Why no previous president walked a picket line

Analysis by Zachary B. Wolf, CNN
Tue, September 26, 2023 

Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters

It was a historic moment when President Joe Biden became the first sitting president to join a picket line.

Members of the United Auto Workers are taking part in targeted strikes at plants for the Big Three US automakers. Biden joined the picket line at a General Motors facility in Van Buren Township, Michigan, appearing alongside UAW President Shawn Fain.

• Read CNN’s full report on Biden’s trip to the picket line.

• What do autoworkers want? Job security, better wages and benefits.

There’s a reason presidents don’t usually walk picket lines, according to Timothy Naftali, former director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library.

“Presidents have basically positioned themselves as mediators between both labor and management,” Naftali said Tuesday on CNN, although he noted that Democrats generally lean in their sympathies toward labor while Republicans lean toward management.

The general election is starting before the primary ends

Former President Donald Trump also wants to claim some support among union members. He will appear in Michigan on Wednesday, although at a non-union facility and without any official sanction by the United Auto Workers.

He will carry a message to undercut Biden’s sympathy for better union contracts. Trump and Republicans argue that Biden’s push for electric vehicles with taxpayer credits puts union auto jobs at risk and is “stabbing” autoworkers in the back.

EVs cut down on carbon emissions to help the environment. They also require fewer jobs for assembly.

The former UAW president Bob King said on CNN on Tuesday that voters should look to Trump’s four years in office to gauge his support for workers.

“There’s a long, long list of ways that he helped the wealthiest and did not help workers at all,” said King.

Biden, meanwhile, has argued the autoworkers helped save the auto industry by accepting worse contracts during the Great Recession and now they should get more from Detroit.

The UAW has not endorsed Biden’s reelection campaign, although that seems like an ultimate foregone conclusion. Trump, meanwhile, won’t have to win union workers in order to win a state like Michigan. Simply eating into Biden’s margins could do the trick.

So, it’s no coincidence that union household voters are the subject of this very public contrast between Trump and Biden.

“I really think it’s the opening salvo of the presidential campaign,” said the historian Douglas Brinkley, appearing on CNN on Tuesday.

While you’re going to read a lot about the future and new technologies like artificial intelligence, Brinkley said the coming election “well might be about the Midwest working class union workers and how they vote.”

Biden and Trump, Brinkley said, “both understand that.”

Unions are key in key states

Fewer and fewer Americans are members of a union, but they play a continually important role in US politics.

Biden won the White House by rebuilding Democrats’ blue wall of support in heavily unionized Rust Belt states. But it’s important to note that Republicans don’t need to win union households in order to win elections.

When Trump won the blue wall state of Michigan in 2016, he got the support of 40% of union households, compared with Hillary Clinton’s 53%. But when Biden won Michigan in 2020, he got the support of 62% of union households and Trump was under 40%. The shift was similar in Wisconsin.

The national picture

The share of voters nationwide who reported being in a union household in those 2020 exit polls was at 20%, and they went 56% for Biden to 40% for Trump.

When Trump won in 2016, 18% of voters reported being in a union household, and they were more evenly split between Clinton, 51%, and Trump, 42%.

Fewer union households

In years where Republicans have done particularly well, the union vote has been split. Richard Nixon actually won 50% of voters in union households for his 1972 romp over George McGovern, the only presidential election in the past 50 years in which a Republican won more votes from union households than the Democrat.

Ronald Reagan got 44% of union household voters in his 1980 landslide.

A more gradual and persistent trend is the shrinking portion of voters who report living in a union household. About a third of voters lived in a union household in the 1970s. That fell to under a quarter by the 1990s. It’s been at or under 20% since 2010.

Restriction on organizing

In the intervening years, a multitude of states enacted so-called “right-to-work” legislation making it more difficult for unions to organize by giving workers the option to opt out of a union even when their job is covered by a collective bargaining agreement.

This is a trend that extended to blue wall states like Wisconsin and Michigan, although Michigan repealed its “right-to-work” law this year.

A resurgent approval of unions

Paradoxically, while fewer Americans belong to a labor union, unions are having a long-term rebound in popularity in recent years.

Asked simply if they approve or disapprove of labor unions, more than two-thirds of Americans said they approve in the most recent Gallup poll. That’s up from fewer than half in 2009, but still short of the more than 70% approval unions enjoyed in the middle part of the 20th century, according to Gallup.

And the most pro-union president is?

Biden is not the first union-friendly president, or maybe even the most pro-union, although the White House wants to claim that mantle for Biden.

Franklin D. Roosevelt wove labor-friendly legislation into the New Deal and oversaw a massive uptick in union membership.

For much of earlier US history, presidents were known more for antagonizing unions than joining them – helping companies and owners put down strikes, including with help from the US military, as when Grover Cleveland dispatched troops to put down the Pullman strike in 1894.

The Republican Theodore Roosevelt broke this trend when he helped broker an end to a massive coal worker strike in 1902.

Why take sides?

Naftali argued Biden is willing to break the norm of the president being viewed as a mediator and instead take public sides.

“Joe Biden knows that to be a second-term president he has to hold his base and part of that base is union America,” Naftali said, adding that Biden will be willing to take more chances to keep Trump from the White House.

Biden will need to find an answer to Trump’s argument about EVs and the skepticism they create among autoworkers. Bringing the labor movement he has long supported into alignment with the environmental movement could be a key to Biden winning a second term.

Detroit Knows It. Unions Know It. Biden Knows It. Everything Is About to Change in the Car Industry.

