Science Megathread

[Frodo]

The Cosmos Is Thrumming With Gravitational Waves, Astronomers Find
Radio telescopes around the world picked up a telltale hum reverberating across the cosmos, most likely from supermassive black holes merging in the early universe.

On Wednesday evening, an international consortium of research collaborations revealed compelling evidence for the existence of a low-pitch hum of gravitational waves reverberating across the universe.

The scientists strongly suspect that these gravitational waves are the collective echo of pairs of supermassive black holes — thousands of them, some as massive as a billion suns, sitting at the hearts of ancient galaxies up to 10 billion light-years away — as they slowly merge and generate ripples in space-time.

“I like to think of it as a choir, or an orchestra,” said Xavier Siemens, a physicist at Oregon State University who is part of the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves, or NANOGrav, collaboration, which led the effort. Each pair of supermassive black holes is generating a different note, Dr. Siemens said, “and what we’re receiving is the sum of all those signals at once.”

And here is the non-paywall version for those without a New York Times subscription.

[Frodo]

And the Euclid telescope has been lifted off into the heavens on schedule and without issues:

SpaceX rocket launches Euclid space telescope to map the 'dark universe' like never before
The European spacecraft will spend six years uncovering the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy.

We might have to wait a few months before this telescope can make any scientific discoveries of our cosmos.  My best guess is October this year:

Over the next four weeks, Euclid will be making its journey towards Sun-Earth Lagrange point 2. Once there, it will be maneuvered into orbit around this point and mission controllers back on Earth will begin to verify the activities and functions of the spacecraft. Once the spacecraft passes all of the tests, mission control will finally turn on the scientific instruments.

Following the activation of its scientific instruments, Euclid will then undergo another two months of testing and calibrating its instruments in preparation for routine observations. The spacecraft will begin its six-year survey of one-third of the sky with "unprecedented accuracy and sensitivity."

[Frodo]

A pre-Clovis site may have been found in Oregon:

Discovery: Oregon may be home to oldest human occupied site in North America

[Frodo]

There is an argument to be made that South America could have been occupied by humans as early as 27,000 years ago:

When Did Humans First Occupy the Americas? Ask the Sloth Bones.
The discovery of ancient, handcrafted ornaments revives a longstanding debate about the arrival of the earliest Americans.

(...) Over the past three decades, however, archaeological research has made it increasingly clear that the (Clovis) hunters were preceded by much earlier cultures that colonized the Americas between 24,500 and 16,000 years ago.

This week a new academic study upended even those migration timelines by proposing that what is now central-west Brazil was settled as early as 27,000 years ago, a finding that bolsters the theory that our ancestors inhabited the continent during the Pleistocene Epoch, which ended around 11,700 years ago. The period is also called the Ice Age because of its numerous cycles of glacial formation and melting.

The conclusions of the paper, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, are based on an analysis of an improbable source: three bones from an extinct giant ground sloth. Excavated 28 years ago in the Santa Elina rock shelter, the fossils — similar to the hard, scaly plates, called osteoderms, that armor the skin of present-day armadillos — showed signs of having been modified into primordial pendants, with notches and holes that researchers said could only have been created by people.

Which could only mean that they entered North America (along the Pacific coast) even earlier.  

[Frodo]

NASA has re-established contact with Voyager 2 (first launched in 1977), which is now way beyond our solar system:

NASA back in touch with Voyager 2 after 'interstellar shout'

[Frodo]

It is a terrifying thought thinking of Earth as a rogue planet without a host star to keep it bound.  It could have easily happened back when Jupiter was still roaming around the solar system coming ever closer to the Sun and the inner planets:

Our Galaxy Is Home to Trillions of Worlds Gone Rogue
Astronomers have found that free-floating planets far outnumber those bound to a host star.

Free-floating planets — dark, isolated orbs roaming the universe unfettered to any host star — don’t just pop into existence in the middle of cosmic nowhere. They probably form the same way other planets do: within the swirling disk of gas and dust surrounding an infant star.

But unlike their planetary siblings, these worlds get violently chucked out of their celestial neighborhoods.

