OMG science
fromThe New Yorker
3 hours agoScience and the Art of Paying Attention
Paying close attention to ordinary experiences reveals that familiar aspects of life are more variable and scientifically interesting than commonly assumed.
Out in the Kuiper Belt, the massive doughnut of debris beyond Neptune, about one in 10 kilometer-scale objects have surprised scientists with their unexpected shape. Rather than resembling a ball, each of these remnants from the solar system's early history is composed of two different-sized lobes, like a peanut or a lazily assembled snowman. Astronomers got their clearest view yet of the phenomenon when NASA's New Horizons mission flew by the two-lobed Kuiper Belt object Arrokoth in 2019.
Welcome to February's solar eclipse, a supercharged new Moon in Aquarius that brings a moment of reset, a blank slate upon which you can write an entirely new reality. Solar eclipses always arrive as cosmic amplifiers and carry the powerful energy of new beginnings and quantum leaps in consciousness. But this upcoming eclipse on the new Moon is especially significant.
Parents often hear the warning: "If your child doesn't learn a second language early, they'll never be fluent." Adults, meanwhile, are told: "It's just too late for you to learn now." These claims are familiar and tidy, but misleading. Are they actually true? Is it better to learn a second language as a child or as an adult? The short answer is that it depends on what we mean by "better."
The universe is exploding. Or parts of it are. The night sky may seem calm, even serene, but that masks events of a catastrophic and nearly unimaginable scale. Across the galaxy and even the cosmos itself, immense outbursts of energy occur that could easily vaporize our planet. Happily, space is vast, and the terrible distance between these events and us diminishes what we see to a faint glowusually.
This particular exoplanet quickly captured astronomers' attention with its extreme variations in brightness. Most objects in space appear to blink, due either to physical changes within the planet or star, or external factors. For super-Jupiter exoplanets, Zhang said, this change in brightness is usually minimal, hovering at 1 to 2%. But on VHS 1256b, brightness variations neared 40%, the largest ever recorded for an object of its size.
More than 100 galaxies can be seen in Galaxy Cluster Abell 209, situated about 2.8 billion light-years away. Though they look close to one another, these galaxies are still separated by millions of light-years. Their combined mass manages to warp and magnify some even more-distant galaxies through a process called gravitational lensing. Lensed galaxies here appear stretched or streaky toward the center.
Collectively, the genetic variants in this population are outside the range of previously described human diversity. What's distinct? Estimates of the timing of when this ancient south African population branched off from any modern-day populations place the split at over 200,000 years ago, or roughly around the origin of modern humans themselves. But this wasn't some odd, isolated group; estimates of population size based on the frequency of genetic variation suggest it was substantial.