Nitish Pahwa

SLATE
Tue, September 26, 2023 

President Joe Biden addresses striking members of the United Auto Workers union at a picket line outside a General Motors parts distribution center in Belleville, Michigan, on Tuesday. Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images

The United Auto Workers’ historic strike does not seem likely to let up soon. On Friday, union president Shawn Fain announced that the work stoppages would expand to 38 more plants all across the country, having begun the week before in just three Midwestern car factories. There are now more than 18,000 autoworkers, from Nevada to Tennessee to Florida, out on the picket lines. Joining them on the line at a General Motors parts distribution center in Belleville, Michigan, on Tuesday was none other than President Joe Biden, the first sitting chief executive to ever appear at such a rally. During his brief appearance, the president told the strikers that “you deserve the significant raise you need and other benefits,” going on to say, “Wall Street didn’t build the country, the middle class built the country. Unions built the middle class.”

Biden’s support will increase the pressure on the major automakers, but it’s also punctuated the workers’ action in a different way. The UAW strike is indeed a labor story, but it’s also a climate story—and an important one. However this thing ends, it could help determine what role blue-collar workers will play in the country’s climate adaptation and energy transition efforts, a process that the Biden administration has dramatically moved along.

Beyond UAW’s demands for higher wages and better hours, a key issue in autoworkers’ beef with the Big Three carmakers is the accelerating shift to electric vehicles. Lawmakers have supercharged government investment, consumer sales are revving up, and manufacturers are rapidly introducing new product lines. But this future is not guaranteed to offer the same kinds of middle-class jobs and robust benefits that unionized autoworkers enjoy in many states.

For one thing, electric vehicles purportedly require fewer assembly-line workers than internal-combustion and hybrid models (although some researchers have disputed this popular talking point). On top of that, much of the money for new auto and car-battery plants—along with assistance in transitioning old fossil-fuel and automotive facilities into hubs for zero-emission technology—is going to union-hostile red states. Union workers rightfully fear that this evolving landscape may well exclude them, which is why the current strike’s demands include employment protections related to plant closures, boosts to retirement benefits, and new restrictions on the use of temp workers in factories.

The EV transition has had labor issues from the beginning. Federal stimulus funds disbursed to EV and clean-energy ventures in 2009 were not conditioned on any labor standards. (One of the most significant recipients of those funds, Tesla, has zero unionized employees in the U.S.) That money also bailed out the auto industry, whose slow recovery pushed the UAW to concede on compensation demands and workforce counts (a point Biden emphasized during his union address to explain why the UAW’s latest demands are warranted). As a result, the factories powering the now-booming EV market are “overwhelmingly nonunionized,” former UAW member Dianne Feeley has written.

This recent history has not inspired worker confidence in Biden’s repeated campaign promises of a “just transition” for labor from the fossil-fuel era, one in which there are opportunities for stable middle-class employment as we swap out oil and gas for wind and solar, internal combustion engines for battery fleets and fuel cells. This has been a thorn for Democrats for years, and one of the more significant obstacles in their climate agendas. Not too long ago, candidate Hillary Clinton was hounded over her comment that “we’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business,” something her opponent Donald Trump seized upon to (falsely) claim he’d never let such a thing happen as chief executive. And President Barack Obama’s clean-power goals were repeatedly characterized as a “war on coal,” despite the fact that coal had been declining for decades before he assumed office.

That attack line overshadowed Obama’s messaging around his investments in a climate-change transition to ensure that fossil-fuel laborers could apply their skills and know-how to develop wind, solar, nuclear, geothermal, and other clean energy sources. Still, there was reason for labor to mistrust the feds. As historian Sarah Milov has pointed out, when the federal government imposed new restrictions on Big Tobacco in the late 1990s, it offered several tobacco farmers buyouts for their fields—but did not grant them pathways toward other agricultural jobs that could support their livelihoods. Another instance from this summer: In late June, Democratic Maine Gov. Janet Mills vetoed a bill encouraging offshore wind turbine buildout because it required that relevant companies adhere to project labor agreements, which often enshrine higher wages and benefits for workers. It was only after substantial pushback that Mills later relented and agreed to sign offshore-wind legislation with some pro-worker carveouts, including collectively bargained salaries and bans on employing temp workers (a similar measure to what the UAW is fighting for).

At one point, the UAW would’ve had a bit of federal backing in the Biden administration’s proposed Build Back Better legislation, which helped kick off nationwide EV investments. In late 2021, however, Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia announced his opposition to the bill’s proposed $4,500 federal tax credit for drivers who buy union-made EVs, effectively excising the measure from future climate legislation—even though it had the support of both the UAW and GM. As it turned out, the only companies at the time whose products would qualify were the Big Three themselves.

There’s an argument to be made, as Manchin did, that restricting such benefits to customers of the country’s biggest carmakers could add an anti-competitive element to the EV race. But, viewed from another way, a credit like this may have had the benefit of encouraging more auto companies to negotiate in good faith with organizing workers. The credit might have also assured Ford, GM, and Stellantis that union labor would equate to better sales because of the resulting cost savings for car buyers interested in the typically expensive EV market. But thanks to Manchin (who was lobbied by anti-union carmakers like the notably EV-skeptical Toyota), no labor standards were attached to the legislation’s clean-tech disbursements. And now, one of the new strikes has landed in his backyard, with laborers at GM’s Parts Distribution Center in Martinsburg joining their UAW comrades on the picket lines.

So now, the frame of worker-climate clashes is playing out again in the political messaging around the current UAW pickets. Republican Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, who’s welcomed federal green-energy investment, claims that his state’s anti-union policy makes it an ideal location for both EV executives and workers. Republican Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance tepidly claims to support the workers while arguing they’re getting screwed because the climate transition is dragging jobs to EV powerhouse China (which is false), in a line echoed by Mike Pence and Ron DeSantis, the latter of whom wants to retract all clean-car subsidies. Other 2024 GOP contenders like Tim Scott and Nikki Haley have taken the opportunity to dump on unions and EVs as a whole, earning the former a filed UAW labor complaint. There’s much speculation on whether Donald Trump will actually stand with UAW strikers during his visit to Michigan, even though Shawn Fain has ruled out any possibility of his union endorsing the Republican front-runner, and there is as of yet no indication that Trump even supports the strike efforts (although he is certainly targeting autoworkers with his upcoming Michigan visit).

