Astronomers the world over are buzzing with anticipation for the new science that will be possible once the James Webb Space Telescope, the world’s most powerful space telescope, completes its commissioning. Since the telescope launched on December 25, 2021, it has unfurled its hardware into its final configuration, reached its final orbit around the sun, and completed aligning its mirrors with its primary camera, but there are still steps like the calibration of its instruments to go before it is ready for scientific use.
As soon as the commissioning phase is complete, which is set to wrap up this summer, the science observations will begin. And this is where things get exciting, as the telescope’s high sensitivity and infrared capabilities will enable it to observe extremely distant objects, even fainter than those observed by current space-based telescopes like Hubble. It will usher in a new era of astronomical observations and could help to investigate topics as wide-ranging as how the first galaxies formed and whether planets in other star systems have atmospheres or not.
NASA technicians lift the James Webb Telescope, using a crane, and move it inside a clean room at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. The scientific successor to NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, Webb is the most powerful space telescope ever built.NASA/Desiree Stover
Thirteen projects have been chosen to test out the capabilities of this brand-new telescope in its first five months of operations, and as you can imagine, the competition for which projects should get first dibs on this new tool was fierce.
Most of the 13 projects chosen will look at distant objects like black holes or far-away galaxies. But one project will look closer to home — at Jupiter, right in our cosmic backyard.
To learn about what researchers hope to discover about this big, beautiful gas giant, and to find out why such a relatively close target is being used to test out such a powerful telescope, we spoke to Berkeley astronomer Imke de Pater, leader of the Jupiter observation team.
A whole system to explore
NASA
Compared to far-off exoplanets or even the more distant ice giant planets in our solar system, astronomers know a lot about Jupiter. We have troves of data about the planet thanks to both observations from ground-based telescopes and missions like Galileo, which orbited the planet up until 2003, and Juno which is still orbiting there now.
But as is often the case with science, every piece of data we get about the planet can raise more questions. “We’ve been there with several spacecraft and have observed the planet with Hubble and many ground-based telescopes at wavelengths across the electromagnetic spectrum (from the UV to meters wavelengths), so we’ve learned a tremendous amount about Jupiter itself, its atmosphere, interior, and about its moons and rings,” said de Pater. “But every time you learn more there are things you don’t yet understand — so you always need more data.”
Some of the biggest open questions we have about Jupiter concern its atmosphere, like how heat moves between layers in the atmosphere, and how the atmosphere interacts with the magnetosphere.
NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
But the group won’t only be looking at Jupiter itself, honing in on details like the Great Red Spot (a turbulent storm so vast that it can be seen as a spot large enough to engulf the entire Earth) and the planet’s southern pole (with its distinctive auroras). They’ll also be looking at the whole Jovian system, including the planet’s faint rings and its moons including Io and Ganymede.
Each of these targets is intriguing in its own right — Io is the most volcanically active place in the solar system, for example, and Ganymede is the only moon known to produce its own magnetosphere. Taken as a whole, the Jovian system is the ideal place to test the limits of Webb’s capabilities.
Peering into the infrared
NASA
To help learn about these complex topics, de Pater’s group will be taking advantage of James Webb’s infrared capabilities, which allow researchers to look deeper into the planet’s atmosphere.
Those capabilities make it possible to study the atmosphere beyond what would be possible by looking in the visible light wavelength. “In the visible wavelength range, you basically see clouds,” she explained. “At infrared wavelengths, you can probe above the clouds and below the clouds, depending on the wavelength. At different wavelengths you can see different altitudes in the atmosphere, depending on the opacity in the atmosphere (i.e. how much ‘light’ is absorbed at the particular wavelength determines how deep one can look into the planet).”
Particularly useful for this research will be the mid-infrared wavelengths, which can be viewed using Webb’s MIRI or Mid-Infrared Instrument.
“The biggest advantage is at the mid-infrared wavelengths,” de Pater explained. “We can observe at some of these wavelengths from the ground, but the Earth’s atmosphere is so turbulent that what we get on the ground, we can’t calibrate the observations very well.” That means more uncertainty in the data; a problem which is exacerbated by the background infrared radiation on Earth.
