Post 8879

Very Large Telescope: Powerful Eyes on the Sky

By Nola Taylor Redd May 30, 2018

The entire arc of the Milky Way can be seen in the southern sky in this view from the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope at the Paranal Observatory in Chile’s Atacama Desert.

(Image: © Miguel Claro)

Seated in the Atacama Desert of Chile, the European Southern Observatory (ESO)’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) consists of four main telescopes and four smaller telescopes that can be used separately or combined into a single larger instrument powerful enough to distinguish two car headlights at the distance of the moon.

World’s most advanced optical instrument

The VLT is located at Paranal Observatory in the Atacama Desert. The four Unit Telescopes boast 8.2-meter (27 feet) mirrors. Just one of these instruments can spot objects that are 4 billion times fainter than what can be seen with the unaided eye. According to the ESO’s website, the VLT is “the world’s most advanced optical telescope.”

The first of the four instruments, Unit Telescope 1 (UT1), saw first light on May 25, 1998, and went into scientific operations on April 1, 1999. UT2 saw first light only four days before the observatory’s March 5, 1999, inauguration.

The four Unit Telescopes sit in compact, thermally controlled buildings that rotate with the instruments. These buildings minimize adverse effects, such as turbulence in the telescope tube, on observations.

At the inauguration, the four Unit telescopes were given names in the Mapuche language, from an indigenous people living in the area south of Santiago de Chile. Chile’s schoolchildren participated in the naming, with an essay by then-17-year-old Jorssy Albanez Castilla unanimously selected by the committee.

UT1 is known as Antu (an-too), which means the sun.
UT2 is Kueyen (quay-yen), or the moon.
UT3 is Melipal (me-li-pal), or the Southern Cross).
UT4 is Yepun (ye-poon), or the evening star (Venus).

The VLT also contains four moveable 1.8-meter Auxiliary Telescopes. All eight telescopes are currently operational.

Together, the eight telescopes can create a massive interferometer. However, the Unit Telescopes are more often used individually, and are only available to be combined for a limited number of nights each year. The four smaller Auxiliary Telescopes, however, are available to allow the interferometer to operate each night.

In February 2018, the ESPRESSO instrument (Echelle SPectrograph for Rocky Exoplanet and Stable Spectroscopic Observations) on the VLT allowed the four Unit Telescopes to combine light from all four telescopes for the first time, making the VLT the largest optical telescope in existence in terms of collecting area. Due to the complexity involved, the light from the four had not been previously combined; only three Unit Telescopes could be combined at once.

“This impressive milestone is the culmination of work by a large team of scientists and engineers over many years,” project scientist Paolo Molaro said in a statement. “It is wonderful to see ESPRESSO working with all four Unit Telescopes, and I look forward to the exciting science results to come.”

A system of mirrors, prisms and lenses transmits the light from each Unit Telescope to the ESPRESSO instrument up to 226 feet (69 meters) away. ESPRESSO can collect the light from all four Unit Telescopes together, or from each one individually.

“ESO has realized a dream that dates back to the time when the VLT was conceived in the 1980s: bringing the light from all four Unit Telescopes on Cerro Paranal together at an incoherent focus to feed a single instrument!” said ESPRESSO instrument scientist Gaspare Lo Curto.

The science of the VLT

Over nearly two decades, the VLT has made significant contributions to astronomy, snapping the first image of an exoplanet, capturing the first direct measurements of the atmosphere of a super-Earth, and taking the universe’s cosmic temperature. In addition, the observatory’s hotel served as a villain’s hideout in the James Bond flick, “Quantum of Solace.”

https://www.space.com/40736-very-large-telescope.html?jwsource=cl

In 2004, a team of European and American astronomers studying the TW Hydrae Association, a group of very young stars and other objects, spotted a red speck of light near one of the association’s brown dwarfs. The object was more than 100 times fainter than its parent star. Further observations confirmed that it was an exoplanet orbiting its star at 55 times the Earth-sun distance.

