Philippa Kaur

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    in Space & Astronomy

    These are our top space images of all time

    We’ve never seen images of space as astounding as those from the James Webb Space Telescope, which shared its first cosmic vistas in July. The pictures have left us dazzled, awestruck and excited for more. They also inspired us to reflect on the top space images past and present. These images have moved us because of their drama, beauty or significance. Here’s how eight Science News staffers answered the question: What’s your favorite space image of all time?

    Apollo 8 Earthrise, taken in 1968

    The Apollo 8 crew orbited the moon 10 times during late December of 1968, capturing this view of Earth.NASA

    Lisa Grossman, astronomy writer, chose Apollo 8’s Earthrise as her top space image. She says: The you-are-there, sci-fi-but-it’s-real feeling of seeing Earth over the edge of the moon gets my imagination going. And something about having the surface of the moon in the image gives me deep chills. I can imagine my own feet in those gray craters, my own eyes looking back at my own Earth. It’s wild. It’s eerie. I love it.

    I feel similarly about the selfie images from the Mars rovers; here’s NASA’s Curiosity rover at Mont Mercou in 2021.

    NASA’s Curiosity rover used a camera on its head and one on its robotic arm to create this selfie with Mont Mercou in March 2021.NASA, JPL-Caltech, MSSS

    You can see the rover and the landscape behind it. That’s our robotic avatar on that planet, rolling around doing our work. Though I’m lukewarm about sending people to do extraterrestrial exploration – I think the risks outweigh the scientific benefits – I have always been a sucker for imagining living on another world. Or at least visiting.

    JWST’s close-up of Neptune, taken in 2022

    Neptune and its rings glow in infrared light in this image from the James Webb Space Telescope. It’s the first direct look at Neptune’s rings in more than 30 years.NASA, ESA, CSA, STSCI, JOSEPH DEPASQUALE/STSCI

    Nikk Ogasa, staff writer for physical sciences, says: There are so many awe-inspiring space images out there, but my favorite from this year was the James Webb Space Telescope’s heavenly shot of Neptune. It is stunning. The image captures the planet’s near-infrared glow in unprecedented detail. Not only can you see the glorious rings, but you can also pick out high-flying methane clouds as bright streaks. It blows my mind that we can see clouds on another world that is billions of miles away.

    Pillars of Creation, first captured in 1995

    After capturing the Pillars of Creation in 1995, the Hubble Space Telescope imaged them for a second time in late 2014 (the image in visible light is shown here).NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage Team, STSCI/AURA

    Two members of our team selected the Hubble Space Telescope’s second view of the Pillars of Creation, taken in 2014, as their top space image.

    Design director Erin Otwell says: My top space image is the Pillars of Creation in the Eagle Nebula. It’s my choice because of the awe-inspiring details and the painterly quality of the composition. To me, this image sums up the feeling of studying the cosmos and of creation itself. The towers of gas and dust where new stars are being born compose an almost solid-looking figure. It looks more like a hand than pillars.  

    Maria Temming, assistant editor at Science News Explores, says: I know that claiming the Pillars of Creation as my favorite space image is like saying Starbucks is my favorite coffee. But I don’t care! I love it. I have something of a sentimental attachment to this vista, since it was on the cover of the Great Courses intro to astronomy DVD set that first sparked my interest in space science.

    In an infrared light view of the Pillars of Creation, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in late 2014, stars in and behind the towers of gas and dust are visible.NASA, ESA, Hubble and the Hubble Heritage Team

    The iconic, candy-colored images of the pillars in visible light are not the only versions that Hubble has captured. In 2014, the space telescope also took a ghostly picture of the scene in infrared light (above). Light at infrared wavelengths shines through the pillars’ gas and dust, revealing the baby stars swaddled inside these clouds.

