Tesla says Black people hold just 4% of its U.S. leadership roles

(Reuters) - Black employees make up just 4% of Tesla Inc's American leadership roles and 10% of its total workforce in the country, the electric carmaker has disclosed in its first U.S. diversity report.

© Reuters/ALY SONG FILE PHOTO: Tesla Inc CEO Elon Musk speaks onstage during a delivery event for Tesla China-made Model 3 cars at its factory in Shanghai

Women comprise 17% of the company's U.S. leadership roles - directors and vice presidents - and 21% of the overall workforce, according to the report. The figures for Asian, Black and Hispanic people combined are 33% and 60%.

The carmaker noted, though, that leadership roles were a "very small cohort", or less than 0.4%, of its workforce.

Elon Musk's Tesla, whose meteoric rise has seen it become the most valuable auto company in the world and worth about $550 billion, acknowledged the lack of representation.

"We know that our numbers do not represent the deep talent pools of Black and African American talent that exist in the U.S at every level – from high-school graduates to professionals," it said in the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Impact Report https://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/downloads/2020-DEI-impact-report.pdf 2020 published on Friday.

"While women are historically underrepresented in the tech and automotive industries, we recognize we have work to do in this area," it added.

Tesla, based in Palo Alto, California, said it planned to increase representation of all under-represented groups next year and would be recruiting at historically Black colleges and universities.

Nasdaq Inc filed a proposal with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday that, if approved, would require all Nasdaq-listed companies to adopt new rules related to board diversity.

The rules would require most of the companies to have, or publicly explain why they do not have, at least two diverse directors, including one who self-identifies as female and one who self-identifies as either an underrepresented minority or LGBTQ+.

(Reporting by Aakriti Bhalla in Bengaluru; Editing by Pravin Char)

Study finds Canada a "laggard" on homophobia in sports

TORONTO — Chris Voth's sexuality cost him a job with a professional volleyball team overseas four years ago.

© Provided by The Canadian Press

The Winnipeg native, who has never named the team nor country, was told outright that the club wasn't interested in having a gay player.

The 30-year-old came out publicly seven years ago because he hoped to be a role model for young LGBTQ athletes, and given the chance to go back and change that, he wouldn't.

But Voth was disheartened to learn that the majority of gay athletes still don't come out, and that homophobic language on the field or court remains rampant — and Canada is among the worst offenders.

"That was disappointing, because I always like to think that we're a bit more further ahead up north (compared to the U.S.)," said Voth, recently home from coaching in the Netherlands.

The former national team player was responding to two studies released Thursday by Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.

The first study analyzed survey responses from 1,173 lesbian, gay and bisexual people aged 15 to 21 living in Canada, the U.S., Britain, Australia, New Zealand and Ireland.

The study found that about 48 per cent of Canadian youth who come out to teammates reported being the target of homophobic behaviour, including bullying, assaults and slurs — and it was more prevalent among Canadian youth than Americans (45 per cent).

Among females, 44 per cent of Canadians who've come out to teammates reported being victimized — more than any other country surveyed by Monash's Behavioural Sciences Research Laboratory.

"It's easy for Canadians to dismiss the data and say, 'No, no, that's not in our country. We're inclusive and welcoming. And we're known around the world for being friendly and polite and nice,'" said lead author Erik Denison, who's Canadian.

"Canada has been a laggard globally, full stop. There's no other way to say that."

Young people who came out were significantly more likely (58 per cent versus 40 per cent) to report they’d been the target of homophobic behaviors in sport settings than those who didn't, the study found.

Every study over the past 15 years has shown that LGBTQ kids play sport at lower rates than straight kids, Denison said, and while there's a perception that the gap is more prevalent in boys than girls, that's not accurate.

"And seeing these big gaps in participation, I can only use the word alarming," said Denison. "We're really alarmed about both discrimination in sport, and the fact these kids are avoiding sport.

"Because the No. 1 thing we could be doing to reduce rates of suicide and self-harm is encouraging these kids to become active in safe and supportive environments."

Numerous studies have shown that suicide attempts and ideation about suicide are significantly higher in LGBTQ kids.

Voth's experiences as an out athlete varied wildly. The 30-year-old believes discrimination cost him spots on several pro clubs, contract negotiations inexplicably stalling with no explanation. On the other hand, when he signed with a pro team in Finland, he was "the first gay person that any of them had met. And only a month-and-a-half later, we were the first pro volleyball team to walk in a pride parade. So it can really go either way."