But with a space-based telescope like James Webb, there’s no atmosphere and less background radiation to get in the way, and that means the data gathered will be much more accurate. Additionally, Webb offers exceptional stability, which means it can point at a target and not waver, thanks to its positioning in space. All of this means it can collect some of the most accurate data yet on Jupiter.
Testing out Webb’s limits
NASA
When assessing proposals for how James Webb could be used, de Pater explained, the committee deciding on which projects to pursue first wanted to see the astronomy community’s ideas about what the telescope could do. “So they really looked for projects which pushed JWST to the limits,” she said. “That’s what our project is doing.”
They will use all four of Webb’s instruments in different combinations for different targets in the system, to pick out different features like volcanoes, rings, and layers of the planet’s atmosphere.
The plan was to observe Jupiter, its rings, and its moons Io and Ganymede, but several years after the team submitted their proposal an unexpected problem arose — the telescope was actually too sensitive for much of the planned work on Jupiter. “The telescope was much more sensitive than they expected, so we had to change a number of our observations on Jupiter — and we can do less on Jupiter itself than we had originally anticipated.”
But the team still knew they could get valuable data and find ways to do the work they wanted to. They changed factors like which filters they would use, and looked at smaller fields of view.
Why Jupiter provides such a challenge
NASA
The idea that a telescope is too sensitive might sound counterintuitive. But think of it like taking a photograph while facing the sun: All the colors get blown out so everything appears white and washed out and it’s hard to see any detail. The light coming from the sun is just too bright, leading to an overexposed image.
The same thing happens when studying astronomical bodies. Planets don’t give off much light compared to stars, as they don’t produce light of their own but just reflect light from their stars. That makes planets much dimmer than stars overall. But when you’re looking at tiny details or looking for even smaller bodies like moons, or at fine details like rings, then the light from a planet can create glare in the data you’re collecting.
That’s the big challenge when using Webb to study Jupiter’s moons or rings: Trying to allow for the light from the planet so these small objects can be seen in detail. Jupiter is one of the brightest objects in the sky, so this isn’t an easy task.
Fortunately, astronomers have lots of experience with observing planetary rings using other tools like the Hubble Space Telescope. “So we use that knowledge for the JWST observations,” de Pater explained. The team will observe the rings at different “roll angles,” meaning the rings will be shifted into slightly different orientations on the detector. By observing the rings at different angles, they can see how the scattered light from the planet falls on the rings. Then this light can be subtracted, leaving just the light from the rings themselves.
Studying planets in our solar system and beyond
Using Webb to study Jupiter isn’t only a way to test the limits of this brand-new telescope. Studying planets in our own solar system can also help to understand planets outside our solar system, called exoplanets.
One of the big aims of exoplanet science today is to go beyond identifying a planet and estimating its size or mass, and to build up a more complete understanding of it by looking at whether it has an atmosphere.
But to understand planets in distant systems, it helps to understand the planets in our own. Webb will be looking at the atmospheres of distant gas giants, which we can then compare to what we know of the atmospheres of Jupiter and Saturn.
Furthermore, by using Webb to study Jupiter, de Pater’s team will develop a set of tools that can be used by others in the astronomy community to study other planets in our solar system, and give a glimpse of what Webb might be able to discover about them — including the intriguing and rarely studied distant planets of Uranus and Neptune.
“Our team will develop software which can be used for the Jovian system, but also for the Saturn system, for Uranus and Neptune. And we can show people what you can expect based on our observations,” de Pater said. “It definitely is a pathfinder in that way.”
More than 40 trillion gallons of rain drenched the Southeast United States in the last week from Hurricane Helene and a run-of-the-mill rainstorm that sloshed in ahead of it — an unheard of amount of water that has stunned experts.
