Mysterious features hide in near-infrared light

Objects in space reveal different aspects of their composition and behavior at different wavelengths of light. Supernova remnant Cassiopeia A (Cas A) is one of the most well-studied objects in the Milky Way across the wavelength spectrum. However, there are still secrets hidden within the star's tattered remains.

The latest are being unlocked by one of the newest tools in the researchers' toolbox, NASA's James Webb Space Telescope — and Webb's recent look in the near-infrared has blown researchers away.

Like a shiny, round ornament ready to be placed in the perfect spot on a holiday tree, supernova remnant Cassiopeia A (Cas A) gleams in a new image from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope.

As part of the 2023 Holidays at the White House, First Lady of the United States Dr. Jill Biden debuted the first-ever White House Advent Calendar. To showcase the "Magic, Wonder, and Joy" of the holiday season, Dr. Biden and NASA are celebrating with this new image from Webb.

While all is bright, this scene is no proverbial silent night. Webb's NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) view of Cas A displays this stellar explosion at a resolution previously unreachable at these wavelengths. This high-resolution look unveils intricate details of the expanding shell of material slamming into the gas shed by the star before it exploded.

Cas A is one of the most well-studied supernova remnants in all of the cosmos. Over the years, ground-based and space-based observatories, including NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory, Hubble Space Telescope, and retired Spitzer Space Telescope have assembled a multiwavelength picture of the object's remnant.

However, astronomers have now entered a new era in the study of Cas A. In April 2023, Webb's MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument) started this chapter, revealing new and unexpected features within the inner shell of the supernova remnant. Many of those features are invisible in the new NIRCam image, and astronomers are investigating why.

Undersea volcanic eruptions account for more than three-quarters of all volcanism on Earth, but rarely do we see the impacts.

The Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai eruption of 2022 was a dramatic exception. Its furious explosion from shallow waters broke the ocean surface and punched through the stratosphere, generating supercharged lighting and an atmospheric shock wave that circled the globe several times.

But there was far more to the fallout than satellite images could possibly capture or observers could report.

We know the human toll this explosion took, but now a new study investigating the underwater impacts of the Hunga-Tonga eruption has detailed just how ferociously the explosion tore open the seafloor, ripped up undersea cables, and smothered marine life.

"The eruption causes dramatic changes to nutrient and oxygen levels in the water which could have feedbacks that we are yet to understand," says first author Sarah Seabrook, a marine biogeochemist at the New Zealand National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research.

But Nasa and space jocks alike haven't explained either the mysterious disappearance or reappearance of space-grown fruit

It might have remained one of the greatest mysteries of the universe, destined never to be solved until a freak recent discovery by the crew of the International Space Station (ISS).

The subject? A tomato grown from seed in microgravity by US astronaut Francisco "Frank" Rubio as part of an agricultural experiment.

Rubio was accused of having eaten the fruit when it inexplicably disappeared more than eight months ago. However, the tiny specimen, or at least its remnants, have now been found, according to members of the seven-strong crew during a live stream this week to celebrate the orbiting outpost's 25th anniversary.

"Our good friend Frank Rubio has been blamed for quite a while for eating the tomato. But we can exonerate him. We found the tomato," Nasa astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli said, reported by space.com.

One of the brightest stars in the sky will go dark next week in an 'extremely rare' event, astronomers report — and it will be visible in parts of the US.

Betelgeuse, the orange-red outlier among the stars that make up the constellation Orion, will seemingly disappear for 12 seconds this Monday night, December 11, when it is briefly blocked by an asteroid.

While asteroids pass between Earth and the stars all the time, the rarity of Monday's event stems from the asteroid, 319 Leona, hitting a sweet spot that will leave a 'ring of fire' visible around Betelgeuse.

The ability to recognize individuals is related to cooperation and signal diversity

A new study of paper wasps suggests social interactions may make animals smarter. The research offers behavioral evidence of an evolutionary link between the ability to recognize individuals and social cooperation.

Furthermore, genomic sequencing revealed that populations of wasps that recognized each other — and cooperated more — showed recent adaptations (positive selection) in areas of the brain associated with cognitive abilities such as learning, memory, and vision.

The study focused on two distinct populations of paper wasps (Polistes fuscatus): A southern one from Louisiana, where individuals are more uniform in appearance, and a northern one in Ithaca, where individuals have diverse color patterns on their faces. A series of experiments indicated that, unlike its southern counterparts, the northern population both recognized individuals and cooperated socially with some members over others.

China's Shidaowan nuclear power plant, the world's first fourth-generation reactor, has begun commercial operations, one of the companies behind its development said.

The high temperature gas-cooled reactor (HTGR) went online following a week-long (168 hours) continuous operation test, state-owned China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC) said in announcing the feat on Wednesday.