“Our new images show convincingly that this really is a planet, the first planet that has ever been imaged outside of our solar system,” ESO astronomer Gael Chauvin said in a statement.

In 2008, a team of scientists used the VLT to discover and image an object near the star Beta Pictoris. Most directly imaged exoplanets lie far from their stars, past where Neptune would orbit, where stellar light is dimmer. In contrast, the planet Beta Pictoris b lies much closer, where Saturn would orbit.

“Direct imaging of extrasolar planets is necessary to test the various models of formation and evolution of planetary systems,” researcher Daniel Rouan said in a statement. “But such observations are only beginning. Limited today to giant planets around young stars, they will in the future extend to the detection of cooler and older planets, with the forthcoming instruments on the VLT and on the next generation of optical telescopes.”

Spin class

Researchers also used the VLT to determine how fast Beta Pictoris b is spinning, clocking the massive planet almost 62,000 mph (100,000 km/h) at its equator. In comparison, Earth’s equator spins at only 1,056 mph (1,700 km/h), while Jupiter travels at about 29,000 mph (47,000 km/h). This was the first time an exoplanet’s rotation rate had been determined.

The sky appears to rotate above ESO's Very Large Telescope in this long exposure. The star trails curve away from the celestial equator in the middle of the photo, where the stars seem to move in a straight line.

ESO/Stéphane Guisard

The sky appears to rotate above ESO’s Very Large Telescope in this long exposure. The star trails curve away from the celestial equator in the middle of the photo, where the stars seem to move in a straight line.

“It is not known why some planets spin fast and others more slowly,” researcher Remco de Kok said in a statement. “But this first measurement of an exoplanet’s rotation shows that the trend seen in the solar system, where the more massive planets spin faster, also holds true for exoplanets. This must be some universal consequence of the way planets form.”

The private organization Breakthrough Initiatives has enlisted the help of the VLT to hunt for planets around Earth’s closest star, Proxima Centauri. After helping to fund an upgrade to an existing instrument on the VLT, Breakthrough Initiatives will receive time for a “careful search” of the Proxima Centauri system for new planets. The improvement in the VLT Imager and Spectrometer for Mid Infrared instrument will equip it with a coronagraph, which blocks much of the light from a star, as well as an adaptive optics system to correct for distortions in starlight caused by Earth’s atmosphere. The upgrade is scheduled to be completed in 2019.

ENVIRONMENT

Post 8878

What is palm oil?

By Grace Browne – Live Science Contributor April 02, 2020

And why is palm oil in practically everything?

Oil palm trees are grown in large plantations, primarily in Southeast Asia.

(Image: © Shutterstock)

Palm oil is an edible vegetable oil that comes from the pulp of oil palm tree fruit. Native to West Africa, the oil palm tree is now most commonly grown in the tropics of Southeast Asia.

Palm oil is the most commonly produced vegetable oil in the world and is incorporated in a wide range of products, including many food items, cosmetics and biofuels. Worldwide annual production of the oil from 2018 to 2019 was nearly 81.6 million tons (71 million metric tons), according to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), and is expected to reach 264 million tons (240 million metric tons) by 2050, The Guardian reported in 2019. For reference, global annual production of soybean oil, the second most produced oil in the world, was about 63 million tons (57 million metric tons) from 2018 to 2019, according to the USDA.

The global market for palm oil grows with every passing year: By 2022, its worth is estimated to reach $88 billion, according to the World Health Organization. The biggest global suppliers of palm oil are Indonesia, followed by Malaysia. Combined, those countries produce approximately 85% of the world’s palm oil.

The production of palm oil is controversial, as oil palm plantations take the place of thousands of acres of mowed-down forests, making palm oil production one of the biggest drivers of deforestation. On the other hand, palm oil production provides jobs for millions of people and is an important natural resource in areas of the world with struggling economies.

Experts have estimated that palm oil can be found in about 50% of packaged items in the supermarket, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). This includes everything from detergents to cosmetics to candy.

