Using data from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), an international team of researchers observed one of the most distant known galaxies in the very earliest years of the Universe. The observations reveal that the early galaxy MACS1149-JD1 (JD1) has a slow spin. The galaxy appears to be rotating at less than a quarter of the speed of the Milky Way today.

The findings came out from a new study involving University of Cambridge researchers.

MACS1149-JD1 (also known as PCB2012 3020) is the most distant object. Light from the young galaxy captured by the orbiting observatories first shone when our 13.7-billion-year-old Universe was just 500 million years old, i.e., 4% of its present age.

Researchers detected subtle variations in the wavelengths of the light coming from a galaxy that signifies parts of the galaxy were moving away from us while other parts were moving toward us. Based on these variations, researchers concluded that the galaxy was disc-shaped and rotating at 50 kilometers a second. In comparison, the Milky Way today rotates at a speed of 220 kilometers per second.

Based on its size and rotational speed, researchers could infer its mass. From this, they calculated the galaxys age- almost 300 million years old and formed about 250 million years after the Big Bang.

Co-author Professor Richard Ellis from University College London (UCL) said,This is by far the furthest back in time we have been able to detect a galaxys spin. It allows us to chart the development of rotating galaxies over 96% of cosmic history rotations that started slowly initially, but became more rapid as the Universe aged.

These measurements support our earlier findings that this galaxy is well-established and likely formed about 250 million years after the Big Bang. On a cosmic time scale, we see it rotating not long after stars first lit up the Universe.

Co-author Dr. Nicolas Laporte from Cambridges Kavli Institute for Cosmology said,Our findings shed light on how galaxies evolved in the early Universe. We see that a galactic disk has developed 300 million years after massive molecular clouds condensed and fused into stars, and the galaxy has acquired a shape and rotation.

Co-author Professor Akio K. Inoue from Waseda University, Tokyo, said,Determining whether distant galaxies are rotating is very challenging because they only appear as tiny dots in the sky. Our new findings came thanks to two months of observations and the high resolution achieved by combining the 54 radio telescopes of the ALMA observatory.

The further away a galaxy is from Earth, the faster it appears to move away from us. Since objects traveling away emit light that has been redshifted toward longer wavelengths, we can determine their distance and, consequently, their age from the degree of redshift.

According to earlier research, JD1 has a redshift of 9.1, which indicates that the Universe was 550 million years old when it was observed. In the most recent investigation, the scientists discovered changes in the redshift across the galaxy, indicating differences in the rate at which the galaxy was moving away from us. Relative to us, one side of the galaxy was moving farther away while the other was moving closer.

From the new observations, the team concluded that JD1 was only 3,000 light-years across (by comparison, the Milky Way is 100,000 light-years across) and that its total mass was equivalent to 1-2 billion times the mass of the Sun.

This mass is consistent with the galaxy being about 300 million years old, with most of the mass coming from mature stars that formed close to the start of the galaxys life.

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Astronomers observed the slow spin of early galaxy - Tech Explorist

San Antonio ratepayers say their June electricity bills were double or triple the usual charge. Experts blame soaring natural gas prices for the hike.

SAN ANTONIO After she saw her June electric bill, Amanda Nunez says she unplugged every large appliance in her home.

"Last month was just astronomical," said Nunez, who usually pays around $140 for power each month.

Her most recent bill cost $350.

"I'm not the only one that's feeling it... it takes away from our families," she said. "That's coming out of my family's mouth."

Many San Antonio residents say they paid more for electricity in June than ever before. For most ratepayers, July bills are due in less than two weeks.

Across Texas, consumers are paying more for power. Experts blame skyrocketing natural gas prices.

"We generate, in Texas, about 45 percent of our electricity using natural gas," said Dr. Emily Beagle, an energy research associate the University of Texas. "When those prices go up, we see the impacts of that on electricity bills."

The Henry Hub natural gas benchmark price is up roughly 136 percent compared to June 2021. That means some Texas power companies, including CPS Energy, are paying about twice as much this year to fuel their generation stations.

Russia's assault on Ukraine is to fault, Beagle says.

"Texas is now starting to export record amounts of natural gas to Europe to help them wean off Russian natural gas," she said.

Higher European demand led to increased natural gas prices in Texas, Beagle said. Local power providers have passed their higher costs on to consumers.

