Ashbakar, head of the European Space Agency: “Space is limited in resources”

Abigail Anderson December 28, 2021 

interview

Mars mission, moon rocket, astronauts’ choice: ESA has big plans for 2022. Director General Joseph Asbacher explains the plans in an interview with tagesschau.de It calls for new rules of space.

tagesschau.de: What are your ESA highlights for the coming year?

Josef Aschbacher: We have a very important mission starting between the end of September and the beginning of October. Her name is “ExoMars” and she has a rover on board called “Rosalind Franklin”. The rover is the largest ever on Mars. He has a wide range of scientific instruments on board for the exploration of Mars. We are carrying out the mission in a very close partnership with our Russian partners from Roscosmos.

Josef Asbacher has been Director General of the European Space Agency (ESA) since March 2021. Prior to this, the original Austrian worked for many years in various positions at the European Space Agency, including Director of Earth Observation Programs.

tagesschau.de: How far does this mission go beyond NASA’s mission with “Perseverance” – Rover Which landed on Mars in February?

Ashbacher: There are more scientific instruments on board our mission. For the first time we will drill up to 1.70 meters into the surface of Mars with an drill, take samples and analyze them in the lab. It will be very exciting and very complex.

tagesschau.de: In 2022, NASA wants to put “Artemis I”, the first mission of the space shuttle Orion, into orbit around the moon. Here, too, the European Space Agency is very involved.

Ashbacher: This is correct. NASA’s SLS — the lunar rocket that will return to the moon decades after Apollo — has a small ESA logo. We supply very basic components, eg “European Service Unit” with electrical supply and drive systems. Without the module being built in Bremen, NASA’s Moon mission could not be performed. We are an essential partner that NASA depends on. The start time window is mid-February. There is no set date yet.
See also Deep Reprogramming of the Innate Immune System - The Practice of Healing
“We must use space sustainably”

tagesschau.de: Space has long gone from a scientific space to an economic one. They have recently expressed concern about the dominance of Elon Musk and his “Starlink” satellite. What is the problem?

Ashbacher: Elon Musk has launched nearly 2,000 “Starlink” generation satellites so far. On the other hand, this is very good because there is a lot of activity in the space. On the other hand, these satellites make up about half of all the satellites currently active in space. This is a good thing for Elon Musk, I personally admire his huge vision and energy to achieve very complex projects. However, its activity also has consequences, namely that space is occupied and occupied by its satellites – not only physically by the satellites themselves, but also by the frequencies used.

Here is the problem: we must use space sustainably. We all depend on satellites on a daily basis – for example for navigation devices, weather forecasting, or information on agriculture and forestry, disaster control and climate research in the broadest sense. Telecommunication is also very limited by space. Space has limited resources. We must think globally together about how resources are used and who has the right to use satellites and their associated frequencies. This requires new binding rules.

tagesschau.de: Elon Musk is behaving like this because no global regulatory “space agency” is slowing it down. Bringing space agencies and companies—that is, states and the private sector—to one table seems utopian, right?

Ashbacher: It is a challenge and a very complex process. You have a mix of public and private individuals like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos. But we must not forget that the national authorities of states issue licenses to launch and operate satellites. This is regulated at the national level, but also at the international level through the International Telecommunication Union, which is the international telecommunications body based in Geneva. So you can actually step in for regulation.

tagesschau.de: You have held the position of Director General of the European Space Agency since March and have made it your mission to make Europe more confident in space. In the United States, enthusiasm for space activities is greater than in Europe. Have you noticed a rethink among politicians in ESA member states who release money?

Ashbacher: The United States is placing more emphasis on expansion and exploration. NASA’s program focuses on the space station, the moon, and Mars. The European program focuses more on our planet, ie climate protection and sustainability as well as practical applications for people such as reliable telecommunications and navigation. This is reflected in politics as well, and this is exactly what Europe’s priorities in space correspond to. Of course, Europe also has astronaut and exploration programs, but it is less funded than NASA.

tagesschau.de: When it comes to astronauts, the European Space Agency currently has a permanent subscription to the International Space Station. Following French ESA astronaut Thomas Pesquet, German astronaut Matthias Maurer followed in November.

Ashbacher: I agree. Now we have Matthias Maurer On the International Space Station. He has conducted more than 35 experiments on the International Space Station with German participation and many other international experiments. After Matthias Maurer, the Italian will be in the spring ESA astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti Fly to the International Space Station. She should also meet Matthias Maurer there. Then, as ESA, we will have three astronauts in direct order in space for the first time. The last four to six candidates for the ESA application process will then be selected by the end of next year. We had with 22,589 applicants set a record for interested parties.

