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)
A hellish “hothouse world” looms as run-away warming tipping points approach
Global warming run-away heating will lead to a Hothouse Earth unless drastic action is taken. But surging wind and solar in China makes it one of the few countries where emissions are already falling. / bne IntelliNews
The world is closer than ever to a new hellish “hothouse world” as it approaches a “point of no return” after which runaway global heating cannot be stopped, scientists warn, the Guardian reported on February 11.
The warning comes as China and India report the first sustained emissions decrease, years ahead of schedule, but the US continues to ignore its carbon budget limits set by the 2015 Paris Agreement and has significantly increased CO₂ emissions – double those of China and India combined.
As bne IntelliNews reported, all the warning signals are flashing red as a raft of tipping points approaches after which positive feedback loops kick in and cause run-away heating that can’t be stopped.
The problems are getting acute as extreme weather events have become an annual disaster season for the last three years. Consultants McKinsey said in a recent report that the world spent $190bn on climate damage last year, but that will rise to $1.2 trillion – more than a six-fold increase – by 2030, and will continue to rise from there. Ratings agency Fitch also warned that countries exposed to extreme weather or that remain heavily dependent on hydrocarbons face sovereign debt downgrades by several notches from 2035 onwards unless they take action to mitigate their exposure now in an environmental damage impact report released last week.
Scientists are becoming increasingly alarmed at the lack of action, especially after the last three UN COP conferences to address the Climate Crisis – COP28, COP29, and COP30 -- failed to take any action.
Failing to halt emissions and curb warming will lead to “a new and hellish “hothouse Earth” climate far worse than the 2-3°C temperature rise the world is on track to reach,” the Guardian reports.
As bne IntelliNews reported, the Climate Crisis is accelerating. The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says that the Paris Agreement goal of keeping temperature increases to less than 1.5°C-2°C above the pre-industrial benchmark has already been missed. Temperature increases are on course to reach a catastrophic 2.7C-3.1C by 2050. At that point extreme temperature events will become routine and large parts of the world will become uninhabitable as global warming becomes irreversible due to positive feedback loops. Currently global warming is accelerating faster than all the 30-plus climate models used at the Paris meeting to set the rates and volumes of emission reduction goals. That suggests those goals should be dramatically increased, yet countries like the US are ignoring even their modest Paris targets, with the notable exception of China that has become a global green energy champion.
This new climate, which could arrive as soon as the middle of this century, would be very different to the benign conditions of the past 11,000 years, during which the whole of human civilization developed and could cause hundreds of millions of deaths in the most climate-exposed or underdeveloped parts of the world. Heat stress already killed thousands of people in Europe last summer, but if “wet-bulb” conditions are reached (35°C, 100% humidity, for six hours) then no one without air conditioning can survive outdoors. Wet bulb conditions have already been observed in places like Pakistan and UAE last year, but not for the full six hours.
Last year, studies calculating the role of the climate crisis in what are now unnatural disasters show 550 heatwaves, floods, storms, droughts and wildfires have been made significantly more severe or more frequent by global heating.
A comprehensive database of hundreds of studies that analyse the role of global heating in extreme weather was compiled by the website Carbon Brief provides overwhelming proof that the climate emergency is here today, taking lives and livelihoods in all corners of the world, the Guardian reports.
Despite the mounting evidence of the annual catastrophes, the public and politicians remain largely unaware of the severity of the mounting crisis, said the scientists. The group, led by Dr Christopher Wolf, a scientist at Terrestrial Ecosystems Research Associates in the US, said they were issuing their warning because while rapid and immediate cuts to fossil fuel burning were challenging, reversing course was likely to be impossible once on the path to a Hothouse Earth, even if emissions were eventually slashed, the Guardian reports. The team also includes Prof Johan Rockström at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany and Prof Hans Joachim Schellnhuber at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria.
“Crossing even some of the thresholds could commit the planet to a hothouse trajectory,” said Wolf. “Policymakers and the public remain largely unaware of the risks posed by what would effectively be a point-of-no-return transition.
Romania’s emissions plunge 75% since communism
Some countries are stepping up to the challenge, although too few to reverse the accelerating warming trend. China and India stand out with Romania the best performer in Europe.
Romania has cut greenhouse gas emissions by 75% since the fall of communism, achieving one of the fastest decoupling’s of economic growth from carbon pollution in Europe even as parts of the transition have proved socially painful.
