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    A reappearing supernova offers a new measure of the universe’s expansion

    A cosmic camera hog is helping astronomers figure out the rate of the universe’s expansion.

    Images of the supernova Refsdal have popped up multiple times in the constellation Leo, thanks to light from the stellar explosion wending its way through the gravitational field of a cluster of galaxies. Analyzing delays between Refsdal’s appearances provides a new measurement of the Hubble constant, researchers report online May 11 in Science. That constant describes how quickly galaxies are flying away from each other as the universe expands. The new measurement is now contributing to debate over how fast the universe is expanding.

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    Supernovas are the massive explosions that come at the ends of some stars’ life cycles. They’re among the most violent and brilliant events in the universe. In 2014, astronomer Patrick Kelly of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis discovered the Refsdal supernova in images from the Hubble Space Telescope.

    Instead of a single burst in the sky, Kelly says, “We saw four images of it.” They formed a pattern known as an Einstein Cross. The cross resulted because the gravity of a cluster of galaxies between us and Refsdal distorts space and time to create a gravitational lens that deflects the light on its way to us.

    The location and arrival times of the images we see depend on three things: the distribution of matter in the galaxy cluster that makes up the lens; the distances between Earth, the lens and the supernova; and the Hubble constant. The combined effect on the light from Refsdal is so strong that in 2014, Kelly predicted that one more image from the supernova would be delayed by another year. Sure enough, light from Refsdal showed up in the sky again in 2015 (SN: 1/5/16).

    The new calculations from Kelly and colleagues greatly improve a 2018 measurement of the Hubble constant using Refsdal’s appearances, putting it at about 66.6 kilometers per second per megaparsec, based on gravitational lens models that most closely matched their observations. “The meticulous modeling of the [lens] system, along with the gravitational forces it generates, have allowed [the team] to decrease the margin of error in estimating the Hubble constant by more than a factor of two,” says astronomer Vivian Miranda of Stony Brook University in New York who was not involved in the new study.

    Studies that estimate the Hubble constant in other ways don’t agree well with each other. One method that relies on ancient light left over from early cosmic times suggests that the universe is expanding at about 67 km/s/Mpc. That’s close to the value Kelly’s group found. But an expansion estimate that uses the distances to supernovas based on their brightness comes in around 74 km/s/Mpc (SN 7/30/19).

    “The predicted value of the Hubble constant is highly sensitive to the dynamics of the universe, both in the distant past and the recent present,” Miranda says. “If our understanding of the universe is accurate, all the various methods of measuring the Hubble constant should align.”

    Settling the discrepancy between different values of the Hubble constant is crucial to explaining things like dark energy, which appears to be accelerating the expansion of the universe (SN: 3/21/98).

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    It will take another supernova and lens to make a big leap in precision over the Refsdal study. A recurring image of a supernova in the constellation Cetus that’s expected to appear in 2037 might do the trick (SN: 9/13/21). In the meantime, Kelly says, further refinements in the model of the gravitational lens that caused the multiplied Refsdal images could improve estimates of the Hubble constant somewhat.

    “This is the first example of this kind of measurement,” Kelly says. “It sets the stage for additional measurements and increased precision,” which could deepen astronomers’ insights into our ever-expanding universe. More

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    Your body wash may make you more attractive to mosquitoes

