Many creatures in the natural world build structures, Bees build their hives, many birds build nests and Beavers build their lodges. Human beings however have rebuilt the world with all of our structures. It’s not surprising therefore that much of the work of archaeologists concerns human structures, how and why they were built.
Bower Bird males build some of the most incredible nests and then they decorate the entrances with basically whatever they can find. All to attract a female for mating. (Credit: Alamy)
The first structure I’ll discuss today is a very well known one, perhaps the best known of all the prehistoric structures, Stonehenge in England. Much has already been written about this most famous of stone circles so I’ll just mention a few points of importance for today’s story.
We’ve learned a lot about Stonehenge over the last century but that hasn’t taken away the sense of mystery from these ancient ruins! (Credit: HistoryExtra)
Begun about the year 2200BCE Stonehenge was initially a circular trench dug into the soil with the excavated earth forming a circular henge inside the trench. It wasn’t until some 500 years later that the first stones were brought to the site and placed inside the earthen ring. These first stones are known as ‘Bluestones’, each weighing about 5 metric tonnes that were brought from the Mynydd Preseli region of western Wales, a full 290 kilometers from Stonehenge. See my post of 27 February 2019. How stone aged men managed to transport these large stones such a great distance is still a subject of controversy.
One of the techniques proposed by modern archaeologists for how the big Sarsen stones of Stonehenge were transported. (Credit: Bradshaw Foundation)And once the ancient Britons got the stones to the site of Stonehenge they then had to erect them! (Credit: English Heritage)
The larger ‘Sarsen Stones’, some weighing as much as 55 metric Tonnes, were brought to the site around the year 1500 BCE. While these massive rocks came from a much closer location just some 25 kilometers to the north bringing them to the Stonehenge site must still have required the cooperation of hundreds if not thousands of people indicating a society with considerable organization.
The Heel stone at Stonehenge lies a distance outside the main ring of the stone circle but from inside it aligns with the rising of the sun on the summer solstice, the first day of summer. (Credit: Daily Mail)The rising of the Sun on the first day of summer as seen from the center of Stonehenge. You can understand why the ancient Britons built this wonderful place. (Credit: EarthSky)
Several of the individual stones at Stonehenge have been given special names such as the Heel stone, which sits away from the other stones near the entrance to the original, and the slaughter stone, so named because early archaeologists thought it could have been used for human sacrifice. Both of these stones are Sarsen stones.
The Altar stone at Stonehenge, so named because of its placement in the circle and its lying flat on the ground. But was it actually used as an altar, we can only guess? (Credit: The Stones of Stonehenge)
One of the Bluestones also has a special name, the Altar stone, so named because the other Bluestones seem to orient towards it as if it were the place where certain ceremonies were enacted. Now a new study by researchers at the Department of Geography and Earth Sciences at Aberystwyth University in the UK have questioned whether the Altar stone is in fact a Bluestone after all. For one thing, although the Altar stone is about the same size and shape as the Bluestones the others are primarily igneous rocks while the Altar stone is made of sandstone. Now there are sandstone deposits near the quarry in Whales were the Bluestones came from and it has long been thought that was the Altar stone’s source.
This outcropping of rocks in Wales has been chemically demonstrated to be the actual quarry where the Stonehenge Bluestones came from some 290 km from the site of Stonehenge. (Credit: The Sun)
The new study conducted several different analysis of the material of the Altar stone including Ramen Spectroscopy, XRF analysis, optical petrography and SEM-EDS analysis. What the researchers found was that the Altar stone had a significantly higher level of the element Barium than the stones from the Welsh quarry, so it definitely did not come from the same place as the other Bluestones.
The study of racks and minerals using different forms of light, optical petrography, can not only tell you a great deal about the rocks but can be very beautiful as well. (Credit: YouTube)
Where did the Altar stone come from, no one knows. So now the hunt is on to try to find the geographic source of the Altar stone. At the same time archaeologists now have to try to understand why that particular stone, from wherever it came from, was brought to Stonehenge. Now we have yet another mystery to add to all the mysteries surrounding Stonehenge.
A clan of Homo erectus, our ancestors half a million years ago. There is a great deal of evidence that H erectus used fire and hunted as shown in this artist’s drawing but the hut in the center? New evidence does indicate that H erectus may have built structures as well! (Credit: Fine Art in America)
The second structure in the news recently may not be as famous as Stonehenge but it is certainly much older, in fact at an estimated age of 475,000 years old it may be the earliest wooden structure known have to been built by humans. In fact the structure wasn’t built by our species Homo sapiens but probably by our ancestral species Homo erectus.
It just two pieces of wood lying together but those pieces have been worked with stone tools so as to fit together making them the oldest known wooden construction made by human beings. (Credit: The Guardian)
The wood was discovered in the sands at the bottom of the river beneath the Kalambo falls in Zambia not far from the border with Tanzania by archaeologists from the University of Liverpool and the University of Aberystwyth. The location had been studied by archaeologists ever since the 1950s and pieces of wood that shows signs of having been worked by humans have been found there before. Those artifacts included sticks used for digging, the hafts of spears and wood used to build fires. The wooden pieces from the riverbed were preserved because they had been essentially ‘pickled’ by the acidic water of the river.
The Kalambo Falls in Kenya are not only very beautiful but the area around them are an archaeological treasure for the study of our ancient ancestors. (Credit: Tanzania Tourism)
The new find however consists of two much larger wooden logs, each about 2m long, which had been worked by stone tools in such a way as to fit together in a ‘T’ shape. The archaeologists who found the logs think that the wooden T probably served either as a foundation for either a dwelling of some kind or more likely an earthen platform from which to fish in the river.
Tom Sawyer knew that fishing was better off of a wooden platform. So apparently did Homo erectus. (Credit: Amazon.com)
Unlike earlier pieces of wood from beneath the falls the team was able to get a more precise date on the logs by using a new dating technique known as luminescence dating. This technique depends on the fact that grains of sand will pick up natural radioactivity from the environment over time. By heating up those grains and analyzing the light they emit their age can be determined. Luminescence dating is quickly becoming an important tool in archaeology and paleontology because it is able to measure the age of objects that are too old to be determined by Carbon14 but too young to use Potassium-Argon dating.
Luminescence dating can be used to determine how long grains of soil have been buried away from the light of the Sun. (Credit: Geographisches Institut)
The find in Zambia pushes back in time the date of the first known use of wood to build structures showing that even our remote ancestor were capable of innovation and invention.
Quit a lot happened in space this past month for both manned and robotic missions. While I usually start with the manned missions this month the Lucy space probe made an interesting and surprising discovery so I’ll begin there.
The Lucy probe, launched back on the 16th of October in 2021, is on a mission to study the Trojan asteroids of Jupiter beginning in 2027. For a description of the Trojan asteroids see my post of 6 January 2017. Before reaching the Trojans however Lucy was scheduled to pass by a small main belt asteroid named Dinkinesh, which means, “you are marvelous” in the Amharic language of Ethiopia. It was during the planning for the mission that the engineers at Goddard Space Center decided that Dinkinesh would represent a good opportunity to test Lucy’s cameras and other sensors so the small asteroid was added to the list of asteroids Lucy would study making a total of eight planned flybys at launch.
The Lucy probe compared to a human being. Those are some really big solar arrays. They’re needed because the sunlight out at the orbit of Jupiter is much weaker than here near Earth. (Credit: Wikipedia)
Turns out that studying Dinkinesh was a great idea because as Lucy passed by on the first of November the images sent back by the probe showed that the small asteroid, about 790m in diameter, had an even smaller moon orbiting around it. While pleased with the surprising discovery the technicians controlling Lucy at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab were equally satisfied at the performance of Lucy’s Terminal Tracking System and it’s Long Range Reconnaissance Imager. Having successfully encountered Dinkinesh Lucy is now ready to begin its prime mission of studying Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids.
A flyby of the Near Earth Object (NEO) Dinkinesh was intended to be just a test of the probe’s equipment but it turned out to be a nice discovery as a tiny satellite asteroid was orbiting the rather small itself, main asteroid. (Credit: Space.com)
Closer to Earth China has successfully carried out a crew exchange at their Tiangong space station. The station, which is smaller than the International Space Station (ISS), is normally crewed by three taikonauts (as China calls its astronauts). For the past six months it had been the crew of China’s Shenzhou-16 manned mission who had occupied Tiangong but on 26 October China launched the Shenzhou-17 mission from its space port on the isle of Xinhau. A day later Shenzhou-17 docked at Tiangong allowing the Shenzhou-16 crew to return home to Earth, which they did successfully on the 31st of October.
