It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Friday, January 17, 2025
Why Would Any Country Partner With the US?
Recent threatening statements by incoming President Donald Trump have raised the question of why any country would risk partnering with the United States. But the erosion in trust has not begun with the incoming Trump administration.
Several years ago, Saudi Arabia began to reexamine its relationship with the United States. Their confidence had been shaken by the unreliability of the partnership. President Biden’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan shocked the Saudis, but so too, Annelle Sheline, Research Fellow for the Middle East Program at the Quincy Institute, told me, did “Obama’s signing of the JCPOA” and “Trump’s lack of response after the September 2019 attacks on Saudi oil facilities.” The damage caused by three consecutive presidents to trust in the partnership helped convince Saudi Arabia to explore closer relationships with Iran, Russia and China.
While Saudi Arabia’s trust in partnering with the U.S. waned because the U.S. made a nuclear agreement with Iran, Iran’s trust in partnering with the U.S. waned because the U.S. broke it. Hardliners in Iran had warned then President Hassan Rouhani that his trust in America would be repaid with broken promises. Despite these warnings, Rouhani placed Iran’s future in trusting the U.S. to keep their promises and honor their agreements. The hardliners were vindicated when Trump illegally pulled out of the JCPOA nuclear agreement. The proof that a partnership with the U.S. was not to be trusted helped convince Iran to forge ever tighter relationships with Russia and China.
America’s reliability as a partner was potentially further threatened by the blowing up of the Nord Stream pipeline. On September 26, 2022, the Nord Stream pipeline that transported Russian gas to Europe exploded. The West immediately blamed Russia. But then The Washington Postreported that intelligence officials said “[t]here is no evidence at this point that Russia was behind the sabotage,” and The Wall Street Journalreported that there is a “growing sense among investigators in the U.S. and Europe that neither Russian-government nor pro-Russian operatives were behind the sabotage.”
Then, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh published a detailed account of the “act of war” that concluded that it was carried out by the United States. If Hersh is right, then the U.S. betrayed Germany. The single biggest economic and environmental act of terrorism sent one of America’s biggest economic and military allies into an economic plunge.
The erosion in trust has been accelerated and widened by recent remarks that have the sound more of threatening imperialism than partnership. Trump’s threat of 25% tariffs on Canadian imports seems intended as an economic assault sufficient to make one of America’s closest neighbors and allies question its sovereignty. As such, it is the threat of economic war.
Though Trump has ruled out military force against Canada, he has said that he would use “economic force.” Challenging Canada’s sovereignty, Trump called the border between the two countries an “artificially drawn line” and said that if “you get rid of [it]… take a look at what that looks like. And it would also be much better for national security.”
Canadians are no longer taking Trump’s remarks as a joke. Once, unthinkable, a third of Canadians think Trump is serious, and, reflecting the new distrust in the U.S. as a partner, nearly two thirds don’t trust him to keep his word not to use military force.
Trump has taken the unusual and undiplomatic step of referring to the Prime Minister of Canada as the “Governor… of the Great State of Canada.” He said Canadians pay taxes that are “far too high” and that, if Canada “was to become our 51st State, their Taxes would be cut by more than 60%, their businesses would immediately double in size, and they would be militarily protected like no other Country anywhere in the World.” Two weeks later, Trump posted, “Many people in Canada LOVE being the 51st State… If Canada merged with the U.S., there would be no Tariffs, taxes would go way down, and they would be TOTALLY SECURE from the threat of the Russian and Chinese Ships that are constantly surrounding them. Together, what a great Nation it would be!!!”
Canada’s Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, responded that “There isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that Canada would become part of the United States.”
Despite Trump’s claim that “[m]any Canadians want Canada to become the 51st State,” the most recent polling shows that 90% of Canadians oppose joining the United States.
That Trump’s policies are affecting perceptions of partnership with the U.S. is reflected in polling of Canadians. Canada has been one of the United States’s closest partners, but favorable views of the U.S. are now down 15 points from half a year ago, and “Canadians are now three-times as likely to view the U.S. as an enemy or a potential threat compared with two years ago.”
The citizens of Greenland and Denmark were taken as much by surprise as Canadians by recent remarks of Trump’s.
Denmark maintains sovereignty over the autonomous territory of Greenland. But Trump has called acquiring Greenland a necessity: “For purposes of National Security and Freedom throughout the World the United States of America feels that the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity.”
Worse even than his statements on Canada, Trump has refused to rule out taking Greenland militarily. When asked if he would rule out military force, Trump refused, saying, “I’m not going to commit to that. It might be that you’ll have to do something… We need Greenland for national security purposes.”
Like Canadians, the people of Greenland and Denmark were taken by surprise by their ally’s comments. Greenland’s prime minister, Múte Egede, said that “all of us were shocked” by Trump’s statements. He responded that “Greenland belongs to the people of Greenland. We are not for sale and we will not be for sale.”
Like Canada, Denmark is an unlikely target for American imperialism. Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen called the U.S. Denmark’s “most important and closest ally.” A European diplomat toldAxios that Denmark is one the United States’ closest allies in the European Union. The diplomat said on one imagined Denmark would be “the first country with which Trump would pick a fight.”
Making military threats against Denmark is nothing less than an unprecedented military threat against a NATO ally. The threat drew warnings from America’s most powerful allies in the EU. “The principle of the inviolability of borders applies to every country,” German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said, “…no matter whether it’s a very small one or a very powerful one”. France’s Foreign Minister, Jean-Noël Barrot, added that “There is obviously no question that the European Union would let other nations of the world attack its sovereign borders, whoever they are. We are a strong continent.”
Reflecting the newly vulnerable trust in America as a partner, Barrot said that the world has “entered into an era that sees the return of the survival of the fittest” and called on Europe to “wake up [and] build up our strength.”
When Donald Trump Jr. landed in Greenland on January 7, Trump wrote, “The reception has been great. They, and the Free World, need safety, security, strength, and PEACE! This is a deal that must happen. MAGA. MAKE GREENLAND GREAT AGAIN!”
The melting polar ice has exposed the value of Greenland’s natural resources and shipping routes. Both Greenland and Denmark have expressed their willingness to work with the United States. Greenland’s Prime Minister Múte Egede said, “The reality is we are going to work with the U.S. – yesterday, today and tomorrow.” In secret messages, Denmark has told Trump’s team that they are willing to talk about increasing U.S. military presence in Greenland.
If Trump’s coveting of Greenland was out of purely security concerns, he has solutions more diplomatic than military force. The U.S. already has a large military base in Greenland, and a 1951 treaty already enshrines the cooperation of the United States, Denmark and Greenland in defending the island. If security were the sole concern, the U.S. could enhance the security of Greenland through its existing diplomatic agreements.
But a second motive has been suggested. “I can say this,” Trump said, “we need them for economic security.” Mike Waltz, Trump’s pick for national security advisor, recently conflated the security and economic motivations. “This is about critical minerals,” he said. “This is about natural resources. This is about, as the polar ice caps pull back, the Chinese are now cranking out icebreakers and pushing up there as well. So, it’s oil and gas. It’s our national security. It’s critical minerals.” But security only got one line.
Canada is one of America’s closest and most trusted economic, diplomatic, cultural and military partners. Denmark is a founding member of NATO and one of America’s closest partners in the EU. Trump’s threat against Canada must make other countries question their economic partnership with the U.S. when existential tariffs could be levied at them, too, at any time; Trump’s military threats against Denmark must make other countries question their military partnerships with the U.S. when their security guarantees could be annulled at any time and they, too, could face military coercion. Trump’s threats raise the suddenly urgent question of why any country would risk partnering with the United States.
Ted Snider is a regular columnist on U.S. foreign policy and history at Antiwar.com and The Libertarian Institute. He is also a frequent contributor to Responsible Statecraft andThe American Conservative as well as other outlets. To support his work or for media or virtual presentation requests, contact him at tedsnider@bell.net
ANTIWAR.COM
Keir Starmer’s Support for the Gaza Ceasefire Is Riddled With Lies
There are so many lies, deceptions and misdirections in Sir Keir Starmer’s statement on the ceasefire agreed between Israel and Hamas yesterday that they need to be picked apart line by line.
Starmer: After months of devastating bloodshed and countless lives lost, this is the long-overdue news that the Israeli and Palestinian people have desperately been waiting for. They have borne the brunt of this conflict – triggered by the brutal terrorists of Hamas, who committed the deadliest massacre of Jewish people since the Holocaust on October 7th, 2023.
Under no reasonable definition can the last 15 months be described as a “conflict”. The slaughter and maiming of hundreds of thousands of civilians, as well as Israel’s program to starve the rest of the population, should rightly be understood as a genocide, one the International Court of Justice began investigating a year ago, and one that has been attested to by every major international human rights group, as well as a growing number of Holocaust scholars.
Starmer does at least hint at the truth in conceding that the ceasefire is “long overdue”. The genocide in Gaza could have been brought to an end at any point by US pressure. Indeed, the outlines of the current ceasefire were advanced by the Biden administration back in May. It was Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu who blocked progress. Israel’s western patrons, including Starmer, rewarded him with weapons, intelligence and diplomatic cover. If the ceasefire is “overdue”, Starmer is fully responsible for that delay.
Further, the “conflict” wasn’t “triggered” by Hamas’ attack of October 7, as Starmer claims. The “conflict” has been going on for more than three-quarters of a century, triggered by Israel’s continuous efforts to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from their homeland, with western backing, in an explicitly colonial project. Israel wants us to believe the “conflict” clock started ticking on October 7. Only the ignorant, and contemptible politicians like Starmer, repeat that lie.
The killings on October 7 2023 weren’t “the deadliest massacre of Jewish people” since the Holocaust. That’s another cynical Israeli talking point repeated by Starmer whose sole purpose is to rationalise Israel’s genocide. The “deadliest massacre” for Jews since the Holocaust was, in fact, committed by the Argentinian junta, which disappeared and murdered thousands of Jews in the late 1970s. And unlike Hamas, whose victims were killed not because they were Jews but because they were Israelis and viewed as members of an oppressor nation, Argentina’s generals killed Jews specifically for being Jewish. Nonetheless, that massacre – inconvenient to the West – has been carefully memory-holed, including by Starmer.
Starmer: The hostages, who were brutally ripped from their homes on that day and held captive in unimaginable conditions ever since, can now finally return to their families. But we should also use this moment to pay tribute to those who won’t make it home – including the British people who were murdered by Hamas. We will continue to mourn and remember them.
For the innocent Palestinians whose homes turned into a warzone overnight and the many who have lost their lives, this ceasefire must allow for a huge surge in humanitarian aid, which is so desperately needed to end the suffering in Gaza.
Notice Starmer’s sleight of hand here. He blames Hamas for everything that has happened over the past 15 months, including the mass slaughter of Palestinians carried out by Israel.
First, he correctly holds Hamas responsible for taking Israelis hostage – though, of course, like everyone else, Starmer fails to make the important legal distinction between the civilians who were taken hostage, a war crime, and occupying Israeli soldiers who were captured, not a war crime. But he then goes on to hold Hamas, not Israel, responsible for the genocide of the people of Gaza.
