It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Wednesday, August 18, 2021
Shedding light on past human histories
Research team reconstructs genetic histories and social organisation in Neolithic and Bronze Age Croatia
Present-day Croatia was an important crossroads for migrating peoples along the Danubian corridor and the Adriatic coast, linking east and west. "While this region is important for understanding population and cultural transitions in Europe, limited availability of human remains means that in-depth knowledge about the genetic ancestry and social complexity of prehistoric populations here remains sparse", says first author Suzanne Freilich, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History and the University of Vienna.
To this aim, an international team of researchers set out to fill the gap. They studied two archaeological sites in eastern Croatia – one containing predominantly Middle Neolithic burials from within the settlement site, the other a Middle Bronze Age necropolis containing cremations and inhumations – and sequenced whole genomes of 28 individuals from these two sites. The researchers’ goal was to understand both the genetic ancestry as well as social organisation within each community – in particular, to study local residency patterns, kinship relations and to learn more about the varied burial rites observed.
Middle Neolithic settlement at Popova zemlja
Dated to around 4,700-4,300 BCE the Middle Neolithic settlement at Beli-Manastir Popova zemlja belongs to the Sopot culture. Many children, especially girls, were buried here, in particular along the walls of pit houses. “One question was whether individuals buried in the same buildings were biologically related to each other”, says Suzanne Freilich.
“We found that individuals with different burial rites did not differ in their genetic ancestry, which was similar to Early Neolithic people. We also found a high degree of haplotype diversity and, despite the size of the site, no very closely related individuals”, Freilich adds. This suggests that this community was part of a large, mainly exogamous population where people marry outside their kin group. Interestingly, however, the researchers also identified a few cases of endogamous mating practices, including two individuals who would have been the children of first cousins or equivalent, something rarely found in the ancient DNA record.
CAPTION
Burials at Popova zemlja were typically along the walls of pit houses or in other pits with ceramic vessels near their heads.
Middle Bronze Age necropolis at Jagodnjak-Krčevine
The second site the researchers studied was the Middle Bronze Age necropolis of Jagodnjak-Krčevine that belongs to the Transdanubian Encrusted Pottery Culture and dates to around 1,800-1,600 BCE. “This site contains burials that are broadly contemporaneous with some individuals from the Dalmatian coast, and we wanted to find out whether individuals from these different ecoregions carried similar ancestry”, says Stephan Schiffels.
The researchers found that the people from Jagodnjak actually carried very distinct ancestry due to the presence of significantly more western European hunter-gatherer-related ancestry. This ancestry profile is present in a small number of other studied genomes from further north in the Carpathian Basin. These new genetic results support archaeological evidence that suggests a shared population history for these groups as well as the presence of trade and exchange networks.
“We also found that all male individuals at the site had identical Y chromosome haplotypes”, says Freilich. “We identified two male first degree relatives, second degree and more distantly related males, while the one woman in our sample was unrelated. This points to a patrilocal social organisation where women leave their own home to join their husband’s home.” Contrary to the Middle Neolithic site at Popova zemlja, biological kinship was a factor for selection to be buried at this site. In addition the authors found evidence of rich infant graves that suggests they likely inherited their status or wealth from their families.
Filling the gap in the archaeogenetic record
This study helps to fill the gap in the archaeogenetic record for this region, characterising the diverse genetic ancestries and social organisations that were present in Neolithic and Bronze Age eastern Croatia. It highlights the heterogeneous population histories of broadly contemporaneous coastal and inland Bronze Age groups, and connections with communities further north in the Carpathian Basin. Furthermore, it sheds light on the subject of Neolithic intramural burials – burials within a settlement – that has been debated among archaeologists and anthropologists for some time. The authors show that at the site of Popova zemlja, this burial rite was not associated with biological kinship, but more likely represented age and sex selection related to Neolithic community belief systems.
So far, few archaeogenetic studies have focused on within-community patterns of genetic diversity and social organisation. “While large-scale studies are invaluable in characterising patterns of genetic diversity on a broader temporal and spatial scale, more regional and single-site studies, such as this one, are necessary to gain insights into community and social organisation which vary regionally and even within a site”, says Freilich. “By looking into the past with a narrower lens, archaeogenetics can shed more light on how communities and families were organised.”
JOURNAL
Scientific Reports
DOI
10.1038/s41598-021-94932-9
ARTICLE TITLE
Reconstructing genetic histories and social organization in Neolithic and Bronze Age Croatia
The team's method predicted the relationship between urban air pollution and traffic flow more accurately than existing methods, particularly for longer term forecasts. Credit: KAUST; Heno Hwang
A partial matching approach can overcome the dimensionality "curse" of continuous measurements over time to yield more accurate future predictions.
By scanning past data for both partial and complete matches to current observations, a KAUST-led research team has developed a prediction scheme that can more reliably forecast the future trajectory of environmental parameters.
The collection of data at regular intervals over time is common in many fields but particularly so in environmental, transportation and biological research. Such data are used to monitor and record the current state and also to help predict what might come in the future. A typical approach is to look for previous patterns or trajectories in the data that match the current trajectory.
However, in practice, there are never any complete matches, and so the predictor needs to find smaller and smaller time windows in past data that provide a partial match. This results in a loss of context and any broader trends that might have given a better prediction, while possibly drawing in random noise.
"Predicting future time-series trajectories is challenging in that the trajectories are composed of many sequential observations or 'dimensions," which limits multivariate prediction approaches," says Hernando Ombao from KAUST. "This is known as the curse of dimensionality."
To overcome these challenges, postdoc Shuhao Jiao developed a method called partial functional prediction (PFP) that integrates information from all past complete and partial trajectories. This optimized approach uses all the available data, capturing both long-term trends and well-matched partial trajectories.
"By smoothing the trajectories, we can transform the curse into a blessing by capturing the big picture of the dynamic information of trajectories," Jiao says. "Our method incorporates both crosstrajectory and intratrajectory dependence, which previous methods have not achieved."
The approach involves a step-wise procedure where the data are first analyzed for longer complete trajectories, the "residual" partial components are then extracted as fragments independent of past trends and anything left over is assigned to random noise. The three functions are then applied to the prediction window.
The team, together with collaborator Alexander Aue from the University of California, demonstrated their method on the prediction of fine particulate matter in the air and traffic flow and showed that their PFP method gave far more accurate predictions than existing methods, particularly for longer term forecasts.
"Our method shows that by incorporating dependence information within and across trajectories, it is possible to achieve a pronounced improvement in the prediction of future trajectories," Ombao says.Trio of tuning tools for modeling large spatial datasets
More information:Shuhao Jiao et al, Functional Time Series Prediction Under Partial Observation of the Future Curve,Journal of the American Statistical Association(2021).DOI: 10.1080/01621459.2021.1929248
The debate over extraterrestrial life has shifted from fringe to mainstream.
The belief that humans eventually will encounter aliens is based on two assumptions: (a) life evolves easily, and (b) interstellar travel is possible and practical.
Neither of these assumptions is likely to be true.
When I was a kid, there was an older guy who frequented our local McDonald's and always carried around a box full of random papers and a fly swatter. He was an archetype of the UFO enthusiast — sort of a kook but a lot of fun to talk to.
In the 1990s, there was something of an alien abduction craze that swept the country. The popular show Unsolved Mysteries featured them, and an entire TV series, The X-Files, was built around the belief that extraterrestrial life had taken a keen (and perhaps malevolent) interest in Earth. (Of course, the aliens were also working in collaboration with the U.S. federal government.)
However, outside of popular culture, few serious intellectuals took the notion of aliens seriously. It certainly was not a major academic topic. The prevailing view was that life is uncommon throughout the universe, and Earth just might be the only planet lucky enough to have it.