Image of the Shenzhou-17 spacecraft docking with the Tiangong space station. (Credit: Kalkine Media)
Keep in mind the fact that both NASA and the Russian space agency Roscosmos have carried out dozens of such crew exchanges at the ISS over the last two decades. The fact that China is now keeping its space station manned so smoothly and professionally however is a testament to how far China’s manned space program has come.
Humanity now has two Manned Space Stations orbiting the Earth. (Credit: YouTube)
Two other news items may tell us something about the future direction of space exploration in the decades to come. The first story concerns Sierra Space Corporation’s long awaited Dream Chaser space plane / mini shuttle. The Dream Chaser design does in fact bear a striking resemblance to the space shuttle and is intended to operate in much the same fashion. Launched into orbit on top of an Atlas rocket or perhaps even a Space X falcon 9 the Dream Chaser would dock at the ISS or another space station. Returning to Earth the Dream Chaser would fly into the atmosphere, experiencing no more than 1.5 g’s in the process and land on a runway like any ordinary plane.
Looking very much like a small shuttle the first Dream Chaser spacecraft will merely carry cargo to the International Space Station but eventually Sierra Space Corp. intends to use it to carry passengers as well. (Credit: Space.com)
Initially intended to deliver cargo to and from Earth orbit Sierra Space hopes that one day the Dream Chaser will also carry people into orbit. Right now however the Dream Chaser still has yet to fly. Indeed the first Dream Chaser space plane has just recently finished its construction at the company’s factory at Louisville, Colorado, a suburb of Denver. That first Dream Chaser, which has been named Tenacity, will now be shipped to NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Ohio to undergo a series of tests to verify that it is capable of withstanding the rigors of space.
The first Dream Chaser, named Tenacity, undergoing construction at Sierra Space Corp. Tenacity has now been shipped the NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center to begin its testing. (Credit: YouTube)
Dream Chaser represents yet another attempt at finding ways to lower the cost of getting into space in order to expand human exploration. Sierra Space Corporation hopes that the first, unmanned flight of this interesting spaceplane could come as early as next year providing some competition to Space X’s Dragon capsule.
The first Dream Chaser will rocket into orbit aboard an Atlas V launch vehicle, perhaps as early as next year. (Credit: Wikipedia)
Finally another current limit on our exploration of our Solar System are the low exhaust velocities possible with chemical rocket fuels. I have in several posts discussed both Nuclear and Ion rocket engines which have to potential to provide much greater exhaust velocities and thereby much greater total delta velocities for space travel. See post of 29 April 2020. Recently NASA and the aerospace corporation Aerojet Rocketdyne have carried out a series of tests on the most powerful ion rocket engine ever developed. Known as the Advanced Electric Propulsion System or AEPS the engine operates at a power consumption of 12 kW.
The Advanced Electric Propulsion System (AEPS) at full thrust during a test at Aerojet Rocketdyne corp. (Credit: Parabolic Arc)
Now ion engines function in a very different way than the chemical rockets we’re used to seeing. In an ion engine the atoms of an inert gas, usually xenon, have an electron stripped from them giving them an electric charge. A high voltage potential then accelerates those ions to a velocity that is scores if not hundreds of times faster than the atoms in a chemical rocket. As the ions are fired out the engine, giving it a thrust, the electrons are reattached to the atoms because otherwise the engine, and the space ship connected to it would quickly build up a tremendous static electric charge.
Cutaway view of the AEPS. A gas is stripped of its electrons making the atoms charged ions. Those ions are then electrically accelerated and fired out the back producing thrust. (Credit: NextBigFuture.com)
One major difference between a chemical and an ion rocket engine is that while a chemical rocket gives a big thrust for a few minutes, the first stage of a Space X Falcon 9 only fires for about four minutes, an ion engine gives a small thrust, but it can do so for days or weeks or even years.
The first stage engines of the Saturn V produced a huge amount of thrust. But they could only do so for about five minutes. An ion engine can fire for months or even years eventually producing an ever greater delta-V. (Credit: National Institute of Standards and Technology)
NASA has used ion engines in past missions, notably the Dawn deep space probe to the minor planet Ceres and the large asteroid Vesta along with the recently launched Psyche space probe. The space agency hopes to use AEPS on the Gateway space station to be placed in Lunar Orbit sometime around 2025.
The Dawn space probe visited both the Minor Planet Ceres and the asteroid Vesta using its ion engine to provide thrust for years. (Credit: Space.com)
Plans for the future even as we have successes in the present, that’s progress in our exploration of space.
In my last post I recounted some of the severe weather events that have already taken place here in the year 2023, a year that will almost certainly be recorded as the warmest in human history, or at least that is until 2024. To be honest I could have written two or three times as much as I did write in that post, extreme weather was basically everywhere this year and many locations around the world suffered for long periods of time or several times over.
Even before this year has set a new record, the top 10 hottest years ever recorded have all come in the last twelve years. That’s kinda scary!!!! (Credit: KCRA)
The important thing to keep in mind is that in 2023 for the first time the average global temperature could cross over the 1.5ºC above pre-industrial average that scientists have been warning will bring ever greater climate change and the natural disasters that accompany it. If, as now predicted this year’s El Niǹo continues into 2024 then the world could remain above that threshold and next year’s weather could be even worse.
The consensus is that El Nino has caused 2023 to be even hotter than predicted. With El Nino still hanging around will next year be even hotter? (Credit: YouTube)
So with the evidence of climate change all around us is the human race as a whole finally waking up to the danger we ourselves are creating? Are governments and the media paying attention, enough attention so that some real progress will finally be made?
Young people are paying attention to the dangers of global warming, are you? (Credit: Denise Pass)
The answer of course is both yes and no. There are clear signs that a large fraction of society is becoming very concerned about the world’s environmental future and are ready to do something about it. As you might guess young people are in the forefront of this movement.
It’s easy to understand why young people are concerned about climate change, it’s the future they’re going to have to live in. (Credit: Oregon Public Broadcasting)
A main focus of the efforts undertaken so far by young people worried about their future has been in courtrooms around the world. This summer a lawsuit was filed in Montana by 16 of the state’s teenagers alleging that the state government has violated the Montana constitution by failing to “maintain and improve a clean and healthful environment for present and future generations.” The Judge in the case agreed, ruling that the state was violating the rights of young people when it enacted policies that prohibit the state from considering the effects on the environment of fossil fuel extraction in the state. Whether or not that judgment will affect the coal and oil industry in Montana remains to be seen, indeed the state is already appealing the decision. However the simple fact that a of that kind case could be brought and won in such a deep red state as Montana is clear evidence that more and more people are becoming concerned about our changing climate. Similar lawsuits have been filed by a group of teenagers in Hawaii and by young people suing the Federal Government as well.
The Montana children who chose to act like adults while the adults in the State Legislature chose to act like children. (Credit: Vox)
Meanwhile in other countries a similar lawsuit was brought by 6 youngsters in Portugal, but these plaintiffs were a bit more ambitious, they decided to sue the entire European Union along with the UK, Switzerland, Norway, Russia and Turkey, 32 countries in all. In this case the plaintiffs allege that the increasing temperatures and drought conditions in their country are generating a Sahara desert like environment in Portugal that is again to the determent of their future lives. They blame this growing problem on the reluctance of the 32 governments to enact significant policies for fighting climate change, specifically legislation to curb CO2 emissions.
Talk ’bout David versus Goliath, six kids in Portugal are suing 32 countries over climate change. (Credit:Climate Home News)
This suit, brought before the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg could actually have major consequences, at least for the EU countries. Again the idea is that the entire future lives of these young people are being harmed by the shortsighted policies of the present. The success for these lawsuits, even if only partial so far, will generate more and more such cases until governments are finally forced to take real action.
For half a century now the world seems to have been concerned only with the next paycheck, the next quarter’s profit, the next election. All the while the foundation of the world we live in has been crumbling beneath our feet. (Credit: Mashvisor)By a large majority now the people of the US support combating climate change. But with the special interests willing to spend so much money keep on emitting greenhouse gasses will that be enough? (Credit: CNN)
Which some governments are actually doing, if only in small steps so far. Here in the US last year the Biden administration, as a part of its Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), succeed in allocating the most money ever for subsidies to boost green energy production. This money is targeted not only for new solar and wind power projects but also to help reduce the cost of electric vehicles (EV) and to increase the number of EV charging stations throughout the nation. At the same time President Biden has announced the formation of his American Climate Corps (ACC), an organization patterned after the New Deal’s Civilian Conservation Corps and intended as a training program for young people leading to good jobs in green energy and climate mitigation. Although both the ACC and the IRA are insufficient to solve the coming climate crisis they are at least steps in the right direction, and can serve as foundations for further programs if the political will for fighting climate change increases.
