A chunk of space trash has left a hole in the International Space Station’s robotic arm but NASA and Canadian mission managers say the arm’s functions won’t be impacted; however, this is far from the last debris encounter for the orbiting laboratory.
The ISS orbits about 200 miles above the planet, in low-Earth orbit, a very popular area for small satellite launches and lots of space debris. More than 23,000 pieces of, essentially, trash from defunct satellites, rocket parts and other objects are being tracked by NASA at all times in the event of a possible collision with spacecraft or the American football-field length space station — where typically about seven astronauts are living and working. There are also other objects including dust particles or smaller pieces of satellite debris that are too small to be tracked.
Even with those precautions — mission managers can make the call to move the ISS to avoid such collisions — impacts to the ISS and its extremities do happen. The space station has also been impacted by tiny micrometeorites before.
On May 12, during a routine inspection of the Canadian Space Agency-made robotic arm, known as Canadarm2, a hole was observed in a small section of the arm boom and thermal blanket.
CSA and NASA engineers worked together to assess the damage and have determined the arm’s performance remains unaffected, according to an update from the CSA. The robotic arm is key to the ISS because it is used to grapple spacecraft and assist astronauts during spacewalks, several of which are coming up.
Operations for the Canadarm2 will continue as planned. The CSA did not disclose if the hole will be patched or repaired.
This week SpaceX will launch its Cargo Dragon spacecraft to the ISS carrying 7,300 pounds of science, supplies and hardware, including a massive set of new solar panels to power the ISS for years to come.
Liftoff is scheduled for 1:29 p.m. Thursday from Kennedy Space Center Launch Complex 39A.
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More than a third of heat-related deaths in many parts of the world can be attributed to the extra warming associated with climate change, according to a new study that makes a case for taking strong action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in order to protect public health.
The sweeping new research, published on Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change, was conducted by 70 researchers using data from major projects in the fields of epidemiology and climate modeling in 43 countries. It found that heat-related deaths in warm seasons were boosted by climate change by an average of 37 percent, in a range of a 20 percent increase to 76 percent.
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Some earlier studies have performed similar analysis for individual cities during particular heat waves, but the new paper applies these ideas to hundreds of locations and across decades to draw broader conclusions.
“It is a thoughtful, insightful, clever approach to try to understand how climate change is altering heat-related mortality,” said Kristie L. Ebi, a professor in the Center for Health and the Global Environment at the University of Washington who was not involved in the study.
The planet has already warmed one degree Celsius over preindustrial times, and much more warming is predicted, with catastrophic results, if global emissions of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane can’t be brought under control.
“Taken together, our findings demonstrate that a substantial proportion of total and heat-related deaths during our study period can be attributed to human-induced climate change,” the authors wrote.
In many locations studied, the scientists found, “the attributable mortality is already on the order of dozens to hundreds of deaths each year” from heat attributed to climate change. Climate change has added to overall mortality from all causes by as much as 5 percent in some parts of the world, the authors found; they detected increased mortality from climate-boosted heat on every inhabited continent.
While the differences in mortality among the places studied are complex and spring from varied factors that include access to health care as well as architecture, urban density and lifestyle, the research indirectly suggests a divide between rich and poor regions. North America and East Asia, the researchers found, tended toward a smaller proportion of climate-related deaths; some Central and South American nations saw a greater than 70 percent proportion of heat deaths attributable to warming.
While people around the world are increasingly reliant on air-conditioning, which could be holding down death rates while contributing to the emissions that heat the planet, climate change is also disrupting power grids, with failures increasing by 60 percent since 2015 in the United States alone. That means that the crutch of air conditioning could become less reliable over time.
Ana Maria Vicedo-Cabrera, the lead author of the new paper and a researcher at the Institute of Social and Preventive Medicine at the University of Bern in Switzerland, said that the study showed that climate change was not just a problem for the future. “We are thinking about these problems of climate change as something that the next generation will face,” she said. “It’s something we are facing already. We are throwing stones at ourselves.”
The future looks even more grim, she added. “This burden will amplify,” she said. “Really, we need to do something.”
Dr. Ebi agreed. “Climate change is already affecting our health,” she said, noting that “essentially, all heat-related deaths are preventable.” Much depends on decisions, she said; communities must adapt to heat through measures like cooling centers and heat action plans to help those most vulnerable. She added, “In the long term, there are lots of choices that will affect our future vulnerability, including reducing our greenhouse gas emissions.”