Today, the exact opposite view prevails. Thanks to advances in astrophysics, we now know that there are billions of exoplanets in the Milky Way alone, leading most of the scientific community to conclude that life probably does exist elsewhere in the universe. Those who do not believe so are now considered the kooks. And while alien abductions are still not in the mainstream, UFOs are — so much so that the U.S. intelligence community just issued a report on them.
It does not matter if intelligent alien life exists elsewhere in the universe. We will never find them, and they will never find us. In other words, we are effectively alone in the universe.
The academic debate now is not whether life exists but in what form. Many scientists assume that the commonest form of life is microbial — a fair assumption, given that on Earth, humans are a relatively modern invention while microbes have been around for 3.5 billion years — so many astrobiologists are spending their days examining the atmospheres of exoplanets for telltale signs of bacteria-like creatures.
Still, others have gone further and pontificated on what, if it exists, alien intelligent life might be like. The late Stephen Hawking argued that contacting aliens is not wise because, just like in the movie Independence Day, they are probably plotting to come to Earth, break our stuff, and steal our resources. Dr. Hawking warned, "One day we might receive a signal from a planet like Gliese 832c, but we should be wary of answering back."
I suppose this is all fun to think and talk about, but the alien debate suffers from a serious lack of perspective. If there is any chance of humans encountering alien life, at least two extremely unlikely things must be true:
Life evolves easily. Decades of research have yielded little in the way of identifying the mechanism of abiogenesis — the formation of life from non-living matter. There are several different theories on the origin of life, and none of them are any good. In the laboratory, we have had some success in creating biomolecules such as amino acids from gaseous precursors; the Miller-Urey experiment is the most famous of these. But scientists have yet to come even close to reproducing life in the laboratory. This strongly implies that life does not evolve easily.
But even if we were to cede the point that life can evolve easily given enough time, there is another problem: the vast majority of exoplanets are inhospitable to life. New research suggests that most stars are incapable of supporting plant life via photosynthesis. Harvesting a star's energy is the first step for the evolution of life, but evolution cannot even get started if there is not enough of it.
Interstellar travel is possible and practical. This, in my opinion, is even more unlikely than the easy evolution of life. We know life evolved at least once (here on Earth), but we have no idea if interstellar travel is possible. Sure, we could get on a spaceship today and head for a planet orbiting the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, but we better pack a lot of fun-sized bags of pretzels because it will take about 6,300 years to get there.
The notion that we will develop (or that some advanced alien civilization has already developed) the ability to easily traverse the galaxy is pure speculation. It is physically impossible to travel at the speed of light, though it may be possible to travel at a substantial fraction of the speed of light. Still, even if light speed was possible, the distances between stars is nearly unfathomable. Traveling at the speed of light, Proxima Centauri is still more than four years away; the other side of the galaxy is over 100,000 years away.
"Theoretically possible" does not mean "probable"
Sci-fi enthusiasts note that unknown technologies may develop, such as the ability to warp the fabric of spacetime or to travel through a wormhole. But again, these suggestions are purely speculative. Other than some fancy math that suggests such maneuvers could theoretically be possible, we have no idea if either can actually happen. Just because unicorns and mermaids are theoretically possible does not mean that they exist.
What about black holes? Perhaps we could dive into one and pop out somewhere else. For the sake of argument, let's say that we know that is absolutely true. The trouble is that the closest black hole to Earth that we know of is 1,500 light-years away.
Putting all this together, the sobering conclusion is that it does not matter if intelligent alien life exists elsewhere in the universe. We will never find them, and they will never find us. In other words, we are effectively alone in the universe.
How Panpsychism and Its Fault Lines Shade in the Ongoing Mystery of Consciousness
“We’ve barely begun to understand our place in the cosmos. As we continue to look out from our planet and contemplate the nature of reality, we should remember that there is a mystery right here where we stand.”
BY MARIA POPOVA
“Meditate often on the interconnectedness and mutual interdependence of all things in the universe,” the aging Marcus Aurelius instructed.