Voth said LGBTQ youth are doubly impacted, losing out on the mental health benefits that come from being part of a team.

The second Monash study investigated why some athletes use homophobic language.

Denison pointed out that while there are "homophobes, racists and sexist people everywhere," they tend to control their behaviour around others.

"The opposite is happening in sport. In sport, the culture is very supportive of homophobic language being used," he said. "Canadian sport has three official languages: French, English and homophobic language."

And while most people believe it's slurs aimed at opponents during games, their studies found that homophobic language is being used at practices, in the locker-room, and at social events, as jokes and banter.

"And we're not just talking about words like 'gay,' we asked about much more severe language,'" Denison said.

He is working with the University of British Columbia among other schools around the world on a program aimed to train team captains to be leaders on this issue, because coaches can't necessarily create change, it's more effective when it comes from an athlete's peers.

Denison said that Volleyball Canada is the only national sport organization in the country that has done work specifically targeting homophobia, and it occurred around the same time Voth came out publicly.

"I don't want to denigrate what the NHL (among other leagues) has done, but at the end of the day, the NHL is a professional sporting organization, they're ultimately a business," Denison said. "It's up to Hockey Canada, it's up to Soccer Canada, it's up to Rugby Canada, it's up to those bodies and provincial bodies as well to be driving change."

The Canadian Olympic Committee has done anti-homophobia social media campaigns, mall installations, and regularly marches in pride parades across the country.

Pro sports teams such as Toronto FC and the Toronto Raptors host annual pride games.

Denison said his research, however, has shown those initiatives do little to reduce homophobic behaviour and language among fans. He'd rather see pro teams work with teams and programs at the grassroots level to hold their own pride games, among other initiatives.

"What we've seen is that when amateur-level teams hold pride games, the players on those teams use half the homophobic language than those who don't hold these events," Denison said. "These events are really good at getting those conversations going around 'Hey, guys, what kind of language do we actually want on our team?' That's where we can change those norms and culture, we think quite effectively."

Denison pointed out that there are openly-LGBTQ people in entertainment, government, and major corporations, but by comparison, they largely remain invisible in sports, particularly on the men's side, and have since David Kopay came out in 1975 after he retired from the NFL. He's believed to be the first pro athlete to come out.

Michael Sam became the first publicly gay player to be drafted in the NFL. He signed with the Montreal Alouettes after being released by St. Louis, but abruptly left after playing one game.

Brooklyn Nets forward Jason Collins came out in 2013, and former Major League Soccer midfielder Collin Martin followed suit in 2018. Collins has retired, and Martin plays in the USL, and there have been no active gay players in any of the five major North American sports leagues since.

Women's pro sport has been a different story. Sports power couple Sue Bird and Megan Rapinoe are two of the numerous out athletes in the WNBA, NWSL, and other women's leagues.

For Denison, Canada's track record is particularly disheartening.

"It's quite embarrassing for me as a Canadian researcher who happens to be down in Australia now to see that Canada is a laggard. Because I'm a proud Canadian, and I think Canadians have a reputation for being friendly and inclusive.

"But it looks like either Canadians have been ignoring this issue, we're not aware of this issue, or worse, maybe there's some deliberate resistance to do anything about this problem."

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Dec. 4, 2020.

Lori Ewing, The Canadian Press

How a police contact by middle school leads to different outcomes for Black, white youth

UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON

Research News

 

For Black youth, an encounter with police by eighth grade predicts they will be arrested by young adulthood - but the same is not true for white youth, a new University of Washington study finds.

Black young adults are 11 times more likely to be arrested by age 20 if they had an initial encounter with law enforcement in their early teens than Black youth who don't have that first contact.

In contrast, white young adults with early police contact are not significantly more likely to be arrested later, compared with white peers without that history.

The study's authors found that Black youth are more likely than white youth to be treated as "usual suspects" after a first encounter with police, leading to subsequent arrests over time. Even as white young adults report engaging in significantly more illegal behavior, Black young adults face more criminal penalties, the study finds.

Researchers also said it's not just the number of stops, but what transpires during a police stop that sets the tone for future interactions with police.