Net emissions intensity — the amount of greenhouse gases per dollar of economic output — fell by 88% between 1990 and 2023, meaning each dollar of activity now produces almost 10-times less warming pollution than at the end of the Nicolae Ceaușescu era. Over the same period, real GDP has doubled.
Once emblematic of heavy industry and low-grade lignite, Romania is now expanding renewables at pace. In southern Romania, workers are preparing to assemble what developers describe as Europe’s largest solar farm, a 760MW project comprising one million photovoltaic panels and battery storage. In the north-west, authorities have approved a 1GW plant. The country already hosts a major onshore windfarm near the Black Sea and operates the Cernavodă nuclear power plant on the Danube, whose lifetime is being extended by 30 years.
The initial collapse in emissions followed the violent end of Ceaușescu’s rule in 1989, when privatisation led to factory closures and a sharp contraction in heavy industry. But since then the government has embraced renewables as the cost of generation, and more recently battery storage tumbled, making green power the cheapest option available.
Accession to the European Union in 2007 imposed stricter environmental standards and integrated Romania into the bloc’s emissions trading system. Revenues from the EU’s modernisation fund supported grid upgrades and cleaner generation. In the 17 years after 1990, the carbon intensity of Romania’s power sector fell by 9.2%; in the following 17 years, it dropped by 52%.
Romania’s rapid decarbonisation highlights limits of ‘low-hanging fruit’ Romania’s sharp fall in greenhouse gas emissions since the end of communism offers a striking example of how quickly economies can decouple growth from carbon, but analysts warn that much of the easiest progress may already have been made.
If industrialised countries could decouple as rapidly as Romania — while avoiding the social dislocation it endured — the task of limiting climate breakdown “may not seem so hopeless”, The Guardian reported.
An analysis by the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU) found that countries representing 92% of the global economy have either fully decoupled economic growth from emissions, including those embedded in imports, or achieved relative decoupling, where emissions rise more slowly than output.
Yet the pace remains insufficient to meet international targets. A 2023 study of 36 advanced economies found that 11 had fully broken the link between GDP and CO₂ emissions, but none had reduced emissions quickly enough to align with their share of the Paris Agreement goal of limiting warming to 1.5C.
Much of the early progress has come from the power sector, where coal-fired generation has been replaced by renewables and gas. However, progress has faced several major setbacks. The US has withdrawn from the Paris Agreements and is accelerating fossil fuels exploitation. The EU has also begun to roll back elements of its Green Deal in the face of economic stagnation and higher energy costs after Russian gas imports were cut off.
The ECIU identified nine countries that had absolutely decoupled in the decade before the 2015 Paris agreement but reversed progress in the following decade. Among them are Latvia and Lithuania, whose post-Soviet trajectories resembled Romania’s initial industrial contraction followed by EU-driven expansion. Russia, by contrast, increased emissions after the collapse of the Soviet Union, doubling down on the large extractive oil and gas sector, coupled with a highly inefficient use of those resources domestically.
China maintains the lead
China remains head and shoulders above the rest of the world in progress towards decarbonisation. Emissions have been flat for 21 months in a row thanks to a surge in clean power curbs coal use, as rapid growth in solar, wind and nuclear power displace coal generation in the world’s largest emitter, according to analysis published by Carbon Brief.
Solar power “increased by 43% year-on-year, wind by 14% and nuclear 8%, helping push down coal generation by 1.9%.” The expansion of low-carbon electricity has coincided with a slowdown in power-sector emissions growth, despite rising demand from industry and electrification.
The analysis notes that “Energy storage capacity grew by a record 75 gigawatts (GW), well ahead of the rise in peak demand of 55GW).” The build-out of battery storage has improved grid flexibility, enabled higher penetration of intermittent renewables and reduced reliance on coal-fired peaking plants.
But despite the progress, the race is still on. China’s key climate commitments for the next five-year period until 2030 are to peak CO₂ emissions and to reduce carbon intensity by more than 65% from 2005 levels. The latter target requires limiting CO₂ emissions at or below their 2025 level in 2030.
The record clean-energy additions in 2023-25 have barely sufficed to stabilise power-sector emissions, showing that if rapid growth in power demand continues, meeting the 2030 targets requires keeping clean-energy additions close to 2025 levels over the next five years.
China’s central government continues to telegraph a much lower level of ambition, with the national plan setting a target of “around” 30% of power generation in 2030 coming from solar and wind, up from around 22% in 2025, Carbon Brief reports.
