First JWST images of Orion Nebula released

The inner region of the Orion Nebula as seen by the James Webb Space Telescope’s NIRCam instrument.
Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, Data reduction and analysis: PDRs4All ERS Team; graphical processing S. Fuenmayor

An international research team including University of Michigan researchers has just revealed the first images of the Orion Nebula, the richest and closest star nursery in the solar system, captured by the James Webb Space Telescope.

Located in the constellation of Orion, 1,350 light years from Earth, the Orion Nebula is an area rich in matter where many stars are formed. Its environment is similar to the environment in which our solar system was born more than 4.5 billion years ago. Studying allows researchers to understand the conditions in which our solar system formed.

“Orion Bar is a prototype region for processes that occur throughout our galaxy and the universe as stars continually irradiate nearby material,” said Felipe Alarcon, U-M graduate student and member of the international group. “This amazing picture will be a template image.”

The heart of star nurseries, such as the Orion Nebula, is obscured by large amounts of dust—impossible to observe in visible light with telescopes such as the Hubble Space Telescope. The JWST observes the infrared light of the cosmos, penetrating these layers of dust.

The image reveals many spectacular structures, down to scales of about 40 astronomical units, or about the size of our solar system. These structures include a number of dense filaments of matter, which could launch the birth of a new generation of stars. The image also reveals forming stellar systems. These consist of a central proto-star surrounded by a disc of dust and gas inside which planets form.

Dark Energy Camera Captures Bright, Young Stars Blazing Inside Glowing Nebula

NOIRLab, captures the star-forming nebula NGC 6357, which is located 8000 light-years away in the direction of the constellation Scorpius.
Hi-Res Zoomable Image
Credit: CTIO/NOIRLab/DOE/NSF/AURA  T.A. Rector (University of Alaska Anchorage/NSF’s NOIRLab), J. Miller (Gemini Observatory/NSF’s NOIRLab), M. Zamani & D. de Martin (NSF’s NOIRLab)

The 570-megapixel US Department of Energy-fabricated Dark Energy Camera at NOIRLab’s Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile is one of the most powerful tools in astronomy and astrophysics. To commemorate its first decade of discovery and exploration, NOIRLab has released a stunning image of the Lobster Nebula, a brilliant star-forming region located 8000 light-years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Scorpius. The image was unveiled at a conference highlighting DECam’s breakthrough science results.

The Dark Energy Camera (DECam) mounted on the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, a Program of NSF’s NOIRLab, is celebrating 10 years as one of the highest-performance, wide-field CCD imagers in the world.

To help commemorate DECam’s first decade of operation, NOIRLab has released a breathtaking image of the star-forming Lobster Nebula (NGC 6357), which is located about 8000 light-years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Scorpius. This image reveals bright, young stars surrounded by billowing clouds of dust and gas.

Mothers Influence Gut Microbial Development in Wild Primates

A baby gelada foraging in Simien Mountains National Park in Ethiopia. Their early-life gut microbiome, from infancy through first years of life, are shown to be influenced by bacteria likely passed down from mom.
Credit: Sharmi Sen

The bacteria that reside in the human gut (“the gut microbiome”) are known to play beneficial and harmful roles in human health. Because these bacteria are transmitted through milk, mothers can directly impact the composition of bacteria that their offspring harbor, potentially giving moms another pathway to influence their infant’s future development and health. A study of wild geladas (a non-human primate that lives in Ethiopia) provides the first evidence of clear and significant maternal effects on the gut microbiome both before and after weaning in a wild mammal. This finding, published in Current Biology, suggests the impact of mothers on the offspring gut microbiome community extends far beyond when the infant has stopped nursing.

A research team co-led by Stony Brook University anthropologist Amy Lu, and biologists Alice Baniel and Noah Snyder-Mackler at Arizona State University, came to this conclusion by analyzing one of the largest datasets on gut microbiome development in a wild mammal.