See also Great image from the International Space Station: Earth glowing green

Waiting for Ariane 6’s “rapid launch test”

tagesschau.de: Will the European Space Agency’s new Ariane 6 launch pad also launch from the Kourou spaceport for the first time next year?

Ashbacher: The question is currently under discussion. We currently have two great gurus to really answer this question. One is the so-called “hot launch test” at the facilities of the German Aerospace Center in Lampoldshausen. This test will be done early next year. If there are no technical changes after that, the Ariane 6 could start in the second half, towards the end of the year.

The interview was conducted by Ute Spangenberger, SWR, for tagesschau.de.

 

Here’s DART’s First Picture From Space. We Are Already Looking Forward to its Last Image

POSTED ONDECEMBER 28, 2021 BY NANCY ATKINSON

It might not look like much, but here is the first monumental image from the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART). Earlier this month, a circular door covering the aperture of its DRACO telescopic camera was opened, allowing the camera to take its first image.  

Now, imagine what the camera’s last image will be like: a REALLY closeup view of a binary asteroid system, Didymos and especially, its moonlet Dimorphos. The goal of DART is to intentionally collide with Dimorphos. If everything goes according to plan, this will alter the asteroid’s motion so that ground-based telescopes can accurately measure any changes.

DART is the world’s first planetary defense test mission. It will demonstrate that a spacecraft can autonomously navigate to and perform a kinetic impact on a relatively small target asteroid. This will test if this is a viable technique to deflect a genuinely dangerous asteroid.

DART will reach its target on Sept. 26, 2022. FYI, the Didymos asteroid system does not pose a threat to Earth.

DART launched on November 24. As in any mission that launches to space, there’s always concern about how the instruments will react to the violent vibrations of launch and the extreme temperature shift. NASA said that because components of DART’s telescopic instrument are sensitive to movements as small as 5 millionths of a meter, even a tiny shift of something in the instrument could be very serious.

But all seems to be well with the DRACO camera. Below is another image taken on December 10.

On Dec. 10, DART’s DRACO camera captured and returned this image of the stars in Messier 38, or the Starfish Cluster, which lies some 4,200 light years away. Credits: NASA/Johns Hopkins APL

DRACO (short for Didymos Reconnaissance and Asteroid Camera for Optical navigation) is a high-resolution camera, inspired by the imager on the New Horizons spacecraft. Recall the excitement of the first close-up images of the Pluto system, and later when New Horizons flew past the Kuiper Belt object, Arrokoth.

As DART’s only instrument, DRACO will capture images of the asteroid Didymos and its moonlet asteroid Dimorphos, as well as support the spacecraft’s autonomous guidance system to direct DART to its final kinetic impact.

DRACO’s first image, taken on Tuesday, Dec. 7, 2021 was taken about 2 million miles (11 light seconds) from Earth — very close, astronomically speaking. The image shows about a dozen stars, crystal-clear and sharp against the black backdrop of space, near where the constellations Perseus, Aries and Taurus intersect.

Artist’s impression of NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft speeding toward the smaller of the two bodies in the Didymos asteroid system. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory

NASA said the DART navigation team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory used the stars in the image to determine precisely how DRACO was oriented, providing the first measurements of how the camera is pointed relative to the spacecraft. With those measurements in hand, the DART team could accurately move the spacecraft to point DRACO at objects of interest, such as Messier 38 (M38), also known as the Starfish Cluster, that DART captured in the second image, taken on Dec. 10.

Located in the constellation Auriga, the cluster of stars lies some 4,200 light years from Earth. Intentionally capturing images with many stars like M38 helps the team characterize optical imperfections in the images as well as calibrate how absolutely bright an object is — all important details for accurate measurements when the spacecraft gets closer to Didymos and DRACO starts imaging the spacecraft’s final destination.

Lead image caption: On Dec. 7, after opening the circular door to its telescopic imager, NASA’s DART captured this image of about a dozen stars near where the constellations Perseus, Aries and Taurus intersect.Credits: NASA/Johns Hopkins APL

HOLD ON 

The Earth Is Spinning Faster Than Average
By Adesola Mojo On Dec 28, 2021

TORONTO —

Let’s start with some well-known facts about the Earth – it’s the fifth-largest planet in the solar system, 70 per cent of its surface is covered in water, and it’s the only planet known to have life on it.