If electricity demand grows in line with the State Grid forecast of 5.6% per year, then limiting the share of wind and solar to 30% would leave space for fossil-fuel generation to grow at 3% per year from 2025 to 2030, even after increases from nuclear and hydropower. But even that level of increase would mean missing China’s Paris commitments for 2030.
Nevertheless, every part of the Chinese economy is reducing emissions, with the exception of the chemical sector as it seeks to go up the value chain. Even though chemical-industry emissions are small relative to other sectors – at roughly 13% of China’s total – the pace of expansion is creating an outsize impact.
Without the increase from the chemicals sector, China’s total CO₂ emissions would have fallen by an estimated 2%, instead of the 0.3% reported by Carbon Brief.
The most important signal will be whether the top-level five-year plan for 2026-30, due in March, sets a carbon intensity target aligned with the 2030 Paris commitment. Officially, China is sticking to the timeline of peaking CO₂ emissions “before 2030”, which was announced by president Xi Jinping in 2020.
Complementing China’s trend, India has also recorded a fall in power-sector emissions, marking the first simultaneous decline in electricity-related carbon output in the two countries in more than five decades. Reuters reported on January 27 that power-sector emissions in China and India “declined simultaneously for the first time in 52 years”, citing a report by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA).
“The fall in emissions in China and India in 2025 is a sign of things to come, as both countries added a record amount of new clean-power generation last year, which was more than sufficient to meet rising demand,” said Lauri Myllyvirta, lead analyst at CREA. Despite their status as leading emitters, both China and India remain inside the allowances for emissions granted in their carbon budgets by the Paris Accords, while the US has used up more than double its allotment. Between them, the three largest emitters — China, India and the US — account for about 60% of global power-sector emissions, which themselves represent roughly 35% of total greenhouse gas output.
Over the decade to 2024, however, power plant emissions rose 3.4% annually on average in China and 4.4% in India, underlining the structural reliance on coal in both economies.
China remains heavily dependent on coal, which still accounts for roughly 60% of electricity generation, according to official data. However, the scale and pace of clean energy deployment are reshaping the country’s power mix. China installed more solar capacity in 2023 and 2024 than the rest of the world combined, driven by falling module costs, supportive industrial policy and energy security concerns.
The flattening of emissions follows a period of volatility linked to post-pandemic economic reopening and drought conditions that constrained hydropower output. Analysts at Carbon Brief attribute the sustained plateau primarily to structural changes in the energy system rather than cyclical weakness.
Beijing has pledged to peak carbon emissions before 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality by 2060. The recent data suggest the peak in power-sector emissions may arrive earlier than expected if renewable additions continue to outpace demand growth.
However, heavy industry, including steel and cement, remains carbon intensive, and coal approvals surged in 2022 and 2023 amid concerns over energy security. Whether the current emissions plateau marks a definitive turning point will depend on continued clean energy deployment and policy support during China’s next five-year plan period.
Wednesday, February 11, 2026
Devastating wildfires in Argentina and Chile made three times more likely by climate change
Copyright AP Photo/Javier Torres, File
By Isabel Debre with AP
Published on
Record droughts and scorching temperatures stoked the wildfires that burned thousands of hectares of native forest.
Human-caused climate change had an important impact on the recent ferocious wildfires that engulfed parts of Chile and Argentina's Patagonia region, making the extremely high-risk conditions that led to widespread burning up to three times more likely than in a world without global warming, a team of researchers warned on 11 February.
The hot, dry and gusty weather that fed last month's deadly wildfires in central and southern Chile was made around 200 per cent more likely by human-made greenhouse gas emissions while the high-fire-risk conditions that fuelled the blazes still racing through southern Argentina were made 150 per cent more likely, according to World Weather Attribution, a scientific initiative that investigates extreme weather events soon after they happen.
That probability will only increase as humans continue to burn fossil fuels and blanket the planet with more heat-trapping gases, researchers added.
The blazes that tore through Chile’s Biobio and Ñuble regions in mid-January killed 23 people, destroyed over 1,000 houses and other structures and forced tens of thousands of people to flee their homes. All were caused by human activity, whether through arson or negligence.
In southern Argentina, the fires first ignited by lightning forced the evacuation of thousands of tourists and residents and burned through over 45,000 hectares of native forest, including vast swaths of the Los Alerces National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage site home to 2,600-year-old trees.
