The “Oh-My-God” particle has a new companion.

In 1991, physicists spotted a particle from space that crashed into Earth with so much energy that it warranted an “OMG!” With 320 quintillion electron volts, or exaelectron volts, it had the kinetic energy of a baseball zipping along at about 100 kilometers per hour.

Now, a new particle of comparable energy has been found, researchers report in the Nov. 24 Science. Detected in 2021 by the Telescope Array experiment near Delta, Utah, the particle had an energy of about 240 exaelectron volts. And mysteriously, scientists are unable to pinpoint any cosmic source for the particle.

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“It’s a huge, huge amount of energy but in a tiny, tiny, tiny object,” says astroparticle physicist John Matthews of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, co-spokesperson of the Telescope Array collaboration.

Cosmic rays consist of protons and atomic nuclei that zip through space at wide range of energies. Particles with energies over 100 exaelectron volts are exceedingly rare: On average, scientists estimate, one such particle falls on a square kilometer of Earth’s surface each century. And particles over 200 exaelectron volts are even rarer — only a few such particles have previously been detected.

When a cosmic ray hits Earth, it collides with a nucleus of an atom in the atmosphere, creating a cascade of other particles that can be detected on Earth’s surface.

To catch the rarest, highest-energy particles, scientists build giant arrays of detectors. The Telescope Array monitors an area of 700 square kilometers using more than 500 detectors made of plastic scintillator, material that emits light when hit by a charged particle. Additional detectors measure ultraviolet light produced in the sky by the shower of particles (although those detectors weren’t operating during the newly reported particle’s arrival). Based on the times that individual scintillator detectors were hit by the cascade of particles, scientists can determine the direction of the incoming cosmic ray and use that information to trace it back to its origins.

Extremely high-energy cosmic rays come from outside the Milky Way, but their exact sources are unknown (SN: 9/21/17). Most scientists think they are accelerated in violent cosmic environments, such as the jets of radiation that blast out of the areas around certain supermassive black holes, or starburst galaxies that form stars at a frenetic pace. 

Whatever their origins, the particles must come from the relatively nearby cosmic neighborhood. That’s because the highest-energy cosmic rays lose energy as they travel, by interacting with the cosmic microwave background, the afterglow of the Big Bang (SN: 7/24/18).

Tracing back the particle’s location is complicated. “The issue is that when you detect a high-energy cosmic ray at Earth, the arrival direction that you get will not point to the source because it will be deflected by … any magnetic field that would be in the way,” says Telescope Array collaborator Noémie Globus, an astroparticle physicist at the University of California, Santa Cruz and the RIKEN research institute in Japan.  

The magnetic fields present in the Milky Way and its environs scatter the cosmic rays like fog scatters light. To trace the particle to its home, scientists must take that scattering into account. But that backtracking pinpointed a cosmic void, a region of space with few galaxies at all, much less ones with violent processes going on. 

That makes this particle particularly interesting, says astrophysicist Vasiliki Pavlidou of the University of Crete in Heraklion, Greece. “It’s actually pointing towards nothing at all, absolutely in the middle of nowhere.”

That might hint that scientist are missing something. For example, researchers may need to better understand the magnetic fields of the galaxy, says Pavlidou, who was not involved with the research. 

“Every time you have one of these very high-energy events, just because they are so rare, it’s a big deal.” More

Though it looks like a smooth, solid, pale blue orb, there’s more going on beneath the clouds of Uranus than meets the eye.

A polar cyclone has been spotted at the planet’s north pole, researchers report in the May 28 Geophysical Research Letters. Observed with radio telescopes, the find is the first direct evidence of a cyclone on Uranus. A previous spacecraft flyby hinted at a similar storm at the planet’s south pole.

“It’s really exciting to see this polar structure come into view,” says Michael Roman, a planetary scientist at the University of Leicester in England who was not involved with the research. The observations “show a rather unique structure that we simply have never been able to study before.”

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In 1986, NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft revealed winds at the center of Uranus’ south pole were moving faster than those in neighboring areas and were rotating. This evidence pointed to something dynamic like a cyclone occurring at the pole. But the spacecraft’s instruments weren’t sensitive enough to confirm the storm.

In recent years, as the north pole of Uranus turned more toward Earth, scientists were able to probe the other side of the ice giant, where they spotted similar hints of a swirling storm. Using the Very Large Array radio observatory in New Mexico, planetary scientist Alex Akins and colleagues probed the temperature under the clouds for more atmospheric clues. “What we saw with the VLA was kind of the last piece of [evidence],” says Akins, of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. 