While the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) is a board piece of legislation intended to fix many problems it does provide a considerable amount of money for Green Energy and other environmental issues. (Credit: AFL-CIO)
A few individual states are also taking action. In California the state’s attorney general has filed a lawsuit against Exxon-Mobile, BP, Shell, Chevron and ConocoPhillips, all the big oil companies alleging that for decades they have been fully aware of the effect that fossil fuel emissions were having on the environment. The suit contends that the oil companies deliberately continued to minimize the threat of global warming while suppressing the data collected by their own scientists.
As the damage caused by climate change grows, 25 billion dollar environmental disasters so far this year, the number of suits against Oil Companies will also grow (Credit: Informed Comment)
Meanwhile voters in Switzerland have passed a referendum calling for their government to enact legislation to curb greenhouse gas emissions by their country. The measure, which passed with 59.1% of the vote for and 40.9% against requires Switzerland to achieve ‘net zero’ carbon emissions by 2050. More immediately it provides more than 3 billion Swiss francs ($3.3 billion US dollars) to help Swiss citizens and companies develop greener energy programs.
Switzerland is a country famous for its glaciers. But for how much longer. The Swiss people voted this year to try to keep such beauty as this. (Credit: AP News)
In parallel with the actions taken by environmental activists and groups there has been a significant increase in the coverage of climate change in many, although certainly not all, media outlets. During the heat of the Summer CNN and MSNBC devoted extensive time to the major environmental stories like Phoenix’s streak of days over 110ºF, the wildfires in Canada and the resulting smoke that drifted down into the US, and of course the great loss of life in the wildfire in Maui. So important were these stories that even Fox news was forced to cover them to some extent. The winner for news coverage of climate change however has to be the Weather Channel, which has even created a daily program, Pattrn, devoted to climate change and other environmental issues.
A major cable network devoting an entire hour every day to environmental issues, especially climate change. Who would have ever have thought it possible? (Credit: www.pattrn.com)
So there is progress, even if only in small steps so far. But as Isaac Newton pointed out, “For every action there is an equal an opposite reaction,” and the climate deniers have been busy as well. So, for every attempt at government action to fight global warming there has been an effort to deny or hide the facts, such as the decision by the Florida Department of Education, as directed by the state’s Governor Ron DeSantis, to approve climate change denying videos for use in the classroom.
Running for President as ‘Trump without the Chaos’ Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has ordered his state’s schools to deny climate change when teaching children. (Credit: Imgur)
At the same time court cases brought by citizens concerned about the future of our planet are opposed by lawyers and officials bought and paid for by the petroleum industry who care about nothing but their next quarter’s profit. The lawsuit won in Montana is already being appealed while other cases are being delayed or obstructed.
Have you seen this ad from the Americans for Prosperity? An Ernst Hemingway lookalike telling us that Prosperity is Possible, at least it is for oil billionaire Charles Koch, he’s the one paying for the ad! (Credit: YouTube)
Finally, even as the overwhelming number of environmental stories has forced Fox news to actually cover global warming they still try with all of their might to obscure the issue by making such absurd claims as that the extreme temperatures endured by Phoenix this summer were caused by ‘the heat island effect’. ‘Heat Islands’ caused by the concrete and asphalt in a city is a real enough phenomenon but one that doesn’t explain the equally high temperatures in the desert around Phoenix, nor the high temperatures in Greece, or Portugal or Vietnam or etc, etc, etc.
During June, July and August there was hardly anywhere on Earth that wasn’t setting record high temps. Is this our Future? (Credit: NASA Climate Change)
About the only thing we can say for certain concerning the world’s reaction to 2023 being the hottest year on record is that the political war over global warming is heating up. Right now world leaders have gathered in the United Arab Emirates for the COP28 meeting on climate change. As I write these words there is considerable division over whether the phrase ‘phasing out of fossil fuels’ manages to get included in the final report that every country must agree to or will the entire conference break apart over the issue. I’ll be sure to keep you informed.
Holding a conference on Climate Change in a country grown rich from oil! Not a good idea. (Credit: State Department)
Addendum: The COP28 final accord has been agreed upon in Dubai and it’s something of a victory for the struggle to fight climate change. For the first time the conferences final document does for the first time explicitly mention fossil fuels as the leading cause of climate change. (Think about that, it took world leaders 28 years just to finally agree that coal, oil and natural gas are causing climate change.) In addition the final accord also calls for a ‘Transitioning away from’ the use of fossil fuels.
The first draft of a final agreement at COP28 caused a firestorm at the weak language about getting rid of fossil fuels. (Credit: BBC)In the end even the Oil executive who was the president of the conference was forced to accept language that at least called for the elimination of fossil fuels. (Credit: CNN)
Now don’t get too excited. The timetable for that transitioning is very non-specific, and there are no enforcement provisions of any kind. Any country that wants to can simply ignore their commitment any time they choose. Nevertheless getting 198 nations, many of them fossil fuel producers or are dependent on fossil fuels, to agree to someday getting rid of those pollutants is a major achievement.
The main parts of the agreement. The big question is whether or not the countries that signed up for this will actually do it! (Credit: CNN)He’s right, it’s really up to all of us to keep up the pressure on our governments and get the job of zero carbon emissions done. (Credit: CNN)
Perhaps the climate disasters of the past year have finally made the nations of the world take notice of the disaster looming not too far in the future. The nations of the world have made a commitment; it’s going to be up to all of us to see to it that they keep it.
COP28, the annual international conference on Climate Change has started in Dubai, 30November, and so I’ll be posting about global warming the next several weeks.
Meeting in the United Arab Emirates the COP28 conference on Climate Change has already been criticized for being hosted by an oil kingdom while allowing petroleum lobbyists free reign. (Credit: Campaign Middle East)
Barring a miracle now the year 2023 is going to wind up as the hottest year ever recorded for the entire planet and that by a wide margin. The declared culprits of this temperature rise are usually stated in the media as being the steady increase in temperature caused by global warming coupled with the return of the phenomenon El Niǹo in the Pacific Ocean. El Niǹo was last observed back in 2016, the previous hottest year on record before 2023. Together they have caused the Earth’s average temperature to rise very close to the 1.5ºC increase over pre-industrial averages that scientists have been saying for decades now will bring about far worse climate conditions.
While still not fully understood the El Nino ocean current in the Pacific Ocean does lead to warmer conditions around the world. (Credit: NOAASciJinks)
And that prediction has certainly appeared to come true. Phoenix Arizona, already one of the hottest cities on Earth, smashed its previous record of consecutive days above 110ºF (43.3ºC), going from 18 to 31. At the same time the city also set a record for most consecutive days where the low temperature at night never got below 90ºF (36.25ºC). (I’ve been to Phoenix and I know it’s a dry heat there but nevertheless I can’t even imagine what a month of temperatures that hot is like.)
Just one day of 110 degree heat would be too much for most people so just imagine 30 days in a row! (Credit: Los Angeles Times)
Phoenix of course is just one example of record shattering heat; many other parts of the world also saw record high temperatures. Places as far apart as Vietnam, France and China each experienced all time record temperatures. For a few days in August the entire nation of Iran was forced to shut down all but emergency services because it was simply too hot for anyone to remain outdoors for any length of time. And just to put a cap on the record setting temperatures on the 17th of November the average temperature for the entire planet passed the 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial level mark for the first time, a very dangerous sign of things to come.
While tying the record temperature set in Death Valley just last year the heat in Ahvaz Iran was actually much worse because unlike California it’s very humid in the Persian Gulf so the heat index was the highest ever recorded.
Then there were the massive wildfires around the planet in places like Greece, China and even Hawaii where 99 people died as a wildfire surged across the island of Maui. But by far the worst fires were the hundreds that spread throughout Canada. Think about it, Canada is the largest nation on Earth by area and most of that is sparsely populated forest so when Canada suffers its worst ever wildfire season that’s a lot of trees being burned. The smoke from those Canadian fires even drifted south into the United States giving cities like New York, Philadelphia and Minneapolis their worst ever measured air quality conditions.