"What we know about police contacts and youth generally is that Black youth are more likely to be stopped by police to begin with, and are more likely to have a negative experience when that happens," said first author Annie McGlynn-Wright, a postdoctoral fellow at Tulane University who led the study while pursuing her doctorate at the UW. "What we haven't known previously is the long-term effects of police contacts in terms of criminal justice outcomes."

McGlynn-Wright added that the study, published Oct. 31 in the journal Social Problems, shows these early contacts with police create a "system response" to Black youth not experienced by white youth.

Racial differences in who is stopped, why and for what penalty have been well documented, the researchers said. Also, police stops have been linked to individuals' later run-ins with law enforcement.

For this study, UW researchers wanted to examine the effects of the first stop on the lives of Black and white adolescents, and whether a stop in the early teen years is associated with "secondary sanctioning," or a "usual suspects" treatment by police that plays out over future stops and/or arrests. The study is among the first to explore the racial differences in police contact over time.

Using longitudinal data from more than 300 Seattle young adults, researchers found stark differences in the law enforcement trajectory of adolescents based on race, from the numbers of Black and white youth who encounter police by middle school, to the numbers arrested in high school and beyond.

It also comes during a period of significant reckoning over race and policing in the United States, after a series of law enforcement killings of Black people around the country. As communities grapple with how to address institutionalized racism, police procedures and accountability, many school districts, including Seattle, have ended their contracts with law enforcement agencies for school resource officers, the personnel who are assigned to specific school buildings. Research has shown that students of color are disproportionately subject to discipline and monitoring by school resource officers.

The UW study launched nearly 20 years ago, with students at 18 Seattle schools. Nearly half of the 331 students were Black. Researchers surveyed students and parents, then followed up with participants in 10th grade and at age 20 to learn more about behavior and consequences. Full data are available on 261 participants.

Differences were clear early on. While there were no differences in self-reported illegal behavior between Black and white youth at 8th grade, 37% of Black teens said they had had some sort of contact with police, compared to 22% of white eighth-graders.

Researchers examined two trends at age 20: whether study participants had been arrested in the past year and whether they had engaged in any illegal activity, from violent crime to drug use to other criminal behavior, such as drawing graffiti, stealing from a store or breaking into private property. The idea, researchers said, was to determine not only who was being arrested, but also who was not.

Significantly more white participants reported engaging in some level of criminal behavior: 53% of white young adults, compared to 32% of Black young adults. But at age 20, Black youth were more than twice as likely to be arrested as white youth (15% compared to 6%). When the eighth-grade police contact is taken into account, it shows that early police contact for Black youth was uniquely predictive of being arrested by age 20, but not for white youth.

Simply put, Black respondents experiencing police contact by eighth grade have an 11 times greater chance of reporting an arrest by age 20 than Black respondents who did not experience early police contact. This was not the case for white youth.

The study was unable to explore the reasons behind these differences, but researchers said the results are clear:

"White people are engaging in more illegal behavior, largely because of their greater drug use, and getting arrested less often at age 20 than Black people, who are committing fewer crimes and getting arrested more," said co-author Kevin Haggerty, a professor in the UW School of Social Work and director of the Social Development Research Group.

Of the 261 respondents surveyed as young adults, white respondents were more likely to report illegal behavior than Black respondents (53% and 32%, respectively), primarily because they were substantially more likely than Blacks to report illegal drug use (40% and 14%, respectively).

While the data was collected in Seattle, researchers say the patterns they found are likely occurring in cities around the country -- Seattle is "more like every other town" than some larger metro areas like Chicago and Philadelphia, where many criminal justice studies are located, noted co-author Robert Crutchfield, a professor emeritus of sociology at the UW.

The bulk of the UW research was conducted before the 2012 Seattle Police Department consent decree with the U.S. Justice Department, whereby the department was to address an excessive use of force, Crutchfield pointed out.

Still, the indisputable differences in the experiences of Black and white youth raise a number of policy and institutional issues. The authors note that it's not just the quantity but the quality of stops - what are often called "investigatory stops" of a young person that raise alarm.

"When police interact with communities, and young people in communities, they have to be especially mindful of the nature and substance of the encounters, and police really need training to avoid negative interactions," Crutchfield said. "What we found is that contact matters. In this study, we couldn't parse out the nature of the interactions, but I suspect most kids experienced the interaction in a negative way. The message is, cops need to do better to minimize unnecessary contacts, and when they do contact people, to treat them better."

