Science & TechnologyS


Telescope

Betelgeuse's wild surface may be reason scientists thought it was spinning twice as fast as it should be

betelgeuse
© Ma et al., ApJL, 2024A comparison of the simulation with the data from ALMA.
There's something peculiar about dying star Betelgeuse.

Yeah, there was the whole sneeze thing. That's been pretty much resolved for now. But before the Great Dimming Debacle of 2019, scientists spotted something even more peculiar about the giant star. Radio measurements of its changing light suggested it was rotating at 5 kilometers (3.1 miles) per second.

The big problem with that is that stars of Betelgeuse's vintage should, theoretically, have a maximum rotation speed at least two orders of magnitude lower. So, astronomers wonder, what the heck gives?

Well, according to new research, it may have been a big old tricksy-doodle. A team led by astrophysicist Jing-Ze Ma of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Germany has found that Betelgeuse's boiling surface could be so riotous that it generates an illusion of fast rotation.

Comment: Betelgeuse isn't the only unusual or surprising discovery in space of late:


Target

China publishing list exposing 'untrustworthy' scientific journals

china library
© Yang Qing/Imago via AlamyThe National Science Library of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing.
China has a list of suspect journals and it's just been updated. Nature talks to the librarian behind China's Early Warning Journal List about how it is compiled each year.
China has updated its list of journals that are deemed to be untrustworthy, predatory or not serving the Chinese research community's interests. Called the Early Warning Journal List, the latest edition, published last month, includes 24 journals from about a dozen publishers. For the first time, it flags journals that exhibit misconduct called citation manipulation, in which authors try to inflate their citation counts.

Yang Liying studies scholarly literature at the National Science Library, Chinese Academy of Sciences, in Beijing. She leads a team of about 20 researchers who produce the annual list, which was launched in 2020 and relies on insights from the global research community and analysis of bibliometric data.

Comment: See also: Academic journal forced to retract peer-reviewed AI-generated paper after 'rat penis' pics go viral

And check out SOTT radio's: MindMatters: Follow the Science? A Peek Behind the Curtain of Institutional Science




Nebula

JWST confirms there is something seriously wrong with our understanding of the universe

Illustration of the expansion of the Universe big bang
© Mark Garlick/Science Photo Library via Getty ImagesIllustration of the expansion of the Universe.
Depending on where we look, the universe is expanding at different rates. Now, scientists using the James Webb and Hubble space telescopes have confirmed that the observation is not down to a measurement error.

Astronomers have used the James Webb and Hubble space telescopes to confirm one of the most troubling conundrums in all of physics — that the universe appears to be expanding at bafflingly different speeds depending on where we look.

This problem, known as the Hubble Tension, has the potential to alter or even upend cosmology altogether. In 2019, measurements by the Hubble Space Telescope confirmed the puzzle was real; in 2023, even more precise measurements from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) cemented the discrepancy.

Now, a triple-check by both telescopes working together appears to have put the possibility of any measurement error to bed for good. The study, published February 6 in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, suggests that there may be something seriously wrong with our understanding of the universe.

Info

'New star' as bright as the North Star will ignite in the sky this year

A nova outburst visible to the naked eye is expected to decorate the night sky this year with a "new star" that will briefly become as bright as the North Star, offering a once-in-a-lifetime stargazing opportunity.

C-shaped Corona Borealis constellation
© NASAHow to find the C-shaped Corona Borealis constellation, located between Boötes and Hercules.
A nova outburst visible to the naked eye is expected to decorate the night sky this year, offering a rare skywatching opportunity.

The star system offering us this opportunity is known as T Coronae Borealis (T CrB). It's located some 3,000 light-years away from Earth and consists of a red giant star and a white dwarf that orbit each other. When the white dwarf steals enough stellar material from its red giant companion, it ignites a brief flash of nuclear fusion on its surface, triggering what is known as a nova outburst.

The outburst will be visible in the constellation Corona Borealis, also known as the Northern Crown, which forms a semicircle of stars. The outburst is expected to occur between February and September 2024 and appear as bright as the North Star in our night sky for no longer than a week before fading again, NASA officials said in a statement.

"This could be a once-in-a-lifetime viewing opportunity as the nova outburst only occurs about every 80 years," NASA officials said in the statement.

This recurrent nova, which last exploded in 1946, is just one of five observed within the Milky Way galaxy. To spot the outburst, viewers should point their gaze to Corona Borealis, which lies between the constellations Boötes and Hercules. The outburst will appear as a bright "new" star in the night sky.

Microscope 2

The process of cellular self-destruction may be ancient. But why?

cell death
© Allison Li for Quanta MagazineApoptosis is inherently self-destructive, and yet it’s an essential and productive process in complex organisms. Recent research traces its genetic origins to single-celled bacteria.
How did cells evolve a process to end their own lives? Recent research suggests that apoptosis, a form of programmed cell death, first arose billions of years ago in bacteria with a primitive sociality.

It can be hard to tell, at first, when a cell is on the verge of self-destruction.

It appears to be going about its usual business, transcribing genes and making proteins. The powerhouse organelles called mitochondria are dutifully churning out energy. But then a mitochondrion receives a signal, and its typically placid proteins join forces to form a death machine.

They slice through the cell with breathtaking thoroughness. In a matter of hours, all that the cell had built lies in ruins. A few bubbles of membrane are all that remains.

"It's really amazing how fast, how organized it is," said Aurora Nedelcu, an evolutionary biologist at the University of New Brunswick who has studied the process in algae.

Comment:


Info

Icy impactor might explain the formation of Mar's moons

In a new study, scientists suggest an impact with a giant icy object could explain the sizes and orbits of Mars's moons, Phobos and Deimos.

