New Delhi:

Even though the Sun is just halfway through its current cycle, the first rumblings of its next 11-year solar cycle have been detected in sound waves within it, according to a team of researchers.

This current cycle is presently reaching its peak, or solar maximum that occurs when the Sun’s magnetic field flips and its poles swap places, until mid-2025.

It impacts the Sun’s surface activity, with sunspots, flares, and coronal mass ejections all increasing during solar maximum.

This causes an increase in electromagnetic energy heading towards Earth, making auroras more visible and at lower altitudes.

The current solar cycle, known as Cycle 25, began in 2019. It is not expected to end for another six years but researchers from the University of Birmingham have spotted the first signs that the next solar cycle is beginning.

They presented the findings at the Royal Astronomical Society’s National Assistance Astronomy in Hull.

Dr. Rachel Howe, Helioseismology Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham, and her team have detected early signs of solar cycle 26 through internal sound waves in the Sun, revealing bands of faster and slower rotation.

This pattern, observed using helioseismic data from GONG, MDI, and HMI since 1995, shows faster-moving material drifting toward the Equator before each solar cycle starts.

Comparing data from Solar Cycles 23, 24, and 25, researchers note a repeating but not identical pattern.

Dr. Howe, monitoring these changes for 25 years, is excited about the first hints of Cycle 26, expected to start around 2030, offering insights into the Sun’s plasma and magnetic fields.
 

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Rare severe solar storm could produce northern lights in the U.S., disrupt power and communications this weekend

NOAA alerted operators of power plants and spacecraft in orbit to take precautions, as well as the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

“For most people here on planet Earth, they won’t have to do anything,” said Rob Steenburgh, a scientist with NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center.

The storm could produce northern lights as far south in the U.S. as Alabama and Northern California, according to NOAA. But it was hard to predict and experts stressed it would not be the dramatic curtains of color normally associated with the northern lights, but more like splashes of greenish hues.

“That’s really the gift from space weather — the aurora,” said Mr. Steenburgh. He and his colleagues said the best aurora views may come from phone cameras, which are better at capturing light than the naked eye.

Snap a picture of the sky and “there might be actually a nice little treat there for you,” said Mike Bettwy, operations chief for the prediction center.

Also Watch: What causes the northern lights?

The most intense solar storm in recorded history, in 1859, prompted auroras in central America and possibly even Hawaii. “We are not anticipating that” but it could come close, said NOAA space weather forecaster Shawn Dahl.

This storm poses a risk for high-voltage transmission lines for power grids, not the electrical lines ordinarily found in people’s homes, Mr. Dahl told reporters. Satellites also could be affected, which in turn could disrupt navigation and communication services here on Earth.

An extreme geomagnetic storm in 2003, for example, took out power in Sweden and damaged power transformers in South Africa.

Even when the storm is over, signals between GPS satellites and ground receivers could be scrambled or lost, according to NOAA. But there are so many navigation satellites that any outages should not last long, Mr. Steenburgh noted.

The sun has produced strong solar flares since May 8, resulting in at least seven outbursts of plasma. Each eruption — known as a coronal mass ejection — can contain billions of tons of plasma and magnetic field from the sun’s outer atmosphere, or corona.

The flares seem to be associated with a sunspot that’s 16 times the diameter of Earth, according to NOAA. It’s all part of the solar activity that’s ramping up as the sun approaches the peak of its 11-year cycle.

NASA said the storm posed no serious threat to the seven astronauts aboard the International Space Station. The biggest concern is the increased radiation levels, and the crew could move to a better shielded part of the station if necessary, according to Mr. Steenburgh.

Increased radiation also could threaten some of NASA’s science satellites. Extremely sensitive instruments will be turned off, if necessary, to avoid damage, said Antti Pulkkinen, director of the space agency’s heliophysics science division.

Several sun-focused spacecraft are monitoring all the action.

“This is exactly the kinds of things we want to observe,” Mr. Pulkkinen said.