“Early life gut microbial development is known to have a large impact on later life health in humans and other model organisms,” said Lu, associate professor in the Department of Anthropology in the College of Arts and Sciences at Stony Brook University. “Now we have solid evidence that mothers can influence this process, both before and after weaning. Although we’re not 100% certain how mothers do this, one possible explanation is that they transfer specific bacteria to their offspring.”

FSU researcher finds forest canopies are warmer than previously thought

 

Stephanie Pau, an associate professor in the Department of Geography.
Source: Florida State University

A study by a Florida State University researcher finds that temperatures in forest canopies are higher than previous estimates, threatening forests’ vital role in mitigating global warming.

Stephanie Pau, an associate professor in the Department of Geography, was part of a team whose study was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Pau said leaves have optimal temperatures at which they capture carbon from the atmosphere. And as carbon dioxide fuels rising global temperatures, forests remain the most important part of the carbon cycle on land, she said.

“The implications of our study are that with greater warming in the future, tree canopies will not cool as much as we thought they would, and this means they may sequester less carbon from the atmosphere.”

She added: “Global temperatures that are livable for us are very closely tied to how much carbon dioxide forests can remove from the atmosphere.”

The study included the use of cutting-edge thermal camera monitoring technology that measured temperatures every five minutes across a network of sites. While it’s long been known that leaf temperatures often differ from air temperatures, the bulk of previous studies came from experiments on individual leaves.

Healthy rivers, healthy people

A new Stanford University-led study in Costa Rica reveals that restoring relatively narrow strips of riverfront forests could substantially improve regional water quality and carbon storage. The analysis, available online and set to be published in the October issue of Ecosystem Services, shows that such buffers tend to be most beneficial in steep, erosion-prone, and intensively fertilized landscapes – a finding that could inform similar efforts in other countries.

“Forests around rivers are key places to target for restoration because they provide huge benefits with very little impediment to productive land,” said study lead author Kelley Langhans, a PhD student in biology at Stanford University affiliated with the Natural Capital Project. “A small investment could have a really big impact on the health of people and ecosystems.”

Unleashing potential

Vegetated areas adjacent to rivers and streams absorb harmful pollutants in runoff, keeping them out of waterways. Creating effective policies to safeguard these riparian buffers and prioritizing where to implement them is a challenge in part because of a lack of data quantifying the impact of restoring such areas. The researchers, in partnership with officials from Costa Rica’s Ministry of Environment and Energy, Central Bank, and PRIAS Laboratory, analyzed one such policy – Costa Rica’s Forest Law 7575. Passed in 1996 and unevenly enforced since then, the law mandates protection of forested riverfront strips 10 meters (about 33 feet) to 50 meters (about 164 feet) wide.

Through the quantum looking glass

Green laser light illuminates a metasurface that is a hundred times thinner than paper, that was fabricated at the Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies. CINT is jointly operated by Sandia and Los Alamos national laboratories for the Department of Energy Office of Science.
Photo credit: Craig Fritz

An ultrathin invention could make future computing, sensing and encryption technologies remarkably smaller and more powerful by helping scientists control a strange but useful phenomenon of quantum mechanics, according to new research recently published in the journal Science.

Scientists at Sandia National Laboratories and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light have reported on a device that could replace a roomful of equipment to link photons in a bizarre quantum effect called entanglement. This device — a kind of nano-engineered material called a metasurface — paves the way for entangling photons in complex ways that have not been possible with compact technologies.

When scientists say photons are entangled, they mean they are linked in such a way that actions on one affect the other, no matter where or how far apart the photons are in the universe. It is an effect of quantum mechanics, the laws of physics that govern particles and other very tiny things.

Although the phenomenon might seem odd, scientists have harnessed it to process information in new ways. For example, entanglement helps protect delicate quantum information and correct errors in quantum computing, a field that could someday have sweeping impacts in national security, science and finance. Entanglement also enables new, advanced encryption methods for secure communication.

Surfaces inspired by nature from the 3D printer

The structure of the surface of its wings gives the morpho butterfly its blue color.
 Credit: Pixabay, Garoch

Using laser radiation, researchers can print tiny structures with the highest precision. A method to imitate the superpowers of animals and plants and to make them accessible to technology.