Presumably for that reason, the Israeli dead need to be “mourned”, “remembered” and paid “tribute”. But according to Starmer’s statement, the Palestinian dead need to be neither mourned nor remembered.
Whatever Starmer claims, Palestinian homes weren’t “turned into a war zone”, with the implication – again echoing a favorite and mendacious Israeli talking point – that Hamas has used Palestinians as human shields, leaving Israel with little choice but to kill them by the tens of thousands. Rather, Palestinian homes were deliberately leveled in an Israeli campaign of bombing far more intense than anything inflicted on Dresden or Hamburg. We know from the Israeli media that the targets of these bombing campaigns were generated automatically by AI programmes that were given the widest possible licence. In most cases, buildings were bombed without reference to any Hamas activity in the vicinity.
Next, Starmer falsely makes a connection between the ceasefire and the ability of international agencies to bring humanitarian aid into Gaza. But it was not fighting that stopped humanitarian aid entering Gaza. It was Israel’s decision to impose a genocidal, Medieval-style aid blockade, with the stated goal of starving the population. A goal, let us never forget, that Starmer explicitly endorsed, stating that Israel had the right to deny the people of Gaza food, water and power. Let us note too that Netanyahu and his former defence minister, Yoav Gallant, are being sought by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity that relate specifically to the starvation policy Starmer supported.
Starmer: And then our attention must turn to how we secure a permanently better future for the Israeli and Palestinian people – grounded in a two-state solution that will guarantee security and stability for Israel, alongside a sovereign and viable Palestine state.
It is far, far too late, as Starmer knows, to be talking about a “better future” for Gaza now that its homes have been destroyed, its hospitals are in ruins, its schools and universities are levelled, it agricultural land devastated. Estimates are that it will likely take 80 years to rebuild the enclave. How are a “better future” and a “sovereign and viable Palestinian state” going to emerge out of Gaza’s ruins.
Had Starmer been serious about “a two-state solution”, he could have done many things to facilitate it as soon as he entered office. He could have imposed a real arms embargo on Israel, one that would have deprived it of the components it needs to keep its F-35s flying over Gaza, dropping bombs. He could have backed South Africa’s genocide case at the ICJ. He could have recognised a Palestinian state, as several European countries have done but Britain hasn’t. He could have refused to transport weapons to Israel and provide it with aerial intelligence from the UK’s air base in Cyprus. He could have promised to arrest Netanyahu and Gallant should they land in the UK. He could have refused to shelter the Israeli military’s chief of staff, General Herzi Halevi, in London in November by issuing him with special immunity from arrest and prosecution by the ICC. And Starmer’s foreign secretary, David Lammy, could have rejected an invitation to Israel this week to “deepen the partnership” between the UK and Israel in the midst of a genocide.
Starmer: The UK and its allies will continue to be at the forefront of these crucial efforts to break the cycle of violence and secure long-term peace in the Middle East.
All that the UK under Starmer will be at the forefront of doing is continuing to shill for Israel, perpetuating “the cycle of violence” – a colonial cycle of violence that the British initiated in Palestine with the Balfour Declaration in 1917 – and ensuring peace remains unachievable as instability spreads across the Middle East.
Jonathan Cook is the author of three books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and a winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His website and blog can be found at www.jonathan-cook.net. This originally appeared on Jonathan Cook’s Blog.
When she was a member of the House of Representatives, Tulsi Gabbard was a fierce defender of personal privacy rights protected by the Fourth Amendment. She consistently opposed permitting federal agents to spy on Americans without search warrants, and she consistently voted against the reauthorization of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978.
Last week, Gabbard, now about to be nominated as Director of National Intelligence – the head of all known American spying agencies – changed her mind on Section 702 and no longer believes that the Constitution means what it says.
Here is the backstory.
After the resignation of President Richard Nixon in 1974 and the full extent of his use of the FBI and the CIA for domestic warrantless surveillance became known, Congress enacted FISA. It proclaims itself to have established the only lawful method for surveillance outside of the Fourth Amendment. This proclamation is itself a profound constitutional error, as ALL surveillance in defiance of the Fourth Amendment is unconstitutional.
That amendment was written in the aftermath of British agents executing general warrants on the colonists. General warrants were not based on probable cause of crime, but rather governmental need. And they did not specifically describe the place to be searched or the person or thing to be seized.
Rather, general warrants – issued by a secret court in London – authorized the bearer in America to search wherever he wished and seize whatever he found. The agents ostensibly were looking for proof of tax payments. They were really engaged in spying. They were looking for subversive, revolutionary materials.
After the Revolutionary War was won and the Constitution was ratified, the Bill of Rights was ratified. The Fourth Amendment in the Bill of Rights protects all “people” from unreasonable searches and seizures by the government – both law enforcement and spies. The courts have interpreted “unreasonable” to mean “without a search warrant.”
The Supreme Court has characterized spying as surveillance and surveillance as a search under the Fourth Amendment. That amendment requires search warrants issued by judges and based upon probable cause of crime demonstrated to the judges under oath and specifically describing the place to be searched or thing to be seized for the surveillance – the spying – to be lawful.
The amendment’s drafters’ intentional employment of the word “people” makes it obvious that the amendment protects every person from every search and every seizure by anyone from the government without a warrant. It is not limited to Americans or adults or good people or people the government likes; rather, it protects all people.
In a linguistic effort to accommodate the warrant requirement and its probable cause pre-condition, the congressional drafters of FISA required that the FISA Court may issue warrants for surveillance based on probable cause not of crime but of being a foreign government agent. The FISA Court then, on its own, morphed foreign agency into foreign personhood and then morphed that into communicating with a foreign person.
So, if you text or email or call your cousin in Geneva or an art dealer in Florence, you become a target for a FISA surveillance warrant – merely by communicating with a foreign person.
Even this loosening of Fourth Amendment protection by the Orwellian re-definition of probable cause was not enough to satisfy the rapacious appetite of the government to spy.
Thus, President George W. Bush ordered the National Security Agency – the federal government’s 60,000-person strong cadre of domestic spies in the Department of Defense, and thus subject directly to the president – to engage in warrantless spying, in defiance of FISA, and on a scale vastly greater than that which Nixon had ordered of the FBI and CIA in the 1970s.
When Congress learned of the warrantless spying through the courageous revelations of Edward Snowden, rather than defunding it, it enacted Section 702 as an exception to FISA, and thereby made warrantless spying on foreign persons in America legal. In a direct affront to the Fourth Amendment, Section 702 permits the NSA and its cousins in the 16 other federal spying agencies to spy without warrants on all communications involving foreign persons.
What happens when a foreign person communicates with an American?
Section 702 permits warrantless surveillance of Americans who communicate with foreign persons, permits the NSA to maintain a database of all such American persons, permits the FBI to search those databases without a search warrant and, if the NSA learns of evidence of criminal behavior without a warrant, requires it to share that evidence with the FBI.
It gets worse.
Since Department of Justice lawyers have persuaded the FISA Court to issue warrants to spy on Americans who communicate with foreigners out to the sixth degree of communication, the NSA has contended that Section 702 also permits it to spy out to the sixth degree.
How many persons can be spied upon under the NSA’s interpretation of 702?
Call your cousin in Geneva and NSA can spy on everyone with whom you speak and everyone to whom they speak and so on, out to the sixth level of communication.
The FBI reported that in 2021, it searched 3.4 million names in the NSA database of Americans who communicated with foreigners. If you take those 3.4 million out to the sixth degree of their American communications, the number grows exponentially. You will have reached 330 million Americans before completion of the process.
In order to win the votes of Republican senators who hate the Fourth Amendment, Gabbard has told them she now favors Section 702 warrantless spying. This is the very same Section 702 used to justify spying on Donald Trump before his election in 2016 and during his first term as president.
Gabbard apparently covets her new job more than she covets her principles. Of what value is the Constitution if federal officials abandon it?
(Reuters) -TD Bank Group said on Friday CEO-designate Raymond Chun would be appointed to the role on Feb. 1, months earlier than initially planned, and slashed the salary of 41 executives, including its outgoing chief.
Last month, the Canadian bank warned of a challenging 2025 and suspended its medium-term earnings forecast as it works through its anti-money laundering remediation program following a U.S. regulatory probe.
TD had also said it would hold a strategic review that would include reassessment of growth opportunities, productivity initiatives and where it needs to invest or divest.
In October, it became the largest bank in U.S. history to plead guilty to violating a federal law aimed at preventing money laundering, and agreed to pay more than $3 billion in penalties to resolve the charges.
The plea deal, which includes a rare imposition of an asset cap and other business limitations, arises from multiple government investigations into what authorities described as pervasive issues.
Chun is set to replace long-time CEO Bharat Masrani, who took the top job at the bank in 2014.
The bank lowered Masrani's total compensation by 89% to $1.5 million in 2024, from $13.27 million in 2023.
At his first appearance as incoming CEO at a banking conference in Toronto in January, Chun addressed the bank's strategic review that could include the sale of its stake in Charles Schwab and exiting some loan portfolios. Chun also said he expects to hold an investor day later in 2025.
"Ray has moved quickly and decisively to launch a review of our strategy, operations, and investments, and has engaged with customers, clients and colleagues across the Bank," chair of TD's board Alan MacGibbon said.
Masrani will stay on in an advisory capacity until July 31, the bank said. TD had previously announced the transition date for Chun as April 10.
(Reporting by Manya Saini in Bengaluru and Nivedita Balu in Toronto; Editing by Shilpi Majumdar)
Op-Ed: ‘Amexit’ — America’s departure from itself and sanity.
As the world looks forward to a repeat 4-year season of Whack a Nutcase there’s a noticeable omission in the imagery.
The awe is gone. There’s nothing impressive about USA 2025 or the faces on the screens. The image is buried under mountains of sleaze.
The Land of Overachievers looks sounds and acts like a crack house.
The Masters of the Universe are long gone.
You don’t even need to mention politics. It’s that bad. Not one single issue affecting the physical realities of Utterly Miserable America is under discussion.
The pattern of Brexit is repeating in monotonous predictability:
Everyone said, “Don’t do Brexit” and “Don’t leave the single market”.
They said they wouldn’t.
They then did Brexit, accompanied by much hysteria and flag-waving.
It was far worse than predicted. Emigration from the UK is more of a problem than immigration.
In the case of the US, “Amexit” will be disastrous. That’s what’s likely to happen.
You have to wonder:
Why would so many very rich people work so maniacally to totally destroy the system that made them so rich and allowed them to remain rich?
Why are non-existent issues more important than a rotting society?
Why are so many gigantic glaring and incredibly dangerous real national issues being ignored?
The American media’s take on the situation is indicative:
“Look at it logically. You’re only dying or going broke or living in an old Dorito packet.
The really important issue is that some useless butt-ugly incompetent rich brat schmuck needs a few hundred more billion to throw more tantrums”.
The level of insanity is so repulsive that the world will have no choice but to react negatively. To protect their own economies, Europe and China will simply have to work with each other.
So what?