The study, confirming what had been widely suspected, brings the first scientific assessment of global warming's role in intensifying some of the most serious wildfire emergencies to grip Chile and Argentina in years.
It's the latest in an emerging subfield of climate science known as weather attribution, which is evolving rapidly in response to a growing thirst for public information about how climate change influences natural disasters.
The World Weather Attribution report has not yet been peer-reviewed or published in a scientific journal, but it relies on widely accepted methods, including the analysis of data and computer model simulations to compare today’s climate with past weather patterns.
“Overall, we’re confident in saying that the main driver of this increased fire risk is human-caused warming,” Clair Barnes, a research associate with World Weather Attribution, said in a briefing with reporters. “These trends are projected to continue in the future as long as we continue to burn fossil fuels.”
Hot and dry forests become a tinderbox
Record droughts and scorching temperatures created conditions conducive to wildfires in Chile and Argentina, the study found, while single-species plantations of highly flammable trees like pines helped the fires spread more easily in both areas. The invasive species have replaced native, more fire-resistant ecosystems in the region, turning shrub, brush and grass into kindling.
In Argentina's Patagonia, the town of El Bolsón recorded its highest January temperature on record – 38.4 degrees Celsius. The town of Esquel, near Los Alerces National Park, logged 11 consecutive days of maximum temperatures in January, its second-longest heat wave in 65 years. Temperatures in Chile ahead of the fires were high but not record-breaking.
The researchers estimated that seasonal rainfall from November to January, before the peak burning period, was around 25 per cent weaker in Chile and 20 per cent less intense in Argentine Patagonia than it would have been without a rise in global temperatures of at least 1.3 degrees Celsius since pre-industrial times.
“This, together with higher-than-average temperatures, led to vegetation being submitted to stress, very low humidity in the soil,” said Juan Antonio Rivera, an Argentine researcher and author of the study. “Once the wildfires began... there was sufficient fuel to extend and be sustained over time.”
Fewer resources makes an impact
Chile has increased its budget for fighting wildfires by 110 per cent in the last four years under left-wing President Gabriel Boric, improving fire forecasting and investing in new equipment.
But in Argentina, a harsh austerity program under libertarian President Javier Milei may have hobbled the country’s ability to respond to the fires, researchers said, citing budget cuts to firefighting crews, a lack of planning and deregulation of tourism activities in Patagonia’s national parks. It’s a claim echoed to news agency The Associated Press by firefighters, park rangers and officials involved in disaster relief.
Milei, like his ally US President Donald Trump, has denied that climate change is related to human presence. His office did not immediately respond to a request for comment early Wednesday (11 February).
“Unfortunately, with a government that does not understand climate change and its connection to human activities, where nature is secondary in terms of priorities, these situations get worse and wildfires end up having greater impacts than they should,” said Rivera. “The situation is still not under control.”
Saturday, February 07, 2026
‘Strongest-in-the-Nation’ Data Center Moratorium Proposed in NY “New Yorkers are suffering from an affordability crisis and a climate crisis, and data centers are going to make both of those much harder to deal with,” said state Sen. Liz Krueger, one of the bill’s sponsors. New York state Sen. Liz Krueger (D-28) looks to the gallery in the Senate chamber of the Capitol on June 9, 2025, in Albany, New York. (Lori Van Buren/Albany Times Union via Getty Images)
In response to rising concerns about the extreme energy demands of artificial intelligence data centers, Democratic legislators in New York are proposing a three-year pause on their creation in the state.
The environmental group Food & Water Watchcalled the proposal, introduced Friday by state Sen. Liz Krueger (D-28) and Assemblymember Anna Kelles (D-125), the “strongest data center moratorium bill in the country,” the sort that is in increasing demand as the public becomes aware of the staggering energy costs required to power the centers.
Last month, a study by the Union of Concerned Scientistsfound that US electricity demand could increase by 60% to 80% over the next quarter century, with data centers accounting for more than half the increase by 2030—costing anywhere from $886 billion to $978 billion and pumping anywhere from 19% to 29% more planet-heating carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
In large part due to data centers, New York’s power grid may fall as much as 1.6 gigawatts short of reliability requirements, according to a projection from the New York Independent System Operator last year.
“Massive data centers are gunning for New York, and right now we are completely unprepared,” Krueger said. When one of these energy-guzzling facilities comes to town, they drive up utility prices and have significant negative impacts on the environment and the community—and they have little to no positive impact on the local economy.