    Thomas Digges’ view of the universe, published in 1576

    In this image published in 1576, English astronomer Thomas Digges depicts stars extending far beyond the solar system.Wellcome Collection

    Tom Siegfried, contributing correspondent, chose this diagram as his favorite space image. He says: When Copernicus displaced the Earth from the center of the universe, he pictured the stars as occupying a sphere surrounding the planets that orbited on smaller spheres surrounding the sun. But Thomas Digges, an English astronomer who defended Copernicus, believed the stars extended far beyond the solar system.

    In this image, published in 1576, Digges depicted numerous stars beyond the spheres of the planets, suggesting that the universe was “garnished with lights innumerable and reaching up in spherical altitude without end.” With these words Digges was the first follower of Copernicus to suggest that the universe encompassed an infinite expanse of space.

    The Milky Way’s black hole, released in 2022

    In May 2022, the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration released this first image of the black hole at the heart of the Milky Way.EVENT HORIZON TELESCOPE COLLABORATION

    Helen Thompson, associate digital editor, says: Is it extremely blurry? Yes. Is it not even the first time we’ve imaged a black hole? Also yes. But it’s the black hole in our galactic backyard, and we’d never seen it before. There’s something mind-blowing and kind of heartwarming about seeing it for the first time. The Event Horizon Telescope’s first image of Sagittarius A* might not be as pretty as James Webb’s fancy-schmancy pictures, but all of the difficulties that come with imaging black holes and especially this black hole make it so compelling.

    Gravitational lensing of quasar 2M1310-1714, captured in 2021

    Thanks to gravitational lensing, predicted by Einstein’s general theory of relativity before it was observed, quasar 2M1310-1714 appears as four points of light sitting on a ring around two bright galaxies.ESA, Hubble, NASA, T. Treu

    Elizabeth Quill, special projects editor, says: Within the ring of light at the center of this image are a pair of distant galaxies and a much more distant quasar behind them. The mass of the galactic duo is warping the fabric of spacetime, bending and magnifying the quasar’s light to form what are four separate images of the quasar, each sitting around the ring. It’s a visually powerful example of a phenomenon known as gravitational lensing, which was predicted by Einstein’s general theory of relativity before it was ever observed.

    My top space image wows me every time. How incredible that the universe works this way. How incredible that the human mind, a motley product of the universe, could foresee it. And not only foresee it; today’s scientists use gravitational lensing as a tool to study otherwise inaccessible regions of space. It’s both humbling and empowering.

    Pale Blue Dot, taken in 1990

    NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft took this parting image of Earth after completing its tour of the solar system in 1990.NASA, JPL-Caltech

    Christopher Crockett, associate news editor, says: My favorite space image of all time isn’t of a colorful nebula, or a glittering galaxy, or even a certain supermassive black hole. It’s a single dot, seemingly ensconced in a shaft of light.

    After completing its tour of the solar system in 1990, NASA’s Voyager 1 looked back and took a series of parting images – a “family portrait,” it was called – of several planets orbiting our sun. One of the images, which came to be known as the “pale blue dot” photo, captured Earth as seen from roughly 6 billion kilometers away — the most distant image of home anyone has ever taken.

    The image, updated with modern image-processing software and re-released in 2020 (above), remains a reminder of why we explore the universe. Yes, we want to better understand how space and time, stars and planets, galaxies and superclusters work, because we’re curious. But all those questions ultimately come back to trying to understand where we come from and how we fit into all that surrounds us.

    As Carl Sagan emphasized, nothing better captures just how tiny we are in the grand scheme of things than seeing our entire planet reduced to a mere speck of light.