The attractiveness of palm oil to manufacturers lies in its cheap cost and versatility. It has a much higher production rate per hectare than any other vegetable oil, and it requires relatively small amounts of energy, fertilizer and pesticides to produce. Oil palm produces about 35% of all vegetable oil on less than 10% of the land allocated to oil-producing crops. To obtain the same amount of alternative oils, such as soybean or coconut oil, between four and 10 times more land would be required, according to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF).

Palm oil is the most common cooking oil in Asia, with India, China and Indonesia accounting for nearly 40% of all palm oil consumed worldwide. It’s a popular oil to cook with because of its high heat resistance, its long shelf life and, most importantly, its low price.

Palm oil is made from the pulp of oil palm fruit. Experts estimate that palm oil is in about 50% of all packaged items. (Image credit: Shutterstock)

Why is palm oil bad for the environment?

Palm oil production is seen as a path out of poverty for the populations of developing countries where it’s produced because it drives economic development. That trend has proliferated across the world; more palm oil plantations are beginning to pop up across Asia, Africa and Latin America. The palm oil industry employs as many as 3.5 million workers across Indonesia and Malaysia, according to a report by Humanity United.

However, the rapid expansion of oil palm plantations means that palm oil production is also a major contributor to large-scale deforestation. Industrial oil palm plantations have caused 56% of deforestation on the island of Borneo since 2005, according to a study in the journal Scientific Reports.

The increasing dedication of land once occupied by tropical forests and other species-rich habitats to palm oil plantations has made palm oil production a major threat to biodiversity. The expansion of plantations has led to the increasingly serious risk of extinction for the orangutan, the pygmy elephant and the Sumatran rhino. The production of palm oil affects at least 193 threatened species, according to The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species.

Palm oil plantations are also a huge source of greenhouse gas emissions. Because they are typically established on land converted from swamp forests, clearing the land releases large amounts of carbon dioxide and methane. The most common method of clearing is by incineration, or so-called “slash-and-burn practices,” which also contribute to regional smoke haze and water pollution.

The wastewater from palm oil refineries is another huge source of methane. A study published in the journal Nature Climate Change showed that the methane produced by a single pond of palm refinery wastewater has the same annual climate impact as 22,000 cars.

Road by a palm oil plantation where a forest used to be, in Sumatra, Indonesia. Palm oil production is a major driver of deforestation. (Image credit: Shutterstock)

Can palm oil ever be sustainable?

Environmentally conscious consumers might think that boycotting products containing palm oil — either by not purchasing them or by putting pressure on retailers to forego it — is the best route toward eliminating the environmental damage caused by palm oil plantations. But it’s not as simple as that.

If palm oil use were restricted, it would need to be replaced by other types of vegetable oils in order to meet the global demand for it. However, there is no equal alternative. Other oils such as rapeseed, sunflower and soybean are nowhere near as efficient to produce as palm. In 2018, the IUCN released a report that described how boycotting palm oil would simply shift the crop’s biodiversity impacts to regions where its replacement oils are produced, such as the tropical forests and savannas of South America.

“If you’re shifting demand to a less efficient oil, you’re going to need more land, and more land comes at the expense of the natural habitats that we all cherish and love across the world,” said Matthew Struebig, a tropical conservation scientist at the University of Kent in the United Kingdom.

Our best hope for decreasing the environmental impacts of palm oil is to strive “for more sustainable production,” Struebig told Live Science. And that means more than just eliminating the threat to endangered species.

“Sustainability is much broader than just species protection. It’s about people’s livelihoods; it’s about their well-being; it’s about greenhouse gas emissions; it’s about clean, healthy water; it’s about having access to a decent wage,” he said. “The issues that are there are much broader than orangutans.”

As of 2020, just under 20% of palm oil is sustainably produced, according to the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), a global initiative formed in 2004 that sets specific standards regarding deforestation, lawfulness, transparency and social impact — standards that must be met in order for palm oil to be considered sustainably derived. Companies such as PepsiCo, Unilever, Nestlé and General Mills have made the commitment to source 100% RSPO-certified sustainable palm oil.

