Nosferatu creeps up on the Alban Film Festival


By Dr. Tim Sandle
November 1, 2024

St Albans Cathedral at night. Image by Tim Sandle

A screening of the full-length version of the German silent film Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror took place at St. Alban’s Cathedral, Hertfordshire, UK. The cathedral is the second oldest in England, with construction starting in the 11th century, commissioned by the new ruling Normans.

The screening was accompanied by a live organist and various electronic additions (also performed live). This special screening – on Halloween – was part of the Alban Film Festival 2024, playing to a full house of 450 people.

The 1922 film is directed by F. W. Murnau and it features the actor Max Schreck as Count Orlok. Schreck plays a vampire who preys on the wife (Greta Schröder) of his estate agent (Gustav von Wangenheim) and brings the plague to their town.

If the plot sounds similar to Bram Stoker’s Dracula that is no coincidence. This was an unauthorized and unofficial adaptation, which led to legal action being taken and an instruction for every copy of the film to be destroyed.Getting ready for the screening inside the cathedral. Image by Tim Sandle

Luckily some prints remained and the movie, now acknowledged as a fine example of the earliest forays into the horror genre, remains available for modern audiences to become acquainted with.

The name of the titular vampire – Nosferatu – derives from the archaic Romanian word Nesuferitu, meaning “the offensive one”.

The film is an example of German Expressionist cinema, so named as the emotions of the artist (or director) are central to the film and take precedence over the plot. This wave of film-making continued until the early 1930s (when political currents brought this wave of German cinema to an end)

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Bird sculptures inside St Alban’s Cathedral as film goers mingle. Image by Tim Sandle.

Murnau was an acknowledged leader of this movement. He made 21 films, although only 12 survive in their complete state. Murnau was killed at the young age of 42 in a road traffic accident.

Thematically, Nosferatu is seen by some film critics as representing the fear of ‘the Other’ (or suspicion of ‘Otherness’ – alien cultures, different ways of life, immigration and other socio-cultural factors).

The music captured Hans Erdmann’s original score, with some additional features designed to enhance the feature. Such features were necessary since a large proportion of the original film score has been lost.

The quality of the film was very good, moving between monochrome, sepia and blue-ish white. Whatever the scheme, Orlok – the inhuman and corpse-like vampire – remains slightly terrifying

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Nosferatu shadow, created from a candle light. Image by Tim Sandle

The screening was very atmospheric, both for being within the cavernous cathedral and due to the live music accomplishment. Being on Halloween too add that extra special touch.

For those less enamoured with film history, a remake of Nosferatu, written and directed by Robert Eggers (who made The Lighthouse), opens in December 2024 / January 2025 (depending on territory).

‘Yokai Parade’ exhibition in Karachi offers glimpse into world of unearthly Japanese creatures

Imaginary supernatural beings dating centuries back have various shapes, sizes, myths, and even behaviours, thanks to the creativity of Japanese artists.

Muskaan Mujahid

Published October 31, 2024

Art and supernatural lovers were left spellbound as the ‘Yokai Parade — Supernatural Monsters from Japan’ exhibition closed its doors for Karachiites.

The three-day exhibition, held from Monday to Wednesday, showcased pieces reproduced from various art forms that depicted yokai — best described as “Japanese folkloric imaginary monsters”.

Words such as ghosts and jinns do not suffice to categorise what yokai are, since these imaginary beings dating centuries back have various shapes, sizes, myths, and even behaviours, thanks to the creativity of Japanese artists.

As time passed, the art medium for these depictions changed from picture scrolls to woodblock prints to card games and popular media, which were displayed at the event (most of them being fine-quality replicas).

The Karachi exhibition was organised by the Japan Foundation in collaboration with the Consulate-General of Japan in Karachi, the Pakistan Japan Cultural Association (PJCA), and the State Bank of Pakistan Museum, where it was held.

The travelling exhibition, which has made stops in several Asian countries, was curated by Yumoto Koichi, director emeritus of the Yumoto Koichi Memorial Japan Yokai Museum, and featured 84 artworks.

“Before it came to our Islamabad embassy which organised it in Lahore, it was [held] in Hong Kong, Indonesia, Turkiye, New Zealand — just to name a few,” said Rabia Ali, a Cultural and Public Affairs official at the Consulate-General of Japan in Karachi.

“After our exhibition in Karachi, it’s going to be shipped to Myanmar,” she added. Earlier this month, Lahore citizens got a chance to see the artefacts up close.

The exhibition in Karachi was held at the SBP Museum — what better location than a museum to display art depicting historical imagination?

Ears shaped like a vampire’s, an eye or three popping out, lively expressions, swords and sticks in hands, and unusual body proportions are some of the features yokai often feature.

Many have animal characteristics combined with human limbs — the head of a cat, short webbed feet like a reptile’s, tongue or neck stretching like a snake’s — or in many cases, animal bodies standing in an upright pose like humans.

Another popular category is of objects taking yokai forms, where you can see musical instruments, pots, lanterns, and suitcases, among others, come to life — often in a whimsical way.

Such creatures are also referred to as Tsukomogami, tools that have acquired a spirit. They have acquired a place in shows as well, such as in Malevolent Spirits: Mononogatari, where a tool’s functions define the resulting being’s abilities.

Yokai are depicted on a ‘Night Parade of One Hundred Demons’ picture scroll at the ‘Yokai Parade — Supernatural Monsters from Japan’ exhibition, at State Bank Museum in Karachi on Oct 30, 2024. — Photo by author

Explaining the exhibition’s aim, Ali, the Consulate-General official, told Dawn.com: “We aim to spread the Japanese culture — all forms of Japanese culture whether they be in written form, through workshops, exhibitions, [or] any cultural festivals that we hold throughout the year.”

Detailing the audience’s response, she said: “As soon as I explain to the audience what it’s about, they are really intrigued and are able to connect it through Pakistani culture as well, like folklore and myths.”

Speaking to Dawn.com, Ali described the visitors as “very impressed” with the bizarre yet amusing paintings. She noted that despite there being a difference in cultures, the Pakistani audience took great interest in the show, considering we have our own local horror folklore and myths.

From scrolls to media

The setup was divided into four “chapters”, or sections, providing a chronological overview of how hundreds of supernatural creatures have continued to live over the years in various mediums.

The first chapter, titled ‘The Spectacular World of Yokai Picture Scrolls’, featured scrolls depicting “various yokai running wild and rampant across washi paper that, at times, is over 10 metres long”, as the exhibition leaflet states.

The next chapter was titled ‘The Richly Colorful World of Yokai’, which showcased woodblock prints that infused even more liveliness into yokai through vivid colours.

The third chapter, ‘Yokai and Games’, gave a glimpse into how yokai were incorporated into games in the late 1800s as time passed. This was the era when yokai became evidently closer to people as they were often featured in board/card games and fictional works.

People “eventually felt a sense of closeness and affection for them, which even gave birth to amicable and almost friendly-looking yokai”, the Japan Foundation notes.

Monster Menko cards are at display at the ‘Yokai Parade — Supernatural Monsters from Japan’ exhibition, organised by the Consulate-General of Japan at State Bank Museum, in Karachi on Oct 30, 2024. — Photo by author

The final chapter, ‘Yokai Passed Down to Present Day’, showed how the stuff of the supernatural world became embedded into entertainment media in the form of monster movies and adorable merchandise.

Merchandise depicting Amabie is at display at the ‘Yokai Parade — Supernatural Monsters from Japan’ exhibition, organised by the Consulate-General of Japan at State Bank Museum, in Karachi on Oct 30, 2024. — Photo by author

While yokai art was the central topic of the show, what really caught people’s eyes were yokai statues. While a large replica stood tall on a block, as if almost guarding the exhibition, smaller ones were lined separately in glass cubes.

The exhibition also included a sub-category of yokai known as ‘Prophetic Beasts’, which were said to foretell the future.

Among these was Amabie, a three-legged sea creature with fish scales that could predict a good harvest or an epidemic. According to BBC, Amabie regained popularity on social media in 2020 during the Covid pandemic with people sharing drawings of it with the hashtag #AMABIEchallenge to ward off the disease.

According to the Japan Foundation, yokai seems to have “gradually become less of a subject of fear and have come to be viewed as a more charming and friendly presence”.

This is especially true when it comes to present-day Japanese media. Yokai are the central figures in not just heart-pounding horror animes such as Mononoke but also in rather calming slice-of-life ones like Natsume’s Book of Friends.

Such shows have piqued the interest of many in Pakistan as well and made them familiar with popular Japanese legends.

Hamza Khan, one such visitor at the exhibition, told Dawn.com that the event was “pretty cool”. Recalling having seen “these depictions in movies and TV shows”, he highlighted that reading about their history was interesting to him.

Khan, who was accompanied by a friend, said he wished to see more exhibitions, especially about Japanese cuisine, as well as more comic conventions (also known as comicons).

Header image: ‘Nekomusume and a Monster Cat’ is at display at the ‘Yokai Parade — Supernatural Monsters from Japan’ exhibition, organised by the Consulate-General of Japan at State Bank Museum, in Karachi, on Oct 30, 2024. — Photo by author

 

Catching prey with grappling hooks and cannons

ETH Zurich

 

image: 

Cryo-electron tomogram (left) and 3D model (right) of the onboard cannon of the hunting bacterium Aureispira.

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Credit: Yun-Wei Lien / ETH Zurich

Countless bacteria call the vastness of the oceans home, and they all face the same problem: the nutrients they need to grow and multiply are scarce and unevenly distributed in the waters around them. In some spots they are present in abundance, but in many places they are sorely lacking. This has led a few bacteria to develop into efficient hunters to tap into new sources of sustenance in the form of other microorganisms.

Although this strategy is very successful, researchers have so far found only a few predatory bacterial species. One is the soil bacterium Myxococcus xanthus; another is Vampirococcus, which sucks its prey dry like a vampire.

In a new study, researchers at ETH Zurich led by Martin Pilhofer, Professor at the Department of Biology, along with his colleagues Yun-Wei Lien and Gregor Weiss, have now presented another of these rare bacterial predators: the filamentous marine bacterium Aureispira.

Among the molecular structures that the researchers have identified in Aureispira are ones that resemble grappling hooks and serve a similar purpose. The bacterium also has a kind of bolt gun that it uses to kill its prey.

Like a pirate ship in search of a potential victim, Aureispira swiftly glides over solid surfaces towards its prey, such as Vibrio bacteria. If the attacker is itself free-floating in water, it waits for its prey to approach. As soon as there is close contact, the grappling hooks become entangled with the victim’s flagella, and it can no longer escape.