So if America can’t borrow or borrowing is too expensive, and US offshore funds stay offshore, there will be a supermassive financial black hole in the next four years. That link is to the ominous and very expensive issue of the USA’s credit rating.
The US domestic economy is far too weak from years of ridiculous price rises to take much more. Domestic demand can’t keep up with the spending sprees.
The people don’t have any money. Nada. Zip. Nonesuch.
That’s why “We the People” are so important. Who the hell do you think ultimately pays for everything?
Even the rich should know money has to come from somewhere other than their egos.
The antiquated US revenue system (no VAT to start with) hasn’t been able to match funding requirements for decades. It’s a miracle the balance didn’t simply implode.
Generations Z and Alpha have been priced out of any hope of the American Dream.
They can’t even afford to shut their eyes and dream, and they know it.
Grasping at straws is understandable. It doesn’t work when you’re drowning. Grasping at a hopelessly outdated millstone of delusional falsehoods won’t work either.
Like Brexit, Amexit doesn’t need to happen. Any guesses what will happen?
__________________________________________________ Disclaimer The opinions expressed in this Op-Ed are those of the author. They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of the Digital Journal or its members.
Op-Ed: Sabotaging the future of the world with cost insanity.
They didn’t mention hitting a point of absolute non-viability in real costs pre-pandemic.
They forgot to tell anyone that raising prices means raising more obstacles to growth, too.
The pseudo-economists left out that population shrinkage is now a long-established fact in the West, Japan, and China due to prices and it’s nothing new.
The economics of the Great Depression were idiotic then. They’re likely to be far worse now.
There’s another fun issue—the Plague of Billionaires just happens to be in businesses that are mainstream trading sectors. These guys were there when the money went past. They had 20+ years of incredibly low borrowing rates, lazy, inept governments, and they never, ever, pay taxes.
There’s nothing to respect in this rabble of rich rabid rodents. A not-very-bright house brick could have become a billionaire in that environment.
That almost total lack of talent and mis-leadership is the basis of the chronic mismanagement of everything. They’ve never had to do real business in an unprotected cost environment. Debts are dangerously high, and they’ll get more dangerous. You can go broke as a borrower and a lender simply because price rises have drained liquidity to this incredible extent.
If anything “growth” is now a measure of shrinkage. History is glaring through the fiction. The devaluation of wealth is very real. A billion is worth a lot less now. Compared to times of real prosperity around 1960, everything is about 10 times more expensive in dollar terms. Is that good? No.
It’s actually a lot worse than that for housing, education, and health. Houses that cost millions now might have cost six figures back then. Five figures would definitely get you a decent house. Health and education were reasonably priced. You could even afford to have both!
Are health, housing, and education being managed or mismanaged? How about energy, quality of life, nutrition, safe living environments, and other indicators of competence?
In the real world, the one you may have heard mentioned occasionally by mystics and debt collectors, denial is pointless. You can’t just say it’s not happening and expect to be believed.
Gen Alpha will have to be totally feral and learn to dig burrows. Survival will be tough.
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Disclaimer The opinions expressed in this Op-Ed are those of the author. They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of the Digital Journal or its members.
Op-Ed: Social media — Full of itself, failing to deliver in too many ways
ByPaul Wallis January 14, 2025 This photo illustration shows the social media platform X (former Twitter) app on a smartphone in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil on September 18, 2024 - Copyright AFP/File Allison Joyce
Social media was going to connect the world. It was going to be a way for people from anywhere and everywhere to engage. “Everyone is connected”, etc.
That worked out well, didn’t it?
The mythology of social media makes even US media look almost focused and respectable. It’s self-hype to infinity.
The hype is pretty messy, too. Glitz, glamour, maybe, if you’re 10 years old. You have the infant influencers and rabid rabbits making millions. So what? A few industry pets aren’t all that relatable. The actual successes aren’t many people. It’s another 1%, as usual.
That’s the problem. What social media thinks of itself vs what it actually delivers. The ridiculous vs an ever-diminishing content value.
Social media is ironically called “the attention economy”, even in a country where ADHD is a sort of cultural icon.
It WAS different. Twitter was a primary source of news, and Tweet volumes meant something. That’s not the case now. Nobody gives a damn what a bot thinks about anything. Social media bots are fiction by definition. AI bots aren’t going to make things any better. You’d be lucky to get real numbers for marketing.
That’s not a problem in the sector.
“We reached 200 million people!”
Well, did you? Any social media demographic has a percentile of social media watchers. In the States, at least half of your audience is hostile to some degree thanks to the tides of political slop. Another hefty percentage of viewers are the people who posted it and their handlers. It’s not even a real audience in that many ways.
You could create a nice cynical algorithmic metric to measure hits as a form of market antagonism. The market, as usual, sees what it wants to see, not what it needs to see.
Well, you could get decent metrics if anyone could be bothered responding to the tonnage of tripe produced every second. Total silence is a negative response.
Imagery has a lot to do with this silent response. Nobody watches social media to find the babbling bozos of their dreams. Bear in mind also that these corporate guys also can’t read their own marketing figures.
Check out this Top Social Media Marketing Skills article, complete with an embarrassingly edited headline. Then see if you can say you’ve noticed any of those skills on social media. This is the image social media has of itself. “Pathetic” is hardly the word.
It becomes this in business terms:
“We spent $10 million on a social media marketing campaign” translates into a few extra sales worth maybe $1 million. They don’t see it and don’t look for it. There are obviously no business skills involved at any level.
TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook are the mainstream market. They’re shopfronts as much or more than social media. They deliver consumables, not information There’s a huge difference. These are the lands of FOMO and the rest of the superficial rubbish on social media.
YouTube is a bit different. It provides content people like, and those people tend to be niche markets. The quality of content varies from undeniably excellent to utter trash. The audience soon learns to discriminate. That’s pretty much the whole story.
I was watching a live CNN coverage of the LA fires. The chat was entirely political, and nobody bothered to respond. There were posts celebrating the fires from around the world.
News?
Useful information?
Hardly. It was a soapbox based on a catastrophe. Do you think that sells or influences anyone? It doesn’t. It wasn’t even a new platform for the nuts; it had nothing to say and went on saying it for the entire CNN coverage.
That’s the dry rot destroying social media. You can’t “engage” with this drivel. It has no value. It’s just noise.
That’s where social media becomes its own worst and most unforgiving enemy. Nobody’s interested in non-information.
The lack of hard or even slightly useful information just isn’t good enough anymore. You can find drivel anywhere; why go looking for it?
There’s a major productivity issue here. Yes, you are allowed to laugh like an enthusiastic hyena.
How productive can this slop be for anyone?
Now add another dimension – Real users who want to communicate with each other. Remember them? Your actual core users who keep your numbers up?
These users can take or leave anything, however insane, and they do. They can ignore anything and be unimpressed by anything. You guys should be thankful you can even point to a meaningful market demographic like that.
The refugees from X and the resulting meltdown are a warning. The advertisers didn’t like it. They left The real users didn’t like it. They left. That’s what non-delivery means for social media.
Nobody HAS to watch anything online.
You’re a click away from oblivion.
__________________________________________________ Disclaimer The opinions expressed in this Op-Ed are those of the author. They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of the Digital Journal or its members.
'Damaging’ AI porn scandal at US school scars victims
A wave of AI porn scandals has rocked schools across US states, from California to New Jersey - Copyright AFP/File Stefani REYNOLDS
Bill McCarthy and Anuj Chopra
Her voice tinged with anger, an American mother worried about what the future holds for her teenage daughter, just one of dozens of girls targeted in yet another AI-enabled pornography scandal that has rocked a US school.
The controversy that engulfed the Lancaster Country Day School in Pennsylvania last year highlights a new normal for pupils and educators struggling to keep up with a boom in cheap, easily available artificial intelligence tools that have facilitated hyperrealistic deepfakes.
One parent, who spoke to AFP on the condition of anonymity, said her 14-year-old daughter came to her “hysterically crying” last summer after finding AI-generated nude pictures of her circulating among her peers.
“What are the ramifications to her long term?” the mother said, voicing fears that the manipulated images could resurface when her daughter applies to college, starts dating, or enters the job market.
“You can’t tell that they are fake.”
Multiple charges — including sexual abuse of children and possession of child pornography — were filed last month against two teenage boys who authorities allege created the images.
Investigators uncovered 347 images and videos affecting a total of 60 victims, most of them female students at the private school, on the messaging app Discord.
All but one was younger than 18.
– ‘Troubling’ –
The scandal is the latest in a wave of similar incidents in schools across US states — from California to New Jersey — leading to a warning from the FBI last year that such child sexual abuse material, including realistic AI-generated images, was illegal.
“The rise of generative AI has collided with a long-standing problem in schools: the act of sharing non-consensual intimate imagery,” said Alexandra Reeve Givens, chief executive of the nonprofit Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT).
“In the digital age, kids desperately need support to navigate tech-enabled harassment.”
A CDT survey of public schools last September found that 15 percent of students and 11 percent of teachers knew of at least one “deepfake that depicts an individual associated with their school in a sexually explicit or intimate manner.”
Such non-consensual imagery can lead to harassment, bullying or blackmail, sometimes causing devastating mental health consequences.
The mother who spoke to AFP said she knows of victims who had avoided school, had trouble eating or required medical attention and counseling to cope with the ordeal.
She said she and other parents brought into a detective’s office to scrutinize the deepfakes were shocked to find printed out images stacked a “foot and a half” high.
“I had to see pictures of my daughter,” she said.
“If someone looked, they would think it’s real, so that’s even more damaging.”
– ‘Exploitation’ –
The alleged perpetrators, whose names have not been released, are accused of lifting pictures from social media, altering them using an AI application and sharing them on Discord.
The mother told AFP the fakes of her daughter were primarily altered from public photos on the school’s Instagram page as well as a screenshot of a FaceTime call.
A simple online search throws up dozens of apps and websites that allow users to create “deepnudes,” digitally removing clothing, or superimpose selected faces onto pornographic images.
“Although results may not be as realistic or compelling as a professional rendition, these services mean that no technical skills are needed to produce deepfake content,” Roberta Duffield, director of intelligence at Blackbird.AI, told AFP.
Only a handful of US states have passed laws to deal with sexually explicit deepfakes, including Pennsylvania at the end of last year.
The top leadership at the Pennsylvania school stepped aside after parents of the victims filed a lawsuit accusing the administration of failing to report the activity when they were first alerted to it in late 2023.
Researchers say schools are ill-equipped to tackle the threat of AI technology evolving at a rapid pace, in part because the law is still playing catchup.
“Underage girls are increasingly subject to deepfake exploitation from their friends, colleagues, school classmates,” said Duffield.
“Education authorities must urgently develop clear, comprehensive policies regarding the use of AI and digital technologies.”
China says population fell for third year in a row in 2024
China ended its strict 'one-child policy', imposed in the 1980s amid overpopulation fears, in 2016 and started letting couples have three children in 2021 - Copyright AFP/File Arif ALI
China said on Friday its population fell for the third year running in 2024, extending a downward streak after more than six decades of growth as the country faces a rapidly ageing population and persistently low birth rates.