On June 5th Philadelphia experienced a nice late spring day (l). Two days later the city experienced its worst air quality day ever (r) all because of wildfires thousands of kilometers away in Canada! (Credit: WHYY)
The increase in heat also brought with it drought conditions across southern Europe, the southern US, China and worst of all large parts of northern Africa, where millions of people live on the edge of survival during the best of times. Drought conditions have caused many of the world’s great rivers to see unprecedented drops in their water levels. For example sections of the Amazon are experiencing their lowest water levels in over 120 years. Meanwhile the drought conditions throughout the Mississippi watershed has caused the flow of that great river to become so anemic that salt water from the Gulf of Mexico has pushed its way upriver almost to the city of New Orleans, threatening the city’s water supply.
Drought conditions throughout the Mississippi watershed have caused salt water from the Gulf of Mexico to back up into the lower Mississippi threatening the water supply of New Orleans. (Credit: CNN)
At the same time other areas of world like Libya, Scotland and even usually dry southern California were stricken with periods of severe flooding. Providing further evidence that global warming doesn’t cause one particular kind of weather disaster but simply causes all types of weather to become more extreme.
They don’t have Hurricanes in the Mediterranean but Storm Daniel was as destructive as any tropical storm, devastating several cities along the Libyan coast. (Credit: Floodlist)
The world’s oceans did not escape from the extreme heat either. The hottest ocean temperature ever recorded was measured in the Caribbean not far from the Florida Keys at over 32.4ºC (90ºF) while the average ocean temperature in early August reached 20.96ºC (69.71ºF), the warmest global average ever recorded. One result of this record heat is that vast stretches of coral reefs around the world are being bleached and could die if temperatures continue to rise.
While all of the world’s oceans are warming in July the temperature measured in the Florida Keys surpassed 100 degrees F for the first time ever. (Credit: Washington Post)
In the Polar Regions the extreme heat did exactly what you would expect as the sea ice around both the North Pole and Antarctica fell below the lowest levels ever previously observed. Glaciers from the Alps to the Himalayas to the Andes and Rockies all saw a continuation of the melting that has been seen for decades now. A recent survey in Switzerland has concluded that the glaciers in that country famed for its glaciers have lost 10% of their volume in just the last two years, that’s the same amount as was lost over the thirty years between 1960 and 1990. By the by it was the retreat of the world’s glaciers that was actually the first real evidence for global warming.
The Trient glacier in Switzerland pictured in 1891 (l) and 2023 (r). Much of southern Europe gets its waters from rivers that flow from glaciers like Trient, if they disappear large parts of southern Europe could become a desert. (Credit: NBC News)
All in all this has simply been a record shattering year for global warming starting with the month of June being measured as the hottest June ever recorded. Then the month of July was recorded as being simply the hottest month ever recorded. July didn’t keep that record for long however as August surged past July’s average temperature to become the new hottest month of all time. September was not quite so hot, just the hottest September ever recorded, as was October. So unless November and December are really below average in temperature, very unlikely with El Niǹo still warming the eastern Pacific, then 2023 will become the hottest year on record, possibly breaking that crucial 1.5ºC above pre-industrial averages that climatologists are convinced will generate even worst climatic conditions.
The effect on the Planet of 1.5 degree warming versus 2 degrees. We still have hopes of staying below 1.5 degrees but for at least one day we’ve gone over 2 degrees and we’re still not even trying to do enough to stop the relentless climb. (Credit: Panda.org)
So if all of the foregoing just seems like a long litany of climate disasters, well it is, and things are just going to get much worse if we don’t really start taking climate change seriously. Next week I’ll discuss some of the ways that people in government and in the media are starting to take global warming seriously, and some of the ways that the petroleum industry and its apologists are still trying to cause confusion in order to continue to deceive the average person.
Lifted into orbit back in (December of 2021) the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) spent its first months in orbit calibrating its instruments while the world’s astronomers eagerly waited. Well JWST has been in operation for a little over a year now and NASA has taken the opportunity to release some of the more spectacular images sent back by the space telescope.
It was almost two years ago the the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) was launched in orbit. Now astronomers are released some of the first results, the first discoveries made by this largest and most advanced space telescope. (Credit: Safran)
First a bit of a reminder, JWST operates as most large astronomical telescopes do by taking long exposure digital images of whatever astronomical object it is studying. Most of those ‘deep space’ objects are actually very dim and the only way to get good images is to open up the telescope’s camera and allow the light to gather photon by photon over a long period of time. The images are then computer enhanced to bring out the details the astronomers are interested in. In other words the pictures released by NASA are not what you would see if you actually looked into a telescope at the same object.
In astronomy time exposures can make dim objects brighter and allow objects that are invisible to become observable. (Credit: Photzy)
Another big difference between JWST and other telescopes, even the Hubble Space Telescope is that JWST views objects primarily in the infrared portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. This allows JWST to see details that are completely invisible to our eyes. That is the reason that JWST had to be placed more than a million kilometers from the Earth because the infrared light coming from both the Sun and the Earth would blind it if it weren’t protected. Again the digital images taken by the JWST in the infrared are then converted by a computer into visible images for astronomers, and the rest of us to see.
The difference between Hubble’s image of the Pillars of Creation in visible light (l) and the JWST image in the infrared is obvious. The dust that obscured Hubble’s image is gone in the JWST image allowing astronomers to actually see stars being born. (Credit: www.asc-csa.gc.ca)
The first set of images released from the JWST team at (John Hopkins Physics Lab) was of the well known ‘Whirlpool Galaxy’ often referred to as Messier 51 or just M51. At a distance of 27 million light years from Earth this galaxy is a favourite target of amateur astronomers not far from the Big Dipper in the sky. While M51 is a typical spiral galaxy it happens to be facing our galaxy almost head on so that our view of its spiral arms is simply magnificent. A very beautiful image of M51 was taken by Hubble a dozen years ago and astronomers have been itching to get a view with JWST ever since.
Hubble’s image of the Whirlpool galaxy only succeeded in making astronomers hungry for more. (Credit: ESA/Hubble)
Now they’ve done just that and the image is beyond expectations. One of the reasons JWST operates in the infrared is that infrared light can pass through the gas and dust that tends to blur the details in the spiral arms of galaxies like M51 in visible light. That means that JWST sees deeper into the galaxy, imaging structure never seen before. The same is also true of the small dwarf galaxy NGC 5195 located at the end of M51’s ‘tail’ and whose gravitational field is actually responsible for much of the structure of the Whirlpool’s spiral arms. Images such as JWST’s of the Whirlpool not only are beautiful but they give astrophysicists a lot of data to use in their efforts to understand how galaxies are structured and how they change with time.
JWST’s image of the center of the Whirlpool galaxy is simply breathtaking in its detail. (Credit: Mint)
The next astronomical object that the JWST team released images of was a lot closer to home, a mere 2,600 light years away. The Ring Nebula or M57 as it is known is located in the night sky near the bright star Vega and is in many ways a glimpse into the future fate of our own Sun. The star at the center of the ring was once about the same mass as our Sun but about a billion years ago it used up all of its hydrogen fuel and began to burn helium. In order to do that the star’s core had to get smaller and hotter which caused its outer regions to puff up making the star a ‘Red Giant’.
Probably the best known Red Giant is the star Betelgeuse in the constellation of Orion. The star is not only larger than our Sun it is actually larger than the orbit of Jupiter!!! (Credit: Brian Koberlein)
Then, less than a million years ago the star started to run out of helium so again its core got smaller and hotter, so much so that its outer regions were ejected from the star into interstellar space. This material was mostly ejected from the star’s equatorial region so it formed a ring around the original star, the Ring Nebula.
The JWST actually took two images of the Ring Nebula with its different instruments. On the right is the view from the Near Infrared NIRCam camera and on the left is from the Mid Infrared MIRI camera. (Credit: Prestige Online)
Since the ring itself is made up of gas and dust JWST’s ability to see in the infrared makes it the perfect instrument with which to study M57. The images taken by JWST show an enormous amount to detail that was never seen before including about 20,000 dense clumps of matter and a halo of 10 concentric arcs with 400 spikes. JWST also discovered that the central star causing the ring is not alone, it has two smaller companion stars, one about 35 astronomical units (AU) from the central star, an astronomical unit is Earth’s distance from our Sun, and the other more distant at 14,400 AU.