In fact, what Republicans are missing in their lines here is that UAW isn’t against EVs so much as it is against being left out of EVs. After the strike launched last week, Fain co-published a Guardian op-ed with Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna that proclaimed, “there is no good reason why EV manufacturing can’t be the gateway to the middle class.” This followed Fain’s support of a multibillion-dollar Biden administration just-transition investment, which the union president praised as “reject[ing] the false choice between a good job and a green job.” In the Michigan Senate, which is considering a bill to create a just-transition office within the state’s Labor Department, UAW members have testified in favor of the legislation. Biden should keep seizing the moment, then, to explain why his EV investments are good both for jobs and for the climate.

As for the auto industry, executives whose companies have received generous federal funds should set an innovative, fair just-transition framework for other EV makers going forward. If UAW can swing that out with the Big Three, the effect could spread to other climate-related sectors sorely in need of uniquely skilled labor that will work for reasonable pay: electricians, wind and solar technicians, construction workers. It’s not just Biden who’s banking on blue-collar workers getting a fair shake in the clean-energy future. It’s all of us.

Earth's Hidden Eighth Continent Is No Longer Lost

Tim Newcomb
Mon, September 25, 2023


Zealandia, considered a candidate for the Earth’s eighth continent, was mostly lost to the sea.

Geologists say they’ve now mapped the entire nearly two million square miles of the underwater land mass.

The research team used rock samples from the seabed to analyze and date the undersea geology of North Zealandia, the final piece of the Zealandia puzzle.

Zealandia had so much promise as the eighth continent on Earth. Well, it did—until about 95 percent of the mass sunk under the ocean.

While the majority of Zealandia may never host inhabitants—at least, not land-based ones—the would-be continent is now no longer simply lost. Researchers recently finished mapping out the northern two-thirds of Zealandia, wrapping up the documentation of the nearly two million square miles of the submerged land mass.

In a study published in Tectonics, researchers from GNS Science of New Zealand document their process of dredging rock samples from the Fairway Ridge to the Coral Sea in order to analyze the rock geochemical and understand the underwater makeup of Zealandia.

Zealandia’s history is quite closely tied to the ancient supercontinent of Gondwana, which broke up hundreds of millions of years ago. Zealandia followed suit—roughly 80 million years ago, according to the latest theory. But unlike neighboring Australia or much of Antarctica, Zealandia largely sunk, leaving only a small portion of what many geologists believe should still be dubbed the eighth continent.

New Zealand makes up the most recognizable above-water portion of Zealandia, although a few other islands in the vicinity are also part of the maybe-continent in question.

The latest research, led by Nick Mortimer, dredged the northern two-thirds of the submerged area, pulling up pebbly and cobbley sandstone, fine-grain sandstone, mudstone, bioclastic limestone, and basaltic lava from a variety of time periods. By dating the rocks and interpreting magnetic anomalies, the researchers wrote, they were able to map the major geological units across North Zealandia. “This work completes offshore reconnaissance geological mapping of the entire Zealandia continent,” they said.

The researchers found the sandstone roughly 95 million years old from the Late Cretaceous period and a mix of granite and volcanic pebbles from up to 130 million years old during the Early Cretaceous period. The basalts are newer—they’re about 40 million years old and from the Eocene period.

Along with the mapping, the paper says that the internal deformation of both Zealandia and West Antarctica show that stretching led to the subduction-style cracking of the plates that welcomed ocean water to form the Tasman Sea. Then, a few million years later, further Antarctica break-away continued to stretch the crust of Zealandia until it thinned enough to break apart and seal the largely underwater fate of Zealandia. This goes against the prevailing theory of a strike-slip breakup.

The team believes, according to Science Alert, that the stretching direction varied by up to 65 degrees, which may have allowed the extensive thinning of the continental crust.

As scientists in New Zealand may tell you, just because Zealandia is largely underwater, doesn’t make it any less of a geological marvel.

Public to weigh in on whether wild horses that roam Theodore Roosevelt National Park should stay

Associated Press
Tue, September 26, 2023


 A wild horse stands near Peaceful Valley Ranch in Theodore Roosevelt National Park near Medora, N.D., on Saturday, May 20, 2023. About 200 horses roam the park's South Unit. The National Park Service has turned to the public to help decide whether the famous wild horses in North Dakota’s Theodore Roosevelt National Park should stay or go. The National Park Service launched a 30-day public comment period on Monday, Sept. 25.

 (AP Photo/Jack Dura, File)

BISMARCK, N.D. (AP) — The National Park Service has turned to the public to help decide whether the famous wild horses in North Dakota's Theodore Roosevelt National Park should stay or go.

The federal agency launched a 30-day public comment period on Monday. It also released a draft environmental assessment of the wild horse herd that said removal of the horses would benefit native wildlife and vegetation, but may lessen the experience of visitors who come to the park to see the horses or cattle, the Bismarck Tribune reported.

North Dakota Republican Gov. Doug Burgum said in a statement Tuesday that he will continue urging NPS to keep the wild horses in the park.

“These horses are a hugely popular tourist attraction, embodying the untamed spirit of the Badlands while also reminding us of the deep ties to Roosevelt’s ranching and conservation legacy," Burgum said.

He added that “wild horses roamed those lands during Roosevelt’s transformative years in the Badlands, when President Truman signed the bill creating the park in 1947 and when it received official national park status in 1978.”

The federal agency's proposal has worried advocates who say the horses are a cultural link to the past and disagree with park officials who have branded the horses as “livestock.”