Within seconds, Aureispira fires its on-board cannons to punch holes in the Vibrio bacterium’s membrane. In collaboration with the laboratory of ETH Professor Roman Stocker, the researchers were able to show that the cell components that leak out of the victim are quickly taken up by the predator as food. “The whole scene resembles a pirate raid on another ship,” Pilhofer says with a grin.

It’s only when the nutrient concentration in its environment is low that Aureispira becomes predatory. As long as the supply of nutrients is sufficient, the pirate bacterium refrains from catching prey and stands down its arsenal of weapons. However, putting the bacterium on a diet awakens its desire to hunt and causes the cell to rebuild the cannons and grappling hooks. Scientists call this selectively predatory lifestyle ixotrophy. Together with Martin Polz's group at the University of Vienna, the researchers were also able to find evidence that this predatory lifestyle does not only occur in the laboratory but actually in marine samples.

New imaging reveals details

The researchers used several imaging techniques, including light microscopy and cryo-electron microscopy, to understand the function and molecular structure of the grappling hooks and cannons.

This method made it possible to preserve and analyse molecular structures free of artefacts and in their cellular context. With an enhanced version of the method, it’s even possible to determine the molecular structure of the proteins that make up the bacterium’s weapons. “All of these imaging techniques are available at ETH Zurich’s ScopeM competence centre, which made this study possible in the first place,” Weiss says.

What are the findings good for? “First and foremost, this is basic research driven by our curiosity,” Pilhofer says. He and his colleague Weiss have been working for ten years to elucidate contractile injection systems – the name given to the pirate bacteria’s on-board cannons.

In other predatory bacteria, contractile injection systems are often also loaded with toxins to kill the prey immediately. It’s conceivable that such bacterial bolt guns could be loaded with active ingredients for injection into individual cells with the help of a molecular machine.

Certain predatory bacteria are known to prey on cyanobacteria, or blue-green algae. That means they could be used to combat algal blooms or to stop mass propagation of Vibrio bacteria. “These bacterial predators are very efficient at what they do,” Weiss says.

---

Journal

Science

DOI

10.1126/science.adp0614 

Article Title

Mechanism of bacterial predation via ixotrophy

Article Publication Date

17-Oct-2024

Boeing Workers are Uniquely Situated to Disrupt the Global Economy

In their fight against Boeing, striking IAM members have significant leverage over the boss and the state.

Jason Koslowski and James Dennis Hoff

September 25, 2024

LEFT VOICE, U$A

Photo credit: Wall Street Journal

It’s been almost two weeks since more than 33,000 Boeing workers in Washington and Oregon went on strike, crippling one of the largest aerospace companies in the world. Since then Boeing has lost more than $500 million and is losing millions more every day. Thanks in large part to a series of terrible decisions, they seem unprepared to weather a long strike, but the struggle at Boeing has significant international implications as well. Boeing, after all, is the largest exporter in the United States by dollar value, the biggest supplier of commercial aircraft in the United States, and one of the main manufacturers of the weapons that Israel is using in both its genocide in Gaza and its war against Lebanon. It is also a key chokepoint in a much larger and still vulnerable global supply chain that extends across the globe.

All of this means that Boeing workers currently have a level of influence and leverage that far exceeds the immediate impact on the company’s bottom line. The union not only has a chance to recoup the major concessions forced on them by years of neoliberalism. They have a chance to throw a wrench into the imperialist machine itself.

In capitalism, the working class always has key strategic power. That’s because the source of all value and of all profit is ultimately exploited work, sucked out of us, vampire-like, by our bosses. We’re the ones who flip the burgers, drive the buses, weld the plane fuselages, teach the classes … and on and on and on. When we go on strike we remove that power — and start stemming the flow of profits made off of our labor.

But Boeing workers in particular are striking at a major strategic nexus of the global economy. It’s a “chokepoint,” and applying force here cuts off huge flows of profit across the system.

To see just how much leverage these 33,000 workers are holding in their hands, it helps to think in terms of concentric circles: the economics of Boeing, its place in the U.S. economy, and then its place in the global economy.
A Crisis of Boeing’s Own Making

Whatever kind of day you’re having, it’s not as bad as the Boeing CEO’s. That’s good news for the working class — and not just in this country.

First of all, Boeing is in the midst of a major crisis of consumer and investor confidence.

Not only is it massively in debt, but for months now, every major newspaper across the globe has been reporting on one Boeing disaster after another, highlighting how Boeing has, time and time again, put profit over the safety of its workers and consumers. In January, for instance, an emergency exit door blew off one of their planes mid-flight, leading to a loss of cabin pressure that could have been catastrophic. It was a 737 MAX 9, produced at the Renton plant outside Seattle, one of their newest models.

This was hardly just a blip on the radar.

In 2018 and 2019, two planes crashed, killing every person on board. This past July, the company’s leaders pled guilty to criminal fraud in those cases. Meanwhile, problems with the Boeing Starliner space capsule have left two astronauts stranded on the International Space Station for months. These astronauts will now not be able to return home until February.

All told, Boeing has already lost something like $1.4 billion in the last three months. It’s shouldering $58 billion in debt. And now there’s a strike.

In other words, the union has tremendous leverage over the boss: Boeing simply can’t afford this strike. If this strike is anything like the last one in 2008, they’re looking down the barrel of losing something like $100 million in lost revenue per day until the strike is settled and workers return to the production lines.

How’d we get here? To see that, we have to take a glance at the last couple of decades at Boeing.

First, it’s worth remembering that in 2004, under then-President George W. Bush, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) decided that Boeing can regulate its own production. In other words, it would not be regulated by an outside body. This helps to explain why Being was able to cut corners so aggressively in making its planes, to maximize its output and its profits.

The problems with this system of self-regulation were made clear when a whistleblower came forward to detail the many mistakes and safety problems that were being ignored by the company. This whistleblower was reporting exclusively on the production of the 787 at Renton, but the lack of any outside oversight means we can probably assume that these kinds of “cost cutting” procedures are common in making other planes, too. For instance, Fortune has reported that “engineers in the construction of the 777 jets” were also “‘pressured to overlook’ issues. … The complaint … alleges these defects ‘are generally not detectable through visual inspection… [and] could ultimately cause a premature fatigue failure without any warning.’”

Another key plank of this production model is the company’s attempts to undercut the union. Just after the last contract was settled with the IAM — in 2009 — Boeing announced it would be building its newest model of jets in Charleston, South Carolina, far from the unionized main plant outside Seattle. The main reason: the workers there, like so many others in the south, wouldn’t be unionized. That, in turn, meant cheaper workers whose hours and workload could be ramped up without any protections from a union. The move was a powerful blow to the IAM’s leverage, raising the specter that the company could just shut down and move production if the union did not play ball. And unfortunately that’s exactly what the union did. The leadership of the IAM cut a deal a few years later to give huge concessions to the bosses, including giving away the guaranteed pension — one of the main grievances in this current strike.

In the wake of these attempts to undermine the union’s power, union workers have faced even more pressure from Boeing to ramp up production. At the Washington plant, some aircraft “can move down the line with incomplete work in order to maintain speed,” reports Business Insider.


Speaking to National Transportation Safety Board investigators in April, another Renton [Washington] factory employee, who works on seat installation, said there were problems with time management. “You just got to work around it,” he said. “So if like, another crew is behind, we’ll just work on the next plane we need to work on.” … He added that 60% to 70% of the aircraft that come through to his station are still waiting for other work to be done. “They travel defects [defective parts] constantly. The line has to keep going” …

Boeing isn’t very original, though. These practices are part of the wider trend of “just-in-time” production that’s been a key part of capitalism over the last few decades: reduce lag time, increase shipping speeds, reduce warehouse space, and speed up production to its maximum in order to ramp up profits.

In other words, the catastrophic failures of Boeing’s planes aren’t the result of lazy workers; they’re baked into the system. Doors falling off of airplanes is par for the course.

But, as Kim Moody so elegantly explains, what makes this system of just-in-time production so profitable, also makes the company vulnerable. In On New Terrain, Moody says:


The overall picture of the context in which the U.S. working class has taken shape since the early 1980s began as one of decentralized production via outsourcing, increased precarious work, and the experience of fragmentation. As is so often the case in the expansion of capital accumulation, however, the reality of competition has produced an opposite tendency in the increased concentration and centralization of capital in almost every realm of the production of goods and services. As part of this process, more and more aspects of production are tied together in just-in-time supply chains that have reproduced the vulnerability that capital sought to escape through lean production methods and relocation

When these supply chains are broken, when production slows down, even a little, it can have knock-off effects across the industry and often the entire economy. This is why this strike in particular, and similar strikes at other major manufacturing or shipping bottlenecks like the ports, Amazon, or the Big Three auto manufacturers are so powerful. But these workers don’t just have leverage over their bosses. They have significant leverage over the global economy as a whole.
A Chokepoint in the Global Economy

Boeing, after all, isn’t just another corporation. It’s a massive monopoly and is more or less the only major U.S. supplier and manufacturer of commercial aircraft.

Its total revenue last year was an astounding $77.8 billion (up 17 percent from the year before). Though a small portion of the total U.S. GDP, Boeing is just one part of a much larger chain of production that reaches across the entire economy. Making an aircraft, for example, also requires making glass, plastic chairs, fuselages, rubber tires, microchips and entire electronic displays, and so on. The strike threatens to disrupt a long supply chain of goods in the U.S. economy — precisely when it seemed like the supply chain disruptions of the pandemic were smoothing out, and at a time when both Harris and Trump are promising a restored “normal” economy for the ruling class. Since Boeing is one of the largest suppliers of commercial aircraft to U.S. airlines, it also threatens to disrupt the airline industry, leading to potentially higher consumer costs, aka inflation, which has been a significant contributor to the labor struggles, particularly among organized labor, that we’ve seen since the end of the pandemic.

This strike, in other words, doesn’t just hold leverage over Boeing’s bottom line. The workers are holding in their hands a significant chunk of the United States’s overall economic output. All this gives some sense of the leverage of the IAM union at this moment.

And it’s not just in the United States that Boeing has such economic weight. As the single biggest exporter in the U.S., it stands at the center of its imperial agenda. Its main competitor in the world is AirBus and together — as a global duopoly — they corner the vast majority of the world’s aviation economy. With a wobbling Boeing, though, the problem isn’t just that AirBus will take on more market share, increasingly crowding Boeing out of the market. The problem is the United States’s imperialist maneuverings against China. As a symbol of America’s technological leadership, the calamitous state of Boeing’s production process, the safety scandals, and accidents, are yet more signs of the decline of U.S. imperialism.