In this undated image made from video provided by the BBC, hatchling marine iguanas. British naturalist Charles Darwin sketched out his theory of evolution in the 1859 book On the Origin of Species – proposing that biological species change over time through the acquisition of traits that favour survival and reproduction. Now 164 years later, nine scientists and philosophers on Monday proposed a new law of nature that includes the biological evolution described by Darwin as a vibrant example of a much broader phenomenon. Image for Representation.
| Photo Credit: AP

When British naturalist Charles Darwin sketched out his theory of evolution in the 1859 book On the Origin of Species – proposing that biological species change over time through the acquisition of traits that favour survival and reproduction – it provoked a revolution in scientific thought.

Now 164 years later, nine scientists and philosophers on Monday proposed a new law of nature that includes the biological evolution described by Darwin as a vibrant example of a much broader phenomenon, one that appears at the level of atoms, minerals, planetary atmospheres, planets, stars and more.

It holds that complex natural systems evolve to states of greater patterning, diversity and complexity.

Also Read | Bottleneck in human evolution explained using a novel genomic analysis technique

“We see evolution as a universal process that applies to numerous systems, both living and nonliving, that increase in diversity and patterning through time,” said Carnegie Institution for Science mineralogist and astrobiologist Robert Hazen, a co-author of the scientific paper describing the law in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Titled the “law of increasing functional information,” it holds that evolving systems, biological and non-biological, always form from numerous interacting building blocks like atoms or cells, and that processes exist – such as cellular mutation – that generate many different configurations. Evolution occurs, it holds, when these various configurations are subject to selection for useful functions.

“We have well-documented laws that describe such everyday phenomena as forces, motions, gravity, electricity and magnetism and energy,” Hazen said. “But these laws do not, individually or collectively, describe or explain why the universe keeps getting more diverse and complex at scales of atoms, molecules, minerals and more.”

In stars, for instance, just two elements – hydrogen and helium – were the main ingredients in the first stellar generation following the Big Bang about 13.8 billion years ago that initiated the universe.

That first generation of stars, in the thermonuclear fusion caldrons at their cores, forged about 20 heavier elements such as carbon, nitrogen and oxygen that were blasted into space when they exploded at the end of their life cycles. The subsequent generation of stars that formed from the remnants of the prior generation then similarly forged almost 100 more elements.

On Earth, living organisms acquired greater complexity including the pivotal moment when multicellular life originated.

“Imagine a system of atoms or molecules that can exist in countless trillions of different arrangements or configurations,” Hazen said. “Only a small fraction of all possible configurations will ‘work’ – that is, they will have some useful degree of function. So, nature just prefers those functional configurations.”

Hazen added that “function” might mean that a collection of atoms makes a stable mineral crystal that can persist, or that a star maintains its dynamic structure, or that “a life form learns a new ‘trick’ that allows it to compete better than its neighbors,” Hazen added.

Also Read | Six recent discoveries that have changed how we think about human origins

The authors proposed three universal concepts of selection: the basic ability to endure; the enduring nature of active processes that may enable evolution; and the emergence of novel characteristics as an adaptation to an environment.

Some biological examples of this “novelty generation” include organisms developing the ability to swim, walk, fly and think. Our species emerged after the human evolutionary lineage diverged from the chimpanzee lineage and acquired an array of traits including upright walking and increased brain size.

“I think this paper is important because it describes a view of the cosmos rooted in function,” said Carnegie Institution astrobiologist and planetary scientist Michael Wong, the paper’s lead author.

“The significance of formulating such a law is that it provides a new perspective on why the diverse systems that make up the cosmos evolve the way they do, and may allow predictions about how unfamiliar systems – like the organic chemistry on Saturn’s moon Titan – develop over time,” added co-author Jonathan Lunine, chair of Cornell University’s astronomy department, referencing a world being scrutinized for possible extraterrestrial life.

Since beginning operations last year, the James Webb Space Telescope has provided an astonishing glimpse of the early history of our universe, spotting a collection of galaxies dating to the enigmatic epoch called cosmic dawn. Image for Representation.
| Photo Credit: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, A. Martel

Since beginning operations last year, the James Webb Space Telescope has provided an astonishing glimpse of the early history of our universe, spotting a collection of galaxies dating to the enigmatic epoch called cosmic dawn.

But the existence of what appear to be massive and mature galaxies during the universe’s infancy defied expectations – too big and too soon. That left scientists scrambling for an explanation while questioning the basic tenets of cosmology, the science of the origin and development of the universe. A new study may resolve the mystery without ripping up the textbooks.