Once the world’s most populous country, China was overtaken by India in 2023, with Beijing seeking to boost falling birth rates through subsidies and pro-fertility propaganda.
The population stood at 1.408 billion by the end of the year, Beijing’s National Bureau of Statistics said, down from 1.410 billion in 2023.
The decline was less sharp than the previous year, when it was more than double the fall reported for 2022, data showed.
China ended its strict “one-child policy”, imposed in the 1980s over overpopulation fears, in 2016 and started letting couples have three children in 2021.
But that has failed to reverse the demographic decline for a country that has long relied on its vast workforce as a driver of economic growth.
Many say falling birth rates are due to the soaring cost of living, as well as the growing number of women going into the workforce and seeking higher education.
Population decline is likely to continue due to gloomy economic prospects for young people and as Chinese women “confront entrenched labour market gender discriminations”, Yun Zhou, a sociologist at the University of Michigan, told AFP.
People over 60 are expected to make up nearly a third of China’s population by 2035, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit, a research group.
– ‘Trend won’t change’ –
Data released on Friday showed that the population aged 60 and over reached 310.31 million — just a few percentage points short of a quarter of the country and an increase from nearly 297 million recorded in 2023.
However, the data also showed China’s birth rate — among the lowest in the world — ticked up slightly from the previous year to 6.77 per 1,000 people.
“This uptick is unlikely to last, as the population of childbearing-age women is projected to decline sharply in the coming decades,” said Zhao Litao, a senior research fellow at the National University of Singapore’s East Asian Institute.
“In the long term, the trends of declining births, overall population contraction, and rapid ageing remain unchanged.”
He Yafu, an independent demographer in China, put the uptick in births down to women who deferred having children during the Covid-19 pandemic giving birth. There was also an increase in marriages in 2023 and 2024, the auspicious Year of the Dragon.
However, “the general trend of total population decline won’t change”, He told AFP.
“Unless strong policies to encourage childbirth are introduced… the proportion of the elderly population will continue to rise.”
Officials said in September they would gradually raise the statutory retirement age, which was set at 60 and among the lowest in the world. It had not been raised for decades.
The rules took effect from January 1.
China’s previous retirement age was set at a time of widespread scarcity and impoverishment, before market reforms brought comparative wealth and rapid improvements in nutrition, health and living conditions.
The world’s second-largest economy now has to contend with slowing growth, while a fast-greying population and a baby bust have piled pressure on pension and public health systems.
Pet boar gets to stay with French owner, for now: court
Cappe said the court ruling made her 'very happy' - Copyright AFP FRANCOIS NASCIMBENI
A French woman who has kept a wild boar as a pet since finding and domesticating the animal can keep it for now, a court has ordered, overruling local authorities who insisted the animal had to be removed or killed.
Horse breeder Elodie Cappe found the female boar — named Rillette after a delicacy often made from pork — in 2023 when it was still a piglet near a complex of stables she runs in Chaource, in France’s centre-east.
The local prefecture informed Cappe that she had to find “an adapted structure” for the boar, which has grown to weigh 100 kilos (220 pounds), or have it euthanised.
The order caused an outcry among animal lovers in France and abroad, with former film star and prominent animal rights activist Brigitte Bardot weighing in to save Rillette.
Several petitions launched on the Change.org website calling for the boar to be allowed to stay put have clocked up a total of around 300,000 signatures.
After the prefecture rejected all calls to drop its opposition to Rillette staying with her owner, Cappe took the case before an administrative court in November.
In its ruling delivered Thursday, the court rejected the administration’s argument that non-domesticated animals can only be held by private individuals if they are from a recognised breeding centre.
“Nowhere”, the court said, did the law state that “they need to be born and bred in captivity”.
While allowing that it is illegal in principle to capture wild boars, the judge noted that the prefecture can grant exceptions, and asked the administration to reconsider its stance.
“We are very happy,” Cappe told AFP, adding she hoped that “finally” the prefecture would allow her to keep Rillette.
Her lawyer, Karl Burger, added that Cappe has been meeting all requirements for holding non-domesticated animals, including having Rillette vaccinated, sterilised and providing a secure, enclosed shelter.
This handout picture released by the Parco Archeologico di Pompei on January 17, 2025 shows a private thermal baths complex discovered by archaeologists - Copyright Parco Archeologico di Pompei press office/AFP Handout
Archaeologists at Pompeii have uncovered a private thermal baths complex where guests would take the plunge before sitting down to sumptuous feasts, the Italian site said Friday.
The baths excavated at the Roman villa make up “one of the largest private thermal complexes” found so far in the ancient city, near Naples, which was devastated when nearby Mount Vesuvius erupted almost 2,000 years ago.
Guests would shed their robes in a changing room that could accommodate up to 30 people, judging by the benches present, according to the Pompeii statement.
They would then relax in the “calidarium” — a room with a hot bath — followed by the “tepidarium” or warm room, and finally take a plunge in a pool of cold water in the “frigidarium”.
The cold room in particular is “very impressive”, with “a porticoed courtyard measuring 10 metres squared, at the centre of which is a large pool”, Pompeii said.
Afterwards, guests would dine by candlelight in a black-walled banqueting hall decorated with scenes from Greek mythology.
The hall and spa are part of a grand villa which archaeologists have spent the past two years uncovering.
“The direct connection of the thermal spaces to the large convivial hall suggests the Roman house lent itself to staging sumptuous banquets,” the Pompeii statement said.
These were “precious opportunities for the owner to ensure the electoral consensus of his guests, to promote the candidacy of friends or relatives, or simply to affirm his social status”, it said.
When Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD, the ash and rock that fell helped preserve many of Pompeii’s buildings almost in their original state, as well as forming eerie shapes around the curled-up corpses of victims of the disaster.
The remains of more than 1,000 victims have been found during excavations in Pompeii, but many more are thought to have died.
Pompeii is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the second most visited tourist site in Italy, after the Colosseum in Rome.
US offered infrastructure incentive for DRC-Rwanda peace deal: official
The United States offered to extend its signature African investment project into the troubled east of the Democratic Republic of Congo as an incentive for a peace deal, but Rwanda has backed away, a senior US diplomat said.
Molly Phee, the outgoing assistant secretary of state for African affairs, said the United States proposed an expansion of the Lobito railway, a project visited last month by President Joe Biden that aims to speed up the transport of minerals from southern DRC and Zambia to Angola's Atlantic coast.
"We had proposed to both sides that if we could get to stabilization in eastern DRC, we could work on developing a spur from the Lobito Corridor up through eastern DRC," Phee told AFP in an interview ahead of her exit Monday as the Biden administration comes to an end.
"We tried to offer positive incentives. A genuine framework -- fundamentally negotiated by the parties -- exists, and at the moment, Rwanda seems to have walked away," she said.
Rwanda-backed rebels known as the March 23 (M23) Movement since 2021 have seized swaths of eastern DRC, displacing thousands and triggering a humanitarian crisis.
Rwandan President Paul Kagame, while never admitting direct military involvement, has demanded the elimination of the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), an armed group in DRC primarily composed of Hutu militants formed in the wake of the 1994 Rwandan genocide.
Authorities in Kinshasa accuse Rwanda of seizing valuable mines in the region amid the conflict.
Phee, who was part of the Biden administration's negotiations along with US intelligence chief Avril Haines, said the United States presented a solution that would include a DRC crackdown on the FDLR.
"They did not take that action," she said of Kinshasa.
"We put it all back together again and then I thought we were on a good track. And then in the end, President Kagame decided not to go to the Luanda summit in December, and you've seen Rwanda and M23 take more territory."
Kagame has dismissed recent peace initiatives such as the summit in the Angolan capital Luanda as little more than photo-ops that do not address "root causes."
- 'Heavy-handed' security response in Ethiopia -
Biden took office vowing to pay more attention to Africa than Donald Trump, his predecessor and successor, although the administration soon also became focused on the Ukraine and Gaza wars. But one of the most devastating conflicts of this century was a two-year war in Ethiopia's Tigray region where at least 600,000 people died, according to an African Union envoy.
The violence stopped with a ceasefire reached in November 2022 in the South African capital Pretoria.
"I'm very proud of the work we did to help end the war in Tigray, which at that time was the largest conflict in the world," Phee said.
But she voiced concern over Ethiopian forces' actions since then, in conflicts in the separate regions of Amhara and Oromia.
"It's a legitimate and difficult problem, as all insurgencies are, but we feel the security services are heavy-handed and are not as attentive to civilian casualties as they should be," she said.
The Biden administration booted Ethiopia out of a major trade pact in response to rights concerns in Tigray.
Phee said the United States "would like to be in a position to resume the kind of partnership that we had" but that Ethiopia still has steps to take.
- Still hopeful in Niger -
The United States also saw a setback when the military seized power in Niger in 2023 -- soon after a visit by Secretary of State Antony Blinken -- and moved closer to Russia.
The junta scrapped a military cooperation deal, forcing Washington to give up a $100 million drone base, soon after Phee voiced concern over Niger potentially selling uranium to Iran, whose nuclear program is under scrutiny.
In a diplomatic dustup, Nigerien authorities denied that there was a deal with Iran and called Phee's attitude "condescending."
Phee said her remarks to Niger should be understood more as an offer than warning.
She said she told Niger that "Iran is a bad actor in the world" and that a deal would cause problems due to sanctions on Tehran.
But she said she told them, "you deserve to use your uranium to benefit your people. We'll be happy to find you a reputable buyer."
"I'm hopeful that action on that kind of path will be taken by them."
Meta’s ‘critical shortcomings’ led to Russian disinformation campaign on platform: report
Erik De La Garza January 17, 2025 RAW STORY How scammers use psychology to create some of the most convincing internet cons Hacker with laptop, Image via Shutterstock.
A covert Russian-led disinformation campaign evaded Meta restrictions and got through more than 8,000 political ads on Facebook despite regulations in the United States and Europe barring companies from conducting business with the organization, a new report revealed.
The Russian IT firm, the Social Design Agency, which has been linked to the Kremlin’s propaganda campaigns, spent an estimated $338,000 in Facebook ads targeting European users, according to The New York Times, citing a report that came out Friday from three groups that track disinformation online.
Its release comes as the Mark Zuckerberg-owned company announced the termination of its third-party fact-checking program in the U.S., which the Times noted “will almost certainly intensify Meta’s confrontation with regulators in Europe over how it handles disinformation and other corrosive content.”
And Meta itself already “highlighted the threat,” the Times reported.
The organization at the center of the report is already under punitive sanction in the European Union and the U.S. “for spreading propaganda and disinformation to unsuspecting users on social media,” according to the Times.
The Facebook ad campaigns expose “critical shortcomings in Meta’s systems to curb the spread of state-sponsored influence — shortcomings that, in turn, create financial rewards for the platform,” the report said.
It also raises “highlights significant concerns related to Meta’s compliance” with laws in the U.S. and Europe, according to the report.
“The SDA operated through a network of anonymous accounts, using false identities to create pages and publish ads. Meta’s failure to enforce strict identity verification allowed these accounts to persist,” the report said of the Russian organization.
