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New Straits Times
2 days ago
- Business
- New Straits Times
[UPDATED] MACC to record statement from Jovian in Indonesia next week
KUALA LUMPUR: Datuk Seri Ismail Sabri Yaakob's former son-in-law, Datuk Jovian Mandagie, will have his statement recorded in Indonesia next week. A source said the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) is expected to record his statement over a span of two days in Jakarta. "The MACC has scheduled an appointment, including the location where the statement from the 39-year-old fashion designer will be recorded. "Investigating officers will fly to Jakarta next week and remain there for two days to meet him," the source said. Jovian's statement will be recorded in Jakarta as the former husband of Nina Sabrina Ismail Sabri was reported to have moved there. He moved back to Jakarta after announcing the closure of his fashion business last year and was previously married to the eldest daughter of Malaysia's ninth prime minister. Previously, it was reported that the MACC had yet to record Jovian's statement, in connection with its investigation into asset ownership linked to the former prime minister. MACC chief commissioner Tan Sri Azam Baki confirmed that the commission would record Jovian's statement. Previously, Ismail Sabri had earlier been summoned several times to the MACC headquarters over investigations into corruption and money laundering. The probe concerns the expenditure and procurement of funds for the promotion and publicity of the "Keluarga Malaysia" programme during his tenure as prime minister from August 2021 to November 2022. Azam said the investigation was initiated following a directive for Ismail Sabri to declare his assets under Section 36(1) of the MACC Act 2009. The former prime minister submitted his asset declaration on Feb 10, and the MACC is currently analysing the source of the assets.
Yahoo
24-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Bizarre softball-sized 'mushballs' explain missing gas on Jupiter
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. The weather forecast for Jupiter now includes softball-size hailstones, known as "mushballs," that are brewed by violent thunderstorms raging in the planet's turbulent atmosphere, a new study finds. The findings confirm these bizarre, ammonia-rich mushballs are also the source of Jupiter's missing ammonia. The absence of this gas in pockets of Jupiter's atmosphere has perplexed scientists for years. Decades ago, astronomers spotted intensely turbulent cloud tops in telescope images of the gas giant. The discovery led scientists to conclude that Jupiter's atmosphere churns and mixes constantly, like a pot of boiling water. Yet recent data from Earth-based radio telescopes and NASA's Juno spacecraft revealed deep pockets of missing ammonia — reaching 90 miles (150 kilometers) deep across all latitudes. This depletion is so significant in the planet's atmosphere that no known mechanism could explain it. Now, the new study's analysis of the aftermath of a massive 2017 storm observed by Juno offers compelling evidence that Jupiter's raging storms are the key to this atmospheric puzzle. The findings also reveal that even localized storms can strip ammonia from the planet's upper atmosphere and plunge it unexpectedly deep, indicating that the long-held vision of a thoroughly mixed atmosphere swirling around Jupiter is an illusion. "The top of the atmosphere is actually a pretty poor representation of what the whole planet looks like," study lead author Chris Moeckel, a researcher in the Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, told Live Science. "As time goes by, we have to dig deeper and deeper into the atmosphere to find the place where it appears well-mixed." Moeckel and his colleagues described their findings in a study published March 28 in the journal Science Advances. Because of the dense cloud cover blanketing Jupiter, scientists cannot directly observe what lies beneath the planet's turbulent cloud tops. The role of ammonia is like a splash of color in a flowing stream of water, Moeckel said: It acts as a tracer, revealing otherwise-invisible patterns and processes deep within Jupiter's atmosphere. To explain the missing ammonia in Jupiter's atmosphere, in 2020 scientists theorized that the planet's violent storms generate strong updrafts that rapidly lift ammonia-rich ice particles to high altitudes, where they combine with water ice into a slushy liquid. Much like Earth's hailstones, Jovian mushballs grow by accumulating ice layers as storm currents repeatedly cycle them, eventually reaching softball size and falling deep into Jupiter's atmosphere, far below their origin. This process, the theory posited, left upper regions depleted of ammonia and water that Juno and ground-based telescopes detected. A distinct signature within the radio observations beamed back by Juno confirmed that this exotic process is indeed occurring, the new study found. During its February 2017 flyby, the spacecraft passed over an active storm region, and its instruments showed a higher concentration of both ammonia and water nestled beneath the storm cloud. "I was actually sitting at the dentist's office waiting and I was playing with the code," Moeckel said. "All of a sudden I saw a signal much deeper at the same location as the storm clouds were at the top, and I remember being like 'Huh,' I didn't expect anything down here." The peculiar signal, which persisted even a month after the storm began, could only be explained by either a drop in temperature consistent with melting ice or an increase in ammonia concentration, which would occur if the ammonia within the mushballs was being released as they melted. RELATED STORIES —Powerful solar winds squish Jupiter's magnetic field 'like a giant squash ball' —NASA solves 44-year-old mystery of why Jupiter's Io is so volcanically active —Jupiter's Great Red Spot is being squeezed, Hubble Telescope finds — and nobody knows why "Both theories led me to the same conclusion — the only known mechanism was these mushballs," Moeckel said. "That's the moment I conceded." The researchers suspect Jupiter is unlikely to be unique in this regard, as gases such as ammonia are swept into forming planets and are likely circulating in the atmospheres of hydrated gas giants both within our solar system and beyond. "I won't be surprised if this is happening throughout the universe," Moeckel said.