Astronomers had once calculated that billions of planets had gone rogue in the Milky Way. Now, scientists at NASA and Osaka University in Japan are upping the estimate to trillions. Detailed in two papers accepted for publication in The Astronomical Journal, the researchers have deduced that these planets are six times more abundant than worlds orbiting their own suns, and they identified the second Earth-size free floater ever detected.

------------------------------------------

And to help us find even more of these rogue planets (especially those Earth-sized), NASA will soon have a new telescope to join Hubble and Webb in a few years:

NASA’s new telescope could spot thousands of exoplanets and hundreds of Earth-size rogue planets

When NASA’s next-generation space observatory launches in a few years, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will expand the search for exoplanets as well as rogue planets, or worlds that travel through space without orbiting stars.

The telescope, expected to lift off between October 2026 and May 2027, may have the potential to spot 400 such rogue planets that are similar in mass to Earth, according to new research. It’s unknown whether these planets will share any other similarities with Earth beside their mass.

Understanding these rogue planets could shed more light on the formation, evolution and disruption of planetary systems. The telescope is named in honor of Nancy Grace Roman, NASA’s first chief of astronomy and “mother of the Hubble Space Telescope.”

Illustration of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope Credit: NASA

[Frodo]

Forget the now-disproved Mt. Toba eruption 'Bottleneck' -scientists found the real one happened 900,000 years ago due to what is called the Mid-Pleistocene Transition that made ice ages longer and colder, to the detriment of our distant human ancestors:

Here's when humans nearly went extinct, reveals new study
For about 117,000 years in the past, a mere 1,280 breeding individuals supported the population.

[Frodo]

With the success of the James Webb Space Telescope and its almost-daily contribution to scientific knowledge, enter the Habitable Worlds Observatory:

Planning is underway for NASA's next big flagship space telescope

[Frodo]

A NASA Spacecraft Comes Home With an Asteroid Gift for Earth
The seven-year OSIRIS-REX mission ended on Sunday with the return of regolith from the asteroid Bennu, which might hold clues about the origins of our solar system and life.

A brown-and-white capsule that spent the last seven years swooping through the solar system — and sojourning at an asteroid — has finally come home. And it has brought a cosmic souvenir: a cache of space rock that scientists are hungry to get their hands on.

On Sunday morning, those scientists waited eagerly as the pod shot through Earth’s atmosphere at thousands of miles per hour. It gently parachuted down into the muddy landscape of the Utah Test and Training Range, about 80 miles west of Salt Lake City, at 8:52 a.m. local time.

The capsule’s landing is a major win for a NASA mission called OSIRIS-REX, which stands for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resources Identification and Security-Regolith Explorer. The spacecraft set out in 2016 to retrieve material from Bennu, a carbon-rich asteroid about 190 feet wider than the height of the Empire State Building. Researchers hope this pristine space dirt will reveal clues about the birth of our solar system and the genesis of life on Earth.

“This is a gift to the world,” said Dante Lauretta, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona and the principal investigator of the OSIRIS-REX mission, at a news conference last month.

[Frodo]

Radio telescope will launch to moon's far side in 2025 to hunt for the cosmic Dark Ages
The radio astronomy experiment LuSEE-Night will test technologies for radio telescopes on the far side of the moon.

A small mission to test technology to detect radio waves from the cosmic Dark Ages over 13.4 billion years ago will blast off for the far side of the moon in 2025.

The Lunar Surface Electromagnetic Experiment-Night mission, or LuSEE-Night for short, is a small radio telescope being funded by NASA and the U.S. Department of Energy with involvement from scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the Brookhaven National Laboratory, the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Minnesota. LuSEE-Night will blast off as part of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payloads program.

The Dark Ages are the evocative name given to the period of time after the Big Bang, when the first stars and galaxies were only just beginning to form and ionize the neutral hydrogen gas that filled the universe. Little is known about this period, despite efforts by the James Webb Space Telescope to begin probing into this era.

[Frodo]

The Xuntian space telescope hasn't even been launched into orbit yet, and already the Chinese are claiming bragging rights over it:

Chinese astronomers say their new space telescope will outdo Hubble

[Frodo]

There was a PBS program (NOVA, I think) that focused on the discovery of these prehistoric footprints in the White Sands area of New Mexico.  I had no idea how much dating evidence could be found in them though, until I read this article:

Ancient footprints upend timeline of humans’ arrival in North America
New evidence adds to work showing people made these prints sometime between 21,000 and 23,000 years ago


Footprints found at White Sands National Park in New Mexico. (National Park Service)

Dozens of awe-inspiring ancient footprints left on the shores of an ice age lake have reignited a long-running debate about when the first people arrived in the Americas.