Both Trump and Biden have made trying to maneuver against China central to their administrations. In this, they were continuing a much longer legacy, which includes Obama’s “pivot” to Asia to try to contain China. When Biden unrolled his “Build Back Better” plan to rebuild the United States’s infrastructure, a key goal was to prepare the United States to compete with China. As it is, though, the Chinese economy is already leading in one key area: electric vehicles. They’re flooding the markets of the world with their models, with the United States struggling to respond. Now the danger to the plan of containing China economically, then, is that, with a struggling Boeing, China could better market its own aircraft abroad.

But Boeing doesn’t just make planes. It makes weapons, too — a lot of them. It’s the fourth largest weapons company in the world, and weapons manufacturing account for a full 44% of its total revenue. And in the last few years it’s also been the single biggest producer of weapons for the State of Israel, fueling the still unfolding genocide, which has completely upended the lives of millons and already led to the deaths of more than 40,000 Gazans.

In this sense, the global impact of an extended strike at Boeing not only threatens capitalist profits, it also directly threatens the imperialist firepower of the United States.

No wonder then that major players in the U.S. state have already sent federal mediators in to settle the strike as soon as possible. Though the union leadership of IAM sees such mediation as being in their favor, the rank and file should not place any trust in the U.S. state or the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to represent their interests or the larger interest of the larger working class. Make no mistake, the federal mediators are not there for the workers but are part of an effort to keep the wheels of imperialism well greased and running smoothly. But the rank and file have a chance to take this strike into their own hands and, alongside the larger working class, use their leverage to build a fight against both the boss and the state.
Strike Boeing for Gaza

Although the workers currently on strike at Boeing are focused mostly on their contract struggle, the strike — as we explain above — has the power to disrupt not only Boeing but also the broader U.S. economy, and even the global economy.

That leverage is a crucial weapon to reverse a long history of concessions to the bosses that led, among other things, to the elimination of IAM’s pension.

There’s much more at stake, too. Not least is our own safety.

We already pointed out that Boeing is a duopoly, and the only U.S. maker of commercial aircraft. It hasn’t just been cutting corners, it’s been slashing at them. Doors are falling off planes; the leaders of the company have already pled guilty to criminal fraud in deadly crashes. The IAM fight, in other words, isn’t just about better conditions and wages; it’s about the safety and integrity of the aircrafts that so many of us have to fly on.

However, in the midst of an unfolding genocide that is being fully funded by the United States, with weapons made by the very same company these workers are fighting against, they are also in a unique position to go further, to take a stand against that genocide, and to demand an end to all weapons shipments and aid to Israel. This is a hugely popular demand among working class people in the United States; it could garner a ton of support for the strike, while at the same time asserting the hegemony of the working class, showing how they can fight for deeply-felt causes in our society.

We already know the old story: Biden, Harris, and the Democrats wave a vague hand at the idea of stopping the slaughter, while continuing to send guns, bullets, bombs, and cash. Boeing’s CEO and its shareholders are cashing in. Stopping the brutality now is going to have to happen because of workers standing at global chokepoints.

In other words, by taking up the fight for Gaza, the workers on the Boeing picket lines have a chance to link up with one of the most militant and dynamic parts of class struggle recently in the United States — to build up wider, and militant, support for the strike.

And this is not just pie in the sky. It is something that several unions have already taken up, including the Association of Flight Attendants (AFA), the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the National Education Association (NEA), and the United auto Workers (UAW). While the bureaucracies of these unions have done little more than make statements, the demand, thanks in part to these efforts, has become more mainstream.

In fact, IAMs own Executive Council has already called for a ceasefire — in March of this year!

In cloudy Seattle, we’re seeing thousands of workers on picket lines who have the power to throw a wrench into the local economy, the global flow of profits, and the imperialist war machine — to win their demands and actually do the thing their union leaders, and union leaders across the country, are calling for. It seems clear from the outside the union leaders don’t have much interest in following through on their own call for a ceasefire. In other words, the workers have major leverage, but to be fully used, it’ll have to be wielded by the rank and file themselves.

And even more than this, IAM rank and filers are facing down a chance to set a precedent for the entire labor movement to follow. We’ve seen plenty of our unions in the United States offering fine words — and little action — against the genocide. Taking a stand now, using the strike to fight against the shipment of bombs to Israel, could be the inspiration that other rank and filers need to help them join the fight in their own strikes: to turn words into action.

IAM’s fight is ours too; it belongs to the whole working class. It’s a powerful part of the tooth-and-claw fight to reverse the long decay of worker power and conditions in the neoliberal age. Boeing’s pickets are at the vanguard of that fight today. But IAM’s fight is at the vanguard of the working class’s struggle right now, too — a chance to disrupt the imperialist slaughter that the United States is so good at exporting.


Jason Koslowski
Jason is a contingent college teacher and union organizer who lives in Philadelphia.


James Dennis Hoff
James Dennis Hoff is a writer, educator, labor activist, and member of the Left Voice editorial board. He teaches at The City University of New York.

Dispatch from the Boeing Picket Lines

Here’s what I saw at three Boeing picket lines in Washington and Oregon.

Samuel Karlin 

September 26, 2024

LEFT VOICE, U$A



When I booked a trip to the Pacific Northwest back in April, I didn’t think for a second that it would align perfectly with the largest strike in the United States so far this year. I just thought I’d be hiking and see the world’s largest rubber chicken in Seattle.

But then 33,000 machinists at Boeing voted overwhelmingly to strike, despite the International Association of Machinists bureaucracy pushing workers to accept a sell-out contract. Less than a week later I was lucky enough to meet some of these workers on the picket lines. The flight from Newark to Seattle was six hours on a Boeing plane, so even before reaching the picket I was reminded of just how different mine and so many people’s lives would be if not for the machines these workers build.

After picking up a rental car and a quick meal, I went straight to the picket line at the Boeing factory in Renton, WA, just outside of Seattle. As I drove by to find parking, picketers were dancing along the sidewalk. Before my trip was over I’d go there once more and also visit the picket in Portland, Oregon.

September 17 in Renton, Washington

I don’t think I’ve ever strolled up to a more energetic picket line. As I approached the big tent surrounded by a large crew of workers and their families, someone greeted me with “Welcome to the block party!” It sure felt like one, with all sorts of food from pizza to freshly grilled sausages blanketing two folding tables and loud hip hop blasting from a speaker. The energy from the workers was matched by the constant stream of cars passing by and honking in solidarity.


Asian, Black, and white workers were dancing, laughing, and talking with one another. It was a beautiful reminder that despite stereotypical depictions of the working class in the United States as mainly chauvinist white men, U.S. workers are diverse and nothing breaks down the very real racial divisions of our class like a shared struggle on the picket line.

I grabbed a sign and stood at the curb soaking it up. Pretty early on it became clear that vehicles were still regularly driving in and out of the facility, almost always honking or raising their fists in solidarity with the workers on strike. Even though these drivers were still helping Boeing run, the striking machinists seemed to mainly just appreciate the honks from these workers and see them as acting in solidarity.

After about an hour I spoke with a machinist who works at the end of the line, checking the quality of the product. He was practically bursting with excitement to be on the picket line. It was his first ever strike. He was ecstatic that I’d come all the way from New Jersey to support, yelling every few minutes at his coworkers “They came all the way from New Jersey!”

He also said in passing that he was surprised I was there to support because “A lot of people don’t like Boeing.” I see where he’s coming from. Boeing has been in the news lately for planes breaking down, and especially in light of this strike I’ve noticed a media campaign trying to pin the blame on the workers who construct the planes. The truth is, these workers are incredibly talented craftspeople spending long hours making machines that improve countless people’s lives and help the world run. It’s the company and bosses who deserve scrutiny for trying to cut corners and ramp up production to save money which degrades the quality of the planes and thus the safety of the workers making them and the passengers using them.

From the still constant stream of honks from passing cars, it seemed that even if people don’t like Boeing the company, they like workers and agree that for their contributions they deserve the 40 percent raise and quality retirement and healthcare that they’re demanding.

I then talked to another machinist who works at the end of the line. “I’m here for my coworkers,” he said, emphasizing that his highly-skilled position pays comfortably, but that he knows so many Boeing workers who aren’t paid a decent wage and that it was important to him to support them. He also expressed some anger with the union leadership which had tried to sell out these workers and prevent a strike. He talked about the union not managing retirement funds well, and donating to “all sorts of political campaigns.” This point really resonated. Especially in this election year, it’s been clear to me that the role of the union bureaucracies is to align workers with the capitalist parties at a time when the labor movement is becoming much more combative. Along with strengthening the parties of the bosses, this work of the union bureaucracies leads many workers to distrust unions as organizations that can be by and for the rank and file. Unions should be organized from below by people like this machinist who was committed to fighting for his less well-off coworkers, not by bureaucrats beholden to the Democrats.

After spending some time at this main tent, I walked down the road where there were smaller (but still highly energetic) pickets sprinkled outside each entrance to the factory. At one of these spots a group of workers kept yelling “do a wheelie” at the passing cars. They were clearly having just as good a time away from the main tent. Eventually I left to check into my hotel and take a desperately needed nap, but very excited to return.

As I was leaving I walked past signs taped to a large traffic pole, reading “THE UNION SOLD US OUT,” and “2014 ALL OVER AGAIN,” the latter referring to the 2014 contract that passed by a mere 51 percent due to pressure on workers from the union leadership. There were also signs encouraging a no vote on this recent contract that the union had been pushing prior to the strike. Another reminder that if the workers win, it’ll be from the fight that the rank and file puts up.

September 18 in Renton, Washington

I returned the following evening to a much different scene. Maybe it was just a weird day and time for the picket. Maybe it was because this was the day that Boeing and the union returned to negotiations which are closed to the rank and file. Maybe it was the news of Boeing furloughing thousands of white collar employees. Whatever the case, far fewer people were out on the picket line, and the mood was much more passive.

I arrived at the location where there’d been about 80 people celebrating the day before. This time there were just five workers holding it down, not talking to each other much, though occasionally one would crack a joke to another. Despite the small numbers, these workers seemed to be in good spirits.

At one point a pedestrian walked by and while waiting to cross the busy intersection, asked about the negotiations. One of the more talkative workers responded that if they don’t get the 40 percent raise that they’re demanding, then “We’ll vote no again.”

I walked down to some of the other locations. The first one I approached had about ten workers. A child of a worker, maybe about eight years old, sat in a camping chair blasting a horn at passing cars. Some workers stood in clusters making small talk.

I walked to another entrance covered by a small but mighty group of workers who were putting all their effort into getting honks from passing cars and hollering “Just give me my money!” One or two cars flipped off or yelled racial slurs at the workers as they passed, an unfortunate reminder that there’s still people out there who are hostile to class struggle, especially when Black and Brown workers are part of it. Still, only about two people like this passed. Dozens if not hundreds honked in support.

