Category: 7. Science

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The following questions appeared in my email inbox this morning, as I woke up for my routine 3-mile jog at sunrise. I list them below along with my answers, since some of them reiterated what dozens of podcasters and interviewers asked me over the past few days.

Question:

“Dr Loeb,

I’ve been following your work since the discovery of 1I/`Oumuamua, and am thoroughly impressed with your dedication to this subject. The discovery of 3I/Atlas is of particular interest, and I wonder if you might answer a question regarding it?

You mentioned, in several of the interviews I’ve watched, that 3I/Atlas will be obscured from our view by the sun at the end of October. If the object is in fact technological in nature, you speculated that it could take advantage of this by potentially changing course and heading toward Earth. Based on the object’s diameter (20 kilometers), velocity (60 km/sec) and angular momentum, how large of an angular momentum impulse would be needed to redirect 3I/Atlas toward Earth while keeping it hidden from observation?

I assume this requires an extraordinary amount of torque to accomplish this task given its current velocity. If the object slows too much, doesn’t it risk being captured in a solar orbit?

Thanks in advance for your reply. I want to commend you on your courage to entertain this hypothesis in the face of criticism from colleagues. Statistically speaking, it seems impossible that we are alone in the universe, or even the Milky Way. Current assumptions that “everything in space is a rock” seem counterproductive and potentially dangerous in our quest for objective truth. Keep up the great work and I look forward to seeing you in future interviews as we learn more about 3I/ATLAS and other interstellar objects.”

Answer:

“The more likely scenario from an engineering perspective involves a mothership that releases mini-probes which perform a reverse Oberth maneuver to slow down at perihelion and intercept Earth, taking advantage of the Sun’s gravitational assist. The change in angular momentum per unit mass needs to be of order ~(0.36 au)*(68 km/s) where 0.36 au is the change in orbital radius required to get to the Earth’s distance from the Sun from the distance of closest approach of 3I/ATLAS (where 1 au=149.6 million kilometers) and 68 kilometers per second is the speed of 3I/ATLAS at perihelion. The amount of fuel required for this maneuver depends on the mass of the mini-probe. The mini-probe can potentially reach the Earth within a few months after perihelion.”

Question:

“Dear Dr Loeb,

I have been following your posts on Medium since your planned and then successful expedition to the seas just north of Papua New Guinea. I had a lot of fun refreshing the browser tab each day, waiting to see if you had exciting news to share.

The habit has continued to this day. Thank you for doing what you do. Through your Medium space I have learned that in science, humanity needs rigorous discourse and exploration of all scientific possibilities, rather than a blinkered focus on comfortable narratives.

It is the subject of comfort that I write to you about today. Your mid-July post about the anomalous properties of 3I/ATLAS immediately struck me as extremely alarming.

After reading your post, I reasoned that the object’s Sagittarian origin, trajectory, tactical approach to the inner solar system bodies, and unlikely size added up to an extraordinary set of coincidences that should not be ignored.

All this is to say, I made plans (a moderate amount of long shelf-life food) after reading your initial 3I/ATLAS posts. More recent information (no cometary activity) brings to mind something Han Solo said… “I have a bad feeling about this.”

I have no illusions about our chances of survival if we are targeted for elimination, as per the Dark Forest theory. However, I would like to spend time with my family in the leadup to a potential encounter. I figure this will be a good thing whether or not all hell breaks loose.

Given what we know now, when would be the earliest time we could expect to greet the arrival of objects in orbit around earth? I appreciate that you are very busy; thank-you for your time.

Yours sincerely and good-luck!”

Answer:

“It is difficult to forecast when and how a direct encounter with aliens would take place, even as we monitor 3I/ATLAS, because that involves many uncertainties regarding the alien travel technologies, goals and intent. The best we can do is monitor the sky with telescopes. It may well be that 3I/ATLAS is a natural comet. But even then, we have to check each and every interstellar object that the Rubin Observatory will find in the coming decade for anomalous characteristics, like non-gravitational acceleration with no cometary tail or artificial lights or unusual shape. It would be a mistake to imagine a specific form based on scripts from science fiction writers, because their imagination, just like Large Language Models of Artificial Intelligence, is limited by their training data set on Earth. Even if we keep finding interstellar rocks, we should always be open to the possibility that one of the future interstellar objects might be technological. The nature of that encounter remains to be seen.”