Some European nations experienced an energy crisis soon after their governments limited Russian natural gas imports. The United States was initially shielded from the supply crunch, since it produces vast amounts of natural gas domestically.

Beagle says crude oil prices are more tied to the global market than natural gas prices are. That means electricity prices can soar, even as gasoline prices fall from historic highs.

"It's definitely an unprecedented situation in global energy commodity markets," Beagle said.

Energy demand has also spiked in Texas, as residents endure an historically hot summer. That contributes to higher costs, too, she said.

The state's grid manager also now requires more power producers to regularly generate electricity in case of emergencies. In theory, the move creates excess energy that's easily tapped during an emergency.

"The size of that buffer has increased to make sure we don't see potentially damaging blackouts over the course of the summer," Beagle said. "But then you do have to pay for all those plants that are running."

Beagle noted that Texas's solar and wind farms have prevented electricity prices from soaring to crisis levels already reached in Europe. But she added that it's unlikely natural gas prices will fall until conditions overseas change.

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"Just astronomical" | Why some electricity bills are higher than ever - KENS5.com

Sky gazers can spot flashes of sporadic meteors, visible nebulae

Published: Fri 8 Jul 2022, 11:28 AM

Summer is the best time to see the Milky Way, according to astronomy experts based in the UAE.

The Emirates Astronomical Society reportedly said that this is the period of the year, which starts from the beginning of summer and to the start of autumn, considered the best time to view the Milky Way.

Astronomy enthusiasts and night gazers in the country should look at the night sky from June until the start of September in areas in the UAE's far south.

Hasan Al Hariri, CEO-Dubai Astronomy Group, said, "When we look at the sky, we'll be able to observe a central bulge in the sky which is the core of the Milky Way. This area is a bit swollen. The best view of the Milky Way with all the clouds and nebulae and concentration of stars are visible in the summertime.which is around this time of the year."

"North is the North Star, so that is the outer area of the Milky Way. But if you look to the middle of the south, you'll see the bulge of the Milky Way above the horizon, nearly towards the centre of the sky. It rises with the night and sets with the morning as the Sun comes out."

He explains throughout the night, the Milky way will be visible in any dark space that one can reach.

However, the rare viewing comes with a warning.

"The whole thing will be magnificent. But people should be careful and should not go out alone, as due to the summer heat, different types of insects will be out. Create a group and watch the areas. Take all the precautions for venturing into the desert."

"The best view would be from the high mountains like Jebel Hafeet or Jebel Jais where the weather will be a little pleasant at the nighttime and one can get a clear view. If you have small telescopes, you can see more details like the number of visible nebulae. Sometimes, you'll see sporadic meteors flashing here and there", adds Hariri.

Further explaining the phenomenon Sarath Raj, Project Director Amity Dubai Satellite Ground Station and AmiSat, Amity University Dubai, says, "The Milky Way galaxy is described as a four-armed SBb (barred spiral galaxy). It is approximately 13.6 billion years old and has long rotating arms."

According to extragalactic frames of reference, the Milky Way is travelling at a speed of about 600 km/s. The Milky Way contains between 100 and 400 billion stars and has a mass between 890 billion and 1.54 trillion times that of the Sun.

He adds, "The star density decreases as one advances away from the Milky Way's centre. The Milky Way's galactic plane fills a region of the sky that encompasses 30 constellations, and it appears to the naked eye as a faint, hazy shape of stars in the night sky when viewed from Earth."

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Raj also highlights that the "Milky Way can be seen throughout the year no matter the location."

"As long as the sky is clear and there is no light pollution, it can be seen. The Milky Way is best observed at its darkest, which occurs just after astronomical twilight at night and just before twilight at dawn. Winter months have the longest duration. The optimum time to view the Milky Way is from March to September in the Northern Hemisphere and from September to March in the Southern Hemisphere. When the Galactic Center is almost vertical to the horizon, the Milky Way is at its most intriguing. The stars appear brightest, and the light is strongest at this time."

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UAE: Summer best time to see Milky Way, say astronomers - wknd.

Just 700 million years after the Big Bang, when the universe was still in its infancy, we already see supermassive black holes with the heft of 1 billion Suns. How could they have grown so fast? A team of astronomers is using computer simulations to glimpse what the formation of these dark behemoths might have looked like.