Because the scientists were unable to gather reliable data in some parts of the world, including parts of Africa and South Asia, Dr. Vicedo-Cabrera was reluctant to say that the mortality average the researchers found could be applied worldwide. “This estimate that we obtained cannot be applied to areas that we did not assess.”
Those gaps need to be filled, a commentary published alongside the paper argued. “The countries where we do not have the necessary health data are often among the poorest and most susceptible to climate change, and, concerningly, are also the projected major hot spots of future population growth,” the commentary said. “Obtaining these data will be key for science to provide the information needed to help these countries adapt.”
The author of the commentary, Dann Mitchell, a climate scientist at the University of Bristol, said in an interview that the increased burden of climate change-boosted heat waves on societies like India, where many people already live in crowded conditions and poverty, and where health services are already strained, could create “something that’s not sustainable.”
The dentition of the gumboot chiton, a lumbering mollusk, contains a rare mineral never before seen in a living animal.
The gumboot chiton is not a glamorous creature. The large, lumpy mollusk creeps along the waters of the Pacific coast, pulling its reddish-brown body up and down the shoreline. It is sometimes known, not unreasonably, as “the wandering meatloaf.” But the chiton’s unassuming body hides an array of tiny but formidable teeth. These teeth, which the creature uses to scrape algae from rocks, are among the hardest materials known to exist in a living organism.
Now, a team of scientists has discovered a surprising ingredient in the chiton’s rock-hard dentition: a rare, iron-based mineral that previously had been found only in actual rocks. Tiny particles of the mineral, which is strong but lightweight, help harden the root of the mollusk’s teeth, the researchers reported in the journal PNAS on Monday.
The discovery could help engineers design new kinds of materials, according to the scientists, who provided proof-of-principle by creating a new chiton-inspired ink for 3-D printers.
A chiton feeds by sweeping its flexible, ribbonlike tongue, known as a radula, along algae-covered rocks. Its ultrahard teeth are arrayed in rows along the soft radula. A long, hollow tube, known as the stylus, anchors each tooth to the radula.
Scientists had previously discovered that the tops of chiton teeth contained an iron ore called magnetite, but knew less about the composition of the stylus. “We knew that there was iron in the upper part of the tooth,” said Linus Stegbauer, a material scientist at the University of Stuttgart, in Germany, and the paper’s first author. “But in the root structure, we had no idea what is going on in there.”
In the new study, the researchers analyzed chiton teeth using a variety of advanced imaging techniques, including several kinds of spectroscopy, which allows scientists to learn about a material’s chemical and physical properties by observing how it interacts with light and other kinds of electromagnetic radiation.
The stylus, they found, contained tiny particles of some kind of iron-based mineral suspended in a softer matrix. (The matrix is made of chitin, the compound that makes up the exoskeletons of insects and crustaceans.)
After further analysis, they were stunned to discover that the mineral particles were santabarbaraite, a mineral that had never been observed in living creatures before. “It was a whole series of surprises, and then they just kept rolling in,” said Derk Joester, the senior author and a material scientist at Northwestern University.
A scanning electron micrograph of the wandering meatloaf’s teeth. The stylus, the hollow columns supporting the claw-shaped tooth heads, were found to contain particles of santabarbaraite, a mineral never before observed in living creatures.L.Stegbauer et al., Northwestern University
Santabarbaraite is a hard mineral but it contains less iron and more water than magnetite, which makes it less dense. The mineral might allow the chiton to build strong, lightweight teeth while reducing their reliance on iron. “Iron is physiologically a rare material,” Dr. Joester said.
The researchers also discovered that the santabarbaraite particles were not evenly distributed throughout the entire stylus. Instead, they were concentrated at the top, closest to the surface of the tooth, and became sparser at the bottom, where the stylus connected to the soft radula. This pattern of distribution created a gradient, making the stylus stiffer and harder at the top and more pliable at the bottom.
“The organism has enormous spatial control over where the mineral goes,” Dr. Joester said. “And that’s really, I guess, what got us thinking about how this might be used to create materials. If the organism can pattern this, can we do the same?”
The researchers decided to try creating a new 3-D printer “ink” inspired by the chiton tooth. They started with a compound similar to chitin and then added two liquids: one containing iron and one containing phosphate. Mixing the ingredients together yielded a thick paste that was studded with tiny particles of a mineral similar to santabarbaraite. “And then it’s ready to be printed — you can just transfer it into your 3-D printer,” Dr. Stegbauer said.