    Mosquitoes may pick up on the fragrances in body washesbrizmaker/iStockphoto/Getty Images
    The body wash you use in the shower may react with your natural odour to make you more attractive to mosquitoes.
    Mosquitoes use various methods to find a target for their next blood meal, such as detecting an animal’s body heat, odour and the carbon dioxide they emit.
    To learn if the body wash we use may have an effect, Clément Vinauger at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University and his colleagues selected varieties from the brands Dial, Dove, Native and Simple Truth.Advertisement
    First, they placed two strips of nylon on one of the forearms of four volunteers and wrapped that area in foil, to collect the participants’ natural odour.
    Next, the researchers washed part of each participants’ other forearm with about 1 gram of one of the body washes for 10 seconds, before rinsing it with water for a further 10 seconds. They then similarly applied two strips of nylon and foil to these forearms, to collect the wash’s scent. The researchers repeated this with the three other body washes.
    One hour after each sample was taken, they took two strips – one from each of the body wash-exposed areas and one from the body wash-free areas – for chemical analysis while the other body wash-free and body wash-exposed strips were put in separate cups.
    The researchers placed these inside cages with 16 to 25 female Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, which can transmit yellow fever, that were free to visit either cup.
    The Simple Truth body wash appeared to increase the attractiveness of all of the participants, measured by the number of times the mosquitoes landed on their body wash-exposed strips compared with their body wash-free strips. The Dove wash had a similar effect, but the increase in attractiveness was only pronounced for three of the participants.
    Dial’s body wash similarly made the participants more attractive to mosquitoes, but to a lesser extent than Simple Truth’s or Dove’s.
    In contrast, the mosquitoes tended to avoid the strips washed in the Native body wash, but displayed a particularly strong aversion towards one participant’s Native-washed strip.
    This suggests the body washes’ fragrances and the participants’ individual odours combined to create a scent that was detectable to the mosquitoes.
    “Our study highlights the importance of the interaction between the specific soap chemicals and the body odour of each person in determining whether a person would become more or less attractive to mosquitoes after applying soap to their skin,” says Vinauger.
    The experiment’s chemical analysis suggests that the compounds benzaldehyde, benzyl benzoate and γ-nonalactone may repel mosquitoes.

    The researchers are planning to repeat their study with a larger group of participants and more body washes, and will investigate how long a wash’s potential mosquito-attracting or mosquito-repelling effects last after it is washed off the skin.
    “The discovery that personal care products may cause mosquitoes to be attracted or repelled by the user opens the door for developing user-friendly mosquito repellents,” says Walter Leal of the University of California, Davis.
    “The chemicals in such products may not directly affect mosquito behaviour, but they may disrupt the specific ratio of human emissions that attract mosquitoes,” he says. “Regardless of the mechanism, reducing human-mosquito interactions mitigates the transmission of vector-borne diseases.”
    New Scientist contacted the four body washes’ manufacturers for comment but received no reply prior to publication.

    Topics:Mosquitoes/Hygiene More

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    The mental tricks you can use in your lifelong pursuit of happiness

    SolStock/Getty Images
    MORE than 2300 years ago, Aristotle argued that happiness was the highest good. Later, the US founding fathers considered its pursuit to be an unalienable human right. These days, you will find countless books promising to reveal the secrets of a happy life. But have millennia of philosophical and scientific enquiry taught us anything about how to achieve that?
    First, let’s look at how people who study happiness measure it. One of the most common strategies is to ask people to rate statements such as “In most ways, my life is close to my ideal” and “If I could live my life over, I would change almost nothing”. These aim to capture someone’s overall satisfaction with life, rather than their mood on a specific day.
    That makes sense, says Richard Layard, co-director of the Community Wellbeing Programme at the London School of Economics, because asking people to sum up their general contentment is often more practical than measuring their emotional state over an extended period. The other thing, says Layard, is that general contentment fits better with philosophical definitions of happiness as an overarching quality, as opposed to transient pleasures.
    Using this kind of scale, psychologists have attempted to identify the specific ingredients that contribute to happiness. Contrary to the idea that “money can’t buy happiness”, income does play a role: it is easier to feel pleased with your lot when you don’t have to worry about bills and can treat yourself to luxuries.
    We are also influenced by the riches of others – we are less happy if we know our neighbour is earning more than us. … More

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    What is longtermism and why do its critics think it is dangerous?