“Any live mind today is of the very same stuff as Plato’s & Euripides,” the young Virginia Woolf meditated in her diary two millennia later. “It is this common mind that binds the whole world together; & all the world is mind.”
Two years earlier, in the first year of the twentieth century and the final year of his life, the uncommonly minded Canadian psychiatrist Maurice Bucke had formalized this notion in his visionary, controversial book Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind, which influenced generations of thinkers ranging from Albert Einstein to Abraham Maslow to Steve Jobs.
Science was young then — it still is — and the world was old, and the mind was old, its dwelling-place practically unchanged since the cranium of early Homo sapiens began accommodating a brain comparable to our own some three hundred thousand years ago. With neuroscience yet to be born, it fell on the poets and the philosophers to meditate on the complexities of consciousness — the sole valve between reality and our experience, made of the same matter as the stars. Today, neuroscience remains a young and insecure science, as crude as Galilean astronomy — and as revolutionary in the revelations it has already contoured, yet to be shaded in with the nuances of understanding that might, just might, one day illuminate the fundaments of consciousness.
Plate from The Principles of Light and Color: Including Among Other Things the Harmonic Laws of the Universe, the Etherio-atomic Philosophy of Force, Chromo Chemistry, Chromo Therapeutics, and the General Philosophy of the Fine Forces, Together with Numerous Discoveries and Practical Applications by Edwin D. Babbitt, 1878. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)
Until that day comes, we have a panoply of theories about what it is that flickers on the cave walls of the cranium to irradiate our entire experience of life and reality. The most compelling — and the most controversial — of them are what Annaka Harris examines with equal parts openhearted curiosity and intelligent consideration in Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind (public library).
At the center of her inquiry is an idea ancient Eastern spiritual traditions, a century of Western neurocognitive science, and epochs of philosophy share: the illusory nature of the self — the self that is always in flux yet rooted in our experience of time, the self we build and rebuild upon a narrative foundation, the self separated from the other by a marvelously permeable boundary, the self of which nature can so easily and profoundly strip us during a solar eclipse, the self into which we fortress our whole sense of identity and from which we peer out to receive our whole view of the world, only to discover again and again that the fortress is an appearance in consciousness filled with what Borges called “the nothingness of personality.”
Drawing on the intricate neurological processes and disorders that shape and misshape our conscious experience, on the behavior-altering effects various parasites have on their hosts, and on her own experience of staggering changes in preference, habit, and temperament on the hormonal cocktail of pregnancy, Harris writes:
The idea that “I” am the ultimate source of my desires and actions begins to crumble [and] it’s hard to see how our behavior, preferences, and even choices could be under the control of our conscious will in any real sense. It seems much more accurate to say that consciousness is along for the ride — watching the show, rather than creating or controlling it. In theory, we can go as far as to say that few (if any) of our behaviors need consciousness in order to be carried out. But at an intuitive level, we assume that because human beings act in certain ways and are conscious — and because experiences such as fear, love, and pain feel like such powerful motivators within consciousness — our behaviors are driven by our awareness of them and otherwise would not occur.
And yet, she observes, many of the actions we attribute to consciousness and hold up as proof of it could, in theory, take place without consciousness, in a machine programmed to operate by logical sequences resulting in those selfsame actions. (That, after all, is the most thrilling and terrifying question of artificial intelligence.) She posits a curious meta-exception:
Consciousness seems to play a role in behavior when we think and talk about the mystery of consciousness. When I contemplate “what it’s like” to be something, that experience of consciousness presumably affects the subsequent processing taking place in my brain. And almost nothing I think or say when contemplating consciousness would make any sense coming from a system without it.
[…]
When I talk about the mystery of consciousness — referring to something I can distinguish and wonder about and attribute (or not) to other entities — it seems highly unlikely that I would ever do this, let alone devote so much time to it, without feeling the experience I am referring to (for the qualitative experience is the entire subject, and without it, I can have no knowledge of it whatsoever). And when I turn these ideas over in my mind, the fact that my thoughts are about the experience of consciousness suggests that there is a feedback loop of sorts and that consciousness is affecting my brain processing.
