Juno’s unprecedented views of Jupiter and its moons are a gift that keeps on giving.
The NASA spacecraft was originally slated to end its mission in 2018 after completing 34 orbits of the giant planet. It’s now on orbit 47. How long scientists will get this front-row view of these worlds isn’t clear, particularly as the spacecraft zooms ever closer to the gas giant and the powerful, destructive radiation of its magnetosphere.
But Juno is tough, said space physicist Scott Bolton, principal investigator for the Juno mission, at a December 14 news conference in Chicago at the American Geophysical Union’s fall meeting. The spacecraft “is built like an armored tank, and its shields are holding,” said Bolton, of the Southwest Research Institute, which has headquarters in San Antonio.
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Juno has also passed by some of the planet’s moons, flying by Ganymede in 2021. Ganymede “is bathed by Jupiter’s magnetic field,” and Juno was able to observe, among other things, a tug of war of magnetic field lines between the planet and its moon, said space physicist Thomas Greathouse, also of the Southwest Research Institute.
In September, Juno flew by Jupiter’s moon Europa, capturing in new detail the chaotic crisscrosses of cracks, ridges and bands in the moon’s icy surface. Now the spacecraft is on its way toward Io, the innermost moon.
While Juno seems to be going strong, “the end could come in two different ways,” Bolton said. Juno could become too degraded by the intense radiation to function — or it could simply run out of propellant, which is needed to keep its antennas pointed toward Earth. If that happens, “it could be collecting data, but can’t send it back.”
Carolyn Gramling is the earth & climate writer. She has bachelor’s degrees in geology and European history and a Ph.D. in marine geochemistry from MIT and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
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JWST observed this region of the sky (in the boxes) that includes and extends a region observed by the Hubble Space Telescope. Scientists used the new space telescope to take multi-wavelength measurements of some of the most distant galaxies ever seen, confirming their extreme remoteness.
BALTIMORE — The James Webb Space Telescope is living up to its promise as a wayback machine. The spectacularly sensitive observatory is finding and confirming galaxies more distant, and therefore existing earlier in the universe’s history, than any seen before.
The telescope, also known as JWST, has confirmed extreme distances to four galaxies, one of which sets a record for cosmic remoteness by shining about 13.475 billion years ago, astronomers reported December 12 at the First Science Results from JWST conference. Dozens of other galaxies may have been spotted as they were just 550 million years or less after the Big Bang, meaning the light from those galaxies traveled at least 13.1 billion years before reaching the telescope.
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Taken together, the new observations suggest galaxies formed earlier and faster than previously thought. “We’re entering a new era,” says astronomer Swara Ravindranath of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.
That new era is thanks in part to JWST’s ability to see very faint infrared light ( SN: 10/6/21 ). For the most distant objects, like the first stars and galaxies, their visible light is stretched by the relentless expansion of the universe into longer infrared wavelengths that are invisible to human eyes and some previous space telescopes. But now, measurements that were recently impossible are suddenly easy with JWST, researchers say.
“JWST is the most powerful infrared telescope that has ever been built,” astrophysicist Jane Rigby said at the conference. Rigby, of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., is the JWST operations project scientist. “Almost across the board, the science performance is better than expected.”
Even in the very first image, released in July, astronomers spotted galaxies whose light originated 13 billion years ago or more ( SN: 7/11/22 ). But those distances were estimates. To measure the distances precisely, astronomers need spectra, measurements of how much light the galaxies emit across many wavelengths. Those measurements are slower and more difficult to make than pictures.
“Thanks to this glorious telescope, we’re now getting spectra … for hundreds of galaxies at once,” said astronomer Emma Curtis-Lake of the University of Hertfordshire in England.
The previous distance record holder existed between 13.3 billion and 13.4 billion years ago, or about 400 million years after the Big Bang ( SN: 1/28/20 ). JWST confirmed the distance to that galaxy and came back with three more whose light comes from as early as 325 million years after the Big Bang.
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The galaxies are also surprisingly pristine, chemically speaking, lacking in elements heavier than hydrogen and helium.
“We don’t see that in the present-day universe,” says Ravindranath, who was not involved in the new discovery. It could mean that not many of the galaxies’ stars have died in supernova explosions that spread heavy elements around the universe, which suggests the galaxies’ original stars were not extremely massive.