If you wish to make a billion-solar-mass black hole from scratch, to borrow a phrase, you must start with a star or perhaps only with the gas that stars are made of.

While the universes first stars might have made the first black holes, those would have been relatively small on the supermassive scale, with masses of only around 100 Suns. Perhaps the first stars clustered and so when stars made black holes, those black holes merged and then merged again. Even then, such black hole seeds would have been only 1,000, maybe 10,000 solar masses. These black holes would have had to grow super-fast to become supermassive in such a short amount of time.

But theres another way: Some astronomers have put forward the idea that in the small early universe, when gas was dense and pristine, gas clouds could collapse directly into more massive black holes.

The calculations for such massive implosions are delicate, though. Whats to prevent pieces of the gas cloud from cooling and collapsing under their own weight, as star-forming clouds in the modern universe are wont to do?

Some astronomers have suggested the ultraviolet emission of nearby newborn stars might have heated the gas, keeping it too warm to fragment. Others have argued that such specific requirements would make the process too rare to explain the number of supermassive black holes weve already found in the young universe.

Now, Muhammed Latif (United Arab Emirates University), Daniel Whalen (Portsmouth University, UK, and University of Vienna), and colleagues report in Nature that massive black holes can form without these special conditions.

The finding relies on computer simulations, which rebuild the conditions of the infant universe, when it was less than 100 million years old. Simulations are necessary because this era of the first stars is out of reach for our current telescopes.

The simulation followed the growth of a small, frothing sea of matter fed by four torrents of inflowing gas. While such nodes would have been common in the web of material filling the universe, Whalen says these streams were unusual because they carried so much gas. Latif adds that the rivers of gas were not only dense but fast-flowing; rushing in at speeds of 50 km/s (more than 100,000 mph), they carried between 1 and 10 Suns worth of material per year.

The sea at the center of these streams of material grew, and within the sea a clump took shape, and then another. The turbulence of inrushing gas flows kept the massive clumps from collapsing straightaway into stars; instead, the clumps continued to grow. By the end of the simulation 1.4 million years later they contained tens of thousands of Suns worth of mass.

Eventually, these clumps compress into what the researchers call supermassive stars; following their evolution requires a different kind of computer simulation, one that takes stellar physics into account. The stellar monstrosities dont last long in this simulation, just 1 million years, before they collapse again into black holes of 30,000 and 40,000 solar masses, respectively.

Such massive seeds could easily collect more gas and grow to become the dark behemoths seen by astronomers. Even though the kind of confluence explored in this study is rare, Latif, Whalen, and colleagues estimate that it would occur often enough to explain observations.

The new environment replete with cold flows thats numerically explored in this study is very exciting, says Priya Natarajan (Yale), as it seems to provide a natural pathway for the formation of massive black hole seeds.

But it isnt the only scenario that results in direct collapse, she cautions. Natarajan, who wasnt involved in the current study, explored a different scenario back in 2014, finding that a dense star cluster could similarly allow direct collapse to happen. The upshot isthat there are multiple pathways to rapidly amplifyand make massive black hole seeds in situ and early in the universe.

Upcoming James Webb Space Telescope observations, she adds, will help distinguish between the different black hole seed scenarios. Webb wont be able to detect the supermassive stars, even though theyre millions of times more luminous than the Sun, but its possible it could detect the black hole seeds that are still growing when the universe is less than 200 million years old.

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Where Did the First Quasars Come From? - Sky & Telescope - Sky & Telescope

Clouds of sand can condense, grow and disappear in some extraterrestrial atmospheres. A new look at old data shows that clouds made of hot silicate minerals are common in celestial objects known as brown dwarfs.

This is the first full contextual understanding of any cloud outside the solar system, says astronomer Stanimir Metchev of the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada. Metchevs colleague Genaro Surez presented the new work July 4 at the Cool Stars meeting in Toulouse, France.

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Clouds come in many flavors in our solar system, from Earths puffs of water vapor to Jupiters bands of ammonia. Astronomers have also inferred the presence of extrasolar clouds on planets outside the solar system (SN: 9/11/19).

But the only extrasolar clouds that have been directly detected were in the skies of brown dwarfs dim, ruddy orbs that are too large to be planets but too small and cool to be stars. In 2004, astronomers used NASAs Spitzer Space Telescope to observe brown dwarfs and spotted spectral signatures of sand more specifically, grains of silicate minerals such as quartz and olivine. A few more tentative examples of sand clouds were spotted in 2006 and 2008.