The paper's findings also may support the choice by some school districts to end the practice of deploying police officers in schools, the authors said. Given the tendency for school resource officers to get involved in school discipline -- though their primary assignment is to enforce the law and keep buildings safe -- it presents another situation where Black students are often treated differently than white students.

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The study was funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Martie Skinner, a research scientist at the UW Social Development Research Group, was a co-author.

PRISON INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX

Mass incarceration results in significant increases in industrial emissions, study finds

PORTLAND STATE UNIVERSITY

Research News

 

Mass incarceration is as much an environmental problem as it is a social one, according to a new Portland State University study that finds increases in incarceration are significantly associated with increases in industrial emissions.

Julius McGee, the study's lead author and an environmental sociologist, argues that the construction and maintenance of prisons, the production of goods and materials used inside prisons and the use of prison labor to manufacture industrial equipment for the government and private companies all contribute to increased emissions.

"As we shift the population into prisons, we see a clear impact on how economic development contributes to emissions," said McGee, an assistant professor of urban studies and Black Studies at PSU.

The prison population began to grow in the 1970s, largely as a punitive response to the social movements that emerged post-World War II, McGee said. Today, more than 2.3 million people are incarcerated in the U.S.

Between 1980 and 2004, 936 prisons were built in the U.S., compared with the 711 prisons built in the 168 years prior. McGee says the construction of new prisons, as well as the renovation of existing prisons, require substantial amounts of fossil fuels. Cement, for example, is one of the largest emitters of carbon dioxide in the built environment.

"This is housing infrastructure that otherwise wouldn't have been built," McGee said, adding that most incarcerated people are forcibly removed from inner-city neighborhoods and transported to massive warehouse-like structures in rural areas.

Mass incarceration disproportionately affects black and brown people -- those whose contributions to carbon dioxide emissions are relatively small, McGee said. But once they go to prison, they become coerced consumers of industrial goods and increased industrial activity. Prisoners require beds, clothing, hygiene products and furniture -- and the prison supply companies that manufacture and distribute these goods have continuously expanded their production in response to a growing incarcerated population.

Lastly, prison labor programs help to stimulate industrial growth by reducing the cost of labor. Prisoners are paid as little as $.023 to $1.15 per hour or sometimes not at all.

"Employment in industrial manufacturing has gone down, but manufacturing in total dollars has not gone down," McGee said. "What's changed is where the labor and jobs are."

If companies did not use prison labor, McGee says, they'd use unionized labor, which requires them to invest more in workers and less into expanding growth.

"Industrial manufacturing has exploited workers, consumers, and the environment by continually reducing the cost of labor, increasing the demand of industrial goods, and increasing the use of fossil fuels," the study reads. "Incarceration allows these patterns to continue unabated, and in many instances provides the tools necessary to accelerate the pace at which such patterns recur."

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The findings were published in the journal Social Currents. Co-authors include Patrick Greiner, an assistant professor of sociology at Vanderbilt University, and Carl Appleton, a PSU graduate and now Ph.D. student in George Mason University's Criminology, Law and Society program.

 

The climate changed rapidly alongside sea ice decline in the north

UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN

Research News

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IMAGE:  "WE HAVE INVESTIGATED HOW THE SEA ICE COVER CHANGED DURING THE LAST GLACIAL PERIOD IN BOTH MARINE CORES AND ICE CORES, " SAYS HELLE ASTRID KJÆR, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR AT THE NIELS... view more 

CREDIT: UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN

Researchers from the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen have, in collaboration with Norwegian researchers in the ERC Synergy project, ICE2ICE, shown that abrupt climate change occurred as a result of widespread decrease of sea ice. This scientific breakthrough concludes a long-lasting debate on the mechanisms causing abrupt climate change during the glacial period. It also documents that the cause of the swiftness and extent of sudden climate change must be found in the oceans.

Scientific evidence for abrupt climate change in the past finally achieved

During the last glacial period, app. 10,000 - 110,000 years ago the northern hemisphere was covered in glacial ice and extensive sea ice, covering the Nordic seas. The cold glacial climate was interrupted by periods of fast warmup of up to 16.5 degrees Celsius over the Greenland ice sheet, the so called Dansgaard Oeschger events (D-O).