One lesser-known fact is that a day on Earth isn’t exactly 24 hours long.

Sure, the Earth takes about 86,400 seconds – 1,440 minutes – on average, to make a full rotation around the sun. But there are a number of factors that affect the Earth’s rotation, causing it to speed up or slow down.

“We’re all used to the idea that Earth rotates every 24 hours, but of course, nothing’s ever really that simple,” Elaina Hyde, director of the Allan I. Carswell observatory and assistant professor at York University, told CTVNews.ca in a video call.

“We’re a rocky planet with a molten core, we have an atmosphere, we have oceans – all of these things can combine with different kinds of complex motions to create effects…like what we have been seeing.”

Hyde is referring to changes in the speed of the Earth’s rotation in recent years. In 2020, scientists say the Earth sped up so much that it broke a previous record for the shortest day on Earth 28 times. The shortest of these days was recorded on July 19, when Earth rotated around the sun 1.4602 milliseconds faster than the average time of 86,400 seconds.

WHAT CAUSES THE EARTH TO SPEED UP?

When it comes to explaining why these shifts happen, Hyde says there’s no single answer. She points to natural events such as earthquakes, as well as the movement of jet streams, and rising ocean levels as a result of climate change as just a few factors that come into play. Hyde also highlights the slowing down of major ocean currents, particularly in the northern Atlantic Ocean, as having an impact as well.

Each of these activities affects the Earth’s angular momentum, she explains, or the rate at which it rotates, taking into account its massive size.

“Saying that this was due to any one cause is not statistically significant,” Hyde said. “It is a combination of effects.”

While the Earth’s rotation has since slowed down, 2021 is still predicted to be the shortest year in a decade by milliseconds, says Hyde. This may create a need for a negative leap second.

Negative leap seconds, the opposite of regular leap seconds, involve subtracting time from the Earth’s timekeeping system so that it aligns with astronomical time, or the time it actually takes the Earth to complete a rotation around the sun.

Co-ordinated universal time, or UTC, is the time standard used to adjust clocks on Earth. It’s determined using an atomic clock. These clocks calculate time based on the movement of atoms. Placing an atom under specific frequencies of radiation will cause its electrons to move between different states of energy. The amount of cycles of radiation necessary for atoms to move between both energy states amounts to a second. Since 1967, one second has been defined as “9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium-133 atom.”

“This clock does not depend on any external force to give you that count of time, it’s a completely independent measurement,” said Hyde. “Atomic clocks are incredibly accurate at keeping time.”

Since many factors can affect the speed at which the Earth rotates, the time it takes to complete a rotation doesn’t always align with UTC on Earth. This creates the need for an adjustment. According to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), leap seconds are added, or subtracted, when there is a difference of 0.4 seconds or more between UTC and astronomical time.

“To keep our very precise atomic clocks lined up so that we can still keep using the months and the days and the years in the calendar system we have, we have to make adjustments,” explained Hyde. “[A leap second] is basically an artificial adjustment that we make in our calendar system to bring ourselves up to date.”

According to the NIST, leap seconds have been added once every 18 months or so since 1972, making them quite common. Negative leap seconds, on the other hand, have never been implemented.

THE POSSIBILITY OF A NEGATIVE LEAP SECOND

While the Earth’s spin has slowed down since last year, it’s still spinning slightly faster than average. Research shows the average length of a day in the first half of 2021 was 0.39 milliseconds less than it was the year before. From July to September though, days were actually 0.05 milliseconds longer than the 2020 average.

“It is more usual to have the leap second going in the direction of making the day longer because that is the overall pattern that we’re expecting,” said Hyde. “But like I said, all kinds of events can cause it to go the other way, it’s just not as common though.”

Looking at the speed at which the planet is rotating now, it’s possible a negative leap second may need to be implemented within the decade. The International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service is responsible for that decision. But when looking at the impact this change might have on day-to-day life, Hyde insists it isn’t something to worry about, unless stock market trading is involved.

“It’s not going to be a big effect for anyone,” she said. “But if you are interested in high-frequency trading or any kind of computational activities that take place multiple times a second, please make sure to keep up with these atomic clocks when they make the adjustment.”

This is as simple as going online and staying up to date with atomic clocks such as this one.

Still, there’s no guarantee that a negative leap second will need to be applied just yet. While it may be easy to plot out the Earth’s rotation over the long term, these kinds of measurements are tougher to predict in the short-term, says Hyde.