The ink hardened as it dried, but its final physical properties depended on how much iron and phosphate were added to the mix. The more that was added, the more nanoparticles formed, and the stiffer and harder the final material became. By tweaking the recipe in this way, the researchers could create objects that were as flexible and rubbery as a squid or as stiff and hard as bone.
“It should be possible to mix the ink at a ratio that you can change immediately prior to printing,” Dr. Joester said. “And that would allow you to to change the composition, the amount of nanoparticles, and therefore the strength of the material on the fly. Meaning that you can print materials where the strength changes very dramatically over relatively short distances.”
The technique might be useful in the burgeoning field of soft robotics, allowing engineers to create machines that are hard and stiff in some places and soft and pliable in others, Dr. Joester said: “I think it would be amazing if you could print all of these gradients into the structure.”
NASA's Curiosity rover has been able to register something which, while unremarkable on Earth, is an interesting phenomenon for Mars — cloudy skies. The agency has shared images of "shining" clouds, able to form on a planet that has a relatively thin atmosphere. Nothing has been confirmed just yet, but they could be naturally formed dry-ice clouds, made of carbon dioxide.
It might not match the appeal of ancient megafloods or possible signs of life, but Curiosity continues to offer up new Mars insights, both above and below the surface of the red planet.
A little closer to home, Japan’s Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has teamed up with Sony, Doshisha University and toy-maker Tomy on a ball-shaped transforming robot destined for the Moon. It will study lunar soil ahead of a crewed rover set to launch in 2029.Continue reading.
The company originally wanted to release the feature in May.
Apple's podcast subscription service won't be coming out this month, as previously scheduled. In an email to podcasters obtained by 9to5Mac, the company has announced it's pushing back both the subscriptions and channels release date to June to ensure it's "delivering the best experience for creators and listeners." The "channels" feature will recommend groups of shows curated by creators, with extra descriptive text and artwork. Continue reading.
Pro-dealership laws have created an awkward situation for Tesla.
Tesla's long-running battle with pro-dealership laws is about to get even weirder. Texas legislature is winding down its session on May 31st, without advancing a bill that lets Tesla sell directly to customers. This means the EV maker will likely have to ship cars from its upcoming Texas, Austin-area Gigafactory out of state before it can sell them to Texans. Continue reading.
Plus, there's a new 5G M.2 laptop module coming.
Announced last night at Intel's Computex keynote, its newest Core i7 chip will reach 5GHz on a single core, thanks to the company’s new Turbo Boost Max 3.0. Beyond hitting 5GHz, the new processors don't pack in many surprises. The series still sports four cores and eight threads, and it features 96 Intel Xe graphics cores like its predecessor. Basically, it should offer a small upgrade to new PCs coming this fall.
Intel also announced its first 5G M.2 module, which was developed with MediaTek after Intel sold its 5G assets to Apple. Continue reading.
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A giant tortoise in the Galápagos Islands that was thought to have gone extinct over a century ago just came out of hiding.
Researchers discovered the female tortoise on the Galápagos' Fernandina Island during a joint expedition carried out by the Galápagos National Park Directorate and the Galápagos Conservancy in 2019, according to a statement. They nicknamed her "Fernanda."
At the time, the team "was confident" that the lone tortoise was the "lost" Fernandina Giant Tortoise (Chelonoidis phantasticus), a species native to the island that was thought extinct for 112 years due to eruptions of the Fernandina Volcano, according to the statement. But to confirm, they sent blood samples to geneticists at Yale University.
The team at Yale compared this tortoise's genes to those of the only other tortoise that scientists have found on Fernandina Island, a male Chelonoidis phantasticus discovered in 1906. The Yale team confirmed that the two were closely related and that Fernanda was indeed the same species.
"One of the greatest mysteries in [the] Galápagos has been the Fernandina Island Giant Tortoise. Rediscovering this lost species may have occurred just in the nick of time to save it," Dr. James Gibbs, vice president of Science and Conservation at the Galápagos Conservancy and tortoise expert at the State University of New York, said in the statement. "We now urgently need to complete the search of the island to find other tortoises."
