mars is essential to understand what happened to Mars's once-abundant water, and helps our search for habitable environments, possible signs of past life, and organic materials from Mars's earliest days," saysESA physicistColin Wilsonin a statement.

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Beneath Canyons on Mars, Astronomers Find Potentially 'Water-Rich Area the Size of the Netherlands' - Smithsonian

Home Technology Abraham Zacuto, the astronomer who predicted an eclipse and saved the life of Columbus December 26, 2021

Pedro Choker

Updated:12/26/2021 00:47h

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During the Middle Ages, religion permeated all aspects of society and the different communities learned to live together and share the same spaces. It was not an easy task, especially for the Jewish communities that alternated permissive moments with other intolerant and repressive ones.

This situation was not an obstacle for them to leave us an enormous cultural baggage. In some aljamas science, literature, drama, philosophy, theology experienced a real revolution.

In the Middle Ages, astronomers offered, as a general rule, a product based on astrological prediction, which was not an impediment for them to be used by some monarchs to make serious political decisions.

Portrait of Abraham Zacuto Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology, Eulogia Merle

In the middle of the 15th century, Abraham Zacuto (1452-1515) was born in Salamanca, a distinguished astronomer and mathematician who was called to revolutionize ocean navigation.

He belonged to a family of French exiles, his grandfather fled from the anti-Semitic laws dictated by the Frankish King Philip the Fair and in 1306, after crossing the Pyrenees, he settled on the Castilian plateau.

Abrahams father served as a rabbi on the banks of the Tormes, which allowed him to enjoy a privileged education and develop his scientific concerns. Around 1475 he published Composition Magna a complex work in which they appear astronomical tables, calculated for the Salamanca meridian, which corrected the errors of the Alphonsine Tables.

The interest of Jewish scientists in astronomy was due to the fact that it allowed them to accurately determine the time when the new moon appeared, which marked the beginning of the Sabbath and the beginning of the new year.

Zacuto was a strong defender of the role that astronomy played in the preservation of health, arguing that the signs of the zodiac influenced each of the parts of the body and that their knowledge helped physicists determine the prognosis of some diseases.

In 1492, with the expulsion of the Jews, Zacuto emigrated to Portugal, where King John II appointed him astronomer royal and court historian. His successor to the throne, Manuel I, asked him for advice on an expedition with which he planned to reach India bypassing the southern cone of the African continent.

Apparently the Hebrew gave a favorable opinion while emphasizing that the stars indicated that the success of the company depended on two brothers leading the expedition. It seems that this detail was decisive for Vasco de Gama, the senior captain of the Navy, was chosen, since he had a brother.

It is said that Zacuto prepared the maritime and astronomical calculations that made the expedition possible and that, in addition, he trained the crew in the use of an astrolabe of his creation and that allowed to determine the geographical latitude during navigation.

In 1496 he published a version of the Magna Composition under the title Perpetual Almanac which would enjoy enormous notoriety for more than a century.

The success of the maritime company under the Portuguese flag was not an obstacle so that, in 1497, in the context of a new anti-Semitic wave in Lusitanian lands, he had to emigrate to North Africa, from where he would travel to Damascus, the city that finally saw him. To die.

Christopher Columbus met Zacuto personally and used his maritime tables on the expedition to the Indies. In them the solar declination angle formed by the rays of the sun with the plane of the equator was collected that allowed to determine with enormous precision the position to the equator, without having to resort to the pole star.

During the last Columbian voyage in February 1504, the fleet was left to its own devices in Jamaica, where the natives refused to provide them with food. The Zacuto tables predicted a lunar eclipse for February 29. The admiral gathered the island chiefs and threatened to make the moon disappear if their needs were not met. Apparently the lunar eclipse scared the indigenous people so much that they not only respected the lives of the sailors, but also provided them with everything they asked for.

M. Jara

Pedro Gargantilla is an internist at the Hospital de El Escorial (Madrid) and the author of several popular books.

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Abraham Zacuto, the astronomer who predicted an eclipse and saved the life of Columbus - The Times Hub

Astronomers at the University of Cape Town (UCT) have discovered a mysterious chain of hydrogen gas clouds.

The dark clouds are the size of a massive galaxy and were discovered through the South African MeerKAT telescope, which the scientists say is proving to be a ground-breaking device in their five-year project to understand galaxy distribution and evolution.

The astronomers say it is the first time they have seen such a massive gas cloud without a host galaxy.

The hydrogen is the fuel for star formation, and so where you have a lot of hydrogen, amassed into a dense object, you have stars or a galaxy of stars, so it is quite a discovery, said professor Thomas Jarrett from UCTs astronomy department.

He said he and his team were going to conduct further studies because such discoveries always lead to a new understanding of nature. The discovery could also provide new insights about galaxy evolution.

The astronomers next move is to figure out how this cloud came to be, and where it is headed.