“It’s much more difficult because we don’t know exactly when earthquakes are going to appear all over Earth, we don’t know exactly how much water is going into the oceans due to climate change there’s a lot of unknowns,” she said. “Earth is an unpredictable system by nature. So making very, very precise predictions…is hard.”

Read original article here

SoloHi catches stunning views of 'Christmas comet' Leonard fly by

by Naval Research Laboratory

Scientists at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory evaluate early data the ESA/NASA Solar Orbiter spacecraft sent back to Earth as it observes comet Leonard, a mass of space dust, rock and ice just over half a mile across (1 kilometer) as it heads inbound to the sun.

Imagery captured between Dec. 17 and 19 by the NRL's Solar Orbiter Heliospheric Imager (SoloHI) aboard the ESA/NASA Solar Orbiter spacecraft, shows comet Leonard streaking diagonally across the field of view. Planets Venus and Mercury are also visible in the top right, Venus appearing brighter and moving from left to right.

"When SoloHI recorded these images, the comet was approximately between the Sun and the spacecraft, with its gas (ion) and dust tails pointing towards the spacecraft," Karl Battams, Ph.D., a computational scientist in NRL's Heliospheric Physics section said. "Toward the end of the image sequence, our view of both of the tails improves as the viewing angle at which we see the comet increases, and SoloHI gets a side-on view of the comet."

Two other observation platforms, the Parker Solar Probe and the Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory, are looking at the comet from very different locations in space, which could give us a lot of valuable information about the 3D structure of the tail and of the solar outflows.

"We hope to use the two views from Solar Orbiter and STEREO to get a 3D structure and velocity," said Robin Colaninno, Ph.D., an astrophysicist and SoloHI PI at NRL. "The changes in the comet's tail give us great insight into the solar winds."

Comet Leonard as captured by NASA's Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory-A (STEREO) spacecraft, HI-2 telescope, which has watched the comet since early November. This animated “difference image” was created by subtracting the current frame from the previous frame to highlight differences between them. Difference images are useful for seeing subtle changes in Leonard's ion tail (the trail of ionized gases streaming from the comet's body, or nucleus), which becomes longer and brighter toward the end of the clip. Credit: NASA/NRL/Karl Battams

Comets are remnants of the swarm of planetesimals that formed the solar system and retain records from before and during planet formation.

Comet Leonard, formally known as C/2021 A1, was discovered Jan. 3, 2021 by Gregory Leonard, a senior research specialist at the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory in Arizona. Leonard spotted the comet in images taken from the Mt. Lemmon Skycenter in Arizona.

Battams said there has been much discussion among astronomers in the past week about this comet.

"Many folks reported a significant brightening around the 14th (before the SoloHI images), and then a subsequent so-called "outburst" in the past 24 hours, with indeterminate behavior in the meantime," Battams said. "My suspicion is that the comet is increasingly unhappy, and these outbursts could be the beginning of a slow and fatal disruption. But it's too early to say for sure—it could just be letting off steam, so to speak."

SoloHI will continue observing the comet until it leaves its field of view until Dec. 22. Comet Leonard's closest pass on Jan. 3, 2021 will take it within 56 million miles (90 million kilometers) of the Sun, slightly more than half Earth's distance. If it does not disintegrate, current orbit calculations show that its path will send it out into interstellar space, never to return to our solar system.

Views of comet Leonard from two sun-watching spacecraft

Provided by Naval Research Laboratory 

 

Drunken solution to the chaotic three-body problem

by Technion - Israel Institute of Technology

Credit: CC0 Public Domain

The three-body problem is one of the oldest problems in physics: It concerns the motions of systems of three bodies—like the sun, Earth, and the moon—and how their orbits change and evolve due to their mutual gravity. The three-body problem has been a focus of scientific inquiry ever since Newton.

When one massive object comes close to another, their relative motion follows a trajectory dictated by their mutual gravitational attraction, but as they move along and change their positions along their trajectories, the forces between them, which depend on their mutual positions, also change, which, in turn, affects their trajectory. For two bodies (e.g., the Earth moving around the sun without the influence of other bodies), the orbit of the Earth would continue to follow a specific curve (an ellipse), which can be accurately described mathematically. However, under the influence of a third object, the complex interactions lead to the three-body problem—the system becomes chaotic and unpredictable, and the system's evolution over long time scales cannot be predicted. Indeed, while this phenomenon has been known for over 400 years, ever since Newton and Kepler, a neat mathematical description for the three-body problem is still lacking.