Visitors who drive the scenic park road can often see bands of horses, a symbol of the West and sight that delights tourists.

Removal would entail capturing horses and giving some of them first to tribes, and later auctioning the animals or giving them to other entities. Another approach would include techniques to prevent future reproduction and would allow those horses to live out the rest of their lives in the park.

A couple bands of wild horses were accidentally fenced into the park after it was established in 1947, Castle McLaughlin has said. In the 1980s, McLaughlin researched the history and origins of the horses while working as a graduate student for the Park Service in North Dakota.

Park officials in the early years sought to eradicate the horses, shooting them on sight and hiring local cowboys to round them up and remove them, she said. The park even sold horses to a local zoo at one point to be food for large cats.

Around 1970, a park superintendent discovered Roosevelt had written about the presence of wild horses in the Badlands during his time there. Park officials decided to retain the horses as a historic demonstration herd to interpret the open-range ranching era.

James Webb Space Telescope reveals ancient galaxies were more structured than scientists thought

Sharmila Kuthunur
Tue, September 26, 2023 


What did galaxies in the early universe look like? Surprisingly close to our own Milky Way, according to the latest findings from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), whose unprecedented infrared eye has been rewriting what we thought we knew about the early universe.

Astronomers have long thought that newly minted galaxies that began merging together just after the Big Bang, about 13.7 billion years ago, were too fragile to boast any noticeable structures like spiral arms, bars or rings. Those galactic features were thought to form during a time at least six billion years after the Big Bang. According to the new study, however, these delicate shapes could've manifested as early as 3.7 billion years after the Big Bang — which is almost at the beginning of the universe.

"Based on our results astronomers must rethink our understanding of the formation of the first galaxies and how galaxy evolution occurred over the past 10 billion years," Christopher Conselice, an astronomy professor at The University of Manchester in the U.K. and a co-author of the new study, said in a statement published Friday (Sept. 22).

The new findings come at the heels of another announcement presented by a different group of researchers, also based on JWST data, which showed these early galaxies produced far fewer heavy elements than previously expected. However, the relationship between a galaxy's chemical composition and its evolution into a well-defined structure is not very well understood.

Much of scientists' previous understanding on galaxy evolution came from data gathered by the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), which is legendary in its own right but still has only so much resolution. While the HST data showed early galaxies had irregular shapes (as was expected during galaxy mergers) higher resolution data from the JWST is peering deeper into the universe to reveal that those early galaxies actually had well-defined structures like our own Milky Way. The new findings were based on an analysis of 3,956 galaxies, which astronomers say is the biggest sample that has been studied thus far with JWST data.

"For over 30 years it was thought that these disk galaxies were rare in the early universe due to the common violent encounters that galaxies undergo," Leonardo Ferreira, an astrophysicist at the University of Victoria in Canada and the lead author of the new study, said in the same statement. "The fact that JWST finds so many is another sign of the power of this instrument and that the structures of galaxies form earlier in the Universe, much earlier in fact, than anyone had anticipated."

According to the new study, the team classified the sample set of close to 4,000 galaxies from the early universe by shape — like disks, point sources and spheroids. Team members further classified them as smooth or structured, with galaxies in the latter group featuring bursts of star formation and indications of mergers with other galaxies.

Results showed that relatively well-defined structures in the universe form a lot quicker than previously thought, following what is known as the Hubble Sequence, which is the standard classification of galaxies by their visual properties as ellipticals, lenticulars and spirals.

The latest findings suggest a need for new ideas that explain how galaxies evolved over the past 10 billion years.

This research is described in a paper published Sept. 22 in The Astrophysical Journal.

James Webb Space Telescope sees early galaxies defying 'cosmic rulebook' of star formation

Robert Lea
Mon, September 25, 2023 


The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has discovered that galaxies in the early universe were cosmic rule-breakers. This discovery sheds light on how early galaxies evolved and the fundamental processes that shaped the universe as we see it today.

To discover the truth about these cosmic scofflaws, a team of astronomers used the JWST to gaze over 12 billion years back in time and observe galaxies as well as the rules they followed through cosmic history. The crew found that the same set of rules continuously prevailed, connecting the rate of star birth to galactic masses to chemical compositions. But these rules traced only so far back. The earliest galaxies defied them.

It was like the galaxies had a rulebook that they followed — but astonishingly, this cosmic rulebook appears to have undergone a dramatic rewrite during the universe’s infancy," Claudia Lagos, an associate professor at the University of Western Australia, said in a statement. "The most surprising discovery was that ancient galaxies produced far fewer heavy elements than we would have predicted based on what we know from galaxies that formed later."

This disparity hadn’t been spotted before because instruments used prior to the JWST hadn’t been powerful enough to see the chemical makeup of galaxies as far back as around 11 billion years ago. The JWST, however, allowed this team to look back to just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, which showed a break in the relationship between star formation, mass and chemistry.

When did things get heavy for the cosmos?

When the universe first began to form the first stars and galaxies, it was filled with hydrogen and helium — the two lightest elements — with the former being the most dominant by far.

Only a smattering of heavier elements-which astronomers call “metals” existed until the first generation of stars forged them at their hearts and then dispersed them through the universe at the end of their lives via massive supernova explosions.

This material was eventually incorporated into the next generation of stars, meaning these stars, and thus the galaxies they sit in, had a higher concentration of metals — a measure called "metallicity." That process of metal enrichment has continued throughout the entire 13.8 billion years of cosmic history, meaning early galaxies are indeed expected to have lower metallicities than their modern counterparts.

But even factoring this in, the team found that the metallicity of early galaxies was still lower than expected. Much lower.

"Their chemical abundance was approximately four times lower than anticipated, based on the fundamental-metallicity relation observed in later galaxies," Lagos continued, explaining that the early galaxies observed by the team delivered even more surprises.

The team suggests the disparity may exist because galaxies just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang could still be intimately connected with the intergalactic medium — the wispy hot gas and dust that exists between galaxies.

"The early galaxies continually received new, pristine gas from their surroundings, with the gas influx diluting the heavy elements inside the galaxies, making them less concentrated," Lagos concluded.

As such, the team’s findings could challenge current models of galactic evolution and the mechanism that facilitated the development of the first galaxies.

The research was published on Sept. 21 in the journal Nature.

Webb Telescope Data Suggests Ancient Galaxies Were Metal-Poor and Full of Gas

Isaac Schultz
Tue, September 26, 2023 


In the beginning, galaxies were lacking in chemical and metal abundances, according to a team of astronomers that recently used a telescope to study the ancient universe.

Though the galaxies in the quarter-billion years seemed to follow the rules established by younger, previously observed galaxies regarding star formation rate and stellar mass, they had only a quarter the chemical abundance that was expected, the researchers found. The team’s research on the ancient galaxies was published last week in Nature Astronomy.

Until recently, the team noted, galaxies’ chemical abundances could only be reliably measured at redshifts of z=3.3 or less. But Webb allowed the recent team to measure such abundances at redshifts of z=7-10, or between 500 million years and 750 million years after the Big Bang.

The researchers used Webb’s far-reaching gaze to measure the rates of star formation, stellar masses, and chemical abundances of galaxies from the universe’s first few hundred million years of existence.

“The most surprising discovery was that ancient galaxies produced far fewer heavy elements than we would have predicted based on what we know from galaxies that formed later,” Lagos said. “The early galaxies continually received new, pristine gas from their surroundings, with the gas influx diluting the heavy elements inside the galaxies, making them less concentrated.”

The ancient galaxies aren’t even the most ancient Webb has seen. Last November the telescope spotted two galaxies with redshifts of approximately 10.25 and 12.5, rivalling the age of Maisie’s Galaxy, another galaxy spotted by Webb with a redshift of 11.8, or an age of about 13.4 billion years. Our universe is about 13.77 billion years old.

One of Webb’s main tasks is scrutinizing these ancient galaxies, to understand how they took form and evolved. Many of the ancient galaxies Webb has seen appear surprisingly mature, given their appearance in a nascent universe.

But the new research indicates the galaxies still have their secrets—in this case, an evident lack of heavy elements. More observations by Webb could help explain how these galaxies took shape, but expect more mysteries to arise on scientists’ search for clarity.

Ancient supernova in James Webb telescope image could help solve one of the universe's biggest mysteries

Harry Baker
Tue, September 26, 2023

A JWST image of two large bright galaxies ringed in orange light from a distant supernova.

A rare, warped supernova that appears three times in a single image could help researchers finally solve a long-standing inconsistency about the universe that has threatened to unravel our understanding of the cosmos, one expert claims.

The type 1a supernova, named SN H0pe, was first discovered lurking in photographs captured by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) in March. In these images, the exploding star can be seen as an arc of orange light with three bright points that surround part of the galaxy cluster PLCK G165.7+67.0 (G165), which is around 4.5 billion light-years from Earth.

The light arc is the result of gravitational lensing — an effect caused when light from a distant object, such as a supernova, passes through space-time that has been warped by the gravity of a massive foreground object, like a large galaxy, that is positioned directly between the distant object and the observer. This also magnifies the distant object, making it easier for researchers to analyze.

The three bright spots in the arc around G165 make it seem like there are three separate light sources being visually manipulated, or lensed by the foreground galaxy. But in reality, the supernova, which is located around 16 billion light-years from us, has been duplicated twice by the lensing effect.

Related: Distortions in space-time could put Einstein's theory of relativity to the ultimate test

In a new article published on BigThink.com on Sept. 20, astrophysicist and science communicator Ethan Siegel, who was not involved in the study, wrote that SN H0pe could help solve a longstanding inconsistency about the expansion of the universe — the "Hubble tension."

The Hubble tension is based on a discrepancy between the two main ways of estimating the rate of the universe's expansion, known as the Hubble constant. The first method, which involves measuring expansion using the cosmic microwave background (CMB) — leftover radiation from the Big Bang that was first detected in 1964 — comes out with one value for the Hubble constant. But the second method, which involves measuring how far specific objects, such as galaxies and supernovas, are moving away from us, consistently comes out with a slightly higher value.

This problem has confused scientists for decades because there is no clear reason why one method should produce a different result from the other, Siegel wrote. The conundrum has even caused some researchers to declare it a crisis in cosmology.

SN H0pe could help solve the Hubble tension because it is a type 1a supernova, which astronomers refer to as a "standard candle" — an incredibly reliable reference point from which we can measure the universe's expansion, Siegel wrote.

Related: The universe could stop expanding 'remarkably soon', study suggests


Type 1a supernovas involve a white dwarf star stealing matter from a binary partner star, before reaching critical mass and exploding. These bright explosions all have near-equal initial luminosity and dim over time at the same rate. By comparing these standard candles at various distances from Earth, scientists can work out exactly how fast they are moving away from us and can then deduce the expansion rate of the universe.

SN H0pe is a particularly important standard candle because it is the second most distant type 1a supernova ever detected, Siegel wrote. The strong gravitational lensing and duplication in the new images also give researchers more information to work with than normal, he added.

The idea of using duplicated supernovae to tackle the problem of Hubble tension is not new. In May, scientists used data from a reappearing, quadruple-lensed supernova named Refsdal to calculate a new value for the Hubble constant. Although this still differed from the value calculated using the CMB, the difference between the two was reduced, suggesting that they could one day match up.

It is currently unclear whether SN H0pe can be used to calculate an even more reliable value for the Hubble constant. But researchers are confident that if JWST's keen eye can continue to pick out more distant standard candles, the problem of Hubble tension may finally be solved.


