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)
Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump speaks to guests during a rally at Clinton Middle School on January 6, 2024, in Clinton, Iowa.
“One thing I’ll be doing very early in the administration is closing up the Department of Education in Washington, DC, and sending all education and education work it needs back to the states,” Trump said in a 2023 video outlining his education policy goals. “We want them to run the education of our children because they’ll do a much better job of it. You can’t do worse.”
Closing the department wouldn’t be easy for Trump, but it isn’t impossible — and even if the DOE remains open, there are certainly ways Trump could radically change education in the United States. Here’s what’s possible.
Can Trump actually close the DOE?
Technically, yes.
However, “It would take an act of Congress to take it out,” Don Kettl, professor emeritus and former dean of the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, told Vox. “It would take an act of Congress to radically restructure it. And so the question is whether or not there’d be appetite on the Hill for abolishing the department.”
That’s not such an easy prospect, even though the Republicans look set to take narrow control of the Senate and the House. That’s because abolishing the department “would require 60 votes unless the Republicans abolish the filibuster,” Jal Mehta, professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, told Vox.
Without the filibuster rule, legislation would need a simple majority to pass, but senators have been hesitant to get rid of it in recent years. With the filibuster in place, Republicans would need some Democratic senators to join their efforts to kill the department. The likelihood of Democratic senators supporting such a move is almost nonexistent.
That means the push to unwind the department is probably largely symbolic. And that is the best-case scenario, Jon Valant, director of the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center on Education Policy, told Vox. According to Valant, dismantling it would simultaneously damage the US education system while also failing to accomplish Trump’s stated goals.
Closing the department “would wreak havoc across the country,” Valant said. “It would cause terrible pain. It would cause terrible pain in parts of the country represented by congressional Republicans too.”
Much of that pain would likely fall on the country’s most vulnerable students: poor students, students in rural areas, and students with disabilities. That’s because the department’s civil rights powers help it to support state education systems in providing specialized resources to those students.
Furthermore, much of what Trump and MAGA activists claim the agency is responsible for — like teaching critical race theory and LGBTQ “ideology” — isn’t actually the purview of the DOE; things like curriculum and teacher choice are already the domain of state departments of education. And only about 10 percent of federal public education funding flows to state boards of education, according to Valant. The rest comes primarily from tax sources, so states and local school districts are already controlling much of the funding structure of their specific public education systems
“I find it a little bewildering that the US Department of Education has become such a lightning rod here, in part because I don’t know how many people have any idea what the department actually does,” Valant said.
Even without literally shutting the doors to the federal agency, there could be ways a Trump administration could hollow the DOE and do significant damage, Valant and Kettl said.
The administration could require the agency to cut the roles of agency employees, particularly those who ideologically disagree with the administration. It could also appoint officials with limited (or no) education expertise, hampering the department’s day-to-day work.
Trump officials could also attempt changes to the department’s higher education practices. The department is one of several state and nongovernmental institutions involved in college accreditation, for example — and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA) has threatened to weaponize the accreditation process against universities he believes to be too “woke.”
Finally, Trump could use the department’s leadership role to affect policy indirectly: “There’s power that comes from just communicating to states what you would like to see” being taught in schools, Valant said. “And there are a lot of state leaders around the country who seem ready to follow that lead.”
Trump’s plans for the department will become clearer once the administration nominates an education secretary. Once that person is confirmed, Kettl said, “They’re just gonna be off to the races on the issue again.”
Ellen Ioanes covers breaking and general assignment news as the weekend reporter at Vox. She previously worked at Business Insider covering the military and global conflicts.
An undercover investigation reveals the deception of “humane”-certified farms
Regulators had a chance to fix the meat industry’s false advertising problem. They failed.
A flock of large white broiler chickens, approximately 10 weeks old, are ready to be processed.
Monica Fecke/Moment via Getty Images
An overwhelming majority of Americans say they’re concerned about the treatment of animals raised for meat, and many believe they can help by simply selecting from one of the many brands that advertise their chicken or pork as “humane.” But such marketing claims have long borne little resemblance to the ugly reality of raising animals for meat.
Nearly all farmed animals in the US live on mega factory farms, where they’re mutilated without pain relief and fattened up in dark, overcrowded warehouses before being shipped off to the slaughterhouse. Only a tiny sliver of livestock are actually reared on the small, higher-welfare farms that many companies conjure on their packaging with quaint red barns and green rolling hills — and even those operations can be rife with animal suffering.
This summer, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) had an opportunity to fix the false advertising problem pervasive in the meat aisle when it published updated guidelines that companies must follow when making animal welfare claims on their labels. Instead, its new guidance barely changed anything.
The updated rules “remain insufficient to combat misleading label claims used to market meat and poultry products,” as the nonprofit Animal Welfare Institute put it, allowing companies “to essentially make up their own definitions with no repercussions.” (The one improvement, the organization noted, was a clearer definition of the term “pasture raised,” though that label remains poorly enforced and does not guarantee animals were raised humanely.)
Here’s how the USDA’s guidelines work: If a meat company wants to make an animal welfare or environment-related claim on its packaging, it must fill out a form with an illustration of its label and an explanation as to how the animals are raised to justify the claim; how the company will ensure the claim is valid from birth to slaughter to sale; and whether or not an independent, third-party organization certified the claim, which is optional. The USDA never conducts surprise audits, or any audits at all, to verify the company is telling the truth. It is, in essence, an honor system.
The USDA also has an incredibly low, and often nonsensical, bar for what passes as humane treatment.
The agency states, for example, that a chicken company can use the term “humanely raised” if it feeds its birds an all-vegetarian diet, which has virtually no bearing on their welfare (chickens are omnivores).
Similarly, the agency says pork can be labeled “humanely raised” if the company provides its pigs with “proper shelter and rest areas.” By that definition, standard factory farms — which produce practically all US pork — are humane because they provide ample shelter in the form of vast, crowded warehouses where the animals have nothing to do but rest on the same concrete flooring where they defecate and urinate. Chickens raised for meat at an operation in Maryland. Edwin Remsberg/The Image Bank via Getty Images Pigs at a breeding farm. Chayakorn Lotongkum/iStock via Getty Images
“I think that a lot of this is out of touch with what consumers are really thinking these claims mean,” P. Renée Wicklund, co-founder of Richman Law & Policy — a law firm that takes meat, dairy, and egg companies to court over false claims — told me.
Over the last decade, the Animal Welfare Institute has requested from the USDA the applications that meat companies submitted for 97 animal welfare claims. For the overwhelming majority of them, there were either no records at all or the justifications for the labels had little to no relevance to animal welfare.
The USDA declined an interview request for this story and didn’t directly respond to numerous detailed questions. Instead, it sent a statement that read in part: “USDA continues to deliver on its commitment to fairness and choice for both farmers and consumers, and that means supporting transparency and high-quality standards.”
To be fair to the agency, it doesn’t have the authority to conduct on-farm audits, which would require an act of Congress. But it does have authority to define animal welfare claims — an authority it rarely exercises. Instead, it allows companies to define animal welfare claims themselves.
The USDA also added that it “strongly encourages” companies to validate animal welfare claims using third-party certifiers — private organizations that audit conditions on farms and license the use of their own humane labels. But a recent undercover investigation into one of the nation’s biggest “humane-certified” poultry companies shows how low third-party certification standards can be.
Chickens kicked and run over with forklifts: Inside a “humane-certified” poultry farm
Foster Farms, the 11th largest chicken company in the US, advertises meat from animals raised with supposedly “better care.” On its packaging, chickens are shown roaming free on pasture, even though the company’s conventionally raised birds will never step foot onto grass. On its website, Foster Farms says its farming is “safe, sustainable, and humane” and that its chickens are “raised on local West Coast farms” with “strenuous, high standards.”
The company also promotes its chicken as “cage-free” with “no added hormones or steroids ever.” But touting these aspects is misleading because chickens raised for meat in the US are not kept in cages — only those raised for eggs are — and it’s illegal to feed chickens hormones or steroids.
“They’re feel-good words, but they don’t have any real meaning,” veterinarian Gail Hansen told Vox.
This summer, an undercover investigator with the animal rights group Animal Outlook worked for a month on the company’s catch crew, a job that entails grabbing chickens on farms, stuffing them into crates, and loading them onto trucks bound for the slaughterhouse.
Over the course of more than a dozen shifts at multiple Foster Farms facilities, the investigator — who requested anonymity due to the covert nature of undercover investigations — documented workers slamming birds into crates, kicking and hitting chickens, and numerous instances of forklift drivers running over birds.
The investigator recalled making eye contact with a bird shortly after they were run over by a forklift. “They were being crushed and everything was being pushed forward, and they had their beak open, and they had this look on their face like they knew that they were dying. And then I watched them flap and struggle for a moment before passing,” the investigator told me.
“From a veterinary perspective, some of the things are just horrific,” Hansen said.
The investigator chalked up most of the cruelty to the chaotic, fast-paced work environment imposed by supervisors during long, grueling shifts.
After Animal Outlook released its investigation last month, Foster Farms fired several employees and reported them to county law enforcement. In a statement to a chicken industry news site, the company said it would also hire for more roles focused on animal welfare, retrain employees on animal welfare, and conduct more audits. Foster Farms did not respond to Vox’s multiple requests for comment.
Cheryl Leahy, who was executive director of Animal Outlook when the investigation was released but has since left the organization, said the company’s problems go much deeper than just a few employees.
Cruelty is “woven into the culture,” Leahy said. “It is a feature, not a bug. It is a business practice. There is a decision made to go with volume and speed” over animal welfare.
In recent years, the USDA has cited Foster Farms for 18 incidents of violating federal animal welfare laws. Numerous other investigations into Foster Farms facilities have found cruel conditions and practices that, to be fair to the company, have also been documented across the US poultry industry.
Foster Farms’ announced reforms in response to Animal Outlook’s latest investigation are unlikely to do much to improve overall conditions, Leahy said. It has already taken similar actions — penalizing workers and increasing training — in the wake of previous investigations. More importantly, the company’s animal welfare standards are already at rock bottom, in line with the rest of the chicken industry.
But you wouldn’t know that from its marketing or its “American Humane” certification.
How misleading marketing — enabled by the USDA — tricks consumers
For years, Foster Farms has bolstered its humane image through a certification from the nonprofit American Humane — the kind of third-party organization that the USDA “strongly encourages” meat companies making humane claims to work with. As of the late 2010s, the company paid American Humane $375,000 annually for its certification, and a lawsuit claimed that American Humane would give Foster Farms seven to 14 days’ notice of an audit, allowing them to prepare for the visits.
Animal advocacy groups like Animal Outlook argue that American Humane’s standards largely mirror that of the typical chicken factory farm, not the higher-welfare conditions a consumer would reasonably expect.
Hansen, the veterinarian, echoed that sentiment: “The daylight between them is pretty narrow.”
American Humane’s “standards are not meant to actually bring these companies up to a level of palatability for the public,” Leahy said. “What they’re trying to do is stop the criticism.”
A former American Humane executive is now an owner and partner of a PR firm that defends factory farm interests and executive director of a related pro-factory farming organization. American Humane did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
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A 2015 class action lawsuit, alleging that Foster Farms misleads consumers with its American Humane Certified label, demonstrates how the USDA’s low standards enable such deception: In a 2018 decision, a three-judge panel rejected an appeal in part because the USDA had already approved the label.
“The Foster Farms of the world can say, ‘Look, this was approved by a government agency,’”said Wicklund. (Wicklund’s law firm, Richman Law & Policy, has represented and co-counseled with Animal Outlook in meat labeling lawsuits; earlier this year, it filed a legal complaint against Foster Farms over its animal welfare claims, which is ongoing.)