The report highlighted “the need for Meta to do more, not less, to fight disinformation, and for E.U. regulators to hold the company accountable,” Alexandre Alaphilippe, executive director of the EU Disinfo Lab, a nonprofit research organization based in Brussels, told the Times.
“If Europe is to be a sovereign entity with its own laws, those laws must be applied by platforms and other actors,” he said to the publication. “A failure to enforce them properly raises serious concerns about sovereignty and whether Europe can ensure its laws are respected on its own territory.”
SPACE/COSMOS
'It blew up': Social media mockery takes off as SpaceX rebrands midair explosion
Erik De La Garza January 16, 2025 RAW STORY FILE PHOTO: Tesla and SpaceX's CEO Elon Musk gestures, as he attends political festival Atreju organised by Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni's Brothers of Italy (Fratelli d'Italia) right-wing party, in Rome, Italy, December 16, 2023. REUTERS/Guglielmo Mangiapane/File Photo
The midair explosion of SpaceX’s Starship rocket took over social media on Thursday with space watchers ridiculing the Elon Musk-owned company’s rebranding of the incident as “a rapid unscheduled disassembly.”
“Starship experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly during its ascent burn,” the company wrote in a post on X of the company's seventh test of its mega-rocket. “Teams will continue to review data from today's flight test to better understand root cause.”
Musk himself weighed in on his own X account, ensuring his space enthusiast followers that “nothing so far suggests pushing next launch past next month,” and thanking supporters like NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, who just months ago called for Musk to be investigated for his ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“Spaceflight is not easy,” Nelson wrote on X. “It’s anything but routine. That’s why these tests are so important—each one bringing us closer on our path to the Moon and onward to Mars through #Artemis.”
But not all were as impressed by the spacecraft blowing up midair as Nelson was, with many social media users particularly amused by the company’s curious rewording.
“It blew up,” biologist Daniel Schneider wrote on Bluesky. “Elon Musk. It. Blew. Up. Starship exploded.” He later shared a photo circulating social media of a colorful array of fireballs falling from the sky and added: “Who knew that when Space X Starship explodes it looks like an LGBTQ pride flag.”
“SpaceX: Starship experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly during its ascent burn,” artist Art Candee wrote to her followers on Bluesky. “Everyone else: It blew up.”
“Hope Musk's presidency experiences a rapid unscheduled disassembly,” Michael Little, a U.S. Navy veteran, said on Bluesky.
Legal report Chris Geidner posted to his social media followers: “Yeah, ‘rapid unscheduled disassembly’ is going in the books.”
“The harbinger of Tuesday January 20, the rapid unscheduled disassembly of democracy,” teacher Paulette Feeney told her followers.
Researchers from Göttingen in Germany shed new light on the formation of the Moon and origin of water on Earth
University of Göttingen
image:
Since the Apollo era, the lunar samples have been stored at NASA's Johnson Space Centre in Houston and are available for research. All lunar samples analysed in the laboratory in Göttingen were provided by NASA.
A research team from the University of Göttingen and the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) has discovered another piece in the puzzle of the formation of the Moon and water on Earth. The prevailing theory was that the Moon was the result of a collision between the early Earth and the protoplanet Theia. New measurements indicate that the Moon formed from material ejected from the Earth's mantle with little contribution from Theia. In addition, the findings support the idea that water could have reached the Earth early in its development and may not have been added by late impacts. The results were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
The researchers analysed oxygen isotopes from 14 samples from the Moon and carried out 191 measurements on minerals from Earth. Isotopes are varieties of the same element that differ only in the weight of their nucleus. The team used an improved version of “laser fluorination”, a method in which oxygen is released from rock using a laser. The new measurements show a very high similarity between samples taken from both Earth and the Moon of an isotope called oxygen-17 (17O). The isotopic similarity between Earth and Moon is a long-standing problem in cosmochemistry for which the term “isotope crisis” had been coined.
“One explanation is that Theia lost its rocky mantle in earlier collisions and then slammed into the early Earth like a metallic cannonball,” says Professor Andreas Pack, Managing Director of Göttingen University’s Geoscience Centre and Head of the Geochemistry and Isotope Geology Division. “If this were the case, Theia would be part of the Earth's core today, and the Moon would have formed from ejected material from the Earth's mantle. This would explain the similarity in the composition of the Earth and the Moon.”
The data obtained also provide an insight into the history of water on Earth: according to a widespread assumption, it only arrived on Earth after the formation of the Moon through a series of further impacts known as the “Late Veneer Event”. As the Earth was hit much more frequently by these impacts than the Moon, there should also be a measurable difference between the oxygen isotopes – depending on the origin of the material that impacted. “However, since the new data shows this is not the case, many types of meteorites can be ruled out as the cause of the ‘late veneer’,” explains first author Meike Fischer, who was working at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Göttingen at the time of the research. “Our data can be explained particularly well by a class of meteorites called ‘enstatite chondrites’: they are isotopically similar to the Earth and contain enough water to be solely responsible for the Earth's water.”
Original publication: Meike Fischer et al. Oxygen isotope identity of Earth and Moon with implications for the formation of the Moon and source of volatiles. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2321070121
View of the Moon with the Earth in the foreground: new measurements support the theory that the Moon is material ejected from the Earth's mantle.
Extremely precise measurements of the distance between the Earth and the Coma cluster of galaxies provide new evidence for the Universe’s faster-than-expected rate of expansion.
The Universe really seems to be expanding fast. Too fast, even.
A new measurement confirms what previous — and highly debated — results had shown: The Universe is expanding faster than predicted by theoretical models, and faster than can be explained by our current understanding of physics.
This discrepancy between model and data became known as the Hubble tension. Now, results published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters provide even stronger support to the faster rate of expansion.
“The tension now turns into a crisis,” said Dan Scolnic, who led the research team.
Determining the expansion rate of the Universe — known as the Hubble constant — has been a major scientific pursuit ever since 1929, when Edwin Hubble first discovered that the Universe was expanding.
Scolnic, an associate professor of physics at Duke University, explains it as trying to build the Universe’s growth chart: we know what size it had at the Big Bang, but how did it get to the size it is now? In his analogy, the Universe’s baby picture represents the distant Universe, the primordial seeds of galaxies. The Universe’s current headshot represents the local Universe, which contains the Milky Way and its neighbors. The standard model of cosmology is the growth curve connecting the two. The problem is: things don’t connect.
“This is saying, to some respect, that our model of cosmology might be broken,” said Scolnic.
Measuring the Universe requires a cosmic ladder, which is a succession of methods used to measure the distances to celestial objects, with each method, or “rung,” relying on the previous for calibration.
The ladder used by Scolnic was created by a separate team using data from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), which is observing more than 100,000 galaxies every night from its vantage point at the Kitt Peak National Observatory.
Scolnic recognized that this ladder could be anchored closer to Earth with a more precise distance to the Coma Cluster, one of the galaxy clusters nearest to us.
“The DESI collaboration did the really hard part, their ladder was missing the first rung,” said Scolnic. “I knew how to get it, and I knew that that would give us one of the most precise measurements of the Hubble constant we could get, so when their paper came out, I dropped absolutely everything and worked on this non-stop.”
To get a precise distance to the Coma cluster, Scolnic and his collaborators, with funding from the Templeton foundation, used the light curves from 12 Type Ia supernovae within the cluster. Just like candles lighting a dark path, Type Ia supernovae have a predictable luminosity that correlates to their distance, making them reliable objects for distance calculations.
The team arrived at a distance of about 320 million light-years, nearly in the center of the range of distances reported across 40 years of previous studies — a reassuring sign of its accuracy.
“This measurement isn’t biased by how we think the Hubble tension story will end,” said Scolnic. “This cluster is in our backyard, it has been measured long before anyone knew how important it was going to be.”
Using this high-precision measurement as a first rung, the team calibrated the rest of the cosmic distance ladder. They arrived at a value for the Hubble constant of 76.5 kilometers per second per megaparsec, which essentially means that the local Universe is expanding 76.5 kilometers per second faster every 3.26 million light-years.
This value matches existing measurements of the expansion rate of the local Universe. However, like all of those measurements, it conflicts with measurements of the Hubble constant using predictions from the distant Universe. In other words: it matches the Universe’s expansion rate as other teams have recently measured it, but not as our current understanding of physics predicts it. The longstanding question is: is the flaw in the measurements or in the models?
Scolnic’s team’s new results adds tremendous support to the emerging picture that the root of the Hubble tension lies in the models.
“Over the last decade or so, there's been a lot of re-analysis from the community to see if my team’s original results were correct,” said Scolnic, whose research has consistently challenged the Hubble constant predicted using the standard model of physics. “Ultimately, even though we're swapping out so many of the pieces, we all still get a very similar number. So, for me, this is as good of a confirmation as it's ever gotten.”
“We’re at a point where we’re pressing really hard against the models we’ve been using for two and a half decades, and we’re seeing that things aren’t matching up,” said Scolnic. “This may be reshaping how we think about the Universe, and it’s exciting! There are still surprises left in cosmology, and who knows what discoveries will come next?”
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CITATION: Scolnic, D., Riess, A.G., Murakami, Y.S., Peterson, E.R., Brout, D., Acevedo, M., Carreres, B., Jones, D.O., Said, K., Howlett, C. and Anand, G.S., 2025. The Hubble Tension in our own Backyard: DESI and the Nearness of the Coma Cluster.The Astrophysical Journal Letters, 979, L9. DOI 10.3847/2041-8213/ada0bd
This work was conducted with funding from the Templeton Foundation, the Department of Energy, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the Sloan Foundation, the National Science Foundation and NASA.
The Hubble Tension in our own Backyard: DESI and the Nearness of the Coma Cluster
Article Publication Date
15-Jan-2025
NASA's Hubble traces hidden history of Andromeda galaxy
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center
image:
This is the largest photomosaic ever assembled from Hubble Space Telescope observations. It is a panoramic view of the neighboring Andromeda galaxy, located 2.5 million light-years away. It took over 10 years to make this vast and colorful portrait of the galaxy, requiring over 600 Hubble overlapping snapshots that were challenging to stitch together. The galaxy is so close to us, that in angular size it is six times the apparent diameter of the full Moon, and can be seen with the unaided eye. For Hubble's pinpoint view, that's a lot of celestial real estate to cover. This stunning, colorful mosaic captures the glow of 200 million stars. That's still a fraction of Andromeda's population. And the stars are spread across about 2.5 billion pixels. The detailed look at the resolved stars will help astronomers piece together the galaxy's past history that includes mergers with smaller satellite galaxies.
Credit: NASA, ESA, Benjamin F. Williams (UWashington), Zhuo Chen (UWashington), L. Clifton Johnson (Northwestern); Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI)
In the years following the launch of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have tallied over 1 trillion galaxies in the universe. But only one galaxy stands out as the most important nearby stellar island to our Milky Way — the magnificent Andromeda galaxy (Messier 31). It can be seen with the naked eye on a very clear autumn night as a faint cigar-shaped object roughly the apparent angular diameter of our Moon.
