SCIENCE

Scientists Just Watched a Star Eating an Entire Planet

Published

21 hours ago

May 8, 2023

(Cape Canaveral, Florida) – For the first time, scientists have caught a star in the process of swallowing the planet – not just a bite or bite, but one big gulp.

Astronomers on Wednesday reported their observations of what appeared to be a Jupiter-sized or larger gas giant being devoured by its star. The solar star swelled with age for thousands of years and finally became so large that it swallowed up a planet in close orbit.

This is a grim preview of what will happen to Earth when our Sun becomes a red giant and engulfs the four inner planets.

“If it’s any consolation, it will happen in about 5 billion years,” said co-author Morgan Macleod of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

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This galactic feast took place between 10,000 and 15,000 years ago near the constellation Aquila, when the star was about 10 billion years old. As the planet descended into the stellar hatch, there was a quick burst of hot light, followed by a continuous stream of dust that shone brightly in cold infrared energy, the researchers said.

read more: James Webb’s latest image reveals new clues about the origin of the universe

While there have previously been signs of other stars gnawing on planets and their digestive effects, this is the first time the swallow itself has been observed, according to a study published in the journal Nature.

MIT researcher Kishalay De spotted the flash of light in 2020 while viewing sky images taken by Caltech’s Palomar Observatory. It took more observations and data processing to unravel the mystery: instead of a star swallowing its companion star, this star swallowed its planet.

Considering a star’s lifespan is billions of years, the ingestion itself was fairly short—essentially in one fell swoop, said Caltech’s Mansi Kasliwal, who participated in the study.

The findings are “very plausible,” said Carol Haswell, an astrophysicist at the British Open University who was not involved in the study. In 2010, Haswell led a team that used the Hubble Space Telescope to identify the star WASP-12 in the process of eating its planet.

“It’s a different kind of food. This star swallowed an entire planet in one gulp,” Haswell wrote in an email. “In contrast, WASP-12 b and other hot Jupiters we’ve previously studied lick and bite delicately.”

Astronomers don’t know if there are more planets orbiting this star at a safer distance. If so, De said, they could have thousands of years before they become second- or third-year stars.

Now that they know what to look for, explorers will look for new space gulps. They suspect that thousands of planets around other stars will suffer the same fate as this one, and ultimately our solar system.

“Everything that we see around us, everything that we have built around ourselves, will disappear in the blink of an eye,” De said.

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The Associated Press Department of Health and Science receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Science and Education Media Group. AP is solely responsible for all content.

SCIENCE

NYPD investigating possible meteorite impact on home

Published

15 hours ago

May 9, 2023

Jan Topete

Police in Hopewell, New Jersey, are trying to determine if the rock that hit the house on Monday came from space.

A press release from the Hopewell Township Police Department says a metal object believed to be a meteorite crashed into the roof of a house at the Pennington Road junction in Old Washington.

People were inside the house when a 4″ x 6″ “oblong” metal object hit the roof, then the ceiling, then hit the wooden floor and stopped.

A suspected meteorite crashed into a house in Hopewell, New Jersey on Monday. (Hopewell Township Police Department)

The department added that no one was hurt when the object crashed into the house.

KANSAS NIGHT SKY LIGHTED BY ‘LITTLE METEOR SWIMMING’

Photographs of the facility provided by police show damage done to a wooden floor next to a possible space rock.

Investigators from the department contacted other agencies to determine what the facility was and to help ensure the safety of residents and the facility.

Possible space rock that crashed into a house in New Jersey

Police in Hopewell, New Jersey, believe a meteorite hit the house on Monday. (Hopewell Township Police Department)

Police also said the object could be linked to the Eta Aquariids meteor shower.

NASA CONFIRMS A HALF-TONNEL METEOR KILLED IN SOUTH TEXAS

According to Space.com, the meteor shower is active from April 15 to May 27, and peaks between May 5 and May 6.

At its peak and under clear skies, observers could see about 50 meteors streak across the sky per hour.

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The American Meteor Society also reported that meteors travel at about 41 miles per second.

Greg Vener is a breaking news reporter for Fox News Digital.

SCIENCE

Cedars-Sinai lays off over 100 employees

Published

16 hours ago

May 9, 2023

Jan Topete

Cedars-Sinai Medical Center to Close over 100 Employees, including pharmacists, administrative support staff, patient support representatives and management personnel, in a move the hospital said was necessary to cut costs as it faces a “difficult financial situation”.