In another part of the sky, JWST has spotted 26 galaxies that may have existed about 550 million years or earlier after the Big Bang, astronomer Steven Finkelstein and colleagues reported at the meeting and in a paper submitted November 10 to arXiv.org.
“On an emotional, visceral level, looking at these images is amazing,” said Finkelstein, of the University of Texas at Austin.
The first of these to be discovered, dubbed Maisie’s Galaxy after Finkelstein’s daughter, appears to be just 380 million years after the Big Bang, the researchers reported December 1 in the Astrophysical Journal Letters . The most distant galaxy in the team’s survey might lie as much as 130 million years earlier than Maisie. Those galaxies’ distances still need to be confirmed with spectra, but the team expect to get those data in the next few weeks.
And distant galaxies that lie behind a massive galaxy cluster called Abell 2744 are also more numerous and distant than expected, astrophysicist Guido Roberts-Borsani of UCLA said at the meeting.
Before JWST observed the cluster, astronomers predicted it should find effectively zero galaxies from 13.2 billion years ago. “But we found two,” said Roberts-Borsani, who reported the results at the meeting. “So something’s a little bit weird.” It could mean that galaxies form earlier and faster than thought, he said, although it could also mean that JWST was just looking at a particularly galaxy-rich patch of the sky.
All these new galaxies are exciting because they could be responsible for making the universe transparent to visible light , a process astronomers call reionization ( SN: 12/2/22 ). Before the first stars ignited, the universe was filled with a hot dense soup of particles. The first stars and galaxies bathed the universe in ultraviolet light, splitting electrons off hydrogen atoms and allowing light to zip through until it reached JWST.
The new data, Roberts-Borsani said, “give us constraints on when this process started, ended, and which galaxies were the culprits for this process.”
Lisa Grossman is the astronomy writer. She has a degree in astronomy from Cornell University and a graduate certificate in science writing from University of California, Santa Cruz. She lives near Boston.
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Extensions branch out of a nerve cell (illustrated) to create connections called synapses. Inactive, or silent, synapses, now found in adult mice, may be important for forming new memories, new research suggests.
Learning lots of new information as a baby requires a pool of ready-to-go, immature connections between nerve cells to form memories quickly. Called silent synapses, these connections are inactive until summoned to help create memories, and were thought to be present mainly in the developing brain and die off with time. But a new study reveals that there are many silent synapses in the adult mouse brain , researchers report November 30 in Nature .
Neuroscientists have long puzzled over how the adult human brain can have stable, long-term memories, while at the same time maintaining a certain flexibility to be able to make new memories , a concept known as plasticity ( SN: 7/27/12 ). These silent synapses may be part of the answer, says Jesper Sjöström, a neuroscientist at McGill University in Montreal who was not involved with the study.
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“The silent synapses are ready to hook up,” he says, possibly making it easier to store new memories as an adult by using these connections instead of having to override or destabilize mature synapses already connected to memories. “That means that there’s much more room for plasticity in the mature brain than we previously thought.”
In a previous study, neuroscientist Mark Harnett of MIT and his colleagues had spotted many long, rod-shaped structures called filopodia in adult mouse brains. That surprised Harnett because these protrusions are mostly found on nerve cells in the developing brain.
“Here they were in adult animals, and we could see them crystal clearly,” Harnett says. So he and his team decided to examine the filopodia to see what role they play, and if they were possibly silent synapses.
The researchers used a technique to expand the brains of adult mice combined with high-resolution microscopy. Since nerve cell connections and the molecules called receptors that allow for communication between connected cells are so small, these methods revealed synapses that past research missed.
The team looked for the typical signs of a silent synapse: the presence of a type of receptor called NMDA and the absence of others, known as AMPA receptors. Both of these types of receptors respond to the chemical messenger glutamate, but both typically need to be present for a synapse to be active.
Of the more than 2,000 synapses that the team looked at, about 30 percent were filopodia and, of those, nearly all had characteristics suggesting that they could be silent synapses.
To test whether the connections were truly silent, the researchers turned to glutamate. Artificially adding the chemical messenger was not enough to activate the synapses, the team found, suggesting that the connections were actually silent ones.