Stunningly perfect 'Einstein ring' snapped by James Webb telescope is most distant gravitationally lensed object ever seen

Harry Baker
Tue, September 26, 2023 

In the field of one of JWST's largest-area surveys, COSMOS-Web, an Einstein ring was discovered around a compact, distant galaxy. It turns out to be the most distant gravitational lens ever discovered by a few billion light-years.


Photos snapped by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have revealed the farthest-ever example of an "Einstein ring." The record-breaking halo of warped light, which is a whopping 21 billion light-years away, is unusually perfect and surrounds a mysteriously dense galaxy.

An Einstein ring is an extremely rare type of gravitationally lensed object that was first predicted by Albert Einstein's theory of relativity. Gravitational lensing occurs when the immense gravity of a massive foreground object, such as a galaxy cluster or a black hole, warps space-time around itself; light emitted by more distant objects, such as galaxies or supernovas, that passes through this warped space-time also appears curved and warped from our perspective on Earth.


This effect also magnifies the light of the object being lensed, similar to how a magnifying glass works, allowing astronomers to study distant objects in greater detail than is normally possible. Most gravitationally lensed objects form arcs or partial rings that surround the foreground object. But a true Einstein ring forms a complete circle around the closer entity, which is possible only when the distant object, foreground object and observer are perfectly aligned.

In a new study uploaded Sept. 14 to the preprint server arXiv and accepted for publication in the journal Nature Astronomy, researchers discovered the new eerily circular Einstein ring, named JWST-ER1, within the COSMOS-Web survey, a detailed map of more than 500,000 galaxies captured during a 200-hour continuous JWST observation.


JWST-ER1 has two parts: JWST-ER1g, the compact galaxy that acts as the lensing object in the foreground; and JWST-ER1r, the light from a more distant galaxy that forms the luminous ring. JWST-ER1g is located around 17 billion light-years from Earth, while JWST-ER1r is another 4 billion light-years farther away. Until now, the farthest detected lensing object was around 14.7 billion light-years away, according to BigThink.com. (While the age of the universe itself is estimated to be about 13.7 billion years, the universe's constant expansion means that light from the oldest objects must travel much farther than this to reach our telescopes).

Related: Dark matter's secret identity could be hiding in distorted 'Einstein rings'

Thanks to the complete ring of JWST-ER1, researchers calculated the mass of the lensing galaxy by seeing how much it had warped space-time around itself. This revealed that the galaxy has a mass equivalent to around 650 billion suns, which makes it unusually dense for its size. Some of this extra mass can be explained by dark matter, the mysterious, invisible matter that makes up around 85% of all matter in the universe. But even then, it is unlikely that there are enough stars to account for the rest of the galaxy's heft based on the researchers' calculations.

"Additional mass is needed to explain the lensing results," but it is not exactly clear what this mass is, the researchers wrote in the paper.

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Other, similarly old and equally dense galaxies have been detected before, which suggests there is something common about these ancient star factories that makes them so massive. One explanation is that these galaxies harbor much more dark matter than expected, while another theory suggests that they may have more small-mass stars lurking within them than younger galaxies do. But more work is needed to find out.

This is not the first true Einstein ring spotted by JWST. In September 2022, a Reddit user discovered a perfectly circular ring of light from the galaxy JO418, located around 12 billion light-years from Earth, lensed around a closer galaxy.

JWST has also utilized gravitational lensing to snap the most distant star ever detected and one of the universe's oldest galaxies.

Nasa spots shocking number of galaxies like our own in early universe

Andrew Griffin
Mon, September 25, 2023 


The finding will prompt us to entirely rethink our understanding of how the universe formed the structures that surround us.

Looking deep into space, scientists found that the galaxies we see in the early universe are much more like our own Milky Way than was thought possible.

A team of international researchers including those at The University of Manchester and University of Victoria in Canada, used the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to discover that galaxies like the Milky Way are 10 times more common than what was believed based on previous observations with the Hubble Space Telescope.

Many of these galaxies formed some 10 billion years ago or longer, going far back into the history of the universe.

The Milky Way is a typical disk galaxy, with a shape similar to a pancake or compact disc, rotating about its centre and often containing spiral arms.

These galaxies might be the kind where life can develop given the nature of their formation history, experts suggest.

Astronomers previously considered these types of galaxies too fragile to exist in the early universe when galaxy mergers were more common, destroying what was thought to be their delicate shapes.

Christopher Conselice, professor of extragalactic astronomy at The University of Manchester, said: “Using the Hubble Space Telescope we thought that disc galaxies were almost non-existent until the universe was about six billion years old, these new JWST results push the time these Milky Way-like galaxies form to almost the beginning of the universe.”

He added: “These JWST results show that disc galaxies like our own Milky Way, are the most common type of galaxy in the universe.

“This implies that most stars exist and form within these galaxies which is changing our complete understanding of how galaxy formation occurs.

“These results also suggest important questions about dark matter in the early universe which we know very little about.”

“Based on our results, astronomers must rethink our understanding of the formation of the first galaxies and how galaxy evolution occurred over the past 10 billion years.”

The researchers say their findings, published in the Astrophysical Journal, completely overturn the existing understanding of how scientists think the universe evolves, and the scientists say new ideas need to be considered.

Lead author Leonardo Ferreira, from the University of Victoria, said: “For over 30 years it was thought that these disc galaxies were rare in the early universe due to the common violent encounters that galaxies undergo.

“The fact that JWST finds so many is another sign of the power of this instrument and that the structures of galaxies form earlier in the universe, much earlier in fact, than anyone had anticipated.”

The improved technology of JWST allows astronomers to see the true structure of these galaxies for the first time.

A paper describing the findings, ‘The JWST Hubble Sequence: The Rest-Frame Optical Evolution of Galaxy Structure at 1.5 The Astrophysical Journal.