Fourth-generation nuclear reactors are designed to be successors for the existing, often water-cooled, nuclear reactors in operation around the world.

The reactor at the Shidaowan plant in China's eastern Shandong province is part of a global push for safer, more sustainable and efficient nuclear operations.

Instead of using water to cool the system, the high-temperature reactor will be cooled using helium gas, offering a promising way to develop more inland nuclear plants, as they will not need to be located next to a water source.

High-temperature reactors can produce heat, power, and hydrogen, and would help China and the world "become carbon neutral", said Zhang Zuoyi, dean of the Tsinghua University Institute of Nuclear and New Energy Technology and chief designer of the Shidaowan reactor project. CNNC, Tsinghua and state-owned China Huaneng Group are the joint developers and operators of the plant.

A monstrous dark patch, known as a coronal hole, recently appeared near the sun's equator. The temporary gap enables unusually fast solar wind to race toward Earth.

The sun has produced a massive coronal hole and is "spewing a stream of solar wind directly toward Earth," according to Spaceweather.com.

An enormous dark hole has opened up in the sun's surface and is spewing powerful streams of unusually fast radiation, known as solar wind, right at Earth. The size and orientation of the temporary gap, which is wider than 60 Earths, is unprecedented at this stage of the solar cycle, scientists say.

The giant dark patch on the sun, known as a coronal hole, took shape near the sun's equator on Dec. 2 and reached its maximum width of around 497,000 miles (800,000 kilometers) within 24 hours, Spaceweather.com reported. Since Dec. 4, the solar void has been pointing directly at Earth.

In a first-of-its-kind discovery, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has detected water in the inner region of a disk of planet-forming gas and dust surrounding an infant star.

The detection is significant because the water, along with other molecules needed to form worlds like Earth, were found close to several massive, young stars that generate extreme ultraviolet radiation. Such extreme environments were previously thought to be unfit for the formation of rocky planets, but this new discovery suggests that Earth-like planets may be capable of forming in a wider range of cosmic environments than once thought.

The findings could also help scientists better understand how the planets of the solar system formed around 4.5 billion years ago. The research also represents the first results from JWST's eXtreme Ultraviolet Environments (XUE) program, which aims to characterize the environments and chemistry of huge spinning disks of dust, gas and rock that surround stars in their youth and eventually spawn planets, asteroids and comets.

"The JWST is the only telescope with the spatial resolution and sensitivity to study planet-forming disks in massive star-forming regions," team leader María Claudia Ramírez-Tannus, a scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany, said in a statement.

A distant comet trapped in orbit between Saturn and Uranus is accompanied by a transforming disk of icy dust, new observations reveal.

A bizarre object that sometimes gets as close to the sun as Saturn, and other times retreats as far out as Uranus, has been discovered to have a transforming disk of dust around it that changes shape and can even mimic rings.

Minor planet 2060 Chiron is what's known as a Centaur, which are captured cometary objects that travel around the sun on looping orbits between Jupiter and Neptune. Chiron is just 218 kilometers (135 miles) across and occasionally has outbursts like a comet. To date, however, no spacecraft has ever visited a Centaur.

In 2011, Chiron passed in front of a faint star from our point of view here on Earth. Such events are referred to as "stellar occultations," and based on how an object such as Chiron blocks a star's light, the occulting object's shape and size can be determined through deduction. During the 2011 occultation, it was noticed that the star's light dimmed slightly — twice before Chiron itself occulted the star, and two further times after Chiron had moved past the star. This observation was interpreted as Chiron having a double-ring system of dust.

Then, Chiron occulted another star on Nov. 28, 2018, in an event taken advantage of by Amanda Sickafoose, who is a senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona. Because Chiron's shadow cast by the star is so small, it crossed only a narrow region of the Earth, clipping southern Africa. Sickafoose therefore led a team who used the 1.9-meter (6.2 feet) telescope at the South African Astronomical Observatory in Sutherland, South Africa, to observe the occultation.

Their results, published exactly five years later, tell a slightly different story to 2011.

What happens in the human brain when we learn from positive and negative experiences? To help answer that question and better understand decision-making and human behavior, scientists are studying dopamine.

Dopamine is a neurotransmitter produced in the brain that serves as a chemical messenger, facilitating communication between nerve cells in the brain and the body. It is involved in functions such as movement, cognition and learning. While dopamine is most known for its association with positive emotions, scientists are also exploring its role in negative experiences.

Now, a new study from researchers at Wake Forest University School of Medicine published Dec. 1 in Science Advances shows that dopamine release in the human brain plays a crucial role in encoding both reward and punishment prediction errors. This means that dopamine is involved in the process of learning from both positive and negative experiences, allowing the brain to adjust and adapt its behavior based on the outcomes of these experiences.