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Adding an electrical current in addition to glutamate turned these connections from immature into mature synapses. That’s also what happens in the developing brain when a new memory is formed from a silent synapse.
It’s unclear whether silent synapses are also prevalent in the adult human brain, though Harnett and other scientists like Sjöström think it’s likely. The researchers are now using the same techniques on human brains to find out.
Finding silent synapses in adult human brains could have implications for treating conditions such as drug addiction. Research on developing rats given cocaine suggests that drug use generates more silent synapses , which may then play a role in withdrawal symptoms. If scientists could develop a way to control the number of silent synapses, they could possibly target conditions that show abnormal levels of silent synapses.
What is clear is that silent synapses probably answer how the adult brain balances keeping old memories while making new ones, Harnett says. With this finding, “all of a sudden, solving that trade-off gets much easier.”
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CHICAGO — The last key ingredient for life has been discovered on Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus.
Phosphorus is a vital building block of life, used to construct DNA and RNA. Now, an analysis of data from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft reveals that Enceladus’ underground ocean contains the crucial nutrient . Not only that, its concentrations there may be thousands of times greater than in Earth’s ocean, planetary scientist Yasuhito Sekine reported December 14 at the American Geophysical Union’s fall meeting.
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The essential element may abound on many other icy worlds too, holding promise for the search for alien life, said Sekine, of the Tokyo Institute of Technology.
“We knew that Enceladus had most of the elements that are essential for life as we know it — carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen and sulfur,” says Morgan Cable, an astrobiologist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., who was not involved in the research. “Now that [phosphorus] has been confirmed … Enceladus now appears to meet all of the criteria for a habitable ocean.”
Many researchers consider Enceladus to be among the most likely places to house extraterrestrial life. It’s a world encased in ice, with an ocean of salty water hidden beneath ( SN: 11/6/17 ). What’s more, in 2005 the Cassini spacecraft observed geysers blasting vapor and ice grains out of Enceladus’ icy shell ( SN: 8/23/05 ). And in that space-faring spray, scientists have detected organic molecules .
But until now, researchers weren’t sure if phosphorus also existed on Enceladus. On Earth’s surface, the element is relatively scarce. Much of the phosphorus is locked away in minerals, and its availability often controls the pace at which life can proliferate.
So Sekine and colleagues analyzed chemical data, collected by the now-defunct Cassini, of particles in Saturn’s E ring, a halo of material ejected from Enceladus’ jets that wraps around Saturn.
Some ice grains in the E ring are enriched in a phosphorus compound called sodium phosphate, the researchers found. They estimate that a kilogram of water from Enceladus’ ocean contains roughly 1 to 20 millimoles of phosphate, a concentration thousands of times greater than in Earth’s big blue ocean.
At the floor of Enceladus’ subsurface ocean, phosphate may arise from reactions between seawater and a phosphate-bearing mineral called apatite, Sekine said, before being ejected through geysers into space. Apatite is often found in carbonaceous chondrites , a primitive, planet-building material ( SN: 7/14/17 ).
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But that’s not all. Many other icy ocean worlds may contain apatite as well, Sekine said. Similarly, they too could also carry high levels of phosphate in their oceans. That richness could be a boon for any potential alien organisms.
Though the findings are promising, they give rise to a glaring conundrum, Sekine said. “If life exists [on] Enceladus, why [does] such [an] abundance of chemical energy and nutrients remain?” After all, here on Earth, any available phosphorus is rapidly scavenged by life.
It’s possible that the moon is simply barren of life, Sekine said. But there’s another more hopeful explanation too. Life on frigid Enceladus, he said, may simply consume the nutrient at a sluggish pace.
Nikk Ogasa is a staff writer who focuses on the physical sciences for Science News . He has a master’s degree in geology from McGill University, and a master’s degree in science communication from the University of California, Santa Cruz.
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A Kharkiv Polytechnic Institute staff member sifts through the debris of a classroom destroyed by a Russian missile strike on August 19, 2022. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine continues to disrupt scientific research locally and internationally.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in late February horrified the world. Images of civilians fleeing their homes, broken bodies strewn across city streets, smoldering apartment complexes and mass graves have permeated the news and social media platforms ever since. This war has killed tens of thousands of people and displaced 14 million more.