The researchers are hoping to avoid what happened to the famous Lonesome George, a tortoise that was the last of another species called the Pinta Island tortoise (Chelonoidis abingdoni). He died in June 2012, at around 100 years old, bringing the end of his species despite breeding efforts, Live Science previously reported.
"We desperately want to avoid the fate of Lonesome George," Danny Rueda Córdova, the director of the Galápagos National Park Directorate, said in the statement. "My team from the Park and Galápagos Conservancy are planning a series of major expeditions to return to Fernandina Island to search for additional tortoises beginning this September."
Scientists discovered traces of at least two other tortoises that may be from Fernanda's species on the Fernandina Volcano during the expedition.
If they find a male giant tortoise of the same species, the team will attempt to unite him with Fernanda at the Galápagos National Park's Giant Tortoise Breeding Center in Santa Cruz and encourage their breeding; if successful, conservationists would raise the young in captivity and then bring them back to Fernandina.
The number of giant tortoises on the Galápagos Islands significantly declined in the 19th century due to exploitation by whalers and buccaneers, according to a statement.
Now, the population of giant tortoises in the Galápagos is thought to only be between 200,000 to 300,000 individuals, about 10% to 15% of what they were historically.
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A piece of space junk smacked into the robotic arm on the International Space Station, but near-term operations should not be affected, according to the agencies involved.
Robotic operators noticed a hole in the station's Canadarm2 provided by the Canadian Space Agency, which has been in service in orbit since 2001, during a routine inspection on May 12, the CSA officials said in a blog post Friday (May 28). Officials called the hole a "lucky strike" given the relatively small size of the arm, which is 57.7 feet (17.6 meters) long and has a diameter of just 14 inches (35 cm).
The size of the hole is not apparent in the pictures, nor if the debris went all the way through. However, it does appear Canadarm2's role in keeping the space station properly maintained can continue without interruption, following careful work from both CSA and NASA.
These images from NASA and the Canadian Space Agency show the location of a space debris strike on the International Space Station's Canadarm2 robot arm spotted on May 12, 2021 and released on May 28.(Image credit: NASA/Canadian Space Agency)
"Results of the ongoing analysis indicate that the arm's performance remains unaffected. The damage is limited to a small section of the arm boom and thermal blanket," the CSA said in the blog post.
Canadarm2 was scheduled soon to move a Canadian robotic hand, Dextre, into a spot to replace a faulty power switchbox called the Remote Power Control module, but CSA added that operation should not be affected whatsoever. Both Canadarm2 and Dextre are usually operated from CSA headquarters near Montreal, Quebec.
Orbital debris is a growing concern in low Earth orbit due to the number of CubeSat launches arriving there in fleets for broadband service and other applications. (Indeed, SpaceX now sends batches of Starlinks to space almost every week, including on Wednesday.)
Some of these orbits intersect with where the space station operates at an inclination of 52 degrees, roughly 200 miles (450 km) in altitude, but natural space dust and other objects are also a threat. "A number of tiny objects – ranging from rock or dust particles to flecks of paint from satellites – are … too small to be monitored," CSA said in the blog post.
Orbiting crews have seen holes in space station solar arrays before, such as a "bullet hole" that Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield tweeted about during his last mission in 2012-13. "Bullet hole — a small stone from the universe went through our solar array," Hadfield wrote in April 2013, suspecting the hole was caused by a tiny space rock called a micrometeoroid. "Glad it missed the hull."
The U.S. Space Surveillance Network keeps close track of at least 23,000 known softball-sized or larger pieces of space debris in orbit; if any get close to the ISS, the station can alter its position slightly or NASA can instruct its crews to take shelter, which last happened in September.
Damage from space rocks or orbiting debris is one of the principal threats to ISS operations, along with natural aging (as parts have been in orbit since 1998). NASA combats the aging problem through regular maintenance and replacements.
The Canadarm series of robotic arms has near-iconic status within the country that created the technology. Canadarm2 graces the back side of the Canadian $5 bill, along with Dextre and an astronaut.
The original Canadarm, which served the space shuttle program between 1981 and 2011, deployed numerous satellites and space missions, such as the Hubble Space Telescope, with one of the arms later adapted into a robotic boom to assist with looking for broken tiles beneath the space shuttle. Dextre, for its part, launched in 2008 as a "handyman" for equipment or component installation and replacements, along with serving as a testbed for robotic technologies, the CSA says on its website.