Because the distances in space are so huge astronomers use units like the Astronomical Unit, the average distance between the Earth and the Sun. (Credit: Study.com)
Like the images of the Whirlpool galaxy astrophysicists will have plenty to keep them busy analyzing what JWST has found at the Ring Nebula. Nebulas like the ring are not only important because they show our Sun’s future but also because the material ejected from such nebula is how heavier elements like Oxygen, Carbon, Nitrogen and Silicon get spread around the galaxy so that they can form planets like our Earth.
With the exception of Hydrogen and Helium all the other elements are manufactured inside stars. Planetary nebula like the ring nebula are one way those elements are released into the galaxy. (Credit: ZME Science)
The final set of images taken by JWST are of Supernova 1987A (SN1987A), the closest supernova to Earth in the last 400 years and the only supernova to date for which we have a picture of the star taken before it blew up. Supernova are rare events that only happen when a huge star, at least 20 times the mass of our Sun has used up all of the nuclear fuel available to it. When that happens the star’s core collapses into a neutron star or even a black hole. The rest of the star explodes in one of the most powerful events in the Universe.
Another comparison of Hubble (r) versus JWST (l). The greater detail in the JWST image is obvious. (Credit: Business Insider)
Obviously studying supernovas is a lot of fun but the problem is that they are so rare that detailed data is hard to get, most of the supernovas observed by astronomers are in galaxies billions of light years away. That’s why astronomers were so anxious for JWST to observe SN1987A. The Hubble space telescope had been observing the supernova for years and had watched as the shock wave from the explosion caught up to and slammed into material ejected from the star before it went nova.
The arrow in the top image points to the star that became the nova SN1987A. Bottom left is the star as it shined while going Nova and the bottom right is the JWST image today. (Credit: Reddit)
The images from JWST show that collision in even greater detail with a cluster of material that looks like a string of pearls. The JWST will continue to observe the dynamic changes around SN1987A while also searching for the neutron star that must have formed in the explosion but which so far has eluded detection.
An object as massive as the Sun but is only the size of a city is a neutron star. SN1987A should have formed such an object but we have yet to detect it. (Credit: Wikipedia)
The images released by the team (at Johns Hopkins) are just the beginning of the marvels that astronomers hope JWST will reveal in the years to come. Just as Hubble altered and illuminated our view of the Universe JWST is sure to do the same.
Last year I published a review of a book entitled ‘Recursion’ by author Blake Crouch. In that review I praised ‘Recursion’ for having a very unusual slant on the old SF theme of time travel. Like ‘Recursion’, the plot of ‘The Dent in the Universe’ by author E. W. Doc Parris also concerns a very different, and interesting kind of time travel, although as you might guess the results are every bit as chaotic.
Cover Art for “A Dent in the Universe” by E.W. Doc Parris. (Credit: Amazon)
Author of ‘A Dent in the Universe’ E. W. Doc Parris. (Credit: Amazon)
One Corporation is a high-tech company operating out of California’s silicon valley in the near future, the 2030s. The company specializes in developing video games and their chief claim to fame is the sChip, an integrated circuit that uses Quantum Entanglement to achieve Faster Than Light (FTL) communications with other sChips. This property allows gamers all over the world to play One Corporation’s video games together without any nasty time delays because of distance. (Actually there are some theorists who think something like that might be possible.)
Einstein called Quantum Entanglement “Fuzzy action at a Distance.” but could it be faster than light? (Credit: The Quantum Atlas)
About ten years after the sChip is first introduced an accident causes a large portion of the network to crash, a gamer spilled his coke onto his terminal. An investigation by One Corporation’s chief scientist, the guy who invented the sChip in the first place, reveals that the crash originated when the coke spilling gamers sChip sent a conformation signal to his buddy’s sChip BEFORE it was asked for the conformation. It seems sChips are not only capable of FTL they can send messages into the past.
Time Travel is one of the oldest and most often used plot device in Science Fiction. In fact it’s been used so often that you have to be very cleaver to come up with a new approach to the idea! (Credit: Penguin Random House)
That’s the neat part about ‘The Dent in the Universe’. Here time travel is limited to only information being send through time, not material objects. Another constraint on time travel in ‘The Dent in the Universe’ is that time travel is only possible through sChips and therefore the farthest back it is possible to go is ten years, when the first sChip was made.
In ‘A Dent in the Universe’ sending messages back in time is only possible through a special integrated circuit, the ‘S Chip’ and hence you can only go as far back in time as to when the first S Chip was made. (Credit: In Compliance Magazine)
Of course it was a part of Stephan Hawkins’ work over decades that showed that information is still energy so it is a material object. Think about it, in a computer information is stored by flipping magnetic fields, something that requires energy to do. So sending information back in time is still sending a material object, the energy to flip a magnetic field, back in time. Nevertheless the unique take on time travel, and the consequences thereof, is the best part of ‘The Dent in the Universe’.
Stephen Hawking spend much of his career wondering if information is destroyed by entering a black hole. His research did show how information is a kind of energy however. (Credit: Nature)
The worst part is the villain, a serial killer of the Bind Torture Kill or Jeffery Dalmer type. I don’t consider myself to have a weak stomach but there were several sections of ‘The Dent in the Universe’ that were simply unpleasant to read, and that’s being kind. There were a lot of gory details that simply weren’t necessary for the plot as far as I was concerned. By the way the idea of a serial killer getting his hands on a time machine isn’t new. Back in the 1979 there was a movie called ‘Time after Time’ where Jack the Ripper, played by David Warner, got his hand’s on H. G. Wells’ time Machine and traveled to 1980s San Francisco. Wells was played by Malcolm McDowell.
In the 1979 movie ‘Time After Time’ H. G. Wells (Malcolm McDowell left) shows Jack the Ripper (David Warner right) his Time Machine. Jack then uses it to escape to 1980s San Francisco. (Credit: Film-Authority.com)
All of that is quite a shame because much of ‘The Dent in the Universe’ is well plotted out, something very necessary in a time travel story and rather exciting. The story could have worked just as well without so much graphic gore.
I’m not a big fan of Slasher movies, which was a big problem I had with ‘A dent in the Universe’, the villain was just too gory for my taste. (Credit: Medium)
I do have one other complaint as well. Like many SF stories that take place in the near future ‘The Dent in the Universe’ is filled with techno-talk. The computer gamers all say things like “Rashad’s device processed a D-pad signal at the I/O bus”. Meanwhile the detective’s hunting the serial killer all say things like “That’s inside the feeding zone. Walking distance to the MPWS station, Good eyes Detective Baker, good eyes.” Sometimes I wonder if authors are just trying to impress their readers with how in tune they are with the language spoken by experts in various fields.
Nowadays every profession has its own specialized jargon. Writing an entire novel using only those forms of speech can be a bit tiring after a while however. (Credit: Tech Talk)
And finally it turns out that ‘The Dent in the Universe’ is just the first installment in another series of novels. I haven’t made up my mind as to whether I’ll read the next installment. As I said ‘The Dent in the Universe’ had some really interesting parts, as well as some very unpleasant ones.
Several new stories about the history of life here on Earth have caught my attention. One concerns the discovery of a fossil creature from the Cambrian period when animals with hard parts first evolved and that links together two groups of the huge phylum the Arthropods. The other two are studies of two important groups of animals, one a little known family of dinosaurs while the other concerns the origins of a very important family of insects, the bees. As usual I will discuss the oldest fossil animal first and then go forward in time.
Paleontologists at work, or is this fun it’s hard to tell! (Credit: The Academy of Natural Sciences at Drexel University)
As far as we can tell the Arthropods have been the largest and most diverse grouping of animals going all the way back to the very first animals with hard parts. While the name Arthropod means ‘jointed leg’ the Arthropods are also known for their hard exoskeletons and segmented bodies.
The largest and most diverse of the animal phylums, arthropods are surely the most successful form of life in the history of our planet. (Credit: Britannica)
Earth’s ancient oceans were filled with arthropods like the trilobites, the Eurypterids or water scorpions and horseshoe crabs just as today’s are filled with shrimp, lobsters and crabs. In the early Cambrian period, (520 to 550) million years ago there was a lot more experimentation going on in evolution as illustrated by some of the ‘weird wonders’ that have been discovered at the famous Burgess Shale in British Columbia.
Some of the weird and wonderful creatures that lived 520 million years ago and which we only know about thanks to the Burgess Shale fossil site. (Credit: Smithsonian Magazine)
Another fossil site where strange creatures from the Cambrian period have been discovered is outside the town of Chengjiang in China’s southern Yunnan Province. Recently a new species of shrimp like Arthropod has been discovered there that truly is a ‘weird wonder’ but which shows characteristics of two different groups of Arthropods and therefore serves as something of a missing link between them.