New thermal emission observations from 2021 and 2022 show a spot on the north pole where the gas beneath the clouds is warmer and drier than its surroundings, suggesting the presence of a low-pressure region in the midst of those spinning winds. “These contrasts look similar to what we see in hurricanes on Earth,” Akins says.

Excluding Mercury, all the planets in our solar system have now been observed to host some kind of swirling air mass at their poles (SN: 10/14/08).

Akins plans to continue to observe the cyclone to see how it changes. Previous observations from 2015 suggest it is growing stronger. Researchers wouldn’t expect Uranus’ atmospheric circulation to change on such a relatively short timescale, Akins says, so a continued strengthening of the storm would suggest there’s more to learn about how the planet’s atmosphere works.

In 2022, experts brought together by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine recommended NASA send a probe to Uranus (SN: 4/20/22). “The more we can learn about Uranus as we begin to plan a mission,” Roman says, “the better we can focus our planning for that mission.” More

We know quite a lot about stars. After centuries of pointing telescopes at the night sky, astronomers and amateurs alike can figure out key attributes of any star, like its mass or its composition.

To calculate a star’s mass, just look it its orbital period and do a bit of algebra. To determine what it’s made of, look to the spectrum of light the star emits. But the one variable scientists haven’t quite cracked yet is time.

“The sun is the only star we know the age of,” says astronomer David Soderblom of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. “Everything else is bootstrapped up from there.”

Even well-studied stars surprise scientists every now and then. In 2019 when the red supergiant star Betelgeuse dimmed, astronomers weren’t sure if it was just going through a phase or if a supernova explosion was imminent. (Turns out it was just a phase.) The sun also shook things up when scientists noticed that it wasn’t behaving like other middle-aged stars. It’s not as magnetically active compared with other stars of the same age and mass. That suggests that astronomers might not fully understand the timeline of middle age.

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Calculations based on physics and indirect measurements of a star’s age can give astronomers ballpark estimates. And some methods work better for different types of stars. Here are three ways astronomers calculate the age of a star.

Hertzsprung-Russell diagrams

Scientists do have a pretty good handle on how stars are born, how they live and how they die. For instance, stars burn through their hydrogen fuel, puff up and eventually expel their gases into space, whether with a bang or a whimper. But when exactly each stage of a star’s life cycle happens is where things get complicated. Depending on their mass, certain stars hit those points after a different number of years. More massive stars die young, while less massive stars can burn for billions of years.

At the turn of the 20th century, two astronomers — Ejnar Hertzsprung and Henry Norris Russell — independently came up with the idea to plot stars’ temperature against their brightness. The patterns on these Hertzsprung-Russell, or H-R, diagrams corresponded to where different stars were in that life cycle. Today, scientists use these patterns to determine the age of star clusters, whose stars are thought to have all formed at the same time.

The caveat is that, unless you do a lot of math and modeling, this method can be used only for stars in clusters, or by comparing a single star’s color and brightness with theoretical H-R diagrams. “It’s not very precise,” says astronomer Travis Metcalfe of the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo. “Nevertheless, it’s the best thing we’ve got.”

[embedded content]
Measuring a star’s age isn’t as easy as you’d think. Here’s how scientists get their ballpark estimates.

Rotation rate

By the 1970s, astrophysicists had noticed a trend: Stars in younger clusters spin faster than stars in older clusters. In 1972, astronomer Andrew Skumanich used a star’s rotation rate and surface activity to propose a simple equation to estimate a star’s age: Rotation rate = (Age) -½.

This was the go-to method for individual stars for decades, but new data have poked holes in its utility. It turns out that some stars don’t slow down when they hit a certain age. Instead they keep the same rotation speed for the rest of their lives.

“Rotation is the best thing to use for stars younger than the sun,” Metcalfe says. For stars older than the sun, other methods are better.

Stellar seismology

The new data that confirmed rotation rate wasn’t the best way to estimate an individual star’s age came from an unlikely source: the exoplanet-hunting Kepler space telescope. Not just a boon for exoplanet research, Kepler pushed stellar seismology to the forefront by simply staring at the same stars for a really long time.

Watching a star flicker can give clues to its age. Scientists look at changes in a star’s brightness as an indicator of what’s happening beneath the surface and, through modeling, roughly calculate the star’s age. To do this, one needs a really big dataset on the star’s brightness — which the Kepler telescope could provide.

“Everybody thinks it was all about finding planets, which was true,” Soderblom says. “But I like to say that the Kepler mission was a stealth stellar physics mission.”

This approach helped reveal the sun’s magnetic midlife crisis and recently provided some clues about the evolution of the Milky Way. Around 10 billion years ago, our galaxy collided with a dwarf galaxy. Scientists have found that stars left behind by that dwarf galaxy are younger or about the same age as stars original to the Milky Way. Thus, the Milky Way may have evolved more quickly than previously thought.