These rapid glacial climate fluctuations were discovered in the Greenland ice core drillings decades ago, but the cause of them have been hotly contested. D-O events are of particular significance today as the rate of warming seems to be very much like what can be observed in large parts of the Arctic nowadays. The new results show that the abrupt climate change in the past was closely linked to the quick and extensive decline in sea ice cover in the Nordic seas. Very important knowledge as sea ice is presently decreasing each year.

"Our, up until now, most extensive and detailed reconstruction of sea ice documents the importance of the rapid decrease of sea ice cover and the connected feedback mechanisms causing abrupt climate change", says Henrik Sadatzki, first author of the study.

Sediment core and ice core data were combined in order to achieve the result

The Norwegian researchers investigated two sediment cores from the Norwegian sea and the Danish researchers investigated an ice core from East Greenland for changes in the sea ice cover. Both sediment and ice cores were meticulously dated and further linked to one another through several volcanic layers of ash (tephra) identified in both.

Past sea ice cover was reconstructed in the marine cores by observing the relation between specific organic molecules produced by algea living in sea ice and others by algea living in ice free waters. In the Renland ice core from East Greenland the researchers looked at the content of Bromin. This content is connected to newly formed sea ice, since Bromin contents increase when sea ice is formed. A robust chronology and sea ice information in both sediment cores and the ice core could be established and used to investigate the extent of the sea ice changes in the Nordic seas during the last glacial period.

"We have investigated how the sea ice cover changed during the last glacial period in both marine cores and ice cores. With the high resolution in our data sets we are able to see that the Nordic seas, during the rapid climate changes in the glacial period, change from being covered in ice all year round to having seasonal ice cover. This is knowledge we can apply in our improved understanding of how the sea ice decline we observe today may impact the climate in the Arctic", says Helle Astrid Kjær, Associate professor at the Ice, Climate and Geophysics section at the Niels Bohr Institute.

Sea ice changes in the past show how the climate today can change abruptly

The data the group of researchers present shows that the Nordic seas were covered by extensive sea ice in cold periods, while warmer periods are characterized by reduced, seasonal sea ice, as well as rather open ice free oceans. "Our records show that the extensive decline in sea ice could have happened during a period of 250 years or less, simultaneously with a phase in which the water in the oceans to the north mixed with the Nordic sea, and that this situation led to sudden changes in atmospheric warming", says Henrik Sadatzki.

As the Nordic seas changed abruptly from ice covered to open sea, the energy from the warmer ocean water was released to the cold atmosphere, leading to amplification of sudden warming of the climate. The result of the study documents that sea ice is a "tipping element" in the tightly coupled ocean-ice-climate system. This is particularly relevant today, as the still more open ocean to the north can lead to similar abrupt climate change.

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Inouye Solar Telescope releases first image of a sunspot

ASSOCIATION OF UNIVERSITIES FOR RESEARCH IN ASTRONOMY (AURA)

Research News

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Volume 90%

 

VIDEO: THE WAVE FRONT CORRECTION CONTEXT VIEWER CAMERA AT THE NSF'S INOUYE SOLAR TELESCOPE RECORDED THIS MOVIE OF A SUNSPOT ON JAN. 28, 2020. THE 2000 BY 2000-PIXEL CAMERA CAPTURED THIS... view more 

CREDIT: NSF/NSO/AURA

The world's largest solar observatory, the U.S. National Science Foundation's Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope, just released its first image of a sunspot. Although the telescope is still in the final phases of completion, the image is an indication of how the telescope's advanced optics and four-meter primary mirror will give scientists the best view of the Sun from Earth throughout the next solar cycle.

The image, taken January 28, 2020, is not the same naked eye sunspot currently visible on the Sun. This sunspot image accompanies a new paper by Dr. Thomas Rimmele and his team. Rimmele is the associate director at NSF's National Solar Observatory (NSO), the organization responsible for building and operating the Inouye Solar Telescope. The paper is the first in a series of Inouye-related articles featured in Solar Physics. The paper details the optics, mechanical systems, instruments, operational plans and scientific objectives of the Inouye Solar Telescope. Solar Physics will publish the remaining papers in early 2021.

Read Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope - Observatory Overview, by Thomas R. Rimmele et al. - Solar Physics volume 295, issue 12, 2020

"The sunspot image achieves a spatial resolution about 2.5 times higher than ever previously achieved, showing magnetic structures as small as 20 kilometers on the surface of the sun," said Rimmele.