“New Yorkers are suffering from an affordability crisis and a climate crisis, and data centers are going to make both of those much harder to deal with,” she added.
The bill would halt new data center projects exceeding 20 megawatts for three years and require the state to conduct environmental reviews and propose new regulations to address any identified impacts.
“Data centers are being built rapidly and with little meaningful oversight, despite the serious strain they place on our energy system, water resources, and local communities,” explained Assemblymember Jessica González-Rojas (D-34), another supporter of the legislation.
“These facilities increase pollution, drive up electricity costs, and threaten farmland and natural land, while disproportionately impacting low-income communities and Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities that have long faced environmental injustice,” she said.
According to Politico, pushes to curb data center growth are gaining steam around the country: New York is the largest state where lawmakers have proposed a moratorium on data centers. But concerns about the growing issue are bipartisan, with Republicans and Democrats backing moratoriums in various states.
Similar measures have been introduced in Maryland, Georgia, Oklahoma, Virginia, and Vermont. A Republican legislator in Michigan—where dozens of local governments have already passed moratoriums—has said she’ll introduce a statewide measure there, as well. In Wisconsin, a Democratic gubernatorial candidate has also called for a moratorium.
Eric Weltman, senior New York organizer at Food & Water Watch, said the bill was necessary to curb “one of the biggest environmental and social threats of our generation.”
“This expansion is rapidly increasing demand for dirty energy, straining water resources, and raising electricity rates for families and small businesses,” Weltman said. “New Yorkers are paying the price while Big Tech rakes in the riches. This strongest-in-the-nation moratorium bill is logical, it’s timely, and it will deliver the results we need.”
Yvonne Taylor, vice president of Seneca Lake Guardian, said the bill “not only safeguards our shared future here in New York, but sets a powerful precedent for states across the nation.”
Friday, February 06, 2026
SPACE/COSMOS
An unusual dust storm on Mars reveals how the red planet lost some of its water
Composite images of Mars taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2024. Thin clouds of water ice, visible in ultraviolet light, give the Red Planet an icy appearance. The frigid north polar ice cap was experiencing the beginning of Martian spring.
The current image of Mars as an arid and hostile desert contrasts sharply with the history revealed by its surface. Channels, minerals altered by water, and other geological traces indicate that the Red Planet was, in its early days, a much wetter and more dynamic world. Reconstructing how this water-rich environment disappeared remains one of the great challenges of planetary science. Although several processes are known that can explain some of this loss, the fate of much of Martian water remains a mystery.
A new study from an international team of researchers published in Communications: Earth & Environment on February 2, 2026, has brought us a significant step closer to solving this puzzle. For the first time, researchers demonstrated that an anomalous, intense, but localized dust storm was able to drive the transport of water to the upper layers of the Martian atmosphere during the Northern Hemisphere summer - a time when this process was previously considered to be irrelevant.
"The findings reveal the impact of this type of storm on the planet's climate evolution and opens a new path for understanding how Mars lost much of its water over time," says Adrián Brines, a researcher at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía (IAA-CSIC) and co-lead author of the study along with Shohei Aoki, a researcher from the Graduate School of Frontier Sciences at the University of Tokyo and the Graduate School of Science at Tohoku University.
While dust storms have long been recognized as important for Mars' water escape, previous discussions have mostly focused on large, planet-wide dust events. In contrast, this study shows that smaller, regional storms can also strongly enhance water transport to high altitudes, where it can be more easily lost to space. Furthermore, previous research has focused on the warm, dynamic summers of the Southern Hemisphere, since it is typically the main period of water loss on Mars.
This study detected an unusual increase in water vapor in the middle atmosphere of Mars during the Northern Hemisphere summer in Martian year 37 (2022-2023 on Earth), caused by an anomalous dust storm. At these altitudes, the amount of water was up to ten times greater than usual, a phenomenon not observed in previous Martian years and not predicted by current climate models.
Shortly afterward, the amount of hydrogen in the exobase - the region where the atmosphere merges with space - increased significantly to 2.5 times that of the previous years during the same season. One of the keys to understanding how much water Mars has lost is measuring how much hydrogen has escaped into space, since this element is readily released when water breaks down in the atmosphere.
"These results add a vital new piece to the incomplete puzzle of how Mars has been losing its water over billions of years, and shows that short but intense episodes can play a relevant role in the climate evolution of the Red Planet," concludes Aoki (University of Tokyo and Tohoku University).