More recently, the Canadian government announced plans for an advanced Canadarm3 in 2019 that would serve as a robotic, artificial intelligence-adaptive assistant on NASA's planned Gateway space station. Canada's robotic contributions allow the country to fly astronauts and science into space using U.S. hardware; the Canadarm3 pledge secured a promise from NASA to put a Canadian on the Artemis 2 moon-orbiting mission.
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Scientists in the Dark Energy Survey have just released the best dark matter map yet, but it's not answering every question — if anything, the cosmos may be more mysterious than ever. As BBC News,Nature and Fermilab report, the survey of 5,000 square degrees used weak gravitational lensing (in this case, how gravity from nearby galaxies affects views of distant ones) to look for large patches of dark matter in relatively close sections of the universe.
The data also helped studies into dark energy, the as yet unexplained force that seems to be accelerating the universe's expansion. The team produced a 3D map thanks to redshifting, or the tendency of objects to appear increasingly red with distance.
Team members conducted observations using the 570-megapixel camera of the Victor M. Blanco telescope, at Chile's Cerro Tololo observatory, between 2013 and 2019.
While the high detail is helpful, it also validated concerns that have been floating for years. The DES results indicate that the universe is slightly smoother and more uniform than expected. While that largely supports current theories that dark energy is a constant, the discrepancy is enough that researchers might have to rethink existing ideas. The universe may not behave quite like scientists thought, and the dark matter map could lead to new models that challenge previous assumptions.
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The inevitable has occurred. A piece of space debris too small to be tracked has hit and damaged part of the International Space Station - namely, the Canadarm2 robotic arm.
The instrument is still operational, but the object punctured the thermal blanket and damaged the boom beneath. It's a sobering reminder that the low-Earth orbit's space junk problem is a ticking time bomb.
Obviously space agencies around the world are aware of the space debris problem. Over 23,000 pieces are being tracked in low-Earth orbit to help satellites and the ISS avoid collisions - but they're all about the size of a softball or larger.
Anything below that size is too small to track, but travelling at orbital velocities can still do some significant damage, including punching right through metal plates.
An impact hole left in the Hubble Space Telescope antenna in 1997. (NASA)
Canadarm2 - formally known as the Space Station Remote Manipulator System (SSRMS), designed by the Canadian Space Agency - has been a fixture on the space station for 20 years. It's a multi-jointed titanium robotic arm that can assist with maneuvering objects outside the ISS, including cargo shuttles, and performing station maintenance.
It's unclear exactly when the impact occurred. The damage was first noticed on 12 May, during a routine inspection. NASA and the CSA worked together to take detailed images of and assess the damage.
"Despite the impact, results of the ongoing analysis indicate that the arm's performance remains unaffected," the CSA wrote in a blog post. "The damage is limited to a small section of the arm boom and thermal blanket. Canadarm2 is continuing to conduct its planned operations."
Although the ISS seems to have gotten lucky this time, the space debris problem does seem to be increasing. Last year, the ISS had to perform emergency maneuvers three times in order to avoid collisions with space debris at its altitude of around 400 kilometers (250 miles).
Ever since the launch of Sputnik 1 in 1957, space debris has been accumulating. According to a report from the European Space Agency, an estimated 130 million fragments of anthropogenic material smaller than a millimeter are orbiting Earth right now. That estimate does not include natural space dust.
"To continue benefiting from the science, technology and data that operating in space brings, it is vital that we achieve better compliance with existing space debris mitigation guidelines in spacecraft design and operations," said head of the ESA's Space Debris Office Tim Florer last year.
"It cannot be stressed enough - this is essential for the sustainable use of space."
Robotics operations on the ISS using the Canadarm2 will continue as planned for the near future, the CSA said. But both space agencies will continue to gather data in order to perform an analysis of the event, both to understand how it occurred, and to assess future risk.
A productive lettuce yield following the researchers' new biodisinfestation method. Credit: Maite Gandariasbeitia et al
The use of many chemical fumigants in agriculture have been demonstrated to be harmful to human health and the environment and therefore banned from use.
Now, in an effort to reduce waste from the agricultural industry and reduce the amounts of harmful chemicals used, researchers have investigated using organic byproducts from beer production and farming as a potential method to disinfest soils, preserve healthy soil microorganisms and increase crop yields.
