An international team of astronomers has investigated a newly detected Type II supernova designated SN 2024jlf. The new study, detailed in a paper published Jan. 30 on the arXiv pre-print server, yields important information regarding the evolution of this supernova and the nature of its progenitor.

Type II supernovae (SNe) are the results of rapid collapse and violent explosion of massive stars (with masses above 8.0 solar masses). They are distinguished from other SNe by the presence of hydrogen in their spectra.

Based on the shape of their light curves, they are usually divided into Type IIL and Type IIP. Type IIL SNe show a steady (linear) decline after the explosion, while Type IIP exhibit a period of slower decline (a plateau) that is followed by a normal decay.

SN 2024jlf was first spotted on May 28, 2024 using the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF), with a brightness of 15.88 mag. The supernova occurred in NGC 5690 — an edge-on spiral galaxy at a redshift of 0.0058.

Subsequent observations of SN 2024jlf after its discovery have revealed that its spectrum shows a blue continuum with weak flash features, indicating a young core-collapse supernova of Type II. A search for the progenitor of SN 2024jlf has also been conducted. However, no source has been identified in the location of this supernova.

While most people were distracted by China's new flavors of AI, something even bigger was happening.

China's EAST experimental fusion reactor ran at temps 6X hotter than sun's core for almost 18 whole minutes, doubling its previous record.

Well, who cares??

You do! More people are realizing that current "Green Energy" push isn't all it's cracked up to be, and fusion reactors could provide nearly infinite energy with no radioactive waste.

But the most interesting thing is the curious link between AI and fusion, and what it says about technology itself...

Astronomers have discovered what may be the largest-scale structure in the known universe — a group of galaxy clusters and clusters of galaxy clusters that spans roughly 1.3 billion light-years across and contains a mind-boggling 200 quadrillion solar masses.

The newfound structure is dubbed Quipu after an Incan system of counting and storing numbers using knots on cords.

Like a Quipu cord, the structure is complex, made up of one long filament and multiple side filaments. It spans roughly 1.3 billion light-years (more than 13,000 times the length of the Milky Way), potentially making it the largest object in the universe in terms of length, beating out previous record-holders such as the Laniākea supercluster.

The discovery was shared in a new paper posted on the preprint website ArXiv on Jan. 31. (The paper has not yet been published in a peer reviewed journal, but has been accepted by the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.)

"Quipu is actually a prominent structure readily noticeable by eye in a sky map of clusters in the target redshift range, without the help of a detection method," the team wrote in the paper.

From LIGO, there weren't enough neutron star-neutron star mergers to account for our heavy elements. With a JWST surprise, maybe they can.

Key Takeaways

• In 2017, two neutron stars collided just 140 million light-years away: sending both light and gravitational wave signals for us to observe.
• When we examined the remnant of this event spectrally, we discovered an enormous number of heavy elements, indicating that the heaviest elements were likely produced by these cataclysms.
• In all the time since, we've never seen another such event directly, throwing the idea that neutron star collisions make the heaviest elements into doubt. But thanks to JWST, the idea is back on the table as our #1 option.

Where do the heaviest elements in the Universe come from? If you were like most astrophysicists during the 20th century, you might've said from supernova explosions: stellar cataclysms that occur either within the cores of massive stars or from stellar corpses (white dwarfs) that undergo destructive, energy-releasing events that trigger a rapid succession of nuclear fusion reactions. Unfortunately, a comprehensive study of these classes of events — including both type II (core-collapse) and type Ia (exploding white dwarf) supernovae — showed that, although they do produce large sets of fusion reactions, they really only produce elements up to about zirconium (element #40) on the periodic table.

Concerning the well-known and persistent problem of the Cambrian explosion, Stephen Meyer stated the issue as clearly and succinctly as possible in his best-selling book Darwin's Doubt: "the origin of new biological information" (p. ix). He has repeated this issue in videos, interviews, debates, articles and speeches before and after 2013, the book's publication date. Indeed, it was the central issue in Meyer's Smithsonian paper that led to Richard Sternberg's ouster in 2004. With scientists in the ID movement stating this issue continually for more than two decades, evolutionary biologists cannot claim ignorance of it. Yet to the present day, they dodge it. In three recent papers, we see how they talk about everything and anything but the issue: the origin of new biological information. Let's consider these papers in order of publication.

Molecular Clock Fiddling

Last November, Philip C. J. Donoghue of the University of Bristol (mentioned by Bechly here) with three colleagues struggled to calibrate the Ediacaran and Cambrian fossil record to the "molecular clock" hypothesis (see my discussion of the molecular clock here). Getting these two data sources to fit has been a pervasive challenge along the entire evolutionary timeline. The abstract of their paper in Science Advances¹ claims success, but ends with a quizzical statement:

How bad can a solar storm be? Just ask a tree. Unlike human records, which go back hundreds of years, trees can remember solar storms for millennia.
Nagoya University doctoral student Fusa Miyake made the discovery in 2012 while studying rings in the stump of a 1900-year-old Japanese cedar. One ring, in particular, drew her attention. Grown in the year 774-75 AD, it contained a 12% jump in radioactive carbon-14 (14C), about 20 times greater than ordinary fluctuations from cosmic radiation. Other teams confirmed the spike in wood from Germany, Russia, the United States, Finland, and New Zealand. Whatever happened, trees all over the world experienced it.