This study is a collaborative, international project combining data across multiple Mars exploration missions such as the Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) of the ESA's ExoMars mission (2016) and its NOMAD instrument with observations from other active missions in Martian orbit, such as NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and the Emirates Mars Mission (EMM).
Daily MRO-MARCI global map images of the initial growth of a rare regional dust storm in northwestern Syrtis Major, observed on August 21, 2023, at Ls = 107.6° (left) and August 22, 2023, at Ls = 108.0° (right), reaching an extent of 1.2 × 10⁶ km².
Diagram illustrating the atmospheric response to a localized dust storm in the Northern Hemisphere during the local summer season. High dust concentrations significantly increase the absorption of solar radiation, leading to greater atmospheric warming, especially in the middle atmosphere. Furthermore, the increased atmospheric circulation associated with the dust storm enhances the vertical transport of water vapor from the lower atmosphere, promoting water injection at higher altitudes and increasing hydrogen escape from the exobase.
An international research team led by scientists from the Technion Faculty of Physics presents a first-of-its-kind measurement of cosmic rays located at the core of the galactic nebula Barnard 68. The measurement was based on observations by the James Webb Space Telescope and will enable researchers to map the properties of cosmic rays in space and shed light on the process of star formation in the galaxy. The findings were published recently in Nature Astronomy, with companion analysis published in the Astrophysical Journal in collaboration with Johns Hopkins University.
What Are Cosmic Rays?
Despite their name, cosmic rays are not related to electromagnetic radiation (light). They are actually particles of matter – protons, electrons, and atomic nuclei – that fill galactic space and travel at speeds close to the speed of light.
Cosmic rays have a decisive impact on the process of star formation. Stars like our Sun are formed through the gravitational collapse of clouds of gas and dust in the galaxy. Thanks to their high energy, cosmic-ray particles can penetrate deep into a nebula and heat its gas, thereby delaying its collapse and the formation of a star. In addition to heating, cosmic-ray-driven ionization plays a key role in nebular chemistry and is involved in the creation of molecules such as water, ammonia, methanol, and more.
Cosmic rays were first discovered more than a century ago in Victor Hess’s famous balloon experiment. Today, measurements from the International Space Station and from the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft allow us to study cosmic rays in the vicinity of the Solar System. However, the question of what the properties of cosmic rays are throughout the galaxy—and particularly inside star-forming nebulae – remains open, and is considered one of the most important unresolved questions in modern astrophysics.
The Discovery
This year, an international team led by Dr. Shmuel Bialy of the Technion achieved a long-sought breakthrough: a direct measurement of cosmic-ray activity inside a galactic nebula. “When cosmic rays penetrate a nebula,” explained Dr. Bialy, “they cause hydrogen molecules to vibrate, emitting infrared radiation at a characteristic frequency of about 100 terahertz. This infrared radiation serves as a unique fingerprint of the interaction between cosmic rays and hydrogen in the nebula.”
The research team designed and conducted an observation using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to measure this radiation from Barnard 68 – a cold, dense nebula (with temperatures around 10-20 Kelvin, barely above absolute zero) 400 light-years from Earth, located in the constellation Ophiuchus. The nebula has a diameter of roughly one-third of a light-year and a mass twice that of the Sun. According to predictions, it will collapse in about 200,000 years, forming a new star.
“The signals detected by the space telescope matched perfectly with the predictions of the theoretical model we developed,” said Amit Chemke, a master’s student in Dr. Bialy’s group and a co-author of the study. “We also examined alternative models, but none fit the observed signals. Our measurement provides unequivocal evidence that we are seeing cosmic rays.”
“These are the first photons ever detected from cosmic-ray–excited H₂,” said David Neufeld, professor of physics and astronomy at Johns Hopkins, who was also part of this study. “JWST has opened a completely new window on cosmic-ray astrophysics.”
What’s Next?
"Years ago, when I first proposed this approach, many experts were skeptical that we could detect such faint signals," said Dr. Bialy. "The James Webb Space Telescope's unprecedented capabilities changed everything. NASA has now allocated an additional 50 hours of telescope time to expand our cosmic-ray mapping across different galactic environments. Nebulae may now serve as enormous natural particle detectors – tens of thousands of solar systems in size – opening the door to the first systematic study of how cosmic rays propagate through galaxies and regulate star formation."