Again, I noticed that whenever vans drove in and out of the factory the drivers tended to honk and express solidarity, and the picketers seemed to appreciate it. I asked a worker about it and he simply said, “Yeah they’re in a different union. I think the forklift drivers?” I thought to myself how powerful it would be to see these drivers join the strike, showing clearly that Boeing is nothing without workers in all points of production, from the machinists building planes to drivers transporting materials. Sadly, labor law has greatly attacked the historical practice of workers in different unions striking in solidarity with their class siblings who go on strike for better pay, benefits, and conditions. But at least at the Renton factory, there’s clearly some driver/machinist solidarity that can be built upon for greater shared struggle.

Later on I heard a younger worker telling his fellow picketers about his typical work shift which starts around 2am and runs through to the morning. He said, “It’s not too bad,” but he and his coworkers joked that if he wants a girlfriend he’ll have to meet her in the factory and take her on a date in the cafeteria. A worker who’d been there a decade at least replied, “I’ve seen this work break up so many families,” referring to the long hours that seem to be the norm for most of the machinists.

While it didn’t come up at these pickets, there has been much reporting on how Boeing uses forced overtime to make workers labor for long hours, with some workers spending 70 hours a week at the factory.

September 21 in Portland, Oregon

After a drive down the 101, I was in Portland where I had the opportunity to check out another picket at a different factory. This one was smaller than the first one I attended, about 30 people maybe, but it ended up being the most overtly friendly picket of the three. Just about everyone along the sidewalk outside the factory was smiling as I pulled up.

I arrived at a small tent with two people and we immediately started talking. I asked how they felt about the strike. One said she’d start looking for work soon because she didn’t want to be sitting around with nothing to do. The other seemed more content, adding “we’ve had years to prepare for this.”

I soon learned from conversations that this factory in particular had about 1,000 workers and while the strike was taking place there were 4 scabs inside trying to fill the tasks of about 30-something people and operate machines that they had no clue how to use. I was also happy to learn that this picket had received support from many other unions including firefighters, representatives from the local AFL-CIO, and Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace, to name a few. Plenty of passing cars also showed solidarity with their horns.

“I think how these negotiations go will affect how all negotiations in the future go,” one worker said. Adding that “If Boeing can get away with cutting retirement, what’s stopping other companies from doing it? If they can go after healthcare, other companies will.” He clearly understood this strike not just as a fight for himself and his coworkers, but for the larger labor movement.

I also learned from talking to another worker that the union was in charge of scheduling who showed up for which picketing shifts, and at least at this factory that meant workers were mostly only scheduled to picket with people they’d typically work with inside the factory. This type of bureaucratic organization of the picket lines is the norm and presents an obstacle to this strike and many others becoming as powerful as possible. Pickets should be spaces that bring out as many workers and community members as possible. In fact, the pickets should serve as spaces where workers have the opportunity to decide how to organize their strike rather than having the union bureaucracy dictate tactics to the workers. These could be spaces where Boeing workers try to convince drivers to join them on strike, affirm their most important demands, and strategize the fight so that the picket can last the long-haul and no contracts skimp out on their demands.

As I headed out I saw some type of box for telecommunications just inside the factory lawn, with “free Palestine fuck Boeing” scrawled across the top. It was powerful to see this message right outside the factory given the role that Boeing is playing in the current Israeli genocide in Gaza. Boeing has long been one of the top weapons manufacturers, and reporting from The Intercept highlights the company’s direct, currently expanding role in Israel’s genocidal campaign.

With no context of who wrote the message or how long it had been there, I don’t want to make too many assumptions. Maybe it was from an unrelated protest. But it made me hopeful that the historic movement for Palestine can find its way onto the picket line in solidarity with these workers fighting for the company to pay them what they deserve. The historic, youth-led movement for Palestine in the United States has shown that imperialist countries should not be written off as sites of struggle against oppression of the world’s most vulnerable people. Meanwhile, the Boeing strike and other recent struggles from the U.S. working class shows the unparalleled role that workers play in making everything, including imperialist companies like Boeing, run. These two struggles, the movement for Palestine and the strike at Boeing, showing up for one another is a scenario that could greatly change how each movement understands its own power and the role that the U.S. working class can play in resisting oppression and all forms of imperialism.

So far, there have only been a few examples of connections being made between the striking Boeing machinists and the anti-imperialist movement for Palestine. The bureaucratic control of the union leadership also is likely to present an obstacle to more militancy in Boeing workers, whether it be the workers taking up anti-imperialist demands or organizing the strike from the rank and file. Despite these limits, I can’t help but feel moralized by these picket lines and what they show about the growing desire of the U.S. working class to fight for everything we deserve.



Samuel Karlin  is a socialist with a background in journalism. He mainly writes for Left Voice about U.S. imperialism and international class struggle.

Archaeologists Reveal Viking Treasure Left Buried for 1,000 Years: 'Unique'

Viking Bracelet Made 1,000 Years Ago Found in Farmer's Field—'Real Shock'

By Aristos Georgiou

NEWSWEEK
Science and Health Reporter
Published Sep 16, 2024 

Archaeologists have unearthed a hoard of Viking treasure that was hidden for more than a 1,000 years.

The treasure was found on a mountainside in Årdal, Hjelmeland municipality, in Norway, the University of Stavanger (UiS) announced in a press release.

The treasure consists of four silver bracelets, each featuring different decorations. Based on their appearance, they have been roughly dated to the 9th-10th centuries, Volker Demuth, an archaeologist with the UiS Museum of Archaeology, who was part of the discovery team, told Newsweek.

This suggests the artifacts date to the Viking Age, a period in medieval history between roughly the late 8th and 11th centuries, when the Vikings—a Scandinavian seafaring people—raided, colonized, and traded widely across Europe and beyond.

The Viking treasure discovered in Årdal, Norway. The hoard consists of silver bracelets that are thought to be more than 1,000 years old. Volker Demuth/Museum of Archaeology, University of Stavanger


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"This is undoubtedly the most significant event of my career," Demuth told ScienceNorway.

The treasure was first spotted by UiS field archaeologists Mari Krogstad Samuelsen and Ola Tengesdal Lygre. The researchers were part of a team, alongside Demuth, who were brought in to survey the site before the construction of a tractor road on the mountainside by a local farmer, who owns the land.


"At first I thought it was a question of some twisted copper wires that you can often find in agricultural land, but when I saw that there were several lying next to each other and that they were not copper at all, but silver, I realized that we had found something exciting," Lygre said in the press release.

The treasure was found beneath the floor of what was once a small house that formed part of a larger Viking Age farm, according to the archaeologists. The house—whose remains are very well-preserved—may have belonged to slaves who lived on the farm, the archaeologists suspect.

"The excavation shows that there was a large and powerful Viking farm here, consisting of several houses for both people and animals. We have found remains of soapstone pots, rivets, knife blades and whetstones for sharpening tools," Demuth said.

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The fact that the treasure was found during a scientific excavation is significant because it enables archaeologists to place the bracelets in their proper context.

"[The treasure] is a unique find, because we very rarely find such objects exactly where they were placed. As a rule, such valuable objects are discovered on fields that have been plowed, where an object has been completely taken out of its original context. Since the silver hoard has not been moved, it can give us completely new insights into life and society in the Viking Age," Demuth said.

"The find-spot has not been disturbed by modern activities, therefore the archaeological remains are comparably well preserved, directly underneath the surface," he told Newsweek.


Evidence from the excavation indicates that the farm was burned down at one point, which might explain why the treasure was buried. In fact, the age of the treasure coincides with a period of significant unrest in the Viking world.

"If people who lived on this farm had to flee from an attack, it would be natural to hide away the valuables you had before escaping to the mountains. And perhaps in a place where you wouldn't have thought that a treasure was hidden," Demuth said.

A map shows the location of the village of Årdal, in Norway's Hjelmeland municipality.

© OpenStreetMap contributors

A map shows the location of the village of Årdal, in Norway's Hjelmeland municipality. A Viking treasure, thought to be more than 1,000 years old, was found in the area.

Map: Ian RandallCreated with Datawrapper

The bracelets have not yet been completely excavated because they were removed from the site together with the surrounding soil. This block of earth is being carefully analyzed and the objects will be dug out in the lab under controlled conditions.

An initial survey indicated that the earth contains four bracelets, which appear to be made from "very pure" silver with almost no signs of corrosion, Demuth told Newsweek.

Thanks to the "excellent" preservation conditions of the archaeological context, researchers expect to obtain a more accurate date for when the treasure was hidden after analyzing samples from fireplaces and burnt features within the Viking building.

"This is an absolutely fantastic find, which gives us completely unique knowledge about one of the most central eras in Norway, namely the Viking Age," museum director Ole Madsen said in the press release.

SPACE

NASA Deploys Sail of Experimental Spacecraft Propelled Purely by Light

Space06 September 2024

ByMark Thompson, Universe Today

Artist’s concept of NASA’s Advanced Composite Solar Sail System. (NASA/Aero Animation/Ben Schweighart)

Those of you following the Advanced Composite Solar Sail System may have heard that its booms and sail are now deployed. It is receiving light pressure from the Sun to propel it through the Solar System.

Like a test pilot in a new aircraft, NASA are now testing out just how it handles. Before deployment, the spacecraft was slowly tumbling and now the controllers will see if they can get it under control and under sail power.

The reflectivity of the sail means it's an easy spot in the night sky, just fire up the NASA app to find out where to look.

Shining, shimmering, tumbling

Our Solar Sail is currently orbiting Earth, slowly tumbling as expected while the team characterizes its boom and sails. You can #SpotTheSail intermittently as it passes overhead using our tool in the #NASA_App. Learn more: https://t.co/7jXKqa19Hl pic.twitter.com/XfVetMBNMW

— NASA Ames (@NASAAmes) September 5, 2024

Solar sails are an ingenious propulsion technique that employ pressure from sunlight to generate low levels of thrust. As the photons of light strike the surface, they transfer momentum to the solar sail and therefore the spacecraft is accelerated.

The thrust is small but when applied over long periods of time can provide a very efficient way to propel small spacecraft. The first successful deployment of a sail occurred in 2010 with the IKAROS (Interplanetary Kite-craft Accelerated by Radiation of the Sun) spacecraft launched by the Japanese space agency JAXA.

The Advanced Composite Solar Sail System (ACSSS) was developed by NASA to test the technology. The boom that supports the sail is made of lighter and more durable composite materials.

KAROS space probe with solar sail in flight (artist's depiction) showing a typical square sail configuration. (Andrzej Mirecki/Wikimedia Commons)

By testing the deployment of the booms and efficient sail operation, NASA hopes to prove the viability of the technology.

The ACSSS uses lighter, more flexible materials than previous attempts and will enable more efficient deep space exploration, asteroid rendezvous, and other missions requiring low-thrust propulsion. ACSSS orbits the Earth in a low orbit with an altitude of between 500-600 kilometers.

