Tag: science

Sunspot update: Maybe solar maximum isn’t over?

9:15 am

The uncertainty of science! It is time for another sunspot update. It is also time to note that once again the Sun appears to be confounding the predictions of NOAA’s solar science panel. Below is NOAA’s monthly graph of the sunspot activity on the Earth-facing hemisphere, updated by NOAA to include the activity in January but annotated with extra information by me to illustrate the larger scientific context.

Since April 2025 that science panel has been predicting that the solar maximum has passed and the Sun was beginning the ramp down to solar minimum, now expected to occur around 2031-32. And in the ten months since, sunspot activity has appeared to more or less track that prediction, as indicated by the purple/magenta curve line on the graph below.

It now appears that this prediction might very well have been premature.
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Comet K1/Atlas has broken apart, not interstellar Comet 3I/Atlas

10:37 am

the end of Comet K1/Atlas

CORRECTION: The image to the right is not that of interstellar Comet 3I/Atlas, as I reported earlier today. I misread the Gemini Telescope release. This is comet K1/Atlas, another comet from our own solar system that made its close approach to the Sun in October, when it broke up.

The the latest image from the Gemini North Telescope in Hawaii shows at least four sections slowly drifting apart.

The picture to the right, cropped to post here, was taken on December 6, 2025. Gemini’s previous image, taken in November 11th, shows about the same number of objects, but clustered much more closely together.

It appears that as the comet made its closest approach, the stress was too great. This is not surprising, as it happens to many comets that get too close to the Sun.

Sorry for the error and hat tip to reader Tom Laskowski for letting me know. I need to look at the names of comets named after the ATLAS telescope, as they are very similar and most are NOT interstellar comet 3I/Atlas.

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Pluto’s mountains of ice surrounded by a sea of frozen nitrogen

2:18 pm

Ice mountains floating in nitrogen sea on Pluto
Click for original image.

Cool image time! Though we only have a limited archive of high resolution pictures of Pluto that were taken when New Horizons did its close fly-by of the planet in July 2015, it is worthwhile sometimes to take a second look at some of those images. The picture to the right, cropped and annotated to post here, was taken during that July 14, 2015 fly-by, and shows a mountainous region dubbed Al-Idrisi Montes on the shore of a white frozen ocean. The red dotted line indicates a large trench that separates the Al-Idrisi mountains from the mountainous region to the west.

Sounds similar to an arctic shoreline here on Earth, doesn’t it? Not in the least. Those mountains, ranging from 600 to 9,000 feet high, are made of frozen ice, which on Pluto are as hard as granite due to the endless cold. And the white frozen ocean is frozen nitrogen, broken into polygon shaped blocks. Even stranger: those ice mountains might even be floating in that nitrogen sea! A paper from 2019 [pdf] looked at the New Horizons data and concluded as follows:

Evidence suggests that the Al-Idrisi mountains may have been uplifted by the formation of
the western trench feature. Solid state convection appears to be our best supposition as to how the Al-Idrisi Montes reached their heights.

In other words, as that large trench/depression formed, convection (the bubbles you see when you simmer tomato sauce) pushed these mountains of ice upward to float above the “sea level” of that nitrogen sea.

At least, that’s one hypothesis. The scientists who wrote this paper admit their “our hypothesis still remains in need of study and this trench-mountain system warrants serious further research.” In other words, we simply don’t know enough to have a definitive understanding of the geology of this extremely alien planet.

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Saturn’s rings with two of its moons perfectly aligned

2:30 pm

Two of Saturn's moons above its rings
Click for original image.

Cool image time! Rather than posting another Mars orbital image, I decided today to delve into the archive of pictures taken by the Cassini orbiter during the thirteen years it circled Saturn, from 2004 until 2017. The picture to the right, cropped to post here, was released on December 14, 2015, and is just one example of the many breath-taking photographs that the Cassini science team took during that mission. From the caption:

Like a cosmic bull’s-eye, Enceladus and Tethys line up almost perfectly for Cassini’s cameras. Since the two moons are not only aligned, but also at relatively similar distances from Cassini, the apparent sizes in this image are a good approximation of the relative sizes of Enceladus (313 miles across) and Tethys (660 miles across).

This view looks toward the un-illuminated side of the rings from 0.34 degrees below the ring plane. The image was taken in red light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Sept. 24, 2015.

The image was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.3 million miles from Enceladus. Image scale on Enceladus is 7 miles per pixel. Tethys was at a distance of 1.6 million miles with a pixel scale of 10 miles per pixel.

Enceladus is in the foreground, and is the planet that has what scientists have labeled tiger stripe fractures that vent water and other material, including carbon molecules.

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Astronomers discover a “surprisingly mature” cluster of galaxies in early universe

11:18 am

Proto galaxy cluster
Click for original image.

The uncertainty of science strikes again! Astronomers using both the Webb Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory now think they have discovered a just-forming protocluster of galaxies only one billion years after the Big Bang, when such galaxy clusters should not yet exist.