The recently released Animal Outlook investigation reported that Foster Farms employees — and, according to the undercover investigator, its supervisors, too — did violate some of American Humane’s poultry handling standards, which are laid out in a dense 115-page document. However, Foster Farms remains certified by American Humane — when companies are in violation of the organization’s standards, there are seemingly no penalties. They have to fill out a form explaining how they’ll meet full compliance in the future and alert American Humane when that’s been done. Companies can still obtain certification even if they don’t fully pass their annual audit. (And numerous investigations into poultry companies have found that rough handling appears to be the industry norm, not the exception).
While some animal certification programs do set standards above the industry norm, what makes especially weak third-party certifications like American Humane’s so fundamentally inadequate — and deceptive — is that they permit the worst systemic abuses of poultry farming: cruel breeding practices, overcrowding, and especially inhumane slaughter methods.
Virtually all chickens raised for meat in the US have been bred to grow so big so fast that they’re in constant pain. Many have difficulty walking or even standing and are more likely to suffer from leg deformities, heart attacks, and other health issues when compared to heritage breeds that grow at a normal pace. Animal Outlook’s investigator alleged that many of the birds in the Foster Farms operations couldn’t walk and that some had broken legs. American Humane’s standards allow for these rapid-growth chickens, which animal rights activists call “Frankenchickens.”
The group’s standards also allow for overcrowding, giving birds a little more space than the industry standard but what still amounts to almost 20 percent less space than what animal advocacy groups argue should be the bare minimum. American Humane allows for the standard chicken slaughter process: shackling chickens upside down, dunking them in a bath of electrified water to stun them unconscious, slitting their throats, and then placing them in a scalding vat to loosen their feathers.
Despite all that, the resulting meat can still be advertised as humane, sustainable, and produced from healthy birds.
The empty claims many meat companies make on their labels and in their advertising stem from forces bigger than the USDA and third-party certifiers. Currently, chickens and other poultry birds have zero federal legal protections while on the farm or in the slaughterhouse, and third-party certification programs make an exceptionally weak substitute for this legal gap. If we wanted truly “humanely raised” chicken, we’d have to fundamentally change how chickens are farmed, which would require significant anti-cruelty legislation from Congress. That would substantially raise the price of chicken, making it more of a delicacy than a staple.
But the USDA, the poultry giants, and the dubious third-party certification schemes would like us to believe otherwise — that wholesome marketing and hollow honor systems can fix the horrific reality of what it is to be a farmed animal in the US.
Kenny Torrella is a senior reporter for Vox’s Future Perfect section, with a focus on animal welfare and the future of meat.
Let there be no doubt: Trump and the Republicans will try to cut our earned benefits. But just as a grassroots movement around the country succeeded in saving the Affordable Care Act during Trump’s first term, we can save Social Security and Medicare.
"Donald Trump ran on a promise to protect Social Security and Medicare," writes Lawson. "Based on Trump’s long record of working to cut and undermine our earned benefits, we don’t trust that promise for one second. But we plan to make him keep it." (Photo: Dave Kotinsky/Getty Images for MoveOn)
No one voted to cut Social Security. No one voted to cut Medicare. And no one voted for higher drug prices.
Donald Trump ran on a promise to protect Social Security and Medicare. Based on Trump’s long record of working to cut and undermine our earned benefits, we don’t trust that promise for one second. But we plan to make him keep it.
There’s a good reason Trump didn’t campaign on cutting Social Security: Ninety-two percent of Americans think that’s a terrible idea.
What will Trump do once he’s actually in the White House? During his first term, he tried to cut Social Security every single year. He appointed an unqualified crony, Andrew Saul, to head the Social Security Administration. And he surrounded himself with advisors who had long records of working to cut and privatize Social Security.
Now, Trump has a new advisor, Elon Musk. He just put Musk in charge of a commission to slash $2 trillion of federal spending. That is essentially impossible without cutting Social Security, Medicare, and/or Medicaid. Indeed, incoming Vice President JD Vance has specifically said that Musk will target Social Security.
We are never going to stop fighting to protect and expand Social Security.
Musk is the wealthiest man in the world. It’s no surprise that Musk and his fellow billionaires want to cut our earned benefits rather than pay their fair share in taxes.
Trump’s top priority is to extend the tax cuts he gave the ultra-wealthy in his first term. Then, Republicans will turn around and claim that we “can’t afford” Social Security and Medicare.
Republicans in Congress have already telegraphed what those cuts could look like. The Republican Study Committee (RSC), a caucus that counts over 80 percent of House Republicans as members, released a budget proposal earlier this year that makes massive cuts to Social Security. That includes raising the retirement age to 69, and decimating benefits for the middle class.
The RSC budget would also repeal Medicare’s power to negotiate lower drug prices. That means seniors and people with disabilities would have to turn over more of their hard-earned Social Security checks to Big Pharma.
In case anyone doubted that Republicans are serious about passing these cuts into law, House Budget Chairman Jodey Arrington (who angrily chased me down the street last year after I confronted him about his support for Social Security cuts) just pledged to cut health care benefits through reconciliation—meaning that Republicans would only need 50 votes in the Senate.
Trump and Republicans will try to cut our earned benefits. But just as a grassroots movement of Americans around the country succeeded in saving the Affordable Care Act during Trump’s first term, we can save Social Security and Medicare.
Musk is the wealthiest man in the world. It’s no surprise that Musk and his fellow billionaires want to cut our earned benefits rather than pay their fair share in taxes.
Here’s how:Hold Every Republican Accountable: Republicans will have only a slim majority in both the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives. Every member of the House, and one-third of the Senate, is on the ballot in 2026. We will target every Republican in a competitive district with protests and billboards saying: Hands off our Social Security and Medicare!
Keep Democrats Unified: There’s nothing Republicans want more than bipartisan cover for benefit cuts. Democrats must stand united and refuse to give it to them. We are calling on every Democrat in Congress to stand strong against even one penny of cuts to Social Security and Medicare.
Refuse To Go Behind Closed Doors: Republicans want to create a closed-door, fast-track commission to cut benefits without political accountability. We’ve beaten back this type of commission before, and we’re prepared to do so again. Any changes to Social Security must happen through regular Congressional order, in the light of day.
We are never going to stop fighting to protect and expand Social Security. Social Security has stood strong for nearly a century. It has survived wars, depressions, and pandemics. And with your help, it will survive Donald Trump.
Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.
Alex Lawson Alex Lawson is the Executive Director of Social Security Works, the convening organization of the Strengthen Social Security Coalition -- a coalition made up of over 340 national and state organizations representing over 50 million Americans. Full Bio >
New GOP senate leader is a former lobbyist who has taken aim at Social Security
Like ‘clockwork,’ the GOP’s hypocritical ‘budget hawks’ are back with a vengeance: columnist
Sen. John Thune of South Dakota speaking at CPAC 2011 in Washington, D.C.,
Senate Republicans on Wednesday elected Sen. John Thune of South Dakota—a former corporate lobbyist and close ally of Sen. Mitch McConnell—as the leader of their conference for the upcoming term, when the GOP will have a 53-seat majority.
"Senators have received angry phone calls from constituents demanding to know how their representatives plan to vote, following MAGA world's embrace of Scott," The Washington Post reported. The leadership election was conducted via secret ballot.
In a statement Wednesday, Thune said he is "extremely honored to have earned the support" of the Senate GOP conference and stressed that "this Republican team is united behind President Trump's agenda."
"Our work starts today," Thune added.
Before winning election to the Senate in 2004, Thune worked as a lobbyist for several sectors including the railroad industry. The Lever reported last year that as part of his lobbying work for the Dakota, Minnesota, and Eastern (DM&E) Railroad, Thune "helped the company procure a $230 million loan from the Federal Railroad Administration."
"In 2015, Thune reprised his advocacy for the rail industry, leading an effortto repeal an Obama administration regulation requiring improved, electronic braking systems on some hazmat trains," the outlet added. "The following year, he received the first-ever 'Railroad Achievement Award' presented by the Association of American Railroads, the industry's main lobbying group."
Thune is also "one of the biggest recipients of oil and gas money in Congress," the youth-led Sunrise Movementnoted Wednesday following his election as leader of the incoming GOP Senate.
Over the course of his Senate career, Thune has received more than $1.16 million in campaign donations from the fossil fuel industry, according to the campaign finance watchdog OpenSecrets.
Thune's top contributor between 2019 and 2024 was the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the right-wing pro-Israel lobbying group.
"Thune has called for taking the debt limit hostage to force cuts to Social Security."
Thune has previously expressed support for leveraging the debt limit—and the threat of a catastrophic default—to secure steep cuts to federal spending and possible changes to Social Security such as raising the retirement age, which would slash benefits across the board. Social Security Works, a progressive advocacy group, voiced alarm over Thune's debt ceiling stance following his election as Senate Republican leader on Wednesday.
"Thune has called for taking the debt limit hostage to force cuts to Social Security," Nancy Altman, the group's president, said in a statement.
This Is America: Turning Slander, Plunder, Sadism Into Honor
Harris supporters react to election results at Howard University. (Photo by ANGELA WEISS / AFP via Getty Images)
Goddamn. This is a gutting one. Amidst our grief and shock at the ascendancy of a racist, vengeful, malevolent sociopath in cognitive decline who "represents everything we should aspire not to be" - but hey at least he's not a black woman - comes the awful realization, after years of telling ourselves as a country we were better than this, that we're not. We are tired, bitter, vanquished. But now that the country has failed us, say sages tougher than us, we cannot fail each other.
It's dumbfounding, of course. With eyes (if not minds) wide open, after years of seeing the cruelty, vulgarity, bullying, incompetence and mean-spirited braggadocio, a majority of the electorate decided to bring him back. There is no ignoring the result, that ghastly map of a blood-red sea with modest, hopeful pockets of blue. He won the Electoral College, the (rare) popular vote by several million, inexplicably more Latinos, Blacks, young people that anyone had envisioned. Despite his long history of carnage and neglect, his insane clown makeup, his terrible campaign of insults, fascism, misogyny, babbling, and Harris' admirable one of real plans, swing state focus, broad coalition from Beyonce to Cheneys - none of it mattered. People just didn't like her laugh. They didn't believe she worked at McDonalds. They thought butter was too expensive. They worried their gymnastic daughter would have to compete against boys - so unfair! And she's a woman of color (who probably slept her way to power), a bridge too far. Better to go with the wolf who straight-up asserts, "I'm going to eat you." Admiring sheep: "He tells it like it is."
"Who Are We?" asks a disconsolate Robert Reich. After years of saying "America is better than Trump, I'm no longer sure," he writes. But the roots of our failures go back far further than his sordid arrival: "This darkness has always been in us." Trump, the ugly consequence of racial, social and economic changes, has given us "an unsparing view of our country in our time" - one that reflects via our politics the deep flaws of our culture, and en route gives us the grotesque likes of Musk, Scott, Cruz, Bannon, Don and RFK Jr., and vomit-inducing headlines like, "J.D. Vance Congratulates Stephen Miller On Appointment to Top White House Job." Yes, it's part of an era of global and American anti-incumbency. Still, George Conway argues, most dispiritingly it's "what Americans chose for themselves," with the only possible saving grace Trump's incompetence. "The system was never perfect," he writes, "but it inched toward its own betterment, albeit in fits and starts. But in the end, the system the Framers set up - and indeed, all constitutional regimes, however well designed - cannot protect a free people from themselves.”
As a grim result, writes Charlie Pierce, the majority of our fellow-citizens (who voted) "will get exactly what they want." They will get attacks on women, trans kids, political dissent, a free press. They'll get a vicious attempt at mass deportation and chaos for millions of families, soaring inflation and national debt, global isolation, sixth-grade invective, 200% tariffs its author will still not understand, violent vengeance against opponents and dreaded "others," pardons for rioters, he end of accountability for felons and, possibly, Social Security. "We have decided that science and learning don’t count as much as misogyny and racism," Pierce adds. "We have traded engaging in the work of self-government for entertaining ourselves with a freak show." And all for a wannabe king who will - irony alert - giddily preside over the 250th anniversary of our toppling of a monarchy. A few years ago, Childish Gambino, aka Donald Glover, made a video for a song about the carnage caused by our guns; you can add to guns the symbolic ravages of our racism, imperialism, capitalism and their attendant brutality, and still, This Is America.