Following launch, it was released purposely without attitude control and was as a result tumbling through space. Once the analysis has been completed, and the boom and sail deployment has been understood, the team will re-engage the attitude control to stabilize the spacecraft.

The next phase then begins as the team analyze flight handling and dynamics to adjust the spacecraft's orbit.

The unfurled solar sail is approximately 30 feet (about 9 meters) on one side. (NASA)

Since the deployment of the sail, the operations team continue to receive images and data to help them understand how the boom technology has deployed.

So far so good it seems for demonstrating the deployment and initial operations.

The team will continue to monitor and analyze the incoming data and images in preparation for further technology tests and demonstrations in the week ahead.

Any keen-eyed sky watchers may be able to spot the spacecraft as it passes overhead. The high reflectivity of the sail will make it clearly visible to the unaided eye.

NASA have added a new feature to their app so that users can set up notifications to get alerts when it is visible from their location. NASA is inviting the public to share their pictures of the spacecraft online using the hashtag #SpotTheSail.

NASA's solar sailing spacecraft is tumbling –

 but that's part of the plan


Who needs fuel – or even engines – when you could use the sun to push a spacecraft along?

Iain Thomson
Fri 6 Sep 2024


NASA has announced its experimental ACS3 solar-sailing spacecraft is working as expected, after it was spotted tumbling in the night sky.

The 80 m2 (860 sq ft) Advanced Composite Solar Sail System (ACS3) successfully spread its sails last week. The spacecraft uses pressure produced by solar radiation to move – doing away with conventional rocket propellant. NASA is testing the sail in the hope that its design, and the materials used, are viable for future vessels.

As the boffins put it:


NASA's Advanced Composite Solar Sail System, or ACS3, technology demonstration uses composite materials – or a combination of materials with different properties – in its novel, lightweight booms that deploy from a CubeSat. Data obtained from ACS3 will guide the design of future larger-scale composite solar sail systems that could be used for space weather early warning satellites, near-Earth asteroid reconnaissance missions, or communications relays for crewed exploration missions.

Questions were raised this week after the instrument – which launched in April and is now in Earth's orbit – was observed to be slowly tumbling, gyrating, or wobbling.

NASA's Langley Research Center assured the public that's neither unusual nor worrying.

"Our Solar Sail System is sailing around Earth, slowly tumbling as expected while the mission team characterizes its boom and sails," the agency explained Thursday.

You can, we're told, track the craft from NASA's app.

Engineers at NASA's Langley Research Center work on an unfurled Advanced Composite Solar Sail System's solar sail – Click to enlarge. Source: NASA

The first probe to use solar radiation pressure as a major means for orientation during flight was NASA's 1970s-era Mariner 10, which caught sunlight on its solar panels and high-gain antenna. ACS3 is using vastly larger composite sails to do this – and hopefully far more efficiently.Bill Nye's bonkers LightSail spaceship unfurls solar sails at last
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NASA is not alone in pursuing solar sails. Japan's JAXA managed a Venus flyby in 2010 using solar sails. And the Planetary Society executed an unfurling in 2019.

It's not ACS3's sails that are of most interest: the booms on which they hang are said to be "made from a polymer material that is flexible and reinforced with carbon fiber."

"This composite material can be rolled for compact stowage, but remains strong and lightweight when unrolled. It is also very stiff and resistant to bending and warping due to changes in temperature," according to NASA.

"The ACS3 technology demonstration will also test an innovative tape-spool boom extraction system designed to minimize jamming of the coiled booms during deployment."

Coiled components matter, because they mean items with large surface area can be packed into the small volume of spacecraft, making them easier to launch. ®

Hints of a Hidden Structure Detected at The Edge of The Solar System

Space06 September 2024

ByMichelle Starr

An artist's impression of the Kuiper Belt. (ESO/M. Kornmesser)

If you travel far enough away from the Sun, the Solar System becomes a lot more populated.

Out past the orbit of Neptune lies the Kuiper Belt, a vast, ring-shaped field of icy rocks. This is where Pluto resides, and Arrokoth, and countless other small objects in the cold and the dark.

These are known as Kuiper Belt objects or KBOs, and astronomers have just found hints of an unexpected rise in their density, between 70 and 90 astronomical units from the Sun, separated by a large, practically empty gap between it and an inner population of KBOs closer to the Sun.

It seems, almost, like there are two Kuiper Belts, or at least two components – something nobody was expecting to find.

"If this is confirmed, it would be a major discovery," says planetary scientist Fumi Yoshida of the University of Occupational and Environmental Health Sciences and Chiba Institute of Technology in Japan.

"The primordial solar nebula was much larger than previously thought, and this may have implications for studying the planet formation process in our Solar System."

The objects in the Kuiper Belt are thought to represent the most pristine material our Solar System contains.

The belt itself extends from the orbit of Neptune, around 30 astronomical units from the Sun (an astronomical unit is the average distance between Earth and the Sun), out to about 50 astronomical units from the Sun.

This distance from the Sun means that anything within the Kuiper Belt is only minimally affected by solar radiation, which, in turn, means that KBOs likely remain pretty much unchanged since the Solar System was born, some 4.6 billion years ago.

These objects are ancient remnants of the cloud of material, known as the solar nebula, from which the Sun and planets formed.

The New Horizons spacecraft has been heading out deeper into the Solar System since its flyby of Pluto in 2015; at time of writing, the spacecraft is nearly 60 astronomical units from the Sun and counting.

To support its ongoing exploration of the outer Solar System, astronomers here on Earth have been conducting observations of the Kuiper Belt using the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan's Subaru Telescope in Hawai'i.

To date, the Subaru observations have revealed 263 new KBOs, but a large, international team of astronomers led by Wesley Fraser of the National Research Council of Canada has found that 11 of those objects are much, much farther than we thought the Kuiper Belt ended – out in the region past 70 astronomical units.

Graph showing the distance distribution for Kuiper Belt Objects discovered using the Subaru Telescope's Hyper Suprime Cam. (Wesley Fraser)

From the number of these objects spotted, the researchers were able to extrapolate the density of the outer Kuiper Belt ring. It would be lower than the inner population, but high enough to constitute a new structure.

In the region between 55 and 70 astronomical units, however, next to nothing has been found. This might sound strange, but a gap of this kind is a feature we've seen in other forming planetary systems, and it brings the Solar System more in line with what we've found elsewhere in the galaxy.

"Our Solar System's Kuiper Belt long appeared to be very small in comparison with many other planetary systems, but our results suggest that idea might just have arisen due to an observational bias," Fraser explains.

"So maybe, if this result is confirmed, our Kuiper Belt isn't all that small and unusual after all compared to those around other stars."

A lot of our observations of the Milky Way galaxy suggest that our Solar System is unusual in many ways. Since the Solar System is the only known planetary system to host life, these oddities could be contributing factors to the Solar System's habitability.

But our technology for observing space has limitations that could result in significant observation biases, suggesting peculiarities that don't actually exist. If the new observations of the Kuiper Belt are confirmed, we have just ruled out one of those peculiarities – an unusually small solar nebula.In order to shed more light on the discovery, observations continue in order to track the orbits of the 11 distant objects.

"This is a groundbreaking discovery revealing something unexpected, new, and exciting in the distant reaches of the Solar System," says New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute.

"This discovery probably would not have been possible without the world class capabilities of Subaru observatory."

The research has been accepted into The Planetary Science Journal and is available on arXiv.

‘Found bolide’: NASA astronaut Matthew Dominick captures ‘shooting star’ over Egypt’s Cairo | Watch video

NASA astronaut Matthew Dominick shared a timelapse capturing a bright green meteor explosion over Cairo. The video, featuring 20 images, showcases the meteor's disintegration as it entered Earth's atmosphere.

Fareha Naaz

Published6 Sep 2024,

Matthew Dominick, a NASA astronaut, shared a stunning timelapse of a green meteor explosion captured from the ISS over Cairo.(AFP)

NASA astronaut Matthew Dominick is in the spotlight again for his latest video that captures a bright green meteor explosion in the night sky over Earth. The commander of the SpaceX Crew-8 mission onboard the International Space Station (ISS) shared a new series of timelapse photos.

The camera positioned over Egypt's Cairo vividly captured a bright green outburst on Monday, September 3, at 5:42 am (IST). This happened while the astronaut was trying to take a shot of the Milky Way's core. The fireball explosion shown in the timelapse resulted from the disintegration of the meteor after entering Earth's atmosphere.

Taking to social media platform X, Matthew Dominick wrote, “I showed this to a couple of friends yesterday to see what they thought.” He added, “They both thought it was a meteor exploding in the atmosphere — a rather bright one called a bolide.”

Keeping in mind the curiosity and admiration of cosmic enthusiasts and sky gazers for the miracles of the universe, Matthew Dominick shared a slowed-down timelapse to one frame per second. This enables us to see the meteor streaking and then exploding. Captured from inside the space station's Cupola module, the clip includes 20 individual images. Matthew Dominick said, “When I went to review the shots afterwards, I found the bolide.”

Also Read | Sunita Williams in space: What if Boeing Starliner’s return is further delayed?

The astronaut shared another version of the timelapse in the comments section of the post, a longer and faster frame with the caption, “It is interesting to compare the size of the bolide blast to other objects in view like the Mediterranean, Cairo, or lightning strikes.” 

In the faster version, the shooting star appears as just a brief flash at the top right of the frame.

Matthew Dominick has emerged as a prolific space photographer with magnificent shots of the aurora, moon, lightning, nebula, and more. This viral post has garnered over 32.01 lakh views in just a few days and over 21,000 likes.

NASA shares mesmerising image of Galaxy NGC 5033; netizens call it ‘sensational’

• NASA released a stunning image of Galaxy NGC 5033.

Livemint

Updated6 Sep 2024, 

FILE PHOTO: NASA shared new images of ISRO’s Chandrayaan-3 REUTERS/Joe Skipper/File Photo

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) Hubble Space Telescope has captured remarkable view of NGC 5033, a spiral galaxy that shines brightly thanks to its active galactic nucleus.

Also Read | Sunita Williams in space: What if Boeing Starliner’s return is further delayed?

The Hubble Space Telescope which launched in 1990 changed the fundamental understanding of the universe right from determining the atmospheric composition of planets around other stars to discovering dark energy.

 

Also Read | Sunita Williams’ return: NASA confirms ’split’ with Boeing — ’Not yelling but…’

Coming back to the image shared by Hubble, NGC 5033, which is located approximately 40 million light-years away in the Canes Venatici constellation, shares notable features with the Milky Way, NASA states. It added that both galaxies stretch roughly 100,000 light-years across and display spiral arms filled with blue regions, marking areas of active star formation.

