YSU professor captures rare discovery on galaxies
YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio (WKBN) — A Youngstown State University professor is looking to the skies to help discover the building blocks of galaxies.
Dr. Patrick Durrell is part of an international team of astronomers who used the Hubble Space Telescope to capture a rare discovery.
For decades, Dr. Durrell has been asking himself the question, 'What makes galaxies tick?' As an astronomer regularly working with the Hubble Space Telescope, he's helping find the answer.
In his small office inside the Ward Beecher Planetarium, he showed off his team's latest research on the far reaches of the universe.
'We thought, 'Oh, maybe we're seeing, you know, the merging of star clusters.''
The galaxies might not look like a big deal because they are dim, but they hold a big secret.
'They're still very important. You know, numerically, these are the most populous galaxies out there,' Dr. Durrell said.
The international team of researchers captured images of over 80 galaxies, getting a look at a rare process for how nuclear star clusters are formed. A long-held hypothesis is that smaller star clusters can move towards the center of a galaxy, pulling other stars and clusters into their orbit, creating the nuclear cluster — something that's been difficult to prove until now.
'It's really hard to catch in the act and it looks like we found five galaxies where we are indeed catching it in the act. We're actually seeing this process in these high-resolution images from Hubble,' Durrell said. 'We're actually seeing this. We're not just saying theoretically this should happen.'
The main point of the original project, Durrell says, was to study star clusters in the galaxy, but discovering that they're actually merging together was an added bonus.
'It's kind of one of the fun things in science. It's not just discovery but you're kind of going, you know, what else is in the data? 'Oh, will ya look at that.''
Their latest research has been published in the scientific journal 'Nature.' Durrell has been working with the international team for over a decade. He helped coordinate capturing the Hubble images for this project and he has several more going on this summer.
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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Yahoo
a day ago
- Yahoo
Hiltzik: Trump's NASA cuts would destroy decades of science and wipe out its future
Like all sponsors of science programs, NASA has had its ups and downs. What makes it unique is that its achievements and failures almost always happen in public. Triumphs like the moon landings and the deep-space images from the Hubble and Webb space telescopes were great popular successes; the string of exploding rockets in its early days and the shuttle explosions cast lasting shadows over its work. But the agency may never have had to confront a challenge like the one it faces now: a Trump administration budget plan that would cut funding for NASA's science programs by nearly 50% and its overall spending by about 24%. This is us metaphorically closing our eyes. Casey Dreier, Planetary Society, on proposed NASA budget cuts The budget, according to insiders, was prepared without significant input from NASA itself. That's not surprising, because the agency doesn't have a formal leader. On May 31 Donald Trump abruptly pulled the nomination as NASA administrator of Jared Isaacman, a billionaire entrepreneur, space enthusiast, and two-time crew member on private space flights, apparently because of his ties to Elon Musk. The withdrawal came only days before a Senate confirmation vote on Isaacman's appointment. While awaiting a new nominee, "NASA will continue to have unempowered leadership, not have a seat at the table for its own destiny and not be able to effectively fight for itself in this administration," says Casey Dreier, chief of space policy at the Planetary Society, a leading research advocacy organization. Things haven't been helped by the sudden breakup between Trump and Musk, whose SpaceX is a major contractor for NASA and the Department of Defense, the relationship with which is now in doubt. The cuts, Dreier says, reduce NASA's budget to less than it has been, accounting for inflation, since the earliest days of Project Mercury in the early 1960s. Superficially, the budget cuts place heightened emphasis on "practical, quantitative," even commercial applications, Dreier told me. Programs transmitting weather data from satellites, valued by farmers, remain funded, but studies of climate change and other studies of Earth science are slashed. Astrophysics and other aspects of space exploration also are eviscerated, with 19 projects that are already operating destined for cancellation. (The Hubble and Webb space telescopes, which thrill the world with the quality and drama of their transmitted images, are spared significant cuts.) The budget cuts will undermine the administration's professed goals. That's because many of the scientific projects on the chopping block provide knowledge needed to advance those goals. Read more: Hiltzik: Trump's assault on science will make Americans dumber and sicker The proposed budget does include two longer-term scientific goals endorsed by Trump — a return of astronauts to the moon via a project