You can read their paper here [pdf]. The image to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, shows the Webb infrared data as the background of stars and galaxies, with the galaxies thought to be part of this protocluster circled. The blue cloud is Chandra’s X-ray data. From the press release:

The Chandra and Webb data reveal that JADES-ID1 contains the two properties that confirm the presence of a protocluster: a large number of galaxies held together by gravity (Webb sees at least 66 potential members) that are also sitting in a huge cloud of hot gas (detected by Chandra). As a galaxy cluster forms, gas falls inward and is heated by shock waves, reaching temperatures of millions of degrees and glowing in X-rays.

What makes JADES-ID1 exceptional is the remarkably early time when it appears in cosmic history. Most models of the universe predict that there likely would not be enough time and a large enough density of galaxies for a protocluster of this size to form only a billion years after the big bang. The previous record holder for a protocluster with X-ray emission is seen much later, about three billion years after the big bang.

It increasingly appears that there are aspects of the universe we simply do not yet understand, which in turn make our theories of its birth and formation either incomplete or invalid. Those theories might be right in principle, but the data suggests they are wrong in detail.

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Webb finds another unexpected galaxy in the very early universe

9:25 am

Unexpected galaxy
Click for original image.

The uncertainty of science: Using the Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have discovered another galaxy in the very early universe that appears too bright and developed for it to even exist so soon after the Big Bang.

MoM-z14 is one of a growing group of surprisingly bright galaxies in the early universe – 100 times more than theoretical studies predicted before the launch of Webb, according to the research team. “There is a growing chasm between theory and observation related to the early universe, which presents compelling questions to be explored going forward,” said Jacob Shen, a postdoctoral researcher at MIT and a member of the research team.

…With galaxy MoM-z14 existing only 280 million years after the big bang, there was not enough time for generations of stars to produce such high amounts of nitrogen in the way that astronomers would expect. One theory the researchers note is that the dense environment of the early universe resulted in supermassive stars capable of producing more nitrogen than any stars observed in the local universe.

All theories about the Big Bang and the early universe did not predict the existence of this galaxy, or a bunch of others that Webb has now detected.

The false color infrared Webb image is to the right, cropped and reduced to post here. The full image covered a much larger area, so this tiny galaxy was not easy to find. Scientists identified it by the very high red shift of its light, due to the expansion of the universe and it being so far away. That expansion away from us causes the wavelengths of its light to stretch into the infrared so that only Webb can see it.

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Scientists produce new estimate of the thickness of Europa’s icy crust

5:23 pm

Europa in true color
Europa in true color, taken by Juno during that
September 2022 fly-by. Click for full image.

Using data produced by Juno during a 2022 close-fly of Jupiter’s moon Europa, scientists have made a new estimate of the thickness of Europa’s icy crust, approximately 18 miles thick with a 6-mile margin of error.

In other words, their estimate could be as small as 12 miles thick, or as large as 24 miles thick.

You can read their paper here. From their abstract:

For the idealized case of pure water ice, the data are consistent with the existence of a thermally conductive ice shell with a thickness of 29 ± 10 km [18 ± 6 miles] and with the presence of cracks, pores or other scatterers extending to depths of hundreds of metres below the surface with a characteristic size smaller than a few centimetres in radius. An ice-shell salinity of 15 mg kg−1, as indicated by models based on terrestrial marine ice, would reduce our estimate of the thickness of the ice shell by about 5 km, substantially less than our 10 km uncertainty. The low volume fraction, small size and shallow depth of the scatterers indicate that the fracture interfaces observed at Europa’s surface are alone unlikely to be capable of carrying nutrients between the surface and the ocean. [emphasi mine]

The highlighted sentence is the important one. If this new estimate is right, than the unidentified reddish material that appears to leak out of the long ridgelike cracks on Europa’s surface, clearly visible in the picture to the right, are not coming from any underground ocean. The distances are too large.

Other estimates have suggested that ice crust could be as thin as 2 miles, but like this research the uncertainties are very large.

Meanwhile, the Juno mission is still alive, though essentially winding down operations. The mission was expected to officially end at the end of September 2025, when its budget ran out, but the just passed budget included enough money to keep it going, albeit at a relatively low level. According to the orbiter’s webpage, it will continue to orbit Jupiter, its orbit degrading naturally until it falls into Jupiter to burn up. As it does so data will continue to be collected, though at a much lower rate.

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Windswept Martian volcanic ash?

2:35 pm

Volcanic ash on Mars?
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on November 30, 2025 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

The science team labels this simply as “Features,” the vagueness of which I can understand after digging in to get a better idea of the location and geography.

The location, as shown by the white dot on the overview map below, is inside the Medusa Fossae Formation, the largest volcanic ash field on Mars that is thought to be the source of much of the red planet’s dust. That ash field is large and very deep, and was put down more than a billion years ago when the giant volcanoes of Mars were active and erupting. Thus it is well layered, and many images of that ash field show that layering exposed by the eons of Martian wind scouring its surface.

In this case, that scouring appears to have produced this feathery surface, though the origin of those ridges might have instead come from volcanic flows that are now hardened. Or we could be looking at ancient channels produced by ice or water, though that would have to have been a very long time ago, as this image is located in the Martian dry tropics, where no near surface ice presently exists.
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Astronomers use AI to discover hundreds of weird galaxies in Hubble archive

10:23 am

Weird galaxies in the Hubble archive, found with AI
Click for original image.