Floating in one of these clouds would feel like being in a sandstorm, says planetary scientist Mark Marley of the University of Arizona in Tucson, who was involved in one of those early discoveries. If you could take a scoop out of it and bring it home, you would have hot sand.

Astronomers at the time found six examples of these silicate clouds. I kind of thought that was it, Marley says. Theoretically, there should be a lot more than six brown dwarfs with sandy skies. But part of the Spitzer telescope ran out of coolant in 2009 and was no longer able to measure similar clouds chemistry.

While Surez was looking into archived Spitzer data for a different project, he realized there were unpublished or unanalyzed data on dozens of brown dwarfs. So he analyzed all of the low-mass stars and brown dwarfs that Spitzer had ever observed, 113 objects in total, 68 of which had never been published before, the team reports in the July Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Its very impressive to me that this was hiding in plain sight, Marley says.

Not every brown dwarf in the sample showed strong signs of silicate clouds. But together, the brown dwarfs followed a clear trend. For dwarfs and low-mass stars hotter than about 1700 Celsius, silicates exist as a vapor, and the objects show no signs of clouds. But below that temperature, signs of clouds start to appear, becoming thickest around 1300 C. Then the signal disappears for brown dwarfs that are cooler than about 1000 C, as the clouds sink deep into the atmospheres.

The finding confirms previous suspicions that silicate clouds are widespread and reveals the conditions under which they form. Because brown dwarfs are born hot and cool down over time, most of them should see each phase of sand cloud evolution as they age. We are learning how these brown dwarfs live, Surez says. Future research can extrapolate the results to better understand atmospheres in planets like Jupiter, he notes.

The recently launched James Webb Space Telescope will also study atmospheric chemistry in exoplanets and brown dwarfs and will specifically look for clouds (SN: 10/6/21). Marley looks forward to combining the trends from this study with future results from JWST. Its really going to be a renaissance in brown dwarf science, he says.

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Sand clouds are common in atmospheres of brown dwarfs - Science News Magazine

After decades of development and billions of dollars of investment, the James Webb Space Telescope finally took off on its mission Saturday to see the stars and galaxies dating back to the beginning of the universe.

The gigantic telescope is the product of a joint collaboration between NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency and its unprecedented new windows to the cosmos will have ramifications for Chicagoans, too, local astronomers say.

Essentially, this telescope is a time machine, said Michelle Nichols, director of public observing at the Adler Planetarium. Its going to be an amazing tool.

The Webb telescope uses infrared technology, which allows it to see objects farther away and more clearly than ever before. As the telescope observes stars and galaxies, its actually seeing them as they were billions of years ago all the way to the beginning of the universe 13.5 billion years ago.

This time-traveling is similar to how we see the sun, Nichols explained. The rays are actually eight minutes old, since thats how long it takes for them to travel to reach the earth.

John Carlstrom, a professor and chair of the University of Chicagos Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, said that astronomers so far have been studying the universe without vital information like trying to piece together your family history without any of the baby pictures.

What the James Webb Space Telescope will do is turn up the baby pictures, Carlstrom said Sunday. Well see what the universe looked like in its infancy.

Nichols said she teared up watching Saturdays launch.

When its on the ground its safe When you stick it on top of a big tube of explosives which is what a rocket is as soon as you light up that rocket, its going. There is nothing you can do at that point, she said.

Carlstrom said he also found himself surprisingly moved during the launch.

Nothing went wrong. It was perfect. It was just a beautiful gift, he said.

While the takeoff went smoothly, everything else has to go perfectly for the telescope to function properly. The equipment, mirrors and sun shields must all unfold and turn on as theyre supposed to otherwise, we dont have a telescope, Nichols said.

The next 29 days are crucial, but Nichols said she wont be able to rest easy until about six months from now, when its expected to be fully operational.

But, if youre not an astronomer or science fan, why care about the Webb?

Theres something for everyone, Nichols said.

Some might marvel at the advanced technology within the telescope technology that took nearly 30 years and thousands of people to develop, Nichols said.

Others might benefit from the technological advancements made during its development in ways they never knew. Some might be in awe of the incredible pictures it will be able to capture, while science fiction fans might be struck by the possibilities of science facts, Nichols said.