A century ago, Edwin Hubble first established that this so-called "spiral nebula" was actually very far outside our own Milky Way galaxy — at a distance of approximately 2.5 million light-years or roughly 25 Milky Way diameters. Prior to that, astronomers had long thought that the Milky way encompassed the entire universe. Overnight, Hubble's discovery turned cosmology upside down by unveiling an infinitely grander universe.
Now, a century later, the space telescope named for Hubble has accomplished the most comprehensive survey of this enticing empire of stars. The Hubble telescope is yielding new clues to the evolutionary history of Andromeda, and it looks markedly different from the Milky Way's history.
Without Andromeda as a proxy for spiral galaxies in the universe at large, astronomers would know much less about the structure and evolution of our own Milky Way. That's because we are embedded inside the Milky Way. This is like trying to understand the layout of New York City by standing in the middle of Central Park.
"With Hubble we can get into enormous detail about what's happening on a holistic scale across the entire disk of the galaxy. You can't do that with any other large galaxy," said principal investigator Ben Williams of the University of Washington. Hubble's sharp imaging capabilities can resolve more than 200 million stars in the Andromeda galaxy, detecting only stars brighter than our Sun. They look like grains of sand across the beach. But that's just the tip of the iceberg. Andromeda's total population is estimated to be 1 trillion stars, with many less massive stars falling below Hubble's sensitivity limit.
Photographing Andromeda was a herculean task because the galaxy is a much bigger target on the sky than the galaxies Hubble routinely observes, which are often billions of light-years away. The full mosaic was carried out under two Hubble programs. In total, it required over 1,000 Hubble orbits, spanning more than a decade.
This program was followed up by the Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Southern Treasury (PHAST), recently published in The Astrophysical Journal and led by Zhuo Chen at the University of Washington, which added images of approximately 100 million stars in the southern half of Andromeda. This region is structurally unique and more sensitive to the galaxy's merger history than the northern disk mapped by the PHAT survey.
The combined programs collectively cover the entire disk of Andromeda, which is seen almost edge-on — tilted by 77 degrees relative to Earth's view. The galaxy is so large that the mosaic is assembled from approximately 600 separate fields of view. The mosaic image is made up of at least 2.5 billion pixels.
The complementary Hubble survey programs provide information about the age, heavy-element abundance, and stellar masses inside Andromeda. This will allow astronomers to distinguish between competing scenarios where Andromeda merged with one or more galaxies. Hubble's detailed measurements constrain models of Andromeda's merger history and disk evolution.
A Galactic 'Train Wreck'
Though the Milky Way and Andromeda formed presumably around the same time many billions of years ago, observational evidence shows that they have very different evolutionary histories, despite growing up in the same cosmological neighborhood. Andromeda seems to be more highly populated with younger stars and unusual features like coherent streams of stars, say researchers. This implies it has a more active recent star-formation and interaction history than the Milky Way.
"Andromeda's a train wreck. It looks like it has been through some kind of event that caused it to form a lot of stars and then just shut down," said Daniel Weisz at the University of California, Berkeley. "This was probably due to a collision with another galaxy in the neighborhood."
A possible culprit is the compact satellite galaxy Messier 32, which resembles the stripped-down core of a once-spiral galaxy that may have interacted with Andromeda in the past. Computer simulations suggest that when a close encounter with another galaxy uses up all the available interstellar gas, star formation subsides.
"Andromeda looks like a transitional type of galaxy that's between a star-forming spiral and a sort of elliptical galaxy dominated by aging red stars," said Weisz. "We can tell it's got this big central bulge of older stars and a star-forming disk that's not as active as you might expect given the galaxy's mass."
"This detailed look at the resolved stars will help us to piece together the galaxy's past merger and interaction history," added Williams.
Hubble's new findings will support future observations by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope and the upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. Essentially a wide-angle version of Hubble (with the same sized mirror), Roman will capture the equivalent of at least 100 high-resolution Hubble images in a single exposure. These observations will complement and extend Hubble's huge dataset.
The Hubble Space Telescope has been operating for over three decades and continues to make ground-breaking discoveries that shape our fundamental understanding of the universe. Hubble is a project of international cooperation between NASA and ESA (European Space Agency). NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope and mission operations. Lockheed Martin Space, based in Denver, also supports mission operations at Goddard. The Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, conducts Hubble science operations for NASA.
Hubble Compass and Scale Image of M31 PHAT+PHAST Mosaic
This is the largest photomosaic ever made by the Hubble Space Telescope. The target is the vast Andromeda galaxy that is only 2.5 million light-years from Earth, making it the nearest galaxy to our own Milky Way. Andromeda is seen almost edge-on, tilted by 77 degrees relative to Earth’s view. The galaxy is so large that the mosaic is assembled from approximately 600 separate overlapping fields of view taken over 10 years of Hubble observing—a challenge to stitch together over such a large area. The mosaic image is made up of at least 2.5 billion pixels. Hubble resolves an estimated 200 million stars that are hotter than our Sun, but still a fraction of the galaxy’s total estimated stellar population.
Interesting regions include: (a) Clusters of bright blue stars embedded within the galaxy, background galaxies seen much farther away, and photo-bombing by a couple bright foreground stars that are actually inside our Milky Way; (b) NGC 206 the most conspicuous star cloud in Andromeda; (c) A young cluster of blue newborn stars; (d) The satellite galaxy M32, that may be the residual core of a galaxy that once collided with Andromeda; (e) Dark dust lanes across myriad stars.
Credit
NASA, ESA, Benjamin F. Williams (UWashington), Zhuo Chen (UWashington), L. Clifton Johnson (Northwestern); Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI)
Large and small galaxies may grow in ways more similar than expected
New observations suggest that contrary to conventional wisdom, dwarf galaxies can accrete mass from other small galaxies.
University of Arizona
image:
NGC 300 is a small galaxy in a relatively isolated region of the universe. About 6 million light-years from Earth, it is one of the Milky Way's closer neighbors.
A team of astronomers led by University of Arizona researcher Catherine Fielder has obtained the most detailed images of a small galaxy and its surroundings, revealing features typically associated with much larger galaxies. The observations provide a rare, elusive glimpse into how small galaxies form and evolve, suggesting that the mechanisms fueling galaxy growth may be more universal than previously thought.
Fielder presented the findings at the 245th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in National Harbor, Maryland, during a press briefing on Jan. 16.
Galaxies, including the Milky Way, grow and evolve by merging with smaller galaxies over billions of years in a process called hierarchical assembly. This cosmic "building block" approach has been well observed in large galaxies, where streams of ancient stars – remnants of swallowed-up galaxies – trace their turbulent history. These streams, along with other faint features such as old, scattered stars, form a so-called stellar halo: a sprawling, low-density cloud of stars that surrounds the bright central disk of a galaxy and traces its evolutionary history.
According to traditional wisdom, smaller galaxies such as the nearby Large Magellanic Cloud may have fewer opportunities to attract mass and merge with smaller systems, including other dwarf galaxies, because of their weaker gravitational pull. Understanding how such galaxies acquire mass and grow in the context of hierarchical assembly remains an open question.
The researchers used the Dark Energy Camera, or DECam, on the 4-meter Blanco Telescope in Chile's Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory to conduct a deep imaging survey of 11 dwarf galaxies, including the spiral galaxy NGC 300, which is similar in mass to the Large Magellanic Cloud. The observations were made as part of the DECam Local Volume Survey, or DELVE, and revealed unprecedented details of NGC 300's features. Spanning about 94,000 light-years, NGC 300's galactic disk is a little smaller than the Milky Way and packs only about 2% of its stellar mass.
"NGC 300 is an ideal candidate for such a study because of its isolated location," said Fielder, a research associate at the U of A Steward Observatory. "This keeps it free from the influential effects of a massive companion like the Milky Way, which affects nearby small galaxies like the Large Magellanic Cloud. It's almost a bit like looking at a cosmic 'fossil record.'"
Fielder and her collaborators created stellar maps around the small galaxy and discovered a vast stellar stream extending more than 100,000 light-years from the galaxy's center.
"We consider a stellar stream a telltale sign that a galaxy has accreted mass from its surroundings, because these structures don't form as easily by internal processes," said Fielder, whose findings will be published in The Astrophysical Journal.
In addition, the researchers found traces of stars arranged in shell-like patterns reminiscent of concentric waves emanating from the center of the galaxy, as well as hints of a stream wrap – evidence that whatever caused the stream may have changed direction in its orbit around NGC 300.
"We weren't sure we were going to find anything in any of these small galaxies," she said. "These features around NGC 300 provide us with 'smoking gun' evidence that it did accrete something."
The team also identified a previously unknown, metal-poor globular star cluster in the galaxy's halo, another "smoking gun" of past accretion events.
When gauging the age of stellar populations, astronomers frequently turn to a feature known as "metallicity" – a term referring to the chemical elements present inside stars. Because heavier elements are forged mostly in more massive stars at or near the end of their lifespans, it takes several generations of star formation to enrich those elements. Therefore, stellar populations lacking heavier elements – or having low metallicity – are presumed to be older, Fielder explained.
"The stars in the features we observed around NGC 300 are ancient and metal-poor, telling a clear story," Fielder said. "These structures likely originated from a tiny galaxy that was pulled apart and absorbed into NGC 300."
Together, these findings clearly reveal that even dwarf galaxies can build stellar halos through the accretion of smaller galaxies, echoing the growth patterns seen in larger galaxies, Fielder said.
"NGC 300 now stands as one of the most striking examples of accretion-driven stellar halo assembly in a dwarf galaxy of its kind, shedding light on how galaxies grow and evolve across the universe."
Fielder and her collaborators created stellar maps around the small galaxy and discovered a vast stellar stream extending more than 100,000 light-years from the galaxy's center. This image shows NGC 300 with its associated features, such as streams and shell structures, indicated by white lines.
Streams, Shells, and Substructures in the Accretion-Built Stellar Halo of NGC 300
This tiny galaxy is answering some big questions
Rutgers-led research using the Webb Telescope reveals patterns of star formation in Leo P
Rutgers University
image:
This image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope shows a portion of the Leo P dwarf galaxy (stars at lower right represented in blue). Leo P is a star-forming galaxy located about 5 million light years away in the constellation Leo. A team of scientists collected data from about 15,000 stars in Leo P to deduce its star formation history.
Credit: Kristen McQuinn/NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope
Leo P, a small galaxy and a distant neighbor of the Milky Way, is lighting the way for astronomers to better understand star formation and how a galaxy grows.
In a study published in the Astrophysical Journal, a team of researchers led by Kristen McQuinn, a scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute and an associate professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the Rutgers University-New Brunswick School of Arts and Sciences, has reported finding that Leo P “reignited,” reactivating during a significant period on the timeline of the universe, producing stars when many other small galaxies didn’t.
By studying galaxies early in their formation and in different environments, astronomers said they may gain a deeper understanding of the universe's origins and the fundamental processes that shape it.
McQuinn and other members of the research team studied Leo P through NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, a space-based apparatus that features a large, segmented mirror and an expansive sunshield, both of which enable it to capture detailed images of distant celestial objects.