Due to its relative proximity to Earth, NGC 5033 provides astronomers with an excellent opportunity to study the intricate details of its glowing nucleus and further understand the behavior of galaxies with active cores, the US space agency stated.

Also Read | Sunita Williams’ return: NASA confirms ’split’ with Boeing — ’Not yelling but…’

In the image shared by NASA Hubble, it shows the close-up shot of a spiral galaxy which is surrounded by spiral arms filled with dark dust and vibrant blue star-forming regions.

Netizens too were captivated by the image shared by NASA's Hubble. One person described it as "Sensational," while another enthusiastically commented, "Smash." Another user labeled it "Fancy," with one more calling it "madness." "I'm in love," expressed a different user, reflecting the widespread admiration for the stunning image.

Meanwhile, Boeing's Starliner is scheduled to undock from the International Space Station (ISS) and return without its crew members – NASA astronauts Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore – on FrBLO

iday, September 6. NASA said in a statement on August 30 that Starliner is scheduled to "autonomously undock" from the space station at around 6:04 pm EDT Friday (or IST 3:30 am Saturday) "to begin the journey home, weather conditions permitting".

After undocking, Starliner is expected to take around six hours to reach the landing zone at White Sands Space Harbor in New Mexico. Starliner is expected to land on Earth around 9:30 am (IST) on Saturday, September 7. Starliner crew Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams will remain aboard the space station as part of the Expedition 71/72 crew on NASA's Crew-9 mission, aboard SpaceX Dragon craft, in February 2025.

Breathtaking NASA images of the Andromeda galaxy

TOI Science Desk / TIMESOFINDIA.COM / Sep 5, 2024, 


The Andromeda Galaxy, positioned 2.5 million light-years away, stands as the closest spiral galaxy to our Milky Way. Boasting over a trillion stars, it significantly contributes to galactic evolution studies. Various NASA missions have captured intricate images of Andromeda's structure and star-forming regions, enhancing our understanding of this cosmic giant.



The Andromeda Galaxy (M31) is the closest spiral galaxy to the Milky Way, located about 2.5 million light-years away. It's the largest galaxy in the Local Group, containing over a trillion stars, and is visible to the naked eye from Earth under dark skies.
Andromeda is on a collision course with the Milky Way, predicted to merge in about 4.5 billion years, forming a new galaxy.
This galaxy is similar in structure to the Milky Way, with a central bulge, spiral arms, and a vast halo of stars. Andromeda plays a key role in studies of galactic evolution and dynamics.


The Andromeda Galaxy: A neighbouring giant

The Andromeda Galaxy (M31), located 2.5 million light-years away, is the closest spiral galaxy to the Milky Way. With over a trillion stars, it's the largest in the Local Group and visible to the naked eye. This galaxy plays a significant role in studies of galactic evolution and dynamics. NASA's various space missions have captured stunning images offering glimpses into the vastness of the universe, including the intricate structure of the Andromeda Galaxy.



Fascinating images captured by different NASA galaxy explorers

NASA Galaxy Evolution Explorer captures Andromeda's majesty
This image from NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer highlights Messier 31 (Andromeda), the largest galaxy in the Milky Way's vicinity, revealing intricate cosmic details.


Image source: NASA
ESA Herschel mission unveils Andromeda's depths
Data from the ESA Herschel mission presents new perspectives on the Andromeda Galaxy, showcasing its expansive star-forming regions and dust clouds.



Image source: NASA
Palomar observatory's Andromeda galaxy view
Taken by the Palomar Observatory, operated by Caltech, this image of the Andromeda Galaxy captures its stunning spiral structure and the rich star field surrounding it.


Image source: Palomar Transient Factory
NASA Wide-field Survey Explorer shows Andromeda's full glory
NASA’s Wide-field Survey Explorer captures a detailed image of the Andromeda Galaxy, offering a complete view of our galactic neighbour 2.5 million light-years away.


Image source: Messier Objects
NASA’s Spitzer Telescope reveals Andromeda’s hidden details
This image from NASA’s retired Spitzer Space Telescope showcases stars and dust clouds in Andromeda, highlighting star-forming regions using infrared data from the WISE mission.


Image source: NASA
Exploring Andromeda with NASA’s Galaxy Evolution explorer
NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer presents a detailed image of the Andromeda Galaxy, capturing its vast spiral arms and a glimpse into its star formation activities.


Image source: NASA

The Andromeda Galaxy glows rosy red in gorgeous new Hubble Telescope image

Samantha Mathewson
Thu, September 5, 2024

The Andromeda Galaxy is located about 2.5 million light-years away, making it the Milky Way's closest galactic neighbor. . | Credit: NASA, ESA, M. Boyer (Space Telescope Science Institute), and J. Dalcanton (University of Washington); Image Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America)

The rosy red structures of a nearby galaxy glow brightly in a new image from the Hubble Space Telescope.

The Andromeda Galaxy — the Milky Way's closest galactic neighbor — is located about 2.5 million light-years away. Measuring approximately 152,000 light-years across, it has nearly the same mass as our Milky Way galaxy. A recent hubble image, released on Aug. 30, captures a detailed view of the northeast region of the famed galaxy, including its intricately woven spiral arms and swathes of ionized gas that fuel star formation.

Related: Stunning Photos of Our Milky Way Galaxy (Gallery)

"The combination of stellar nurseries and supernovas create a dynamic environment that excites the surrounding hydrogen gas, flourishing it into a garden of star-studded roses," NASA officials said in a statement.

Using Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys and Wide Field Camera 3, researchers were able to peer through the clouds of gas and hone in on Andromeda's spiral arms to analyze the galaxy's vast collection of stars.

"The extent of the study spanned a vast range of stars, providing not just a clear view of Andromeda's stellar history and diversity, but also more insight on stellar formation and evolution overall," NASA officials said in the statement.

"By examining these stars in our local cosmic neighborhood, scientists can better understand those within galaxies in the distant universe."

Andromeda is believed to be falling toward the Milky Way due to gravitational forces between the two galaxies and the invisible dark matter that surrounds them both. Ultimately, the two galaxies are expected to experience a head-on collision in about 2 billion to 4 billion years, which will drastically alter the structure of both Andromeda and the Milky Way as we know them today. However, some new research casts doubt on this collision theory — so, perhaps only time will tell.

One of the universe's biggest paradoxes could be even weirder than we thought, James Webb telescope study reveals

Ben Turner
Thu, September 5, 2024 

Credit: NASA/CXC/JPL-Caltech/STScI/NSF/NRAO/VLA

New measurements taken with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have deepened the scientific controversy of the Hubble tension — suggesting it may not exist at all.

For years, astronomers have found that the universe appears to be expanding at different speeds depending on where they look, a conundrum they call the Hubble tension. Some of the measurements agree with our best current understanding of the universe, while others threaten to break it.

When JWST came online in 2022, one team of researchers used the space telescope's unprecedented accuracy to confirm the tension exists. But according to the new results from a different team of scientists, the Hubble tension may arise from measurement error and be an illusion after all. Yet even these results are not definitive.

"Our results are consistent with the standard model. But they don't rule out that there's a tension there too," study lead author Wendy Freedman, an astrophysicist at the University of Chicago, told Live Science. "[The experience] is probably the closest thing to a rollercoaster — it's been exciting, but there are these moments when you've got to climb the hill again."

Hubble trouble

Currently, there are two gold-standard methods for figuring out the Hubble constant, a value that describes the expansion rate of the universe. The first involves poring over tiny fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background — an ancient relic of the universe's first light produced just 380,000 years after the Big Bang.

Related: 'It could be profound': How astronomer Wendy Freedman is trying to fix the universe

After mapping out this microwave hiss using the European Space Agency's Planck satellite, cosmologists inferred a Hubble constant of roughly 46,200 mph per million light-years, or around 67 kilometers per second per megaparsec (km/s/Mpc). This, alongside other measurements of the early universe, aligned with theoretical predictions.

The second method operates at closer distances and in the universe's later life using pulsating stars called Cepheid variables. Cepheid stars are slowly dying, and their outer layers of helium gas grow and shrink as they absorb and release the star's radiation, making them periodically flicker like distant signal lamps.

As Cepheids get brighter, they pulsate more slowly, enabling astronomers to measure the stars' intrinsic brightness. By comparing this brightness to their observed brightness, astronomers can chain Cepheids into a "cosmic distance ladder" to peer ever deeper into the universe's past.

A bright star surrounded by beige swirls

Recently, when Adam Riess, a professor of astronomy at Johns Hopkins University, and his team measured the Hubble constant using the Hubble Space Telescope and JWST, they found a puzzlingly high value of 73.2 km/s/Mpc. Hence the tension, a significant discrepancy between methods measuring the expansion rate in the early universe and those in the more modern one, was cemented.

But Freedman previously suggested that dust, gas and other stars could be throwing off the brightness measurements of the Cepheids, creating the appearance of a discrepancy where there isn‘t one at all.

In the new study, to tease out a possible systematic error in Cepheid crowding, Freedman and her colleagues trained JWST on 11 nearby galaxies containing Type Ia supernovae, measuring their distances and anchoring them to three independent distance ladders with intrinsic brightnesses in similar regions of the sky: the Cepheids; and two other standard candle red giant stars known as "tip-of-the-red-giant-branch" (TRGB) stars and J-region asymptotic giant branch (JAGB) stars.

Their results were puzzling. The TRGB and JAGB stars gave Hubble constant results of 69.85 km/s/Mpc and 67.96 km/s/Mpc, respectively. But the Cepheids returned 72.04 km/s/Mpc, replicating the Hubble tension — albeit less dramatically than the results made by Riess. To Freedman and her colleagues, this is a possible hint that the Cepheid measurements could contain some unknown systematic error.

The end of Hubble tension?

Yet not all scientists agree with the study's conclusions. When asked about the new findings, Riess suggested the mismatched results could be because Freedman and her team's sample was too small.

"They get a lower Hubble constant because the sample they selected gives a lower Hubble constant, regardless of whether you measure with JWST or HST [Hubble Space Telescope], or Cepheids, JAGB or TRGB, because the supernovae in the hosts they selected fluctuate that way," Riess told Live Science. "They chose a very small sample … and they chose these from the tail, not the middle of the distribution."

But Freedman countered this point. Although the sample might be too small to account for the full range of star distances, she said, the results also may mean the measurements of the more distant Cepheid stars contain a "fatal" systematic error — a crowding that is throwing off the calculations of the Cepheid distances.

To make a measurement of Cepheid stars, "you're making a crowding correction, and they're not small corrections," Freedman said. "And if you get that wrong, you get the [star] colors wrong, you get the dust correction wrong, you get the metallicity correction wrong. These effects are covariant, and they could have a much bigger effect [on the final distance measured] than just saying that crowding is not a problem."