Meanwhile, notes Dem advisor Adam Parkhomenko after Monday's news Trump named Stephen Miller deputy chief of Nazi policy, "All the shit we warned everyone about is coming true, and it has not even been a week." In fact, within 24 hours of the win by a serial rapist and Jeffrey Epstein confidant, women were facing crass hate campaigns. Many echo the venom of white supremacist Nick Fuentes, who sneered, "Your body, my choice. Forever." Or thug Jon Miller, who scoffed, “Women threatening sex strikes like LMAO, as if you have a say." Outside Texas State University, triumphant MAGA fans toted signs that read, "Homo Sex Is Sin" and "Types of Property: Women, Slaves, Animals, Cars, Land." Trump lawyer Mike Davis, who's proposed throwing journalists in gulags and dragging dead political opponents through the streets, darkly warned New York A.G. Letitia James, who won a $454 million judgment against Trump for fraud, against "daring to continue your lawfare. "Listen here, sweetheart," he snarled. "We're not messing around this time, and we will put your fat ass in prison."
The next obvious targets, perhaps yet more vilely, are people of color, especially young vulnerable ones. In a text campaign and hate crime spewing from some 25 states, Black students from college age to middle school have received messages claiming they'd been chosen as "house slaves" and were due to appear at "plantations." "Greetings, Samuel. You have been selected to pick cotton at the nearest plantation," read one. "Be ready at 12 sharp...Our executive slaves will come get you in a brown van. You are in Plantation Group W." The recipients in at least 10 states and D.C. ranged from students at historically Black colleges to high-schoolers in New York and Massachusetts to middle schoolers in Pennsylvania. “This is mandatory,” the message read. “Sincerely, Trump Administration." Defending their "commonsense mandate for change," Trump officials say they had nothing to do with the racist attack. But the NAACP still called them on it. "The unfortunate reality of electing a President who historically has embraced and at times encouraged hate," they charged, " is unfolding before our eyes."
More well-publicized horrors await. Trump promised a blank check for rounding up millions of immigrants, even U.S.- born children who've never been to the ravaged countries their parents fled. To facilitate this atrocity, he's appointed dead-eyed ghoul, Project 2025 architect and "devil on earth" Tom Homan as Border Czar. "Is there a way to carry out mass deportation without separating families?" Homan's asked on 60 Minutes. "Of course there is," he responds with brutal alacrity. "Families can be deported together." A gleeful prison-industrial complex sees the upcoming carnage as "an unprecedented opportunity"; their stocks are soaring in anticipation of at least $400 million in tracking, transporting and detaining millions of new victims, and greedy kingpins like Musk Bezos have joined on bended knee. The rest of us, meanwhile, grieve. Choking back tears, Jimmy Kimmel declared the election "a terrible night" for pretty much everyone, even MAGA fans who don't know it yet: "I never thought leopards would eat MY face," sobs the guy who voted for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party. Who knew?
The night was perhaps most painful for women - "It is an awful thing, how much this country hates women" - especially Black women for whom it "affirmed the worst of what many believed about their country": That America would rather elect a racist, rapist, liar, convicted felon, "the world's worst man," than let a woman lead. Hell, they don't even trust us with our own bodies: "This is, it turns out, who we are." "Our biggest mistake was to think we lived in a better country than we do," wrote Rebecca Solnit, "to think we could row this boat across the acid lake before the acid dissolved it." She cites MAGA's angry masculinity - cue ludicrous Trump-as-Rambo memes - a media that failed to explicate the climate crisis matters more than a trans girl playing softball, and a social media run by rich white men that "arose like a school of sharks" to spread hate and lies. All overseen by Dorothy Thompson's standard Nazi: "He is formless, almost faceless, a man whose countenance is a caricature...He is inconsequent and voluble, ill-poised, insecure. He is the very prototype of the Little Man." Whose devastation we now must grapple with, and endure.
We
We are feeling our way through the sadness and horror, seeking a way forward. We are weary, hopeless, soul-scorched. Everything sucks. We need time to process. But not, experts say, too much time. In his book On Tyranny, historian Timothy Snyder warns of the Russian strategy of “internal emigration," turning away from politics or resistance in powerless despair, leaving the vulnerable among us to suffer first and worst. His mantra: “Do not obey in advance.” Do what heals or feeds you. Consider Raymond Carver's "small good thing," and do it. Here in Maine, we've done a lot of walking and talking with friends in the woods or by the ocean, usually with dogs, who these days, as all days, seem much happier than the rest of us. Community is key; we are going to need each other. Michael Moore just emerged: "Silence. Thinking. Then acting. In that order." From one sage, "Remember that living your life with purpose in a country that wants you to fade away is a radical act." Also, remember that on Nov. 26, the president-elect is due to be sentenced in a New York courtroom on 34 felony counts. What a time to be alive..
"It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character.”
– Joseph Heller, Catch-22
Monday, November 11, 2024
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Trump taps fierce UN critic to serve as envoy to it
President-elect Trump’s nomination of Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations sets the stage for one of the organization’s most vocal and combative critics to have a powerful seat at its table.
Stefanik, 40, the fourth-ranking House Republican and a devoted Trump loyalist, has little foreign policy experience. But she has built a reputation over the last year as a leading champion of Israel, in part by repeatedly hammering the U.N. for its reproach of the country’s military response to last year’s attacks by Hamas. In September, she accused the organization of being infected by “antisemitic rot.”
Her nomination as America’s top envoy to the U.N. sends an early signal that Trump intends to side squarely with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a conservative Trump ally who has ignored President Biden’s calls for a regional cease-fire, as the Middle Eastern conflict expands and intensifies.
The posting also sends a broader message to the world that Trump’s “America First” approach — which envisions a shrinking role for the United States in world diplomacy and global affairs — is likely to reign supreme in his second term.
That strategy is likely to surface most prominently in Ukraine, where Trump has declined to commit more military support as Kyiv continues the years-long battle against Russia’s invading forces. Stefanik called for “devastating action” to defeat Russian President Vladimir Putin early in the war, but voted against a multibillion-dollar aid package to Ukraine earlier this year.
In accepting the nomination Monday, Stefanik defended Trump’s shift toward isolationism, suggesting it would nudge America’s allies into taking a more active role in the pursuit of global peace.
“America continues to be the beacon of the world,” she said in a statement, “but we expect and must demand that our friends and allies be strong partners in the peace we seek.”
Trump’s Republican allies on Capitol Hill quickly hailed the nomination on Monday, praising Stefanik as a “fantastic choice” for the position.
“She is extremely qualified for this new role in public service, and the House’s loss will be a huge gain for the Trump Administration and the country. There is nobody better to represent President Trump’s foreign policy and America’s values at the United Nations than Elise Stefanik,” House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) said in a statement.
But her promotion to global envoy is sure to ring alarm bells among both traditional conservatives, who still support a muscular defense of NATO and America’s overseas allies, and Democrats, who consider Stefanik to be an unscrupulous political opportunist and a blind sycophant to Trump.
“Trump’s pick of Rep. Stefanik is a gift to Vladamir Putin,” said Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), a senior member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. “She abandoned Ukrainians in April, and this further signals Donald Trump and MAGA’s retreat from the global stage.”
Stefanik’s imminent jump to the administration immediately sparked the race to replace her in GOP leadership, with a handful of GOP lawmakers already announcing their bids. It could also complicate Trump’s ambitious 100-day legislative agenda by cutting into what is already expected to be a slim majority for the House Republicans.
Although Stefanik serves on the House Armed Services and Intelligence committees, she has made greater waves from her perch as a senior member of the Education and Workforce Committee, where she was in line for the gavel before jumping into House leadership.
But the New York Republican saw her star rise rapidly in December when, during a hearing of the Education committee, she questioned a trio of university presidents about antisemitism on their campuses following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel — an episode that went viral and prompted two of the three leaders to resign from their posts.
Since then, the House GOP conference chair has made combating antisemitism a prime part of her portfolio on Capitol Hill, a posture that has included incisive criticism of the United Nations.
In October, for example, the New York Republican appeared to threaten U.S. funding for the U.N. over the Biden administration’s alleged “silence” regarding perceived antisemitism in the organization. The statement was in reaction to the Palestinian Authority eyeing an effort to expel Israel from the United Nations.
“Should the Palestinian Authority succeed in their antisemitic pursuit, it would result in a complete reassessment of U.S. funding of the United Nations. American taxpayers have no interest in continuing to fund an organization that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have allowed to rot with antisemitism,” Stefanik wrote.
She also took a jab at the United Nations in her May address before the Israeli Knesset, when she became the highest-ranking House member to visit Israel after the Oct. 7 attack.
“When the enemy is inside the gates of the United Nations, America must be the one to call it by its name and destroy it,” Stefanik said. “President Trump understood that, and B’ezrat hashem, we will return to that strategy soon.”
Stefanik is already making clear that Israel will remain a top priority of hers if she is confirmed as ambassador: The congresswoman is scheduled to meet with Israeli President Isaac Herzog on Tuesday, according to The Times of Israel.
The nomination highlights Trump’s penchant for rewarding his most loyal allies with plum assignments. It also marks the culmination of Stefanik’s head-snapping turn from moderate lawmaker with a reputation for reaching across the aisle to fierce partisan who emerged as one of Trump’s most ardent defenders on Capitol Hill. That support first gained prominence during Trump’s first impeachment in 2019, and it only grew louder in the wake of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
That loyalty to the former president was quickly rewarded in the months following the rampage when House Republicans — infuriated that Rep. Liz Cheney (Wyo.), a member of their own leadership ranks, had voted to impeach Trump for his role in the attack — voted to oust Cheney and promote Stefanik as the conference chair.
As House investigators began examining the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, Stefanik blamed then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) for the rampage. It was a familiar argument — one initiated by Trump.
UN officials plan to charm Stefanik
Officials at the international body believe they’re better off working with Trump’s envoy than fighting with her.
Elise Stefanik is a onetime moderate Republican who has transformed herself into a pro-Donald Trump loyalist. | Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
U.N. officials worry that when President-elect Donald Trump takes office, he’ll slash the organization’s funding and trash it over alleged anti-Israel bias.
But when Elise Stefanik — Trump’s pick to be the new ambassador to the institution — arrives, she’ll be greeted with a smile.
That’s because U.N. officials are generally of the mind that embracing the new envoy is the best way to mitigate what is likely to be a damaging four years under Trump, according to eight U.N. diplomats and others who are in touch with officials there.
U.N. officials were more prepared for the possibility of a Trump victory this year than in 2016. They know from experience that there’s no point in picking a fight with the new envoy, who is on a glide-path to confirmation by the Republican-controlled Senate after Trump takes office. Instead, U.N. officials are likely to put on a charm offensive, from Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to the lowliest staff assistant.
“It’s in any secretary general’s interest to have the most constructive possible relationship with a U.S. permanent representative,” a senior U.N. diplomat said, noting that Guterres saw himself as getting along well with Trump during the president-elect’s first term. “She seems to have a close relationship with Trump, and that’s what matters.”
Like others interviewed, the diplomat was granted anonymity to speak candidly.
An African diplomat in touch with U.N. officials said the sentiment was widespread in New York’s Turtle Bay neighborhood, where memories are still fresh about Trump’s first term.
“Now they all know they need to work with [the Trump administration], and it’s better to work with them than fight them,” the African diplomat said.
Stefanik, a GOP House member from New York, has publicly berated the U.N. for perceived anti-Israel bias, including by criticizing some of the resolutions passed by the organization. She has said the U.S. should consider funding cuts to punish the U.N. for such actions.
Such statements don’t surprise U.N. officials. Still, many at the U.N. believe Stefanik’s close relationship to Trump means she will speak for him with no caveats — a clarity that can prove useful in diplomacy.
Aides to Stefanik did not respond to requests for comment.