The researchers used sophisticated computer simulations to model how the earliest galaxies evolved. These indicated that star formation unfolded differently in these galaxies in the first few hundred million years after the Big Bang event 13.8 billion years ago that initiated the universe than it does in large galaxies like our Milky Way populating the cosmos today.

Star formation in the early galaxies occurred in occasional big bursts, they found, rather than at a steady pace. That is important because scientists typically use a galaxy’s brightness to gauge how big it is – the collective mass of its millions or billions of stars.

Also Read | Billion-light-year-wide ‘bubble of galaxies’ discovered

So, according to the study, these galaxies may have been relatively small, as expected, but might glow just as brightly as genuinely massive galaxies do – giving a deceptive impression of great mass – because of brilliant bursts of star formation.

“Astronomers can securely measure how bright those early galaxies are because photons (particles of light) are directly detectable and countable, whereas it is much more difficult to tell whether those galaxies are really big or massive. They appear to be big because they are observed to be bright,” said Guochao Sun, a postdoctoral fellow in astronomy at Northwestern University in Illinois and lead author of the study published this week in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Webb, which was launched in 2021 and became operational in 2022, detected about 10 times more very bright galaxies from cosmic dawn than anticipated based on most theoretical models.

“According to the standard model of cosmology, there should not be many very massive galaxies during cosmic dawn because it takes time for galaxies to grow after the Big Bang. Immediately after the Big Bang, the universe was filled with a very hot, nearly uniform plasma – a fireball – and there were no stars or galaxies,” Northwestern University astrophysicist and study senior author Claude-André Faucher-Giguère said.

Also Read | Space telescope uncovers massive galaxies near cosmic dawn

“In our new paper, we show quantitatively using our simulations that the bursts of star formation produce flashes of light that can explain the very bright galaxies observed by Webb. And the reason this is so significant is that we explain these very bright galaxies without having to break the standard cosmological model,” Faucher-Giguère added.

The simulations in the study were conducted as part of the Feedback of Relativistic Environments (FIRE) research project.

The findings centered upon a phenomenon called “bursty star formation.”

“In contrast to forming stars at a nearly constant rate, the star formation activity in those early galaxies went on-and-off, on-and-off, with some large fluctuations over time. This, in turn, drives large variations in their brightness because the light seen by telescopes like JWST was emitted by the young stars formed in those galaxies,” Sun said.

The researchers have an idea of why this phenomenon occurs in smaller galaxies. In these, a batch of very large stars may form in a sudden burst, then explode as supernovas after just a few million years due to their great size. They blast gas into space that becomes ingredients for another burst of star formation. But the stronger gravitational effects in larger galaxies prevent these bursts, favoring steady star formation.

Sun expects Webb to continue to challenge our understanding of the universe and provide fresh insight, regardless of whether it meets scientific expectations.

“This is exactly how science is done and progressed,” Sun said.

Representational file image.
| Photo Credit: Rajeev Bhatt

Stargazers are in for a double treat this week: a rare blue supermoon with Saturn peeking from behind.

The cosmic curtain rises Wednesday night with the second full moon of the month, the reason it’s considered blue. It’s dubbed a supermoon because it’s closer to Earth than usual, appearing especially big and bright.

This will be the closest full moon of the year, just 222,043 miles (357,344 kilometers) or so away. That’s more than 100 miles (160 kilometers) closer than the Aug. 1 supermoon.

As a bonus, Saturn will be visible as a bright point 5 degrees to the upper right of the moon at sunset in the east-southeastern sky, according to NASA. The ringed planet will appear to circle clockwise around the moon as the night wears on.

If you missed the month’s first spectacle, better catch this one. There won’t be another blue supermoon until 2037, according to Italian astronomer Gianluca Masi, founder of the Virtual Telescope Project.

Clouds spoiled Masi’s attempt to livestream the supermoon rising earlier this month. He’s hoping for clearer skies this time so he can capture the blue supermoon shining above St. Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican.

Weather permitting, observers don’t need binoculars or telescopes — “just their own eyes.” said Masi.

“I’m always excited to admire the beauty of the night sky,” he said, especially when it features a blue supermoon.

The first supermoon of 2023 was in July. The fourth and last will be in September.