Freedman believes the answer is to make even more measurements, potentially some with an additional type of star. She expects this work to be completed in the next two years. Yet whether additional measurements will resolve the problem or add to it is debated.

"We're in the midst of this, and there's more to come," Freedman said. "[JWST] is a marvelous machine, and it's exactly what we need to get at some of these kinds of issues. It's a good time to be working on this."

Astronaut watches a meteor explode over Earth in a bright green fireball in stunning video from ISS

Samantha Mathewson
Thu, September 5, 2024


a bright green streak can be seen above earth as seen from space

Credit: NASA/Matthew Dominick

A new video from an astronaut's vantage point in space catures a bright green burst over Earth as a meteor exploded in the night sky.

NASA astronaut Matthew Dominick, commander of the SpaceX Crew-8 mission, shared a new time-lapse of photos taken from the International Space Station as it passed over Cairo, Egypt. While aiming to photograph the Milky Way's Core, Dominick ended up capturing a bright green fireball that exploded on Monday (Sept. 2) at 8:12 p.m. EDT (2012 GMT).

The outburst seen in the time-lapse was created by a meteor that entered Earth's atmosphere and burned up. Dominick shared the new view in a post on X (formally Twitter) on Sept. 3.

"I showed this to a couple of friends yesterday to see what they thought," Dominick wrote in his post. "They both thought it was a meteor exploding in the atmosphere — a rather bright one called a bolide."

Dominick shared two versions of the timelapse. In his initial post, the timelapse was slowed down to one frame per second, offering a more detailed view of the fleeting meteor as it streaked across the sky and then exploded. In the comments, Dominick shared a faster version, in which the meteor appears as only a very brief flash in the top right of the frame.

Given the exceptional brightness of the meteor, it is considered a bolide, which is a large meteor that explodes in Earth's atmosphere with enough force to create a sonic boom. This type of meteor can last several seconds, or even minutes, and create a bright glow across the sky that outshines the stars and moon.

"I think it is interesting to compare the size of the bolide blast to other objects in view like the Mediterranean, Cairo, or lightning strikes," Dominick commented.

The timelapse includes 20 individual images taken from inside of the space station's Cupola module.

"When I went to review the shots afterwards I found the bolide," Dominick said in his post.

Dominick has been a prolific photographer during his stay aboard the ISS as part of the SpaceX Crew-8 mission. The NASA astronaut and U.S. Navy test pilot has captured auroras, several meteors exploding above Earth and more on camera during his stay on the orbital lab.

Watch: Mesmerising explosion of meteor over Earth gets captured by NASA astronaut

WION
California, United States

Updated: Sep 05, 2024


Screengrab of the viral video of meteor explosion in space. 

Story highlights

The meteor exploded on September 3 as the space station soared above the Mediterranean Sea as the astronaut made a timelapse video of the event

A stunning explosion of a meteor in the atmosphere of the Earth was captured by NASA astronaut Matthew Dominick and shared on social media which left netizens in awe.

Dominick, who is currently aboard the International Space Station (ISS), recorded the event while he was taking pictures of Earth from the cupola window during night-time.

Posting on X, Dominick said that he shared the suspected meteor event with his friends who said that it was indeed a 'bolide'.

This is a term for meteors which explode in the atmosphere and create a very bright light.


The timelapse video of the event was shared by the astronaut after it happened on September 3 as the space station soared above the Mediterranean Sea.

Also Read: Meteor that fell over North Carolina packed force of 10 tonnes of TNT

"I showed this to a couple of friends yesterday to see what they thought. They both thought it was a meteor exploding in the atmosphere - a rather bright one called a bolide. Timelapse is slowed down to one frame per second for you to see it streaking and then exploding," wrote Dominick in the caption of his post.


"I think it is interesting to compare the size of the bolide blast to other objects in views like the Mediterranean, Cairo, or lightning strikes," he added.

Here's how netizens reacted to the viral video

Since the video was posted it garnered more than 12.6k views and garnered several comments..

"How much faster than real life is this video? That's a lot of lightning strikes!" said a user.

Watch: Stunning Perseid Meteor shower dazzles in night sky over Bosnia

"Point of order, "Under the Ball" point of view should only be used for Southern Hemisphere videos. Just sayin'. You will be confusing Flat Earthers no end," wrote another user.

"Keep trying to capture the Milky Way core.  Just imagining it in the frame would be epic," commented a third.

"This is incredible! Thank you for this. Great work!" wrote a fourth user.

(With inputs from agencies) 

Small meteor lights up 

Philippine sky, causes 

harmless ‘spectacular

 fireball’

The meteor, discovered through the Catalina Sky Survey, is only the ninth meteor that humans have ever spotted before impact. — Screengrab from social media

Friday, 06 Sep 2024 

MANILA, Sept 6 — A small, bright meteor lit up skies over the northern Philippines early Thursday as it burned up entering the Earth’s atmosphere, the European Space Agency and witnesses said.

The one-metre space rock, named 2024 RW1, collided with the Earth’s atmosphere shortly after midnight (1639 GMT Wednesday) and caused a “harmless” but “spectacular fireball” over the Philippines’ Luzon island, the ESA said.

The meteor, discovered through the Catalina Sky Survey, is only the ninth meteor that humans have ever spotted before impact.

Businessman Allan Madelar, 28, told AFP he waited an hour in Gonzaga, a municipality in Luzon, to watch the meteor with a friend.

“It was mesmerising, the colour was beautiful. The sky went from black to blue-green to orange and black again,” he said.

Video clips posted on Facebook and verified by AFP showed an orange-tailed fireball that briefly illuminated the night sky over Luzon.

Audie de la Cruz, 65, set up his camera on a bridge in Tuguegarao city, 142 kilometres south of Gonzaga, to photograph the celestial spectacle but the fireball died out before he could press the shutter.

“It was like a tadpole with a very big head, and its head was very bright,” de la Cruz told AFP.

“I might have failed to photograph it but seeing it was a very unforgettable

Spacecraft flies closer to Mercury than planned after thruster glitch

Pierre Celerier
Thu, September 5, 2024


A 2021 image of Mercury taken by the BepiColombo mission, which has again flown past the Sun-scorched planet (-)

A spacecraft carrying European and Japanese probes passed closer to Mercury than originally planned overnight after thruster problems delayed the mission to study the little-known, Sun-scorched planet.

The BepiColombo mission launched in 2018 on a winding path that had been intended to enter the orbit of the planet closest to the Sun in December 2025.

But in April, a glitch with the spacecraft's thrusters sapped some of its power supply, forcing teams on the ground to change its trajectory and delaying its arrival until November 2026.

The new path meant the spacecraft needed to fly 35 kilometres (22 miles) closer to the planet than initially planned -- passing just 165 kilometres above the surface -- during its latest flyby.

The European Space Agency's operations team confirmed that "all went well" with the flyby overnight, the mission's account on X said on Thursday.

It also posted a new image taken by the probe of the planet, whose pockmarked surface resembles the Moon.

It was the fourth of six planned flybys of Mercury on the mission's nine-billion-kilometre journey before it can finally settle into the planet's orbit.

Most of the time Mercury is closer to Earth than Mars -- but the red planet can be reached by missions from Earth in just seven months.

Mercury is "the most difficult" planet for probes to reach, explained Paris Observatory astronomer Alain Doressoundiram.

The planet's relatively tiny mass -- it is only slightly bigger than the Moon -- means its gravitational pull is extremely weak compared to the Sun, making it tricky for satellites to stay in its orbit.

"It takes much more energy to brake and stop at Mercury than to go to Mars," Doressoundiram told AFP.

This is where delicate manoeuvres called gravitational assists come in. These slingshots around celestial bodies allow spacecraft to speed up, slow down, or change trajectory.

The glitch with the electric thrusters means the spacecraft is now operating with only 90 percent of its planned power supply.

After months spent investigating the problem, the thrusters will "remain operating below the minimum thrust required for an insertion into orbit around Mercury in December 2025," mission manager Santa Martinez said in a statement earlier this week.

The new slower path means BepiColombo is now planned to enter orbit in November 2026.

- Space 'oddities' -

Mercury is by far the least studied of the four rocky, innermost planets in our solar system, which also include Venus, Earth and Mars.

NASA's Mariner 10 was the first probe to capture a close picture of its lunar-looking surface in 1974.

No spacecraft had orbited the planet until the MESSENGER probe arrived in 2011.

The NASA mission confirmed "some rather bizarre things," said Doressoundiram, a specialist on the surfaces of planets.

One of these "oddities" is that Mercury is the only rocky planet other than Earth to have a magnetic field, Doressoundiram said. Exactly how it has such a magnetic field so close to the Sun is not fully understood.

Another "oddity" is that Mercury's iron core composes 60 percent of its mass -- compared to only a third for Earth.

Mercury's surface is also marked by "hollows," which could suggest relatively recent geologic activity.

Also unclear is the composition of minerals on covering the planet's surface, which is blasted with intense radiation from the Sun.

These are just some of the mysteries that the BepiColombo mission hopes to shed light on when it finally orbits Mercury for at least a year and a half.

The spacecraft carries two separate satellites, one from the ESA and another from Japan's JAXA space agency, which have a total of 16 scientific instruments.

NASA Will Push Starliner Away From ISS Quickly Because Of Its Troubled Thrusters

Ryan Erik King
Thu, September 5, 2024 

Photo: NASA

With NASA announcing that astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams will return to Earth next March on SpaceX’s Crew-9 mission, the focus quickly shifted to what will happen to the beleaguered Boeing Starliner. The space agency plans to autonomously undock the craft from the International Space Station but fears the Starliner could drift out of control and potentially crash into the station.

NASA outlined a plan to shove the Starliner as away from the ISS as quickly as possible without overstressing the thrusts that caused this dilemma in the first place. This breakout burn procedure will be a series of a dozen short and sharp thruster burns. In a teleconference on Wednesday, Johnson Space Center lead flight director Anthony Vareha explained:

“The reason we chose doing this breakout burn is simply it gets the vehicle away from Station faster and, without the crew on board, able to take manual control if needed. There’s just a lot less variables we need to account for when we do the breakout burn and allows us to get the vehicle on its trajectory home that much sooner.”

NASA vigorously attempted to find fixes while Wilmore and Williams ended up stranded on the ISS. The space agency confirmed during a briefing last month that engineers were able to recreate the thruster’s issues during tests at White Sands Test Facility in New Mexico, SpaceNews reported. The Teflon seal around a poppet, a thruster valve, expanded and started extruding out as the thruster headed up. The melted Teflon then constrained the propellant’s flow.