Question:

“Thanks, Avi. I always really appreciate your replies.

May I ask one simple question — as of today, what % chance would you say 3I/ATLAS is of extraterrestrial/alien intelligence origin?!

Best regards, “

Answer:

“60%. In my recent essays at

https://avi-loeb.medium.com/

I suggested a `Loeb Scale’ for interstellar objects where `0’ is a definitely natural object (comet or asteroid) and `10’ is a definitely technological object (identified by maneuvers or emission of artificial light or signals). Currently, I give 3I/ATLAS a 6 on that scale, but my assessment will change as we get better data on it when it comes closer to the Sun.

Scientists change their opinions as they learn from new results. For example, Stephen Hawking wished to prove that the idea of black hole entropy — first proposed by the Princeton PhD student, Jacob Bekenstein, is nonsense. When he did the quantum-mechanical calculation, he realized that Bekenstein was right and black holes evaporate by emitting thermal radiation. This was the biggest theoretical discovery in Hawking’s scientific career.”

Question:

“How would an alien spacecraft look like?”

Answer:

An encounter with alien technology is a blind date of astronomical proportions. We should observe rather than imagine what it might look like. If alien intelligence is above ours, we may not be able to comprehend the full scope of their scientific understanding, tactics and ambitions, for the same reason that prehistoric cave dwellers who encounter a cell phone would regard it as a rock of a type that they had never seen before. The current approach of comet experts to interstellar objects reflects the stone age of space exploration.”

Question:

“Hi Avi, It is remarkable that the latest imaging data in the most recent observations does not show a tail trailing 3I/ATLAS. I saw an older study that found 3I/ATLAS did have a tail. What do you think led that group to make that conclusion?”

Answer:

“There were claims of a tail but since 3I/ATLAS is accelerating and its current size is not much larger than the angular resolution of Earth-based telescopes, it is challenging to avoid fictitious elongation of the image as a result of the object’s motion. As 3I/ATLAS gets closer to the Sun in the coming weeks, it would be easier to gauge whether it has a tail for three reasons: it will get brighter by reflecting more sunlight, bigger on the sky because it is closer to us, and if it is a comet — its activity will be enhanced as the Sun warms it up to a higher surface temperature.”

Question:

“Some conspiracy theorists argued that the story of 3I/ATLAS was floated as a distraction from the Jeffrey Epstein files. What is your take on this?”

Answer:

“3I/ATLAS is a physical object in the sky at a large distance from Earth that cannot be faked because it was observed independently from different directions by the Hubble Space telescope and ground-based telescopes. You can purchase a 0.5-meter telescope yourself and look at it. Its existence has nothing to do with terrestrial politics.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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Avi Loeb is the head of the Galileo Project, founding director of Harvard University’s — Black Hole Initiative, director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the former chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University (2011–2020). He is a former member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and a former chair of the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies. He is the bestselling author of “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth” and a co-author of the textbook “Life in the Cosmos”, both published in 2021. The paperback edition of his new book, titled “Interstellar”, was published in August 2024.

Designated Stephenson 2 DFK 52, the newly-discovered red supergiant resides in the massive stellar cluster RSGC2.

RSGC2 is a cluster of at least 26 red supergiants located at the base of Milky Way’s Scutum-Crux spiral arm at a distance of 5,800 parsecs (18,917 light-years).

Also known as Stephenson 2, the cluster is a site of recent star-forming activity in the region where the arm intersects the Galactic bulge.

Chalmers University of Technology astronomers Mark Siebert and colleagues observed the RSGC2 stars with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA).

“What we’re seeing in this photo of Stephenson 2 DFK 52 is actually a red supergiant star expelling a cloud of gas and dust as it nears the end of its life,” they said.

“These nebulae are common around supergiant stars; however, this particular cloud presents an unexpected and considerable mystery for astronomers.”

“This is the largest cloud of ejected material to have been found around a supergiant star, at an enormous 1.4 light-years across.”