Leo P, a dwarf galaxy some 5.3 million light years from Earth, was discovered by McQuinn and other scientists in 2013. The celestial structure is far enough away from the Local Group, a clump of galaxies straddling the Milky Way, to be its neighbor without being affected by the gravitational fields of larger star systems.
The galaxy, located in the constellation Leo, is about the same size as a star cluster within the Milky Way and is about the same age as the Milky Way. The “P” in Leo P refers to “pristine,” because the galaxy has so few chemical elements beside hydrogen and helium.
“Leo P provides a unique laboratory to explore the early evolution of a low-mass galaxy in detail,” said McQuinn, who also is the mission head for the Science Operations Center for the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.
The team started by looking deeply into the past. Since the stars detected by the team with the telescope are about 13 billion years old, they can serve as “fossil records” of star formation that occurred at earlier times. “Essentially, instead of studying the stars in-situ [in their original positions] as they are forming in the early universe, we study the stars that have survived over cosmic history and use their present-day properties to infer what was occurring at earlier times,” McQuinn said.
The team found that Leo P formed stars early on but then stopped making them for a few billion years. This stoppage happened during a period known as the Epoch of Reionization. It took a few billion years after the epoch for the galaxy to reignite and start forming new stars.
“We have a measurement like this for only three other galaxies – all isolated from the Milky Way – and they all show a similar pattern,” McQuinn said.
Observations of the dwarf galaxies within the Local Group, however, show that, in contrast, star production disappeared during this period.
The Epoch, regarded by astronomers as a significant period in the history of the universe, occurred between about 150 million and one billion years after the Big Bang. It was during this period that the first stars and galaxies formed.
The contrast between the star production of the dwarf galaxies provides compelling evidence that it isn’t just the mass of a galaxy at the time of reionization that determines whether it will be quenched, McQuinn said. Its environment – meaning whether it is isolated or functioning as a satellite of a larger system – is an important factor.
McQuinn said the observations will help pin down not only when little galaxies formed their stars, but how the reionization of the universe may have impacted how small structures form.
“If the trend holds, it provides insights on the growth of low-mass structures that is not only a fundamental constraint for structure formation but a benchmark for cosmological simulations,” she said.
The researchers also found that Leo P is metal-poor, possessing 3% of the sun’s metallicity. This means that the stars of the dwarf galaxy contain 30 times fewer heavy elements than the sun, which makes Leo P similar to the primordial galaxies of the early universe.
Knowledge gleaned from these observations will help astronomers piece together the timeline of cosmic events, understand how small structures evolved over billions of years and learn about the processes that led to the creation of stars, McQuinn said.
Other scientists from Rutgers on the study included Alyson Brooks, an associate professor; Roger Cohen, a postdoctoral associate; and Max Newman, a doctoral student, all with the Department of Physics and Astronomy.
The Ancient Star Formation History of the Extremely Low-mass Galaxy Leo P: An Emerging Trend of a Post-reionization Pause in Star Formation
Astronomers observe real-time formation of black hole jets for the first time
University of Maryland Baltimore County
image:
Active galaxy 1ES 1927+654, circled, has exhibited extraordinary changes since 2018, when a major outburst occurred in visible, ultraviolet, and X-ray light. The galaxy harbors a central black hole weighing about 1.4 million solar masses and is located 270 million light-years from Earth. Observations of this galaxy from 2018 -- 2024 revealed phenomena never before observed in real time, including the formation of plasma jets.
A large international team of scientists has observed a phenomenon that astronomers didn’t ever expect to see happen in real time. The findings are described in a new paper published in Astrophysical Journal Letters led by Eileen Meyer, associate professor of physics at UMBC.
A galaxy about 270 million light-years away from Earth in the constellation Draco called 1ES 1927+654 is the focus of the excitement. For many years, scientists had classified 1ES 1927+654 as an “active galactic nucleus,” or AGN, meaning it has an active black hole at its center. This particular black hole was adding material at a slow rate—until it wasn’t.
Back in 2018, the black hole first made news when it suddenly increased its activity exponentially. It dramatically increased the rate at which it was consuming material and became over 100 times brighter in the visible light spectrum over the course of a few months. A shift like that was once thought to take far longer than a human lifetime, on the order of thousands to millions of years. Since then, scientists have been observing it closely for any additional interesting phenomena, and 1ES 1927+654 has delivered.
More drama
After the major increase in activity began in 2018, which included nearly a year of extremely high levels of X-ray emission, the black hole quieted down again by 2020—only to dramatically increase its output again in 2023. At that time, it began emitting radio waves at 60 times the previous intensity over just a few months, behavior which has never been monitored in real time for a supermassive black hole.
Some of the highest-resolution imaging of radio frequency emissions was collected using a technique called Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI). It clearly shows a pair of oppositely directed plasma jets forming near the black hole and expanding outward over the course of 2023 – 2024. Among the other unusual behavior of the black hole, this is the first-ever observation of jet formation in real time.
In recent years, scientists have discovered a handful of supermassive black holes that appear to emit far more intensely at radio frequencies compared to when they were first observed, which they call “changing-look AGN.” However, until now all of them had been observed at two timepoints years or decades apart, and the assumption was that “something happened” in between. This new paper gives the very first look at how this kind of change occurs in detail.
Turning on in real time
In some cases, black hole jets “can reach huge scales well outside the host galaxy. They can affect how many stars are forming,” Meyer says. Figuring out how the jets work “is a very important thing, in order to understand the big picture of how the universe is evolving and galaxies evolved.”
In the case described in the new paper, “We have very detailed observations of a radio jet ‘turning on’ in real time, and even more exciting are the VLBI observations, which clearly show these plasma blobs moving out from the black hole,” Meyer says. “That shows us that this really is an outflow jet of plasma that’s causing the radio flare. It’s not some other process causing increased radio emission. This is a jet moving at likely 20 to 30 percent of the speed of light originating very near a black hole. That’s the exciting thing.”
Sibasish Laha, an assistant research scientist for UMBC with the Center for Space Sciences Technology and second author on the new paper, has long studied changing-look AGN at X-ray wavelengths. On a hunch that 1ES 1927+654’s radio frequency emission might show interesting behavior as well, he reached out to Meyer to form a collaboration to study 1ES 1927+654 and other similar galaxies back in 2020. He is lead author on a companion paper that is currently under review. It includes additional X-ray observations and interpretation of the jet formation event.
“We still do not understand how black holes and their host galaxies interact with each other and co-evolve in cosmic time,” Laha says, “and this study for the first time gives us the rare opportunity to understand how a supermassive black hole ‘talks’ to the host galaxy."
Not for the faint of heart
In this kind of work, time is of the essence. “Time-domain astronomy,” as it’s called, “is not for the faint of heart,” Meyer says. “You know, there are rapid alerts—something happens and you have to go follow up. You gotta get on it, and it doesn’t matter if it’s midnight, you have to send that email because you know every hour counts. It’s a little stressful.”
The project became an “all hands on deck” moment for the UMBC collaboration. Once Meyer and Laha saw the huge jump in radio activity in 2023, Meyer says, “We were like, ‘whoa, ok, something is happening.’ This has never been seen before. We got very excited, so this is where we went all in on basically trying to grab every radio telescope and get it to look at this source.”
Because 1ES 1927+654 was changing so rapidly before their eyes, the team was awarded new, unscheduled observations on telescopes around the world during the study period, when typically telescope time must be scheduled months or years in advance.
A postdoctoral fellow working with Meyer, Onic Shuvo, who is third author on the paper, took on the lion’s share of the late-night duties, rapidly analyzing incoming data and requesting new observations. He’s thrilled to be part of such an exciting discovery. “This remarkable finding challenges existing models of AGN activity and highlights the unique role that changing-look AGN play in unraveling the mysteries of the central engine of active galaxies in real-time,” Shuvo says.
A new jet is born
The newborn jets coming from 1ES 1927+654 are relatively small compared to the massive jet structures in some of the most powerful AGN, Meyer says. But that doesn’t make them less interesting—in fact, they are probably more common across the universe and therefore very important to understand, she says.
Some data suggested that the 2018 flare, in the visible spectrum, could be due to a “tidal disruption event,” where a large object like a star or cloud of gas gets too close to an inactive black hole and artificially brightens it for just a few years, Meyer says. But observations of tidal disruption events in already-active galaxies are rare and not well understood.
While the largest plasma jets extend well beyond their host galaxies and last millions of years, scientists are gaining understanding of a new class of smaller, shorter-lived jets called “compact symmetric objects,” or CSOs. Meyer believes the data in this case point most strongly to the birth of a new CSO. One recent hypothesis is that jets in CSOs are qualitatively different from the very large and long-lived jets seen elsewhere, Meyer says, perhaps representing “a single ingestion of a star or a gas cloud; basically a single tidal disruption event happens and powers this short-term jet for maybe 1,000 years.”
Perhaps the tidal disruption event occurred several years ago, “and it took a few years for the accreting black hole to organize and start producing the jet,” as the team saw in 2023 – 2024, Meyer says.
Open questions
Overall, “We still don’t really understand after all these decades of studying these sources why only a fraction of accreting black holes produce jets and then exactly how they launch them. Until recently we could not literally look into that innermost region to see what’s happening—how the accretion disk surrounding the black hole is interacting with and producing the jet. And so there are still a lot of open questions there,” Meyer says.
Questions remain, but today there are many promising models of how black holes produce jets, Meyer says. Next steps will include working with theorists to understand how the data from this study can help test and refine those models.
“There’s a lot of theoretical work to be done to understand what we’ve seen, but the good thing is that we have a massive amount of data,” Meyer says. “We’re going to keep following this source, and it’s going to continue to be exciting.”
An artist's concept of the Pandora mission, seen here without the thermal blanketing that will protect the spacecraft, observing a star and its transiting exoplanet.
Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Conceptual Image Lab
Pandora, NASA's newest exoplanet mission, is one step closer to launch with the completion of the spacecraft bus, which provides the structure, power and other systems that will allow the mission to carry out its work. Pandora's exoplanet science working group is led by the University of Arizona, and Pandora will be the first mission to have its operations center at the U of A Space Institute.
The completion of the bus was announced during a press briefing at the 245th Meeting of the American Astronomical Society in National Harbor, Maryland, on Jan. 16.
"This is a huge milestone for us and keeps us on track for a launch in the fall," said Elisa Quintana, Pandora's principal investigator at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. "The bus holds our instruments and handles navigation, data acquisition and communication with Earth – it's the brains of the spacecraft."
Pandora is a small satellite poised to provide in-depth study of at least 20 known planets orbiting distant stars to determine the composition of their atmospheres – especially the presence of hazes, clouds and water. The data will establish a firm foundation for interpreting measurements by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope and future missions aimed at searching for habitable worlds.
"Although smaller and less sensitive than Webb, Pandora will be able to stare longer at the host stars of extrasolar planets, allowing for deeper study," said Pandora co-investigator Daniel Apai, professor of astronomy and planetary sciences at the U of A Steward Observatory and Lunar and Planetary Laboratory who leads the mission's Exoplanets Science Working Group. "Better understanding of the stars will help Pandora and its 'big brother,' the James Webb Space Telescope, disentangle signals from stars and their planets."