As space telescopes like NASA’s TESS and the European Space Agency’s CHEOPS survey new patches of sky, astrophysicists will be able to learn more about the stellar life cycle and come up with new estimates for more stars.

Aside from curiosity about the stars in our own backyard, star ages have implications beyond our solar system, from planet formation to galaxy evolution — and even the search for extraterrestrial life.

“One of these days — it’ll probably be a while — somebody’s going to claim they see signs of life on a planet around another star. The first question people will ask is, ‘How old is that star?’” Soderblom says. “That’s going to be a tough question to answer.” More

Meteorites offer tantalizing clues about what the early solar system was like. But finding them is far from rocket science. Often, researchers simply fan out across a landscape and walk for hours while staring at the ground. Now, some scientists are turning to drones and machine learning to help spot freshly fallen meteorites much more efficiently.

A team of six people on a meteorite-hunting expedition can search about 200,000 square meters per day, says Seamus Anderson, a planetary scientist at Curtin University in Perth, Australia. But since the area over which a cluster of meteorites falls typically can’t be pinpointed to better than a few million square meters, searching can take a while, he says. “It’s quite slow.”

Seamus Anderson (pictured) and his colleagues used a drone to find a meteorite in Western Australia in 2021.The Desert Fireball Network

Around 2016, Anderson began toying with the concept of using drones to take pictures of the ground to look for meteorites. That idea blossomed into a Ph.D. project. In 2022, he and his colleagues reported their first successful recovery of a meteorite spotted with a drone. They’ve since found four more meteorites at a different site, the team reported August 17 in Los Angeles at a meeting of the Meteoritical Society.

Drone-based searches are much faster than the standard way of doing things, Anderson says. “You’re going from about 300 days of human effort down to about a dozen or so.” It’s also fun and exciting work, he says, but there are challenges too.

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Anderson and his collaborators have used drones to search for meteorites in remote parts of Western Australia and South Australia. The team is tipped off about a fall site by networks of ground-based cameras that track meteoroids flashing through Earth’s atmosphere. Then, the hunt is on.

The researchers pack a four-wheel drive vehicle with drone and computer equipment, battery charging stations, generators, fuel, food, camping equipment, tables, chairs and more. The drive to the fall site can take more than a day, often on rough or nonexistent roads, Anderson says. “You hope you don’t pop a tire.”

After arriving, the team flies its primary drone at an altitude of about 20 meters. Its camera takes an image of the ground once every second, and the researchers download the data every 40 minutes or so when the drone lands to receive fresh batteries.

A typical day of flying can net over 10,000 images, which are then divided digitally into 100 million or so smaller sections. Those “tiles,” each 2 meters on a side, are fed into a machine learning algorithm that has been trained to recognize meteorites based on images of the real thing or terrestrial rocks spray-painted black. The latter are convincing stand-ins for real meteorites, Anderson says.

The algorithm is good but not perfect. It automatically discards most tiles — typically upwards of 99 percent — that don’t contain any meteorite-looking objects. But that still leaves roughly 50,000 or so tiles after a day’s worth of flights that must be manually checked by a human, Anderson says.

A machine learning algorithm, trained to identify potential meteorites in drone images, can mistake sleeping kangaroos (indicated with yellow squares) for space rocks. Researchers are working on improving the algorithm further.The Desert Fireball Network

Most of the time, those tiles contain things that decidedly aren’t meteorites: animal poop, tin cans, snakes or sleeping kangaroos, for instance. Those objects get flagged as potential meteorites simply because the algorithm isn’t familiar with them, Anderson says, and it’s up to the team to winnow out those false positives.

For objects that still look convincing to the human eye, the researchers send out a smaller drone that flies much lower — about a meter off the ground — to investigate. Finally, the team goes out in person to examine promising candidates.

The researchers plan to train their algorithm to better avoid flagging things like poop and kangaroos as meteorites. And the team is working on making its computer code open-source so that other researchers can freely use it.

Anderson also hopes to see drones make an appearance in Antarctica, a hotbed of meteorite sleuthing (SN: 1/26/22). But the icy environment will present a whole new slew of challenges, Anderson says, such as making sure sensitive electronic equipment fares well in the frigid conditions and overcoming the logistics of working in such a remote place. “Antarctica is a whole different beast.” More

McKenzie Prillaman is a science and health journalist based in Washington, DC. She holds a bachelor’s degree in neuroscience from the University of Virginia and a master’s degree in science communication from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She was the spring 2023 intern at Science News. More