The image reveals striking details of the sunspot's structure as seen at the Sun's surface. The streaky appearance of hot and cool gas spidering out from the darker center is the result of sculpting by a convergence of intense magnetic fields and hot gasses boiling up from below.

The concentration of magnetic fields in this dark region suppresses heat within the Sun from reaching the surface. Although the dark area of the sunspot is cooler than the surrounding area of the Sun, it is still extremely hot with a temperature of more than 7,500 degrees Fahrenheit.

This sunspot image, measuring about 10,000 miles across, is just a tiny part of the Sun. However, the sunspot is large enough that Earth could comfortably fit inside.

CAPTION

This is the first sunspot image taken on Jan. 28, 2020, by the NSF's Inouye Solar Telescope's Wave Front Correction context viewer. The image reveals striking details of the sunspot's structure as seen at the sun's surface. The sunspot is sculpted by a convergence of intense magnetic fields and hot gas boiling up from below. This image uses a warm palette of red and orange, but the context viewer took this sunspot image at the wavelength of 530 nanometers -- in the greenish-yellow part of the visible spectrum. This is not the same naked eye sunspot group visible on the sun in late November and early December 2020.

CREDIT

NSO/AURA/NSF

Sunspots are the most visible representation of solar activity. Scientists know that the more sunspots that are visible on the Sun, the more active the Sun is. The Sun reached solar minimum, the time of fewest sunspots during its 11-year solar cycle, in December 2019. This sunspot was one of the first of the new solar cycle. Solar maximum for the current solar cycle is predicted in mid-2025.

"With this solar cycle just beginning, we also enter the era of the Inouye Solar Telescope," says Dr. Matt Mountain, president of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA), the organization that manages NSO and the Inouye Solar Telescope. "We can now point the world's most advanced solar telescope at the Sun to capture and share incredibly detailed images and add to our scientific insights about the Sun's activity."

Sunspots, and associated solar flares and coronal mass ejections, cause many space weather events, which frequently impact the Earth, a consequence of living inside the extended atmosphere of a star. These events affect technological life on Earth. The magnetic fields associated with solar storms can impact power grids, communications, GPS navigation, air travel, satellites and humans living in space. The Inouye Solar Telescope is poised to add important capabilities to the complement of tools optimized to study solar activity particularly magnetic fields.

NSF's Inouye Solar Telescope is located on the island of Maui in Hawaii. Construction began in 2013 and is slated to be completed in 2021.

"While the start of telescope operations has been slightly delayed due to the impacts of the COVID-19 global pandemic," said Dr. David Boboltz, NSF Program Director for the Inouye Solar Telescope, "this image represents an early preview of the unprecedented capabilities that the facility will bring to bear on our understanding of the Sun."

The Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope is a facility of the National Science Foundation operated by the National Solar Observatory under a cooperative agreement with the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc. The Inouye Solar Telescope is located on land of spiritual and cultural significance to Native Hawaiian people. The use of this important site to further scientific knowledge is done so with appreciation and respect.

CAPTION

The National Science Foundation's Inouye Solar Telescope.

CREDIT

NSF/NSO/AURA

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Image Use:

The images and movies shown here are part of the facility Science Verification Phase. They are for the sole purpose of promotion and are not released for scientific use. Science Verification Phase data is proprietary to the Inouye Solar Telescope project, and its use for publications or outreach purposes requires approval by the NSO Director, and notification to the cognizant NSF program officer. Please contact outreach@nso.edu for details and questions. The original data are still being processed and are not fully calibrated for scientific use. Images have been processed to remove noise and enhance the visibility (contrast) of small-scale (magnetic) features while maintaining their shape. The movie frames have been smoothed to remove noise.

This product is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). For image use conditions, please visit our image use page or email outreach@nso.edu.