It could be the detritus from a titanic collision between two galaxies, stripping and separating the gas from the stars. But we really dont see the progenitors, the two or more galaxies that did this. They could be there, just hiding somehow, Jarrett said.

Alternatively, it could be more pristine gas that has been flowing through the filament of the cosmic web, into the attractor that it appears to be aimed.This gravitational attractor is a massive galaxy group. We need deeper MeerKAT observations, and a deeper optical imaging to dig down into the fainter stuff to see if we can discern any gas or star trails that point to a past tidal disturbance, he added.

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UCT astronomers discover first dark cloud without host galaxy - Mail and Guardian

Sixty-six million years ago, the dinosaurs had a really bad day.

Not just them, either, since 75% of the species on Earth disappeared in a short time. Theres no doubt now that the main driver of this mass murder, called the K-Pg extinction event, was an enormous asteroid (or possibly comet) impact, an object 10 kilometers across that slammed into the planet just off the coast of modern-day Yucatan. This created a crater some 150 kilometers wide, and instigated a series of catastrophic events both immediate and long-term that wiped out most of the life on Earth.

We dont know what the exact date of this event was, but scientists are honing in on the time of year it was, the season. And its looking like life on Earth had a really, really bad June.

Knowing the time of year of the impact is important because of the effect on biology. For example, a species might be more likely to survive if the event happened after they lay their eggs in a protected place. Even if the adults are wiped out a second generation could still have a chance. It also effects how long it might take for plants to regain their place in the environmental niches opened by the impact, or what specific species might dominate in the short term after the impact.

There has been previous work done that points toward the impact happening in late spring/early summer, but there hasnt been a consensus. However, a new paper just published has some pretty good evidence that it was this time of year when the hammer fell.

In the new research, scientists turned to the Tanis fossil site in western North Dakota, a part of the vast Hell Creek Formation, a geological layer that spans several states and is dated to have been laid down at the time of the impact. Some 10 13 minutes after the impact in Mexico, immense seismic waves passed the Tanis site, causing flooding that most likely came from the nearby Western Interior Seaway, a huge but shallow sea that ran north/south across western North America at the time. This in turn created whats called a seiche, a huge standing wave in water that can generate waves a hundred meters high. This is similar, for a much smaller and mundane scale, to when you scooch back and forth in a bathtub in time with the waves generated, amplifying the crests enough that you can splash water out of the tub.

Now picture the tub being a lake, and the waves reaching 20 stories high.

This happened quite suddenly at Tanis, and the geography of the area makes it possible to actually get extremely fine time resolution of the events. Its also replete with fossils, including fish, insects, plants, and more. Heres where this gets cool: By examining these fossils, its possible to figure out the time of year of the impact.

For example, the scientists looked at sturgeon fossils, specifically a pectoral fin spike. Sturgeon are anadromous, which means they migrate from river to sea and back again, so they go from fresh to salty water, and this migration is seasonal. Bone growth in sturgeon depends on time of year, health, and so on, and they can see that the growth of this spike bone stopped suddenly at the tip, certainly due to the fishs death by the impact.

But the key here is in the elemental content of the bone. An isotope of oxygen called oxygen-18 fluctuates in a yearly pattern in the bones corresponding to migration; when the fish is in fresh water theres not as much oxygen-18, and when theyre in salty seawater it is incorporated more strongly. The opposite is true for an isotope of carbon called carbon-13; its absorption in the bone is heavier in fresh water and lighter in seawater.

The scientists saw these abundances going up and down in the fish bone as they traced them toward the tip, and theyre out of phase (when one goes up the other goes down, and vice-versa), a clear indication of the seasons. Plotting these fluctuations, the scientists found the impact happened in late spring or early summer.

They found the same thing in mayflies. These insects burrow into wood to lay eggs, which hatch during a very brief interval of less than a few weeks in early spring. The fact that adult mayflies were found fossilized shows that the impact happened while adult mayflies were active, so after the eggs hatched. The bodies are also fragile, so the impact must have happened early in their adulthood, or else intact fossils wouldnt have been found.

On top of that, some insect larvae eat leaves, leaving characteristic tracks in the leaves (this is called leaf-mining, an adorable term). Intact furrows in some fossilized leaves including some still attached to branches show that larvae were actively feeding at the time of impact, again pointing toward spring/summer, when larvae are busy building mass for metamorphosis.

I find this all rather amazing. I remember when the asteroid impact hypothesis was very controversial, and now its not only accepted, but evidence has popped for it in unlikely events like a million-year-long volcanic eruption halfway around the planet due to the force of impact opening up underground magma pipes, allowing the eruption to increase (though the contribution of this to mass extinctions is still being argued over).

And now not only is it accepted, but scientists can narrow down what month it happened in.