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    IMAGINE a child, running barefoot through a forest, and a broken glass bottle buried just beneath the soil. What’s worse: that a present-day child steps on the shards, or that a child in 100 years from now does?
    This question, posed by philosopher Derek Parfit in the 1980s, was intended to clarify our moral obligations towards unborn generations. Knowingly risking harm to a future person, he argued, is just as bad whether it is today or in a century.
    Parfit’s ideas inspired a branch of moral philosophy called longtermism. It rests on three premises: future people matter, there could be a lot of them and we have the power to make their lives better or worse. Ensuring the future goes well should therefore be a key moral priority of our time.
    All of which seems reasonable, at first glance: it apparently promotes the universal values of stewardship, the duty to posterity and being a “good ancestor”. But longtermism has proven controversial, with some critics arguing that it is a “dangerous ideology” that permits or even encourages the suffering of people alive today.
    Is that fair? To make up your own mind, the first thing you need to know is that longtermism comes in different flavours. Many of the most strident criticisms focus on the implications of “strong longtermism”, a variant introduced in a 2021 paper by the University of Oxford’s Hilary Greaves and William MacAskill, which says that it should be the top moral priority of our time.
    This would have striking consequences for how money is spent in the real world. Indeed, it is already having an influence. … More

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    The James Webb telescope revealed surprise asteroids in the Fomalhaut star system

    The star Fomalhaut is ready for its close-up.

    Rings of dust encircle the young star in stunning new images from the James Webb Space Telescope. The photos offer a clearer view of the star system — already famous for previous images of a purported, now widely disputed, planet. Features in the system include an oddly cockeyed asteroid belt, an expanding cloud of debris from a possible planet collision, and other unidentified bits that hint at a dynamic and crowded environment, researchers report May 8 in Nature Astronomy. 

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    “It’s the first time we’re actually looking at the inner system, and it looks really different than I think anybody expected it to,” says astrophysicist Meredith MacGregor of the University of Colorado Boulder, who was not involved in the study. “The expectation was that there would be something like our solar system,” a place that is relatively mature and stable. “It really starts changing how we think about the dynamics of the [Fomalhaut] system.”

    Fomalhaut, a scant 25 light-years away, is a young star at the center of a rapidly evolving planetary system. It was once thought to host one of the first planets to be photographed outside of our solar system (SN: 11/13/08). However, the existence of the planet — dubbed Dagon — has long been in question (SN: 1/26/12). 

    The new JWST images add to the growing evidence that Dagon is actually a cloud of dust. A collision among planets probably explains the dusty feature, says András Gáspár, an astronomer at the University of Arizona in Tucson. “It is fading, and it is expanding in size,” he says, as it follows a trajectory consistent with dust blowing in the stellar wind from Fomalhaut. Those are all characteristics more indicative of dust clouds than planets.

    But just because Dagon hasn’t seemed to have panned out, that doesn’t mean there aren’t other planets lurking around Fomalhaut.

    Indirect evidence for other worlds comes from an unexpected asteroid belt, seen for the first time in the new images. The belt is tilted at a jaunty 23 degrees from everything else seen in orbit around the star.

    “This is a truly unique aspect of the system,” Gáspár says. The tilted belt, he says, could be the result of as-yet-undiscovered planets stirring up the debris around Fomalhaut.

    MacGregor agrees. “If you see a disk that’s like this, that has an [elongated] outer ring and a bunch of dust that’s getting dragged in, there are probably planets there,” she says. “I think the easiest explanation [for the tilted belt] is there’s a planet in there, and the planet is on an orbit that is not aligned with the disk.” The misaligned planet, in turn, is dragging the asteroid belt off-kilter with respect to the plane of the solar system, she says.

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    The JWST images also turned up a newly identified feature in the outer belt around the star.  It’s a blob that Gáspár and his colleagues call the Great Dust Cloud. It’s not yet clear whether it’s a real feature, or just some bright object shining through from beyond the Fomalhaut system.

    “It could easily be a background galaxy,” Gáspár says, “which would be a really cruel trick by nature.” Follow-up observations with JWST will help them decide, he says. If the object stays put while the Fomalhaut system keeps spinning, then it’s a cosmic photobomber, lurking in the background.