U.N. diplomats had eagerly anticipated Trump’s choice for the role since he won election this month. Stefanik wasn’t on many of their radars until last week. But her history only added to expectations that the incoming administration will prioritize cutting U.N. funding and promoting a pro-Israel vision.
Stefanik is a onetime moderate Republican who has transformed herself into a pro-Trump loyalist. She stood up for Trump relentlessly when he faced impeachment.
Many at the U.N. believe Stefanik’s close relationship to Trump means she will speak for him with no caveats — a clarity that can prove useful in diplomacy. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
She’s also been one of the most pro-Israel voices in Congress. She drew the spotlight by slamming university leaders for their responses to antisemitism on college campuses amid protests against the Israel-Hamas war.
She has voiced support for cutting U.N. funding because of perceived anti-Israel bias at the world body. But Republicans have also long had other reasons for wanting to reduce U.S. support for the U.N., including questions about its effectiveness and allegations of previous corruption.
Several U.N.-based diplomats warned that if Trump reduces U.S. funding, he may not like the trade-offs.
“Whatever the MAGA team may think of the U.N., it’s also true that China will fill whatever vacuum they leave behind,” warned one of them. If confirmed for the job, Stefanik will need to balance Trump’s desire to act tough on China with his distaste for the world body.
Turtle Bay is, however, bracing for an era of austerity. U.N. officials have said for months that, independent of potential U.S. funding cuts, they’ve been looking at liquidity issues and seeking ways to save money.
Several U.N. diplomats said they expected the U.S. to zero-out funding for the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, or UNRWA, which oversees aid to Gaza entirely. “We have to plan as if U.S. funding for UNRWA will never come back,” said a U.N.-based diplomat.
Some diplomats contend U.S. cuts to the U.N. — an issue on which Congress would get a say — can be managed if they aren’t too steep.
“We’re in a more resilient position for core funding … than we were three, four years ago,” the senior U.N. diplomat said.
But plenty of people at the U.N. are nervous about the money flow, and they speak of it in terms of exhaustion. They question whether the U.S. is still reliable.
“It’s not related to her,” one U.N. diplomat said of Stefanik. “It’s the basic question, what is going to be the stand of the U.S.?”
Trump is putting Stefanik in his Cabinet, but her influence may be hemmed in by the future secretary of State and national security adviser, both key diplomatic players in any administration.
When Nikki Haley served as Trump’s U.N. ambassador during his first term, she did not get along with his first secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, and created her own power center. The former South Carolina governor claimed in a memoir that Tillerson tried to persuade her to work with him to undermine Trump. Tillerson has denied this.
But there also were rumblings that Haley was drawing too much attention in an administration where the president liked the limelight. One senior White House official said Haley “flew too close to the sun.” Haley subsequently ran against Trump for the GOP presidential nomination, and he declared on Saturday that he would not invite her to serve in his second administration.
Based on her history with Trump so far, Stefanik is unlikely to try to outshine or outmaneuver the president-elect.
While Stefanik has little diplomatic background, her time in the GOP House leadership has given her experience that can come in handy at the United Nations, where persuading other countries to vote for your priorities is critical.
“A lot of what you learn in leadership in the House of Representatives carries over to how you put together a coalition in New York — it’s the same skill set,” said Peter Yeo, senior vice president of the U.N. Foundation.
Nick Reisman contributed to this report from Albany, New York.
Why Sweden nixed new wind farms for fear of missing Russian missiles
Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen looks at wind turbines of the Middelgrunden offshore wind farm, in Oeresund between Denmark and Sweden, outside Copenhagen, on April 22, 2021. (Emil Helms/Ritzau Scanpix/AFP via Getty Images)
BERLIN — Sweden’s government this month blocked the construction of 13 offshore wind farms over concerns that they would shorten the country’s early-warning window for a Russian missile attack.
The decision marks another example in Europe of national security factors seeping into political decisions that were deemed civilian in nature before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
In this case, the issue is about two dueling interests: sustainable-energy independence and surveillance of the national airspace. That is because wind farms can interact with radar signals, reducing the quality of the situational air picture or even outright blocking out parts of the sky.
“The reaction time in the event of a missile attack could go from 2 minutes to 60 seconds with wind farms in the way,” Swedish Defense Minister Pål Jonson wrote in a series of posts on X, formerly known as Twitter. They were accompanied by a schematic drawing of the wind farms casting a “shadow” behind them in which missiles and cruise missiles would stay undetected.
The perceived threat clearly comes from Russia, with Jonson pointing out that “the proximity to the heavily militarized” Russian exclave of Kaliningrad was “important in this context.”
Experts speaking to Defense News for this story said wind farm radar interference is a known issue. And some expressed concern that as more and more wind farms are built, the effects could get worse unless countermeasures are put in place.
“Radar interference can impede air traffic control, weather forecasting, homeland security, and national defense missions,” U.S. Department of Energy spokesperson wrote in an email to Defense News, while also stressing that “the vast majority of wind projects … pose no significant impacts to radar missions.” Radar performance
There are a number of ways that wind turbines, and especially large groups of them, can mess with the readings from a radar system. For one, they can show up on the screen because, just like any other object, they bounce back the electromagnetic waves that radar relies on. The fact that they are moving – the blades are spinning, and the turbines can change orientation – can make it more difficult for analysts to filter out the noise and find actual threats in the skies.
With the wingtips rotating at a speed of up to 370 kilometers per hour (around 230 mph), they move fast enough for doppler radars to sense them as moving objects, resulting in a false positive on an operator’s screen.
Benjamin Karlson leads the Wind Turbine Radar Interference Mitigation program at the American Sandia National Laboratories. His team has tested various concepts at mitigating the problem, he said, but “there’s no silver bullet.” Radar-absorbent coating is expensive and leaves the problem of a blind spots; temporary shutoffs lead to losses for the operators of wind farms; and infill, or fallback, radars are but costly workarounds.
Governments and private companies have been aware of the issue for decades, with the topic first being presented to the U.S. Congress in 2006. Considerable research has occurred in both the U.S. and U.K.
In the United States, “the communication between the developers and the federal agencies has grown over the years,” said Karlson. The Department of Defense, Federal Aviation Administration, the country’s weather service NOAA and others all have a stake in approving new wind farm developments. Despite these hurdles, Karlson said he wasn’t aware of a single case where a wind farm proposal had to be denied outright, though adjusting the placement of individual turbines, or tweaking their dimensions, is a more common practice.
“Most potential conflicts are dealt with through minor and routine mitigation measures in the federal project evaluation process,” the Department of Energy said in a statement.
Radar systems vary greatly so what might work for one can be completely ineffective on another. Over-the-horizon radars, for example, might be especially affected by offshore wind farms. As the name suggests, these systems have a much greater range than other radars, which are generally limited to the line of sight of the antenna and so cannot see past the curvature of the earth.
The longer-range variants bounce their beams off the ionosphere layer of the atmosphere before the waves travel back close to the surface – where wind farms can get in the way and may completely block out the signal. “There is no way of mitigating that aside from not building turbines,” said Karlson.
In his announcement, the Swedish defense minister did not specify what radar systems’ signals the country was concerned about blocking, and Karlson said that there was not enough information to make an educated guess.
Additionally, “the wind farms could also lead to reduced intelligence-gathering capabilities and disrupt sensors used to detect submarines,” Jonson said in his announcement. Altogether, the construction would have “unacceptable consequences for Swedish security.”
“Clearly, the Swedish government thinks there is a big concern,” said Karlson. Energy requirements
Simultaneously, wind energy presents a crucial pillar in the clean energy transition, a topic that has gained exceptional pertinence in a Europe starved for energy since the Russian war in Ukraine. Traditionally, Europe obtained a large part of its energy from Russia, which controls vast oil and gas reserves and over decades built a network of pipelines to European countries to sell its hydrocarbons at a competitive price. While the green-energy transition predates the war, it has been turbocharged by it: Russia has used its leverage over European energy supply as a leverage and a weapon in its hybrid warfare, while European leaders have rushed to ween their countries off of Russian gas and oil.
According to the Swedish Energy Agency, the “supply of electricity in Sweden is stable.” Simultaneously, however, the government agency warned that “Sweden will have rising electricity prices” as a direct result of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The planned wind farms would have had the potential to contribute significantly to Sweden’s renewable energy production, with the rejected plans seeing turbines stretching all the way from the Åland Islands along the east coast down to Öresund.
While the government blocked the construction of the 13 proposed wind farms in the Baltic, it also greenlit the construction of the “Poseidon” wind farm off the country’s western – NATO-facing – coast, with a maximum of 81 turbines producing up to 5.5 terawatt hours per year.
Sweden’s government has committed itself to double the country’s annual electricity production in the next twenty years, in anticipation of higher consumption. A buildup of the country’s nuclear power capacity is supposed to bear the brunt of this burden, though critics have pointed out that demand is expected to increase faster than new power reactors can go online.
Similar trade-offs between wind farm construction and radar visibility have had to be made in other European countries. The British and French ministries of Defense have objected to developments over similar concerns, and various other government agencies across the continent have issued guidelines for distances that should be maintained between wind farms and different types of radar stations.
Both energy independence and climate change have increasingly entered the realm of national security in national government across Europe and the world, with leaders seeing them as integral parts of their countries’ defense and prosperity. The Swedish government’s decision points the spotlight on one dimension of this interaction that has, until now, flown under the radar.
Linus Höller is a Europe correspondent for Defense News. He covers international security and military developments across the continent. Linus holds a degree in journalism, political science and international studies, and is currently pursuing a master’s in nonproliferation and terrorism studies.
Sweden Rejects 13 Baltic Sea Wind Projects on Risks to Security Against Russia Threats
By Lars Paulsson and Niclas Rolander
November 04, 2024
(Bloomberg) -- Sweden rejected 13 offshore wind projects in the Baltic Sea deemed to pose a risk to the nation’s ability to protect itself against attacks from Russia.
Offshore turbines could hamper the activity of submarines and delay the ability to react to any incoming missiles, Defense Minister Pal Jonson said at a news conference in Stockholm on Monday. The security situation in the Baltic Sea is “extremely sensitive,” he said.
Sweden’s concern about Russian aggression has heightened following the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, which prompted the Nordic nation to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization alongside neighboring Finland. The Swedish Armed Forces have also vetoed onshore wind parks on security grounds.
“It’s a very unfortunate decision,” said Hillevi Priscar, who runs Swedish operations at OX2 AB, one of the developers that had several projects rejected. “We are convinced that it’s possible to take advantage of Sweden’s unique conditions for offshore wind while at the same time build a stronger defense,” she said by email.
The Baltic Sea is an ideal place for offshore wind, with good and even wind speeds and a shallow seabed. Other nations in close proximity to Russia, including Poland and Germany, are expanding offshore wind, with a constructive cooperation between the industry and armed forces, Priscar said.
Other firms with projects that were rejected include Germany’s energy giant RWE AG and Norway’s state-owned utility Statkraft AS.
“Statkraft remains committed to developing offshore wind in Sweden and we continue our work with development of the five Swedish projects in our portfolio that are outside the Baltic Sea,” said Jakob Norstrom, head of Statkraft Sverige.
Despite the good conditions for offshore wind, hardly any has been built. Vattenfall AB, Sweden’s biggest power producer, has halted the development of a large project and threatened to pause another off the west coast, saying that they don’t make financial sense if firms have to pay for connections to the grid themselves.
The rejected projects would have had a combined output of about 140 terawatt-hours, or almost the same as the nation’s current demand. While all of them wouldn’t have been built, it’s a huge blow to the nation’s future power supplies, as concerns mount of the prospects of its planned nuclear revival.
While Sweden needs to roughly double its power production in the next few decades to meet the demands of the electrification of the economy, safety is the most important, Jonson said, adding that “the interests of the Armed Forces must weigh extra heavily on any decisions taken.”
With wind farms hampering signals, Sweden would have much less time to respond to any attack, Jonson said.