In what is a perfect example of the proper use of artificial computer intelligence (AI), astronomers have now used this programming to analyze almost 100 million images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope over the decades to find any galaxies hidden there that have “anomalies” or unusual shapes.

The team analyzed nearly 100 million image cutouts from the Hubble Legacy Archive, each measuring just a few dozen pixels (7 to 8 arcseconds) on a side. They identified more than 1,300 objects with an odd appearance in just two and a half days — more than 800 of which had never been documented in scientific literature.

The six galaxies to the right are just a small sample. All six were previously unidentified, and include “three lenses with arcs distorted by gravity, one galactic merger, one ring galaxy, and one galaxy that defied classification” (the galaxy at the top left). From the European Space Agency’s (ESA) press release:

The strange, bi-polar galaxy seen here is certainly anomalous, with its compact, swirling core and two open lobes at the sides. Exactly what kind of galaxy it is is unclear, and it was not previously known to astronomers.

As noted in the first link, the volume of data that astronomers are now collecting from ground-based and orbiting telescopes — many of which are survey telescopes that photograph the entire sky repeatedly — has actually become a problem. They have great data, but don’t have the time or human resources to study it sufficiently. Even employing large numbers of ordinary citizens, working at home with their own computers, can’t get the job done.

This is the kind of grunt work that AI is ideally made for. It can quickly review the data and identify objects that don’t fit normal expectations. Humans then can do the real work, finding the most interesting of these strange objects, such as the top left galaxy, and devote human creativity to studying it.

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“AI isn’t getting smarter. We are getting dumber.”

2:20 pm

Link here. The point the op-ed makes is fundamental: AI cannot add anything to the information it has. It might be able to compile that information well, but its analysis is always going to be limited because it has no true creative spirit. It is merely a software program, albeit a very sophisticated one.

This quote from the essay will give you the sense:

Maybe you just use AI to clarify your thoughts. Turn the mottle of ideas in your head into coherent communicable paragraphs. It’s OK, you say, because you’re reviewing the results, and often editing the output. You’re ending up with exactly what you want to say, just in a form and style that’s better than any way you could have put it yourself.

But is what you end up with really your thoughts? And what if everyone started doing that?

Stripping the novelty and personality out of all communication; turning every one of our interactions into homogeneous robotic engagements? Every birthday greeting becomes akin to a printed hallmark card. Every eulogy turns into a stamp-card sentiment. Every email follows the auto-response template suggested by the browser.

We do this long enough and eventually we begin to lose the ability to communicate our inner thoughts to others. Our minds start to think in terms of LLM prompts. All I need is the gist of what I want to say, and the system fills in the blanks. [emphasis in original]

Comments are of course welcome. But please read the full essay before doing so.

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Dragonfly’s rotors complete testing

12:07 pm

According to a press release yesterday from the Applied Physics Lab (APL) in Maryland that is building the Dragonfly helicopter that is going to Saturn’s moon Titan, the rotors have completed the first round of testing, and are now about to undergo “fatigue and cryogenic trials under simulated Titan conditions.”

Over five weeks, from August into September, the team evaluated the performance of Dragonfly’s rotor system — which provides the lift for the lander to fly and enables it to maneuver — in Titan-like conditions, looking at aeromechanical performance factors such as stress on the rotor arms, and effects of vibration on the rotor blades and lander body. In late December, the team also wrapped up a set of aerodynamics tests on smaller-scale Dragonfly rotor models in the TDT [Transonic Dynamics Tunnel].

This quote about the manufacture of the rotors however stood out the most:

Pennington and team cut Dragonfly’s first rotors on Nov. 1, 2024. They refined the process as they went: starting with waterjet paring of 1,000-pound aluminum blocks, followed by rough machining, cover fitting, vent-hole drilling, and hole-threading. After an inspection, the parts were cleaned, sent out for welding, and returned for final finishing.

“We didn’t have time or materials to make test parts or extras, so every cut had to be right the first time,” Pennington said, adding that the team also had to find special tools and equipment to accommodate some material changes and design tweaks. [emphasis mine]

In other words, this is another hardware-poor NASA project. What they build is what they have. No time or money for testing of prototypes.

This mission is really pushing the envelope, possibly more than any NASA planetary probe in a half century. I just hope they get it right.

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New gullies on Mars?

12:08 pm

Fresh gullies on Mars?
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken on November 6, 2025 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

The science team labels this image “Fresh-Looking Gullies.” It was clearly taken to study the gullies flowing down the north interior crater wall of this 4.4 mile-wide unnamed crater, about 1,500 feet deep.

What causes these gullies remains an open question. They are found in many places in the Martian mid-latitudes. When first discovered scientists thought they might be related to the sublimation of underground ice. More recent research suggests they are formed by the seasonal dry ice frost cycle that in the high latitudes has carbon dioxide condense to fall as snow in autumn and then sublimate away in the spring.
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