In order to survive even in extreme habitats, many animals and plants have developed skills in the course of evolution that are only known from superheroes from films. They are mostly based on the extraordinary properties of their surfaces. The imitation of these properties holds great potential for technology to develop new products or to solve technical problems. A research team from Bochum and Kiel has succeeded in imitating the structural color of the famous blue Morpho butterflies using high-precision 3D printing technology. The researchers report on their findings on the so-called two-photon polymerization, or 2PP for short, in the Journal of Optical Microsystems from 2nd. September 2022.

Researchers from the Chair of Laser Application Technology at the Ruhr University Bochum (RUB) led by Prof. Dr. Andreas Ostendorf and Prof. Dr. Cemal Esen and the working group "Functional Morphology and Biomechanics" of the Christian-Albrechts-University in Kiel (CAU) by Prof. Dr. Stanislav Gorb involved.

A thousand days of CHEOPS

Artist's impression of CHEOPS
Credit: ESA / ATG medialab

After a thousand days in orbit, the CHEOPS space telescope shows almost no signs of wear. Under these conditions, it could continue to reveal details of some of the most fascinating exoplanets for quite some time. CHEOPS is a joint mission by the European Space Agency (ESA) and Switzerland, under the aegis of the University of Bern in collaboration with the University of Geneva.

Since its launch from Europe's Spaceport in French Guiana, on December 18th, 2019, the CHEOPS telescope in Earth’s orbit has demonstrated its functionality and precision beyond expectations. During this time, it has revealed the characteristics of numerous fascinating planets beyond our Solar System (exoplanets) and has become a key instrument for astronomers in Europe and worldwide.

Planting trees is not always an effective way of binding carbon dioxide

Test site where extra carbon dioxide is emitted to the air and the biomass growth is measured in the plants.
Photo credit: Louise C Andresen

Tree-planting has been widely seen as an effective way of binding carbon as carbon dioxide levels rise in the atmosphere. But now researchers from the University of Gothenburg and elsewhere are warning that forests on nutrient-poor land won’t be an additional carbon sink in the long term. As forests age, their uptake of CO2 declines and, each time forests are planted, there is a risk of additional carbon being released from the soil.

The capacity of plants to bind carbon is a key factor in calculating the effects of climate change as carbon dioxide levels rise in the atmosphere.

Scientists have now measured how much biomass grows under air with elevated CO2 concentrations in several long-term field experiments. Growth stimulation was poor or missing when the plants lived in poor soil, in some cases after only ten years.

“The total biomass that binds carbon was not stimulated more by the elevated CO2 levels in our experiments over time. Exactly when growth slowed down depended on various factors, but one important one was how much nitrogen the soil contained,” says Louise Andresen, a researcher at the University of Gothenburg.

Agriculture drives over 90% of deforestation in the tropics

Recently destroyed cattle pasture
Credit: Chalmers University of Technology, Toby Gardner

A new study published in leading journal, Science, finds that between 90 and 99 percent of all deforestation in the tropics is driven directly or indirectly by agriculture. Yet only half to two-thirds of this results in the expansion of active agricultural production on the deforested land.

The study is a collaboration between many of the world’s leading deforestation experts and provides a new synthesis of the complex connections between deforestation and agriculture, and what this means for current efforts to drive down forest loss.

Following a review of the best available data, the new study shows that the amount of tropical deforestation driven by agriculture is higher than 80 percent, the most commonly cited number for the past decade.

This comes at a crucial time following the Glasgow Declaration on Forests at COP26 and ahead of the UN Biodiversity Conference (COP15) later this year and can help ensure that urgent efforts to tackle deforestation are guided and evaluated by an evidence base fit for purpose.

“Our review makes clear that between 90 and 99 percent of all deforestation in the tropics is driven directly or indirectly by agriculture. But what surprised us was that a comparatively smaller share of the deforestation – between 45 and 65 percent –​​ results in the expansion of actual agricultural production on the deforested land. This finding is of profound importance for designing effective measures to reduce deforestation and promote sustainable rural development”, says Florence Pendrill, lead author of the study at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden.