Space

One of the most compelling potential signs of extraterrestrial communication might have an astrophysical explanation.

Called the “Wow!” signal, the bright burst of radio waves has defied our understanding since its discovery in the 1970s. Now, scientists using archived data from the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico suggest a new possible source for the signal: a cosmic hydrogen cloud that emitted light like a laser.

“I think we have probably the best explanation so far,” says astrobiologist Abel Méndez of the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo. Méndez, together with astrophysicist Kevin Ortiz Ceballos of the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., and Jorge Zuluaga of the University of Antioquia, Colombia, submitted this idea to arXiv.org on August 16. More

Researchers may have figured out how a crucial ingredient that cells need to produce energy could form in deep space.

Calculations and lab experiments suggest that glyceric acid can arise from radiation blasting carbon dioxide and ethylene glycol in interstellar clouds, researchers report in the March 15 Science Advances.

The study is “a great start to understand how these molecules are formed in space,” says Anthony Remijan, an astrochemist at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Charlottesville, Va., who was not involved in the research. The finding suggests that “if you put the right mixture together, in the right conditions, maybe you can even afford more complex molecules in space,” he says. More

Reports that NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope broke the universe may have been exaggerated.

In its first images, JWST captured what appeared to be gargantuan galaxies in the early universe — ones much too big to be explained by current cosmological theories (SN: 2/22/23). But a new analysis of old data from the Hubble Space Telescope suggests that those alleged behemoths probably have more prosaic explanations fitting in with our standard understanding of the universe, cosmologist Julian Muñoz and colleagues report in the Feb. 9 Physical Review Letters. More

Our MoonRebecca BoyleRandom House, $28.99

Science journalist Rebecca Boyle has an intergenerational connection with the moon. Her grandfather Pfc. John J. Corcoran was involved in the 1943 Battle of Tarawa on the namesake atoll in the Pacific Ocean during World War II. The United States’ narrow victory against Japan came at heavy human cost. One reason: A weak high tide forced American soldiers to wade through the ocean into Japanese gunfire rather than sail their boats to meet their enemies. More

NEW ORLEANS — A mind-bogglingly strong spurt of electromagnetic energy has for the first time been traced back to a cluster of seven merging galaxies. The finding could bolster the hypothesis that such mysterious flareups, known as fast radio bursts, originate from bizarre, highly magnetized dead stars called magnetars.

Fast radio bursts, or FRBs, are fleeting explosive events: They last fractions of a second but release as much energy as the sun does in a month. It remains unclear what causes these strange spectacles, first discovered in 2007 (SN: 7/25/14). More

Erin Wayman is the managing editor for print and longform content at Science News. She has a master’s degree in biological anthropology from the University of California, Davis and a master’s degree in science writing from Johns Hopkins University. More

The James Webb Space Telescope has spotted objects in the early universe that might be a new kind of star — one powered by dark matter.

These “dark stars” are still hypothetical. Their identification in JWST images is far from certain. But if any of the three candidates — reported in the July 25 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences — turn out to be this new type of star, they could offer a glimpse of star formation in the early universe, hint at the nature of dark matter and possibly explain the origins of supermassive black holes.

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First proposed in 2007 by cosmologist Katherine Freese and colleagues, dark stars might have been some of the first types of stars to form in the universe (SN: 1/1/08). Though dark stars have yet to be observed, they’re thought to be powered by heat from dark matter interactions rather than by nuclear fusion reactions like in the sun.

Dark stars “would be very weird looking,” says Freese, of the University of Texas at Austin. The hypothetical stars would have formed from clouds of hydrogen and helium that drew in locally abundant dark matter as they coalesced. Though the true nature of dark matter isn’t known — its presence is inferred largely via its effect on how stars move within galaxies — it’s possible that dark matter particles can interact with themselves, annihilating each other when they collide and producing vast amounts of light and heat (SN: 7/7/22). That heat would keep the cloud of hydrogen and helium from condensing into a dense, hot core like the stars that exist today.

Because the heat from dark matter annihilations would keep the gas cloud from condensing, dark stars could grow to gargantuan size. Theoretically, dark stars could be 10 times as wide as Earth’s orbit around the sun. They could also be millions of times as massive as the sun and shine billions of times brighter — bright enough, potentially, to be spotted by JWST.

To see if any dark stars are lurking in data from the orbiting observatory, Freese and colleagues pored over images from a JWST survey of early galaxies. In such images, JWST has so far discovered over 700 objects that may have originated in the first few hundred million years of the universe — the epoch when dark stars would have emerged (SN: 12/16/22). Light from these remote objects is stretched, or redshifted, as the universe expands. So Freese and colleagues zeroed in on four objects already confirmed to be highly redshifted, making them some of the oldest objects seen to date.

Those objects are currently thought to be small galaxies from the universe’s relative infancy. But because they’re so far away, JWST can’t resolve them well enough to determine whether they’re actually galaxies or large, ultrabright stars, the researchers say.

Three dark star candidates were identified from data collected by the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey. One of the candidates, JADES-GS-z13-0, is shown here (arrow).NASA, ESA, CSA, JADES Collaboration

The team ran computer simulations of how much light a hypothetical dark star might produce at various wavelengths. They compared those spectra to light from images collected by JWST at different wavelengths for each of the four objects. JWST data from three of those objects are consistent with the simulated dark star patterns, Freese and colleagues report.

Some scientists are skeptical. Known types of stars could also create the observed light from the three candidates, says Sandro Tacchella, an astrophysicist at the University of Cambridge. And identifying any of the objects as a dark star would require that the simulated patterns fit well to more detailed spectra, says Brant Robertson, a theoretical astrophysicist at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

If dark stars were to be found, though, “that would be revolutionary,” says study coauthor Cosmin Ilie, an astrophysicist at Colgate University in Hamilton, N.Y.

Detecting dark stars would confirm the existence of a dark matter particle and hint at how it works (SN: 7/7/22). “Just having the information that [dark matter] is something that could annihilate would be really, really powerful,” says Tracy Slatyer, a theoretical physicist at MIT who was not involved in the study. That knowledge could help scientists look for dark matter elsewhere in the universe, she says.

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Dark stars could also help explain the formation of supermassive black holes (SN: 3/16/18). Once the dark matter inside the star has annihilated itself, the remaining hydrogen and helium — millions of times the mass of the sun in a relatively compact space — would collapse in on itself and form a black hole. Those black holes could merge over time into black holes like the ones at the centers of most galaxies, millions or billions of times as massive as the sun.

Future experiments, like looking for brighter or dimmer light at certain wavelengths, could help confirm whether any of the three objects are dark stars. Freese also expects to find more dark star candidates in future JWST data, she says. But for now, whether dark stars truly exist remains a mystery. 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