Category: Science

Archaeology News for July 2024: Two stories from Biblical times in the eastern Mediterranean. 

The eastern Mediterranean has always been one of the hotbeds of archaeology surrounded as it is by Greece to the north, Egypt to the south and the lands of the bible to the east. Yet despite over two hundred years of intensive study the eastern Mediterranean still manages to surprise us on occasion. In this post I’ll be discussing two new discoveries that have recently been made in the eastern Mediterranean. As usual I will discuss the earliest study first and move forward in time.

Often called the ‘Cradle of Civilization’ the lands to the east of the Mediterranean have been intensely studied by archaeologists. (Credit: The Latin Library)

We humans took to traveling on the water long before the beginning of recorded history so the story of how the first boats and ships were built can only be uncovered by archaeology. Based upon underwater excavations of ancient shipwrecks it is known that by the late Bronze Age there were ships capable of sailing hundreds of kilometers and carrying tons of cargo conducting regular trade between the people of Egypt, the Hittite empire, Canaan, Troy and Greece.

Modern replicas of bronze age ships have been built by archaeologists in order to test their theories about how much trade between ancient civilizations there was during the Bronze Age. These replica ships have been found to be quite seaworthy! (Credit: Medium)

However it was always thought that those ships never sailed out of sight of land but instead hugged the coastline throughout their journeys. The reasons for this timidity are basically twofold; firstly in case of a storm a ship close to shore could quickly find a harbour or even beach itself for safety. In addition the navigators of that time probably lacked the navigational tools necessary to know where they were and what direction they were going once they were out of sight of land.

One big question about Bronze Age sea trade is, just how far from land did these ancient mariners dare to go? (Credit: Quora)

That’s what makes the recent discovery of a 3,300 year old vessel that had sunk about 90 kilometers off the coast of northern Israel so interesting; the location of the wreck was well out of sight of any land. Another interesting aspect of the discovery is the fact that the wreck was found at a depth of 1,800 meters, with its cargo apparently intact by the London based fossil fuel company Energean which operates underwater natural gas extraction wells in the eastern Mediterranean.

Looking for natural gas the energy company Energean came across a 3,3300 year old shipwreck far off the coast of Israel. (Credit: Marine Insight)

Energean was searching in an area off the coast of Israel for likely new sites for gas wells using an underwater robot when the robot just happened upon the ancient wreck. From what the robot could see the ship is approximately 12-14 meters in length and lays on the ocean floor surrounded by hundreds of earthenware jars that must have held the ships cargo of oil, wine or perhaps fruit.

Nowadays, if we need to go somewhere that could be dangerous for humans we send a robot. It was this robot that actually found the ancient wreck! (Credit: The Times of Israel)

Once the engineers from Energean realized what they had come across they contacted the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) who announced the discovery of the wreck on the 20th of June. The wreck itself is so deep beneath the ocean’s surface that a comprehensive examination of the ship is probably impossible. However the Energean robot did succeed in bringing up two of the ship’s jars that archaeologists with the IAA have identified as being of Canaanite origin and from about the year 1,300 BCE.

Some of the debris found on the sea floor. The wooden ship itself has decayed so most of what can be seen is pottery that carried the ship’s cargo. (Credit: Haaretz)

The Canaanites were of course the Bronze Age enemies of the Hebrews who lived along the coast of modern Israel and Lebanon. The fact that the wreck was discovered so far from land clearly shows that the ancient mariners of the Bronze Age were not as timid as we had though and that they probably could use the position of the Sun and stars to navigate when they were away from land.

As the enemies of the ancient Hebrews the Canaanites are accused in the Bible of many horrible rituals including sacrificing their children to the god Moloch. By the way don’t confuse the Canaanites with the Philistines, they were two very different people! (Credit: Merrimack Valley Havurah)

Speaking of the enemies of the ancient Hebrews as the Bronze Age turned into the Iron Age the people of Israel and Judah acquired enemies who were much more powerful than the Canaanites. The Iron Age in the Middle East was a time of empires starting with Egypt and followed by the Assyrians, Babylon and Persia.

At the height of their empire the Assyrians controlled much of what today is the Middle East. (Credit: Biblical Archaeology Society)

According to the bible the Assyrians tried to conquer the two Hebrew kingdoms several times before finally subjugating the kingdom of Israel, giving rise to the legend of the ‘lost ten tribes of Israel’. They never succeeded in defeating Judah however despite their king Sennacherib laying siege to Jerusalem in 701 BCE. As told in 2Kings 19:35 the Assyrian army was encamped outside the walls of the city when “the angel of the Lord went out and put to death a hundred and eighty-five thousand in the Assyrian camp.”

The Assyrians tell it a little bit differently. Cuneiform tablets have been found in excavations at the Assyrian capital of Nineveh that relate how king Hezekiah of Judah paid Sennacherib a large tribute, and promised to behave as the Assyrian king’s vassal in order to save the city.

The Assyrians succeeded in their conquests by fast moving attacks using chariots like this one depicted here. (Credit: Science Photo Library)

The truth is probably somewhere in-between but regardless an independent scholar who specializes in Near Eastern Archaeology named Stephen Compton has written an article in the journal Near Eastern Archaeology where he claims to have found the campsite of Sennacherib’s army. Now Mister Compton didn’t go digging around in Israel, instead he studied aerial photographs from the mid 20th century of the area between Jerusalem and the Hebrew town of Lachish that Sennacherib also laid siege to searching for clues as to where the Assyrian army might have camped.

One of the earliest people for whom we can identify a portrait king Sennacherib of Assyria almost succeeded in conquering Jerusalem. The question is, why didn’t he? (Credit: Wikipedia)

What Mr. Compton was looking for in particular was a simple oval wall encompassing an area large enough for an army to camp in but without any permanent structures inside. A temporary city in other words, which is pretty much what an army camp is. Stone reliefs from Nineveh have been found that show that the Assyrians did in fact build oval shaped temporary fortifications for their army during campaigns. The location that Mr. Compton has identified is known locally as the Khirbet al Mudawwara where Mudawwara is an Arabic word that can mean a place where a sultan has placed his army. A memory perhaps of the Assyrians even after 2700 years!

The oval in this Assyrian bas-relief depicts the kind of fortification the Assyrian Army would build as a camp. (Credit: X)
Aerial view of the Khirbet al Mudawwara. Is the oval shape on the right of the image the site of the camp the Assyrians built in order to besiege Jerusalem? (Credit: Live Science)

If Mr. Compton’s discovery does turn out to be true it will be good evidence that the bible, like Homer’s tales, can be used as a guide for the ancient history of the Near East. Provided that is you take into account spin doctoring, exaggeration and the occasional outright falsehood.

Space News for July 2024: Boeing’s Starliner finally reaches the ISS with a Crew Aboard, but not without Problems.

Well Starliner finally made it, the long delayed Boeing space capsule has at last succeeded in taking live astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS). Problem is it hasn’t succeeded in returning them safely to Earth yet. Launched from the Kennedy Space Center on June 5 aboard an Atlas V rocket the Starliner Crew Flight Test (CFT) managed to dock with the ISS the next day and the two person crew of NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams were welcomed by the official crew of the ISS. The launch itself was delayed several times because of faulty valves and leaks in both Starliner and the Atlas V rocket.

Launch of Boeing’s Starliner on its Crewed Flight Test (CFT). The capsule was sent into orbit aboard an Atlas V rocket. Credit: (NASA/Joel Kowsky)

In fact launch was only allowed to go ahead after NASA decided that a helium leak in Starliner did not threaten the mission. Then, during the daylong trip in Low Earth Orbit (LOE) to the ISS Starliner developed another four helium leaks. Finally, as the spacecraft neared the ISS yet another technical issue appeared as five of Starliner’s twenty-eight maneuvering thrusters began to function erratically forcing a two hour delay in docking.

After several problems the Starliner Capsule finally did dock at the ISS.

Because of all those problems NASA decided to delay Starliner’s return, rather than remaining at the ISS for about a week Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams have now spend more than a month at the ISS trying to resolve Starliner’s problems, or at least learn more about them. Officially NASA says that the two astronauts are not ‘stranded’ in space but this situation is certainly without precedent.

While NASA insists that Suni Williams (l) and Butch Wilmore (r) are not ‘Stranded’ at the ISS they nevertheless have spent a lot more time there trying to ‘understand’ Starliner’s problems then anyone originally anticipated. (Credit: Florida Today)

The two astronauts are in no danger; they are perfectly safe at the ISS, they could always be brought back down in a Space X Dragon capsule. If after all of the testing in orbit however NASA finally does decide that Starliner isn’t reliable enough to bring Wilmore and Williams back to Earth it would be a terrible blow to Boeing’s Starliner program, and Boeing itself.