“Stephenson 2 DFK 52 is rather similar to Betelgeuse, another famous red supergiant, so they were expecting to see a similar cloud around it.”

“However, if Stephenson 2 DFK 52 was as close to us as Betelgeuse is, the cocoon around it would be as wide in the sky as a third of a full Moon.”

The new ALMA observations allow the astronomers to measure how much material surrounds the star and how fast it is moving.

“The parts that are moving towards us are highlighted in blue, and the sections that are moving away, in red,” they said.

“The data show that about 4,000 years ago the star went through an episode of extreme mass shedding, and then slowed down to its current rate, more similar to that of Betelgeuse.”

According to the team, Stephenson 2 DFK 52 has a mass of between 10 and 15 solar masses, and by now it has already lost 5-10% of its mass.

“It’s still a mystery as to how the star managed to expel so much material in such a short timeframe,” the researchers said.

“Could it be an odd interaction with a companion star? Why is the shape of the cloud so unusually complex? Are there more supergiants like this out there?”

“Deciphering why Stephenson 2 DFK 52 has already shed so much material will help astronomers understand how it will meet its end: a supernova explosion sometime in the next million years.”

The team’s paper will be published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

_____

Mark A. Siebert et al. 2025. Stephenson 2 DFK 52: Discovery of an exotic red supergiant in the massive stellar cluster RSGC2. A&A, in press; arXiv: 2507.11609

The rise of “fake” science poses a serious threat to the integrity of academic research, a new study warns.

A widespread underground network of fraudsters is pumping out fake scientific results at an ever-increasing pace, researchers reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In fact, the publication of fraudulent science now outpaces the growth rate of legitimate scientific journals, researchers found.

“These networks are essentially criminal organizations, acting together to fake the process of science,” said senior researcher Luís A.N. Amaral, a professor of engineering sciences and applied mathematics at Northwestern University. “Millions of dollars are involved in these processes.”

News reports of scientific fraud usually involve single instances of retracted papers, falsified data or plagiarism committed by individuals who take shortcuts to get ahead, researchers said.

But this new investigation revealed a shadowy network churning out fake science outside the public’s awareness.

“This study is probably the most depressing project I’ve been involved with in my entire life,” Amaral said in a news release.

“Since I was a kid, I was excited about science. It’s distressing to see others engage in fraud and in misleading others,” he continued. “But if you believe that science is useful and important for humanity, then you have to fight for it.”

Researchers analyzed retracted papers and tracked studies published in de-indexed journals — scholarly journals that have been removed from major online scientific repositories for failing to meet quality or ethical standards.

The data revealed coordinated networks of “paper mills” that churn out low-quality manuscripts that are then sold to academics who want to quickly publish new work.

These ready-made reports feature fabricated data, manipulated or stolen images, and plagiarized content — as well as claims that can be nonsensical or physically impossible.

“More and more scientists are being caught up in paper mills,” Amaral said. “Not only can they buy papers, but they can buy citations. Then, they can appear like well-reputed scientists when they have barely conducted their own research at all.”

The paper mills “sell basically anything that can be used to launder a reputation,” lead researcher Reese Richardson, a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern, said in a news release.

“They often sell authorship slots for hundreds or even thousands of dollars. A person might pay more money for the first author position or less money for a fourth author position,” Richardson said.

“People also can pay to get papers they have written automatically accepted in a journal through a sham peer-review process.”

The research team also found that fraud networks use several strategies to get work published:

Groups of researchers collude to publish papers across multiple journals, retracting their work only when their activities are discovered.

Brokers serve as intermediaries to coordinate this mass publication of fake papers.

Perpetrators focus on specific, limited fields of research that are less likely to detect and head off fake reports.

“Brokers connect all the different people behind the scenes,” Amaral said. “You need to find someone to write the paper. You need to find people willing to pay to be the authors. You need to find a journal where you can get it all published. And you need editors in that journal who will accept that paper.”

These groups also will do an end-run around respected journals by “hijacking” journals that have gone out of print, researchers said.

Fraudsters can take over the name or website of a defunct journal, surreptitiously assume its identity, and start churning out fraudulent science that appears to be coming from a legit source, researchers said.

