The first planet ever spotted by the Kepler space telescope is falling into its star.
Kepler launched in 2009 on a mission to find exoplanets by watching them cross in front of their stars. The first potential planet the telescope spotted was initially dismissed as a false alarm, but in 2019 astronomer Ashley Chontos and colleagues proved it was real ( SN: 3/5/19 ). The planet was officially named Kepler 1658b.
Now, Chontos and others have determined Kepler 1658b’s fate. “It is tragically spiraling into its host star,” says Chontos, now at Princeton University. The planet has roughly 2.5 million years left before it faces a fiery death. “It will ultimately end up being engulfed. Death by star.”
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The roughly Jupiter-sized planet is searingly hot, orbiting its star once every three days. In follow-up observations from 2019 to 2022, the planet kept transiting the star earlier than expected.
Combined data from Kepler and other telescopes show that the planet is inching closer to the star , Chontos and colleagues report December 19 in the Astrophysical Journal Letters .
“You can see the interval between the transits is shrinking, really slowly but really consistently, at a rate of 131 milliseconds per year,” says astrophysicist Shreyas Vissapragada of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass.
That doesn’t sound like much. But if this trend continues, the planet has only 2 million or 3 million years left to live. “For something that’s been around for 2 to 3 billion years, that’s pretty short,” Vissapragada says. If the planet’s lifetime was a more human 100 years, it would have a little more than a month left.
Studying Kepler 1658b as it dies will help explain the life cycles of similar planets. “Learning something about the actual physics of how orbits shrink over time, we can get a better handle on the fates of all of these planets,” Vissapragada says.
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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Fending off an attacker by swordplay with two genital spines turns out to be a moderately useful form of self-defense for male wasps, an unusual study shows. A mason wasp’s rear spikes may be useless when it comes to delivering sperm, but they could save his life.
Male wasps (and bees) don’t grow venom-injecting stingers. That’s female weaponry that evolved with the equipment for laying eggs. Instead, males of a mason wasp species fight against gulping tree frogs (and collecting entomologists) by deploying a pair of spines that evolved with male reproductive genital equipment at the wasp’s rear.
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The spines are just pseudo-stings. There’s no venom, but a male wasp can stab an attacking frog in the face and mouth.
“Our study is the first to demonstrate the defensive roles of pseudo-stings as counterattack devices in wasps,” says ecologist Shinji Sugiura of Kobe University in Japan. Biologists have long known the spines exist, but the new study, published December 19 in Current Biology , tests how well they work.
The inspiration came from Sugiura’s student and coauthor, Misaki Tsujii, who got jabbed while collecting a male Anterhynchium gibbifrons mason wasp.
Female mason wasps use their real stinging equipment to paralyze multiple caterpillars as still-alive and fresh baby food. A mom seals zombified caterpillars into the private nursery chamber she builds for each offspring.
Males, without true stinging power, can still deliver “a pricking pain,” says Sugiura. To see just how much protection that pricking offered, the researchers put the wasps near various hungry frogs in the lab.
Each of 17 male wasps trapped with a pond frog ( Pelophylax nigromaculatus ) got eaten despite the pricking. Confrontations with the tree frog Dryophytes japonica , however, were a different story.
Male wasps resisted, and this time with some success. Their genital spines “were frequently observed to pierce the frog mouth,” the researchers report. Lab video shows a tree frog batting its skinny-toed feet against a wasp it was vigorously spitting out of its wide frog mouth. Frogs ultimately rejected six of 17 wasps. When offered wasps with the spines removed, however, the tree frogs ate them all.
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Judging by Tsujii’s own reaction to being pseudo-stung by one of these male wasps, they don’t sound like pleasant snacks. She ranks the pain as a 1 on the 0–4 Schmidt pain scale used to categorize sting agony increasing from none to, non-technically, chained in hot lava ( SN: 7/24/16 ). A honeybee delivers a 2 of stinging pain.
“I can attest from personal experience that male pseudo-stings … are used in defense,” says James Carpenter, a wasp specialist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. “I’ve been jabbed by them several times, and they can be painful enough that they elicit a startle response and you drop the wasp.”
Despite the rear position, though, “the spines don’t appear to be used in copulation,” Carpenter says. On such occasions, “they’re moved out of the way.”
Sugiura and Tsujii even checked to see if a male that a female had rejected in courtship would use his spines in some way to overcome her objection. No, the researchers say after watching 10 matings and seven rejections: The spines in this species appear merely defensive.
The male spikes, called parameral spines, show up in other kinds of wasps too but have not been tested in those species for defensive power. And the possibility that the spines still have some sexual function should be considered, says Menno Schilthuizen, an evolutionary ecologist at the Naturalis Biodiversity Center and Leiden University in the Netherlands.
“The male genitalia of many insects have such accessory spines, whip or drumstick-like structures,” he says. Remaining “outside of the female’s body during copulation … does not mean that they do not play a role in reproduction. In many species they tap or stroke the female’s abdomen in what’s known as ‘copulatory courtship,’ enhancing the male’s chances that the female will actually use his sperm for fertilizing her eggs.”