An artist’s impression of Kylinxia zhangi from the Chengjiang fossil site in China. (Credit: Wikipedia)
The animal has been given the name of Kylinxia zhangi and measures about 5 cm in length by 1.2 cm in width. While the body resembles that of a modern shrimp K zhangi possesses two large grasping appendages at it’s front and three large compound eyes on its head, that’s right three eyes!
Beautifully preserved specimen of K zhangi clearly showing the large grabbing ‘arm’ at the front. (Credit: Sci.News)
Using the best preserved specimens of K zhangi researchers at Leicester University in the UK carried out a CT scan of the fossils to better visualize it’s anatomy. One of the surprises they discovered was that the head of K zhangi was composed of a fusion of six segments, the same number as in modern insects. While it is too early to suggest any definite relationship between K zhangi and insects the fact shows how the basic building blocks of Arthropods were being experimented with, leading to the immense diversity we see today.
The heads of all insects are built from of fusion of six body segments. K zhangi’s head is also composed of six body segments. Is there a relationship or just a coincidence? (Credit: Pixels)
Speaking of insects some of the best known and most valuable of the six-legged creatures are the bees. Everyone knows, or should know that bees not only produce honey but also pollinate a wide variety of the plants that we grow to eat. Much of our agricultural industry is dependent on pollination by bees with honey just a special side bonus.
A honeybee covered in pollen. Most flowering plants are dependent on other creatures to fertilize them and bees do more than their share of that work! (Credit: Let’s talk science)
Since bees are so important it’s understandable that paleontologists would like to understand their evolution, where and under what conditions they first appeared. For such a widespread group of small animals trying to gather enough data to see the big picture has been difficult however.
120 million years ago the ancient super continent of Gondwana was composed of what today we call South America, Africa, India, Antarctica and Australia. (Credit: Free University of Berlin)
Now a new study from researchers at Washington State University have combined data, including DNA studies, of modern bees with fossil evidence to generate a geneological map of bee evolution. According to the study bees first evolved from their cousins the wasps around 120 million years ago on the ancient super-continent of Gondwana, which has since broken up into Africa, South America and Antarctica. What appears to have caused the predatory wasps to become peaceful gatherers of pollen and nectar was the evolution of the first flowering plants. In fact the study seems to argue for a kind of co-evolution back and forth between flowering plants and bees.
Fossil of one of the first flowers! Flowering plants appear to have evolved at almost the same time as bees evolving from wasps. No coincidence there! (Credit: Sci.news)
Published in the journal Current Biology the team analyzed the DNA from over 200 species of bees living today while comparing their anatomical characteristics with those of 185 fossil bee specimens. Based on this data the researchers developed a genomic map of bee evolution and distribution from the early Cretaceous period to today. One surprising fact the team discovered was that all seven bee families developed before the end of the Cretaceous, in other words the bees appear to have survived the extinction of the dinosaurs rather well!
A bee from the age of the dinosaurs, 100 MYA. All seven families of bees evolved before the asteroid hit that killed the dinosaurs so bees survived that extinction rather well. (Credit: EarthSky)
The question now is whether or not bees can survive the extinction event going on right now thanks to human destruction of the environment. Many species of bees are in danger of extinction because of global warming, pollution and invasive species like the killer hornet that prey on bees. Hopefully studies like the Washington State University’s will help us to protect these busy little creatures, rather than making them one more victim of our ignorance and greed.
Today our friends the bees face many challenges, most of them caused by us. Murder Hornets from Japan are only one the the threats to these very useful insects. (Credit: CBS News)
Finally today I’d like to stay in the Cretaceous period to discuss a little known group of dinosaurs called the Rhabdodontidae. The Rhabdodontidae consist of nine species, all of which seen to have been confined to the continent of Europe and the period 86 to 66 million years ago. Europe at that time consisted of an Archipelago of large and small islands and the Rhabdodontidae seem to have suffered from the phenomenon of ‘island dwarfism’ because as a group they were rather small dinosaurs at 2-6 meters in length. Plant eaters like the Hadrosaurs the Rhabdodontidae had a similar body shape but the head was quite different because instead of the familiar ‘duck bill’ of the Hadrosaurs the Rhabdodontidae had a pointy beak covered in keratin.
Europe isn’t exactly famous for its dinosaurs so you’d think that European paleontologists would be anxious to study their own unique family the Rhabdodontidae. (Credit: EurekAlert)
Although the first named species of the Rhabdodontidae was discovered more than 150 years ago there is still a lot about them that paleontologists don’t know such as their posture, mode of walking and eating. In fact no complete fossil specimen of a Rhabdodontidae has ever been found so most of our knowledge of them comes from putting the pieces together like in a jigsaw. Ever since the late 19th century Europe’s dinosaurs have taken back seat in recognition to the iconic dinosaurs of North America like the T rex or Triceratops. Perhaps it’s time for European paleontologists to do a little more digging in their own backyard and find that complete Rhabdodontidae.
The big news in space this month is the return of the OSIRIS-Rex probe from its seven-year long mission to the asteroid Bennu, see my posts of 21 October 2020 and 1 May 2021. During the probe’s more than yearlong study of the asteroid in October of 2020 the spacecraft made a pogo stick style bounce off of Bennu that succeeded in collecting an estimated 250 grams of the asteroid’s material. Once the spacecraft had gathered its precious cargo it ignited its rockets once more for the three-year journey back home.
Artist’s impression of the OSIRIS-Rex spacecraft’s touch and go collection of a sample of the asteroid Bennu. (Credit: Smithsonian Magazine)
On September 24th, as the school bus sized main probe passed by the Earth it dropped off a suitcase sized capsule that entered our atmosphere at around 8:40 AM Mountain Daylight Time. The capsule’s descent, including both drogue and main parachute deployment, were flawless and at 8:53 MDT the capsule landed at the US Army’s Proving Ground in Utah and within 30 minutes a NASA recovery team was on the spot and the capsule secured.
The re-entry capsule containing the sample collected by OSIRIS-Rex at Bennu as it was recovered in the Utah desert. (Credit: Flickr)
Taking the utmost care to prevent the capsule’s precious contents from becoming contaminated by anything of this Earth, the NASA personnel took it to a small, especially prepared clean room at the Army base. There the capsule underwent more procedures designed to prevent contamination in order to prepare it for its plane ride to the Johnson Space Center at Houston.
In order to prevent contamination of the material from Bennu the sample collected by OSIRIS-Rex was placed in this chamber which was itself inside a clean room at NASA’s Johnson Space Flight Center in Houston. (Credit: NASA Blogs)
That plane ride took place the very next day and now the samples of asteroid dirt are in Texas undergoing their initial evaluation. A public announcement of the results of those initial tests took place later in the month. In the years to come scientists all over the world will have their chance to study some of the material brought back from Bennu in the hopes of learning clues as to how our Solar system came into being as well as how some of the chemicals of life, basically carbon and water, came to our Earth.
NASA bigwigs discussing the initial results of the sample brought back by OSIRIS-Rex. The big news is that they collected a lot more material than they ever expected. (Credit: Ariziona Daily Star)
O’k so the capsule contained material from Bennu landed safely back here on Earth but what about the main OSIRIS-Rex space probe, what’s going to happen to it? Well, it’s still out there, after dropping off the capsule it fired it engines again and is now on it’s way to another asteroid, one named Apophis which the probe is scheduled to reach in 2029. By the by, that same year Apophis will also pass by our planet at one tenth the distance of the Moon.
The OSIRIS-Rex sample collection maneuver was so successful that some material didn’t get inside the container, see left center of image. NASA scientists are still glad to have it and will catalog everything before actually opening the main container to see what all’s inside. (Credit: Popular Mechanics)
Another NASA interplanetary probe has also been making some dramatic headlines is the Parker Solar Probe which continues to adjust it orbit taking it closer and ever closer to the Sun, see my posts of 7 June 2017 and 18 December 2019. Now just getting to the Sun is dangerous enough, its surface temperature is over 5,000º C after all and last year in September of 2022 the hazards of getting too close to the Sun increased dramatically.
In order to protect itself from the Sun’s heat the Parker Solar Probe has a very sophisticated Heat Shield. (Credit: Phys.org)
You see the Sun can be quite violent at times, remember it is really a million and a half kilometer wide hydrogen bomb that’s been going off for over 4 billion years now. Explosions on the Sun’s surface are common and can result in what are called Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) that can hurl billions of tons of plasma away from the Sun. And the closer you get to the Sun the more likely it is that sooner or later you’ll get hit by a CME.
A Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) larger than the Sun itself. Such explosions are really very common and can cause considerable damage to our modern electronics based society. (Credit: EarthSky)
That’s exactly what happened to the Parker Solar probe last September. In fact that CME was one of the most powerful ever observed. Well protected by its massive heat shield Parker not only survived the two day long ordeal but the probe actually succeeded in filming the CME as it went by. You can watch that video by clicking on the link below. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FF_e5eYgJ3Y
The Sun’s eleven year sunspot cycle is expected to peak in 2025 or 26 and the Parker probe’s trajectory was designed so that it will make its closest approaches at just that time. So Parker will almost certainly encounter even more violent CMEs in the years to come. It’s important to learn all that we can about these powerful events because as our society grows ever more dependent on electrical power and electronics in general the threat of a CME striking our planet and causing massive damage to our infrastructure grows as well.
Just some of the many ways that a CME can cause damage here on Earth. (credit: Hindustan Times)
While the Parker Solar Probe faces extraordinary hazards as it gets ever closer to the Sun space is a dangerous place for any spacecraft. That danger was illustrated by what appears to be the fate of India’s Chandrayaan 3 probe that landed at the Moon’s south polar region just last month.
The Moon isn’t a comfortable place to live either. The Chandrayaan 3 probe and its rover had to endure the long Lunar day where temperatures can reach 200 degrees C but the equally severe Lunar night seems to have been too much for them. (Credit: NDTV)
The success of Chandrayaan 3 made India only the fourth nation to land a probe on the Lunar surface and the first to land near the south pole where it is hoped water ice may be hidden at the bottom of some craters, see my post of 9 September 2023. Chandrayaan landed at the start of the two week long lunar day, sending back priceless data on conditions at the South Pole. Chandrayaan even deployed a small rover vehicle that puttered around the main lander making further measurements.
The Chandrayaan 3 lander as photographed by its rover. (Credit: Space.com)
At the end of the lunar day both the rover and the main lander were ordered to go into a sleep mode for the two week long lunar night during which time the probe’s solar cells would not be able to generate power and the outside temperature could drop to well below -200º C. Even doing so there was no guarantee that either the lander or rover would survive the ordeal.
Hoping to survive the harsh Lunar night the Indian engineers put both Chandrayaan 3 and its rover into a sleep mode. It doesn’t appear to have worked. (Credit: YouTube)
At the moment it appears Chandrayaan 3 has not survived. Engineers at the Indian Space Research Organization (Isro) report that they have not received any signals from the spacecraft and hopes are diminishing that it will revive. Nevertheless Chandrayaan’s mission was a success, a success that told us a great deal about our Moon’s south polar region.
Is there ice at the Moon’s South Pole. If there is then that’s where the first long term human habitation of our satellite will begin. (Credit: SOEST Hawaii)
The knowledge sent back to Earth by missions like OSIRIS-Rex, Parker and Chandrayaan make taking the risks of those missions well worth the effort.
Lifted into orbit back in (December of 2021) the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) spent its first months away from Earth calibrating its instruments while the world’s astronomers waited eagerly. Well JWST has been in operation for a little over a year now and NASA has taken the opportunity to release some of the more spectacular images sent back by the space telescope.
It may not look much like the telescopes we’re used to seeing but the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is the most powerful instrument ever for observing the Universe. (Credit:General Dynamics Mission Systems)
First a bit of a reminder, JWST operates as most large astronomical telescopes do by taking long exposure digital images of whatever astronomical object it is studying. Most of those ‘deep space’ objects are actually very dim and the only way to get good images is to open up the telescope’s camera and allow the light to gather photon by photon over a long period of time. The images are then computer enhanced to bring out the details the astronomers are interested in. In other words the pictures released by NASA are not what you would see if you actually looked into a telescope at the same object.
To the unaided eye the Milky Way is just a dim wisp of light across the night sky. But by taking a time exposure it becomes much more brilliant and impressive. (Credit: Dave Marrow Photography)
Another big difference between JWST and other telescopes, even the Hubble Space Telescope is that JWST views objects primarily in the infrared portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. This allows JWST to see details that are completely invisible to our eyes. That is the reason that JWST had to be placed more than a million kilometers from the Earth because the infrared light coming from both the Sun and the Earth would blind it if it weren’t protected. Again the digital images taken by the JWST in the infrared are then converted by a computer into visible images for astronomers, and the rest of us to see.
Infrared light, with longer wavelengths than visible light, is actually a much larger portion of the entire Electromagnetic spectrum than visible light is. (Credit: Study.com)
The first set of images released from the JWST team at John Hopkins Physics Lab was of the well known ‘Whirlpool Galaxy’ often referred to as Messier 51 or just M51. At a distance of 27 million light years from Earth this galaxy is a favourite target of amateur astronomers not far from the Big Dipper in the sky. While M51 is a typical spiral galaxy it happens to be facing our galaxy almost full on so that our view of its spiral arms is simply magnificent. A very beautiful image of M51 was taken by Hubble a dozen years ago and astronomers have been itching to get a view with JWST ever since.
A dozen years ago the Hubble space telescope took the image of the Whirlpool galaxy on the right. Now JWST has taken the image on the left. The increase in detail is obvious. (Credit: Business Insider)
Now they’ve done just that and the image is beyond expectations. One of the reasons JWST operates in the infrared is that infrared light can pass through the gas and dust that tends to blur the details in the spiral arms of galaxies like M51 in visible light. That means that JWST sees deeper into the galaxy, imaging structure never seen before. The same is also true of the small dwarf galaxy NGC 5195 located at the end of M51’s ‘tail’ and whose gravitational field is actually responsible for much of the structure of the Whirlpool’s spiral arms. Images such as JWST’s of the Whirlpool not only are beautiful but they give astrophysicists a lot of data to use in their efforts to understand how galaxies are structured and how they change with time.
The detail in this closeup of the JWST Whirlpool image can tell astrophysicists a lot about how galaxies are structured. (Credit: ESA/Webb)
The next astronomical object that the JWST team released images of was a lot closer to home, a mere 2,600 light years away. The Ring Nebula or M57 as it is known is located in the night sky near the bright star Vega and is in many ways a glimpse into the future fate of our own Sun. The star at the center of the ring was once about the same mass as our Sun but about a billion years ago it used up all of its hydrogen fuel and began to burn helium. In order to do that the star’s core had to get smaller and hotter which caused its outer regions to puff up making the star a ‘Red Giant’.
The Ring Nebula as seen by JWST. This is the most likely scenario for the eventual fate of our own Sun so as you might guess astronomers are very interested in all of the details. (Credit: Daily Express US)
Then, less than a million years ago the star started to run out of helium so again its core got smaller and hotter, so much so that its outer regions were pushed out from the star into interstellar space. This material was mostly ejected from the star’s equatorial region so it formed a ring around the original star, the Ring Nebula.
Stars spend about 90% of their life on the main sequence of the HR Diagram burning hydrogen. As they run out of hydrogen they begin to burn helium, becoming a red giant in the process. Eventually a star like our Sun will shed its outer layers, run out of helium and become a white dwarf. (Credit: Britannica)
Since the ring itself is made up of gas and dust JWST’s ability to see in the infrared makes it the perfect instrument with which to study M57. The images taken by JWST show an enormous amount to detail that was never seen before including about 20,000 dense clumps of matter and a halo of 10 concentric arcs with 400 spikes. JWST also discovered that the central star causing the ring is not alone, it has two smaller companion stars, one about 35 astronomical units (AU) from the central star, an astronomical unit is Earth’s distance from our Sun, and the other more distant at 14,400 AU.
Many star systems contain more than one star, our own Sun is actually in a minority. One of the few double stars systems that can be seen with the naked eye is in the Big Dipper, Mizar and Alcor. (Credit: Earthsky)
Like the images of the Whirlpool galaxy astrophysicists will have plenty to keep them busy analyzing what JWST has found at the Ring Nebula. Nebulas like the ring are not only important because they show our Sun’s future but also because the material ejected from such nebula is how heavier elements like Oxygen, Carbon, Nitrogen and Silicon get spread around the galaxy so that they can form planets like our Earth.