“This happened to the journal HIV Nursing,” Richardson said. “It was formerly the journal of a professional nursing organization in the U.K., then it stopped publishing, and its online domain lapsed. An organization bought the domain name and started publishing thousands of papers on subjects completely unrelated to nursing.”

The advent of AI threatens to make the spread of fake science even worse, researchers added.

“If we’re not prepared to deal with the fraud that’s already occurring, then we’re certainly not prepared to deal with what generative AI can do to scientific literature,” Richardson said. “We have no clue what’s going to end up in the literature, what’s going to be regarded as scientific fact and what’s going to be used to train future AI models, which then will be used to write more papers.”

Academia needs to respond to this threat by enhancing scrutiny of editorial processes, improving the detection of fabricated research, investigating these fraud networks, and radically restructuring the system of incentives in science, the researchers said.

“Science must police itself better in order to preserve its integrity,” Amaral said.

“If we do not create awareness around this problem, worse and worse behavior will become normalized,” he continued. “At some point, it will be too late, and scientific literature will become completely poisoned.”

Amaral said some people worry that talking about this issue is attacking science, but he’s not among them.

“I strongly believe we are defending science from bad actors,” he concluded. “We need to be aware of the seriousness of this problem and take measures to address it.”

More information

The American Council on Science and Health has more on the lasting impacts of scientific fraud.

Copyright © 2025 HealthDay. All rights reserved.

And a quick note on mandolines, which elicited an audible groan from multiple of the experts we spoke with: Avoid if possible. “They can create beautiful uniform slices, but it’s very difficult to keep your fingers away from the slicing platform,” Jeff Baker, DO, an emergency medicine physician in Palm Springs, California, tells SELF.

3. Having a mishap on a bike, e-bike, or scooter

Two-wheeled vehicles are behind a wide swath of ER admissions, ranging from serious scrapes and fractures to concussions and other traumatic head injuries. Dr. Morocco has even seen people “cheese-grater” their whole bodies.

The biggest danger is riding them on city streets with high speed limits, Dr. Baker says. E-bikes and scooters might not go as fast as four-wheeled vehicles, but the chance of a dangerous accident or collision is higher.

If you’re going to hop on any of these vehicles, experts stress wearing a helmet—yes, even on scooters. You might think it looks goofy, but it could spare you brain damage from an accident. Same goes for foam-padded safety glasses, like the kind motorcyclists wear, Dr. Morocco adds. Just trust him: You really don’t want a bug or piece of debris from the road to zip into one of your eyes mid-ride. Also, steer clear of road surfaces that are grated up or uneven, and make sure you’re as visible as possible to fellow riders and drivers (wear bright colors, add lights to the vehicle). And whatever you do, don’t text or look at your phone while riding, Dr. Vukmir says. You’ll be way more capable of swerving away from an errant car or obstacle if you’re focused and aware of your surroundings.

4. Falling off a ladder or step stool

Using a ladder to get to your roof, clear out a gutter, or cut high limbs off of trees is basically asking for trouble, Dr. Baker says. Falling six or eight feet is enough to break bones, he adds. It’s best to hire someone for the job, if you can; otherwise, be sure the ladder is structurally intact and on stable ground, and have someone there with you—not to hold it up (that won’t end well) but in case you do fall and need help, Dr. Vukmir says.

Inside your home, a step stool or step ladder is, deceivingly, among the riskiest things you can own, Dr. Morocco says. “People use them to reach the stuff at the top of the refrigerator or a shelf and fall off all the time.” Some advice: Be sure to use one that’s high enough for the job without having to stand on the top step, position it exactly below the thing you’re grabbing, and try to keep one hand on the ladder or a stable surface at all times.

5. Getting debris in your eye

A tiny piece of metal or wood flipping into your eye can be supremely painful, potentially scratching your cornea or even causing an “open globe injury, which is a puncture to your eye itself,” Dr. Conroy says, and can lead to vision loss. It typically happens to people doing a DIY activity that involves drilling, grinding, or cutting without wearing eye protection, Dr. Vukmir says. Other common victims: those who bypass eyegear while mowing the lawn, blowing leaves, or doing other yard work. In any of these scenarios, all it takes is a simple pair of plastic safety glasses to avoid the trauma and the ER trip altogether, Dr. Morocco says.