Two years ago, a team of scientists came to the conclusion that human tracks sunk into the mud in White Sands National Park in New Mexico were more than 21,000 years old. The provocative finding threatened the dominant thinking on when and how people migrated into the Americas. Soon afterward, a technical debate erupted about the method used to estimate the age of the tracks, which relied on an analysis of plant seeds embedded with the footprints.

Now, a study published in the journal Science confirms the initial finding with two new lines of evidence: thousands of grains of pollen and an analysis of quartz crystals in the sediments.

“It’s more or less a master class in how you do this,” said Edward Jolie, an anthropological archaeologist at the University of Arizona who has studied the White Sands footprints in the field but was not involved in the new study. “As Carl Sagan said, ‘Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.’ They have some extraordinary evidence.”

--------------------------------

And for those without a Washington Post subscription.

[Frodo]

A NASA Spacecraft Comes Home With an Asteroid Gift for Earth
The seven-year OSIRIS-REX mission ended on Sunday with the return of regolith from the asteroid Bennu, which might hold clues about the origins of our solar system and life.

A brown-and-white capsule that spent the last seven years swooping through the solar system — and sojourning at an asteroid — has finally come home. And it has brought a cosmic souvenir: a cache of space rock that scientists are hungry to get their hands on.

On Sunday morning, those scientists waited eagerly as the pod shot through Earth’s atmosphere at thousands of miles per hour. It gently parachuted down into the muddy landscape of the Utah Test and Training Range, about 80 miles west of Salt Lake City, at 8:52 a.m. local time.

The capsule’s landing is a major win for a NASA mission called OSIRIS-REX, which stands for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resources Identification and Security-Regolith Explorer. The spacecraft set out in 2016 to retrieve material from Bennu, a carbon-rich asteroid about 190 feet wider than the height of the Empire State Building. Researchers hope this pristine space dirt will reveal clues about the birth of our solar system and the genesis of life on Earth.

“This is a gift to the world,” said Dante Lauretta, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona and the principal investigator of the OSIRIS-REX mission, at a news conference last month.

They aren't much to look at for a casual observer (so I didn't bother posting a pic), but for a scientist this is the equivalent of gold (or mithril):

NASA shows off its first asteroid samples delivered by a spacecraft

[Frodo]

When the need calls for it, it is good to know we can always turn back:

Humans still have the genes for a full coat of body hair


© Dave Einsel/Getty Images

[Frodo]

And the Euclid telescope has been lifted off into the heavens on schedule and without issues:

SpaceX rocket launches Euclid space telescope to map the 'dark universe' like never before
The European spacecraft will spend six years uncovering the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy.

We might have to wait a few months before this telescope can make any scientific discoveries of our cosmos.  My best guess is October this year:

Over the next four weeks, Euclid will be making its journey towards Sun-Earth Lagrange point 2. Once there, it will be maneuvered into orbit around this point and mission controllers back on Earth will begin to verify the activities and functions of the spacecraft. Once the spacecraft passes all of the tests, mission control will finally turn on the scientific instruments.

Following the activation of its scientific instruments, Euclid will then undergo another two months of testing and calibrating its instruments in preparation for routine observations. The spacecraft will begin its six-year survey of one-third of the sky with "unprecedented accuracy and sensitivity."

Euclid Space Telescope Releases Stunning First Science Images
Fresh images show off the Euclid space telescope’s ability to capture crisp pictures of vast swaths of sky

And here are just a couple.  There are more in the link:


A view of the nearby spiral galaxy IC 342 from the European Space Agency’s Euclid space telescope. Credit: ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre (CEA Paris-Saclay), G. Anselmi (CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO)


The stellar nursery of the Horsehead nebula, as seen by Euclid. Credit: ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA; J.-C. Cuillandre/CEA Paris-Saclay/G. Anselmi (image processing) (CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO)

[Frodo]

For anyone living in or near Vancouver, British Columbia:

Interactive exhibit The Infinite takes Vancouver audiences to outer space this fall
“This was truly a once-in-a-lifetime project for us, and it’s proving to be life-changing for some of the people who have participated in The Infinite.”