In this study published to Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, researchers from the Neiker Basque Institute for Agricultural Research and Development in Spain investigated using agricultural by-products rapeseed cake and beer bagasse (spent beer grains), along with fresh cow manure as two organic biodisinfestation treatments. The lead author Maite Gandariasbeitia explains: "Rapeseed cake and beer bagasse are two potential organic treatments which have shown really positive results in previous studies.
"Their high nitrogen content promotes the activity of beneficial microorganisms in the soil, which helps to break down organic matter like manure and kill off nematodes and other parasites which damage crops."
Gandariasbeitia also highlights how nematodes can negatively impact crop yields: "Root-knot nematodes are a type of common soil parasite which penetrate a plant's root tissue to lay their eggs and this activity causes galls, or knot-like swellings, to form on the root," she says.
Root galling caused by root-knot nematode infestation. Credit: Maite Gandariasbeitia et al
"This damage negatively impacts root development and means the crop can't take up nutrients efficiently, slowing plant growth and ultimately, leading to reduced yields for farmers."
To disinfest the soil and reduce these nematode populations, beer bagasse and rapeseed cake were incorporated into the soil with fresh cow manure as a potential organic treatment. After the first crop post-treatment, the researchers found a significant reduction in galling on plant roots.
Next steps for research
Plots also demonstrated increased yields by around 15% compared to the control plots after one year. Additionally, the organic matter treatment boosted populations of beneficial microorganisms in the soils, as demonstrated by a significantly higher soil respiration rate.
The study demonstrates that these agricultural byproducts are an effective treatment for root-knot nematodes and other soil parasites, achieving higher crop yields as well as promoting sustainable food systems to reduce waste from the agricultural industry. Gandariasbeitia highlights that further research is needed to explore other potential organic treatments that could be used in a similar way: "There are still many questions to answer so that we can gain a better understanding of what happens in the soil during and after these biodisinfestation treatments.
"This can help us to really elucidate what characteristics we should be looking for in other potential organic treatments to be effective in tackling soil parasite populations."
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NASA's Curiosity rover just spotted a rarely-seen event on Mars: a cloudy day. The agency has shared images of "shining" clouds (produced by ice crystals reflecting light) that started appearing over the Curiosity site starting in late January. They'd be pedestrian here on Earth, but they're notable for a planet with a very thin atmosphere and have even led to a discovery of their own.
The mission team has determined that these clouds are higher than usual for Mars, floating well above the 37-mile peak altitude for the planet's water-ice clouds. That raises the possibility they're dry ice clouds formed out of frozen carbon dioxide, and might reveal more about the Martian sky.
NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
NASA noted that the clouds were easiest to see with Curiosity's black-and-white navigation cameras, but that the color mast camera produced the best shine.
This might not be the most dramatic event on Mars at the moment. It does, however, serve as another reminder that the planet isn't a static set of images. Mars is a dynamic world with ever-changing weather, even if it isn't as lively as it was in the distant past.
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This spectacular image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows the trailing arms of NGC 2276, a spiral galaxy 120 million light-years away in the constellation of Cepheus. At first glance, the delicate tracery of bright spiral arms and dark dust lanes resembles countless other spiral galaxies. A closer look reveals a strangely lopsided galaxy shaped by gravitational interaction and intense star formation. Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, P. Sell, Acknowledgement: L. Shatz
This spectacular image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows the trailing arms of NGC 2276, a spiral galaxy 120 million light-years away in the constellation of Cepheus. At first glance, the delicate tracery of bright spiral arms and dark dust lanes resembles countless other spiral galaxies. A closer look reveals a strangely lopsided galaxy shaped by gravitational interaction and intense star formation.
This striking image showcases the unusually contorted appearance of NGC 2276, an appearance caused by two different astrophysical interactions — one with the superheated gas pervading galaxy clusters, and one with a nearby galactic neighbor.
The interaction of NGC 2276 with the intracluster medium — the superheated gas lying between the galaxies in galaxy clusters — has ignited a burst of star formation along one edge of the galaxy. This wave of star formation is visible as the bright, blue-tinged glow of newly formed massive stars towards the left side of this image, and gives the galaxy a strangely lopsided appearance. NGC 2276’s recent burst of star formation is also related to the appearance of more exotic inhabitants — black holes and neutron stars in binary systems.