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They are known as Little Red Dots, or LRDs. We find them in deep field images of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), and they remain a bit of a mystery. But a new study finds that they are not super-Eddington objects, so while they are unusual, they don’t break the known rules of astrophysics.

We’re pretty sure that LRDs are young supermassive black holes at the hearts of early galaxies. Previous observations strongly suggest that they have many of the properties of Active Galactic Nuclei (AGNs) such as quasars, blazars, and radio galaxies. For example, the emission lines of their spectra are very broad, which means they come from material that is rapidly moving around a dense mass. They also don’t emit much x-ray or radio light, suggesting the source is surrounded by a dense cloud of ionized gas. This is exactly what you’d expect to see from a rapidly growing black hole in a primordial galaxy.

There is, however, a possible snag in this model. Since the light from AGNs comes from the super-hot accretion disk surrounding the black hole, the amount of x-rays they emit is tremendous. In order to block the x-rays, the ionized cloud surrounding the AGN would need to be very thick, almost galactic in size. But this cloud should also block much of the visible and infrared light we see from Little Red Dots. In order to be as bright as we observe, these things would need to emit an incredible amount of energy. Perhaps too much energy according to what’s known as the [Eddington Limit].(https://briankoberlein.com/post/take-it-to-the-limit/)

To consume matter, black holes have to pull gas and dust into the small region surrounding the black hole. All of the material trying to enter the black hole is squeezed tremendously, which is why it superheats and emits light. Of course, the heat and pressure from the matter push other stuff away from the black hole. As a result, there is a kind of self-regulating maximum growth rate for black holes, known as the Eddington limit. If a black hole captures too much matter too quickly, the resulting heat and pressure would push away incoming material, thus damping down the growth rate.

It is possible that a black hole could break this limit for a short time, becoming a super-Eddington black hole. Eat really fast, then clear the room with a hot burp. This could also explain the lack of intense x-rays, since the black hole is eating material too quickly for x-rays to build in intensity. But a new study suggests this isn’t the case.

X-rays can be difficult to detect, and we only see a handful of x-ray photons from any given LRD. So the team compiled observations from the Chandra Deep Field South, combining observations from 55 different LRDs into a simulated single one. This gave the team the ability to look at the optical depth of the surrounding material statistically, as well as the overall intensity of a typical LRD. What they found was that the amount of ionized gas surrounding an LRD is significant, but the overall intensity doesn’t break the Eddington limit.

One way to explain these results is to assume the supermassive black holes at the center of Little Red Dots aren’t as massive as they initially appear. Thus, they would emit plenty of light at wavelengths that aren’t heavily obscured without emitting the kind of high-energy x-rays we observe in more modern AGNs. There is still a great deal to learn about LRDs, but we now know they aren’t as mysterious as we once thought.

Reference: Sacchi, Andrea, and Akos Bogdan. “Chandra Rules Out Super-Eddington Accretion For Little Red Dots.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.09669 (2025).

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Using one of the most detailed sets of observations ever of a galaxy cluster 700 million light-years from Earth, astronomers have captured the faint glow of stray stars in the process of being ripped from their home galaxy and absorbed into another. The ‘bridge’ of diffuse light — spanning roughly a million light years between two galaxies in the cluster Abell 3667 — is the first direct evidence that the two brightest galaxies in the cluster are actively merging.

The findings also imply, the researchers say, that Abell 3667 formed from two smaller clusters, which had themselves merged around a billion years ago.

“This is the first time a feature of this scale and size has been found in a local galaxy cluster,” said Anthony Englert, a Ph.D. candidate at Brown University and lead author of a study describing the findings. “We knew that it was possible for a bridge like this to form between two galaxies, but it hadn’t been documented anywhere before now. It was a huge surprise that we were able to image such a faint feature.”

The new images of Abell 3667 were made using the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) mounted on the Víctor M. Blanco Telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. Englert and two colleagues — Ian Dell’Antonio, a professor of physics at Brown, and Mireia Montes, a research fellow at the Institute of Space Sciences in Barcelona, Spain — stitched together a record-breaking 28 hours of observations taken over a span of years by DECam. The findings are published in The Astrophysical Journal .