Most researchers think it was a solar storm — an extraordinary one. Often, we point to the Carrington Event of 1859 as the worst-case scenario for solar storms. The 774-75 AD storm was at least 10 times stronger; if it happened today, it would floor modern technology. Since Miyake's initial discovery, she and others have confirmed five more examples (12,450 BC, 7176 BC, 5259 BC, 664-663 BC, 993 AD). Researchers call them "Miyake Events."

Are they exo terrestrials?

Mars is apparently not the only planet on our radar capable of sustaining life. UK researchers have confirmed the existence of a "super-Earth" located 20 light-years away that could reveal the existence of extraterrestrial beings, per a cosmic study published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Dr. Michael Cretignier — a scientist with Oxford University, who first detected the potential interstellar oasis in 2022 — said in a press release:

"I'm now very enthusiastic to hear what other scientists can tell us about this newly discovered planet. Excitingly, its proximity with us - only 20 light-years - means there is hope for future space missions to obtain an image of it. It is among the closest Earth analogues we know about and given its peculiar orbit."

An international team then analyzed highly-precise measurements recorded over two decades by Chile's HARPS (High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher) spectrograph and its successor ESPRESSO to confirm that the unidentified object was an exo-planet, defined as a planet located beyond our solar system.

An international research team led by the University of Göttingen has investigated the influence of the forces exerted by the Zagros Mountains in the Kurdistan region of Iraq on how much the surface of the Earth has bent over the last 20 million years. Their research revealed that in the present day, deep below the Earth's surface, the Neotethys oceanic plate - the ocean floor that used to be between the Arabian and Eurasian continents - is breaking off horizontally, with a tear progressively lengthening from southeast Turkey to northwest Iran. Their findings show how the evolution of the Earth's surface is controlled by processes deep within the planet's interior. The research was published in the journal Solid Earth.

When two continents converge over millions of years, the oceanic floor between them slides to great depths beneath the continents. Eventually, the continents collide, and masses of rock from their edges are lifted up into towering mountain ranges. Over millions of years, the immense weight of these mountains causes the Earth's surface around them to bend downward. Over time, sediments eroded from the mountains accumulate in this depression, forming plains such as Mesopotamia in the Middle East. The researchers modelled the downward bend of the Earth's surfaces based on the Zagros Mountain's load where the Arabian continent is colliding with Eurasia. They combined the resulting size of the depression with the computed topography based on the Earth's mantle to reproduce the unusually deep depression in the southeastern segment of the study area. The researchers found that the weight of the mountains alone cannot account for the 3-4 km deep depression that has formed and been filled with sediment over the past 15 million years.

A breakthrough personalized cancer vaccine developed by Russia's Gamaleya Research Institute could receive regulatory approval as early as this summer, potentially allowing patients to begin treatment in September, the institute's director Alexander Gintsburg has told RIA Novosti.

"According to the roadmap plan that we submitted to the Ministry of Health, although it has not yet been finally approved, we will likely receive permission at the end of August so that we can begin treating people in September," Gintsburg told the news agency.

The Gamaleya Research Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology had previously developed Sputnik V, world's first registered Covid-19 vaccine. In 2022, the center applied mRNA technology, the basis for other Covid vaccines, to develop a new type of cancer drug.

The discovery marks only the second time that an asteroid's impact risk has reached greater than a 1% chance.
Astronomers — professional and amateur alike — have turned their attention to an asteroid with a slight chance of impacting Earth in 2032, based on current observations. While the possibility is slim, and more observations are needed, the object itself might be large enough to devastate a city, motivating follow-up observations as well as archival searches for pre-discovery observations.

The asteroid, designated 2024 YR4, was first noticed on December 27, 2024, by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS); searches quickly revealed that ATLAS had already imaged it two days earlier. Then, as observations accumulated, astronomers could roughly determine its orbit. That's when the realization dawned: The object has some chance of striking Earth.

On Monday, January 27th, NASA's Sentry impact-tracking system officially raised the asteroid to a level 3 on the Torino scale. This is only the second time that an asteroid has merited a rating greater than 2 on the 10-point Torino scale, created in 1999 to convey the risk of an impact. At this level, an object has more than 1% chance of striking Earth.

Only one other object, asteroid 99942 Apophis, discovered in 2004, has ever reached that high on the scale. That asteroid peaked at 4, with a possibility of impact in 2029. But additional observations soon ruled that out, sending it back to a Torino rating of 0 — meaning no possible impact within the next century.

The chance of impact for 2024 YR4 is still slim: NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory estimates 1.2%. But if it does happen, German astronomer Daniel Bamberger (Northolt Branch Observatories) has used observations in hand to constrain the possible impact in time and location: The impact would take place on December 22, 2032, somewhere along a long line that extends from the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Mexico, through Ecuador and northern South America, across the Atlantic, through central Africa (from Kenya to Somalia), and then across to northern India.

The possible impact track covers big stretches of ocean as well as populated areas and some large cities. "I'd be really excited to see an impact," Bamberger says, "but I don't want it to be this one. Something over Antarctica, please!"