What emerges is the intimation that we are not merely machines that think — after all, many of our machines now “think” in the sense of processing information and adapting it to govern behavior — but machines that think about thinking, lending our biochemical machinery an edge of the miraculous not (yet) explicable by our science, which remains our mightiest technology of thought. She observes:
Most of our intuitions about what qualifies as evidence of consciousness affecting a system don’t survive scrutiny. Therefore, we must reevaluate the assumptions we tend to make about the role consciousness plays in driving behavior, as these assumptions naturally lead to the conclusions we draw about what consciousness is and what causes it to arise in nature. Everything we hope to uncover through consciousness studies — from determining whether or not a given person is in a conscious state, to pinpointing where in the evolution of life consciousness first emerged, to understanding the exact physical process that gives birth to conscious experience — is informed by our intuitions about the function of consciousness.
Where our intuitions break down most dramatically and where the breakdown most disorients us is in what may be the most poorly branded and therefore poorly understood theory of consciousness: panpsychism.
Coined in the sixteenth century by the Italian philosopher and proto-scientist Francesco Patrizi, whose work inspired Galileo, from the Greek pan (“all”) and psyche (“mind” or “spirit”), panpsychism is the idea that all matter is endowed with the capacity for subjective experience of immaterial quality — the sort of experience we call, in its expression familiar to us, consciousness.
In the epochs since, as the world slowly began shedding the cloth of the supernatural and began seeking in mystical notions a kernel of secular and scientifically verifiable truth, panpsychism came closer and closer to information theory and the modern scientific understanding of the physicality of the universe. (There are echoes of panpsychism in the great theoretical physicist John Archibald Wheeler’s famous “It-for-Bit” theory, asserting that “observer-participancy gives rise to information” because “all things physical are information-theoretic in origin and this is a participatory universe.”)
With an eye to the muddling, misconstrual, and ample misapplications of panpsychism as a framework that could broaden the conversation on consciousness but instead often shuts it down, Harris does the essential and courageous public service of lens-clearing:
Those of us who want to push this conversation forward have an important obligation to clearly distinguish panpsychic views from the false conclusions people tend to draw from them — namely, that panpsychism somehow justifies or explains a variety of psychic phenomena — following from the incorrect assumption that consciousness must entail a mind with a single point of view and complex thoughts. Ascribing some level of consciousness to plants or inanimate matter is not the same as ascribing to them human minds with wishes and intentions like our own. Anyone who believes the universe has a plan for us or that he can consult with his “higher self” for medical advice should not feel propped up by the modern view of panpsychism.
[…]
Unfortunately, it seems quite hard for us to drop the intuition that consciousness equals complex thought. But if consciousness is in fact a more basic aspect of the universe than previously believed, that doesn’t suddenly give credence to your neighbor’s belief that she can communicate telepathically with her ficus tree. In actuality, if a version of panpsychism is correct, everything will still appear to us and behave exactly as it already does.
Plate from The Principles of Light and Color by Edwin D. Babbitt, 1878. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)
Such appropriations of panpsychism are to the study of consciousness what the pseudoscience of phrenology is to neuroscience — contours of promising regions of exploration on our ever-evolving map of reality, shaded in with human bias. Rather than having the egalitarian view of consciousness-across-matter they seek to espouse, these misinterpretations impose on the concept of consciousness self-referential standards rife with human exceptionalism, making of nature an uncanny valley that betrays both nature and our humanity.
Paradoxically, this misunderstanding of panpsychism is often used as an argument against panpsychism itself, not against its misunderstanding. But to actually consider a lichen or a quark endowed with a measure of consciousness is to recognize that its experience cannot, by structural definition, be anything close to our subjective human experience of consciousness — our qualia and their byproduct: the sense of self.