Few studies, even in nonwasps, have documented genital action for self-defense. The other example Sugiura and Tsujii cite comes from hawkmoths. These big, night-flying foragers use a genital structure to create scratchy static that jams the echolocation frequencies of moth-hunting bats ( SN: 7/3/13 ).
Studying genital structures in terms of defense instead of just sexual allure is important, the researchers argue, in large part because it’s not common. Looking for death-dodging aspects of genital evolution could encourage “a new perspective,” the researchers propose. And there’s astonishing variety to account for in the evolution of genital forms.
Susan Milius is the life sciences writer, covering organismal biology and evolution, and has a special passion for plants, fungi and invertebrates. She studied biology and English literature.
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For generations, ancient dolphinlike reptiles called Shonisaurus popularis (shown in this artist’s rendition) returned to their favorite safe water haven to breed, researchers say.
Some 230 million years ago, massive dolphinlike reptiles called ichthyosaurs gathered to breed in safe waters — just like many modern whales do.
That’s the conclusion that researchers arrived at after studying a mysterious ichthyosaur graveyard in Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park in Nevada. The park is home to the world’s richest assemblage of fossils of Shonisaurus popularis , one of the largest ichthyosaurs ever discovered ( SN: 8/19/02 ).
“This is something we see in modern marine vertebrates — gray whales make [the] trek to Baja California every year” to breed, says Randall Irmis, a paleontologist at the National History Museum of Utah in Salt Lake City. The sheltered, warm water offers safety for the whales ( SN: 1/19/80 ).
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The new finding , described December 19 in Current Biology , shows that this behavior “goes back at least 230 million years,” Irmis says. “It really connects the past to the present in a big way.”
The idea of birthing areas for ichthyosaurs has been proposed previously, and is even well-known enough to often be incorporated into artists’ renderings of the creatures, says Erin Maxwell, a paleontologist at the State Museum of Natural History in Stuttgart, Germany, who wasn’t involved in the new research. But, she says, this study “is the first to support these speculations with data.”
Nevada’s ichthyosaur fossil trove has been a puzzle to paleontologists for decades. One curiosity is the many ichthyosaur fossils clustered in what’s now the park, but about 230 million years ago, was part of a tropical sea. Another oddity is that the site seems as if it were almost entirely populated by giant, 14-meter-long adult S. popularis . And then there’s the tantalizing question of what caused the deaths.
Scientists have previously suggested that the reptiles, which could be roughly the length of a school bus when grown, had congregated together for some unknown reason before something caused their mortality en masse.
Several pockets, or quarries, of specimens are scattered across the park. All told, Irmis and colleagues identified at least 112 ichthyosaur individuals in these quarries, including at one site where park officials had left previously discovered bones half-encased in the rock for public viewing.
That death snapshot meant that scientists could examine how the fossils were arranged relative to one another, perhaps offering insight into the reptiles’ behavior, says Neil Kelley, a paleontologist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville.
Kelley, Irmis and colleagues used digital cameras and a laser scanner to collect hundreds of measurements of the bone bed with the half-buried reptiles, combining the data into a 3-D model of the site. The team also studied the sizes and shapes of bones from across the park, including some now in museum collections. And the researchers analyzed the chemical makeup of the surrounding rocks and pored over older photographs and field notes.
These scraps of evidence helped the researchers begin to understand what they were looking at — and potentially solve at least one long-standing mystery: what brought these creatures together.
Though almost all of the park’s Shonisaurus skeletons are fully-grown adults, the site does have a few very tiny ichthyosaur remains, the scientists found. Using micro-computed tomography, a 3-D imaging technique that uses X-rays to see inside the fossils, the researchers discovered that some tiny bones were those of embryonic and newborn Shonisaurus .
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The finding led the team to conclude that the site was a birthing ground. That could explain why there were so many of the same creatures in the same place alongside newborns, the researchers say.
The site also seems to have been a birthing ground for Shonisaurus for a long time. Rather than all the quarries dating to roughly the same time, different ones are separated by at least hundreds of thousands of years, the researchers found.
As for what killed the reptiles, “we don’t know,” Irmis says.
Among the hypotheses for a mass mortality event were harmful algal blooms or large-scale volcanic activity. But the new rock chemistry data eliminated those events as culprits.
Some of the animals in each quarry could have still died en masse. Having the creatures grouped in one place to breed may have left the reptiles vulnerable to a sudden catastrophic event that buried them in sediment, such as an undersea landslide.
But the fossil finds might also represent “just normal mortality over time,” Irmis says, given how the creatures seem to have come to the site again and again.
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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The Department of Energy announced Tuesday that U.S. scientists have made a major breakthrough in nuclear fusion: the reaction that powers the sun and that could one day provide a near limitless and zero-carbon source of energy here on Earth. In an experiment at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, researchers used nearly 200 lasers to heat a tiny pellet of hydrogen plasma to more than 180 million degrees Fahrenheit. The hydrogen atoms then fused and released vast amounts of energy — more energy, crucially, than it took to start the reaction.
This achievement “will go down in the history books,” Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said.
The fusion reaction lasted for only 100 trillionths of a second; scientists caution it will take decades to turn what is currently an experimental technology into a large-scale power plant.