This image shows a wide-field view of NGC 2276, a spiral galaxy 120 million light-years away in the constellation of Cepheus. At first glance, the delicate tracery of bright spiral arms and dark dust lanes resembles countless other spiral galaxies. A closer look reveals a strangely lopsided galaxy shaped by gravitational interaction and intense star formation. Credit: Adam Block/Mount Lemmon SkyCenter/University of Arizona
On the other side of the galaxy from this burst of new stars, the gravitational attraction of a smaller companion is pulling the outer edges of NGC 2276 out of shape. This interaction with the small lens-shaped galaxy NGC 2300 has distorted the outermost spiral arms of NGC 2276, giving the false impression that the larger galaxy is orientated face-on to Earth.[1] NGC 2276 and its disruptive companion NGC 2300 can both be seen in the accompanying image, which shows a wider view of the interacting galaxies.
NGC 2276 is by no means the only galaxy with a strange appearance. The Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies — a catalog of unusual galaxies published in 1966 — contains a menagerie of weird and wonderful galaxies, including spectacular galaxy mergers, ring-shaped galaxies, and other galactic oddities. As befits an unusually contorted galaxy, NGC 2276 has the distinction of being listed in the Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies twice — once for its lopsided spiral arms and once for its interaction with its smaller neighbor NGC 2300.
Notes
The actual alignment of NGC 2276 can be inferred from the position of its brightly glowing galactic core, which is offset from the distorted spiral arms.
The NGC 2276 galaxy, recently imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope, had previously made it to the Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies.(Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, P. Sell)
The Hubble Space Telescope has captured a stunning new image of a distant spiral galaxy deformed by gravitational tug of its neighbor.
The spiral galaxy, called NGC 2276, is located in the constellation Cepheus some 120 million light-years away from Earth's sun. In a wide-field image from Hubble, it can be seen together with its smaller neighbor NGC 2300. The gravitational pull of the neighbor galaxy has twisted the spiral structure of NGC 2276 into a lopsided shape, earning it a spot in the The Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies, a catalog of the weirdest stellar conglomerates originally published in 1966.
As the neghboring NGC 2300 exerts a gravitational force on one side of NGC 2276, the outermost parts of the larger galaxy's spiral arms stretch out further from its center, giving NGC 2276 its asymmetric look.
Spiral arms emanate like the legs of a spider from the center of so-called spiral galaxies (hence their name) to form bright streams where the density of stars is higher than in the rest of the galaxy. The sweeping arms are the distinguishing feature of spiral galaxies, which can have a rather complicated structure featuring a central bulge, a flat disk with spiral arms where most stars are concentrated, and a less dense stellar halo surrounding the disk. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, as well as its neighbor Andromeda, are both spiral galaxies.
In addition to the gravitational interaction with NGC 2300, the appearance of NGC 2276 is also affected by extremely hot gas that typically pervades galaxy clusters.
A wide-field view of the Hubble Space Telescope shows the NGC 2276 galaxy together with its smaller neighbor NGC 2300, which exerts its gravitational force on one side of NGC 2276 and causes its asymmetric shape. (Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, P. Sell)
According to a European Space Agency (ESA) image description, this superheated gas triggered a burst of star formation in NGC 2276, which can be seen on the left side of the close-up image as a bright area of blue-tinged light. NGC 2276's recent burst of star formation is also related to the appearance of more exotic inhabitants — black holes and neutron stars in binary systems, ESA said in the statement.
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It might look like a postcard from Arizona, but this snapshot shows something much more exotic: the planet Mars, as seen by NASA's Curiosity rover.
The image is a combination of 21 individual photographs the rover took recently to study a strange type of wispy cloud over its Gale Crater home. Scientists realized two Earth years ago that the cloud type was forming earlier in the Martian year than they expected. So this Martian year, Curiosity was watching for the early clouds, and it was not disappointed. The clouds did indeed show up beginning in late January, when the robotic skywatcher began documenting the wispy, ice-rich clouds scattering sunlight in sometimes-colorful displays.
"I always marvel at the colors that show up: reds and greens and blues and purples," Mark Lemmon, an atmospheric scientist with the Space Science Institute in Colorado, said in a NASA statement. "It's really cool to see something shining with lots of color on Mars."
Strangely, these clouds appear higher in the Mars atmosphere than those clouds scientists typically see on the planet, according to NASA. Usually, if a cloud passes over Curiosity, the structures are full of water ice and float about 37 miles (60 kilometers) above the Martian surface.
The clouds in Curiosity's new photos are higher in the atmosphere, although NASA didn't specify their altitude. The distinction may reflect a different composition, clouds of frozen carbon dioxide or dry ice, according to the agency, although the scientists aren't yet confident in that explanation.