Some people just look up and wonder, Nichols said. They wonder, Are we alone? Is earth the only planet with life? What do we know about the possibilities for life elsewhere in the universe? This telescope will hopefully give us more information about that.

The telescope also represents collaboration and the power of science, Nichols said.

Science, and astronomy especially, can show that we can often put our differences aside and find common ground, Nichols said.

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Chicago astronomers excited by possibilities of James Webb Space Telescope - Chicago Sun-Times

Centaurus A is a giant elliptical active galaxy 12 million light-years away. At its heart lies a black hole with a mass of 55 million suns. This image shows the galaxy at radio wavelengths, revealing vast lobes of plasma that reach far beyond the visible galaxy, which occupies only a small patch at the centre of the image. The dots in the background are not stars, but radio galaxies much like Centaurus A, at far greater distances. Credit: Ben McKinley, ICRAR/Curtin and Connor Matherne, Louisiana State University

Astronomers have produced the most comprehensive image of radio emission from the nearest actively feeding supermassive black hole to Earth.

The emission is powered by a central black hole in the galaxy Centaurus A, about 12 million light years away.

As the black hole feeds on in-falling gas, it ejects material at near light-speed, causing radio bubbles to grow over hundreds of millions of years.

When viewed from Earth, the eruption from Centaurus A now extends eight degrees across the skythe length of 16 full Moons laid side by side.

It was captured using the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) telescope in outback Western Australia.

Centaurus A is a giant elliptical active galaxy 12 million light-years away. At its heart lies a black hole with a mass of 55 million suns. This composite image shows the galaxy and the surrounding intergalactic space at several different wavelengths. The radio plasma is displayed in blue and appears to be interacting with hot X-ray emitting gas (orange) and cold neutral hydrogen (purple). Clouds emitting Halpha (red) are also shown above the main optical part of the galaxy which lies in between the two brightest radio blobs. The background is at optical wavelengths, showing stars in our own Milky Way that are actually in the foreground. Credit: Connor Matherne, Louisiana State University (Optical/Halpha), Kraft et al. (X-ray), Struve et al. (HI), Ben McKinley, ICRAR/Curtin. (Radio)

The research was published on December 22, 2021, in the journal Nature Astronomy.

Lead author Dr. Benjamin McKinley, from the Curtin University node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR), said the image reveals spectacular new details of the radio emission from the galaxy.

These radio waves come from material being sucked into the supermassive black hole in the middle of the galaxy, he said.

It forms a disc around the black hole, and as the matter gets ripped apart going close to the black hole, powerful jets form on either side of the disc, ejecting most of the material back out into space, to distances of probably more than a million light years.

Previous radio observations could not handle the extreme brightness of the jets and details of the larger area surrounding the galaxy were distorted, but our new image overcomes these limitations.

A video showing the radio galaxy, Centaurus A, which hosts the closest actively feeding black hole to Earth. The video shows the apparent size of the galaxy at optical, X-ray, and submillimeter wavelengths from Earth when compared to the Moon. It then zooms out to show the enormous extent of the surrounding bubbles that are observed at radio wavelengths. Astronomers have produced the most comprehensive image of radio emission from the nearest actively feeding supermassive black hole to Earth.

Centaurus A is the closest radio galaxy to our own Milky Way.

We can learn a lot from Centaurus A in particular, just because it is so close and we can see it in such detail, Dr McKinley said.

Not just at radio wavelengths, but at all other wavelengths of light as well.

In this research weve been able to combine the radio observations with optical and x-ray data, to help us better understand the physics of these supermassive black holes.

Tile 107, or the Outlier as it is known, is one of 256 tiles of the MWA, located 1.5km from the core of the telescope. Lighting the tile and the ancient landscape is the Moon. Credit: Pete Wheeler, ICRAR

Astrophysicist Dr. Massimo Gaspari, from Italys National Institute for Astrophysics, said the study corroborated a novel theory known as Chaotic Cold Accretion (CCA), which is emerging in different fields.

In this model, clouds of cold gas condense in the galactic halo and rain down onto the central regions, feeding the supermassive black hole, he said.

Triggered by this rain, the black hole vigorously reacts by launching energy back via radio jets that inflate the spectacular lobes we see in the MWA image. This study is one of the first to probe in such detail the multiphase CCA weather over the full range of scales, Dr. Gaspari concluded.