“Early warning is crucial, both to be able to counteract ballistic missiles and cruise missiles,” Jonson said. “It’s also crucial for the population to be able to seek shelter in the event of an attack on Sweden.”
One project on the west coast, known as Poseidon, was approved by the government.
(Updates with comments from developers from fourth paragraph.)
UK's oldest satellite veers miles off track on its own leaving scientists confused
UK satellite launched in 1969 moves dep into outer space but nobody knows who moved it or how
By Web Desk| November 11, 2024
An undated image shows Skynet-1A satellite. — X/@Horashi0
In a shocking turn of events for the space industry in the United Kingdom, scientists recently discovered that the country's oldest satellite has veered deep into space, thousands of miles off track.
Skynet-1A, a satellite that was launched into space in 1969 soon after man's first lunar landing, and was originally positioned over East Africa to facilitate British military communications.
However, recently, it was found by scientists to have relocated and hovering above the Americas, far from its expected trajectory over the Indian Ocean, the Daily Express reported.
What scientists found baffling about this was that they had no clear explanation of who moved it or how.
According to the scientists, orbital mechanics suggest that a half-tonne satellite shouldn't drift that far on its own which leads to the conclusion that it was intentionally moved.
Nobody can say who would want or be able to do such a thing. But is the satellite's relocation a good thing or a bad thing?
Space consultant Dr Stuart Eves told the BBC: "It's still relevant because whoever did move Skynet-1A did us few favours.
“It's now in what we call a 'gravity well' at 105° West longitude, wandering backwards and forwards like a marble at the bottom of a bowl. And unfortunately this brings it close to other satellite traffic on a regular basis.
"Because it's dead, the risk is it might bump into something, and because it's 'our' satellite, we're still responsible for it.
The satellite was made in the United States and put in space by a US Air Force (USAF) Delta rocket.
Thanks to veterans of the programme that put it in space, the satellite revolutionised UK telecommunications capacity and allowed London to communicate securely with British forces, such as Singapore.
Rachel Hill, a PhD student from University College London, has reviewed documents and believes that plausible explanations exist for how the satellite has arrived at its present location.
She said: "A Skynet team from Oakhanger would go to the USAF satellite facility in Sunnyvale (colloquially known as the Blue Cube) and operate Skynet during 'Oakout'. This was when control was temporarily transferred to the US while Oakhanger was down for essential maintenance. Perhaps the move could have happened then?”
Mining old data from NASA's Voyager 2 solves several Uranus mysteries
by Karen Fox, Molly Wasser and Gretchen McCartney, NASA
The first panel of this artist’s concept depicts how Uranus’s magnetosphere — its protective bubble — was behaving before the flyby of NASA’s Voyager 2. The second panel shows an unusual kind of solar weather was happening during the 1986 flyby, giving scientists a skewed view of the magnetosphere. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
When NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft flew by Uranus in 1986, it provided scientists' first—and, so far, only—close glimpse of this strange, sideways-rotating outer planet. Alongside the discovery of new moons and rings, baffling new mysteries confronted scientists. The energized particles around the planet defied their understanding of how magnetic fields work to trap particle radiation, and Uranus earned a reputation as an outlier in our solar system.
Now, new research analyzing the data collected during that flyby 38 years ago has found that the source of that particular mystery is a cosmic coincidence. It turns out that in the days just before Voyager 2's flyby, the planet had been affected by an unusual kind of space weather that squashed the planet's magnetic field, dramatically compressing Uranus's magnetosphere.
"If Voyager 2 had arrived just a few days earlier, it would have observed a completely different magnetosphere at Uranus," said Jamie Jasinski of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California and lead author of the new work published in Nature Astronomy. "The spacecraft saw Uranus in conditions that only occur about 4% of the time."
Magnetospheres serve as protective bubbles around planets (including Earth) with magnetic cores and magnetic fields, shielding them from jets of ionized gas—or plasma—that stream out from the sun in the solar wind. Learning more about how magnetospheres work is important for understanding our own planet, as well as those in seldom-visited corners of our solar system and beyond.
That's why scientists were eager to study Uranus's magnetosphere, and what they saw in the Voyager 2 data in 1986 flummoxed them. Inside the planet's magnetosphere were electron radiation belts with an intensity second only to Jupiter's notoriously brutal radiation belts. But there was apparently no source of energized particles to feed those active belts; in fact, the rest of Uranus's magnetosphere was almost devoid of plasma.
The missing plasma also puzzled scientists because they knew that the five major Uranian moons in the magnetic bubble should have produced water ions, as icy moons around other outer planets do. They concluded that the moons must be inert with no ongoing activity.
NASA’s Voyager 2 captured this image of Uranus while flying by the ice giant in 1986. New research using data from the mission shows a solar wind event took place during the flyby, leading to a mystery about the planet’s magnetosphere that now may be solved. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Solving the mystery
So why was no plasma observed, and what was happening to beef up the radiation belts? The new data analysis points to the solar wind. When plasma from the sun pounded and compressed the magnetosphere, it likely drove plasma out of the system. The solar wind event also would have briefly intensified the dynamics of the magnetosphere, which would have fed the belts by injecting electrons into them.
The findings could be good news for those five major moons of Uranus: Some of them might be geologically active after all. With an explanation for the temporarily missing plasma, researchers say it's plausible that the moons actually may have been spewing ions into the surrounding bubble all along.
Planetary scientists are focusing on bolstering their knowledge about the mysterious Uranus system, which the National Academies' 2023 Planetary Science and Astrobiology Decadal Survey prioritized as a target for a future NASA mission.
JPL's Linda Spilker was among the Voyager 2 mission scientists glued to the images and other data that flowed in during the Uranus flyby in 1986. She remembers the anticipation and excitement of the event, which changed how scientists thought about the Uranian system.
"The flyby was packed with surprises, and we were searching for an explanation of its unusual behavior. The magnetosphere Voyager 2 measured was only a snapshot in time," said Spilker, who has returned to the iconic mission to lead its science team as project scientist. "This new work explains some of the apparent contradictions, and it will change our view of Uranus once again."
Voyager 2, now in interstellar space, is almost 13 billion miles (21 billion kilometers) from Earth.
'Webb has shown us they are clearly wrong': How astrophysicist Sophie Koudami's research on supermassive black holes is rewriting the history of our universe
How did supermassive black holes get big so fast? Astrophysicist Souphie Koudmani tells us how she and her colleagues are finding out.
An artist's rendering of a black hole (Image credit: Vadim Sadovski via Shutterstock)
A supermassive mystery lurks at the center of the Milky Way. Supermassive black holes are gigantic ruptures in space-time that sit in the middle of many galaxies, periodically sucking in matter before spitting it out at near light speeds to shape how galaxies evolve.
Yet how they came to be so enormous is a prevailing mystery in astrophysics, made even deeper by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Since it came online in 2022, the telescope has found that the cosmic monsters are shockingly abundant and massive in the few million years after the Big Bang — a discovery that defies many of our best models for how black holes grew.
Sophie Koudmani is an astrophysicist at the University of Cambridge searching for answers to this problem. Live Science sat down with her at the New Scientist Live event in London to discuss the cosmic monsters, how they could have formed, and how her work using supercomputers to simulate them could rewrite the history of our universe.
Ben Turner: Why are supermassive black holes so important for understanding our universe?
Sophie Koudmani: In the universe, everything is connected and supermassive black holes play a very important role. They generate a huge amount of energy that comes from the region around the black holes. As gas falls in, its gravitational potential energy is converted into radiation. This makes the gas very hot, and as it heats up it starts glowing.
The gas is heated up to millions of degrees, and its radiation then influences the whole galaxy. It stops gas clumping together to form stars, pausing star formation in a way that's important to produce realistic galaxies. The energy [from supermassive black holes] can then travel out even further and influence the large-scale structure of the universe — which is really important for cosmology and understanding cosmic evolution.
BT: So when you talk about the energy flowing outwards, you're referring to relativistic jets, or near-light speed outflows from some black holes, right?
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SK: Yes. There's three kinds of ways that black holes "'speak"' to their host galaxies. One is through relativistic jets, another is by winds given off by the accretion disk [the cloud-like structure of gas, dust and plasma that orbits black holes] — these are not as thin as jets — and then there is radiation. So generally disks give off X-rays and radiation from other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum.
BT: You touched on this already, but what would galaxies look like if black holes didn't exist?
SK: So what you could get is what is often called "runaway star formation." All of the gas would get very quickly consumed, and you would get balls of stars. This is not what galaxies look like. To get the disk galaxies [we see in our universe] it's really important to have some kind of black hole. You need to get a realistic ratio between gas and stars, without them being eaten up straight away.
Sophie Koudmani. (Image credit: Elodie Guige)
BT: What drew you to studying black holes? What questions do you want to answer about them?
SK: One thing that I really like about supermassive black holes is that they are seemingly simple, but then this incredibly rich physics comes off them. You can actually characterize black holes with just two numbers — their mass and their spin — and that completely tells you what they behave like, it's called the "no hair theorem." From these two numbers you can get all of these different possibilities. For example, some black holes have jets and others don't, some have brightly-glowing accretion disks and others are completely quiet. It's the interaction with the galaxies that brings this out.
So it's a simple object at the center that can be incredibly powerful. It interacts with something that can be quite complex and messy, the galaxy — you get the gas, the dust, the stars, all being held together by dark matter which we don't understand very well. And all of these components interact with each other in ways that are really complex to understand.
BT: It's interesting that you described them as simple, because in relativistic physics they're where all of our equations break down and where we might want to look for theories of quantum gravity. Do they only look simple because our theories of them are?
SK: It depends what you're interested in. If you're interested in what's going on inside the event horizon, then yeah, sure, the singularity is where our theories break down. We don't know exactly about other physical phenomena, like Hawking radiation, that could actually come from inside of the black hole.
If you're worrying about all of this, yes, you have a very difficult job! But if you're thinking about astrophysical black holes, you're interested in the gas flows and radiation around the black hole. As an astrophysicist, you can be quite happy to locate the event horizon, see what it does to the region around it, and be relatively agnostic about what's inside. The location of that horizon itself is uniquely determined by the mass and the spin.
BT: What mysteries has JWST revealed about black holes that we didn't know before?
SK: We didn't know that there would be so many supermassive black holes so early on. They exist in such high numbers [in the early universe] and inside pretty small galaxies, that was surprising.
My PhD was on modeling black holes in small galaxies, it was lucky that I happened to be working on that because it's become very relevant for the early universe. JWST is telling us that black hole activity happened at very early times and in more galaxies than was thought possible. In fact, the activity seems to be more efficient than in the present-day universe.
Two merging black holes. (Image credit: Mark Garlick/Science Photo Library via Getty Images)
BT: Why might that be?
SK: We all know about cosmic expansion — so the Big Bang happens and the whole universe expands — and this means that in the early times of the universe everything was a bit closer together so gas inflows were stronger, this might have helped to feed black holes.
One problem is that black holes and supernovae kind of compete with one another. Both star formation and black holes consume gas. The black hole blows gas away, so do the supernovae, and supernovae also evacuate the gas from the central region, and then black holes can't grow because the supernovae have kicked out all of the gas. It could be that in the early universe, for one reason or another, this doesn't happen as much, and the black hole just wins out in that process.
In fact, there's a strong hint that the black holes win out [in the early universe]. It almost suggests, because of how massive these black holes are, that black holes assembled faster than their host galaxies.
BT: You also mentioned black hole efficiency. What does that mean, how can black holes have efficiency?
SK: There are various ways. One way is, when they draw in gas, how highly accreting [the speed at which the accretion disk grows] is it? There's a thing called a black hole speed limit called the Eddington Limit. We often measure, as a fraction of that theoretical upper limit, how much the black hole is growing by sucking in gas. For some objects measured by the JWST the efficiency is over 100% — so they are really extremely efficient.