In the past, physicists—including Newton himself—have tried to solve the three-body problem; in 1889, King Oscar II of Sweden even offered a prize, in commemoration of his 60th birthday, to anybody who could provide a general solution. In the end, it was the French mathematician Henri Poincaré who won the competition. He ruined any hope for a full solution by proving that such interactions are chaotic, in the sense that the final outcome is essentially random; in fact, his finding opened a new scientific field of research, termed chaos theory.

The absence of a solution to the three-body problem means that scientists cannot predict what happens during a close interaction between a binary system (formed of two stars that orbit each other like Earth and the sun) and a third star, except by simulating it on a computer and following the evolution step-by-step. These simulations show that when such an interaction occurs, it proceeds in two phases: First, a chaotic phase during which all three bodies pull on each other violently until one star is ejected far from the other two, which then settle down to an ellipse. If the third star is on a bound orbit, it eventually comes back down toward the binary, whereupon the first phase ensues once again. This triple dance ends when, in the second phase, one of the stars escapes on an un-bound orbit, never to return.

In a paper accepted for publication in Physical Review X this month, Ph.D. student Yonadav Barry Ginat and Professor Hagai Perets of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology used this randomness to provide a statistical solution to the entire two-phase process. Instead of predicting the actual outcome, they calculated the probability of any given outcome of each phase-1 interaction. While chaos implies that a complete solution is impossible, its random nature allows calculation of the probability that a triple interaction ends in one particular way rather than another. Then, the entire series of close approaches could be modeled by using a the theory of random walks, sometimes called "drunkard's walk." The term got its name from mathematicians thinking about how a drunk would walk, regarding it as a random process—with each step, the drunk doesn't realize where they are and takes the next step in some random direction.

The triple system behaves, essentially, in the same way. After each close encounter, one of the stars is ejected randomly (but with the three stars collectively still conserving the overall energy and momentum of the system). This series of close encounters could be regarded as a drunkard's walk. Like a drunk's step, a star is ejected randomly, comes back, and another (or the same star) is ejected to a likely different random direction (similar to another step taken by the drunk) and comes back, and so forth, until a star is completely ejected and never returns (akin to a drunk falling into a ditch).

Another way of thinking about this is to notice the similarities with describing the weather, which also exhibits the same phenomenon of chaos that Poincaré discovered; this is why the weather is so hard to predict. Meteorologists therefore have to recourse to probabilistic predictions (think about that time when a 70 percent chance of rain ended up as glorious sunshine in reality). Moreover, to predict the weather a week from now, meteorologists have to account for the probabilities of all possible types of weather in the intervening days, and only by composing them together can they get a proper long-term forecast.

What Ginat and Perets showed in their research was how this could be done for the three-body problem: They computed the probability of each phase-2 binary-single configuration (the probability of finding different energies, for example), and then composed all of the individual phases using the theory of random walks to find the final probability of any possible outcome, much like calculating long-term weather forecasts.

"We came up with the random walk model in 2017, when I was an undergraduate student," said Mr. Ginat, "I took a course that Prof. Perets taught, and there I had to write an essay on the three-body problem. We didn't publish it at the time, but when I started a Ph.D., we decided to expand the essay and publish it."

The three-body problem was studied independently by research groups in recent years, including Nicholas Stone of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, collaborating with Nathan Leigh, then at the American Museum of Natural History, and Barak Kol, also of the Hebrew University. Now, with the current study by Ginat and Perets, the entire, multi-stage, three-body interaction is fully solved statistically.

"This has important implications for our understanding of gravitational systems, and in particular, cases where many encounters between three stars occur, like in dense clusters of stars," said Prof. Perets. "In such regions, many exotic systems form through three-body encounters, leading to collisions between stars and compact objects like black holes, neutron stars and white dwarves, which also produce gravitational waves that have been directly detected only in the last few years. The statistical solution could serve as an important step in modeling and predicting the formation of such systems."

The random walk model can also do more: So far, studies of the three-body problem treat the individual stars as idealized point particles. In reality, of course, they are not, and their internal structure might affect their motion, for example, in tides. Tides on Earth are caused by the moon and change the planet's shape slightly. Friction between the water and the rest of the planet dissipates some of the tidal energy as heat. Energy is conserved, however, so this heat must come from the moon's energy in its motion about the Earth. Similarly for the three-body problem, tides can draw orbital energy out of the three-bodies' motion.

"The random walk model accounts for such phenomena naturally," said Mr. Ginat. "All you have to do is to remove the tidal heat from the total energy in each step, and then compose all the steps. We found that we were able to compute the outcome probabilities in this case, too." As it turns out, a drunkard's walk can sometime shed light on some of the most fundamental questions in physics.