Several nonprofit groups are also working toward a more sustainable palm oil industry in countries where millions are dependent on its continued existence. For example, an initiative based in Malaysia called Wild Asia is helping to organize hundreds of small farmers into larger groups that can be certified to sell palm fruit that meets the requirements of the Malaysian Sustainable Palm Oil (MSPO) and RSPO Production standard, so it benefits both the farmers and the environment.

Palm oil isn’t going away anytime soon. So, the most effective way to curb the environmental impacts of palm oil is to support the initiatives and brands committed to a more sustainable palm oil industry.

THE UNIVERSE & SPACE SCIENCE

Post 8877

In his famous 1687 treatise “Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica,” Newton described what is now called his law of universal gravitation. It is usually written as:

F_g = G (m₁ ∙ m₂) / r²

Where F is the force of gravity, m1 and m2 are the masses of two objects and r is the distance between them. G, the gravitational constant, is a fundamental constant whose value has to be discovered through experiment.

Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation says that the force of gravity is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. — Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation says that the force of gravity is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. (Image credit: marekuliasz Shutterstock)

Gravity is powerful, but not that powerful

Gravity is the weakest of the fundamental forces. A bar magnet will electromagnetically pull a paper clip upward, overcoming the gravitational force of the entire Earth on the piece of office equipment. Physicists have calculated that gravity is 10^40 (that’s the number 1 followed by 40 zeros) times weaker than electromagnetism, according to PBS’s Nova.

While gravity’s effects can clearly be seen on the scale of things like planets, stars and galaxies, the force of gravity between everyday objects is extremely difficult to measure. In 1798, British physicist Henry Cavendish conducted one of the world’s first high precision experiments to try to precisely determine the value of G, the gravitational constant, as reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science’s Front Matter.

Cavendish built what’s known as a torsion balance, attaching two small lead balls to the ends of a beam suspended horizontally by a thin wire. Near each of the small balls, he placed a large, spherical lead weight. The small lead balls were gravitationally attracted to the heavy lead weights, causing the wire to twist just a tiny bit and allowing him to calculate G.

Remarkably, Cavendish’s estimation for G was only 1% off from its modern-day accepted value of 6.674 × 10^−11 m^3/kg^1 * s^2. Most other universal constants are known to far higher precision but because gravity is so weak, scientists must design incredibly sensitive equipment to try to measure its effects. Thus far, a more precise value of G has eluded their instrumentation.

The German-American physicist Albert Einstein brought about the next revolution in our understanding of gravity. His theory of general relativity showed that gravity arises from the curvature of space-time, meaning that even rays of light, which must follow this curvature, are bent by extremely massive objects.

Einstein’s theories were used to speculate about the existence of black holes — celestial entities with so much mass that not even light can escape from their surfaces. In the vicinity of a black hole, Newton’s law of universal gravitation no longer accurately describes how objects move, but rather Einstein’s tensor field equations take precedence.

Astronomers have since discovered real-life black holes out in space, even managing to snap a detailed photo of the colossal one that lives at the center of our galaxy. Other telescopes have seen black holes’ effects all over the universe.

The application of Newton’s gravitational law to extremely light objects, like people, cells and atoms, remains a bit of an unstudied frontier, according to Minute Physics. Researchers assume that such entities attract one another using the same gravitational rules as planets and stars, but because gravity is so weak, it is difficult to know for sure.

Perhaps, atoms attract one another gravitationally at a rate of one over their distance cubed instead of squared — our current instruments have no way of telling. Novel hidden aspects of reality might be accessible if only we could measure such minute gravitational forces.

A perpetual force of mystery

Gravity perplexes scientists in other ways, too. The Standard Model of particle physics, which describes the actions of almost all known particles and forces, leaves out gravity. While light is carried by a particle called a photon, physicists have no idea if there is an equivalent particle for gravity, which would be called a graviton.