“Because Blanco has been imaging with DECam for the past decade, there is a ton of archival data available,” Englert said. “It was just a happy coincidence that so many people had imaged Abell 3667 over the years, and we were able to stack all of those observations together.”

That extensive observation time is what made it possible to image the dim light of stray stars within the cluster. This type of diffuse light, known as intracluster light or ICL, offers a treasure trove of information about the history of Abell 3667 and the gravitational dance of the galaxies within it.

The ICL imaged by Englert and his colleagues revealed a special type of galactic merger happening in Abell 3667. Normally, Englert says, mergers that involve the largest galaxy in a cluster, called the brightest cluster galaxy or BCG, occur gradually as it steals stars from many smaller galaxies that surround it. But this new research shows something different happening in this case. Abell 3667 is actually made of two galaxy clusters, each with its own BCG, that are now merging together. The ICL bridge discovered by the researchers suggests that the larger BCG is stealing stars from the smaller one — an event known as a rapid or aggressive merger. As the two BCGs merge, so too do the smaller galaxies that surround them, making Abell 3667 the product of two merging clusters. Data from X-ray and radio frequency observations had suggested a rapid merger in Abell 3667, but this is the first optical evidence to back it up.

The appearance of intracluster light in these new images offers a tantalizing preview of what’s to come when the Vera C. Rubin Observatory becomes fully operational later this year or early next. Using a telescope twice the size of Blanco and the largest camera ever built , the Rubin telescope will perform a 10-year scan deep into the entire southern sky, a project called the Legacy Survey of Space and Time.

“Rubin is going to be able to image ICL in much the same way as we did here, but it’s going to do it for every single local galaxy cluster in the southern sky,” Englert said. “What we did is just a small sliver of what Rubin is going to be able to do. It’s really going to blow the study of the ICL wide open.”

That will be a scientific bonanza for astronomers and astrophysicists. In addition to revealing the history of galaxy clusters, the ICL holds clues to some of the most fundamental mysteries of the universe, particularly dark matter — the mysterious, invisible stuff thought to account for most of the universe’s mass.

“ICL is quite important for cosmology,” Dell’Antonio said. “The distribution of this light should mirror the distribution of dark matter, so it provides an indirect way to ‘see’ the dark matter.”

Seeing the unseeable — that’s a powerful telescope.

The Victor M. Blanco Telescope and the Vera C. Rubin Observatory are operated by NOIRLab, the U.S. national center for ground-based, nighttime optical astronomy operated by the National Science Foundation. The research was funded by NSF (AST-2108287), the U.S. Department of Energy (DE-SC-0010010) and the NASA Rhode Island Space Grant Consortium.

Flowering plants are a real treat for the senses, but when it comes to the biggest blooms, the talipot palm really puts on a show. With the largest branched inflorescence in the world, it can produce in the region of 24 million flowers that bloom all at once in a dazzling swan song that marks the beginning of this peculiar palm’s end.

Known to science as Corypha umbraculifera, the talipot palm is native to India and Sri Lanka, but you may also spot it in Cambodia, Mauritius, Myanmar, and Thailand. These palms live for around 30 to 80 years, growing to staggering heights of 25 meters (82 feet).

Staggeringly, in all that time, they only get round to blooming once. Still, they’ve earned themselves a reputation as one of the most dramatic plants in nature because when they do, they put on one hell of a show.

“Some palms go out with a bang,” explains Kew. “After a long period of growth without blooming, they literally flower themselves to death. Once such species, the talipot palm (Corypha umbraculifera) indulges in the most prolific sexual spectacle of the plant kingdom, producing the largest inflorescence of any plant.”

“Above the enormous fan-shaped leaves that crown its 20 m [66-foot] trunk, an immense candelabra emerges, some 8 m [26 feet] high. This bears an estimated 24 million flowers in tiny clusters, and the total length of the branches within this inflorescence is thought to exceed 9 km [5.5 miles].”