The workers being laid off are not unionized, the hospital told government officials in a legally binding notice that lists dozens of different categories of employees affected by the layoffs. The reduction is less than 1% of the workforce at Cedars-Sinai facilities and primarily affects “non-residential positions”, according to a Cedars-Sinai spokesperson.

In a statement, the hospital blamed the growing gap between its income and expenses “as a result of underpayments from government insurance programs and rising costs of patient care, among other factors.”

“We understand that these changes are difficult and painful, and we have done everything possible to avoid them,” Cedars-Sinai said in a statement.

The layoffs will affect 131 employees at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, a spokesman said, down from the numbers the hospital originally told the state. Cedars-Sinai has also laid off about two dozen employees at other companies associated with Cedars-Sinai.

The Cedars-Sinai layoffs come as industry groups raised concerns about the financial health of California hospitals amid rising labor and supplies costs. Hospital systems across the country were announcement of layoffs this year, citing pressure from rising costs.

Madera Community Hospital closed this winter in the San Joaquin Valley; In Los Angeles County, Beverly Montebello Hospital recently filed for bankruptcy protection, saying it is trying to avoid the same fate, and previously announced it would no longer assist births in its maternity ward or admit babies for inpatient care.

However, the cuts at Cedars-Sinai are far more modest in scope for a large employer, “not a signal that the hospital is in trouble,” said Glenn Melnick, a USC professor who specializes in health finance. Melnick said that as hospitals anticipate further increases in labor costs and grapple with losses in the stock market, “prudent places are adjusting early.”

Rand Corp Economist Christopher Whaley described the Cedars-Sinai contraction as “a normal fluctuation, not something that I think is indicative of a bigger problem” with finances.

California lawmakers decided this week to offer a lifeline to hardest-hit hospitals to prevent them from shutting down by voting in a $150 million loan to financially struggling nonprofit and public hospitals. California Hospital Assn. is pushing for a much larger injection of $1.5 billion into the upcoming state budget, but lawmakers are also facing a projected budget deficit of $22.5 billion.

SCIENCE

News Brief: US counts old growth forests, Canadian scientists march for higher wages, and condor dung reveals ancient history of birds | The science

Published

17 hours ago

May 9, 2023

Jan Topete

FOREST ECOLOGY

US increased the number of old forests

Last year, President Joe Biden surprised forest scientists by ordering an Earth Day inventory of state holdings of mature and old-growth forests. This sparked a fight from the US Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management to create a formal definition of what constitutes “mature” and “old growth” forests and apply those definitions to millions of hectares. Meeting the April 22 deadline last month, the agencies released their findings in a report noting that of the nearly 72 million hectares of forest they manage, 45% are mature and 18% are old-growth. Figures that exceed estimates published by non-federal researchers include 9 million hectares of pine-juniper forest (pictured here in Utah), a type of forest rarely previously classified as old-growth. The report’s findings are likely to spark a heated debate on how to manage old forests and make them resilient to climate change.

SCIENTIFIC SECURITY

The chemist received house arrest

United States District Judge Last week, former Harvard University chemist Charles Lieber was sentenced. to 6 months house arrest and fined $50,000 for lying to federal agencies about his dealings with a Chinese university and failing to report payments from it. The ruling ended the most notorious case of about two dozen recent prosecutions of American academic scientists with research ties to China. In December 2021, Lieber’s connections with Wuhan University of Technology led to his conviction in court. Prosecutors have asked for a 90-day jail sentence and a $150,000 fine for 64-year-old Lieber, who has terminal blood cancer and left Harvard earlier this year. His lawyers requested that he not be sentenced to prison due to his poor health. The case was initiated by the Chinese government, aimed at curbing economic espionage by the US rival. The campaign was renamed last year to clarify that it applies to cancerous subjects from anywhere in the world. The government has a controversial reputation for harassing academics; several were acquitted or had their cases dismissed, while several were found guilty of offenses similar to Lieber’s and sentenced to prison.

MARINE BIOLOGY

unknown underwater

Scientists suspect they have described less than 10% of the marine species on Earth. To learn more about the ocean’s remaining inhabitants, researchers, businesses and philanthropists have teamed up to identify some 100,000 new sea creatures from an estimated 2 million as yet unidentified species over the next decade. V ocean census, launched last week, will combine DNA sequencing with machine learning to create a kind of cyber-taxonomy, classifying organisms collected on expeditions across the world’s seas. The results could help conservation and give scientists a better understanding of the role marine life plays in oxygen and food production, and in the carbon cycle. With financial support from the Nippon Foundation, Japan’s largest philanthropic organization, the British Institute of Marine Science and Conservation, called Nekton, will coordinate the collection of ships, divers, submarines and deep-sea robots. Ocean Census will make its data, along with 3D digital images of all new species, available to both researchers and the public. With the disappearance of corals, sharks and other marine species in recent decades, “we are in a race against time,” says project leader Alex Rogers, a marine biologist at the University of Oxford.