dubbed Artemis, and the landing of a crew on Mars. The highly ambitious Artemis timeline anticipates a crewed landing in late 2027 or early 2028. As for the Mars landing, that goal faces so many unsolved technical obstacles that it has no practical timeline at this moment. (Doubts about its future may have deepened due to the sudden rift between Trump and the Mars project's leading advocate, Elon Musk.) The administration's approach to NASA involves a weirdly jingoistic notion of the primacy of American science, akin to the administration's description of its chaotic tariff policies. Trump has said he wants the U.S. to dominate space: "America will always be the first in space," he said during his first term. "We don't want China and Russia and other countries leading us. We've always led." Vice President JD Vance recently told an interviewer on Newsmax that "the American Space Program, the first program to put a human being on the surface of the moon, was built by American citizens. ... This idea that American citizens don't have the talent to do great things, that you have to import a foreign class of servants, I just reject that." Among the "foreign class of servants," whom Vance acknowledged included "some German and Jewish scientists" who came to the U.S. after World War II, was the single most important figure in the space program — Wernher von Braun, a German engineer who had helped the Nazis develop the V-2 rocket bomb (using Jewish slave labor) and who was recruited by the U.S. military after the war. The lunar rover that allowed astronauts to traverse the moon's surface was developed by the Polish-born Mieczyslaw G. Bekker and Ferenc Pavlics, a Hungarian. Read more: Hiltzik: Elon Musk's dumbest idea is to send human colonists to Mars The human exploration of space, its advocates say, could cement America's relationship with its scientific allies. No mission on the scale of a return to the moon or a manned voyage to Mars could conceivably be brought off by the U.S. acting alone, much less by a Republican administration alone or within the time frame of practical politics. These are long-term projects that require funding and scientific know-how on a global scale. Because of the relationship between the Martian and Earth orbits, for instance, Mars launches can only be scheduled for two-month windows every 26 months. That necessitates building partisan and international consensuses, which appear elusive in Trumpworld, in order to keep the project alive through changes in political control of the White House and Congress. "Celestial mechanics and engineering difficulties don't work within convenient electoral cycles," Dreier observes. In this White House, however, "there's no awareness that the future will exist beyond this presidency." A representative of the White House did not respond to a request for comment. Trump's assault on NASA science and especially on NASA Earth science is nothing new. Republicans have consistently tried to block NASA research on global warming. In 1999, the Clinton administration fought against a $1-billion cut in the agency's Earth science budget pushed by the House GOP majority. (Congress eventually rejected the cut.) During the first Trump term, the pressure on Earth science came from the White House, while Trump dismissed global warming as a "hoax." He wasn't very successful — during his term, NASA's budget rose by about 17%. Characteristically for this administration, the proposed cuts make little sense even on their own terms. Programs that superficially appear to be pure science but that provide data crucial for planning the missions to the moon and Mars are being terminated. Read more: How the U.S. gave up on Nobel Prize research Among them is Mars Odyssey, a satellite that reached its orbit around the red planet in late 2001 and has continued to map the surface and send back information about atmospheric conditions — knowledge indispensable for safe landings. The Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution mission, which reached Mars orbit in 2014, has provided critical data about its upper atmosphere for 10 years. In fiscal terms, the budget cuts are penny-wise and galactically foolish. The costs of space exploration missions are hugely front-loaded, with as much as 90% or 95% consumed in planning, spacecraft design and engineering and launch. Once the crafts have reached their destinations and start transmitting data, their operational costs are minimal. The New Horizons spacecraft, launched in 2006 to explore the outer limits of the Solar System (it reached Pluto in 2016 and is currently exploring other distant features of the system), cost $781 million for development, launch, and the first years of operation. Keeping it running today by receiving its transmitted data and making sure it remains on course costs about $14.7 million a year, or less than 2% of its total price tag. Terminating these projects now, therefore, means squandering billions of dollars in sunk costs already borne by taxpayers. Exploratory spacecraft can take 10 years or more to develop and require the assemblage of teams of trained engineers, designers, and other professionals. Then there's the lost opportunity to nurture new generations of scientists. The proposed budget shatters the assumption that those who devote 10 or 15 years to their science education will have opportunities awaiting them at the far end to exploit and expand upon what they've learned. Read more: Hiltzik: The Pentagon's former top UFO hunter talks about COVID-19, Haitian pet-eaters and pseudoscience generally The deepest mystery about the proposed budget cuts is who drafted them. Circumstantial evidence points to Russell Vought, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget and the main author of Project 2025, the infamous right-wing blueprint for the Trump administration. NASA doesn't appear in Project 2025 at all. It does, however, appear in a purportedly anti-woke 2022 budget proposal Vought published through his right-wing think tank, the Center for Renewing America. In that document, he called for a 50% cut in NASA's science programs, especially what Vought called its "misguided ... Global Climate Change programs," and a more than 15% cut in the overall NASA budget. The 47% cut in science programs and 24% overall is "very suspiciously close to what Vought said he would do" in 2022, Dreier says. I asked the White House to comment on Vought's apparent fingerprints on the NASA budget plan, but received no reply. The abrupt termination of Isaacman's candidacy for NASA administrator is just another blow to the agency's prospects for survival. The space community, which saw Isaacman as a political moderate committed to NASA's institutional goals, was cautiously optimistic about his nomination. "Someone who had the perceived endorsement of the president and the power to execute, would be in a position if not to change the budget numbers themselves, but to take a smart, studied and effective route to figure out how to make the agency work better with less money," Dreier told me. That may have been wishful thinking, he acknowledged. No replacement has yet been nominated, but "I don't think anyone is thinking this is going to be a better outcome for the space agency, whoever Trump nominates," Dreier says. The consequences of all this amount to an existential crisis for NASA and American space science. They may never recover from the shock. The void will be filled by others, such as China, which could hardly be Trump's dream. At the end of our conversation, I asked Dreier what will become of the 19 satellites and space telescopes that would be orphaned by the proposed budget. "You turn off the lights and they just tumble into the blackness of space," he told me. "It's easy to lose a spacecraft. That's the weird, symbolic aspect of this. They're our eyes to the cosmos. This is us metaphorically closing our eyes." Get the latest from Michael HiltzikCommentary on economics and more from a Pulitzer Prize me up. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Scientific American
a day ago
- Scientific American
New Doubts about Milky Way–Andromeda Collision, Explanation of 2023 Marine Heat Wave and Worms That Build Towers
Rachel Feltman: Happy Monday, listeners! For Scientific American 's Science Quickly, I'm Rachel Feltman. Let's kick off the week with a quick roundup of some science news you may have missed. You've probably heard that our galaxy, the Milky Way, is doomed to collide with the neighboring Andromeda galaxy sometime around 5 billion years from now. But according to new research, maybe we shouldn't count on this multigalactic merger deal going through. In a study published last Monday in Nature Astronomy, researchers who analyzed data from the European Space Agency's Gaia space telescope and NASA's Hubble say the event is more of a coin flip than a given: the team's 100,000 computer simulations suggest there's just about a 50/50 chance of the two galaxies colliding within the next 10 billion years or so. When you look at the next 4 to 5 billion years, that chance drops down to around 2%. On supporting science journalism If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today. In other space news, scientists are buzzing about a tiny star that punches way above its weight. TOI-6894 is a red dwarf that's roughly 20% as massive as our sun. But in a study published last Wednesday in Nature Astronomy, researchers say they've spotted the signature of a giant planet orbiting the little guy. The planet, called TOI-6894b, is described as a low-density gas giant—it is a little bigger than Saturn, but only has around half as much mass. Astronomers say the presence of a gas giant around such a small star is so surprising that it challenges the most widely accepted theory of planet formation. That theory, called core accretion, suggests that giant planets are born when their solid cores get massive enough to start pulling in lots of gas. Smaller stars generally lack enough gas and dust in their protoplanetary discs to allow for such a process, but this red dwarf ended up with a gas giant anyhow. Because red dwarf stars are super common in our galaxy, this could mean gas giants are more plentiful than we thought. The researchers will use the James Webb Space Telescope to study the planet's atmosphere, which should provide more clues about its formation. Now let's move on to some environmental news. Back in the summer of 2023 an extreme marine heat wave hit the North Atlantic Ocean, affecting water temperatures from Greenland to the Sahara and all the way over to the Americas. A study published last Wednesday in Nature aimed to explain why. The researchers say the summer temperature surge was equivalent to around 20 years of typical warming in the North Atlantic. While climate change, of course, played a role, the new study pinpoints some other factors that made water temperatures particularly hot that summer. For starters, in June and July of that year, the winds over the North Atlantic were weaker than at any other period on record, which meant less churning to mix sun-warmed surface waters. As a result heat was more concentrated and rose more quickly. The researchers also note that it's possible a reduction in sulphur emissions led to fewer clouds in some areas, so more sunlight hit the water. But the scientists were quick to add that weak wind was the primary driver—and that climate change is likely to make things worse. Reducing pollution from the atmosphere, generally speaking, remains a great thing to do. In a news release, the study's lead author noted that if we don't cut down our fossil fuel emissions, extreme marine heat waves like the one we saw in 2023 will only get more common and more intense. And that's bad news for everyone: warm water releases heat into the atmosphere, contributing to heat waves and severe rainstorms. Warmer oceans also mean more hurricanes. And higher water temperatures are tied to increases in coral bleaching as well. But another study, published last Thursday in Frontiers in Marine Science, offers some hope for ailing coral—not from bleaching but from a disease that can be just as devastating to a reef. Stony coral tissue loss disease, or SCTLD, was first identified off the coast of Florida just over a decade ago and has now been spotted on reefs throughout the Caribbean. More than 20 species of coral can catch it. SCTLD quickly destroys a coral's soft tissue, with some species dying within weeks of symptoms appearing. It's not clear exactly what causes SCTLD, but it seems likely that bacteria at least play a part because treating affected corals with an antibiotic paste has been shown to help them survive. The issue with this treatment is that it's a temporary fix, and it opens the door for the potential evolution of a resistant strain of whatever bacterium is involved. This new study reports on the promising results of treating coral with pro biotics instead. Corals have microbiomes just like we do, and a boost of good bacteria seems to help keep them healthy. The researchers behind the new study started by testing more than 200 strains of bacteria from disease-resistant corals and ultimately focusing on a particularly promising strain from great star corals in the lab. In 2020 the scientists took their experiment into the ocean, applying a solution of seawater and probiotics to a Florida reef impacted by SCTLD and using weighted plastic bags to create a sort of in-ocean aquarium that kept the treatment from floating away. After two and a half years, the probiotics seemed to be preventing the spread of SCTLD without causing any other disruptions to the reefs' microbiome. More research is needed to see how this treatment might impact coral in other regions, but probiotics could prove to be an important tool for fighting this devastating disease. We'll wrap up today's episode with something fun, if maybe also a little bit creepy: an act of 'collective hitchhiking' featuring a living tower of worms. Nematodes are tiny worms that you probably don't spend much time thinking about, but they're actually the most abundant animals on Earth, making up an estimated four-fifths of all animal life on our planet. According to a study published last Thursday in Current Biology, these creatures might sometimes use their vast numbers to make up for their miniscule size. Individual nematodes will sometimes stand on their tails and wave around to try to hitch a ride on a passing animal. Scientists have long suspected that they can also link together to form multi-worm 'towers' to increase their height, but this had only ever been observed in a lab setting. In the new study scientists describe seeing some of these waving worm towers inside decaying apples and pears found in the dirt of orchards. Further observations proved that, far from a chaotic pile of worms, these structures reflect the kind of superorganism behavior we see in slime molds and fire ants. While many species of nematode could be found in each piece of rotting fruit, the towers only consisted of members of the same species. Once in place, the nematodes would wave in unison as if they were one giant worm. Experiments in the lab showed that nematodes could self-assemble in just two hours and remain stable for more than 12. They could even create little arms with which to explore the space and build bridges to cross gaps to new locations. So the next time you're struggling with a group project at school or work, just remind yourself that even nematodes can figure out how to work together. That's all for this week's science news roundup. We'll be back on Wednesday. Science Quickly is produced by me, Rachel Feltman, along with Fonda Mwangi, Kelso Harper, Naeem Amarsy and Jeff DelViscio. Shayna Posses and Aaron Shattuck fact-check our show. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Subscribe to Scientific American for more up-to-date and in-depth science news.
Los Angeles Times
a day ago
- Los Angeles Times
Trump's NASA cuts would destroy decades of science and wipe out its future
Like all sponsors of science programs, NASA has had its ups and downs. What makes it unique is that its achievements and failures almost always happen in public. Triumphs like the moon landings and the deep-space images from the Hubble and Webb space telescopes were great popular successes; the string of exploding rockets in its early days and the shuttle explosions cast lasting shadows over its work. But the agency may never have had to confront a challenge like the one it faces now: a Trump administration budget plan that would cut funding for NASA's science programs by nearly 50% and its overall spending by about 24%. The budget, according to insiders, was prepared without significant input from NASA itself. That's not surprising, because the agency doesn't have a formal leader. On May 31 Donald Trump abruptly pulled the nomination as NASA administrator of Jared Isaacman, a billionaire entrepreneur, space enthusiast, and two-time crew member on private space flights, apparently because of his ties to Elon Musk. The withdrawal came only days before a Senate confirmation vote on Isaacman's appointment. While awaiting a new nominee, 'NASA will continue to have unempowered leadership, not have a seat at the table for its own destiny and not be able to effectively fight for itself in this administration,' says Casey Dreier, chief of space policy at the Planetary Society, a leading research advocacy organization. Things haven't been helped by the sudden breakup between Trump and Musk, whose SpaceX is a major contractor for NASA and the Department of Defense, the relationship with which is now in doubt. The cuts, Dreier says, reduce NASA's budget to less than it has been, accounting for inflation, since the earliest days of Project Mercury in the early 1960s. Superficially, the budget cuts place heightened emphasis on 'practical, quantitative,' even commercial applications, Dreier told me. Programs transmitting weather data from satellites, valued by farmers, remain funded, but studies of climate change and other studies of Earth science are slashed. Astrophysics and other aspects of space exploration also are eviscerated, with 19 projects that are already operating destined for cancellation. (The Hubble and Webb space telescopes, which thrill the world with the quality and drama of their transmitted images, are spared significant cuts.) The budget cuts will undermine the administration's professed goals. That's because many of the scientific projects on the chopping block provide knowledge needed to advance those goals. The proposed budget does include two longer-term scientific goals endorsed by Trump — a return of astronauts to the moon via a project dubbed Artemis, and the landing of a crew on Mars. The highly ambitious Artemis timeline anticipates a crewed landing in late 2027 or early 2028. As for the Mars landing, that goal faces so many unsolved technical obstacles that it has no practical timeline at this moment. (Doubts about its future may have deepened due to the sudden rift between Trump and the Mars project's leading advocate, Elon Musk.) The administration's approach to NASA involves a weirdly jingoistic notion of the primacy of American science, akin to the administration's description of its chaotic tariff policies. Trump has said he wants the U.S. to dominate space: 'America will always be the first in space,' he said during his first term. 'We don't want China and Russia and other countries leading us. We've always led.' Vice President JD Vance recently told an interviewer on Newsmax that 'the American Space Program, the first program to put a human being on the surface of the moon, was built by American citizens. ... This idea that American citizens don't have the talent to do great things, that you have to import a foreign class of servants, I just reject that.' Among the 'foreign class of servants,' whom Vance acknowledged included 'some German and Jewish scientists' who came to the U.S. after World War II, was the single most important figure in the space program — Wernher von Braun, a German engineer who had helped the Nazis develop the V-2 rocket bomb (using Jewish slave labor) and who was recruited by the U.S. military after the war. The lunar rover that allowed astronauts to traverse the moon's surface was developed by the Polish-born Mieczyslaw G. Bekker and Ferenc Pavlics, a Hungarian. The human exploration of space, its advocates say, could cement America's relationship with its scientific allies. No mission on the scale of a return to the moon or a manned voyage to Mars could conceivably be brought off by the U.S. acting alone, much less by a Republican administration alone or within the time frame of practical politics. These are long-term projects that require funding and scientific know-how on a global scale. Because of the relationship between the Martian and Earth orbits, for instance, Mars launches can only be scheduled for two-month windows every 26 months. That necessitates building partisan and international consensuses, which appear elusive in Trumpworld, in order to keep the project alive through changes in political control of the White House and Congress. 