Dr. McKinley said the galaxy appears brighter in the center where it is more active and there is a lot of energy.

Then its fainter as you go out because the energys been lost and things have settled down, he said.

But there are interesting features where charged particles have re-accelerated and are interacting with strong magnetic fields.

MWA director Professor Steven Tingay said the research was possible because of the telescopes extremely wide field-of-view, superb radio-quiet location, and excellent sensitivity.

The MWA is a precursor for the Square Kilometre Array (SKA)a global initiative to build the worlds largest radio telescopes in Western Australia and South Africa, he said.

The wide field of view and, as a consequence, the extraordinary amount of data we can collect, means that the discovery potential of every MWA observation is very high. This provides a fantastic step toward the even bigger SKA.

Reference: Multi-scale feedback and feeding in the closest radio galaxy Centaurus A by B. McKinley, S. J. Tingay, M. Gaspari, R. P. Kraft, C. Matherne, A. R. Offringa, M. McDonald, M. S. Calzadilla, S. Veilleux, S. S. Shabala, S. D. J. Gwyn, J. Bland-Hawthorn, D. Crnojevi, B. M. Gaensler and M. Johnston-Hollitt, 22 December 2021, Nature Astronomy.DOI: 10.1038/s41550-021-01553-3

The Murchison Widefield Array is the MWA is managed and operated by Curtin University on behalf of an international consortium, and is located on the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory in Western Australia. The observatory is managed by CSIRO, Australias national science agency, and was established with the support of the Australian and Western Australian Governments. We acknowledge the Wajarri Yamatji as the traditional owners of the observatory site.

The Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre in Pertha Tier 1 publicly funded national supercomputing facilityhelped store and process the MWA observations used in this research.

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Astronomers Capture Supermassive Black Hole Eruption Near Earth Spanning 16 Times the Full Moon in the Sky - SciTechDaily

It's not the first time astronomers have discovered so-called "rogue planets" free-floating planets that wander aimlessly through space without a host star to orbit. But they thought it was a somewhat rare phenomenon, until now.

According to new research published in the journal Nature Astronomy, scientists have recently discovered an impressive number of these elusive exoplanets: 70 or more. It marks the largest such group ever spotted roaming the Milky Way and it may be a crucial step in understanding the origins of the "mysterious galactic nomads," scientists say.

"We did not know how many to expect and are excited to have found so many," Nria Miret-Roig, the first author of the study, said in apress release.

Most exoplanets are spotted using observations of their host stars, so finding these orphaned planets is considerably more difficult. But using decades of research, the group of scientists saw infrared energy emitted by between 70 and 170 of the gas giants, young enough to still emit a detectable heat glow.

"We measured the tiny motions, the colors and luminosities of tens of millions of sources in a large area of the sky," explains Miret-Roig. "These measurements allowed us to securely identify the faintest objects in this region, the rogue planets."

The planets were discovered using a series of telescopes, located both on Earth and in space, including the European Space Agency's Very Large Telescope and Gaia satellite. The planets, with masses comparable to that of Jupiter, are located within the Scorpius and Ophiuchus constellations.

"We used tens of thousands of wide-field images from ESO facilities, corresponding to hundreds of hours of observations, and literally tens of terabytes of data," said project leader Herv Bouy.

The findings indicate that there could be a treasure trove of cosmic wanderers just waiting to be found, Bouy added. "There could be several billions of these free-floating giant planets roaming freely in the Milky Way without a host star."

And finding more of these types of celestial travelers will help scientists understand their origins. Some hypothesize that they form from the collapse of a gas cloud that is too small to form a star companion, while others believe they could have been booted from their original parent system.

Astronomers hope to continue their research using the forthcoming Extremely Large Telescope, or ELT, currently under constriction in Chile's Atacama Desert.

"These objects are extremely faint and little can be done to study them with current facilities," said Bouy. "The ELT will be absolutely crucial to gathering more information about most of the rogue planets we have found."

Sophie Lewis is a social media producer and trending writer for CBS News, focusing on space and climate change.

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Astronomers discover dozens of "rogue planets" roaming the galaxy without a star - CBS News

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) may steal the headlines by finding the first galaxies or detecting potential biosignatures in the atmospheres of exoplanets, but it will also take us on a giant leap forward in our understanding of cosmic chemistry.