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Clouds moving over the Curiosity rover on March 19, 2021.(Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)
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Curiosity's navigation camera spotted clouds on March 28, 2021.(Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)
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Curiosity's navigation camera spotted clouds on March 31, 2021.(Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)
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A composite image shows iridescent noctilucent clouds on March 5, 2021.(Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)
The clouds are at their prettiest just after sunset, when the last light makes the ice crystals glow, which is why scientists call them noctilucent, or night-shining. (Curiosity can monitor these noctilucent clouds with both its black-and-white navigation cameras and its color Mast Camera.)
Some of these clouds even appear a bit iridescent when the cloud particles are very similar sizes, Lemmon said, which typically happens when clouds have just formed and have grown at the same speed.
Email Meghan Bartels at mbartels@space.com or follow her on Twitter @meghanbartels. Follow uson Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.
Clouds are rare on Mars and usually only pop up at the coldest time of the year near the planet’s equator. One Martian year ago though, NASA noticed some clouds forming in the sky above its veteran Curiosity rover and became determined to document them the following year. In recent months, Curiosity got to work, taking some amazing photos that show us what cloudy days are like on the Red Planet and broadening our understanding of just how clouds form far, far away.
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NASA refers to these unexpected clouds simply as “early” clouds at the moment. In an announcement, NASA said that the Curiosity team has already made one new discovery about the early clouds from the rover’s photos: They’re at a higher altitude than usual. Those of us who aren’t cloud experts—guilty, though in my defense I think clouds are very cool—might not find that too significant at first glance, but it’s actually an important distinction that lets us know what the clouds are made of.
As explained by NASA, most clouds on Mars are usually at an altitude of 37 miles (60 kilometers) in the sky and are composed of water ice. These so-called early clouds, however, are at a higher and colder altitude, which means that they are likely made of frozen carbon dioxide, or dry ice. NASA did not specify at what altitude the early clouds were in Curiosity’s photos.
“Scientists look for subtle clues to establish a cloud’s altitude, and it will take more analysis to say for sure which of Curiosity’s recent images show water-ice clouds and which show dry-ice ones,” the agency said in a news announcement.
Besides gaining new information on the so-called early clouds, NASA has also witnessed some truly beautiful clouds on Mars: noctilucent clouds and iridescent clouds.
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Using the navigation cameras on its mast, NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover took these images of clouds just after sunset on March 31, 2021, the 3,075th sol, or Martian day, of the mission.Gif: NASA/JPL-Caltech
In the photos above, taken by Curiosity’s black-and-white navigation cameras, we can see the fine, rippling structures in the clouds. Known as noctilucent clouds, which is Latin for “night shining,” or twilight clouds, these clouds “grow brighter as they fill with crystals, then darken after the Sun’s position in the sky drops below their altitude,” NASA said. Scientists use this information about the Sun’s position to calculate the altitude of noctilucent clouds.
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You can really appreciate the stunning beauty of these clouds in the photos below, which makes it seem like there are waves in the Martian sky.
Using the navigation cameras on its mast, NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover took these images of clouds just after sunset on March 28, 2021, the 3,072nd sol, or Martian day, of the mission.Gif: NASA/JPL-Caltech
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Curiosity didn’t just give us a look at noctilucent clouds, though. The rover, through photos taken by its MastCam, also showed us that clouds on Mars can shimmer with color. These are called iridescent clouds, or “mother of pearl” clouds, and are some of the most colorful things you’ll see on Mars.
NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover spotted these iridescent, or “mother of pearl,” clouds on March 5, 2021, the 3,048th Martian day, or sol, of the mission.Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
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“If you see a cloud with a shimmery pastel set of colors in it, that’s because the cloud particles are all nearly identical in size,” Mark Lemmon, an atmospheric scientist with the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado, said in the NASA announcement. “That’s usually happening just after the clouds have formed and have all grown at the same rate.”
Curiosity’s cloud photos offer us a new perspective of Mars. At a time when our rovers and helicopters send us fascinating photos of the planet’s rocky surface, Curiosity shows us that the planet can be more colorful than we imagined. It’s also another reminder that NASA’s veteran rover, overshadowed right now by the agency’s shiny new Perseverance rover and Ingenuity helicopter, may be old, but it’s still carrying out amazing science.
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