'Celestial mechanics and engineering difficulties don't work within convenient electoral cycles,' Dreier observes. In this White House, however, 'there's no awareness that the future will exist beyond this presidency.' A representative of the White House did not respond to a request for comment. Trump's assault on NASA science and especially on NASA Earth science is nothing new. Republicans have consistently tried to block NASA research on global warming. In 1999, the Clinton administration fought against a $1-billion cut in the agency's Earth science budget pushed by the House GOP majority. (Congress eventually rejected the cut.) During the first Trump term, the pressure on Earth science came from the White House, while Trump dismissed global warming as a 'hoax.' He wasn't very successful — during his term, NASA's budget rose by about 17%. Characteristically for this administration, the proposed cuts make little sense even on their own terms. Programs that superficially appear to be pure science but that provide data crucial for planning the missions to the moon and Mars are being terminated. Among them is Mars Odyssey, a satellite that reached its orbit around the red planet in late 2001 and has continued to map the surface and send back information about atmospheric conditions — knowledge indispensable for safe landings. The Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution mission, which reached Mars orbit in 2014, has provided critical data about its upper atmosphere for 10 years. In fiscal terms, the budget cuts are penny-wise and galactically foolish. The costs of space exploration missions are hugely front-loaded, with as much as 90% or 95% consumed in planning, spacecraft design and engineering and launch. Once the crafts have reached their destinations and start transmitting data, their operational costs are minimal. The New Horizons spacecraft, launched in 2006 to explore the outer limits of the Solar System (it reached Pluto in 2016 and is currently exploring other distant features of the system), cost $781 million for development, launch, and the first years of operation. Keeping it running today by receiving its transmitted data and making sure it remains on course costs about $14.7 million a year, or less than 2% of its total price tag. Terminating these projects now, therefore, means squandering billions of dollars in sunk costs already borne by taxpayers. Exploratory spacecraft can take 10 years or more to develop and require the assemblage of teams of trained engineers, designers, and other professionals. Then there's the lost opportunity to nurture new generations of scientists. The proposed budget shatters the assumption that those who devote 10 or 15 years to their science education will have opportunities awaiting them at the far end to exploit and expand upon what they've learned. The deepest mystery about the proposed budget cuts is who drafted them. Circumstantial evidence points to Russell Vought, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget and the main author of Project 2025, the infamous right-wing blueprint for the Trump administration. NASA doesn't appear in Project 2025 at all. It does, however, appear in a purportedly anti-woke 2022 budget proposal Vought published through his right-wing think tank, the Center for Renewing America. In that document, he called for a 50% cut in NASA's science programs, especially what Vought called its 'misguided ... Global Climate Change programs,' and a more than 15% cut in the overall NASA budget. The 47% cut in science programs and 24% overall is 'very suspiciously close to what Vought said he would do' in 2022, Dreier says. I asked the White House to comment on Vought's apparent fingerprints on the NASA budget plan, but received no reply. The abrupt termination of Isaacman's candidacy for NASA administrator is just another blow to the agency's prospects for survival. The space community, which saw Isaacman as a political moderate committed to NASA's institutional goals, was cautiously optimistic about his nomination. 'Someone who had the perceived endorsement of the president and the power to execute, would be in a position if not to change the budget numbers themselves, but to take a smart, studied and effective route to figure out how to make the agency work better with less money,' Dreier told me. That may have been wishful thinking, he acknowledged. No replacement has yet been nominated, but 'I don't think anyone is thinking this is going to be a better outcome for the space agency, whoever Trump nominates,' Dreier says. The consequences of all this amount to an existential crisis for NASA and American space science. They may never recover from the shock. The void will be filled by others, such as China, which could hardly be Trump's dream. At the end of our conversation, I asked Dreier what will become of the 19 satellites and space telescopes that would be orphaned by the proposed budget. 'You turn off the lights and they just tumble into the blackness of space,' he told me. 'It's easy to lose a spacecraft. That's the weird, symbolic aspect of this. They're our eyes to the cosmos. This is us metaphorically closing our eyes.'