For one UK-based astronomer, its also the chance to lead a science project on NASAs new orbiting observatory, once it has safely launched and deployed. JWST is scheduled for launch at 12:20pm GMT on Christmas Day.

Patricia Schady, of the University of Bath, is leading a multinational team of scientists who will use JWSTs Near-Infrared Spectrometer (NIRSpec) to measure the abundance of heavy elements present in interstellar gas contained within galaxies over 10 billion light years away.

One of the key questions to be addressed by JWST is the chemical enrichment of the Universe, Schady tells Astronomy Now.

Metal galaxies

All elements heavier than hydrogen and helium are known, in astronomer-speak, as metals. These metals are formed by stars, and as each generation of stars comes and goes, the abundance of metals in the Universe increases. Galaxies that existed 10 billion years ago therefore should have much lower metallicities than modern galaxies, but how much lower? Measuring the metallicity of distant galaxies will teach us the rate of star-formation in the early Universe, and when important molecules necessary for rocky planets or life became commonplace. It will also help us understand how our Milky Way has evolved into the galaxy that it is today.

However, measuring the metallicity of galaxies at great distances from us, which we see as they were just three or four billion years into cosmic history, is not easy. There are two ways to do this. One is to search for light emitted at specific wavelengths by various molecules in these galaxies, which is difficult because these emission lines are often very faint. The other way is to look for molecules absorbing light from a bright background object. The wavelength of light that is absorbed depends on the type of molecule doing the absorbing, making these molecules readily identifiable.

Quasars have been used as background light sources in some cases, but its difficult to determine the location of the gas doing the absorbing in the foreground galaxy being studied. Is the absorbing gas in the core of the galaxy, or in its outer halo? The core of a galaxy is expected to have a greater metallicity than the outer regions because more star formation will have taken place in the core. Plus, the farther back in time one looks, the fewer quasars there are to act as background light sources.

So astronomers have veered towards using the afterglows of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), which signal the destruction of a massive star and the formation of a black hole. The afterglows are bright enough to be seen in galaxies at great distances, and have the added advantage of being located in the galaxies that are being studied. Since the absorption of their light takes place dozens, or at most hundreds, of light years from the site of the GRB, they allow astronomers to more accurately pin down the location of the gas doing the absorbing.

The complete jigsaw puzzle

However, for Schadys project, JWST will not be measuring the absorption lines in GRB afterglows. JWST is powerful enough to directly measure the emission lines from molecules. So, instead it will be targeting ten distant galaxies that have played host to GRBs and for which the metallicity has already been measured through absorption. By measuring the metallicity from the light emitted by molecules in those galaxies, Schadys project will provide the first detailed cross-check of the two methods in the same galaxies.

This is important for a number of reasons. Within galaxies, interstellar gas is present either as neutral gas, or as ionised gas. Whereas today about 90 per cent of the gas in the Milky Way Galaxy is ionised, in galaxies existing in the early Universe, most of the gas is present in neutral form.

Information on the metallicity of the neutral gas can be gauged through absorption line studies, says Schady. Meanwhile, emission-line measurements trace the presence of ionised gas. It requires both kinds of measurements to get a complete picture of the metallicity of a galaxy.

My project will create the first sample of galaxies with both absorption- and emission-line metallicities within the same region of the galaxy, says Schady.

The measurements will also be of broader importance, by providing a sample of galaxies against which observations of even more distant, and fainter, galaxies can be calibrated. Since GRBs tend to mostly explode in galaxies that have lower metallicity, that makes them the closest match to the first galaxies, which would also have low metallicity.

Therefore, the results of Schadys project will be relevant to many other studies of cosmic chemical enrichment being undertaken with JWST or other facilities, she says.

So while the observations themselves may not make any headlines, they are going to be vital to much of the other work that astronomers will be conducting with JWST on the evolution of galaxies in the early Universe. Indeed, this will be the case for many of JWSTs projects, in that they will provide the foundations for astronomical discoveries for many years to come.

For more on the UK-based astronomers who will be using JWST, and the projects that they will be conducting, read our article in the January 2022 issue of Astronomy Now, or check out the UK JWST website.

See the original post here:

How JWST will unlock the chemical cosmos Astronomy Now - Astronomy Now Online

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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