These impressive stats have earned the talipot palm the Guinness World Record for “largest branched inflorescence”, a distinction characterized by the fact the talipot palm’s flowers are arranged in clusters of multi-branched stems, rather than flowers growing on the end of a single stem, such as daffodils or roses. The crown for largest unbranched inflorescence goes to our old stinky pal, Titan arum, or Amorphophallus titanum – better known to most as the “corpse flower”.

A corpse flower develops quickly, gaining around 10 centimeters (4 inches) per day, until it reaches a height of around 2 meters (6.6 feet), and that’s in a matter of weeks in some cases. Then it will open, releasing its noxious gas for all the carrion-eating insects of Sumatra to smell. When a corpse flower blooms, the pinky-purple spathe unfolds from an enormous yellow spadix that can grow to 3.7 meters (12 feet). It’s the shape of this unusual bloom that really puts the “misshapen penis” in its Latin name, Amorphophallus.

Animals get a lot of airtime when it comes to curious mating displays, but let it be known that when it comes to putting on a sexual spectacle, there are plenty of freaks in the plant kingdom, too.

Scientists have used ultrafast high-intensity lasers to superheat gold to 14 times its melting point without turning the solid metal into a liquid.

The record-breaking experiment, which was described in a study published July 23 in the journal Nature, smashed a decades-old theory about the stability of solids and is the first reliable method to precisely measure the temperature of extremely hot systems, the researchers said.

Today’s Image of the Day from the European Space Agency features a stunning view of the spiral galaxy NGC 1309 captured by the Hubble Space Telescope.

The galaxy, located about 100 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Eridanus, shines with bluish stars and trails of dusty gas.

The real fascination lies not just in how NGC 1309 looks – it’s what happened there that keeps astronomers coming back.

The galaxy has been a familiar subject for Hubble, appearing in images released in both 2006 and 2014. That continued interest isn’t just because it’s photogenic. 

NGC 1309 is a site of rare astronomical events that have helped researchers understand what happens when stars die, and in one case, what happens when they don’t quite finish the job.

Hundreds of galaxies surround NGC 1309

Hubble’s newest look at NGC 1309 captures more than just one galaxy. As ESA noted, countless distant galaxies are visible in the background of the image. 

But one sharp point of light stands out near the top of the frame. It’s not a galaxy, but a nearby star from our own Milky Way, just a few thousand light-years away.

“This stunning Hubble image encompasses NGC 1309’s bluish stars, dark brown gas clouds and pearly white centre, as well as hundreds of distant background galaxies,” noted ESA.

“Nearly every smudge, streak and blob of light in this image is an individual galaxy. The only exception to the extragalactic ensemble is a star, which can be identified near the top of the frame by its diffraction spikes.”

The unusual story of NGC 1309

Even though the view is crowded, all eyes are on NGC 1309. This galaxy gained attention after two significant explosions lit it up in the past few decades. The first, a textbook Type Ia supernova named SN 2002fk, occurred in 2002. 

These types of supernovae are known for being reliable “standard candles” that help astronomers measure cosmic distances. They happen when a white dwarf – the leftover core of a dead star – gets pushed past its limit and explodes.

That first explosion was expected. The second one, though, was not.

A supernova that left something behind

In 2012, Hubble detected a second supernova in NGC 1309 – SN 2012Z. This one threw scientists a curveball. On the surface, it looked like another Type Ia event, but its brightness didn’t quite measure up. It turned out to be part of a lesser-known category called Type Iax supernovae.

Unlike typical Type Ia explosions, SN 2012Z didn’t tear the white dwarf completely apart. What was left behind surprised astronomers: a “zombie star.” 

Instead of fading into the background, the star remained – and it actually became brighter after the explosion. That’s not something astronomers were expecting to see.

This discovery made NGC 1309 the site of something that had never been captured before: the exact white dwarf that triggered a supernova, seen in images taken before the explosion. 

Usually, supernovae are identified after the fact, based on the light they release. But in this case, the star was already in Hubble’s earlier images of the galaxy. That allowed scientists to link the before-and-after views in a way they’d never been able to do.

Why these explosions matter

Studying supernovae helps astronomers learn about the life cycles of stars, and how the elements created in those explosions spread through galaxies. 

Type Ia supernovae, in particular, have been crucial for measuring how fast the universe is expanding. But Type Iax events like SN 2012Z add a wrinkle to that story.