It’s not just Starliner that’s been giving Boeing problems. Their 737 Max airplanes have caused several deadly accidents causing the entire company’s safety program to be called into question. (Credit: NextBigFuture.com)

So Starliner still has problems, but are they serious enough to cause NASA to refuse to certify the capsule for regular operation in the Commercial Crew Program. NASA does not like the idea of entrusting its astronauts to vehicles that have any technical problems, and Starliner obviously still has quite a few. The space agency could require Boeing to conduct one more CFT in the same way that it required Boeing to conduct a second unmanned Orbital Flight Test (OFT) of Starliner back in December of 2019. That decision will undoubtedly have to wait for the final mission review.

Whatever methodology you use to solve a problem a review of everything that happened and everything that was tried is always the last step! (Credit: Humor that Works)

However NASA has been waiting a long time for Starliner to begin conducting regular crew rotation missions to the ISS as a part of the Commercial Crew program. In fact at the beginning of the Commercial Crew Program it was expected that Boeing would contribute the largest part of the missions to the ISS under the program. That’s why the Aerospace giant received the largest development contract, $4.2 Billion USD, while Space X received only $2.6 billion to develop their Dragon capsule. Originally NASA’s schedule called for Starliner to carry out its test flights back in 2017 and begin regular missions to the ISS in 2018, to be followed shortly thereafter by Space X’s Dragon capsule.

NASA’s plan was to have two private companies carrying their astronauts to the ISS. Space X has now conducted nine missions but Boeing has yet to complete a single one! (Credit: NASASpaceFlight.com)

What eventually happened however was that Space X, after a few delays carried out its first regular mission, designated as Crew-1 in November of 2020 and has now successfully conducted nine missions as a part of the Commercial Crew Program. Space X is now contracted to conduct another 14 crew transfer missions before the ISS is officially shut down and de-orbited. The price tag for the remaining 14 Space X missions is set at $258.7 million each or $64.4 million per seat.

With their reusable Falcon 9 first stage Space X has greatly reduced the cost of getting into outer space. (Credit: Statista)

Currently NASA still hopes that Boeing’s Starliner can also participate in regular crew rotation missions to the ISS. Assuming that Starliner does receive certification Starliner’s first crew mission is scheduled for no earlier than 2025 and NASA has contacted Boeing to provide a total of six regular crew missions by 2030. The estimated price tag for a seat on Starliner is approximately $95 million per seat or around $380 million per mission.

In just a few years private space stations will be orbiting our planet. Boeing still hopes to be a part of that future but will Starliner ever be a reliable space system? (Credit: Yahoo)

Even at that price however Boeing is not going to make money on Starliner from the Commercial Crew Program. The added cost of seven years of delays, the extra unmanned OFT and the possibility of NASA requiring a second CFT will certainly cause Boeing to suffer a financial loss. However Boeing is looking beyond this decade to the 2030’s when it is expected that several privately owned space stations will be in orbit and the business of taking astronauts, scientists and even tourists to those stations will become much more profitable. Boeing had better fix its capsules remaining problems though; it already has competition in Space X’s Dragon and Sierra Nevada’s Dreamchaser mini-shuttle is scheduled to make it’s first, unmanned flight later this year.

Boeing has more competition than just Space X, Sierra Nevada’s Dreamchaser is scheduled to make its first, unmanned flight later this year. (Credit: Wikipedia)

Before I go I just want to mention some good news concerning everybody’s favourite space probe that could, Voyager 1. You’ll recall that back in November the Voyager probe began radioing back a data stream that made no sense to the Voyager team at the Jet Propulsion Labouratory (JPL). See my post of 9 September 2023. Well after a lot of effort on the part of the engineers at JPL in April they managed to correct the problem to the extent that Voyager was back in communication with Earth.

Even after 45 years the two Voyager spacecraft are still sending back useful data about conditions in interstellar space! (Credit: Science in the news- Harvard University)

 Even with that success however, there was still a considerable amount of work to be done before the probe was fully repaired. Now, on June 14th NASA announced that Voyager 1 is fully functional and sending back useful measurements about the void of interstellar space which it was the first of all human made objects to ever reach.

Book Review: ‘A City on Mars’ by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith

I’m not certain as to whether or not to classify ‘A City on Mars’ by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith as Science Fiction. You see ‘City on Mars’ is actually an overview of the many problems we humans are going to have to overcome if we really want to settle outer space. Right now we are at the very beginning of that endeavor; we currently have two small, emphasis on small, space stations that are crewed by rotating teams of astronauts about every six months. In other words nobody is actually living in space at this moment. So in a sense that makes ‘A City on Mars’ kinda fictional, doesn’t it?

While ‘A City on Mars’ is definitely not this kind of Science Fiction it’s still a book about the future, so it is sorta Science Fiction! (Credit: OverDrive)

No matter, Kelly and Zach Weinersmith are a pair of space enthusiasts who have done a lot of delving into the challenges that humans are going to face trying to settle, they don’t like the term colonize because of its political baggage, outer space. Having started out as proponents of space settlement they freely admit that the number and scale of those challenges has made them a lot more cautious.

Cover Art for ‘A City on Mars’ by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith. (Credit: Wikipedia)

In ‘A City on Mars’ the problems of space settlement are classified into three broad categories, Physiology or can humans live and multiply long term in space, where to live in space and how, and finally, what are the legal aspects of building a settlement in space. You might wonder about the inclusion of that third class, after all isn’t space the final frontier and therefore kinda lawless? However the legal challenges may be the toughest of all, if we’re going to do it without starting any wars between space powers, nations that just happen to be nuclear powers as well.

Most people’s idea of what a city on Mars would look like. Actually if you read ‘A City on Mars’ you’ll find out that there are a few problems with this sort of design! (Credit: Asia Times)

Starting with the question of whether humans can live long term in space it’s worth remembering that back in the 1950s, right before the space age began, many medical experts were convinced that humans could not survive for more than a few minutes in zero gravity. Without gravity, they said, you couldn’t even swallow, you’d get disoriented, dizzy and be unable to perform any task. Finally, without gravity your heart would race at double the normal pulse rate until before long you’d have a heart attack.

In the 1950s no one had ever been into space so we had no idea if even the toughest person could survive more than a few minutes there. Because of that ignorance the original Mercury 7 astronauts were subjected to a battery of medical tests to ensure they were in the best of health. (Credit: NASA)

Fortunately it didn’t work out that way. By the time the first men walked on the Moon it was obvious that people could survive zero gravity for several weeks with the only impediment being some temporary weakness when you returned to Earth.

Readjusting to Earth’s gravity after a year in space isn’t easy, as Scott Kelly can tell you. Zero gravity causes your muscles and bones to weaken so that a lifetime in space may simply not be physically possible. (Credit: Geekwire)

However, living in zero gravity for the rest of your life may be another matter. You see, thanks to our space stations we now have lots of data about people living in zero gravity for six months to a year at a time and it’s becoming clear that our bodies aren’t built for living there. Bone mass loss appears to be the biggest problem but there is muscle loss as well, and that’s despite astronauts putting in several hours of exercise every day. There’s also the way that fluids in your body redistribute themselves in zero gravity and that includes the shape of your eyeball causing vision problems. Of course NASA is doing a lot of medical research to find treatments to remedy these problems but it’s clear that our bodies are not built to live in zero gravity long term.

The astronauts who landed on the Moon did not so much walk on its surface as hop like bunny. Still the Moon has some gravity. Whether or not it’s enough to prevent our muscles and bones from deteriorating is still questionable. (Credit: WHYY)

But what if we if build settlements on the Moon or Mars, they have gravity after all, it’s not as strong as Earth’s but it’s still more than zero gravity? Well the problem there is that the longest anymore has spent in partial gravity was about three days on the Moon. We have no idea about whether Lunar or Martian gravity is strong enough to prevent or even lessen any of the problems stated above.

In the Movie 2001: A Space Odyssey a Lunar base is already well established. That obviously didn’t happen and it may take a long time to come! (Credit: Kitbashed)

There’s another big issue about which we have no data at all and that’s the question of trying to have children, and raise them in outer space. While it’s true that a fetus in the womb is kinda sorta in zero gravity still there’s that business of the mother’s fluids being redistributed along with her loss of bone and muscle. Then, once the child is born how will they grow in zero or partial gravity, could a child born and raised on Mars ever acquire enough muscle to be able to visit Earth? To date no experiments related to breeding and raising animals have been conducted in space so we literally know nothing about whether it can be done.