Wars aren’t fought in a vacuum. The ripple effects of the war in Ukraine, from skyrocketing energy and food costs to environmental damage and the threat of nuclear disaster ( SN: 7/2/22, p. 6 ; SN Online: 3/7/22 ), have been felt around the globe — especially amid two other crises, the ongoing coronavirus pandemic and climate change.
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“A convergence of all these crises at the same time is very, very dangerous for the world,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization, said in May.
We often look to science for solutions to the world’s problems. But this tectonic shift in the geopolitical landscape has upended global science collaboration, leaving many researchers scrambling to find solid footing. While the outcome of this change — like the outcome of the war itself — is uncertain, here are some examples of how the conflict has affected scientists and their research.
Ukraine’s infrastructure has sustained massive damage since the invasion began. Hospitals, universities and research institutions have not been spared.
Some scientists have sought refuge in other countries while roughly half remain in Ukraine, with male researchers between the ages of 18 and 60 expected to serve in the military, says George Gamota, a U.S.-based physicist who advises the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. Gamota was born in Ukraine and moved to the United States as a child. He maintains close ties with his country of birth. When Ukraine became an independent country in 1991 after the fall of the Soviet Union, he helped advise Ukraine as it built its scientific infrastructure.
“When Russia attacked Ukraine, all hell broke loose. This situation really has not stabilized,” Gamota says.
Research funding in Ukraine has declined by 50 percent, he says. Scientific bodies across the globe have stepped up to offer aid through grants, job opportunities and resettlement programs. But monetary support, whether it’s from Ukraine’s government or independent organizations, still takes too long to reach scientists’ pockets, Gamota says. “Some are not getting anything.”
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The National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine is already looking ahead to how to rebuild. In September, the organization met with its counterparts in Europe and the United States. Latvia, Poland and other places described how they restructured after the end of the Soviet Union, Gamota says. “It was an exercise that I think is important to have. But probably what the Ukrainians were looking for is how can the world help us right now.”
In March, the Breakthrough Prize Foundation donated $1 million to directly support Ukrainian researchers. The organization donated an additional $2 million in October for rebuilding efforts, a move that Gamota calls “fantastic.”
While science in Ukraine has struggled as the war drags on, Russian science has become more and more isolated. Sanctions from Western countries have directly and indirectly targeted Russia’s scientific enterprise.
In June, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy announced that the United States will “wind down” collaborations with Russia , following an earlier ban on exports of U.S. technology there. The policy applies to national labs, as well as projects that receive federal funding and involve Russian government–affiliated universities and research institutions. Many research organizations in the West have also cut ties with collaborators in Russia.
These steps have particularly affected some large-scale collaborations in space and physics research.
There have been mission delays and the temporary shutdown of at least one space telescope ( SN: 3/26/22, p. 6 ). The International Space Station, which is run jointly by NASA and the Russian space agency Roscosmos, however, continues to operate normally for now.
In the world of high-energy physics research, the CERN particle physics lab near Geneva announced that it will not be renewing its international cooperation agreements with Russia and Belarus, which is aiding Russia’s invasion, when the contracts expire in 2024.
When that happens, the roughly 8 percent of CERN staff affiliated with Russian institutions, equaling about 1,000 researchers, will be unable to use CERN facilities. And Russia will stop contributing resources to experiments.
These measures strongly condemn the invasion “while leaving the door ajar for continued scientific collaboration should conditions allow in the future,” CERN Director-General Fabiola Gianotti wrote in a memo to staff about the decision. Until 2024, Russian and Belarusian scientists can continue working on current collaborations, such as ATLAS — one of the detectors that spotted the Higgs boson in 2012 and is part of ongoing searches for theoretical particles, including dark matter ( SN: 7/2/22, p. 18 ). But new efforts are prohibited.
Science outside of Ukraine and Russia has not escaped the geopolitical maelstrom’s economic fallout. Rising energy costs — spurred by Russia cutting off exports of natural gas — are causing European research labs to reassess their energy use , the journal Nature reported in October. CERN is a major consumer, using the equivalent of about a third of Geneva’s annual average energy consumption.