Bringing gravity together in a theoretical framework with quantum mechanics, the other major discovery of the 20th-century physics community, remains an unfinished task. Such a theory of everything, as it’s known, might never be realized.

But gravity has still been used to uncover monumental findings. In the 1960s and 70s, astronomers Vera Rubin and Kent Ford showed that stars at the edges of galaxies were orbiting faster than should be possible. It was almost as if some unseen mass was tugging on them gravitationally, bringing to light a material that we now call dark matter.

In recent years, scientists have also managed to capture another consequence of Einstein’s relativity — gravitational waves emitted when massive objects like neutron stars and black holes rotate around one another. Since 2017, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) has opened up a new window to the universe by detecting the exceedingly faint signal of such events.

SCIENCE

Post 8876

Monstrous ‘murder hornets’ have reached the US

By Mindy Weisberger – Senior Writer 11 days ago

Native to Asia, the giant insects rip off the heads of honeybees by the thousands.

Vespa mandarinia, or Asian giant hornets, as also known as “yak-killer hornets,” “murder hornets,” and “hornets from hell.”

Massive, deadly hornets affectionately known as “murder hornets” “hornets from hell” and “yak-killer hornets,” have been spotted in the U.S. for the first time.

These Asian giant hornets (Vespa mandarinia) are the size of your thumb; they’re orange-headed and orange-striped; and they’re extremely pointy at the back end. The hornets, which were detected in Washington state, prey on bees and are known for ripping the heads off honeybees by the thousands, The New York Times reported on May 2. Enormous curved stingers and powerful venom make the hornets uniquely dangerous to humans, and their stings are responsible for as many as 50 deaths in Japan each year, mostly due to allergic reactions to the venom, according to the Times.

V. mandarinia is native to forests and low-altitude mountains in eastern and southeastern Asia, but troubling evidence suggests that the hornet is beginning to make some headway in North America. Now entomologists are racing against the clock to learn how widespread the invaders are in the U.S., and to isolate and destroy invasive populations before the hornets become so numerous that they settle in for good, the Times reported.

The Washington State Department of Agriculture (WSDA) verified two sightings of Asian giant hornets in early December 2019, Washington State University (WSU) Insider reported on April 6. WSDA received two more accounts describing the invasive insects, but those remain unconfirmed. No one knows how the hornets arrived in the U.S., but they may have been introduced as other types of invasive insects have: They were deliberately released, or transported here as unseen stowaways in international cargo, WSU representatives said in a statement.

Hornets are large members of the wasp family, and Asian giant hornets are the biggest hornets in the world, according to Animal Diversity Web (ADW), a database maintained by the University of Michigan’s Museum of Zoology. Queens can grow to be 2 inches (5 centimeters) in length, with a wingspan of more than 3 inches (8 cm), while female workers and males are somewhat smaller, with body lengths of about 1 to 1.5 inches (3.5 to 3.9 cm).

Only the females of the species have stingers, which can measure up to 0.2 inches (6 millimeters) long; the stingers can be used repeatedly; and they deliver a toxin that is “considerably venomous,” ADW says. The pain from their sting is significant, “like a hot nail through my leg,” Masato Ono, an entomologist at Tamagawa University near Tokyo, told National Geographic in 2002.

These so-called killer hornets made headlines worldwide in 2013, when a series of attacks in China injured hundreds of people and killed 28, mostly in Shaanxi province, Live Science previously reported.

However, not all people shy away from the hornets. In some Japanese mountain villages, the hornets are considered a delicacy when deep fried, according to the BBC.

Hunt, slaughter, occupy

European honeybees have the most to fear from this deadly predator. V. mandarinia are social hornets, and they are the only known wasp species to coordinate attacks on bee colonies, which they carry out with deadly precision.