The biggest medical question however is, can a human being, born and raised on the Moon or Mars, ever grow strong enough to come home to Earth and survive our planet’s strong gravity! (Credit: Raising Children Network)

Assuming we can live and multiply somewhere in space the question now becomes where and how. After a quick review of the various choices in our solar system ‘A City on Mars’ settles on the Moon and Mars because the two of them are the closest to Earth in both distance and conditions. The problem is that even then the Moon and Mars are horrible places to live. As far as trying to live there is concerned they are both airless, waterless deserts where even the sky and ground are trying to kill you. Any people living there will have to build themselves strong shelters equipped with the means of providing air, water and food while keeping a livable temperature, oh and shielding its inhabitants from cosmic radiation.

There’s been a lot of talk over the last few years about water ice at the bottom of some Lunar craters. Probably more talk than there is water ice! If that ice is there it would make a small fraction of one percent of the Moon’s surface extremely valuable! (Credit: YouTube)

‘A City on Mars’ also takes a chapter to discuss the choicest real estate on the Moon. You may have heard recently about how space nations are really interested in the Moon’s south pole. That’s because it’s thought that the bottom of some of the craters there may have been in complete darkness for billions of years so that there may be water there in the form of ice. Also, some of the peaks of those craters may be in almost perpetual sunlight making them the perfect places to build solar arrays for power. The fact that those areas represent less than one tenth of one percent of the Moon’s surface makes them extremely valuable, valuable enough to be the cause of violence?

Everybody loves ‘Star Wars’ don’t they. If we start fighting over the Moon or Mars however most of the fighting will probably be here on Earth! (Credit: Forbes)

Which brings me to the legal aspects of settling space. Of course so far there hasn’t been much need for the long arm of justice in space. That’s because there are only three nations that have the ability to send people into space and those nations have all made certain that the people they send are law abiding and can be expected to behave themselves while in space. Nevertheless, as more actors gain access to space, such as Space X, the race to obtain what little resources there are in space may lead to conflict.

It’s amazing how quickly the private corporation Space X has come to dominate space exploration. In the future there is going to be more private investors in space, more guests at the table wanting more of the few resources readily available. That could certainly provoke violence! (Credit: Dreamstime.com)

The governing legal document covering the exploration of space right now is actually called the Outer Space Treaty or OST and it was ratified in 1967 by the only two space powers at the time, the USA and the USSR. Since that time another 110 countries have signed on including all of the major space nations. Shortly after its creation the OST was supplemented by several other agreements known as the Rescue Agreement, the Liability Convention and the Registration Convention.

Yes there really is an “Outer Space Treaty’ and here’s the first page. (Credit: Alamy)

So how are these treaties going regulate the way that human beings settle space? The short answer is that the OST forbids anyone from owning any part of any celestial object, in other words no ‘I claim this crater in the name of King and Country’. On the other hand anyone can explore and make use of space, so Ireland for example has the right to set up a exploratory outpost basically anyway on the Moon, but they don’t even control the ground directly beneath that outpost! Obviously that could lead to a fair amount of misunderstanding if Vietnam decides to set up their outpost in exactly the same spot as Ireland’s!

Land grabs here on Earth have caused more than a few wars. It would be naive to think that we’ll behave any better in outer space. (Credit: Grain.org)

What the authors of ‘A City on Mars’ have discovered is that there isn’t a lot of rules and regulations that will govern how we settle space, which could lead to a ‘wild west’ scenario complete with shoot outs that trigger full-scale wars, between nuclear powers, back here on Earth. Remember Spain, Portugal, France, Holland and England fought a number of wars in Europe that began in the New World.

What we call the French and Indian War and Europe calls the Seven Years War was just one of the many wars started over disputes for land in the New World by Old World Powers! By the way it was a young George Washington, on the white house above, who started the French and Indian War. (Credit: American Battlefield Trust)

So there are a lot of problems that are going to have to be solved before humans settle space and most of them do not involve rockets or robots or spacesuits or cool technical things like that. If you’d like to know more about those nasty little details, and some of the possible solutions I think you’d like to read ‘A City on Mars’.

Astronomy News for June 2024: New Discoveries by the James Webb and Euclid Space Telescopes.

We’ve gotten used to big discoveries about the Universe being made by space telescopes. Hubble, the Chandra X-ray and the Kepler planet hunting telescopes have all revolutionized our picture of Universe, both near and far, big and small. Now it’s NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) along with the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Euclid space telescope that are making the discoveries so in this post I’ll be discussing one from each. I’ll start with JWST.

Orbiting more than a million kilometers from Earth the new James Webb Space Telescope is making observations that are revolutionizing Our understanding of the Universe. (Credit: NASA)

Although it will be making other observations the JWST was primarily designed to peer back further in time than Hubble or any ground-based telescope can. How does JWST look backward in time? Well since the speed of light is a finite 3×108 m/s you’re actually always doing that. You see if you look at the Moon you’re actually not seeing the Moon as it is but the Moon as it was about a second and a half ago because that’s how long it took the light that’s entering your eyes to get from the Moon to you!

At the speed of light our solar system is no more than a few light hours away. The universe however is more than 13 billion light years across. The farther away something is, the farther back in time you’re seeing it! (Credit: Amazon.com)

Similarly if you look at the planet Jupiter you’re really seeing it as it was about 35 minutes ago, because Jupiter is so far away that it takes light about 50 minutes to get from the planet to your eyes. The brightest true star in the sky is Sirius at a distance of about 10 light years so that means when you look at Sirius you’re really looking 10 years into the past. Finally, if you manage to find the Andromeda galaxy, the furthest object you can see with your unaided eye, you’ll be looking about two and a half million years into the past!

The Andromeda galaxy is so distant that it takes light 2.5 million years to get from there to Earth. So when we look at Andromeda what we see is the galaxy as it was 2.5 million years ago. (Credit: BBC Sky at Night Magazine)

So, when astronomers want to see what conditions were like in the early Universe, less than a billion years after the Big Bang let’s say, all they have to do is look far enough away. About 13.5 billion light years away if our calculations are right about the Big Bang. There are a couple of problems with that however, first of all the further away something is the smaller and dimmer it will appear to be, so you’ll need a bigger telescope. Oh, and you’d better put your telescope in space because the gas molecules moving around in Earth’s atmosphere will just smear whatever images you try to take.

The gas molecules in our atmosphere are moving rapidly all the time. As light tries to pass through them it gets knocked about, something called dispersion. That’s why photographs of distant objects look fuzzy when compared to images of close objects. This effects the images astronomers take of celestial objects as well. (Credit: Makodeny.org)

There’s a second more subtle problem as well caused by the expansion of the Universe that’s called the Doppler effect. Now the Doppler effect is familiar enough to everyone. Picture yourself standing on a sidewalk and a police car or ambulance is coming toward you with its siren blaring. As the vehicle is coming toward you the siren’s pitch is quite high but as it goes past the tone drops noticeably. What is happening is that the sound waves are squeezed together as the car approaches you but then are pulled apart as it recedes. That’s the Doppler effect and it happens to light waves as well as sound.

We’re all familiar with the Doppler effect. It the reason that sirens have a higher pitch as they’re approaching, and a lower pitch as then are moving away. (Credit: The Physics Classroom)

Since the Universe itself is expanding that causes all but a very few nearby galaxies to move away from us and that causes the light from those receding galaxies to get shifted to the red. For a galaxy that’s more than 10 billion light years away it’s visible light, the light we’d like to observe it by, gets shifted all the way into the Infrared requiring much more complicated equipment to make observations. That’s why the JWST was built the way it was and placed into an orbit that’s over a million kilometers from Earth.

Astronomers can measure the redshift of distant galaxies by looking for the shift of the spectral lines of the elements in the light coming from those galaxies. This gives them a very precise measurement of the velocity of that galaxy away from us. (Credit: Wikipedia)

It’s been almost two years now since JWST began its task of studying the early Universe and the first results are starting to get published. In particular it was announced on the 30th of May that JWST had broken its own record for discovering the farthest, and hence youngest galaxy ever observed. The galaxy has been given the designation of JADES-GS-z14-0 and it is estimated to have existed a mere 290 million years after the Big Bang.