Big asteroid impacts are exceptionally rare, and global mass extinctions from them even more so. Still, the more we know about such events the better. You never know what piece of evidence will lead to a discovery that helps us better prevent an impact, or understand what the consequences are if we dont.

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The last spring of the dinosaurs - SYFY WIRE

A deadly new class of synthetic opioids has been identified in cities throughout the United States at a time when fatal drug overdose rates are soaring.

Forensic scientists have identified nitazenes on streets throughout the country. The nitazene class has proven even stronger than fentanyl, the synthetic opioid the extreme potency of which is responsible for the majority of deadly overdoses in the U.S.

There's probably about five to 10 drugs that make up this medicine class right now that have been identified on the market, said Alex Krotulski, an expert in nitazenes at the Center for Forensic Science. They're really spread through all areas throughout the U.S. Usually, we see them epicentered around places in the Midwest and then, they sort of proliferate out from there.

DOCTORS CAUTION CDC AGAINST CHANGING 'FULLY VACCINATED' STANDARD FOR NOW

The most commonly found drugs within the nitazene class are isotonitazene, metonitazene, and protonitazene, which have been found in many states such as Texas, Ohio, Indiana, New York, and New Jersey. Experts estimate the potency of the nitazene class to range from twice to 10 times as fatal as fentanyl, which is sometimes undetectably laced in heroin or cocaine and can be fatal in even miniscule doses.

The majority of these nitazene analogs are more potent than fentanyl, especially the ones that we see. I think that's probably by design, Krotulski said. You've got drugs that are, say, one to two times more potent than fentanyl, that are two to three times more potent, and now you've got drugs that are 10 times more potent than fentanyl.

The onset of the pandemic in Spring 2020 brought with it mandatory quarantines and social distancing, conditions that facilitated skyrocketing drug overdoses. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported in July that fatal drug overdoses in 2020 increased by nearly 30% over the previous year, reaching an all-time high of more than 93,300. Opioids were the cause of a majority of overdose deaths in every state as well as D.C. Fatal overdoses caused by opioids specifically increased from 50,963 in 2019 to an estimated 69,710 in 2020.

Fentanyl and other synthetic opioids were involved in more than 60% of all fatal drug overdoses in 2020. Drug users who misuse nitazenes will often use them in concert with another substance, sometimes unknowingly. Drugs such as heroin or cocaine are often laced with trace amounts of extremely potent synthetic opioids to make them cheaper to traffic.

"Nowadays with the overdose epidemic, we're seeing a lot more poly drug use so you have to examine the drugs by themselves ... Then you also have to take into account the fact that these drugs are being found and used with fentanyl. And when you get into that scenario, you're just adding things together, adding potent on top of potent," Krotulski said.

Versions of fentanyl that have been chemically altered to be more potent, also called fentanyl analogs, have increased in popularity in recent years due to the governments whack-a-mole-like approach to regulating the synthetic drugs. Since 2018, all fentanyl analogs have been categorized as schedule 1 substances, meaning they have extremely high abuse potential and no medical benefit.

When a drug is scheduled with the Drug Enforcement Administration and becomes harder to find, a newer drug takes its place. Enter: nitazenes.

We're seeing the same thing happen where with fentanyl analogs, one drug would be prevalent, it would be scheduled by the DEA, that drug would go away, and then a new drug would be introduced into the market, Krotulski said. So, we're seeing this sort of cyclic pattern, if you will, of one drug after another after another after another.

The synthetic opioids have also been identified in the District of Columbia, where opioid overdose deaths in the 12 months leading up to May 2021 reached about 498. D.C. ranks second behind West Virginia in the number of deaths due to opioid overdoses during the pandemic, according to an analysis from the Washington Post. Alexandra Evans, a chemist at the D.C. Public Health Lab was the first in the district to identify the drugs after finding residue on a used needle collected from the citys needle exchange locations for intravenous drug users to discard used paraphernalia and get new supplies.

We knew that it was a new type of synthetic opioid very quickly, based on its instrumental analysis report, Evans said. Our lab had heard about the discovery of nitazenes in other cities beginning in 2019. We were familiar with this drug class, and the specific drugs within it.

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The stress of COVID-19 and social isolation have contributed to the roughly 4 in 10 adults in the U.S. who have experienced increased rates of anxiety and depression, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. Stay-at-home orders during the first wave of COVID-19 also made visiting with or checking in on people suffering with substance use disorders difficult and sometimes impossible.

COVID-19 has been difficult to track, and surges have been difficult to predict. The recent discovery of the omicron variant has concerned public health experts and healthcare workers who are still reeling from roughly 20 months of overcrowded ICUs and strained supplies. While the Biden administration has not indicated it will revert back to early pandemic restrictions such as business closures or stay-at-home orders, the U.S. will continue to beat back renewed surges into next year.

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New synthetic opioid threatens to drive up astronomical overdose rates - Washington Examiner