The Israeli team’s research was supported by the Technion, the Israel Science Foundation, and the German-Israeli Foundation for Scientific Research and Development.
James Webb Space Telescope Near-infrared Camera (JWST NIRCam) false colour image of IRAS07251-0248, made by combining exposures with the 2 mm (Blue), 2.77 mm (Green) and 3.56 mm (Red) wide filters on NIRCam. Data are part of the observations carried out under JWST GO Programme ID 3368 (P.I. L. Armus). Calibrated data were obtained from the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes at the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under NASA contract NAS 5-03127 for JWST.
Credit: Data came from Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes, Space Telescope Science Institute, Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., NASA.
A recent study, led by the Center for Astrobiology (CAB), CSIC-INTA and using modelling techniques developed at the University of Oxford, has uncovered an unprecedented richness of small organic molecules in the deeply obscured nucleus of a nearby galaxy, thanks to observations made with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The work, published in Nature Astronomy, provides new insights into how complex organic molecules and carbon are processed in some of the most extreme environments in the Universe.
The study focuses on IRAS 07251–0248, an ultra-luminous infrared galaxy whose nucleus is hidden behind vast amounts of gas and dust. This material absorbs most of the radiation emitted by the central supermassive black hole, making it extremely difficult to study with conventional telescopes. However, theinfrared wavelength range penetrates the dust and provides unique information about these regions, revealing the dominant chemical processes in this extremely dusty nucleus.
State-of-the-art instruments
The team used spectroscopic observations from the JWST space telescope covering the 3–28 micronwavelength range, combining data from the NIRSpec and MIRI instruments. These observations allow the detection of chemical signatures from gas-phase molecules, as well as features from ices and dust grains. Thanks to these data, the researchers were able to characterize the abundance and temperature of numerous chemical species in the nucleus of this buried galaxy.
The observations reveal an extraordinarily rich inventory of small organic molecules, including benzene (C₆H₆), methane (CH₄), acetylene (C₂H₂), diacetylene (C₄H₂), and triacetylene (C₆H₂), and, detected for the first time outside the Milky Way, the methyl radical (CH₃). In addition to gas-phase molecules, a large abundance of solid molecular materials was found, such as carbonaceous grains and water ices.
“We found an unexpected chemical complexity, with abundances far higher than predicted by current theoretical models,” explains lead author DrIsmael García Bernete formerly of Oxford University and now a researcher at CAB. “This indicates that there must be a continuous source of carbonin these galactic nuclei fuelling this rich chemical network.”
The analysis, involving techniques and theoretical polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) models developed by the Oxford group, suggests that the observed chemistry cannot be explained solely by high temperatures or turbulent gas motions. Instead, the results point to cosmic rays, abundant in these extreme nuclei, as fragmenting PAHs and carbon-rich dust grains, releasing small organic molecules into the gas phase.
The study also finds a clear correlation between hydrocarbon abundance and the intensity of cosmic-ray ionization in similar galaxies, supporting this scenario. These results suggest that deeply obscured galactic nuclei could act as factories of organic molecules, playing a key role in the chemical evolution of galaxies.
This work opens new avenues to study the formation and processing of organic molecules in space extreme environments and demonstrates the enormous potential of JWST to explore regions of the Universe that have remained hidden until now.
In addition to CAB, the following institutions also contributed to this work: Instituto de Física Fundamental (CSIC; M. Pereira-Santaella, M. Agúndez, G. Speranza), University of Alcalá (E. González-Alfonso) and University of Oxford (D. Rigopoulou, F.R. Donnan, N. Thatte).
The study ‘JWST detection of abundant hydrocarbons in a buried nucleus with signs of grain and PAH processing’ will be published in Nature Astronomy at 10 AM GMT / 11 AM CET Friday 6 February at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-025-02750-0 DOI 10.1038/s41550-025-02750-0.
Project funded through the Programa Atracción de Talento Investigador “César Nombela” (grant 2023-T1/TEC-29030) by the Comunidad de Madrid and INTA.
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About CAB
The Centro de Astrobiología (CAB) is a joint research center of INTA and CSIC. Created in 1999, it was the first center in the world dedicated specifically to astrobiological research and the first non-US center associated with the NASA Astrobiology Institute (NAI), currently the NASA Astrobiology Program. It is a multidisciplinary center whose main objective is to study the origin, presence, and influence of life in the universe through a transdisciplinary approach. In 2017, the CAB was awarded by the Ministry of Science and Innovation as a “María de Maeztu” Unit of Excellence.