The lab ended the run of its largest accelerator on November 28, two weeks ahead of schedule, to decrease its load on the electrical grid and prepare for surging prices and potential winter shortages. CERN officials announced that the number of particle collisions in 2023 will decrease, tightening competition among researchers for accelerator time, Nature reported.
The war also has put pressure on an already faltering global supply chain, which has led to shortages and shipping delays. The delays have created snags in the construction of ITER, the world’s largest nuclear fusion experiment that’s slated to open in 2025, in France. “We have been through thick and thin with this project, and we will manage,” says ITER spokesperson Sabina Griffith. ITER had been expecting a ring magnet and other equipment from Russia, one of seven partners along with the European Union and the United States. Due to intergovernmental contracts, Russia is still part of the project. But for now, “everything is put on ice,” Griffith says.
Northern Russia is home to about two-thirds of Earth’s frozen soil, or permafrost. Collectively, the world’s permafrost contains almost twice as much carbon as is in the atmosphere. With temperatures in the Arctic rising almost four times as fast as the global average, the region’s permafrost is thawing.
By the end of this century, the defrosted soil could exhale hundreds of billions of tons of carbon dioxide and methane , according to some estimates ( SN Online: 9/25/19 ). To better understand how climate change is reshaping the Arctic and vice versa, researchers need detailed measurements of permafrost carbon, temperature, microbial communities and more.
But the deteriorating relationship between the West and Russia is “throwing a major wrench into bringing the data together so that we can get the clearest picture of the Arctic as a whole,” says Ted Schuur, an ecologist at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff and the principal investigator of the Permafrost Carbon Network . Now that much of the Arctic’s permafrost is inaccessible, Schuur and colleagues are looking for sites in North America and Europe that could serve as a proxy for Russian permafrost, he says.
Terminated collaborations, “while intended to ‘punish’ Russia, are realistically affecting the global Arctic community by limiting the researchers’ access to scientific information and undermining the resilience of Arctic (including notably Indigenous) communities,” Nikolay Korchunov, Russia’s ambassador-at-large for Arctic affairs, wrote in an e-mail to Science New s.
Korchunov chairs the Arctic Council, an eight-member intergovernmental body that acts as a steward for the region, forging agreements on oil spill cleanup, commerce, wildlife conservation, climate change research and more. In March, the council’s other seven member nations — Canada, Denmark, Iceland, Finland, Sweden, Norway and the United States — announced they would pause collaboration with Russia.
Work among the so-called “Arctic 7” continues . But the freeze-out has derailed Russia’s planned biodiversity – and pollution -monitoring projects, Korchunov says. “A cold scientific environment only increases uncertainty and risks of an ineffective response to the warming Arctic.”
But some cooperation in the Arctic has continued, for now. Vladimir Romanovsky is a geophysicist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks who studies permafrost temperature and relies on data provided by scientists in Russia. This year, his team got results, but whether his Russian collaborators will be able to take measurements in 2023 is unclear, Romanovsky says. “It is changing so quick, so fast that we don’t know what the situation will be by then.”
Most of the researchers in Russia that Romanovsky knows are struggling with funding. At the moment, there is enough money to keep his collaborators employed but not enough to do fieldwork. Cutting off Russian scientists from communication and data sharing is a “big, big problem,” Romanovsky says. They now are almost completely excluded from international meetings and collaborations, he notes.
In the long term, Romanovsky thinks that Russian science could lose many young researchers, like what happened in the 1990s when the Soviet Union collapsed. “They just went to go somewhere else,” he says, leaving to find work in other fields to continue to support their families. He and many others hope it won’t happen again.
A version of this article appears in the December 17, 2022 issue of Science News .
Cassie Martin is an associate editor. She has a bachelor’s degree in molecular genetics from Michigan State University and a master’s degree in science journalism from Boston University.
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These reported discoveries from 2022 could be game changers, if only we were sure of the findings. News reports this year left us wondering …
A measurement of the mass of an elementary particle called the W boson has physicists holding their breath. Data from the Collider Detector at Fermilab, or CDF, suggest the particle is heftier than expected ( SN: 5/7/22 & 5/21/22, p. 12 ). If so, the finding would be just the kind of crack that researchers have been looking for in the standard model of particle physics. That theory successfully describes the basic constituents of our world but doesn’t explain how gravity fits in. Whether the discovery dissolves with further measurements or points the way to a new and better understanding of matter remains to be seen.