Novel theory addresses centuries-old physics problem

More information: Yonadav Barry Ginat et al, Analytical, Statistical Approximate Solution of Dissipative and Nondissipative Binary-Single Stellar Encounters, Physical Review X (2021). DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevX.11.031020

Journal information: Physical Review X 

Provided by Technion - Israel Institute of Technology 

 

Image: Red velvet Mars

by European Space Agency

Credit: ESA/Roscosmos/CaSSIS, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

Like a sprinkle of powdered sugar on a rich red velvet cake, this scene from the ESA/Roscosmos ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter captures the contrasting colors of bright white water-ice against the rusty red martian soil.

This delightful image was taken 5 July 2021 and soaks in the view of a 4 km-wide crater in Mars' north polar region of Vastitas Borealis, centered at 70.6 °N/230.3°E.

The crater is partially filled with water ice, which is also particularly predominant on its north-facing slopes that receive fewer hours of sunlight on average throughout the year.

The dark material clearly visible on the crater rim—giving it a somewhat scorched appearance—likely consists of volcanic materials such as basalt.

Most of the surrounding terrain is ice free, but has been shaped by ongoing aeolian processes. The streaks at the bottom right of the image are formed by winds that have removed the brighter iron oxide dust from the surface, exposing a slightly darker underlying substrate.

TGO arrived at Mars in 2016 and began its full science mission in 2018. The spacecraft is not only returning spectacular images, but also providing the best ever inventory of the planet's atmospheric gasses, and mapping the planet's surface for water-rich locations. It will also provide data relay services for the second ExoMars mission comprising the Rosalind Franklin rover and Kazachok platform, when it arrives on Mars in 2023.

Image: Crater trio

Provided by European Space Agency 

Two galaxies hidden by cosmic dust discovered, more to be found with Canada's help

Canada is one of NASA's partners in the just-launched James Webb Space Telescope

Author of the article: Spiro Papuckoski
Publishing date: Dec 26, 2021

Two distant galaxies previously hidden by cosmic dust were recently discovered. 

PHOTO BY MIK38 /iStock / Getty Images

The size of the universe may be unknown, but astronomers keep discovering galaxies farther and farther away.

Two previously invisible galaxies 29 billion light-years away were located by researchers at the University of Copenhagen’s Niels Bohr Institute, according to a recent study published in Nature

That’s far away — to put it mildly — as one light-year is the equivalent to 9.46 trillion kilometres. Multiply that by 29 billion and see if you can bust your calculator.

The researchers explain that the two galaxies hidden behind a thick layer of cosmic dust that surrounds them were invisible to the optical lens of the Hubble Space Telescope.

But by using the Atacama Large Millimeter Array telescopes in Chile’s Atacama Desert, astronomers were able to capture radio waves from the distant galaxies.

“We were looking at a sample of very distant galaxies, which we already knew existed from the Hubble Space Telescope,” Pascal Oesch, the Cosmic Dawn Center associate professor at the Niels Bohr Institute, told the university’s website .

“And then we noticed that two of them had a neighbour that we didn’t expect to be there at all. As both galaxies are surrounded by dust, some of their light is blocked, making them invisible to Hubble.”

What this new discovery suggests is that more galaxies formed in the early universe than what was previously estimated.

“Our discovery demonstrates that up to one in five of the earliest galaxies may have been missing from our map of the heavens. Before we can start to understand when and how galaxies formed in the universe, we first need a proper accounting,” said Oesch.

To help locate the missing galaxies, the Canadian Space Agency, NASA and European Space Agency launched a newly-built super telescope — the James Webb Space Telescope — i nto orbit on Christmas Day.

Once in place, the new telescope will help astronomers further map out the universe’s origins.

“The next step is to identify the galaxies we overlooked, because there are far more than we thought,” said Oesch.

“That’s where the James Webb Telescope will be a huge step forward. It will be much more sensitive than Hubble and able to investigate longer wavelengths, which ought to allow us to see these hidden galaxies with ease.”

 

Scientists Discover Fossil of Extinct Early Bird That Could Stick Out Its Tongue

By CHINESE ACADEMY OF SCIENCES DECEMBER 27, 2021

Reconstruction of Brevirostruavis macrohyoideus with its mouth open to show its long tongue that was used to catch insects or obtain nectar from cone-bearing plants. Credit: IVPP

A new fossil skeleton of an extinct species of bird from northeastern China that lived alongside dinosaurs 120 million years ago unexpectedly preserves a bony tongue that is nearly as long as its head.