PALEONTOLOGY

Welsh fossils highlight early life

This 462-million-year-old fossil represents a new species, a clam-like creature with long appendages.JOE BOTTING

In Wales, paleontologists have discovered a rich source of 462-million-year-old fossils that show a greater match than expected between animals that evolved in the Cambrian explosion 40 million years ago and the ancestors of modern species. The researchers thought these ancestors had replaced the Cambrian creatures, but the new site – a small quarry in a sheep field – shows a much more gradual transition, say Jo Botting and Lucy Muir of the Amgedfa Simru National Museum in Wales. Among the many fossils, the couple cataloged 170 marine species, including glass sponges, crustaceans called horseshoe shrimp, and six-legged arthropods that may have given rise to insects. Nearly all of the animals are tiny, many ranging from the size of a sesame seed to a pencil eraser, and their soft bodies are perfectly preserved, giving insight into what they ate and how they lived, the research team reports this week in Ecology of nature and evolution. The quarry, according to Julien Kimmig, a paleontologist at the Karlsruhe State Museum of Natural History, who was not involved in the work, “could certainly be as famous” as the famous Burgess Shale in Canada, a rich source of Cambrian fossils from 500 million years ago.

EDUCATION

Indian classes got rid of Darwin

Scientists in India are protesting the decision to exclude discussion of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution from the textbooks used by millions of ninth and tenth graders. More than 4,000 people have signed a petition from the Society for Breakthrough Sciences to recover the material. The non-profit advocacy group for science reports that the National Council for Educational Research and Training, an autonomous government group that sets curricula for India’s 256 million primary and secondary school students, has dropped the theme as part of a “content rationalization” process. The removal “distorts the idea of a comprehensive secondary education,” says evolutionary biologist Amitabh Joshi of the Jawaharlal Nehru Center for Advanced Science. Others fear it indicates a growing interest in pseudoscience among Indian officials and see it as unlikely that NCERT will back down.

SCIENCE POLICY

EU trial defense fund blown up

The European Union was ill-prepared to increase funding for defense research report published last week own financial supervisory authority. Between 2017 and 2019, the EU spent around €90m on 18 projects under the Defense Research Preparatory Action, a fund designed to “pave the way” for the much larger €8bn European Defense Fund, which began operations in 2021 and will last until 2027. But the European Audit Chamber report says the previous pilot fund did not fully function as a “test bed” for the larger program as projects were shelved and made “limited progress”. The auditors also warned that the European Commission is too understaffed to cope with rising spending on defense research.

ECOLOGY

Condor feces reveal their history

Andean condor nests hold a messy archive of their diet going back thousands of years.JACK DIKING/NPL/MINDEN PICTURES

To find out how the Andean condor’s diet has changed over millennia of environmental change, researchers climbed a cliff in Argentina’s Patagonia region to collect samples of bird droppings from a donut-shaped mound. Based on radiocarbon dating and other clues, scientists have found that condors have nested on this slope for about 2,200 years. However, guano has shown that between about 300 and 1300 AD. Andean condors became scarce as ash from nearby volcanic eruptions covered the landscape and killed the animals whose carcasses they hunted. The scientists also learned that the careers of condors have changed over the years. Traces of llama DNA predominate in older layers of guano deposits, while introduced sheep and cattle are more visible in more recent layers. The researchers say the findings illustrate the value of studying long-term nesting sites for reconstructing a species’ ecological history.

SCIENCE COMMUNITY

Demand for Canadian PhDs on the rise

Thousands of scientists across Canada left work May 1 to protest against the low wages of graduate and doctoral students. Sarah Laframboise, Doctor of Biochemistry, University of Ottawa, at an event on Canada’s Parliament Hill. A student and executive director of the grassroots organization Support Our Science cited a study that found 86% of graduate students were stressed and worried about their finances. The organization behind the one-day protest is asking the federal government to increase pay for graduate and postdoc students, who are funded by federal scholarships and fellowships. In August 2022, he sent an open letter to the government asking for more investment in the next generation of scientists. But there were no such changes in this year’s federal budget, released in March.