The most distant galaxy observed so far, JADES-GS-z14-0 formed less than 290 million years after the Big Bang. (Credit: X.com)

Now JADES-GS-z14-0 is a small galaxy compared to modern galaxies like the Milky Way or Andromeda, being measured at about 1,600 light years across and only having a mass of a couple of million stars. Unlike other early galaxies, which appear to get most of their light from gas falling into the supermassive black hole in their center, JADES-GS-z14-0 seems to get its light from millions of very bright, young stars.

Bright, young stars being formed inside a gaseous nebula. (Credit: SciTechDaily)

The fact that such a well developed galaxy could have formed in such a short time after the Big Bang has a lot of early Universe theorists scratching their heads but there it is, and it appears certain that JWST will discover more of them in the days to come. So our models of how the first galaxies came into being are just going to have to change to account for the observable facts.

Theories are generated from facts, observations, not the other way around! (Credit: Quora)

In the same way new observations by the ESA’s Euclid space telescope are upending some of our ideas about how stars form in the present Universe. You see fifty years ago our models of star formation basically started with a gas cloud in the Milky Way collapsing due to gravity. As the cloud condensed it split into smaller clouds each of which was just big enough to then condense further into a star and maybe some planets. At that time we weren’t even certain how many stars had planets.

Forty years ago we weren’t certain any other stars had planets but now we know of thousands of exoplanets, these are just some that we think might have life on them. (Credit: SETI Institute)

Back then some astronomers suggested that there might be objects smaller than stars roaming interstellar space, objects too small to ignite the nuclear fire that makes stars shine so they would be dark. These proposed objects were given the name Brown Dwarf stars, but nobody knew how to find them. Well over the last decade or so we’ve found a couple of dozen and so brown dwarfs are now a recognized part of the celestial zoo. (See my posts of 22September 2021 and 19August 2023 for more about Brown Dwarf stars)

Too big to be a planet, yet too small to be a star Brown Dwarfs are a hot topic of research because we aren’t certain just how many of these objects there are roaming around our galaxy! (Jet Propulsion Labouratory)

So if brown dwarfs are real that begs the question, are there even smaller objects floating through space, planet sized objects that either never belonged to a star or that somehow got kicked out of their solar system. These objects have been named rogue planets and the Euclid space Telescope has discovered seven of them, so far!

Rogue Planets, planets roaming the Galaxy but not orbiting any star are the latest addition to the Celestial Zoo. (Credit: Wikipedia)

Just imagine an object, just about the size of our Earth that for billions of years has been traveling through the galaxy without the warmth of any star, cold and alone. Some astronomers are already suggesting that our galaxy may contain more than a trillion such rogue planets. After all with the mass of a single star you could make hundreds of thousands of planets so if the stellar nurseries that produce the stars also make rogue planets there probably are more of them out there than the stars.

Our Milky way galaxy contains over 200 billion stars that we can see. The question is, how many other objects does it also contain that we can’t see? (Credit: EarthSky)

Every time we look at the Universe with newer, better instruments we find new and unexpected objects out there to understand.

Paleontology News for June 2024: Almost all Dinosaur Edition.

There have been several interesting discoveries made recently about animals that lived during the Mesozoic Era, the ‘Age of the Dinosaurs’ from about 230 to 66 million years ago. Three of the four studies deal with dinos themselves but since I like to start with the oldest and work my way forward in time I’m going start with the non-dino story.

The two most destructive mass extinctions is the history of Earth were the Permian and Cretaceous. The time between these two events was the ‘Age of Dinosaurs’! (Credit: Amazon.com)

However I suppose most people would regard an Aetosaur as a dinosaur, in the Triassic period Aetosaurs were a group of large reptiles with extremely thick, bony scales covering their bodies for protection. The Aetosaurs dominated the land about 220 million years ago just before the rise of the dinosaurs and are in fact the ancestors of our modern crocodiles and alligators.

The resemblance to a modern Crocodile is evident but ancient Aetosaurs like this illustration of Garzapelta muelleri were land dwellers and some were actually vegetarians! (Credit: University of Texas at Austin)

Aetosaur fossils have been unearthed on every continent except Antarctica and Australia but for the most part the fossils have been isolated specimens of those thick bony scales.  Bones and nearly complete skeletons of Aetosaurs are quite rare. That’s what makes the recent paper describing a new species of Aetosaur from Texas so important; the animal’s remains are about 70% complete. In a new article describing the fossil it has been given the name Garzapelta muelleri because it was discovered in Garza county in Texas, it’s covered with a very strong skin or pelt and it was originally unearthed by paleontologist Bill Mueller.

Because they fossilize so easily most Aetosaurs are mostly known from the hard, boney plates on their backs. (Credit: Wikipedia)

Garzapelta muelleri is actually not a new discovery however; in fact the fossil had been lying in a storage room at Texas Tech University for almost thirty years. It wasn’t until graduate student Bill Reyes came across the fossil and decided it might be worth spending several years cleaning it up and preparing it for study that G muelleri could finally be described and published. Another example of how some of the best fossil hunting is done in the basements and storage rooms of natural history museums.

Some of the most important discoveries made in biology, or geology or archaeology are not made in the field but by re-examining specimens that may have been stored for decades in a museum storage room. (Credit: Southwest Solutions Group)

Getting back to actual dinosaurs, not all fossils are from the remains of animals who died long ago, many are the remains of the activity of extinct creatures, especially their tracks or footprints. Hundreds of examples of dinosaur footprints are known, from many different types of dinosaurs, although narrowing any footprints down to a single species that made them is difficult.

Paleontologists can usually identify the type of dinosaur that made a set of tracts but trying to narrow down the exact species is a lot more difficult. (Credit: The Great Cretaceous Walk)

A newly recognized track of footprints in Colorado are now being announced as the longest known track by a sauropod dinosaur, those huge long necked and long tailed dinosaurs that were the largest animals to ever walk on land. The site contains an estimated 134 steps by the animal who appears to have been heading north, turned east before changing it’s mind and turning around to go west. The turning around motion is something never seen before for sauropods and will tell us a lot about how they moved.

Aerial view of the tracks made by a sauropod in Colorado. The animal’s decision to turn around and head the other way is obvious. (Credit: Times of India)

The trail is now the property of the Grand Mesa, Uncompahgre and Gunnison National Forests who bought the property from the Charles family whose children had played among the ‘potholes’ for years without knowing they were dinosaur footprints. The good news is that you can visit the footprints in the National Forest. The bad news is that it’s a three-kilometer hike up a steep grade to the 2800-meter elevation site.

High up in Colorado Rockies the Grand Mesa, Uncompahgre and Gunnison National Forests are obviously a very beautiful place to visit, but be prepared to ‘rough it’. (Credit: Visit Telluride)

Back when I was first learning about dinosaurs it was assumed that they were cold blooded animals like other reptiles but nowadays nearly all paleontologists think that at least some groups of dinosaurs were warm blooded. The clearest evidence for this idea comes from well preserved fossil impressions showing that some dinosaurs had evolved feathers, not for flight but instead as insulation to keep warm. At the same time there are many early bird fossils that show anatomical similarities to dinosaurs!

Archaeopteryx, the little lizard with feathers! A mixture of reptile and bird anatomies this fossil was unearthed shortly after Darwin published his ‘Origin of Species’ and provided considerable evidence that Darwin was correct. (Credit: Live Science)

So if dinosaurs did evolve warm bloodiness the questions we need to ask are, when did dinosaurs become warm blooded, which dinosaur groups evolved to be warm blooded and perhaps most critically, just how do we answer those two questions? Now a new study by a group of paleontologists from the University College of London and the University of Vigo in Spain has tried to understand warm bloodiness in dinosaurs by examining their distribution in various temperature regions of the Mesozoic world.

The Velociraptor made famous by the Jurassic Park Movies was probably at least partly covered by feathers, not in order to fly but rather to help keep them warm! (Credit: NBC News)

Look at it this way, the whole reason for an animal to evolve to be warm blooded is so that they can be active in cold temperatures. That’s why you don’t see many reptiles in Polar Regions and that’s why both reptiles and insects like to sun themselves in the morning to warm their bodies. It’s the heat that they get from the Sun that allows them to become active. On the other hand the metabolism of mammals and birds is always high because of their warm blood. So, the researchers reasoned, if fossils of dinosaur species have been found in locations that were cold back when the dinos lived there then it’s a fair bet that those dinosaur species were warm blooded!

A fossil site in northern Alaska has provided specimens of different dinosaur species, but notice no sauropods! (Credit: ScienceDirect.com)

According to that logic the study found that it was the members of the Theropod and Ornithischian groups of dinosaurs that became warm blooded approximately 180 million years ago. The theropods are the two legged predators like T rex and Velociraptor while the ornithischians contain such species as triceratops and the hadrosaurs. The sauropods, the biggest of the dinosaurs stayed in the warmer, tropical regions and do not appear to have evolved warm bloodiness. The study suggests that the sauropods may have evolved their huge size in order to store heat in their massive bodies rather than generate it by becoming warm blooded. 