These smaller explosions don’t follow the usual rules. They’re dimmer, take longer to unfold, and – as SN 2012Z revealed – they might not mark the end of a star’s life.

Ultimately, weaker explosions are less reliable for measuring distances in space. But they offer something different: a look at what could happen when a supernova doesn’t finish the job.

Observing a white dwarf that somehow survives its own explosion gives scientists a chance to rethink their models. Maybe some stars don’t die as completely as once thought. Maybe there’s a middle ground between a full explosion and a quiet fade.

Hubble’s long memory pays off

Thanks to its sharp vision and longevity, the Hubble Space Telescope has been able to watch NGC 1309 across decades. The long record made it possible to notice changes and connect the dots between past and present. 

Even though newer telescopes like the James Webb Space Telescope are joining the game, Hubble still has a key role. 

Hubble’s deep image of NGC 1309 is a map of astronomical history – and in this case, a rare chance to catch a supernova before and after its big moment.

Image Credit: ESA

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Voyager was launched in 1977 and has been traveling ever since. At the moment, it is around 167 AU from the Earth, having become the first spacecraft to go beyond the heliosphere, cross the heliopause, and enter interstellar space. At its current position, it takes 23 hours, 12 minutes, and 18 seconds for signals from Earth to reach the spacecraft. At its current speed of about 61,195 kilometers per hour (38,025 miles per hour), it will still take over a year to widen that light-distance to a full 24 hours. At that point, Voyager will become the first human-made object to reach a full light-day from Earth.

While Voyager’s mission is nearly over, with fuel dwindling and the spacecraft expected to power down permanently in the 2030s, its journey is only just beginning. In 40,000 years, it will be closer to the star AC +79 3888 than our own Sun. But before that, it will have to pass through the Oort cloud, the hypothetical spherical shell of objects thought to surround our Solar System, right at the edge of the Sun’s influence.

“The distant Oort cloud marks the gravitational edge of the Solar System, in a vast region of undiscovered objects,” NASA explains of the cloud, first hypothesized by Dutch astronomer Jan Oort in 1950. “Short-period comets may originate in the scattered disk, inner, part of the Oort cloud, while long-period comets likely come from the spherical, outer portion of the Oort cloud. These comets only pass the Sun on rare occasion, possibly when disturbed by distant passing stars or galactic tides. There is speculation of other large planets in this region that may disturb comets in their vicinity, but none have yet been discovered.”

The inner edge of the Oort cloud is thought to begin around 2,000-5,000 astronomical units (AU) from the Sun, with one AU being the distance between the Earth and the Sun, and ending somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000 AU from the Sun, though estimates on where this hypothetical region begins and ends vary. 

At the lower range of estimates, the Oort cloud could begin around 1,000 AU from the Sun. If the Oort cloud does begin here, the spacecraft could reach it in just a few centuries. However, given the sheer scale of the cloud, it will be there for tens of thousands of years.

“Much of interstellar space is actually inside our Solar System,” NASA explains. “It will take about 300 years for Voyager 1 to reach the inner edge of the Oort Cloud and possibly about 30,000 years to fly beyond it.”

Assuming that the Voyager probes make it through the cloud undamaged (a likely outcome, given that space is not the asteroid-dodging exercise sci-fi would have us believe), they could go on relatively unscathed for many, many years beyond that. Given that the probes contain the Golden Records, a message to any aliens who happen to stumble across them, astronomers have attempted to figure out how long they could continue their journey through the cosmos.

“We evaluate the eventual degradation of the records from interaction with interstellar matter. We find that after traveling for 5 Gyr [billion years] in a smooth axisymmetric galactic potential, Voyager 1 is ~99% likely to suffer damage rendering the exterior-facing side of the record indecipherable, while Voyager 2 is only ~20% likely to suffer similar damage,” a 2020 paper looking into Voyager’s end explains. “We find that the spacecraft-facing side of both records will likely survive until the merger of the Milky Way and M31 in ~5 Gyr, after which it becomes possible that the spacecraft are ejected into the intergalactic medium and erosion rates reduce accordingly.”

In that context, Voyager’s 50th anniversary in 2027 will look like peanuts.