Additional reporting by agencies

Earth Is Doing Something Incredible: Helping the Moon Form Water

Tim Newcomb
Mon, September 25, 2023 

Earth Helping the Moon Form WaterGrant Faint - Getty Images

High-energy electrons from Earth’s magnetic field act like solar wind protons to help form water on the Moon.

The Moon interacts with Earth’s magnetic field, a key piece in understanding water formation on the Moon.

Learning fresh ways in which the Earth helps the Moon form water could help future explorations on the planet.

Earth has so much sway in our little corner of the Solar System that the forming of water on the Moon is directly tied to its magnetic field. Now, scientists know even more about the importance of these Earth-to-Moon interactions, and have discovered an entirely new way that Earth helps form water on the Moon.

In a new study from the University of Hawaii at Mānoa—published in Nature Astronomy—researchers show how Earth’s magnetosphere helps the weathering processes along on the Moon’s surface, and just how important high-energy electrons are in the process of forming water.

To understand the water-forming element, though, researchers first had to understand data about solar wind.

Earth’s magnetosphere protects us from the Sun’s unrelenting radiation. Solar wind can affect this magnetosphere, reshaping it and creating a “magnetotail” pointing away from the Sun. The Moon, in turn, can spend 27 percent of its time within the tail—a spot that blocks roughly 99 percent of solar wind.

Previously, solar wind was given nearly carte blanche credit for the forming of water molecules on the Moon. Full of high-energy particles, solar wind brings the Moon hydrogen ions, and the force of the wind kickstarts an interaction with oxygen to form water.

But solar wind can’t take all the credit any longer for the water, according to the study’s lead author Shuai Li, planetary scientist at the University of Hawaii. The research shows that even when the solar wind isn’t present, water formation is still running rampant.

“When the Moon is outside the magnetotail, the lunar surface is bombarded with solar wind,” Li said in a news release. “Inside the magnetotail, there are almost no solar wind protons and water formation was expected to drop to nearly zero. To my surprise, the remote sensing observations showed that the water formation in Earth’s magnetotail is almost identical to the time when the Moon was outside of the Earth’s magnetotail.”

This was a significant—and unexpected—finding. “This indicates that, in the magnetotail, there may be additional formation processes or new sources of water not directly associated with the implantation of solar wind protons,” Li said. “In particular, radiation by high-energy electrons exhibits similar effects as the solar wind protons.”

Li believes that the new discovery shows that Earth and the Moon may be linked together even more intrinsically than previously believed, and “in many unrecognized aspects.”

The data for the current study comes from the Moon Mineralogy Mapper instrument onboard India’s Chandrayaan 1 mission from 2008 to 2009. In the future, Li hopes to work with NASA’s Artemis programs to monitor the plasma environment and water content in the polar region of the lunar surface.

“This provides a natural laboratory,” Li said, “for studying the formation processes of lunar surface water.”

A Royal Navy Nuclear Sub Just Spent 6 Months Underwater. That's Irresponsible.

Sébastien Roblin
Tue, September 26, 2023 

Royal Navy Nuclear Sub Completes 6 Month PatrolRoyal Navy - Wikimedia Commons


On September 11, a Vanguard-class ballistic missile submarine glided back to its port of Clyde Naval Base in a zombie-like state—the sound-dampening anechoic tiles on its hull bleached pale white by barnacles where they weren’t stained sickly green with algae. It was the very image of tired.

That haggard sentiment was likely shared by the sub’s roughly 130-person crew, and for good reason. The craft and its crew are believed to have spent 195 days on patrol, the vast majority of it submerged. Many allege that this sets a record for the longest known patrol by a Royal Navy submarine.

According to website Navy Lookout, however, its sister ship Victorious may have endured a couple weeks longer, completing a 207-day patrol in 2021. The website claims that Vanguard-class patrols are averaging 163 days (5.5 months), up from the previous 3 months average.

The Royal Navy refuses to confirm deployment lengths, per official policy. While the returning sub’s identity is unstated in reports, reportedly, only the Vigilant and Vanguard are operationally available in 2023.


While the sub’s crew can justly take pride in completing this stupendously long mission, that it was deemed necessary is not a good thing. Regular nuclear deterrence patrol by the U.S. Navy’s Ohio-class SSBNs last two or three months, while their record for longest ever SSBN patrol—set by the Gold crew of USS Pennsylvania in 2014—was just over 4 and a half months.

HMS Vengeance enroute to Devonport for a refit in February 2012.Handout - Getty Images

The Royal Navy’s four Vanguard-class subs are nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines (or SSBN)—often referred to as ‘boomers’ or ‘bombers’ in U.S. and Royal Navy parlance. While attack submarines prowl across the ocean looking for trouble, a boomer just wants to quietly creep around and be left alone—waiting just in case the call ever comes to end the world as we know it by launching a strategic nuclear missile attack. Hopefully, it never does.

London no longer bothers with land- or air-based nuclear weapons, such as its long retired ‘V-bombers.’ Sea-based nukes are expensive, but hard to preemptively attack—when submerged, they effectively guarantee apocalyptic retribution, even if an adversary executes a successful first strike. For over a half century, the Royal Navy has always had at least one SSBN on patrol at sea, armed with nuclear missiles 365 days a year. The mission is known as Continuous At-Sea Deterrence (CASD).

The prime culprit for the extra-long patrols is the class’s lead ship HMS Vanguard. In 2012, the Royal Navy discovered that the Vanguard’s reactor was leaking radiation into coolant water. This development was revealed to the public in 2014.

Vanguard thus spent seven years being refueled and overhauled to the tune of £500 million. These refurbishments included repairs related to its hair-raising collision with French SSBN Le Triomphant in February of 2009, and replacement of much of the tail section and hydroplane bearings. Vanguard finally departed the shipyard at Devonport in May of 2023.