That’s enough to fill the Dallas Cowboys’ stadium 51,000 times, or Lake Tahoe just once. If it was concentrated just on the state of North Carolina that much water would be 3.5 feet deep (more than 1 meter). It’s enough to fill more than 60 million Olympic-size swimming pools.
“That’s an astronomical amount of precipitation,” said Ed Clark, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Water Center in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. “I have not seen something in my 25 years of working at the weather service that is this geographically large of an extent and the sheer volume of water that fell from the sky.”
The flood damage from the rain is apocalyptic, meteorologists said. More than 100 people are dead, according to officials.
Private meteorologist Ryan Maue, a former NOAA chief scientist, calculated the amount of rain, using precipitation measurements made in 2.5-mile-by-2.5 mile grids as measured by satellites and ground observations. He came up with 40 trillion gallons through Sunday for the eastern United States, with 20 trillion gallons of that hitting just Georgia, Tennessee, the Carolinas and Florida from Hurricane Helene.
Clark did the calculations independently and said the 40 trillion gallon figure (151 trillion liters) is about right and, if anything, conservative. Maue said maybe 1 to 2 trillion more gallons of rain had fallen, much if it in Virginia, since his calculations.
Clark, who spends much of his work on issues of shrinking western water supplies, said to put the amount of rain in perspective, it’s more than twice the combined amount of water stored by two key Colorado River basin reservoirs: Lake Powell and Lake Mead.
Several meteorologists said this was a combination of two, maybe three storm systems. Before Helene struck, rain had fallen heavily for days because a low pressure system had “cut off” from the jet stream — which moves weather systems along west to east — and stalled over the Southeast. That funneled plenty of warm water from the Gulf of Mexico. And a storm that fell just short of named status parked along North Carolina’s Atlantic coast, dumping as much as 20 inches of rain, said North Carolina state climatologist Kathie Dello.
Then add Helene, one of the largest storms in the last couple decades and one that held plenty of rain because it was young and moved fast before it hit the Appalachians, said University of Albany hurricane expert Kristen Corbosiero.
“It was not just a perfect storm, but it was a combination of multiple storms that that led to the enormous amount of rain,” Maue said. “That collected at high elevation, we’re talking 3,000 to 6000 feet. And when you drop trillions of gallons on a mountain, that has to go down.”
The fact that these storms hit the mountains made everything worse, and not just because of runoff. The interaction between the mountains and the storm systems wrings more moisture out of the air, Clark, Maue and Corbosiero said.
North Carolina weather officials said their top measurement total was 31.33 inches in the tiny town of Busick. Mount Mitchell also got more than 2 feet of rainfall.
Before 2017’s Hurricane Harvey, “I said to our colleagues, you know, I never thought in my career that we would measure rainfall in feet,” Clark said. “And after Harvey, Florence, the more isolated events in eastern Kentucky, portions of South Dakota. We’re seeing events year in and year out where we are measuring rainfall in feet.”
Storms are getting wetter as the climate change s, said Corbosiero and Dello. A basic law of physics says the air holds nearly 4% more moisture for every degree Fahrenheit warmer (7% for every degree Celsius) and the world has warmed more than 2 degrees (1.2 degrees Celsius) since pre-industrial times.
Corbosiero said meteorologists are vigorously debating how much of Helene is due to worsening climate change and how much is random.
For Dello, the “fingerprints of climate change” were clear.
“We’ve seen tropical storm impacts in western North Carolina. But these storms are wetter and these storms are warmer. And there would have been a time when a tropical storm would have been heading toward North Carolina and would have caused some rain and some damage, but not apocalyptic destruction. ”
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It’s a dinosaur that roamed Alberta’s badlands more than 70 million years ago, sporting a big, bumpy, bony head the size of a baby elephant.
On Wednesday, paleontologists near Grande Prairie pulled its 272-kilogram skull from the ground.
They call it “Big Sam.”
The adult Pachyrhinosaurus is the second plant-eating dinosaur to be unearthed from a dense bonebed belonging to a herd that died together on the edge of a valley that now sits 450 kilometres northwest of Edmonton.
It didn’t die alone.