Titanosaurus, the largest dinosaur discovered so far. Did the sauropods evolve to be so big in order to help regulate their body temperature? (Credit: YouTube)

Finally, I mentioned above that there is now abundant evidence that some species of dinosaur possessed feathers over at least some parts of their bodies in order to keep them warm. The Velociraptor is thought to be one of those species. However the precise details of the evolution of feathers from reptile scales are still rather mysterious.

Feathers and scales are made from the same kinds of proteins and it appears that bird feathers evolved by the splitting of reptile scales. (Credit: Avian Biology)

Now a new specimen of a feathered dinosaur called Psittacosaurus is revealed some of those details. A small creature from about 135-120 million years ago Psittacosaurus belonged to the branch of dinosaurs that would soon evolve into the birds we know today. Previously examined fossils of Psittacosaurus have shown that the animal had some feathers that covered a portion of its body and initially the specimen NJUES-10 appeared to be the same.

Artist’s impression of the species Psittacosaurus, feathers in some places, scales in others. (Credit: Everything Dinosaur Blog)

It was only when specimen NJUES-10 was examined under Ultra-Violet (UV) light that impressions of its skin from other places on its body were discovered. After further examinations with both X-rays and Infra-Red (IR) light it became clear that Psittacosaurus had lizard like scales everywhere on its body that didn’t have feathers. In other words, even as dinosaurs were evolving feathers they still kept their reptilian scales in order to protect the rest of their bodies. Psittacosaurus therefore appears to have been truly half dinosaur and half bird, a real missing link.

The NJUES-10 specimen of Psittacosaurus under visible light (top) and UV light (bottom. By looking at fossils in different kinds of light paleontologists can see different things in the fossil. (Credit: Sci.news)

Even with all of the research that has gone into studying dinosaurs over the last 200 years there’s still plenty of questions left to be answered.

A Worldwide Conference to reduce the enormous amount of Plastic that Humans produce and then just throw away achieved little if anything.

We all know that plastics are almost everywhere nowadays. There are many reasons for this but two are most important. First of all plastic is versatile; it seems like nearly anything can be made out of plastic. And its cheap, derived from petroleum the chemical process of making plastic is simple and by the process of injection molding turning plastic into a product is again very simple and easy to accomplish. Because of its usefulness and low cost the human race is currently producing about 400 million tonnes of plastic waste every year. That’s about the same mass as that of every person on this planet.

The plastic waste per person varies greatly around the world with people in developed countries wasting a huge amount while those in the developing world hardly contributing anything. (Credit: Forbes)

So as I said plastic is everywhere, too much of it and it is piling up not only in landfills but in places we don’t want it, like our rivers, streams and oceans. Plastic is a miracle, but I like to say it’s a miracle that doesn’t go away once it has accomplished the task it was created for. To be specific plastic is so stable a chemical that it doesn’t breakdown chemically in the way wood or paper or even iron will eventually do.

The irony is that their sign is made of plastic! The message however is real, plastic is everywhere nowadays. (Credit: Greenpeace)

So all of the plastic trash that we throw out just piles up, layer by layer. Because of this plastic pollution is now vying with Global Warming to be our biggest environmental problem. Even worse, although plastic doesn’t breakdown chemically it will over time breakdown mechanically, that is to say plastic products will break into smaller and smaller pieces of plastic. Pieces so small that they are called microparticles, so small that they get into our water, into our food and even the air that we breath. Pieces so small that they have now been detected inside us, in our stomachs, in our lungs and even in our blood.

Although plastics do not decay chemically they do break down mechanically into smaller and smaller pieces called microplastics and in this state they have even been found in our bodies! (Credit: Fast Company)

Plastics have become so big a problem that last month negotiators from 175 countries met in Ottawa, Canadian to try to hammer out an international treaty to regulate plastics. Like the annual COP conferences that are held to address Climate Change the plastics meeting is a yearly affair, last year’s gathering was held in Kenya.

Press Conference at the international conference on Plastic Pollution held in Ottawa, Canada. (Credit: UN Web TV – The United Nations)

Also like the COP Climate Change conference the meeting on Plastics was not only attended by negotiators with their scientific and environmental advisors but also by representatives of the petroleum industry, lobbyists whose only concern is the profits of the oil companies who pay them. Worldwide the manufacture of plastics is valued at over $700 billion dollars annually so the industry can afford to hire a lot of lobbyists.

It often seems as if our elected officials are really working for the special interests represented by lobbyists rather than the people for voted for them. Maybe that’s because it’s true! (Credit: The Vagabond Blog)

These special interests have formed themselves into organizations like the Plastics Industry Association and America’s Plastic Makers in order to use their influence to prevent any actual limits to plastic production from getting into any treaty. Aiding them in their efforts are negotiators for counties with national oil companies like Saudi Arabia, Russia and Venezuela who also sought to avoid anything that would reduce oil production.

Logo for the Plastics Industry Association. Funded by the Petroleum Industry it’s their job to tell us about all of the benefits there are to be gained by poisoning our planet! (Credit: Plastic News)

Instead of legally limiting the amount of plastic that is produced in the world these apologists for the plastics industry advocate recycling as the best approach to eliminating the plastic trash that is choking our planet. If you think about it that argument doesn’t really work for the petroleum industry because if we recycled all of the plastic products we use into new plastic products then we still wouldn’t need to make any more plastic, so we wouldn’t need any more oil from them.

The seven different types of recyclable plastic. The very fact that there are so many different types, and they have to be separated before they can be recycled, makes the job of recycling both labour intensive and expensive. That’s why we don’t actually recycle very much! (Credit: Alleycho)

In truth however the lobbyists for the oil companies know that we do a lousy job of recycling, only around 5% of the plastic that gets produced every year ends up being recycled. To make matters worse the plastic companies themselves sabotage the recycling effort they promote by making seven different types of plastic, each of which requires a different technique to recycle. In fact several of the types of plastics being manufactured cannot even be recycled economically. Combined these factors make the handling and sorting of recycled plastic products very labour intensive and therefore so expensive that in reality very little of the plastics being produced are ever actually recycled.

So all of that effort environmentally conscious people put into sorting their recyclables from their trash mostly goes to waste as plastics are too expensive to actually recycle. By the way that’s not true of glass and aluminum, they do get recycled so keep up the good work! (Credit:

At the conference itself there was a proposal by the delegates from Peru and Rwanda to actually cut back on the scale of plastic production. This proposal was supported by 29 other nations but in the end the US and UK bowed to pressure from the plastics manufacturers and the conference ended without any agreement on cutbacks.

In the end it was plastic that won at Ottawa. (Credit: Greenpeace)

The lobbyists had good reason to gloat about their victory. According to Matt Seaholm. CEO of the Plastics Industry Association the US did “a very good job of trying to balance all of the interests.” Which is just another way of saying the conference achieved nothing. Not only was there no agreement on reducing production of plastics but there was also no implementation of any policy that could actually increase the amount of plastics that are recycled. The plastics industry, which is just a subset of the petroleum industry, got everything they wanted and environmentalists got nothing.

So get used to seeing more of this because nobody’s really doing anything to stop it! (Credit: Stern Minds)

There will of course be another international conference on plastics next year in Busan, South Korea. Bureaucrats just love big conferences that allow them to travel to other countries on taxpayer’s money. Like the annual COP conference on Climate Change however it appears that nothing will happen to combat either of these environmental threats until there is a real crisis, until there are so many people dying that the problems can no longer be ignored. By that time it will be too late because the buildup of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere along with the plastic on the land and in the oceans will continue to poison our planet for at least decades to come.

Archaeology News for April 2024: New tools in the Archaeologist’s toolkit are providing answers to old questions

When most people think of the kind of tools that an Archaeologists use in their study of ancient people the first thing to come to mind would probably be either a shovel or a trowel. After all, archaeology is about digging up the lost artifacts from bygone civilizations isn’t it?

Archaeology is all about digging up fabulous treasures from the past, isn’t it? Well despite what Indiana Jones does, there’s more to it than that! (Credit: Egypt Museum)

Well in my post today I’ll be discussing a couple of studies that employ the latest technological tools that archaeologists now have to help them learn about past cultures. As usual I’ll start with the oldest story and work my way forward in time.