HMS Vanguard arriving at Naval Base Clyde at Faslane in November 2010.CPOA(Phot) Tam McDonald - Wikimedia Commons

During those years three subs were forced to shoulder the continuous patrols—even though they too inevitably required time for maintenance and repairs. Indeed, the same month that Vanguard took back to the sea, Victorious arrived in Devonport to begin a major refit, following an onboard fire in September of 2022.

These problems stem from the risks of operating such a small SSBN force with little redundancy. Sustaining continuous deployment of SSBNs, with their nuclear reactors and missiles, is so expensive that only four other countries currently do it: France, Russia, the U.S. and now China. And though China has 20 times the UK’s population, it has only six Type 094 Jin-class SSBNs.
The psychic toll of underwater boredom

The Royal Navy insists that it has compensated the crew with “extra payment after an extended period at sea.” But many veteran submariners agree that six months underwater is longer than humans should spend in an isolated and confined environment—especially with virtually no communication with the outside world.

Commenting in 2022, on two Vanguards that performed 157-day-long patrols—former Royal Navy SSBN commander Rob Forsyth—noted in a blog post that the “great danger is that this unchanging routine, week after week, leads to boredom, complacency and an inevitable drop-off in standards […] personal relationships are tested to the limit.”

For comparison, Forsyth states that his Cold War-era patrols lasted only 50-75 days (averaging two months), and were carried out in allegedly less cramped conditions than the Vanguard’s. Even then, he wrote that “major effort was still needed to keep crews stimulated and alert and not allow them to withdraw into themselves […].” Forsyth noted that he himself adopted quirky habits, like tying his scrub brush to a leash and taking it for a walk once a week.

Regarding a 111-day patrol by the Warspite from 1982 to 1983, he wrote that he was “told that operating errors, flare ups between crew members and disciplinary problems started to be a problem after the half-way mark, around 50 days in.” He adds that long patrols led to loss of sight, weight, general fitness and spatial awareness, and that the lack of sunlight lead to Vitamin D deficiencies.

Biscuits and tea for Prime Minister Cameron and crew of Vanguard-class submarine HMS Victorious while at sea off the coast of Scotland on April 4, 2013.AFP - Getty Images

The Telegraph interviewed a former attack submarine commander, Ryan Ramsey, who said that he would “be surprised if there aren’t mental health challenges after this because it’s extreme. The reality is they shouldn’t have to do that. Those boats were designed to go on three-month patrols.”

Breakdowns in discipline in Royal Navy submarines have received periodic media attention in recent years, whether related to harassment and forbidden sexual relationships, the abuse of hard drugs and alcohol, or raucous partying. At one point, in 2017, such scandals culminated in 10% of the Vigiliant’s crew being discharged, investigated, or compelled to resign—including the captain and first officer.

The Ministry of Defence’s unwillingness to discuss the length of nuclear patrols on the basis of operational security has earned the ire of critics who argue that the strain on the crew from lengthy patrols increases the risk of a mishap involving the UK’s nuclear delivery systems.

London's Nuclear Vanguards

A Vanguard-class submarine departs Faslane on September 2009.

JEFF J MITCHELL - Getty Images

The Royal Navy’s four Vanguard-class submarines—Vanguard, Victorious, Vigilant, and Vengeance—were commissioned between 1993 and 1999 at a cost of £3.75 billion per hull. Each measures 150 meters long (one and a half football fields) and displaces 17,500 tons while submerged. Originally built for 25-year service lives, they’ve received life extensions to operate 35-40 instead. Their Rolls-Royce PWR2 pressurized water reactors generate air and sustain propulsion such that the submarine can remain submerged nigh indefinitely—at least as long as there’s food for the crew.


Though Vanguards have four torpedo tubes for self-defense, their primary weapons are stored in their sixteen missile tubes. These Trident II D5 ballistic missiles—the same type used by U.S. Navy boomers—are each capable of releasing multiple independent nuclear warheads. In practice, since 2010, the subs have gone to sea loaded with only 8 missiles stuffed with no more than 40 warheads between them. London’s total stockpile is in flux, however. During the 2010s, it was reduced to roughly 160 warheads, with no more than 120 operationally available. In 2021, the government announced plans to regrow the stockpile to 260 nukes.

The cost and purpose of the UK’s nuclear deterrence force is criticized in left-leaning quarters of British politics. One complication is that all Royal Navy submarines are based at Faslane, Scotland. Should Scotland vote for independence in a referendum, use of Faslane by SSBNs could be denied, as Scottish independence parties oppose the base’s use for nuclear deterrence.

Nicola Sturgeon, former leader of Scottish National Party and First Minister of Scotland attends anti-nuclear arms protest in London (Trident being the name of the missile on Vanguard-class submarine) on February 27, 2016.

Mike Kemp - Getty Images

Political risks aside, the Vanguards should (in theory) be replaced by a succeeding generation of Dreadnaught SSBNs—with planned services lives of fifty years—by the 2030s. The initial phases of construction for the first three Dreadnaughts began in 2016 at BAE Systems’ Barrows-in-Furness shipyard. The Dreadnaughts will be slightly longer than the Vanguards and significantly larger, at 153.6 meters and nearly 19,000 tons displacement submerged.

Many of the Dreadnaught’s reported innovations appear to center on improving quality of life for the crew. That includes separate quarters and bathrooms for male and female crew, new dedicated gym facilities and sick bay, and a lighting system designed to simulate an artificial day/night cycle. That could make a six month patrol more tolerable—even if still not recommended.

Infographic on characteristics of the successor SSBNs posted by Royal Navy in 2016, the year the first steel for lead ship HMS Dreadnaught was cut.

BAe Systems PLC - Wikimedia Commons