That also means that it's not a hard limit, and there's always some theory and assumptions that went into it, and some of those assumptions might be wrong. In fact, Webb has shown us they are clearly wrong in those scenarios because they manage to break the limit and grow even faster.
BT: And so why does that efficiency decrease as we get into the later stages of the cosmos, the local universe?
SK: So if you have more star formation, there's simply less gas around. So galaxies might get progressively more gas poor, some of it being ejected elsewhere, some turned into stars, and some being consumed by black holes. Very old galaxies are usually dominated by their stars, so-called elliptical galaxies.
BT: How do black holes grow in the first place? There are three key ways, right? Take us through them.
SK: So, the first one is to the first generation of stars. So these would have been much more massive than our sun, around 100 times its mass. When these come to the end of their life and collapse, they collapse into black holes. This could be a good starting point [for supermassive black holes], or it could be a challenging one, as we're starting at 100 [solar masses] and we want to get to 1 million.
A much easier starting point would be huge gas clouds. These collapse directly into black holes, and they start off at something like 100,000 times the mass of the sun, that makes it much easier to get to supermassive black hole [mass scales]. And then there is an in-between scenario called nuclear star clusters, where lots of stars spawn in the center of galaxies and these collapse into black holes.
An artist's impression of the LISA detector, and the gravitational waves it will search for. (Image credit: EADS ASTRUM)
BT: There's also another option out there, hypothesized primordial black holes — possible relics from a time before the Big Bang. It's a very out-there theory, do we see much evidence for it?
SK: It is a very out-there theory. We're getting more constraints on it, and it's certainly not ruled out. I think the exciting thing about this question right now is that nothing is ruled out. The constraints get tighter as we push closer and closer to the times these black holes formed.
BT: How could we finally rule it out? What are those constraints?
SK: Some people are saying that, now that we have found massive black holes so early in the universe, that this means they have to have formed from direct collapse. There are several papers published suggesting that the observations prove this.
But what we are now doing is that we are revising our models of how black holes grew in the early universe to see if there are still other options for other models. Especially if black holes grow efficiently, there's still just enough time for them to grow from a very light seed. So I would say right now, the exciting thing is that none of the models are ruled out.
BT: So how are we looking for answers? We've mentioned the JWST spotting earlier and earlier black holes, are there other pathways we're exploring to find answers?
SK: A really cool way is with gravitational waves. [Detecting them] will allow us to map the supermassive black hole population in a whole different way. Because right now, unless a black hole is very close to us and we can map out these stellar orbits, the only way to spot supermassive black holes is if they're in an active phase.
But when we have gravitational wave instruments that can spot supermassive black hole mergers we will have a second channel that will help us estimate their masses. And that would go back to the early universe because these instruments would be incredibly sensitive. Then we can spot merger signals and find viable mechanisms for their growth.
BT: Your work is on using simulations to spot possible growth pathways. How do they help us to find answers?
SK: It's a constant interplay between observation and simulation. So an observation, for example the early supermassive black holes, gives us something to explain. That then means we might need to adjust models to allow for that kind of growth early on. The simulations then help us know what to look for, and when those observations come back we can adjust our models again.
I work very closely with observers, and I'm part of a large program of the JWST that will take observations next year and do follow ups of these supermassive black holes in their infancy to understand them better.
BT: So finally, what areas of new research into giant black holes are you most excited about?
SK: I'm super excited about the gravitational wave detector LISA that will come online in the 2030s then we'll finally be able measure gravitational waves not just from small black holes but supermassive black holes. You need to be in space to do that.
I'm also quite nerdy when it comes to coding and building models, so I'm also excited about technical development. A really interesting example that's all over the news is, of course, AI.
We're using AI to accelerate our simulations, to make them even more accurate, and to try and bridge all the scales from the huge space of the cosmic web all the way down to event horizons. This is something that's impossible to do even directly right now, because the computational resources of even the biggest, best supercomputers find it too intensive, but we can use AI to develop solutions to that.
Editor's note: This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
This black hole just did something theoretically impossible
Astronomers trained the instrument on a number of galaxies in deep space, and at the center of one galaxy spotted a young, dwarf black hole triggering enormous outbursts of gas. Cosmic material traveling near a black hole can get pulled around these gravitationally powerful objects, and some of it gets eaten. But black holes are awfully messy eaters, leading to ejections of gas in potent "outflows." Yet this particular black hole, dubbed LID-568, is feeding ravenously on matter at a rate 40 times faster than thought possible.
Scientists found this black hole has exceeded the "Eddington limit," which is basically the maximum brightness an object can achieve and how rapidly it can consume matter. Such a feat could be why astronomers are finding black holes, born early on, that are more massive than such a young object ought to be. (This black hole dwells in a galaxy born around 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang — which is means it's relatively young. The universe is some 13.8 billion years old.) It's possible that black holes may grow massive in a single bout of dramatic feeding. "This black hole is having a feast."
"This extreme case shows that a fast-feeding mechanism above the Eddington limit is one of the possible explanations for why we see these very heavy black holes so early in the Universe," Scharwächter explained. An artist's conception depicting the ravenously feeding black hole at the center of an early dwarf galaxy. Credit: NOIRLab / NSF / AURA / J. da Silva / M. Zamani
Black holes are fascinating objects. They're unimaginably dense: If Earth was (hypothetically) crushed into a black hole, it would be under an inch across. This profound density gives black holes phenomenal gravitational power. Famously, even light that falls in (meaning passing a boundary called the "event horizon") cannot escape.
To observe the extremely distant black hole LID-568, scientists employed the Webb telescope's Near InfraRed Spectrograph, or NIRSpec, to observe the faint but powerful light from gas emissions beaming from the black hole. Mashable Light Speed Want more out-of-this world tech, space and science stories? Sign up for Mashable's weekly Light Speed newsletter.Sign Me Up By signing up you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.
The investigation of LID-568, however, has just begun. Astronomers want to know how this black hole broke its Eddington limit, which means more viewing with the Webb telescope.
The Webb telescope's powerful abilities
The Webb telescope — a scientific collaboration between NASA, ESA, and the Canadian Space Agency — is designed to peer into the deepest cosmos and reveal new insights about the early universe. It's also examining intriguing planets in our galaxy, along with the planets and moons in our solar system.
- Giant mirror: Webb's mirror, which captures light, is over 21 feet across. That's over two-and-a-half times larger than the Hubble Space Telescope's mirror. Capturing more light allows Webb to see more distant, ancient objects. The telescope is peering at stars and galaxies that formed over 13 billion years ago, just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. "We're going to see the very first stars and galaxies that ever formed," Jean Creighton, an astronomer and the director of the Manfred Olson Planetarium at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, told Mashable in 2021.
- Infrared view: Unlike Hubble, which largely views light that's visible to us, Webb is primarily an infrared telescope, meaning it views light in the infrared spectrum. This allows us to see far more of the universe. Infrared has longer wavelengths than visible light, so the light waves more efficiently slip through cosmic clouds; the light doesn't as often collide with and get scattered by these densely packed particles. Ultimately, Webb's infrared eyesight can penetrate places Hubble can't.
"It lifts the veil," said Creighton.
- Peering into distant exoplanets: The Webb telescope carries specialized equipment called spectrographs that will revolutionize our understanding of these far-off worlds. The instruments can decipher what molecules (such as water, carbon dioxide, and methane) exist in the atmospheres of distant exoplanets — be they gas giants or smaller rocky worlds. Webb looks at exoplanets in the Milky Way galaxy. Who knows what we'll find?
"We might learn things we never thought about," Mercedes López-Morales, an exoplanet researcher and astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics-Harvard & Smithsonian, told Mashable in 2021.
Already, astronomers have successfully found intriguing chemical reactions on a planet 700 light-years away, and have started looking at one of the most anticipated places in the cosmos: the rocky, Earth-sized planets of the TRAPPIST solar system.
Data from today's reboost to help inform the design for SpaceX's ISS deorbit vehicle.
(Image credit: NASA/Don Pettit)
The International Space Station is going a just tiny bit faster today, after receiving an orbital boost from SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft.
SpaceX's 31st commercial resupply mission lifted off Nov. 4, launching a Dragon cargo vehicle to rendezvous with the International Space Station (ISS), docking to the station's forward-facing port the next day. Today (Nov. 8), for the first time, Dragon performed an orbit-raising maneuver to stabilize the ISS's trajectory in low-Earth orbit.
Such maneuvers are routine for the orbital lab, which requires periodic boosts to maintain its altitude above Earth and prevent its orbital decay into the planet's atmosphere. Historically, this has been accomplished using Russia's Soyuz and Progress vehicles, and other spacecraft, but, for the first time, it has now been performed SpaceX's Dragon. The milestone marks a symbolic beginning of the end for the ISS, as data from the maneuver will be used toward the design of the deorbit vehicle NASA has contracted SpaceX to construct to plunge the decommissioned space station into the Pacific Ocean sometime after 2030.
"NASA and SpaceX monitored operations as the company’s Dragon spacecraft performed its first demonstration of reboost capabilities for the International Space Station at 12:50pm ET today," NASA posted on X.
.@NASA and @SpaceX monitored operations as the company’s Dragon spacecraft performed its first demonstration of reboost capabilities for the International Space Station at 12:50pm ET today. https://t.co/jckgtW5pW8November 8, 2024
Dragon isn't the first U.S.-built spacecraft to lend its fuel to the space station's orbit. NASA tested an ISS orbit reboost using a Northrop Grumman Cygnus cargo vehicle in 2022. The data from Dragon's reboost, however, will ultimately pave the way for a catastrophic "un-boosting" of the space station's orbit.
The ISS has been in continuous use and occupancy for almost 25 years now. NASA has projected the ISS's viability through the end of this decade. Citing aging technology, increasing maintenance requirements and rising costs, the space agency aims to retire the space station no earlier than 2030, and in July, awarded SpaceX the contract to develop the vehicle tasked with safely plummeting the football field-size spacecraft into the sea.
When the burden of ongoing ISS costs are alleviated from its budget, NASA will count on the availability of new commercially operated space stations to continue its research in low-Earth orbit. The space station's retirement will free up financial room for the space agency to expand endeavors like the Artemis Program and other deep space exploration missions.
Jared Metter, director of flight reliability at SpaceX, expressed optimism during a press conference Monday (Nov. 4), saying today's attitude control maneuver was "a good demonstration" of Dragon's capabilities as the company designs the ISS deorbit vehicle.
Though international tensions were inflamed following Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the U.S.-Russian partnership as it pertains to the ISS has persisted. Dragon's success, however, does eliminate another U.S. reliance on Russia for operation of the space station, should that partnership dissolve.
Between the retirement of the space shuttle in 2011 and the beginning of Dragon's crewed missions, the only way for NASA astronauts to launch to the ISS was aboard Russian spacecraft. SpaceX's Crew Dragon returned the launch of NASA astronauts to American soil in 2020, and has now proven it can maintain the space station's orbit, indefinitely.
While NASA has committed to its ISS partnership through 2030, Russia, as of yet, is only committed through 2028, stating its intent to launch a new Russian space station into polar orbit by 2027.
Mysterious 'Interstellar Tunnel' Found in Our Local Pocket of Space
A 3D model of the solar neighborhood, within the Local Hot Bubble. (Michael Yeung/MPE)
The Solar System's little pocket of the Milky Way is, interestingly enough, exactly that. Our star resides in an unusually hot, low-density compartment in the galaxy's skirts, known as the Local Hot Bubble (LHB).
Why it's not called the Local Hot Pocket is anyone's guess; but, because it's an anomaly, scientists want to know why the region exists.
Now a team of astronomers has mapped the bubble, revealing not just a strange asymmetry in the pocket's shape and temperature gradient, but the presence of a mysterious tunnel pointing towards the constellation Centaurus.
The new data about the shape and heat of the bubble supports a previous interpretation that the LHB was excavated by exploding supernovae that expanded and heated the structure, while the tunnel suggests that it may be connected to another low-density bubble nearby.