‘Man the Tool Maker’ is a classic in the field of archaeology making the point that civilizations are characterized by the tools they possess as a measure of the progress they have made! (Credit: Amazon.com)

Surprisingly enough over the last few years DNA has become one of the most important tools in archaeology, see my posts of 10 August 2019, 22 July 2020 and 14 January 2020 for example. The ability to demonstrate, or refute, genetic connections between two or more archaeological sites has answered many long disputed questions about the past.

The famous Double Helix of DNA, the molecule that makes us related to family, ethnic group, species and etc! (Credit: Medline Plus)

Now a new study published in the journal Science Advances has used both ancient and modern DNA to reveal some surprising facts about the genetic relationships of the indigenous people of North America, in particular the people of the Blackfoot Confederacy. Historically these tribes lived in the northern plains of the US and southern Canada between the Rocky Mountains and the Great Lakes. According to Blackfoot legends those plains had been their home as far back as the end of the last ice age more than 10,000 years ago. These legends have also been supported by archaeological evidence collected from the region.

The pre-Colombian lands of the Blackfoot people. (Credit: Pinterest)

The new study compared DNA taken from seven ancient burials unearthed in the region inhabited in the Blackfoot to that of six modern day members of the Blackfoot Nation. What the researchers, led by Dorothy First Rider of the Blood First Nation Organization in Canada discovered was a high proportion of shared alleles between the ancient and modern samples, strong evidence for a direct genetic relationship, even after thousands of years. Comparisons were also made to nearby native peoples. These comparisons indicated that the Blackfoot / Blood native nations separated as long ago as 18,000 years while the separation of the Blackfoot and Athabascan peoples occurred about 13,000 years ago.

Living to the northwest of the Blackfoot people the Athabascan people occupied a large part of western Canada and Alaska. (Credit: Wikipedia)

The fact that the Blackfoot Nation may have remained a homogenous group living in the same place for so long may even have legal repercussions. That’s because the Blackfoot legacy has for decades been at the center of numerous lawsuits over land and water rights in the ancestral Blackfoot homeland. The DNA evidence detailed in the study may help the original inhabitants to have a greater say in how those lands are treated today.

Many of the lawsuits being filed by the Blackfoot nation concern the use of water that originates on their ancient lands. (Credit: KRTV)

Another high tech tool that is starting to find applications in archaeology is Artificial Intelligence or AI for short. Computer algorithms that can learn from their mistakes are now appearing in a wide range of research fields from driverless cars to deep fake images to deciphering ancient cuneiform tablets. See my post of 16 September 2023.

Artificial Intelligence is actually a broad field covering several areas of cybernetics. Together they may revolutionize human civilization. (Credit: The Motley Fool)

Now a contest, open to literally anyone has succeeded in using AI to reveal the text written on a 2,000 year old papyrus scroll that was charred beyond recognition, but still kept in one piece, by the eruption of Vesuvius that buried the town of Pompey. The scroll is one of hundreds that were excavated from a luxury villa in the nearby town of Herculaneum back in the 18th century.

One of the ancient scrolls unearthed at Herculaneum. Burned beyond readability their contents have been a mystery for over 200 years. (Credit: Euronews.com)

In the more than 200 years since their discovery many attempts had been made to read the scrolls, all without success and some of which caused considerable damage to the fragile remains of ancient writing. Then, in 2019 Brent Seals, a computer researcher at the University of Kentucky developed software that could virtually unwrap the outer layers of two of the scrolls using the scans produced by Computed Tomography (CT). Those scans by themselves were still unreadable however because the density of the ink used on the scrolls was the same as the papyrus itself. CT scans generate 3D images of the inside of objects by measuring the difference in densities of the materials of which the object is composed. 

While CT Scanners are primarily used in the field on medicine that have also made major discoveries in both Archaeology and Paleontology. (Credit: Wikipedia)

It was at this point that Seales thought of the idea of a contest among AI researchers in the hope that someone, or some team could take the scans he had produced and finally decipher the text of the ancient scrolls. With the financial assistance of Nat Friedman, a well known Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur, Seales raised $700,000 dollars and announced the Vesuvius Challenge. The criteria set for the winners was to decipher at least 4 passages of at least 140 characters each.

Brent Seales of the University of Kentucky. He carried out the CT scans of the scrolls while also organizing the contest that finally deciphered them. (Credit: University of Kentucky College of Engineering)

Three students, Luke Farritor, a undergraduate computer science major at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, Youssef Nader, a Ph.D. candidate from Egypt who is studying in Berlin along with Julian Schilliger a robotics student at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich pooled their respective talents in order to decipher 15 columns of text, about 15% of the entire scroll, enough to win the prize.

A drawing of what the final deciphering looked like. Any Greek scholar could read most of the text giving us a look into what the reading public of the 1st century was interested in. (Credit: Wikipedia)

The scroll turned out to be a treatise on pleasure based upon the Greek Epicurean school of philosophy. Specifically the writing discussed the pleasures of music and food spiced with capers. The ability of the AI programs developed by Seales, Farritor, Nader and Schilliger to decode the blackened remains of the scroll has given archaeologists hope that at least some portions of the other 200 Herculaneum scrolls may also be deciphered.

Like Pompey the town of Herculaneum was buried in the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD. And like Pompey some potions of Herculaneum have been left unexcavated for future archaeologists to explore with even better instruments than we have today. (Credit: Wikipedia)

Not only that, but the ancient Roman villa in which the scrolls were discovered has never been completely excavated. Large sections of both Pompey and Herculaneum have been intentionally left for future archaeologists, with more advanced technology to study. Who knows what other wisdom from the classical Roman period lie waiting to be unearthed and hopefully read?

Some ancient Roman wisdom that our modern politicians would benefit from. (Credit: X)

Just two examples of how new technology, new tools can bring new discoveries that allow us to better understand the ancient world.

Space News for May 2024: 

Regular readers of this blog may have noticed that I haven’t been posting any Space News recently, not since February in fact. The reason for this is that I have been waiting for the Final Test Launch (FTL) and first manned mission of Boeing’s Starliner capsule. Well after years of delays and redesigns Starliner is still not ready and the launch, which was originally set for mid April was pushed back to May 6 only to have weather cause a delay until the 7th. That bad weather was probably a good thing however because on the 7th, even as the two crew members were in their seats waiting for ignition a valve on the Atlas 5 launch vehicle started misbehaving. So the whole mission was delayed yet again and the astronauts removed from the capsule.

Compared to the problems Boeing is having with their commercial aircraft their difficulties with Starliner are really rather small, but get a lot of publicity! (Credit: WESH)

The launch was then rescheduled for May 17th but while the engineers at the Kennedy Space Center were working on the malfunctioning valve on the Atlas 5 a helium valve on Starliner itself began to leak pushing back the launch until no earlier than the 25th of May, and I wouldn’t put any money on that Since I wrote this post it’s been further delayed into June!). So I decided to move on and talk about other happenings in the exploration of space.

It’s all up to the individual, some people simply cannot see any reason for exploring the Universe. If you’re reading these words however I think I can assume it’s important to you. (Credit: Earth and Space Exploration Center)

In manned spaceflight on the 25th of April China successfully launched three Taikonauts aboard the Shenzhou 18 spacecraft to their Tiangong space station. Arriving at the space station the Taikonauts relieved the Shenzhou 17 crew who had occupied Tiangong for six months. The Shenzhou 17 crew then returned to Earth several days later.

The launch of China’s Shenzhou 18 mission to their Tiangong space station. Shenzhou 18 is the seventh crew to occupy Tiangong giving China a long term presence in Low Earth Orbit (LOE). (Credit: Current Affairs – Adda247)

Crew transfer and cargo resupply missions to Tiangong have now become routine for China’s space agency just as they have for NASA and Roscommon, Russia’s space agency. China’s growing capability in space is becoming a concern to strategic analysts in the west. Along with their space station China has landed two probes on the Moon’s farside, something no other nation has achieved.

China’s Chang’e 5 lunar probe, mission currently underway, will be the first ever return sample mission from the Moon’s far side. (Credit: Business Standard)

With a stated goal of landing Taikonauts on the Moon by 2030 some commentators are trying to invent another ‘Space Race’ between the US and China. Unlike the USSR however, which simply gave up any plans for landing on the Moon after the Americans succeeded, China seems content to just move ahead at its own pace as opposed to the streaks and stops that NASA has endured because of politics here in the US.