A joint effort between a Montreal company and NASA has achieved something many thought to be impossible: sending average citizens into space for a visit to the International Space Station (ISS) — and beyond.

Fortunately, at no point in the journey are the travelers at risk: while able to roam an estimated 12,500 square feet of the ISS, they do so on Planet Earth, wearing Oculus headsets during a full body immersive experience that is widely regarded as setting a new standard for large scale, location-based virtual events.

The Infinite exhibition, which opens Nov. 15 in Vancouver, is an extension of Space Explorers: The ISS Experience, the largest production ever filmed in space. It is produced by Montreal’s Felix & Paul Studios in association with TIME Studios and in collaboration with ISS U.S. National Laboratory, NASA, Canadian Space Agency, and a host of other aerospace organizations.

“This was truly a once-in-a-lifetime project for us, and it’s proving to be life-changing for some of the people who have participated in The Infinite,” says Felix Lajeunesse, co-founder and creative director at Felix & Paul.

[Frodo]

The Xuntian space telescope hasn't even been launched into orbit yet, and already the Chinese are claiming bragging rights over it:

Chinese astronomers say their new space telescope will outdo Hubble

They had to delay its launch by a year:

China Delays Launch of Its Xuntian Space Telescope
The Xuntian Space Telescope is China’s entry in a global race to unlock the secrets of dark energy, and it will now lift off no earlier than mid-2025
------------------------------------------------

Edit -I know the article is from November, but I only just found about it.  

[Frodo]

Chemists have just discovered the origins of life in a lab, or at least made great strides doing so:

How did life on Earth begin? The chemical puzzle just became clearer.

People have long scratched their heads trying to understand how life ever got going after the formation of Earth billions of years ago. Now, chemists have partly unlocked the recipe by creating a complex compound essential to all life — in a lab.

Like making the ingredients of a cake, researchers have successfully created a compound critical for metabolism in all living cells, which is essential for energy production and regulation. The pathway, which has evaded scientists for decades, involved relatively simple molecules probably present on early Earth that combined at room temperature over months.

The discovery provides support to the idea that many key components for life could have simultaneously formed early on and combined to make living cells.

“Why do we have life? Why do the rules of chemistry mean life here looks the way it does?” said Matthew Powner, senior author of the research paper. These are “just the most fantastic questions we could possibly answer.”

The ingredient is called pantetheine. 

[Frodo]

The story of how Earth got all its water is -appropriately- complex:

God I love PBS Eons. 

[Frodo]

This could have implications for the field of astrobiology as well:

‘Monumental’ experiment suggests how life on Earth may have started

A much-debated theory holds that 4 billion years ago, give or take, long before the appearance of dinosaurs or even bacteria, the primordial soup contained only the possibility of life. Then a molecule called RNA took a dramatic step into the future: It made a copy of itself.

Then the copy made a copy, and over the course of many millions of years, RNA begot DNA and proteins, all of which came together to form a cell, the smallest unit of life able to survive on its own.

Now, in an important advance supporting this RNA World theory, scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif., have carried out a small but essential part of the story. In test tubes, they developed an RNA molecule that was able to make accurate copies of a different type of RNA.

The work, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, gets them closer to the grand goal of growing an RNA molecule that makes accurate copies of itself.

“Then it would be alive,” said Gerald Joyce, president of Salk and one of the authors of the new paper. “So, this is the road to how life can arise in a laboratory or, in principle, anywhere in the universe.”

The team remains a ways off from showing that this is how life on Earth truly began, but the scenario they tested probably mimics one of the earliest stirrings of evolution, a concept described by the English naturalist Charles Darwin more than 150 years ago.

“This is a steppingstone toward understanding how life evolved,” said Nikolaos Papastavrou, first author of the paper and a Salk postdoctoral fellow.

[Frodo]

The largest 3-D map of the universe reveals hints of dark energy’s secrets
Dark energy might evolve over time, results from a major cosmic survey suggest


Researchers have made the largest 3-D map of the universe to study the properties of dark energy. Here a thin slice through the map is shown, with a magnified section revealing further detail.