    When I used to give public talks about astronomy, I almost always closed with this image. And I would usually read from Sagan’s reflections on it:

    “Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.… on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.… There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.” More

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    Large cities lead to more segregation between rich and poor

    Smartphone data from more than 9 million people in the US reveals that big cities lead to greater socioeconomic segregation despite claims they reduce it

    Humans

    28 October 2022

    By Alex Wilkins
    The size and design of cities affect social segregationImage Craft/Shutterstock
    People living in large cities are more segregated, and mix less with those from different socioeconomic backgrounds, than people in small towns, according to an analysis of anonymous phone data from more than 9 million people in the US.
    A longstanding premise of urban design is that cities encourage interactions between different economic groups, and so lead to less segregation. One of the most common ways to measure this segregation is to look at where people live and their corresponding economic status. … More

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    in Space & Astronomy

    Meet the BOAT, the brightest gamma-ray burst of all time

    The brightest gamma-ray burst ever recorded recently lit up a distant galaxy — and astronomers have nicknamed it the BOAT, for Brightest of All Time.

    “We use the boat emoji a lot when we’re talking about it” on the messaging app Slack, says astronomer Jillian Rastinejad of Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill.

    Gamma-ray bursts are energetic explosions that go off when a massive star dies and leaves behind a black hole or neutron star (SN: 11/20/19; SN: 8/2/21). The collapse sets off jets of gamma rays zipping away from the poles of the former star. If those jets happen to be pointed right at Earth, astronomers can see them as a gamma-ray burst.

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    This new burst, officially named GRB 221009A, was probably triggered by a supernova giving birth to a black hole in a galaxy about 2 billion light-years from Earth, researchers announced October 13. Astronomers think it released as much energy as roughly three suns converting all of their mass to pure energy.

    NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, a gamma-ray telescope in space, automatically detected the blast October 9 around 10:15 a.m. EDT, and promptly alerted astronomers that something strange was happening.

    “At the time, when it went off, it looked kind of weird to us,” says Penn State astrophysicist Jamie Kennea, who is the head of science operations for Swift. The blast’s position in the sky seemed to line up with the plane of the Milky Way. So at first Kennea and colleagues thought it was within our own galaxy, and so unlikely to be something as dramatically energetic as a gamma-ray burst. If a burst like this went off inside the Milky Way, it would be visible to the naked eye, which wasn’t the case.

    But soon Kennea learned that NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope had also seen the flash — and it was one of the brightest things the telescope had ever seen. A fresh look at the Swift data convinced Kennea and colleagues that the flash was the brightest gamma-ray burst seen in the 50 years of observing these rare explosions.

    “It’s quite exceptional,” Kennea says. “It stands head and shoulders above the rest.”

    This series of visible-light images from NASA’s Swift telescope’s ultraviolet/optical instrument shows that the bright glow of the gamma-ray burst GRB 221009A (yellow circle) faded over about 10 hours.Swift/NASA, B. Cenko

    After confirmation of the burst’s BOAT bonafides — a term coined by Rastinejad’s adviser, Northwestern astronomer Wen-fai Fong — other astronomers rushed to get a look. Within days, scientists around the world got a glimpse of the blast with telescopes in space and on the ground, in nearly every type of light. Even some radio telescopes typically used as lightning detectors saw a sudden disturbance associated with GRB 221009A, suggesting that the burst stripped electrons from atoms in Earth’s atmosphere.

    In the hours and days after the initial explosion, the burst subsided and gave way to a still relatively bright afterglow. Eventually, astronomers expect to see it fade even more, replaced by glowing ripples of material in the supernova remnant.

    The extreme brightness was probably at least partially due to GRB 221009A’s relative proximity, Kennea says. A couple billion light-years might seem far, but the average gamma-ray burst is more like 10 billion light-years away. It probably was also just intrinsically bright, though there hasn’t been time to figure out why.

    Studying the blast as it changes is “probably going to challenge some of our assumptions of how gamma-ray bursts work,” Kennea says. “I think people who are gamma-ray burst theorists are going to be inundated with so much data that this is going to change theories that they thought were pretty solid.”

    GRB 221009A will move behind the sun from Earth’s perspective starting in late November, shielding it temporarily from view. But because its glow is still so bright now, astronomers are hopeful that they’ll still be able to see it when it becomes visible again in February.