The skull is very well preserved, showing that it had a relatively short snout and small teeth, with extremely long and curved bones for the tongue (called the hyoid apparatus).

Scientists from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the University of Texas at Austin have named this bird Brevirostruavis macrohyoideus, which means “bird with a short snout and big tongue.”

Their discovery was published in Journal of Anatomy on December 1, 2021.

We learn quickly as children to stick out our tongues, but most reptiles and birds do not have large muscular tongues like humans. Birds instead have a set of rod-shaped elements made of bone and cartilage comprising the hyoid apparatus that sits in the floor of their mouth.

In birds with larger tongues like ducks and parrots, they use their tongue to move food around in their mouth, get food into their mouth, and help to swallow food. Some birds today like hummingbirds and woodpeckers have a bony tongue as long or longer than their skulls.

Photograph and drawing of the skull of the extinct Cretaceous enantiornithine bird Brevirostruavis macrohyoideus, with the curved bones of the long tongue highlighted in orange. Credit: IVPP

This extinct short-snouted, big-tongued bird is the earliest example of a bird being able to stick its tongue out. Of course, this feature makes one wonder why this bird would be sticking its tongue out. The scientists hypothesized that the bird might have used this feature for catching insects in the same way that living woodpeckers use their tongues to get insects out of holes in bark, wood, and tree branches. Alternatively, the bird might have been feeding on pollen or nectar-like liquids from plants in the forest where it lived. No stomach contents were found with this skeleton.

This short-snouted, big-tongued bird is part of an extinct group of birds called enantiornithines or “opposite” birds. They were the most successful group of birds during the Cretaceous Period (between 66 and 145 million years ago), with fossils found around the world.

“We see a lot of variation in the size and shape of the skulls of enantiornithine birds and that probably reflects the great diversity of the foods they ate and how they caught their food. Now with this fossil, we see that it’s not just their skulls, but their tongues that also vary,” said Dr. WANG Min, co-author of the study.

The researchers previously showed that these early birds had fairly rigid skulls like their dinosaur relatives. This feature set some evolutionary and functional restrictions on early birds. “Perhaps the only way for them to fundamentally change through evolution how they caught their food and what food they ate was to shorten their skull in this case and to make the tongue bones much longer,” said lead author Dr. LI Zhiheng.

The long, curved hyoid apparatus in the fossil bird is made of bones called ceratobranchials. Living birds also have such bones in their hyoid, but it is the epibranchial bones, absent in early birds, that are very long in birds like woodpeckers.

“Animals experiment evolutionarily with what they have available. This bird evolved a long tongue using the bones it inherited from its dinosaur ancestors, and living birds evolved longer tongues with the bones that they have. This situation demonstrates the power of evolution, with birds using two different evolutionary pathways to solve the same problem of making a long tongue to stick out of their mouths,” said co-author Dr. Thomas Stidham.

Reference: “Novel evolution of a hyper-elongated tongue in a Cretaceous enantiornithine from China and the evolution of the hyolingual apparatus and feeding in birds” by Zhiheng Li, Min Wang, Thomas A. Stidham, Zhonghe Zhou and Julia Clarke, 1 December 2021, Journal of Anatomy.
DOI: 10.1111/joa.13588

 

Scientists Succeed in Culturing the Pygmy Zebra Octopus – The Size of a Grain of Rice When They Hatch

By EMILY GREENHALGH, MARINE BIOLOGICAL LABORATORY DECEMBER 24, 2021

A pygmy zebra octopus hatchling in the Cephalopod Mariculture Lab at the Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole. These octopuses are about the size of a grain of rice when they hatch. They reach full size (about the size of a table grape) within six months. Credit: Tim Briggs

For generations, scientists have relied on a handful of organisms to study the fundamentals of biology. The usual suspects—fruit flies, zebrafish, and mice, among others—all have short lifespans, small body size, can be bred through multiple generations in the laboratory, and have been developed for genetic investigations. These research organisms leave out a whole swath of biological diversity and scientists have lacked access to a cultured octopus laboratory organism—until now. Introducing the pygmy zebra octopus (O. chierchiae).

In a new paper published in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science, researchers from the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) introduce scientists to successful culturing methods for O. chierchiae that were developed at the MBL.

“The pygmy zebra octopus has certain biological features that make them attractive and more appropriate for laboratory research, compared to other octopuses,” says Bret Grasse, MBL’s manager of Cephalopod Operations and co-author on the paper.