CLAIRE LAMMAN/DESI COLLABORATION; CUSTOM COLORMAP PACKAGE BY CMASTRO

[Frodo]

Along those lines, there was an article in Scientific American a few months back about the "voids" in the universe (the dark spots in the above map) where there is almost nothing at all (except dark energy, which is mostly constant) for truly vast distances. They are understudied but may be extremely important to understanding the evolution of the universe.

Do you think you could find it?

[Frodo]

So geologically speaking, Scandinavia 'belongs' to Greenland:

New geological study: Scandinavia was born in Greenland
The oldest Scandinavian bedrock was 'born' in Greenland according to a new geological study from the University of Copenhagen. The study helps us understand the origin of continents and why Earth is the only planet in our solar system with life.

[Frodo]

Climate change ultimately led our earliest ancestors to develop speech and language, apparently:

Change in landscape for early hominids may have led to the development of speech, new study finds
A turning point in language development occurred in the Miocene Era

Scientists have discovered what may have prompted early human ancestors to begin developing speech and language.

As the landscape in which ancient hominids lived transformed from dense forests to open plains during the Miocene era, between 5.3 million and 16 million years ago, the transformation may have prompted the hominids to develop language, switching from vowel-based calls to consonant-based calls, according to a study published in the journal Nature on Thursday.

Hominids -- a family of primates from which homo sapiens evolved -- lived in treetops prior to a change in climate in the Middle and Late Miocene era that led to wide-open grasslands replacing forests in Africa, and hominids transitioning from living primarily in trees to moving onto the ground.

Modern language still had millions of years after the Miocene era to get to its current form, Gannon said, but noted that this early expansion of speech was a "pivotal" turning point in language development for humans.

Out of all the hominid species, homo sapiens is the only one to emerge with a "rich" spoken language, Gannon said.

Yes, I know this is from last December. 

[Frodo]

Study reveals when the first warm-blooded dinosaurs roamed Earth

Were dinosaurs warm-blooded like birds and mammals or cold-blooded like reptiles? It’s one of paleontology’s oldest questions, and gleaning the answer matters because it illuminates how the prehistoric creatures may have lived and behaved.

Challenging the prevailing idea that they were all slow, lumbering lizards that basked in the sun to regulate their body temperature, research over the past three decades has revealed that some dinosaurs were likely birdlike, with feathers and perhaps the ability to generate their own body heat.

However, it’s hard to find evidence that unquestionably shows what dinosaur metabolisms were like. Clues from dinosaur eggshells and bones have suggested that some dinosaurs were warm-blooded and others were not.

A new study published in the journal Current Biology on Wednesday suggested that three main dinosaur groups adapted differently to changes in temperature, with the ability to regulate body temperature evolving in the early Jurassic Period about 180 million years ago.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Along those lines, there was an article in Scientific American a few months back about the "voids" in the universe (the dark spots in the above map) where there is almost nothing at all (except dark energy, which is mostly constant) for truly vast distances. They are understudied but may be extremely important to understanding the evolution of the universe.

Do you think you could find it?

How Analyzing Cosmic Nothing Might Explain Everything
Huge empty areas of the universe called voids could help solve the greatest mysteries in the cosmos

Computational astrophysicist Alice Pisani put on a virtual-reality headset and stared out into the void—or rather a void, one of many large, empty spaces that pepper the cosmos. “It was absolutely amazing,” Pisani recalls. At first, hovering in the air in front of her was a jumble of shining dots, each representing a galaxy. When Pisani walked into the jumble, she found herself inside a large swath of nothing with a shell of galaxies surrounding it. The image wasn't just a guess at what a cosmic void might look like; it was Pisani's own data made manifest. “I was completely surprised,” she says. “It was just so cool.”

The visualization, made in 2022, was a special project by Bonny Yue Wang, then a computer science undergraduate at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York City. Pisani teaches a course there in cosmology—the structure and evolution of the universe. Wang had been aiming to use Pisani's data on voids, which can stretch from tens to hundreds of millions of light-years across, to create an augmented-reality view of these surprising features of the cosmos.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-analyzing-cosmic-nothing-might-explain-everything/

Thanks!