    “I’m so excited for a few months from now when we have all the beautiful data,” Rastinejad says. More

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    in Humans

    Don't Miss: Read about how the milky way smells of rum and raspberries

    New Scientist’s weekly round-up of the best books, films, TV series, games and more that you shouldn’t miss

    Humans

    26 October 2022

    Read
    The Milky Way Smells of Rum and Raspberries writes astrophysicist Jillian Scudder. Her offbeat tour of the universe, with its weird and wonderful facts, will have us looking at the night sky afresh. On sale 3 November.
    PETER KRAMER/NETFLIX
    Watch
    Manifest‘s fourth season continues the uncanny story of airline passengers who landed five years too late. It stars Josh Dallas and Melissa Roxburgh as Ben and Michaela Stone (pictured above). The first half of the season comes to Netflix on 4 November.
    NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute
    Visit
    The Pluto Story is astronomer Ian Robson’s tale of … More

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    in Humans

    How to make a sweet potato even sweeter: freeze it before baking

    Studies show it is always best to bake your sweet potatoes, rather than boil or microwave them, and there is another trick to take the tubers to the next level of deliciousness, says Sam Wong

    Humans

    26 October 2022

    By Sam Wong
    Shutterstock/Piyaset
    DELICIOUS meals don’t get much simpler than a baked sweet potato. But a little science can tell us how to maximise this dish’s sweetness and deepen its flavour.
    Sweet potatoes are between 1 and 2.5 per cent sugar when raw, but they get sweeter as they cook thanks to the work of amylase enzymes that break down starch into simple sugars. These enzymes are most active at 75°C (167°F).
    A study from 2012 found that the sugar content of one type of sweet potato was almost five times higher after baking for 90 minutes, mainly due … More

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    in Space & Astronomy

    Particles from space provide a new look inside cyclones

    Particles raining down from space offer 3-D views inside swirling tropical storms.

    Muons created from cosmic rays that smash into Earth’s upper atmosphere have revealed the inner workings of cyclones over Japan, researchers report October 6 in Scientific Reports. The new imaging approach could lead to a better understanding of storms, the researchers say, and offer another tool to help meteorologists forecast the weather.

    “Cosmic rays are sustainable natural resources that can be used everywhere on this planet for 24 hours [a day],” says geophysicist Hiroyuki Tanaka of the University of Tokyo, so it’s just a matter of taking advantage of them.

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    Muons offer a glimpse inside storms because variations in air pressure and density change the number of particles that make it through a tempest. By counting how many muons arrived at a detector on the ground in Kagoshima, Japan as cyclones moved past, Tanaka and colleagues produced rough 3-D maps of the density of air inside the storms. The approach gave the team an inside look at the low-pressure regions at the centers rotating storm systems.

    Muons, which are similar to electrons but roughly 200 times as massive, can scatter off molecules in the air. They’re also unstable, which means they break down into electrons and other particles called neutrinos given enough time. As air pressure increases, so does its density. That, in turn, increases the chances that a muon born from a cosmic ray will be bumped off its path on the way toward a detector or get slowed enough that it breaks down before it makes it all the way through the atmosphere.

    For every 1 percent increase in air pressure, Tanaka and colleagues say, the number of muons that survive passage from the upper atmosphere to the ground decreases by about 2 percent.

    Fewer muons make it through the high-pressure portions at the edges of a swirling cyclone (yellow and green in this muograph) than through the low-pressure regions in the center (red), providing a map of conditions inside the storm (illustrated outline). The darkened portion was outside the viewing angle of the muon detector.©2022 H.K.M. Tanaka

    Tanaka has previously used muons from cosmic rays to look inside volcanoes, and he suspects that others have used the particles to study weather (SN: 4/22/22). But, he says, this appears to be the first time that anyone has made 3-D muon scans of the insides of a storm.