Considering what might be the greatest intuitive challenge to psychism, known as the “combination problem” — how the small constituents of matter, each the carrier of primitive consciousness, can combine into larger entities that have new and different consciousnesses, including ours — Harris observes that much of the challenge stems from a reflexive confusion:
For many scientists and philosophers, the combination problem presents the biggest obstacle to accepting any description of reality that includes consciousness as a widespread feature. However, the obstacle we face here once again seems to be a case of confusing consciousness with the concept of a self, as philosophers and scientists tend to speak in terms of a “subject” of consciousness. The term “self” is usually used to describe a more complex set of psychological characteristics — including qualities such as self-confidence or a capacity for empathy — but a “subject” still describes an experience of self in its most basic form… Perhaps it’s wrong to talk about a subject of consciousness, and it’s more accurate to instead talk about the content available to conscious experience at any given location in space-time, determined by the matter present there — umwelts applied not just to organisms, but to all matter, in every configuration and at every point in space-time.
Iris Murdoch — one of the most brilliant and underappreciated philosophical minds our species has produced — provided a potent antidote to the combination problem in her lovely notion of unselfing, rooted in the recognition that “the self, the place where we live, is a place of illusion.” In this light, the combination problem becomes decidedly less problematic — without the notion of a subject, a concrete entity to be combined with another concrete entity, there is no combining to be done. Consciousness becomes both the vessel of experience and the content of experience, and transcends both — more field than form.
After citing research on split-brain patients, in whom mental function and the contents of consciousness can be divided in astonishing ways, Harris writes:
[Without a self], consciousness could persist as is, while the character and content change, depending on the arrangement of the specific matter in question. Maybe content is sometimes shared across large, intricately connected regions and sometimes confined to very small ones, perhaps even overlapping. If two human brains were connected, both people might feel as if the content of their consciousness had simply expanded, with each person feeling a continuous transformation from the content of one person to the whole of the two, until the connection was more or less complete. It’s only when you insert the concepts of “him,” “her,” “you,” and “me” as discrete entities that the expanding of content for any area of consciousness (or even multiple areas merging) becomes a combination problem.
Harris ends her rigorous reconnaissance mission of the terra semicognita of consciousness studies with the telescopic perspective that is the poetry of possibility:
Humanity is young, and we’ve barely begun to understand our place in the cosmos. As we continue to look out from our planet and contemplate the nature of reality, we should remember that there is a mystery right here where we stand.
A century ago — a century during which humanity split the atom, unraveled the mysteries of our genetic code, and heard the sound of spacetime for the first time — quantum theory originator Max Planck insisted that “science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature… because… we ourselves are part of nature and therefore part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.” In the first year of that century, Lord Kelvin took the podium at the British Association of Science to declare that “there is nothing new to be discovered in physics,” while at the same moment, a young patent clerk in Zurich was incubating the ideas that would converge into his theory of relativity, forever transfiguring our elemental understanding of reality. It is our human nature to consider the inconceivable impossible, again and again mistaking the parameters of the conceivable for the perimeter of the possible. But it is also the nature of the human mind — that material miracle of electrical and poetic impulses — to transcend its own limits of imagination again and again, inventing new parameters of thought that broaden the perimeter of the possible until it becomes real.
Astronomers have captured some of the most detailed images ever seen of galaxies in deep space.
They are in much higher definition than normal and reveal the inner workings of galaxies in unprecedented detail.
Many of the images could yield insights into the role of black holes in star and planet formation.
The researchers say that the pictures will transform our understanding of how galaxies evolve.
The images are of the radio waves emitted by the galaxies. Researchers often study the radio waves from astronomical objects rather than the visible light they give off because it enables them to see things that would otherwise be blocked by the Earth's atmosphere or dust and gas in faraway galaxies.
Many regions of space that are dark to our eyes, actually burn brightly in the radio waves they give off. This allows astronomers to peer into star-forming regions or into the heart of galaxies.