    The latest images answer some questions about Fomalhaut while raising a host of new ones, Gáspár says. “This single observation of Fomalhaut revealed way too many aspects of the system that we need to understand and unpack,” he says. “We set out to spatially resolve the asteroid belt component but ended up opening a much greater box of surprises.” More

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    Your saliva may determine which types of wine you prefer

    Wine drinkers have a lot of options when choosing their preferred varietyKlaus Vedfelt/Getty Images
    Variations in our salivary proteins may explain why different people can like different wines. Researchers have linked the concentrations of two types of proteins to how intense wine drinkers find a wine’s notes, such as fruity or floral, and their preferences for the alcoholic drink.
    A person’s wine preferences may at least partially come down to their cultural background, knowledge of the drink and individual taste. But Kate Howell at the University of Melbourne, Australia, and her colleagues … More

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    A streak of light may not be a black hole fleeing its galaxy after all

    A trail of starlight thought to possibly indicate a runaway supermassive black hole may be something much more mundane: a spiral galaxy seen edge on, a new study finds.

    In February, astronomer Pieter van Dokkum of Yale University and colleagues reported spotting a line of stars near a compact galaxy in Hubble Space Telescope images. The researchers’ analysis suggested that three galaxies had interacted and merged, kicking a supermassive black hole out of its host galaxy (SN: 3/10/23). The black hole then traveled through a nearby gas cloud, the scenario goes, triggering the formation of stars in a line that points toward the home galaxy and revealing the black hole’s madcap escape.

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    But other researchers have been skeptical of this interpretation, with some suggesting that the scenario is too complex to explain the linear feature. In the new study, “we decided to explore what we thought was the most simple explanation,” says astronomer Ignacio Trujillo of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias in Tenerife, Spain.

    He was inspired by a data plot in the original study, which compared the velocities of the stars in the linear feature with their positions, a comparison known as a velocity curve. To him, it looked like a spiral galaxy’s plot of its pinwheel rotation, where the stars in the galactic disk all move at nearly the same speed, no matter if they appeared to travel toward or away from Earth (SN: 8/17/21). That, combined with van Dokkum and colleagues’ estimate of the feature’s mass — roughly 100 million suns, which was surprisingly large for a simple line of stars — implied that the object is actually a spiral galaxy viewed on its edge, Trujillo says.

    So he and his colleagues compared characteristics of the linear feature with those of a well-studied spiral galaxy called IC 5249, which astronomers know we see edge on from Earth. The team looked at the objects’ masses, surface brightnesses and general motions of stars. The properties of the galaxy and linear feature matched closely, the researchers report in the study, which is in press in Astronomy & Astrophysics and was also submitted April 24 at arXiv.org.

    For now, “the evidence is not conclusive either way,” says astrophysicist Christopher Conselice of the University of Manchester in England who studies galaxy evolution and was not involved in either study.

    “A black hole being ejected from a galaxy would be really cool,” Conselice says. “But I think the simple explanation is that it’s either an edge-on galaxy, or some kind of filament or tidal debris,” left over from some previous galaxy interaction.

    Van Dokkum still favors the black hole scenario, in part because of one new image. In the original Hubble images, the linear feature merely points toward a compact galaxy at its left. In a new ultraviolet image, from the Very Large Telescope in Chile, “you start to see that this feature is actually connected to the galaxy,” which strengthens the runaway black hole theory, he says.

    Trujillo and his colleagues suggest that the edge-on spiral galaxy and compact galaxy are independent structures but members of the same galaxy group, coincidentally close to each other from our viewpoint.

    The debate’s resolution may have to wait at least until this summer when better imagery from Hubble arrives. More

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    How maths reveals the best time to add milk for hotter tea

    Claire Plumridge
    PICTURE the scene: you are making a cup of tea for a friend who is on their way and won’t be arriving for a little while. But – disaster – you have already poured hot water onto a teabag! The question is, if you don’t want their tea to be too cold when they come to drink it, do you add the cold milk straight away or wait until your friend arrives?
    Luckily, maths has the answer. When a hot object like a cup of tea is exposed to cooler air, it will cool down by losing heat. This is the … More