Root-munching southeastern pocket gophers ( Geomys pinetis ) tend their tunnels like farmers tend their fields , scientists claimed ( SN Online: 7/14/22 ). The gophers, which live in Alabama, Georgia and Florida, spread their feces in the tunnels, churn the soil and nibble existing roots. All of that encourages new roots to grow, and so secures future lunch. But some researchers say the gophers’ inadvertent environmental changes don’t count as agriculture. For now, it’s an open question whether any mammals but people cultivate crops.
There’s no doubt that fossils of a part of a leg and two forearms unearthed in 2001 in Chad are a window into the past. But what they can tell us about our own evolution has been hotly debated. The bones, which date to around 7 million years ago, belong to Sahelanthropus tchadensis and confirm that the species walked upright, scientists reported ( SN: 9/24/22, p. 7 ). That conclusion cements the species’ status as the earliest known hominid, those scientists argue. Other proposed early hominids are much younger, dating from about 5 million to 6 million years ago . But some scientists say the 7-million-year-old bones don’t clearly point to a two-legged gait and belonged instead to an ancient ape. With all the uncertainty, these findings may yet be walked back.
Scientists have been on the hunt for six decades. Now for the first time they may have spotted an elusive quartet: a cluster of four neutrons called a tetraneutron ( SN Online: 6/22/22 ). These clumps seem to last for a fleeting instant, less than a billionth of a trillionth of a second in an experiment reported this year. Studying the clusters could be a boon to researchers who want to know how neutrons behave within atomic nuclei. But disagreements among various theoretical calculations leave some experts unconvinced that tetraneutrons even exist.
An odd-looking primate spotted some six years ago in Borneo might be a rare hybrid . But researchers won’t be sure until they can collect animal droppings for genetic analysis ( SN: 6/18/22, p. 11 ). Photographs suggest that the primate’s mother is a silvered leaf monkey ( Trachypithecus cristatus ), its father a proboscis monkey ( Nasalis larvatu s). If true, it’s a concerning coupling. Mating across genera suggests the two species are under extreme pressure, probably from the deforestation for oil palm plantations that’s fragmenting the habitat the monkeys share along the Kinabatangan River.
Humans may have migrated to Europe as early as 56,800 years ago, scientists reported based on discoveries at a rock-shelter in southern France. Those finds would put Homo sapiens on the continent about 10,000 years earlier than previously thought and long before Neandertals died out ( SN: 3/12/22, p. 9 ). The disappearance of the Neandertals, the work suggests, may have been a more complex and drawn-out process than had been realized. The researchers suggest that H. sapiens not only traded off occupation of the site with Neandertals, but also took survival tips. Still, the evidence rests on a single human tooth and tools that other researchers say could have been made by Neandertals.
Remember that stunning first picture of a black hole, unveiled in 2019 by the Event Horizon Telescope team? It showed the shadow of galaxy M87’s black hole on its swirling ring of hot matter. Well, astrophysicists announced this year that they had teased out a ring within a ring in M87, identifying the thin circle of light created by the orbiting photons that are flung around the black hole before they fly toward Earth ( SN: 9/24/22, p. 8 ). This “photon ring” would offer a new way to test what we think we know about gravity, but some researchers are critical of the methods used to identify the ring. A clear detection of the photon ring might have to wait for space telescopes to join the black hole–imaging effort.
Elizabeth Quill is the special projects editor. She has overseen collections on topics ranging from consciousness to general relativity, and recently took a deep dive into the periodic table of the elements .
Our mission is to provide accurate, engaging news of science to the public. That mission has never been more important than it is today.
As a nonprofit news organization, we cannot do it without you.
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Science News was founded in 1921 as an independent, nonprofit source of accurate information on the latest news of science, medicine and technology. Today, our mission remains the same: to empower people to evaluate the news and the world around them. It is published by the Society for Science, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) membership organization dedicated to public engagement in scientific research and education (EIN 53-0196483).