Contacts:

Claire Raftery
Head of Communications
National Solar Observatory
303-735-9044
claire@nso.edu
National Science Foundation
media@nsf.gov

Rochester researchers uncover key clues about the solar system's history

New clues lead to a better understanding of the evolution of the solar system and the origin of Earth as a habitable planet

UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER

Research News

 

IMAGE: ILLUSTRATION OF SOLAR WIND FLOWING OVER ASTEROIDS IN THE EARLY SOLAR SYSTEM. THE MAGNETIC FIELD OF THE SOLAR WIND (WHITE LINE/ARROWS) MAGNETIZES THE ASTEROID (RED ARROW). RESEARCHERS AT THE UNIVERSITY... view more 

CREDIT: UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER ILLUSTRATION / MICHAEL OSADCIW

In a new paper published in the journal Nature Communications Earth and Environment, researchers at the University of Rochester were able to use magnetism to determine, for the first time, when carbonaceous chondrite asteroids--asteroids that are rich in water and amino acids--first arrived in the inner solar system. The research provides data that helps inform scientists about the early origins of the solar system and why some planets, such as Earth, became habitable and were able to sustain conditions conducive for life, while other planets, such as Mars, did not.

The research also gives scientists data that can be applied to the discovery of new exoplanets.

"There is special interest in defining this history--in reference to the huge number of exoplanet discoveries--to deduce whether events might have been similar or different in exo-solar systems," says John Tarduno, the William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences and dean of research for Arts, Sciences & Engineering at Rochester. "This is another component of the search for other habitable planets."

SOLVING A PARADOX USING A METEORITE IN MEXICO

Some meteorites are pieces of debris from outer space objects such as asteroids. After breaking apart from their "parent bodies," these pieces are able to survive passing through the atmosphere and eventually hit the surface of a planet or moon.

Studying the magnetization of meteorites can give researchers a better idea of when the objects formed and where they were located early in the solar system's history.

"We realized several years ago that we could use the magnetism of meteorites derived from asteroids to determine how far these meteorites were from the sun when their magnetic minerals formed," Tarduno says.

In order to learn more about the origin of meteorites and their parent bodies, Tarduno and the researchers studied magnetic data collected from the Allende meteorite, which fell to Earth and landed in Mexico in 1969. The Allende meteorite is the largest carbonaceous chondrite meteorite found on Earth and contains minerals--calcium-aluminum inclusions--that are thought to be the first solids formed in the solar system. It is one of the most studied meteorites and was considered for decades to be the classic example of a meteorite from a primitive asteroid parent body.

In order to determine when the objects formed and where they were located, the researchers first had to address a paradox about meteorites that was confounding the scientific community: how did the meteorites gain magnetization?

Recently, a controversy arose when some researchers proposed that carbonaceous chondrite meteorites like Allende had been magnetized by a core dynamo, like that of Earth. Earth is known as a differentiated body because it has a crust, mantle, and core that are separated by composition and density. Early in their history, planetary bodies can gain enough heat so that there is widespread melting and the dense material--iron--sinks to the center.

New experiments by Rochester graduate student Tim O'Brien, the first author of the paper, found that magnetic signals interpreted by prior researchers was not actually from a core. Instead, O'Brien found, the magnetism is a property of Allende's unusual magnetic minerals.

DETERMINING JUPITER'S ROLE IN ASTEROID MIGRATION

Having solved this paradox, O'Brien was able to identify meteorites with other minerals that could faithfully record early solar system magnetizations.

Tarduno's magnetics group then combined this work with theoretical work from Eric Blackman, a professor of physics and astronomy, and computer simulations led by graduate student Atma Anand and Jonathan Carroll-Nellenback, a computational scientist at Rochester's Laboratory for Laser Energetics. These simulations showed that solar winds draped around early solar system bodies and it was this solar wind that magnetized the bodies.

Using these simulations and data, the researchers determined that the parent asteroids from which carbonaceous chondrite meteorites broke off arrived in the Asteroid Belt from the outer solar system about 4,562 million years ago, within the first five million years of solar system history.

Tarduno says the analyses and modeling offers more support for the so-called grand tack theory of the motion of Jupiter. While scientists once thought planets and other planetary bodies formed from dust and gas in an orderly distance from the sun, today scientists realize that the gravitational forces associated with giant planets--such as Jupiter and Saturn--can drive the formation and migration of planetary bodies and asteroids. The grand tack theory suggests that asteroids were separated by the gravitational forces of the giant planet Jupiter, whose subsequent migration then mixed the two asteroid groups.

He adds, "This early motion of carbonaceous chondrite asteroids sets the stage for further scattering of water-rich bodies--potentially to Earth--later in the development of the solar system, and it may be a pattern common to exoplanet systems."

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