Mar's Impact
© Université Paris Diderot / Labex UnivEarthSAnrtist's rendering shows the giant collision on Mars that might have led to the formation of its moons, Phobos and Deimos. New simulations suggest the impactor may have been icy. At the time, Mars was young, and might have had a thicker atmosphere and liquid water on its surface.
The origin of Mars's two enigmatic moons, Phobos and Deimos, is a mystery. Their irregular shapes, dark surfaces, and peculiar orbits have fueled two main theories: They might be asteroids that strayed too close to Mars and were captured. Or perhaps the moons instead coalesced from debris launched to orbit after giant impactor struck the Red Planet.

New research presented at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in The Woodlands, Texas, adds a cool twist to the latter idea by suggesting that the impactor was made mostly of water ice. The idea, presented by Courteney Monchinski (Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan), eliminates some of the problems that have plagued the giant-impact scenario.

Telescope

Astronomers spot oldest 'dead' galaxy yet observed

'Dead' galaxy Jades-GS-z7-01-QU
© Tobias J Looser et al.'Dead' galaxy Jades-GS-z7-01-QU
Using the James Webb Space Telescope, an international team of astronomers led by the University of Cambridge have spotted a 'dead' galaxy when the universe was just 700 million years old, the oldest such galaxy ever observed.

This galaxy appears to have lived fast and died young: star formation happened quickly and stopped almost as quickly, which is unexpected for so early in the universe's evolution. However, it is unclear whether this galaxy's 'quenched' state is temporary or permanent, and what caused it to stop forming new stars.

The results, reported in the journal Nature, could be important to help astronomers understand how and why galaxies stop forming new stars, and whether the factors affecting star formation have changed over billions of years.

Galaxy

Best of the Web: Earth's interactions with Mars may drive deep-sea circulation, 'surprising' new study suggests

mars earth rock
© The University of SydneyLead author Dr. Adriana Dutkiewicz from the EarthByte Group in the School of Geosciences at the University of Sydney.
Scientists from the Universities of Sydney and Sorbonne University have used the geological record of the deep sea to discover a connection between the orbits of Earth and Mars, past global warming patterns and the speeding up of deep ocean circulation.

They discovered a surprising 2.4-million-year cycle where deep currents wax and wane, which in turn is linked to periods of increased solar energy and a warmer climate.

The study, published in Nature Communications, tackles the questions of how geological-timescale climate change affects ocean circulation and how this could help scientists model future climate outcomes. The researchers sought to find whether ocean-bottom currents become more vigorous or more sluggish in a warmer climate.

Comment: And so the scientists admit that these processes could have a significant impact on our climate; aren't they essentially admitting that the (readily debunked) models much touted by global warmists are missing a significant piece of data?

Could it be that it's not Mars that's impacting the deep-ocean dynamics and, instead, it's that both Mars and the Earth are being impacted by the same, greater force? Such as the influence of the Sun?

Either way, it's a timely, and fascinating, finding: Also check out SOTT radio's:





NPC

AI's Fatal Flaw

AI's fatal flaw: people!
AI is all the rage.

But with the recent Gemini disaster along with a lack of truly killer applications using AI, it doesn't seem like AI is really going anywhere.

So, is it all just hype, or what?

Join me for a look at the real danger presented by AI.

Hint: It ain't SkyNet you need to be worried about!

Comet 2

The comet strike theory that just won't die

Mainstream science has done its best to debunk the notion, but a belief in a world-changing series of prehistoric impacts continues to gain momentum.
Comet Impact
© Photo illustration by Ricardo Tomás
In 2007, a group of researchers, led by a nuclear physicist named Richard Firestone, announced an astonishing discovery. They had uncovered evidence, they said, that 12,900 years ago, a comet — or possibly a whole fleet of comets — struck Earth and changed the course of history. For the preceding two and a half million years, through the Pleistocene Epoch, the planet's climate fluctuated between frozen stretches, called glacials, and warm interglacials. At that time, Earth was warming again, and the ice sheets that covered much of North America, Europe and Asia were in retreat. Mammoths, steppe bison, wild horses and other enormous mammals still wandered the Americas, pursued by bands of humans wielding spears with fluted stone blades. Suddenly, somewhere over the Upper Midwest — an explosion.

Presenting their claim in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a top scientific journal, the researchers took the sober tone characteristic of such publications. But in The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes, a book published around the same time, two of the researchers described the scene more vividly. The impact caused the ground to shake and the sky to glow, they wrote. A hail of tiny molten particles sank into flesh and set forests ablaze. Soot blotted out the sun. Earth's magnetic field wavered, and living things were bombarded by cosmic rays, confounding the navigational senses of turtles and porpoises, which beached themselves en masse. Addled birds plummeted from the sky.

Most disastrous of all, the impact shattered the ice dam holding back Lake Agassiz, a vast expanse of glacial meltwater that stretched across Manitoba, Ontario, Saskatchewan, Wisconsin and Minnesota. The lake cascaded into the Atlantic Ocean, where the freshwater pooled over the denser seawater, disrupting the convection current carrying warm water north from the tropics. The Northern Hemisphere plunged back into full-glacial cold.

For decades, scientists had puzzled over the cause of this rapid climatic reversal, which they marked by, among other things, the reappearance in southerly fossil deposits of tundra plants. These included the wildflower Dryas integrifolia, which gives the 1,200-year time span its name: the Younger Dryas. Here was an explanation: The impact caused the sudden cooling, the Firestone team argued, and contributed to the demise of the mammoths, steppe bison and other large Pleistocene mammals, along with the people who pursued them.