    “It is an interesting approach,” says meteorologist Frank Marks of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory in Miami, who wasn’t involved in the research.

    He doesn’t expect muon imaging to replace conventional meteorological measurements, but it’s another tool that scientists could use. “[It] would be complementary to our existing techniques to provide 3-D mapping of the storms with our other traditional observing systems, like satellites and radar.” More

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    17th-century infant's life and health revealed by 'virtual autopsy'

    A young child found in an unmarked coffin in an Austrian crypt was exceptionally well preserved, and his bones and organs show signs of rickets and pneumonia

    Humans

    26 October 2022

    By Christa Lesté-Lasserre
    A close-up of the mummified child’s handA. G. Nerlich et al/Frontiers
    An infant born into an aristocratic Austrian family in the 17th century died overweight but may have been deficient in vitamin D, according to researchers who conducted a “virtual autopsy” on the mummified body.
    Scans of the surprisingly well-preserved body revealed knobbly extensions on the rib joints typical of rickets, caused by lack of vitamin D, as well as thick layers of fat – which probably helped the tissues mummify. The findings suggest the child was overfed and underexposed to sunlight, leading to his death, says Andreas Nerlich at the Academic Clinic Munich-Bogenhausen in Germany.
    Nerlich and his colleagues examined the infant’s remains after an unmarked wooden coffin was discovered in a crypt near a castle in Upper Austria. The crypt had constant airflow and a stable temperature, which probably helped dry out the child’s body. “We have here one of the very rare cases where such an aristocratic infant spontaneously mummified – and was available for a scientific investigation,” he says.Advertisement
    Radiocarbon dating of the body, combined with records of the crypt’s construction, led the researchers to estimate that the child was buried approximately 400 years ago. Given the infant’s approximate age at death – between 10 and 18 months old – and silk wraps indicative of aristocratic birth, they suspect the child was Reichard Wilhelm, who lived from 1625 to 1626, the first-born son of the Count of Starhemberg.
    Based on computed tomography (CT) scans of the body, the researchers confirmed that the child was male, and his bone measurements and tooth eruption were consistent with a child of about a year old.
    The infant mummy found in the cryptA. G. Nerlich et al/Frontiers
    Scans of his rib bones revealed rachitic rosary, a condition typical of severe cases of rickets. Rickets results primarily from a lack of vitamin D, which the body produces when exposed to ultraviolet sun rays. While his leg bones weren’t bowed – a tell-tale sign of rickets in older children – that may have been because the infant wasn’t walking yet, says Nehrlich. One arm bone, however, appeared slightly bent.
    The infant’s lungs were inflamed, suggesting he may have died of pneumonia – a disease known to occur more frequently in children with rickets, he says.
    “The combination of obesity along with a severe vitamin deficiency can only be explained by a generally ‘good’ nutritional status along with an almost complete lack of sunlight exposure,” says Nerlich.
    It is unclear whether this combination of traits was common, but early infant death rates were generally high compared with today in upper social classes during the Renaissance, says Nerlich.
    Journal reference: Frontiers in Medicine, DOI: 10.3389/fmed.2022.979670

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    US Army bullets unexpectedly found at 1918 Mexico border massacre site

    A ballistics analysis has raised new questions about the role of the US Army in the 1918 Porvenir massacre, where Texas Rangers killed 15 unarmed Mexican boys and men

    Humans

    25 October 2022

    By Jeremy Hsu
    The 1918 Porvenir massacre occurred at the US-Mexico borderTexas Historical Commission
    The first archaeological investigation of the site of a century-old massacre at the US-Mexico border has unexpectedly found bullets and cartridge casings for US military weapons.
    On the morning of 28 January 1918, Texas Rangers and local ranchers, escorted by the US Army’s 8th Cavalry, rounded up 15 boys and men of Mexican descent from the town of Porvenir, Texas, and shot them execution-style. None of that is disputed. But new evidence suggesting that both civilian and military weapons were used raises … More