Why does it seem like the US only gets serious about space when we think somebody else might be beating us? (Credit: Global Times)

However the big news to me this month isn’t in manned spaceflight. Rather it’s the success that the engineers at the Jet Propulsion Labouratory (JPL) have had in reestablishing communication with the Voyager 1 space probe, the farthest man made object from Earth. Launched back in 1977 the two Voyager space probes completed their flyby missions to the four gas giants of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune and have for over 45 years now continued to send back data about conditions in the outer solar system.

The Voyager 1 spaceprobe. This Illustration is from about 1975 but Voyager is still out there, observing the conditions in Interstellar Space now, the first man made object to ever leave our solar system. (Credit: NASA)

At 45 years old and a distance from Earth of 24 billion kilometers it was amazing that the Voyagers were still working at all so back in November of 2023 when Voyager 1 started sending back gibberish instead of readable data the engineers at JPL feared for the worst but hoped for the best. The engineers were hopeful that they might be able to fix the problem because the spacecraft was still radioing back something, so it was still alive.

To most of us the good data from Voyager would look like just a bunch of 1’s and 0’s but to the engineers at JPL those digits are worth more than gold. (Credit: USA Today)

At a distance of 24 billion kilometers it takes more than 22 hours for a radio signal to travel from Earth to Voyager, and an equal time for a response to get back to Earth. So there wasn’t going to be a quick fix to the problem. In fact it wasn’t until March of 2024 that the engineers were certain that the problem lay in one of Voyager’s three onboard computers, in a section referred to as Flight Data Subsystem (FDS).

Photo of a Voyager Flight Data Simulator from before the spacecraft was assembled. Notice this is serial number S/N 003 so this was probably installed on Voyager 1 and may very well be the cause of the problem! (Credit: Ars Technica)

The engineers finally discovered that the problem was caused by the malfunction of a single chip responsible for storing the FDS’s operating code. The engineers therefore came up with a plan to restore the software on several other chips that were still functioning. The team initiated their plan on the 18th of April and on the 20th they began receiving back usable data about the health of Voyager 1. There’s still more work to do relocating and adjusting other portions of the software that was stored on the malfunctioning chip but at least Voyager 1 is back to communicating properly with Earth.

So how long can the two Voyager spacecraft continue to operate? No one really knows for certain. Even if the engineers at JPL can keep fixing any problems the energy both Voyagers get from Radioactive Thermoelectric Generators or RTVs is slowing getting smaller. Their power has been decreasing over the last 45 years so how long they keep working is anybody’s guess. (Credit: Quora)

Finally, Sierra Space Corporation’s Dream Chaser mini-shuttle, see my post of 23 December 2023, has completed its environmental testing at NASA’s Neil Armstrong Test Facility and on the 20th of May was delivered to the Kennedy Space Center to begin preparations for its maiden flight. Sometime later this year the unmanned spacecraft be launched into orbit aboard a United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan rocket on a mission to deliver 3500 kilograms of cargo to the International Space Station (ISS). If the Dream Chaser’s mission is successful the unmanned, reusable mini-shuttle will join Space X’s cargo Dragon and Orbital Sciences Corporation’s Cygnus as commercial cargo spacecraft supplying both the ISS and any future orbital stations.

The Dream Chaser spacecraft (foreground) next to the iconic NASA space shuttle. (Credit: Autoevolution)

Sierra Space Corporation’s plans for Dream Chaser go beyond unmanned missions however, from the beginning Dream Chaser was intended to eventually become a manned craft. If that comes to pass then NASA and commercial space corporations will have three privately owned space systems for getting people into Low Earth Orbit (LOE).

There are a lot of plans out there right now for privately owned, commercial space stations. By 2030 there will almost certainly be several in orbit. (Credit: Space.com)

So imagine ten to fifteen years from now. There are maybe a half dozen space stations in orbit, being regularly supplied by three distinct cargo spacecraft. At the same time another three distinct space capsules are taking astronauts, many of them civilians, between Earth and those stations.

O’k maybe it’s going to a while before we get to this stage but it really is only a matter of time. (Credit: National Air and Space Museum)

Right now we are building the infrastructure of LOE, within a generation we really will be starting the colonization of nearby space.

Did You Get to See the Northern Lights this Weekend, May 10th-12th? This Time the Weather didn’t Cooperate and I missed out on everything.

Seems like just a couple of weeks ago that I was talking about the great American Eclipse of 8th April 2024 and how the weather in Greenville, Texas just cleared enough for me and my family to see a good show. (See my post of 20 April 2024) Well this past weekend the Solar System decided to stage another celestial event as a massive solar flare erupted in a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) that passed by the Earth producing the biggest display of the Northern Lights, also known as the Aurora Borealis seen in decades.

Anyone who has ever actually seen the Aurora, not me, always says that pictures don’t do it justice, but here’s one anyway. (Credit: Space.com)

So what’s going on here? Why is the Sun so active this year that astronomers were predicting that the Corona during last month’s eclipse would be much bigger and more active than during the eclipse of 2017? Why does the Sun have so many sunspots this year, and what are sunspots anyway? And what do sunspots have to do with the Aurora anyway?

Closeup view of a sunspot on the surface of the Sun. One interesting thing about sunspots is that they come in pairs or even more complex combinations. That’s because they are caused by the Sun’s magnetic field and a magnetic field has to have both a north and a south pole. (Credit: IU Blogs – Indiana University)

Let’s take this one step at a time. First of all it was Galileo who discovered the fact that our Sun is often covered with dark spots, the ancient Greeks had believed that the Sun was a perfect, unblemished disk. While scientists quickly realized that sunspots are areas of the Sun’s surface that are slightly cooler than the regions around them they are actually quite bright, they only appear dark in comparison to the normal brightness of the Sun’s surface.

Drawings made by Galileo of spots on the Sun’s disk. It was by noticing how the spots moved that Galileo first realized that the Sun rotated on its axis just as the Earth did. (Credit: NASA Earth Observatory)

It took several hundred years for scientists to understand that sunspots are caused by the Sun’s magnetic field that, like the Earth’s is strongest near the Sun’s north and south poles. Unlike the Earth however, which is partly solid and partly liquid the Sun is a huge ball of ionized gas so that inside the Sun the magnetic field gets all twisted around itself.  Because of this the magnetic field can break onto the Sun’s surface at places other than the poles. When this happens the magnetic field causes the gasses on the surface to expand and cool down, generating a sunspot.

The plasma in a sunspot is still very hot, but because it is more than a thousand degrees cooler than the plasma outside sunspots appear dark! (Credit: Study.com)

It’s also been recognized for several hundred years that the Sun has an approximately eleven-year sunspot ‘cycle’. That is to say that in some years the Sun will have a very large number of sunspots, solar maximum, this year is going to be one of those years. Then five or six years later there will be a minimum number of sunspots, during the last solar minimum in 2019 the Sun went 281 days without a single sunspot on its surface. Then five or six years after that there will be another sunspot maximum. In 2023 and so far in 2024 there has been at least one sunspot on the Sun’s surface at all times. Why the Sun should have a sunspot cycle and why it should be eleven years is still poorly understood as are a great many things about our local star.

The Sun can appear very different between its solar maximum and solar minimum. (Credit: Space.com)
Not only does the Sun have an eleven year sunspot cycle but there also seems to be an even longer cycle of large versus small maximums. Why any of this should happen is still one of the Sun’s mysteries. (Credit: Wikipedia)

As I said sunspots happen when the twisting and turning of the Sun’s magnetic field breaks the surface and so sunspots are anything but stable objects, growing and shrinking in size, changing shape while moving closer or further apart. There are a large number of astronomers and physicists who have spent their entire careers studying the behavior of sunspots and one thing that they’ve learned is that there is an extraordinary amount of energy in those magnetic twists and turns. Then, if the magnetic field lines become too tangled they can snap releasing that energy in an explosion so powerful it makes a hydrogen bomb look like a firecracker.

A solar flare perhaps a half million kilometers in length. Notice again how the magnetic lines come out of and go back into the Sun. The explosion that produced this flare contained far more energy than the human race has generated in all of history. (Credit: Britannica)

Those explosions around sunspots are known as solar flares where matter from the Sun’s surface erupts tens of thousands of kilometers into space. Occasionally solar flares can be so powerful that matter, and we’re talking about millions of tonnes of matter, is ejected from the Sun and into space creating a ‘Coronal Mass Ejection’ or CME.

A Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) back in 2000 as seen by the European Space Agencies two Soho Satellites. The satellite’s cameras block the Sun itself, creating an artificial eclipse so that they can observe what’s going on in the Sun’s Corona. (Credit: NASA)

That’s what happened to sunspot AR3664 on the 8th of May when it produced the largest CME observed since at least 2005, measuring at X5.8 on the scale solar astronomers use. AR3664 it itself a monster, one of the largest sunspots ever seen being about as large as 17 Earths laid side by side, so large in fact that it is one of the biggest sunspots ever seen. When it erupted AR3664 wasn’t quite pointed right at the Earth but that CME was so huge that it still hit our planet in two waves on the nights of May 11th and 12th moving at a speed in excess of 600 km per second.

Close up view of sunspot AR3664, the source of the CME that struck the Earth on May 10th producing the largest aurora display in decades. (Credit: SpaceWeather.com)
Sunspot AR2664 compared in size to Carrington’s sunspot back in 1859 which is considered to be the most active sunspot ever observed caused extensive aurora displays across the world. (Credit: Daily Mail)

Now the matter in a CME, like most of the Sun’s material isn’t either a solid, liquid or a gas like the matter here on Earth, it’s far too hot for that. Instead it’s mostly just a huge cloud of Protons and Electrons that’s called a plasma. As everyone knows protons and electrons are charged particles so that when those particles come near the Earth they are deflected by the Earth’s magnetic field towards our planet’s poles before finally striking the atmosphere. So it’s the Earth’s magnetic field that normally keeps the aurora at our planet’s polar regions.

The four states of matter, solid, liquid, gas and plasma. Plasma is the most energetic with many of the atoms being stripped of one or more electrons making it an ionized form of matter. Here on Earth plasma may be rare but most of the matter in the Universe is in this state. (Credit: Ferrarini & Benelli)

As they enter the atmosphere the charged protons and electrons collide with gas molecules, which you’ll recall are mostly Nitrogen and Oxygen. The collisions break those molecules into their separate atoms, which then recombine giving off visible light in the process. It is this light that creates the dancing streaks of the Aurora. So powerful was the geomagnetic storm generated by the X5.8 flare that the aurora it created pushed out from the polar regions reaching so far south that it was even observed by people living in northern Florida.

This was the aurora forecast as put out by the Space Weather Prediction Center. It actuality people in every state, even Texas and Florida saw the display. (Credit: X.com)

Here in Philadelphia I should have had a great chance to finally see this natural phenomenon, but to quote an old song “clouds got in my way!” Both nights that the aurora was at its maximum the Delaware valley was treated to a light, continuous rainstorm but more importantly we were blanketed by a thick layer of stratus clouds making it impossible to see any part of the sky.

Clouds so thick you’d think the sky has disappeared. That’s what Philadelphia had the two nights of the aurora so I didn’t get to see anything. (Credit: Types of Clouds)

Still, solar maximum isn’t over yet and astronomers think that anything could happen in the next 4-6 months. So to those of you who managed to see the Aurora Borealis on the nights of May 11th or 12th I envy you but I haven’t given up my hope of seeing them yet.

Whether you call it Climate Change or Global Warming it’s starting to get really serious as Scientists are Astounded by just how hot this last year was.

It certainly didn’t take long for climatologists to pronounce the year 2023 as the hottest year ever recorded for our planet. On January 1st the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) immediately declared that not only had 2023 broken all previous temperature records but that it had done so by an unprecedented amount. Many scientists blamed the record shattering heat on a combination of global warming with a particularly strong El Nino in the Pacific but many others felt that there had to be additional factors at work as well.

2023 didn’t just set the record for hottest year ever recorded it smashed it, exceeding the previous record in 2016 by a huge amount. (Credit: BBC)

And so far 2024 hasn’t been any better, the global heat wave has continued with January being the hottest January ever recorded followed by February being the hottest February ever then March and so far April. Even worse, the world’s oceans are also setting records for the hottest temperatures ever measured, and remember it takes a lot more heat, more energy to heat up water than it does to warm up air.

So far 2024 looks to be even hotter with each month from January to April being the hottest of that month ever recorded. (Credit: Axios)
And it’s not just the air that’s getting hotter, the oceans are actually absorbing most of the heat caused by greenhouse gasses. 2023 was the hottest year ever recorded and 2024 is continuing the trend. (Credit: USA Today)

In fact the WMO’s annual State of the Climate Report, which was issued on the 19th of March, gave special significance to the rising temperatures in the world’s oceans claiming the measured increases were “Off the Charts”. So huge is the amount of heat now entering the oceans that it may take centuries for them to return to pre-industrial temperatures, even after the elimination of greenhouse gas emissions. In other words, even if we ended all greenhouse gas emissions today, the world’s oceans might take several hundred years to fully cool back down.

With so much extra heat being stored in the Earth’s oceans it will take centuries for them to cool back down to mid-20th century levels, and that’s only if we stopped warming them up right now! (Credit: Fox Weather)

And the long term consequences of the warming of the oceans is only now becoming understood. A new study published in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science and led by Alexey Mishonov of the University of Maryland’s Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center (ESSIC) has complied decades of data on conditions in the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC). That’s the system of ocean circulations in the north Atlantic that includes the well known Gulf Stream.

One of the areas of the oceans that is warming the fastest is along the US east coast, right where the Gulf Stream passes. What effect this will have on the Gulf Stream is still controversial but many studies predict a considerable weakening of the Gulf Stream. (Credit: Vox)

What the researchers found was that the current flows of the system remained stable during the period from 1955 to 1995, but from 1995 onward all of the currents have weakened measurably. This weakening of the circulation is attributed to both the increased temperatures at the ocean’s surface but also to a decrease in salinity caused by the melting of the polar icecaps as well as the Greenland ice sheets. These scenarios were used as the main plotline in the 2004 movie ‘The Day after Tomorrow’ and while the timescale of that movie was several orders of magnitude too fast the consequences, and the climate damage they would cause, are quite within the realm of possibility.

Like most Si-Fi disaster movies ‘The Day After Tomorrow’ exaggerated both the scale and the speed of what could happen if the Gulf Stream collapses. (Credit: Disney Plus)

Worst still, another study has detailed the effects of sea level rise on the US east and Gulf coasts. The paper, which was published on March 6th in the journal Nature, used satellite images to show that not only are sea levels rising but that the land right along the coasts from Maine all the way around to Texas are sinking. The combination of these two factors is putting the homes and businesses of millions of Americans at risk of being swept away in the next major storm.

Large section of the US coastline are under threat from rising sea levels. And these areas just happen to be among the most densely populated portions of the country. (Credit: USGS)

According to the study there are many reasons for the subsidence of the land, most of them related to human activity. In Louisiana and eastern Texas the pumping out of oil and natural gas from the ground is the leading cause but in Charlestown South Carolina and Atlantic City New Jersey it’s the pumping out of groundwater to use as drinking and household water that is causing the land to sink. Regardless of the cause many very expensive beachfront homes must now either be protected by very expensive dykes and breakwaters, or simply abandoned to the ocean.

Everyone knows that the nation of Holland is protected from the sea by a large series of dykes. Some people claim that we could do the same to protect our coastlines from sea level rise. The dykes of Holland were constructed over centuries however, and Holland is a much smaller country than the US! (Credit: Van Oord)

Finally one more small item dealing with climate change. The ever increasing temperatures around the globe obviously includes the world’s wine growing regions as well. For centuries different parts of the globe, like Italy or Spain, grew grapes that were acclimated to the heat of the country they grew in while other regions like The Rhineland in Germany or Burgundy in France, grew grapes that liked weather that was a bit cooler.

It’s predicted that by 2050 many of the world’s best known wine producing regions will become practically deserts unable to produce much of anything. (Credit: Wine Folly)

Well thanks to global warming that’s all changing with Germany and France now getting as hot as Italy and Spain were while Italy and Spain are just getting too hot. One consequence of the increased heat might sound at first like a good thing, the grapes are producing more sugar and after fermentation that means more alcohol. Wine experts however say that the wines no longer taste the same, the increase in strength is taking away something of the complex flavour of many varieties of wine. 

Making good wine these days pretty much requires a degree in chemistry. To get the best flavour a balance of many different complex compounds is needed. Climate change is changing that balance by increasing the alcohol content at the expense of taste. (Credit: Quora)

Now what is bad for some parts of the world, Italy, Spain and southern California, could actually be good for places that are not generally thought of as wine producing areas like the UK or New England. At the same time places like Germany or France may need to change the types of wines they grow to reflect that their climate is now more like the way Italy and Spain used to be.

England and the rest of the British Isles have always been known for their beers not wine. That’s one more change that Global Warming may cause. (Credit: Brew Your Own)

Just one more way that climate change is forcing entire industries to make major changes to the way they do business. All just so the petroleum companies can continue to make their unholy profits.