Archaeological field school offers First Nations students hands-on experience
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Yahoo
7 hours ago
- Yahoo
This Webb photo didn't just see galaxies. It changed their place in time.
A James Webb Space Telescope study is setting the record straight on the ages of some known ancient galaxies, which have turned out to be much older and farther away in space than previously thought. Webb, a joint observatory of NASA and its European and Canadian counterparts, took a fresh look at a piece of the sky made famous by the Hubble Space Telescope's ultra-deep field view more than 20 years ago. At that time, Hubble's long-exposure image was extremely ambitious: Scientists pointed the telescope at a seemingly starless area, unsure what photons they'd collect. In the end, that ultra-deep field image was "found to be anything but blank," Webb researchers said, "containing thousands of distant galaxies." Now with Webb, this patch of sky is revealing more about the universe — even shuffling the cosmic timeline. Known as the MIRI Deep Imaging Survey, the project involved the Webb telescope's mid-infrared instrument, which detects light wavelengths invisible to the naked eye. The new findings from the survey are published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. With Webb, astronomers are able to observe the faint infrared glow from ancient stars and the structures they formed. The telescope trained on the Hubble Ultra Deep Field area for 100 hours, according to the research, including 41 hours with one particular filter. The resulting image picked up dim signals from galaxies when the universe was barely a few hundred million years old — a mere whippersnapper. To understand a deep field space image, think of it as you would a core sample taken from the ground, collecting older rocks and soil the farther down you go: The image is a tiny-but-distant slice of space, revealing cosmic history by cutting across billions of light-years, each deeper layer revealing an earlier time. "To our knowledge, this constitutes the longest single-filter exposure obtained with (Webb) of an extragalactic field as of yet," the authors wrote. The project, dubbed MIDIS for short, found nearly 2,500 light sources, most of them distant galaxies. About 1,000 now have revised distance estimates, based on how their light has shifted. Webb was built to observe an early period known as "cosmic dawn," between 100 million to 1 billion years after the Big Bang, detecting light at invisible infrared wavelengths. In short, light gets stretched — or "redshifted" — over time and distance by the expansion of the universe. Those infrared waves can also pierce through the prevalent gas and dust in space that could otherwise obscure far and naturally weaker light sources. In one case, the project found that a galaxy previously believed to be 11.8 billion years old was closer to 13.3 billion — pushing its origins back to when the universe was perhaps just 450 million years old. That puts the galaxy squarely in the first wave of galaxies formed. Other objects in the MIDIS image reveal a different story: hundreds of red galaxies, some of which got their color because they're dusty or contain mature, cooler stars. Either way, the results show Webb's MIRI instrument can be a powerful tool for uncovering missed or misidentified ancient galaxies. Not even NASA's Spitzer, a now-retired infrared space telescope, saw with this level of clarity. That bodes well for researchers looking into how the universe evolved from birthing the first galaxies to a time when star and supermassive black hole formation seemed to peak. "MIDIS surpasses preflight expectations," the authors wrote. "Deep MIRI imaging has great potential to characterise the galaxy population from cosmic noon to dawn." Solve the daily Crossword
Wall Street Journal
8 hours ago
- Wall Street Journal
The Growing Buzz Around Ancestral Wines
In the rolling hills of Valencia in Spain, winemaker Pablo Calatayud has joined forces with scientists and archaeologists to mount a small viticultural revolution—one that reaches back to pre-Roman times to recreate what have become known as ancestral wines. At his Celler del Roure, Calatayud is using large, egg-shaped clay amphorae to make wine pressed from grapes native to the region. The process is reconstructed from old texts and drawings carved into archaeological finds across the Mediterranean, including an ancient Iberian settlement that overlooks his own vineyard.
Yahoo
10 hours ago
- Yahoo
Close encounter with great white shark near Halifax sparks awe, disbelief
A Dalhousie University student studying marine biology is sharing a breathtaking photo of a great white shark she took while on a recent research expedition off the coast of Halifax. Geraldine Fernandez snapped the picture Wednesday from a cage atop a boat operated by Atlantic Shark Expeditions near Sambro, a rural fishing community in the Halifax Regional Municipality. The male shark can be seen rising out of the water, staring almost directly at the camera, with his mouth agape and his teeth showing. For some, the image may be menacing. But for Fernandez, who is studying to become a shark biologist, coming up close and personal with the shark was closer to love at first bite. "The whole interaction was [one of] the most elegant, graceful and natural interactions that I have personally ever had with a shark," she said Friday in an interview with CBC's Mainstreet Halifax. "It was able to show its size and its power without even doing anything. "People think they're these mindless animals that just attack, and, honestly, all it was doing was checking out the people, being a little curious, and I just got really lucky that day." 'Once-in-a-lifetime opportunity' When the image was shared on social media, many of the people commenting thought it had to be the product of artificial intelligence. But it came from a camera that Fernandez had attached to a pole. The shark was being monitored from a cage above, where she was stationed, and by divers underwater. "This encounter was extremely unique," said Neil Hammerschlag, the founder and president of Atlantic Shark Expeditions. His company regularly works with researchers like Fernandez. It also offers shark tours for civilians in Halifax and Yarmouth at various times of the year. "The other great whites we've seen this season, and there's been a handful of them, they've all been really cautious," Hammerschlag said. "This one stuck around for hours, they had no interest in the bait … was more interested in looking at the cage, rubbing up against the cage … and looking at what people were doing on the boat." Fernandez has been obsessed with sharks since she was young. As a summer research student with Dalhousie's Future of Marine Ecosystems Lab, she's been collecting data for a new method of monitoring sharks, which involves using a tool called a "shark bar" to measure the size of sharks in the water. Her close encounter with the great white shark is more proof she's on the right track. "It definitely felt like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity," she said. "All it's done is just put more drive in me to continue my research and continue with shark exploration." MORE TOP STORIES Solve the daily Crossword