The LHB is characterized by its temperature. It's a region thought to be at least 1,000 light-years across, hovering at a temperature of around a million Kelvin. Because the atoms are spread so thin, this high temperature doesn't have a significant heating effect on the matter within, which is probably just as well for us. But it does emit a glow in X-rays, which is how astronomers identified it, years ago.
But characterizing something you're physically inside is a lot easier to say than do. Imagine a fish (if a fish had human-like intelligence) trying to describe the shape of its tank without moving from the center. It's tricky – but with the right tools, it becomes easier.
This brings us to eROSITA, the Max Planck Institute of Extraterrestrial Physics' powerful space-based X-ray telescope. Led by astrophysicist Michael Yeung of the Institute, a team of researchers has made use of eROSITA to probe the LHB in greater detail than ever before.
We know, thanks to previous research efforts, that the LHB was likely the product of supernova explosions going off like a string of firecrackers, some 14.4 million years ago. The Solar System's position in the bubble's center is just a fun cosmic coincidence. But the LHB's shape remained poorly-defined – a sort of blobby, chubby knucklebone-like configuration.
One big advantage of eROSITA is its position. Wisps of our planet's atmosphere reach a surprising distance into space, with a large halo of hydrogen known as the geocorona extending as far as 100 Earth radii – over 600,000 kilometers (more than 370,000 miles) – from the surface. When particles blowing from the Sun interact with the geocorona, they create a diffuse X-ray glow very similar to the glow of the LHB.
eROSITA is aboard a space observatory positioned some 1.5 million kilometers from Earth. Sitting in a gravitationally stable position created by Earth's and the Sun's pull, the X-ray observatory is the first of its kind to observe the X-ray sky from completely outside of our glowing geocorona.
The researchers divided up eROSITA observations of the X-ray sky into around 2,000 sections, and painstakingly studied the X-ray light in each to generate a map of the LHB. Their findings revealed that the bubble is expanding perpendicular to the galactic plane, more than in a parallel direction. This is not unexpected, since the vertical directions offer less resistance than the horizontal.
The temperature gradient of the Local Hot Bubble, coded by color. (Michael Yeung/MPE)
The asymmetrical temperature gradient the researchers measured was consistent with the supernova theory for the bubble's creation, with the possibility that stars were exploding in our neighborhood until just a few million years ago.
Their map also refined the known shape of the LHB, allowing for a model to be constructed in three dimensions. The result resembles the outflows of what's known as a bipolar nebula, if a little spikier and bumpier. And there was a hidden surprise.
"What we didn't know was the existence of an interstellar tunnel towards Centaurus, which carves a gap in the cooler interstellar medium," says astrophysicist Michael Freyberg of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics. "This region stands out in stark relief."
We don't know, yet, what the tunnel connects to. There are a number of objects in the direction it trails off in, including the Gum nebula, another neighboring bubble, and several molecular clouds.
It could also be a clue that the galaxy consists of a whole connected network of hot bubbles and interstellar tunnels, an idea proposed in 1974, and for which little evidence has yet emerged. We might be on the brink of finding that network now – and this, in turn, could help us learn more about the recent history of our galaxy.
November 7, 2024 A screen broadcasts a CCTV state media news bulletin, showing an image of Mars taken by Chinese Mars rover Zhurong as part of the Tianwen-1 mission, in Beijing, China, May 19, 2021.
REUTERS/Thomas Peter/File Photo
WASHINGTON, Nov 7 (Reuters) - With the assistance of China's Zhurong rover, scientists have gathered fresh evidence that Mars was home to an ocean billions of years ago - a far cry from the dry and desolate world it is today.
Scientists said on Thursday that data obtained by Zhurong, which landed in the northern lowlands of Mars in 2021, and by orbiting spacecraft indicated the presence of geological features indicative of an ancient coastline. The rover analyzed rock on the Martian surface in a location called Utopia Planitia, a large plain in the planet's northern hemisphere.
The researchers said data from China's Tianwen-1 Orbiter, NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and the robotic six-wheeled rover indicated the existence of a water ocean during a period when Mars might already have become cold and dry and lost much of its atmosphere.
They described surface features such as troughs, sediment channels and mud volcano formations indicative of a coastline, with evidence of both shallow and deeper marine environments.
"We estimate the flooding of the Utopia Planitia on Mars was approximately 3.68 billion years ago. The ocean surface was likely frozen in a geologically short period," said Hong Kong Polytechnic University planetary scientist Bo Wu, lead author of the study published in the journal Scientific Reports, opens new tab.
The ocean appears to have disappeared by approximately 3.42 billion years ago, the researchers said.
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"The water was heavily silted, forming the layering structure of the deposits," Hong Kong Polytechnic University planetary scientist and study co-author Sergey Krasilnikov added.
Like Earth and our solar system's other planets, Mars formed about 4.5 billion years ago. At the time the ocean apparently existed, it might already have begun its transition away from being a hospitable planet.
"The presence of an ancient ocean on Mars has been proposed and studied for several decades, yet significant uncertainty remains," Wu said. "These findings not only provide further evidence to support the theory of a Martian ocean but also present, for the first time, a discussion on its probable evolutionary scenario."
Water is seen as a key ingredient for life, and the past presence of an ocean raises the prospect that Mars at least at one time was capable of harboring microbial life. "At the beginning of Mars' history, when it probably had a thick, warm atmosphere, microbial life was much more likely," Krasilnikov said.
The solar-powered Zhurong, named after a mythical Chinese god of fire, began its work using six scientific instruments on the Martian surface in May 2021 and went into hibernation in May 2022, likely met with excessive accumulation of sand and dust, according to its mission designer. It exceeded its original mission time span of three months.
Researchers have sought to better understand what happened to all the water that once was present on the Martian surface. Another study, published in August and based on seismic data obtained by NASA's robotic InSight lander, indicated that an immense reservoir of liquid water may reside deep under the surface within fractured igneous rocks.
Reporting by Will Dunham, Editing by Rosalba O'Brien
Mars Rover Finds Evidence of an Ancient Ocean on The Red Planet
A Chinese rover has found new evidence to support the theory that Mars was once home to a vast ocean, including tracing some ancient coastline where water may once have lapped, a study said Thursday.
The theory that an ocean covered as much as a third of the Red Planet billions of years ago has been a matter of debate between scientists for decades, and one outside researcher expressed some scepticism about the latest findings.
In 2021, China's Zhurong rover landed on a plain in the Martian northern hemisphere's Utopia region, where previous indications of ancient water had been spotted.
It has been probing the red surface ever since, and some new findings from the mission were revealed in the new study in the journal Scientific Reports.
Lead study author Bo Wu of The Hong Kong Polytechnic University told AFP that a variety of features suggesting a past ocean had been spotted around Zhurong's landing area, including "pitted cones, polygonal troughs and etched flows".
Previous research has suggested that the crater-like pitted cones could have come from mud volcanoes, and often formed in areas where there had been water or ice.
Information from the rover, as well as satellite data and analysis back on Earth, also suggested that a shoreline was once near the area, according to the study.
The team of researchers estimated that the ocean was created by flooding nearly 3.7 billion years ago.
Then the ocean froze, etching out a coastline, before disappearing a little over 3.4 billion ago, according to their scenario.
Bo emphasised that the team does "not claim that our findings definitively prove that there was an ocean on Mars".
That level of certainty will likely require a mission to bring back some Martian rocks to Earth for a closer look
Benjamin Cardenas, a scientist who has analysed other evidence of a Martian ocean, told AFP he was "sceptical" of the new study.
He felt the researchers did not take enough into account how much the strong Martian wind had blown around sediment and worn down rocks over the past few billion years.
"We tend to think of Mars as being not very active, like the Moon, but it is active!" said Cardenas of Pennsylvania State University in the United States.
He pointed to past modelling research which suggested that "even the slow Martian erosion rates" would destroy signs of a shoreline over such a long period.
Bo acknowledged that wind might have worn down some rocks, but said the impact of meteors hitting Mars can also "excavate underground rock and sediment to the surface from time to time".
While the overall theory remains contentious, Cardenas said he tended "to think there was an ocean on Mars".
Finding out the truth could help unravel a greater mystery: whether Earth is alone in the Solar System in being capable of hosting life.
"Most scientists think life on Earth sprung up either under the ocean where hot gases and minerals from the subsurface came to the seafloor, or very close to the interface of water and air, in little tidal pools," Cardenas said.
"So, evidence for an ocean makes the planet appear more hospitable."
November 8, 2024 By 3.6 billion years ago, Mars should have become too cold for liquid water, but something kept the rivers flowing.
(Image credit: Peter Buhler/PSI)
A lone researcher may have figured out how Mars was able to support rivers and seas even after the planet had begun to grow cold and its atmosphere thin, and it's all thanks to a cycle of water and carbon dioxide.
We know from geological and mineralogical evidence that, around four billion years ago, Mars was warm and wet enough to have extensive liquid water on its surface, from rivers and lakes to a vast northern sea. This period covers two geological eras: the Noachian, which ran from 4.1 to 3.7 billion years ago, and the Hesperian, which endured from 3.7 to about 3 billion years ago. The Noachian is characterized by warmer conditions, but by its latter stages Mars should have been starting to grow cold as it steadily lost its atmosphere to space. Yet there is still evidence of river channels and seas dating back to the late Noachian and into the Hesperian era. Planetary scientists have been mystified as to how Mars could still be wet at this time, and one theory is that the Red Planet experienced an unexplained period of global warming.
Now, though, researcher Peter Buhler of the Planetary Science Institute in Arizona may have solved the problem, thanks to his modeling of the role of carbon dioxide ice settling onto the south polar cap.
The model "describes the origins of major landscape features on Mars — like the biggest lake, the biggest valleys and the biggest esker system — in a self-consistent way," Buhler said in a statement. "And it's only relying on a process that we see today, which is just carbon dioxide collapsing from the atmosphere."
Eskers are long, gravelly ridges left by running water, and their presence near Mars' south pole is a big clue about how events played out on the Red Planet.
Usually, Buhler spends his time modeling the carbon-dioxide cycle on Mars today. During Martian winter, a layer of carbon-dioxide ice settles out on top of the polar caps of water ice. While it is just a thin layer on the north polar cap, the south polar cap has much more, with a permanent layer of carbon dioxide ice 26 feet (8 meters) thick, with more added in winter. This additional carbon dioxide is normally locked away in the Martian dirt, but during what passes as Martian summer it can sublimate into the atmosphere and be transported to the winter pole.
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Buhler wanted to see what effect this process had 3.6 billion years ago, during the early Hesperian when the atmosphere — despite beginning to leak out into space after Mars' magnetic field that had warded off the solar wind shut down — was still much thicker than it is today. He found that a layer of carbon dioxide ice 650 meters (0.4 miles) thick would settle onto Mars' south polar cap each winter.
A Viking 1 image of the southern edge of Argyre Planitia, which is marked by mountains that surround the huge impact basin that was once flooded with water. (Image credit: NASA)
The carbon dioxide did two things. It first acted as an insulator, preventing heat leaking out of the planet's interior from escaping at the south pole. It also added weight and pressure onto the ice cap. Combined, these effects led to temperatures and pressures at the base of the ice cap that allowed the ice there to melt and form a pool of water. Eventually, over many winters, water ice and carbon dioxide ice continued freezing out onto the ice cap while, below, the liquid water built up to such an amount that it began seeping out at the sides of the ice cap.
Once exposed to the cold air, according to the new modeling work, the liquid water would freeze as permafrost. This isn't the end of the story, though. Liquid water would keep on forming behind the ice, looking for ways to escape.
"The only way left for the water to go is through the interface between the ice sheet and the rock underneath it," said Buhler. "That's why on Earth you see rivers come out from underneath glaciers instead of just draining into the ground."
The rivers would still freeze as they popped up above ground, but the volume of water was such that it would keep burrowing under this ice, which eventually formed a frozen ceiling over the rivers many dozens of meters (hundreds of feet) thick. The rivers themselves were only a meter or so deep, but they were long, running for thousands of kilometers away from the south pole.