Astronomers can sample an exoplanet's atmosphere when it passes in front of its star as seen from Earth's perspective, during an event known as a transit. Part of the star's light skims the planet's atmosphere before making its way to the observer. This interaction allows the light to interact with atmospheric substances, and their chemical fingerprints — dips in brightness at characteristic wavelengths — become imprinted in the light.
The concept of Pandora was born out of necessity to overcome a snag in observing starlight passing through the atmospheres of exoplanets, Apai said.
"In 2018, a doctoral student in my group, Benjamin Rackham – now an MIT research scientist – described an astrophysical effect by which light coming directly from the star muddies the signal of the light passing through the exoplanet's atmosphere," Apai explained. "We predicted that this effect would limit Webb's ability to study habitable planets."
Telescopes see light from the entire star, not just the small amount grazing the planet. Stellar surfaces aren't uniform. They sport hotter, unusually bright regions called faculae and cooler, darker regions similar to the spots on our sun, both of which grow, shrink and change position as the star rotates. As a result, these "mixed signals" in the observed light can make it difficult to distinguish between light that has passed through an exoplanet's atmosphere and light that varies based on a star's changing appearance. For example, variations in light from the host star can mask or mimic the signal of water, a likely key ingredient researchers look for when evaluating an exoplanet's potential for harboring life.
Using a novel all-aluminum, 45-centimeter-wide telescope, jointly developed by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Corning Specialty Materials in Keene, New Hampshire, Pandora's detectors will capture each star's visible brightness and near-infrared spectrum at the same time, while also obtaining the transiting planet's near-infrared spectrum. This combined data will enable the science team to determine the properties of stellar surfaces and cleanly separate star and planetary signals.
The observing strategy takes advantage of the mission's ability to continuously observe its targets for extended periods, something flagship observatories like Webb, which offer limited observing time due to high demand, cannot regularly do.
Over the course of its yearlong mission, Pandora will observe at least 20 exoplanets 10 times, with each stare lasting a total of 24 hours. Each observation will include a transit, which is when the mission will capture the planet's spectrum.
Karl Harshman, who leads the Mission Operations Team at the U of A Space Institute that will support the spacecraft's operation once it launches later this year, said: "We have a very excited team that has been working hard to have our Mission Operations Center running at full speed at the time of launch and look forward to receiving science data. Just this week, we performed a communications test with our antenna system that will transmit commands to Pandora and receive the telemetry from the spacecraft."
Pandora is led by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory provides the mission's project management and engineering. Pandora's telescope was manufactured by Corning and developed collaboratively with Livermore, which also developed the imaging detector assemblies, the mission's control electronics, and all supporting thermal and mechanical subsystems. The infrared sensor was provided by NASA Goddard. Blue Canyon Technologies provided the bus and is performing spacecraft assembly, integration and environmental testing. NASA's Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley will perform the mission's data processing. Pandora's mission operations center is located at the University of Arizona, and a host of additional universities support the science team.
Pandora’s spacecraft bus sits in a thermal-vacuum testing chamber at Blue Canyon Technologies in Lafayette, Colorado. The bus provides the structure, power and other systems that will enable the mission to help astronomers better separate stellar features from the spectra of transiting planets.
Credit
NASA/Weston Maughan, BCT
Flexible electronics integrated with paper-thin structure for use in space
University of Illinois Grainger College of Engineering
Credit: The Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Being lightweight is essential for space structures, particularly for tools used on already small, lightweight satellites. The ability to perform multiple functions is a bonus. To address these characteristics in a new way, researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign successfully integrated flexible electronics with a three-ply, self-deployable boom that weighs only about 20 grams.
“It's difficult to get commercial electronics integrated into these super thin structures,” said Xin Ning, an aerospace professor in The Grainger College of Engineering at U. of I. “There were a lot of engineering constraints adding to the challenge of making the electronics able to withstand the harsh environment of space.”
Ning said the concept for the work began at a conference about two years ago. He presented his unique expertise in making multifunctional space structures that integrate lightweight, flexible electronics.
“It got the attention of Juan Fernandez from NASA Langley Research Center. He was making a boom structure for a Virginia Tech CubeSat project and saw the opportunity to collaborate and add multi-functional devices to the structures instead of just a pure structure,” Ning said.
Ultimately, the boom to contain the electronics was made at NASA Langley Research Center, Ning said. It is a three-ply carbon fiber and epoxy composite material designed to be extremely thin—about as thick as a sheet of paper. It is rolled up like a tape measure with stored energy in its coils until it unfurls on its own in space.
“Virginia Tech had specific requirements for us to follow, some that created challenges,” Ning said. “One was the length. They wanted to have power and data lines over a meter in length embedded in a paper-thin composite material. We tried different materials and different technologies.
“Eventually, we went with thin commercial wires coated with insulation and it worked. I think we were overthinking it at the beginning. We tried more difficult, fancier approaches, but they failed. This was a simple and reliable solution using off-the-shelf, readily available wires.”
Another key component is a lightweight, flexible electronics patch with a motion sensor, a temperature sensor, and a blue LED, all mounted on the boom tip. Ning explained that the electronics needed to endure the harsh thermal-vacuum conditions of space while remaining flexible enough to withstand the sudden unfurling of the coiled boom. The motion sensor monitors the deployment and vibration of the boom, and the blue LED assists CubeSat cameras in seeing the structure in space once deployed.
Ning’s team conducted comprehensive on-ground experiments and simulations to explore the mechanics of the bistable boom with flexible electronics, as well as its deployment and vibration behavior. Ning said that these fundamental studies could offer valuable insights for future designs of multifunctional space structures.
The Virginia Tech three-unit CubeSat with the multifunctional boom is aiming for launch in 2025.
“We are also working on making the flexible electronics more durable in space—ways to protect the electronics so they will be operational longer in the space environment.”
The study, “Multifunctional bistable ultrathin composite booms with flexible electronics,” by Yao Yao and Xin Ning from Illinois, Juan Fernandez from NASA Langley Research Center and Sven Bilén at Penn State is published in Extreme Mechanics Letters. DOI: 10.1016/j.eml.2024.102247
Yao Yao earned a double major in 2018 from Illinois in materials science and engineering and physics. He began working with Xin Ning when he was an undergraduate and Ning was a postdoctoral research associate in materials science at Illinois. Later, Yao joined Ning’s research group when Ning was a professor at Penn State, and now is completing his Ph.D. with Ning back at Illinois again.
WASHINGTON, Jan. 16, 2025 – The Heineman Foundation, American Institute of Physics, and American Astronomical Society are pleased to announce Priyamvada Natarajan as the winner of the 2025 Dannie Heineman Prize for Astrophysics.
Natarajan was selected for her groundbreaking contributions to advancing our understanding of dark matter substructure in galaxy clusters, the formation and fueling of black holes, and their feedback into the surrounding environment.
“AIP is proud to recognize the achievements of Dr. Natarajan and her research on dark matter and the formation of black holes,” said Michael Moloney, chief executive officer of AIP. “Her work has laid the foundation for modeling of black hole populations across the lifetime of the universe, which can be validated by direct observations.”
Natarajan is the Joseph S. and Sophia S. Fruton Professor in the astronomy and physics departments at Yale University. She also serves as the chair of the Department of Astronomy at the university.
Born in Coimbatore, India, Natarajan came to the U.S. to study physics and mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She received a Master of Science from the MIT Program in Science, Technology and Society and traveled to the University of Cambridge in the U.K. to study astrophysics through the Isaac Newton Fellowship.
While completing her doctorate at Cambridge’s Trinity College, she was the first woman in astrophysics to be elected as a Trinity fellow. Before accepting a professorship at Yale, she was a visiting postdoctoral fellow at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics in Toronto, Canada.
Natarajan’s research has been foundational to the field of cosmology. As a theoretical physicist with an interest in dark matter and black holes, she has focused on making maps of dark matter in galaxy clusters, the largest known concentrations of dark matter.
“The invisible ingredients of the universe have always deeply fascinated me,” Natarajan said. “While we now know how these components manifest in the universe, their true nature remains unknown, and I find these cosmic mysteries deeply inspiring.”
Dark matter repositories have enough gravity to bend light, which creates a type of telescope, a process known as gravitational lensing that allows for distant galaxy observation.
Natarajan is currently developing methods to use gravitational lensing to constrain dark energy models. Her work has created a powerful tool that utilizes gravitational lensing to its fullest.
Her research on black hole seeds has contributed to a new model of galaxy formation, one in which the first black holes evolved with the universe, rather than being created from the end state of the very first stars. Recent discoveries by the James Webb Space Telescope and Chandra X-Ray Observatory have validated one of her predictions regarding the formation of the first black holes, that a population of over-massive black hole seeds likely formed in the very early universe.
In 2016, she published “Mapping the Heavens: The Radical Scientific Ideas That Reveal the Cosmos.”This book chronicles the biggest discoveries in the field of cosmology in the past century.
“I was thrilled and excited to hear about this award, and this recognition from colleagues and peers is very meaningful,” Natarajan said. “I am delighted to be able to celebrate with my mother, who has played a critical role by enthusiastically supporting me unconditionally in everything I have done.”
Natarajan’s award of the 2024 Dannie Heineman Prize for Astrophysics was announced at the 245th AAS meeting in National Harbor, Maryland, on Jan. 16. She will be invited to speak at next year’s AAS Winter Meeting in Phoenix, Arizona, and will receive a certificate and a $10,000 award.
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ABOUT THE DANNIE HEINEMAN PRIZE FOR ASTROPHYSICS
The prize is named after Dannie N. Heineman, an engineer, business executive, and philanthropic sponsor of the sciences. The prize was established in 1979 by the Heineman Foundation for Research, Education, Charitable and Scientific Purposes, Inc. Awarded annually by the AIP and the AAS, the prize consists of $10,000 and a certificate citing the contributions made by the recipient(s) plus travel expenses to attend the meeting at which the prize is bestowed. https://www.aip.org/aip/awards-and-prizes/heineman-astro
ABOUT AIP
As a 501(c)(3) non-profit, AIP is a federation that advances the success of our Member Societies and an institute that engages in research and analysis to empower positive change in the physical sciences. The mission of AIP (American Institute of Physics) is to advance, promote, and serve the physical sciences for the benefit of humanity.
ABOUT AAS
The American Astronomical Society (AAS), established in 1899, is a major international organization of professional astronomers, astronomy educators, and amateur astronomers. Its membership of approximately 8,000 also includes physicists, geologists, engineers, and others whose interests lie within the broad spectrum of subjects now comprising the astronomical sciences. The mission of the AAS is to enhance and share humanity’s scientific understanding of the universe as a diverse and inclusive astronomical community, which it achieves through publishing, meetings, science advocacy, education and outreach, and training and professional development.
America is off track. Immigration and homelessness crisis in large metropolises like Los Angeles is the best example. — Image: © AFP