Carl Sagen liked to say that we were all made of star stuff and except for the hydrogen in your body all the other elements were made in stars. Objects like the Ring Nebula and supernova spread those elements throughout the galaxy so that they can form new planets and perhaps new life. (Credit: National Science Foundation)
The final set of images taken by JWST are of Supernova 1987A (SN1987A), the closest supernova to Earth in the last 400 years and the only supernova to date for which we have a picture of the star taken before it blew up. Supernova are rare events that only happen when a huge star, at least 20 times the mass of our Sun has used up all of the nuclear fuel available to it. When that happens the star’s core collapses into a neutron star or even a black hole. The rest of the star explodes in one of the most powerful events in the Universe.
The JWST image of supernova SN1987A. Only a very few stars are massive enough to explode the way this star did so there are only a few examples close enough for astronomers to study adequately. (Credit: Webb Space Telescope)
Obviously studying supernovas is a lot of fun but the problem is that they are so rare that detailed data is hard to get, most of the supernovas observed by astronomers are in galaxies billions of light years away. That’s why astronomers were so anxious for JWST to observe SN1987A. The Hubble space telescope had been observing the supernova for years and had watched as the shock wave from the explosion caught up to and slammed into material ejected from the star before it went nova.
Another comparison of Hubble (r) vs. Webb (l) of SN1987A. (Credit: Business Insider)
The images from JWST show that collision in even greater detail with a cluster of material that looks like a string of pearls. The JWST will continue to observe the dynamic changes around SN1987A while also searching for the neutron star that must have formed in the explosion but which so far has eluded detection.
It is thought that the Neutron Star left over after a supernova event becomes a Pulsar beaming radio waves like a lighthouse. If the beams aren’t pointed at you a Pulsar can be difficult to detect however and that seems to be the case with SN1987A. (Credit: aether.lbl.gov)
The images released by the team (at Johns Hopkins) are just the beginning of the marvels that astronomers hope JWST will reveal in the years to come. Just as Hubble altered and illuminated our view of the Universe JWST is sure to do the same.
Every year during the first week of October the Nobel prizes are awarded for the sciences and this year the order of announcement was Physiology or Medicine on Monday the second with Physics on Tuesday the third and Chemistry on Wednesday the fourth. Not only did the Medicine prize lead off this year but the award was also arguably the most important and controversial of the three prizes. I’ll discuss each award in the order in which it was announced.
If only everybody lived by such a motto! (Credit: NobelPrize.org)
The announcement on Monday that the Physiology prize was awarded to University of Pennsylvania (UofP) researchers Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman was hardly a surprise. You see the pair’s research on messenger RNA (mRNA) as a means to develop vaccines is what allowed the quick fabrication of the Civid-19 vaccines by both Pfizer and Moderna. To date more than 650 million people have received a Covid-19 vaccine and the work of Drs. Karikó and Weissman is credited with saving millions of lives.
Doctors Katalin Kariko (l) and Drew Weissman (r), the 2023 recipients of the Nobel Prize for Medicine. (Credit: NobelPrize.org)
Thirty years ago such a result would have seemed very unlikely. Back then the problems of working with mRNA were so great that the possibility of using it as a vaccine appeared hopeless. RNA is a much more delicate chemical than its cousin DNA, which is why our bodies use DNA for long term storage of genetic information while RNA is used as a short-term messenger. At the same time experiments had shown that when RNA was injected into a lab animal the result was often a severe inflammation at the area of injection.
mRNA is manufactured in the cell nucleus from DNA. It then moves to the ribosomes where it is used to manufacture proteins. Hence ‘Messenger’ RNA. (Credit: Wikipedia)
It was for these reasons that in the mid-1990s Dr. Karikó lost all of the funding for her work and was refused a tenure track position at UofP. In fact she was almost kicked out of the university and forced to return to her home in Hungary. Only a chance meeting with Dr. Weissman, who was working on the human immune system and who had a secure source of funding, enabled Karikó to continue working on mRNA.
‘No bucks, no Buck Rogers’. It’s unfortunate but true. Modern science depends on funding, lot’s of it! (Credit: Imgur)
Even when the two researchers published their key results of how to modify mRNA and deliver it successfully into the body in 2005 few people took notice. It really is something of a miracle that the pharmaceutical community did begin to pay attention in time so that the Covid-19 vaccines could be developed and tested quickly enough to save millions of lives.
It took more than twenty years to develop the vaccine for polio, even longer for measles. But thanks to the work of Kariko and Weissman the Covid vaccine was ready and tested in less than two years! (Credit: Phila.gov)
Now for the controversy. As I mentioned above Dr. Karikó was officially kicked out of the UofP when she lost her funding and only managed to remain in the US thanks to her collaboration with Dr. Weissman. The question is, how much of her problems were also due to her being a woman, and an immigrant! Right now the university is justly praising Dr. Karikó for her work there despite having tried several times to fire her. Hopefully that was because of Dr. Karikó’s lack of funding, not her sex or nationality. Still the UofP and academia in general may want to take a moment to review their criteria for who gets funding and why!
The University of Pennsylvania is now celebrating the work of a scientist they almost got rid of. But at least they are admitting to that fact. Hopefully this incident will cause all universities to reconsider how they deal with their scientists. Ben Franklin, their founder, would certainly approve of that! (Credit: The Daily Pennsylvanian)
The awarding of the Physics Nobel on Tuesday was a lot less divisive. This year’s award went to Pierre Agostini, Anne L’Huillier, both originally from France along with the Hungarian born Ferenc Krausz for their work in generating high-speed laser pulses at the attosecond scale. Like a strobe light that captures movements so fast that they are just a blur to human eyes the team’s attosecond lasers allow scientists to actually see the movements of electrons in chemical reactions and solid state electronics.
Doctors Pierre Agostini (l), Ferenc Krausz (c) and Anne L’Huillier (r) were awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics for their invention of laser systems that can pulse at one quintillionth of a second. (Credit: NobelPrize.org)
Consider a water molecule for a moment, a single oxygen atom that “shares” the electrons of two hydrogen atoms. Well, back when I was in college we were taught that the electrons in a water molecule behaved something like a cloud, quantum mechanics allowed you to calculate probabilities of where they’d be but trying to actually see them, forget it, they just moved too fast.
Generating attosecond pulses may look complicated, because it is. Still its only with such short flashes of light that we can see what electrons are doing in atoms and molecules. (Credit: Phys.org)
It wasn’t until the early 2000s that Drs. Agostini, L’Huillier and Krausz developed lasers that could flash at the attosecond scale, fast enough to capture a solid image of a electron in motion. An attosecond by the way is one quintillionth of a second, that’s 10-18 or 0.000000000000000001 seconds. As a comparison there are about as many attoseconds in a single second as there are seconds in the current age of the Universe, 13.5 billion years.
There are about as many attoseconds in a single as there have been seconds in the lifetime of the Universe so far! (Credit: Insight IAS)
The development of attosecond light pulses has already enabled chemists to better understand how chemical reactions happen and therefore how to better predict their properties. At the same time a better understanding of how electrons behave in semi-conductor materials should help led to better solid-state electronics.
Just a few of the things that scientists can now clearly observe thanks to attosecond pulses. (Credit: DiMauro The Ohio State University)
Finally on Wednesday the Chemistry prize was announced and as with Physics it was a celebration of the small, only this time small in size rather than duration. The recipients of the 2023 Nobel Prize in Chemistry were Moungi Bawendi, Louis Brus and Alexei Ekimov, all Americans. These three scientists were honoured for their pioneering work in the development of nanocrystals, crystals whose size is measured in millionths of a meter and are also known as “quantum dots”.
For their achievements in nanotechnology the 2023 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Moungi Bawendi (l), Louis Brus (c) and Alexei Ekimov (r). (Credit: NobelPrize.org)
It was back in the 1980s that Drs. Brus and Ekimov first created quantum dots independently of each other and studied their properties. Then in the 1990s Bawendi discovered techniques to manufacture high quality nanocrystals in large quantity, thereby establishing one of the sectors of the current field of nano-technology. Today quantum dots are used in a wide range of products from QLED TV screens to imaging in biochemistry and even in medicine and increasing the efficiency of solar cells.
Because their are so small the colour of a quantum dots literally changes with its size. That’s what makes them so useful in modern electronics. (Credit: Samsung)
So we celebrate the achievements of the best in the fields of Medicine, Physics and Chemistry. Throughout the year the various sports each get their separate seasons and it seems like politics just goes on year round so I suppose we should be grateful that pure science at least gets some notice one week out of the year.