This is where the eskers come in. They are the remains of these long subglacial rivers, and many have been found extending radially away from the southern polar region.
Even today, we can see the remains of four large river channels flowing into Argyre Planitia, which is a huge impact basin 1,700 kilometers (1,100 miles) wide and 5.2 kilometers (3.2 miles) deep. Over millions of years, the sub-glacial rivers filled Argyre with water to form an ocean as large as the Mediterranean. And, over those millions of years, the meltwater kept on coming, causing Argyre to episodically overflow and flood Mars' northern plains.
"This is the first model that produces enough water to overtop Argyre," said Buhler. "It's also likely that the meltwater, once downstream, sublimated back into the atmosphere before being returned to the south polar cap, perpetuating a pole-to-equator hydrologic cycle that may have played an important role in Mars' enigmatic pulse of late-stage hydrologic activity."
Eventually, Mars grew too cold for even this meltwater process to take place. There was recently a claim of a subsurface lake still existing beneath the south polar ice cap on Mars today, but significant doubt has been cast on this idea.
What's neat about Buhler's model is that it doesn't need to enact any unexplained warming to account for the evidence for water that we see — it's literally the same carbon dioxide cycle that we see on Mars today. Unfortunately, Mars has grown so cold, with so little carbon dioxide available, that the days of widespread liquid water on the Red Planet have been over for billions of years.
NASA’s ‘Ingenuity Helicopter’ found ‘otherworldly’ wreckage on the surface of Mars
NASA’s ‘Ingenuity Helicopter’ completed 72 flights on the surface of Mars During one flight, its camera captured some spacecraft debris in the red sand Looking like the work of aliens, the shattered remains were in fact man-made
But, let’s get back to the helicopter, which – during action – took a series of images, giving us a greater insight into this other world, and in 2022, it captured a remarkable sight.
What it had stumbled across was the wreckage of a spacecraft, laying there in the planet’s sands, slightly reddened by the contact.
The collection of objects may appear to the untrained eye to have been manufactured on another world, but sadly that’s not the case.
NASA/JPL-Caltech What the experts say
Speaking to the New York Times, Ian Clark – an engineer who worked on Perseverance’s parachute system – said: “There’s definitely a sci-fi element to it. It exudes otherworldly, doesn’t it?
“They say a picture’s worth 1,000 words, but it’s also worth an infinite amount of engineering understanding.”
So there you have it, it’s not the work of aliens; the shattered remains are in fact man-made
.
NASA What it actually found
The reality is, if we find spaceship debris on another planet, it’s because we put it there.
What the helicopter actually found was part of the landing equipment used to bring Ingenuity down to the surface of the red planet.
NASA
Mars isn’t the only planet where humans have left their litter; the orbit of Earth is full of debris that we’ve sent up there and no longer need, too.
The Natural History Museum said that around 2,000 active satellites are orbiting Earth.
However, there are around 3,000 more ‘dead’ satellites that we no longer use still floating around up there.
Add to that more debris floating around our planet, which not only poses a danger to spacecraft, but the future hopes of space travel.
3D map reveals our solar system's local bubble has an 'escape tunnel'
Hot spots and tunnels to neighboring "superbubbles" seem to have been created by supernovas and infant star outbursts.
A 3D model of the Milky Way's "local bubble" created using data from eROSITA. (Image credit: Michael Yeung / MPE)
Using data from the eROSITA All-Sky Survey, astronomers have created a 3D map of the low-density bubble of X-ray-emitting, million-degree hot gas that surrounds the solar system.
The investigation has revealed a large-scale temperature gradient within this bubble, called the Local Hot Bubble (LHB), meaning it contains both hot and cold spots. The team suspects that this temperature gradient may have been caused by exploding massive stars detonating in supernovas, causing the bubble to be reheated. This reheating would cause the pocket of low-density gas to expand.
The researchers also found what seems to be an "interstellar tunnel," a channel between stars directed towards the constellation Centaurus. This tunnel may link the solar system's home bubble with a neighboring superbubble and could have been carved out by erupting young stars and powerful and high-speed stellar winds
Scientists have been aware of the LHB concept for at least five decades. This cavity of low-density gas was first suggested to explain background measurements of relatively low-energy, or "soft," X-rays. These photons, with an energy of around 0.2 electronvolts (eV), can't travel very far through interstellar space before being absorbed.
The fact that our immediate solar neighborhood is devoid of large quantities of interstellar dust that could emit these photons suggested the existence of soft X-ray emitting plasma that displaces neutral materials around the solar system in a "Local Hot Bubble." Thus, theories of the LHB were born.
One of the major problems with this theory emerged in 1996, when scientists found that exchanges between the solar wind, a stream of charged particles blown out by the sun, and particles in Earth's "geocorona," the outermost layer of our planet's atmosphere, emit X-ray photons with energies similar to those proposed to originate from the LHB. Understanding the solar system's local bubble
The eROSITA telescope, the primary instrument of the Spectrum-Roentgen-Gamma (SRG) mission launched in 2019, is the ideal instrument to tackle this conundrum. At 1 million miles (1.5 million kilometers) from Earth, eROSITA is the first X-ray telescope to observe the universe from outside Earth's geocorona, meaning potential X-ray "noise" can be ruled out of observations of photons from the LHB.
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Additionally, eROSITA's All-Sky Survey (eRASS1) collected data during a lull in the sun's 11-year solar cycle when solar winds are weak, called the "solar minimum." This reduced the amount of contamination coming from solar wind exchange.
"In other words, the eRASS1 data released to the public this year provides the cleanest view of the X-ray sky to date, making it the perfect instrument for studying the LHB," team leader Michael Yeung, a researcher at Max Planck Institute of Physics (MPE), said in a statement.
Two versions of eRosita All-Sky Survey Catalogue (eRASS1) data (Right) the X-ray sky over earth (right) X-ray sources. (Image credit: MPE, J. Sanders für das eROSITA-Konsortium)
After dividing the hemisphere of the Milky Way into 2,000 distinct regions, Yeung and colleagues analyzed the light from all these regions. What they discovered was a clear disparity in temperatures in the LHB, with the Galactic North cooler than the Galactic South.
The same team had already established that the hot gas of the LHB is relatively uniform in terms of its density. Comparing this to the gas in cool and dense molecular clouds at the edge of the LHB, the team was able to create a detailed 3D map of the LHB.
This revealed that the LHB is stretched toward the poles of the galactic hemisphere. Hot gas expands in the direction that offers the least resistance, which, in this case, is away from the galactic disk. Thus, this wasn't a huge surprise to the researchers as it is also finding that had been revealed by eROSITA's predecessor, ROSAT, around 3 decades ago.
But, the new 3D map did reveal something hitherto unknown.
"What we didn't know was the existence of an interstellar tunnel towards Centaurus, which carves a gap in the cooler interstellar medium," team member and MPE physicist Michael Freyberg said in the statement. "This region stands out in stark relief thanks to the much-improved sensitivity of eROSITA and a vastly different surveying strategy compared to ROSAT."
The nebula L1527 and its erupting protostar put on a celestial fireworks display, captured by the JWST. Feedback like this could help carve out a network of "tunnels" between stars. (Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI)
Excitingly, the team suspects that the Centaurus tunnel in the LHB may just be a part of a network of hot gas tunnels that bore their way between the cool gas of the interstellar medium between stars.
This interstellar medium network would be maintained and sustained by the influence of stars in the form of stellar winds, the supernovas that mark the death of massive stars, and jets blasting out from newly formed stars or "protostars."
These phenomena are collectively referred to as "stellar feedback," and they are believed to sweep across the Milky Way, thereby shaping it.
In addition to the 3D map of the LHB, the team also created a census of supernova wreckage, superbubbles, and dust, which they incorporated into the map to build a 3D interactive model of the solar system's cosmic neighborhood.
This included another previously known interstellar medium tunnel called the Canis Majoris tunnel. This is thought to stretch between the LHB and the Gum nebula or between the LHB and GSH238+00+09, a more distant superbubble.
They also mapped dense molecular clouds at the edge of the LHB that are racing away from us. These clouds could have been built when the LHB was "cleared" and denser material was swept to its extremities. This could also give a hint as to when the sun entered this local low-density bubble.
"Another interesting fact is that the sun must have entered the LHB a few million years ago, a short time compared to the age of the sun [4.6 billion years]," team member and MPE scientist Gabriele Ponti said. "It is purely coincidental that the sun seems to occupy a relatively central position in the LHB as we continuously move through the Milky Way."
You can explore the team's 3D model of our solar neighborhood here.
How can Jupiter have no surface? A dive into a planet so big, it could swallow 1,000 Earths
The planet Jupiter has no solid ground – no surface, like the grass or dirt you tread here on Earth. There’s nothing to walk on, and no place to land a spaceship.
But how can that be? If Jupiter doesn’t have a surface, what does it have? How can it hold together?
While the four inner planets of the solar system – Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars – are all made of solid, rocky material, Jupiter is a gas giant with a composition similar to the Sun; it’s a roiling, stormy, wildly turbulent ball of gas. Some places on Jupiter have winds of more than 400 mph (about 640 kilometers per hour), about three times faster than a Category 5 hurricane on Earth.
What They Didn't Teach You in School About Jupiter | Our Solar System's Planets - YouTube
Start from the top of Earth’s atmosphere, go down about 60 miles (roughly 100 kilometers), and the air pressure continuously increases. Ultimately you hit Earth’s surface, either land or water.
Compare that with Jupiter: Start near the top of its mostly hydrogen and helium atmosphere, and like on Earth, the pressure increases the deeper you go. But on Jupiter, the pressure is immense.
As the layers of gas above you push down more and more, it’s like being at the bottom of the ocean – but instead of water, you’re surrounded by gas. The pressure becomes so intense that the human body would implode; you would be squashed.
Go down 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers), and the hot, dense gas begins to behave strangely. Eventually, the gas turns into a form of liquid hydrogen, creating what can be thought of as the largest ocean in the solar system, albeit an ocean without water.
Go down another 20,000 miles (about 32,000 kilometers), and the hydrogen becomes more like flowing liquid metal, a material so exotic that only recently, and with great difficulty, have scientists reproduced it in the laboratory. The atoms in this liquid metallic hydrogen are squeezed so tightly that its electronsare free to roam.
Keep in mind that these layer transitions are gradual, not abrupt; the transition from normal hydrogen gas to liquid hydrogen and then to metallic hydrogen happens slowly and smoothly. At no point is there a sharp boundary, solid material or surface.
An illustration of Jupiter’s interior layers. One bar is approximately equal to the air pressure at sea level on Earth. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI)
Scary to the core
Ultimately, you’d reach the core of Jupiter. This is the central region of Jupiter’s interior, and not to be confused with a surface.
Scientists are still debating the exact nature of the core’s material. The most favored model: It’s not solid, like rock, but more like a hot, dense and possibly metallic mixture of liquid and solid.
But pressure wouldn’t be your only problem. A spacecraft trying to reach Jupiter’s core would be melted by the extreme heat – 35,000 degrees Fahrenheit (20,000 degrees Celsius). That’s three times hotter than the surface of the Sun. Jupiter helps Earth
Jupiter is a weird and forbidding place. But if Jupiter weren’t around, it’s possible human beings might not exist.
That’s because Jupiter acts as a shield for the inner planets of the solar system, including Earth. With its massive gravitational pull, Jupiter has altered the orbit of asteroids and comets for billions of years.
Without Jupiter’s intervention, some of that space debris could have crashed into Earth; if one had been a cataclysmic collision, it could have caused an extinction-level event. Just look at what happened to the dinosaurs.
Maybe Jupiter gave an assist to our existence, but the planet itself is extraordinarily inhospitable to life – at least, life as we know it.
Could something be living in Europa’s water? Scientists won’t know for a while. Because of Jupiter’s distance from Earth, the probe won’t arrive until April 2030.