When the Starliner shoves off, it will open up space on the ISS for the Crew-9 Crew Dragon. Colonel Nick Hague will command the mission, becoming the first Space Force Guardian selected to go to space. However, the achievement comes with a caveat: he’s already been to space. Hague graduated from the U.S. Air Force Academy in 1998 and was selected to become an astronaut in 2013, but he transferred to the Space Force in 2021.

I want to believe that the Space Force is a real military branch and not just a scheme by Air Force Space Command to get more funding and promotions with ugly uniforms and forced traditions. At least the fledging service is more capable than Boeing.
a bright green streak can be seen above earth as seen from space

Hubble Telescope spies a very sparkly mini-galaxy (image)

Victoria Corless
Wed, September 4, 2024 

The Pegasus Dwarf spheroidal galaxy, also known as Andromeda VI, is one of at least 13 dwarf galaxies that orbit the Andromeda galaxy. | Credit: NASA, ESA, and D. Weisz; Processing: Gladys Kober

New images released by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope are of the Pegasus Dwarf spheroidal galaxy, also known as Andromeda VI.

Pegasus is located in the Andromeda Galaxy, also called Messier 31, which is the Milky Way’s closest neighbour at about 2,480,000 light-years away from Earth. As such, Andromeda is one of the few galaxies visible to the naked eye — best observed in November.

The images were captured as part of a re-examination of the entire Andromeda system, meant to gather further information to answer long-standing questions related to dark matter, reionization and the growth of galactic ecosystems across cosmic time, according to a NASA statement.

The Andromeda galaxy is host to at least 13 dwarf galaxies that orbit around it, one of which is the Pegasus Dwarf spheroidal galaxy. Pegasus was first identified in 1998 thanks to the sharp eyes of an amateur astronomer. It almost slipped notice due to the dim nature and relatively small sizes of dwarf spheroidal galaxies like this one.

Related: Hubble telescope captures stunning shot of spiral galaxy (photo)

Pegasus, and galaxies like it, contain very few "heavy" elements — elements heavier than helium, such as carbon, oxygen and iron — suggesting it hasn't experienced many cycles of star formation. In more evolved galaxies, the birth and death of stars results in a chemical enrichment, also known as a galaxy's chemical evolution.

However, these dwarf spheroidal galaxies — which are generally devoid of gas and experience very little new star formation — are instead populated by old and intermediate-age stars. It is possible that Andromeda's massive gravitational field may have stripped the star-forming gases from Pegasus, leaving only enough material for a few generations of stars.

"In comparison, some of the dwarf spheroidal companion galaxies of the Milky Way found at comparable distances do contain some intermediate-age stars, but this could be because Andromeda is so massive and extended that its gravitational effects extend farther," NASA scientists explain.

Pegasus is therefore likely a fossil of the first galaxies, making it a valuable subject for studying the ancient universe.

Asteroid Bigger than Dino-Killer Knocked Jupiter Moon Sideways

Jeffrey Kluger
Wed, September 4, 2024 

Bright Ray Craters in Ganymede's Northern Hemisphere

Credit - NASA/JPL

The asteroid collision that killed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago may have been a major cosmic crack-up, but it was nothing compared to a bigger impact that occurred roughly four billion years earlier, between an incoming rock and Jupiter’s moon Ganymede. That’s the conclusion of a new study in Scientific Reports, suggesting that the distant world was knocked completely sideways by the long-ago bombardment.

Ganymede is one of the most complex of Jupiter’s nearly 100 moons—and indeed, one of the most intriguing worlds in the entire solar system. It is the only known moon with its own magnetic field and is believed to have a salty ocean 60 miles deep, lying beneath a 95-mile thick crust. That makes it a prime place for the potential emergence of life. At nearly 3,300 miles in diameter, Ganymede is also the solar system’s largest moon—bigger even than the 3,030-mile wide planet Mercury. But that doesn’t mean it’s impervious to a pounding.

Like our moon, Ganymede is tidally locked—meaning it keeps the same face pointed to its parent planet at all times. In the 1980s, astronomers discovered a radiating system of ripple-like furrows exceeding 1,000 miles in diameter at the center of the moon’s far side. A scar like that could only have been formed by an impact—but just how cataclysmic it was had never been clear. The scale of the collision could have implications for the internal structure and temperature of the moon, which in turn could have implications for the emergence of life. Now, planetologist Hirata Naoyuki of Kobe University in Japan believes he knows more about the force of the impact—and the size of the impactor.

Read more: 2024 Marks an Important Year in NASA’s Search for Extraterrestrial Life

Naoyuki ran a computer model estimating that the incoming ordinance that left the ripples would have to have measured at least 185 miles across—absolutely massive compared to the dino-killing rock—especially considering the relative sizes of Ganymede and Earth. The asteroid that struck our planet measured no more than 10 miles across, or 0.112% of the size of the 7,917-mile diameter Earth. Ganymede’s asteroid was fully 5% of its diameter.

That kind of blow not only left a scar, it also knocked the world cockeyed. According to Naoyuki’s calculations, the far side of Ganymede, where the ripples are, was once located in the north polar region of the moon. But the force of the blow and the added weight of the asteroid tipped the moon on its side. As the New Horizons spacecraft discovered in 2015, a similar collision led to a similar tipping at Pluto, a dwarf planet that rotates effectively on its side, at a 57-degree angle relative to its revolution around the sun. That impact may have had a role in creating Pluto’s litter of five moons—Charon, Nix, Hydra, Kerberos, and Styx.

Ganymede will be studied more closely still in 2034, when the European Space Agency’s JUICE (Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer) spacecraft, launched in 2023, arrives at the moon and goes into orbit around it. Hirata is counting on that to extend astronomers’ knowledge of Ganymede and similar moons further.

“I want to understand the origin and evolution of Ganymede and other Jupiter moons,” he said in a statement that accompanied the release of his study. “I believe that further research applying [to] the internal evolution of ice moons could be carried out next.”

Write to Jeffrey Kluger at jeffrey.kluger@time.com

Related Stories:

— Milky Way's cosmic neighbors help bring ancient galaxies into focus

— Hubble telescope reels in gorgeous, star-spawning cosmic jellyfish (photo)

— Can you see the cosmic 'cat' grinning into one of the world's largest telescopes in this photo? (video)

 The mystery of vampire star rejuvenation solved

This finding is an important missing link in the rejuvenation of these stars.

ByAmit Malewar

2 Sep, 2024

Credit: ISRO

A team of astronomers from the Indian Institute of Astrophysics (IIA), an autonomous institute of the Department of Science & Technology, Government of India, discovered a vampire star in M67. This discovery offers significant clues on a complex rejuvenation process known as mass transfer in a binary system.

Vampire stars, also called blue straggler stars (BSS), can easily be found in star clusters. They show several characteristics of younger stars and defy simple models of stellar evolution.

This unusual young star is thought to be rejuvenated by taking material from a nearby binary star. Star clusters are good places to study this because they have many binary stars, some of which form vampire stars.

These rejuvenated stars evolve differently from single stars like the Sun. However, finding the material they’ve absorbed and spotting their companion star has been challenging.

Star clusters are ideal laboratories for understanding the life and death of single and binary stars. M67, in the Cancer constellation, is one such interesting star cluster.

This newly discovered vampire star- called WOCS 9005- bears the chemical imprint of recently sucked barium-rich material from its binary companion and unambiguously detected emission from the dead-remnant of its companion.

The team discovered this using the UltraViolet Imaging Telescope data onboard AstroSat, India’s first dedicated space observatory. Using spectroscopy, they studied the vampire star’s surface composition.

The spectra of stars are bar codes that decipher their surface/atmosphere chemistry. The team used the archival spectral data from the GALAH survey (GALactic Archeology using Hermes), which used the Two-Degree Field fibre positioner with the HERMES spectrograph at the Anglo-Australian Telescope.

Harshit Pal, the paper’s lead author, said, “This star is expected to show chemistry very similar to our Sun, but we found that its atmosphere is rich in heavy elements such as barium, yttrium, and lanthanum.”

These heavy elements are rare and are mostly found in stars called asymptotic giant branch (AGB) stars. In these stars, a slow process called s-process uses neutrons to create heavy elements from lighter ones. This process makes about half of the atomic nuclei heavier than iron. Before AGB stars die and become white dwarfs, they shed their outer layers rich in these heavy elements. However, AGB stars are more massive and evolved than WOCS 9005, which is puzzling.

Prof. Annapurni Subramaniam, co-author of the paper and Director IIA, said, “The presence of heavy elements in the spectrum pointed to a polluted atmosphere of the vampire star and an external source of pollution. The external source is likely to be its binary companion, which must have made the heavy elements when it passed through its AGB phase and later became a white dwarf star.”

“The blue straggler star that we see now must have eaten up most of this barium-rich material due to its gravitational pull and is now presenting itself as a rejuvenated star. When the enhancement of barium (and other s-process elements) is detected in stars earlier than the AGB evolutionary phase, such as the main sequence (MS), subgiant (SG), or red giant branch (RGB), these stars are called barium stars.”

Dr. Bala Sudhakara Reddy, a co-author of the paper, said, “The presence of significant barium in this vampire star makes it the first barium blue straggler star discovered in the cluster M67. The mass transfer from a companion AGB star has been extensively studied, though only a few chemically enriched post-mass transfer binaries have been identified in star clusters. Having established that the mass transfer took place, the team started their search for the unseen companion.”

The vampire star was known to have a tiny, unseen companion that is half the mass of the Sun. Scientists used the Ultra-Violet Imaging Telescope (UVIT) on the AstroSat satellite to take pictures of the vampire star and measure its UV brightness.

As its temperature is similar to the Sun’s, it was unexpectedly bright in the UV. Scientists detected considerable UV brightness for this star, which, on analysis, proved that it indeed originated from its hot and small companion.

Based on theoretical calculations and validations, scientists confirmed that this is indeed the remnant of the star that produced heavy elements and that the two stars are close enough to transfer the matter from the donor star through the wind.

“This is for the first time the white dwarf remnant of the donor is sighted in the case of the polluted blue straggler star, said Pal. This discovery experimentally confirms the theoretical prediction that vampire stars are formed by acquiring polluted matter through transfer from their companion, leaving behind a remnant white dwarf. The rarity of such chemically polluted systems is still a mystery, and the team thinks that it may be due to the quick settling of the pollutants in the atmosphere of the vampire stars.”

Journal Reference:

1. Harshit Pal, Annapurni Subramaniam, Arumalla B. S. Reddy and Vikrant Jadhav. Discovery of a Barium Blue Straggler Star in M67 and “Sighting” of Its White Dwarf Companion. The Astrophysical Journal Letters. DOI 10.3847/2041-8213/ad6316