The CAB has led the development of the REMS, TWINS y MEDA instruments, operational on Mars since August 2012, November 2018, and February 2021, respectively; as well as the science of the RLS and RAX Raman instruments, which will be sent to Mars at the end of this decade as part of the ExoMars mission and to one of its moons in the MMX mission, respectively. In addition, it is developing the SOLID instrument for the search for life in planetary exploration. The CAB also co-leads, together with three other European institutions, the development of the PLATO space telescope, and participates in various missions and instruments of great astrobiological relevance, such as MMX, CARMENES, CHEOPS, BepiColombo, DART, Hera, the MIRI and NIRSpec in JWST, and the HARMONI in ESO’s ELT (Extremely Large Telescope).
Galactic nucleus and hydrocarbon chemistry in IRAS 07251–0248. Left: Schematic of the nucleus, showing a very hot central component (dark red), a warm layer with gas-phase molecules (orange-yellow), and a cold envelope with solid-phase molecules (blue-gray). Right: Conceptual illustration of how cosmic rays process carbonaceous grains and PAHs, generating the observed hydrocarbon-rich chemistry. Credit: García Bernete et al. Nature Astronomy, 2026.
High-powered satellites use electromagnetic waveguides to deliver energy from one component to another. Typically, they are made of heavy, inflexible metal tubes with an even heavier flange on either end, neither of which is ideal for space applications.
Using origami folding techniques as inspiration, Xin Ning and his graduate students at the Department of Aerospace Engineering in The Grainger College of Engineering, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign developed several design concepts for flexible, lightweight waveguides that can be launched in a compact, folded state, then expanded to full size after being deployed into space.
“My former colleague at Penn State, Sven Bilén, is an expert in electromagnetics. I showed him some origami structures I’d been working on a few years ago. He was intrigued and asked if origami could be used for deployable electromagnetic waveguides. We started exploring this idea since then.” said Xin Ning. “Because the most common electromagnetic waveguides are rectangular-shaped, our origami designs needed to maintain a rectangular cross section in the operational state for comparable performance.”
Ning said the simplest rectangular foldable structure he could think of was a brown paper shopping bag. The rectangular bottom portion acts like the flange. Grad students Nikhil Ashok and Sangwoo Suk created a design with two shopping-bag-like sections to obtain a foldable tube and rectangular inlet and outlet for connection to flanges. Using that as a starting point, they developed more advanced origami electromagnetic waveguides shaped like a bellows. Ning said the folding is time consuming, but by the end, both students mastered the skill.
To fabricate the model, the pattern was printed onto large paper, then laminated with kitchen aluminum foil and folded. For use in spacecraft, Ning said they might be 3D printed durable materials, then coated with more durable high-quality commercial materials such as Kapton and metal laminates.
He said they didn’t choose random cross sections or lengths. Instead, they modeled their structures based on commercial designs so they could compare apples to apples.
“With the first bellows shape, we knew we had a foldable, deployable design that could perform, but we wanted to explore more possibilities with origami principles. We needed to find other designs that could twist and bend as it unfurls at the right angle and the right distance between the flanges. These new designs were more complicated, so we simulated the model to try different distances and angles and achieve a 90-degree twist from the input to the output,” Ning said.
Ning said everything began experimentally before moving to analytical design models. While testing the twisting, bending model, they ran into a snag.
“After a few inches of easy deployment, it suddenly got stuck and we really wanted to understand why. We spent a lot of time trying to understand the mechanics and analyzing the angle and distance and deriving the equations. We saw that when we stretched the model, the load was initially very low, then it would shoot up. We realized that when it is stretched to the point where the creases are flat, the force could break it.”
Ning said adding more folds to achieve a longer waveguide made it more difficult and longer waveguides would result in more energy loss.
“We finally arrived at the maximum distance we want to carry and designed it to reach that point with just enough units, or folds.”
The team now has a pending patent. And although the team’s design focus was initially for spacecraft, the concept can be applied for waveguides used in naval, electrical and communications systems for transferring microwave energy.
The study, “Shape-morphable origami electromagnetic waveguides,” by Nikhil Ashok, Sangwoo Suk, and Xin Ning from Illinois and Sven G. Bilén from Penn State, is published by Communications Engineering, a journal in Nature’s portfolio. DOI: 10.1038/s44172-025-00539-7