“We have hundreds of juvenile bones in the bonebed, so we know that there are many babies and some adults among all of the big adults,” Emily Bamforth, a paleontologist with the nearby Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum, said in an interview on the way to the dig site.
She described the horned Pachyrhinosaurus as “the smaller, older cousin of the triceratops.”
“This species of dinosaur is endemic to the Grand Prairie area, so it’s found here and nowhere else in the world. They are … kind of about the size of an Indian elephant and a rhino,” she added.
The head alone, she said, is about the size of a baby elephant.
The discovery was a long time coming.
The bonebed was first discovered by a high school teacher out for a walk about 50 years ago. It took the teacher a decade to get anyone from southern Alberta to come to take a look.
“At the time, sort of in the ’70s and ’80s, paleontology in northern Alberta was virtually unknown,” said Bamforth.
When paleontogists eventually got to the site, Bamforth said, they learned “it’s actually one of the densest dinosaur bonebeds in North America.”
“It contains about 100 to 300 bones per square metre,” she said.
Paleontologists have been at the site sporadically ever since, combing through bones belonging to turtles, dinosaurs and lizards. Sixteen years ago, they discovered a large skull of an approximately 30-year-old Pachyrhinosaurus, which is now at the museum.
About a year ago, they found the second adult: Big Sam.
Bamforth said both dinosaurs are believed to have been the elders in the herd.
“Their distinguishing feature is that, instead of having a horn on their nose like a triceratops, they had this big, bony bump called a boss. And they have big, bony bumps over their eyes as well,” she said.
“It makes them look a little strange. It’s the one dinosaur that if you find it, it’s the only possible thing it can be.”
The genders of the two adults are unknown.
Bamforth said the extraction was difficult because Big Sam was intertwined in a cluster of about 300 other bones.
The skull was found upside down, “as if the animal was lying on its back,” but was well preserved, she said.
She said the excavation process involved putting plaster on the skull and wooden planks around if for stability. From there, it was lifted out — very carefully — with a crane, and was to be shipped on a trolley to the museum for study.
“I have extracted skulls in the past. This is probably the biggest one I’ve ever done though,” said Bamforth.
“It’s pretty exciting.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 25, 2024.
TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — A rare Bronze-Era jar accidentally smashed by a 4-year-old visiting a museum was back on display Wednesday after restoration experts were able to carefully piece the artifact back together.
Last month, a family from northern Israel was visiting the museum when their youngest son tipped over the jar, which smashed into pieces.
Alex Geller, the boy’s father, said his son — the youngest of three — is exceptionally curious, and that the moment he heard the crash, “please let that not be my child” was the first thought that raced through his head.
The jar has been on display at the Hecht Museum in Haifa for 35 years. It was one of the only containers of its size and from that period still complete when it was discovered.
The Bronze Age jar is one of many artifacts exhibited out in the open, part of the Hecht Museum’s vision of letting visitors explore history without glass barriers, said Inbal Rivlin, the director of the museum, which is associated with Haifa University in northern Israel.
It was likely used to hold wine or oil, and dates back to between 2200 and 1500 B.C.
Rivlin and the museum decided to turn the moment, which captured international attention, into a teaching moment, inviting the Geller family back for a special visit and hands-on activity to illustrate the restoration process.
Rivlin added that the incident provided a welcome distraction from the ongoing war in Gaza. “Well, he’s just a kid. So I think that somehow it touches the heart of the people in Israel and around the world,“ said Rivlin.
Roee Shafir, a restoration expert at the museum, said the repairs would be fairly simple, as the pieces were from a single, complete jar. Archaeologists often face the more daunting task of sifting through piles of shards from multiple objects and trying to piece them together.
Experts used 3D technology, hi-resolution videos, and special glue to painstakingly reconstruct the large jar.
Less than two weeks after it broke, the jar went back on display at the museum. The gluing process left small hairline cracks, and a few pieces are missing, but the jar’s impressive size remains.
The only noticeable difference in the exhibit was a new sign reading “please don’t touch.”