Adult pygmy zebra octopus (Octopus chierchiae). Credit: Tim Briggs

Also known as the “lesser Pacific striped octopus,” the pygmy zebra octopus shares many useful similarities with other research organisms—such as small adult body size—but it also has unique features that distinguish it from other cephalopods (the group of animals that include octopus, squid, and cuttlefish).

O. chierchiae adult in a shell looking at a snail. Credit: Tim Briggs

“The majority of octopuses are ‘live fast, die young.’ They breed once and then immediately start to senesce and age and then die relatively quickly,” says Anik Grearson, former MBL intern and co-lead author on the paper. Unlike other octopus species, a female O. chierchiae lays several clutches of 30-90 eggs over her reproductive period.

Anik Grearson, co-lead author on the paper, leans over a tank in the Cephalopod Mariculture Lab at the Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole. Credit: Marine Biological Laboratory

“We can mate them and know exactly when they’ll lay their eggs. We know exactly how long they’ll incubate and we can raise offspring at a relatively high survivorship rate compared to other octopuses,” says Grasse. Add that to its small size, sexual dimorphism, and predictable breeding schedule and it’s easy to see why O. chierchiae is an ideal candidate for further exploration and research.

Reference: “The Lesser Pacific Striped Octopus, Octopus chierchiae: An Emerging Laboratory Model” by Anik G. Grearson, Alison Dugan, Taylor Sakmar, Dominic M. Sivitilli, David H. Gire, Roy L. Caldwell, Cristopher M. Niell, Gül Dölen, Z. Yan Wang and Bret Grasse, 13 December 2021, Frontiers in Marine Science.
DOI: 10.3389/fmars.2021.753483

 

Science Made Simple: What Are High Energy Density Laboratory Plasmas?

By U.S. DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY DECEMBER 27, 2021

High energy density (HED) laboratory plasmas are perhaps the most extreme states of matter ever produced on Earth. Normal plasmas are one of the four basic states of matter, along with solid, gases, and liquids. But HED plasmas have properties not found in normal plasmas under ordinary conditions. For example, matter in this state may simultaneously behave as a solid and a gas. In this state, materials that normally act as insulators for electrical charges instead become conductive metals. To create and study HED plasmas, scientists compress materials in solid or liquid form or bombard them with high energy particles or photons.

Invisible infrared light from the 200-trillion-watt Trident Laser enters from the bottom to interact with a one-micrometer thick foil target in the center of the photo, generating a high energy density plasma. Credit: Image courtesy of Joseph Cowan and Kirk Flippo, Los Alamos National Laboratory

Scientists’ ability to create and control extreme conditions in laboratories on Earth helps us understand black holes and other events in the universe. This research also supports efforts to make fusion power a reality on Earth, harnessing the processes that happen within the Sun to produce energy here. Scientists working with HED plasmas address the basic laws of nature. But they also work on practical applications; research on HED plasmas can help us understand how to make radioactive isotopes. These radioisotopes have many practical applications. For example, they can be used to create images of the inside of our bodies for understanding medical issues, or in industry for understanding how materials wear out with use.

High Energy Density Plasma Facts

• High energy density plasmas are an exotic state of matter found in astrophysical events such as the birth of stars and brown dwarfs, in laboratory fusion experiments, and in nuclear weapons explosions.
• Scientists generate HED plasmas using high-power petawatt-class lasers, which generate instantaneous power levels equivalent to the output of the entire U.S. electrical grid.
• HED plasmas are created in the National Ignition Facility (NIF), which is the most energetic laser in the world with 2 megajoules (the energy consumed by 20,000 100-watt light bulbs in one second) of light energy delivered in 16 nanoseconds.
• Applications enabled by HED plasmas in the form of compact, inexpensive sources of radiation have applications in science, industry, and medicine.
• Using NIF’s 192 lasers at a target of hydrogen isotopes has been compared to throwing a baseball from the pitcher’s mound at San Francisco’s Oracle Park into the strike zone at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, some 400 miles away.

DOE Office of Science: Contributions to High Energy Density Laboratory Plasmas

The Department of Energy supports HED research and development because the associated applications address several DOE missions. Support for HED plasma research originated with the U.S. nuclear weapons program. Following the invention of the laser, HED research expanded beyond nuclear weapons. The United States manages HED activities under DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and the Fusion Energy Sciences program in the DOE Office of Science. The Office of Science focuses on developing the scientific basis for understanding and producing HED plasmas.