What is new is that the team has dramatically improved the resolution of radio images by linking together more than 70,000 small antennae spread across nine European counties.
Combining radio signals from so many antennas is not a straight-forward process. The team has spent six years developing a completely new way of collecting the signal from each antenna, digitising it, transporting it to a to central processor, and then combining all the data into images that are not only of enormous scientific interest but also of great beauty.
The accomplishment is a technical tour de force and was led by Dr Leah Morabito from Durham University, UK.
"To work on the data for so long, and then to finally get such images and be able be the first person to see what it looks like is just incredible," she told BBC News.
"I walked around with a huge smile on my face for the rest of the day, because I felt so proud that I was able to make these images and be able to see something nobody had ever seen before".
The image at the top of the page was produced by a member of Dr Morabito's team. It shows a galaxy that is barely visible, sitting in the middle of jets of material in orange, shooting out from either side, each one much larger than the galaxy itself.
The jets are caused by a supermassive black hole at the heart of the galaxy- an object with such strong gravity not even light can escape. It normally sucks in material - but the inward pull also creates forces around the black hole that result in material being spat out, far into space.
Such jets have been observed before - but astronomers have obtained new scientific information from the dark bands on the jet on the right, which have not been seen before. These, the astronomers believe, represent periods of relative inactivity by the black hole - when it spits out less material. The image therefore gives researchers an insight into the black hole's "sleep cycle".
The picture above shows two galaxies colliding. the bright spot on the one on the left is caused by exploding stars - creating what is effectively a galactic wind - blowing dust and gas away from it.
Early Galaxy
The light from the galaxy shown directly above originated when the Universe was only 2.6 billion years old. Above and below it are jets of material thrown out by the black hole within. Normally such early galaxies can't be studied in detail. But now, for the first time, the astronomers have seen the structure of one of them at radio frequencies - which provides critical scientific information about how the black hole is interacting with its surroundings.
The images are revealing that galaxies are much more than a collection of stars. They are dynamic sun- and planet-making factories, powered by black holes, according to Dr Neal Jackson, from the University of Manchester.
"Even seasoned astronomers go 'wow!' when they see these images," he told me.
"It's become very clear that, in order to understand galaxy evolution, we need to understand the black hole right at the very centre, because it appears to have a fairly fundamental influence on how galaxies evolve and that is what these images allow us to do," says Dr Jackson.
"These high-resolution images allow us to zoom in to see what's really going on when supermassive black holes launch these jets of material." The picture on the left is of a galaxy observed in visible light. The middle image shows the same galaxy but seen at radio frequencies and on the right is the high-definition image.
Dr Morabito says that images like these are helping astronomers learn just how these processes, that created stars and planets - including our own Solar System - actually work.
"We are really beginning to understand how galaxies have evolved. And the black holes are a massive part of that because their jets can take away fuel for star formation. And as they push outwards, they can disrupt the galaxies. They can even trigger star formation or quench it and make it happen less," she said.
The first set of results have led to the publication of nine scientific papers on the dynamics of black holes in galaxies. But this is just the start for the team. They plan to scan millions of galaxies over the next few years.
"And that's really what we need to be able to understand, the whole complete picture of how black holes impact galaxy evolution," says Dr Morabito,
"I think we're definitely in for some surprises. Whenever you start doing something new in astronomy you always find out things that you never expected and that's what I really look forward to."
The international network of telescopes is known as the Low Frequency Array known as Lofar for short. Most of the antennas are located in Exloo in the Netherlands.
Stunning images of galaxies reveal how black holes devour stars -
BBC News
Aug 17, 2021
Astronomers have captured some of the most detailed images ever seen of galaxies in deep space.
The pictures reveal their inner workings in unprecedented detail, and show the role of black holes in creating, and destroying, stars and planets.
Clive Myrie presents BBC News at Ten reporting by science correspondent Pallab Ghosh.