Attacks on beehives happen in three phases, ADW says. First, the hornets hunt individual bees from a hive that has been chemically marked by one of their sisters. The hornets rip the bees to pieces, carrying the dismembered bits back to their own hive and feeding them to hornet larvae.

Asian giant hornets, the world's biggest hornet, attack and destroy honey bee hives, killing tens of thousands of bees in just a few hours. — Asian giant hornets, the world’s biggest hornet, attack and destroy honey bee hives, killing tens of thousands of bees in just a few hours. (Image credit: Courtesy of WSDA)

Next is the slaughter phase, when dozens of hornets attack the hive and massacre tens of thousands of bees.

“Within a few hours, a strong, healthy and populous honey bee colony of 30,000 to 50,000 workers is slaughtered by a group of 15 to 30 hornets,” according to a WSU fact sheet.

Finally, the hornets move into the defeated hive. They chew up the abandoned bee larvae and pupae into a bee-brood paste, which the hornets also feed to their own young. During this stage, the hornets are especially aggressive and may attack animals and humans that are unfortunate enough to wander too close to the occupied beehive, WSU says.

“Hot defensive bee balls”

European honeybees (Apis mellifera ligustica) are powerless against giant hornet attacks, but Japanese honeybees (Apis cerana japonica) have evolved a unique defense against the marauding hornets. They form “hot defensive bee balls,” swarming individual hornets and vibrating their flight muscles to generate heat. Inside the ball, temperatures build to 116 degrees Fahrenheit (47 degrees Celsius), cooking the trapped hornets to death.

Japanese honeybees are the only bee species with special brain cells that allow them to collectively thermoregulate just enough heat to kill the hornets without hurting themselves, Live Science previously reported.

Worker bees forming a hot defensive bee ball. Click for whole series of images: (A) Presentation of a wire-hung hornet to the beehive as a decoy. (B) Hundreds of workers form a hot defensive bee ball surrounding the wire-hung giant hornet. (C) Bee ball recovered in a glass beaker. (D) The giant hornet is dead 60 min after the bee ball forms. (Image credit: Copyright Ugajin A, Kiya T, Kunieda T, Ono M, Yoshida T, et al. (2012) Detection of Neural Activity in the Brains of Japanese Honeybee Workers during the Formation of a ‘‘Hot Defensive Bee Ball’’. PLoS ONE 7(3): e32902. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0032902)

Giant hornets from Asia made their first forays into North America in Canada, with sightings of three V. mandarinia hornets reported on British Columbia’s Vancouver Island in mid-August 2019, according to British Columbia’s Ministry of Agriculture. The agency issued a pest alert for the invasive hornets in September 2019, warning that more hornets might be seen in the spring when queens emerge from hibernation and establish their annual nests.

Springtime is also when Asian giant hornets are likely to become active in Washington State, entomologists told WSU Insider.

Conditions in the Pacific Northwest are just right for Asian giant hornets, according to a fact sheet issued by WSU. Should the Asian giant hornet become established in the U.S., its impact on native bee populations would be “severe enough to cause significant disruptions,” WSU associate professor Timothy Lawrence said in a statement.

Very Large Telescope: Powerful Eyes on the Sky

World’s most advanced optical instrument

The science of the VLT

Spin class

TRAPPIST-1

Nebula Dominated by Cosmic Superbubble

Swirling Star Trails Over Yepun

Omega Nebula’s Bright Pink Heart

The VLT in Action

Carina Nebula Infrared Image from ESO’s Very Large Telescope

Milky Way in 360-Degree Panorama

Yepun’s Laser and the Magellanic Clouds

War and Peace Nebula Captured by ESO’s Very Large Telescope

VLT Looks into the Eyes of the Virgin

NGC 6729 – Baby Stars Spit Up High-Speed Jets in Photo

Orion Nebula Spied by Hawk I 1024

Hot Stars Found Hidden in Galaxy’s Dusty Embrace

Rose Red Stars

Carina Nebula Imaged by the VLT Survey Telescope

Planetary Nebula Fleming 1

Sharpening Up Jupiter