The federal Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, which uses a process called inertial confinement fusion that involves bombarding a tiny pellet of hydrogen plasma with the world’s biggest laser, had achieved net energy gain in a fusion experiment in the past two weeks, the people said. Although many scientists believe fusion power stations are still decades away, the technology’s potential is hard to ignore. Fusion reactions emit no carbon, produce no long-lived radioactive waste and a small cup of the hydrogen fuel could theoretically power a house for hundreds of years. source; https://www.ft.com/content/4b6f0fab-66ef-4e33-adec-cfc345589dc7
To handle an exponential growth in data, the metric system is getting its first update in three decades Based on the measuring system’s new prefixes, Earth’s mass is about six ronnagrams. That’s a six followed by 27 zeroes.
Meet the metric system’s newest prefixes: ronna-, quetta-, ronto- and quecto-.
Adopted November 18 at the 27th General Conference on Weights and Measures in Versailles, France, ronna- and quetta- describe exceedingly large numbers while ronto- and quecto- describe the exceedingly small. This is the first time that the International System of Units, or SI, has expanded since 1991, when the prefixes zetta-, yotta-, zepto and yocto- were added ( SN: 1/16/93 ).
Numerically, ronna- is 10 27 (that’s a digit followed by 27 zeroes) and quetta- is 10 30 (30 zeroes). Their tiny counterparts ronto- and quecto- also refer to 27 and 30 zeroes, but those come after a decimal point. Until now, yotta- and yocto- (24 zeros) capped off the metric system’s range.
Science New s spoke with Richard Brown, head of metrology at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington, England, about what the latest SI expansion means for science . The following conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.
SN: Why do we need the new prefixes?
Brown: The quantity of data in the world is increasing exponentially. And we expect that to continue to increase and probably accelerate because of quantum computing, digitalization and things like that. At the same time, this quantity of data is starting to get close to the top range of the prefixes we currently use. People start to ask what comes next?
SN: Where do the prefix names come from?
Brown: About five years ago, I heard a BBC podcast about these new names for quantities of data. And the two that they mentioned were brontobyte and hellabyte. Brontobyte, I think comes from brontosaurus being a big dinosaur and hellabyte comes from “‘hell of a big number.”
The problem with those from a metrology point of view, or measurement point of view, is they start with letters B and H, which already are in use for other units and prefixes. So we can’t have those as names. [It was clear] that we had to do something official because people were starting to need these prefixes. R and Q are not used for anything else, really, in terms of units or SI prefixes. [The prefix names themselves are] very, very loosely based on the Greek and Latin names for nine and 10.
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SN: How will the prefixes be used?
Brown: The whole point of the International System of Units is it’s an accepted global system, which if you use, you will be understood.
When you use a prefix with a unit, it means that the number associated with the unit changes. And people like small numbers that they can understand. So you can express the mass of the Earth in terms of ronnagrams; it’s six ronnagrams. And equally the mass of Jupiter is two quettagrams. Some good examples of [small numbers] are that the mass of an electron is about one rontogram, and the mass of one bit of data as stored on a mobile phone is around one quectogram.
I think the use of a suitable prefix makes things more understandable. And I think we shouldn’t forget that even if there’s not always a direct scientific usage immediately, they will gain traction over time.
Deborah Balthazar is the Fall 2022 science writing intern at Science News . She holds a B.A. in biology with minors in English and chemistry from Caldwell University and is currently pursuing a master’s degree in science journalism from New York University.
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Look closely at a snowflake, and you’ll observe a one-of-a-kind gossamer lattice, its growth influenced by ambient conditions like temperature and humidity. Turns out, this sort of intricate self-assemblage can also occur in metals, researchers report in the Dec. 9 Science .
In pools of molten gallium, physicist Nicola Gaston and colleagues grew zinc nanostructures with symmetrical, hexagonal crystal frameworks. Such metal snowflakes could be useful for catalyzing chemical reactions and constructing electronics, says Gaston, of the MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology at the University of Auckland in New Zealand.
“Self-assembly is the way nature makes nanostructures,” she says. “We’re trying to learn to do the same things.” Figuring out how to craft tiny, complex metal shapes in fewer steps and with less energy could be a boon for manufacturers.
The researchers chose gallium as a growth medium, due to its relatively low melting point, ability to dissolve many other metals and the tendency for its atoms to loosely organize while in a liquid state.
After mixing zinc into the gallium, the team subjected the alloy to elevated temperatures and different pressures, and then let the mixture cool to room temperature. The loose ordering of gallium atoms appeared to coax the crystallizing zinc to bloom into symmetrical, hexagonal structures resembling natural snowflakes and other shapes, the team found. It’s somewhat like how a fruit tray imparts order on the fruits stacked within, Gaston says.
The future may be bright for research into applications of gallium and other low-temperature liquid metals. “Not to take that snowflake metaphor too far, but [this work] really hints at new branches for scientific discovery,” Gaston says.
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.
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.
Your support enables us to keep our content free and accessible to the next generation of scientists and engineers. Invest in quality science journalism by donating today.
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).