Yahoo
22-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Jupiter Was Twice Its Current Ginormous Size, Scientists Discover
Jupiter's already the big kahuna of the Solar System, an absolute unit of a planet with a mass 2.5 times greater than all of the rest of the planets combined. Prepare, then, to have your mind blown – the Solar System's biggest planet was once even bigger. New calculations suggest that early Jupiter could have had as much as 2.5 times its volume today, say astronomers Konstantin Batygin from Caltech and Fred Adams of the University of Michigan. Based on their study of two of the moons of Jupiter, the scientists have found that, just 3.8 million years after the first solid materials formed in the Solar System, Jupiter was 2 to 2.5 times its current volume, with a significantly more powerful magnetic field to boot. This is a finding that supports the bottom-up method of planet formation for the giant gas-shrouded world. "Our ultimate goal is to understand where we come from, and pinning down the early phases of planet formation is essential to solving the puzzle," Batygin says. "This brings us closer to understanding how not only Jupiter but the entire Solar System took shape." We believe that rocky worlds, like Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars, form from the bottom up, a gradual accumulation of dust and rocks to eventually build an entire world, with a differentiated core and all. This is known as core accretion. Gas giants are thought to start out the same way, but once they reach a certain mass, around 10 times the mass of Earth, they have enough gravity to retain a substantial gas envelope, and begin to accumulate that, too. This process is thought to have taken place in the outer Solar System, since there wouldn't be enough material closer to the Sun to accumulate the large core. Since the formation and evolution of Jupiter is thought to have played a key role in the formation and evolution of the architecture of the Solar System, the details of how it was born and how it grew are of intense interest to planetary scientists. Since we can't just, you know, rewind the Solar System though, we need to look at what's happening now to try and reconstruct the past. Typically, this involves using standard models of planet formation collected from observing planetary systems (including our own) throughout the Milky Way and constructing a model based on those observations. These models, however, involve a lot of guesswork and connecting the dots, and as such, tend to leave significant uncertainties. Batygin and Adams took a different approach: they studied the orbital motions of Amalthea and Thebe, two tiny Jovian moons that orbit close to the planet, closer even than the orbit of Io. The orbits of these tiny moons are tilted with respect to Jupiter's equator. These tilts, previous work has shown, can be used to back-trace the orbital history of these tiny moons. Batygin and Adams used that orbital history to reconstruct the early evolution of Jupiter. "It's astonishing that even after 4.5 billion years," Adams says, "enough clues remain to let us reconstruct Jupiter's physical state at the dawn of its existence." Their results showed that Jupiter had a period of rapid, intense growth early in the history of the Solar System. Just 3.8 million years after the first solids emerged, Jupiter's volume was at least twice its current volume. Moreover, its magnetic field was 50 times higher than it is now, facilitating a rate of accretion from a disk of material feeding into the planet of around 1.2 to 2.4 Jupiter masses per million years. This rapid growth phase developed the planet and put it on the path to becoming the Jupiter we see today. When the material around Jupiter eventually dissipated, the planet itself contracted under its own gravity, reducing its volume, and increasing its spin speed. Jupiter continues to shrink to this day as its surface and internal temperatures fall, compressing and heating its core and thus losing energy, although this occurs at a very slow rate. Even with a larger volume, Jupiter was never close to massive enough to achieve star status. It would need to be at least 85 times its current mass to be able to ignite core hydrogen fusion, a defining feature of all stars. What the team's work gives us is a new tool for understanding Jupiter and its role in the Solar System, where it is thought to have played a vital part in stabilizing the planets enough so that life could emerge on Earth. "What we've established here is a valuable benchmark," Batygin says. "A point from which we can more confidently reconstruct the evolution of our Solar System." The research has been published in Nature Astronomy. Early Universe's Milky Way 'Twin' Looked Surprisingly Like Our Galaxy Dark Streaks on Mars May Not Be Signs of Flowing Water Like We Thought Bright Streak Appears Over US During Aurora Storm, Mystifying Skywatchers
Yahoo
14-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
JWST Captures Jupiter's Auroras 'Fizzing And Popping With Light'
It's only fitting that Jupiter, nicknamed the king of the planets, wears a crown – and what a crown it is. Although we can't see them with our naked eyes, the giant planet sports the most powerful auroras in the Solar System – permanent shimmering caps at its north and south poles, gleaming in non-visible wavelengths – ultraviolet, infrared, and occasional bursts of X-ray. In recent years, observations with the most cutting-edge instruments have finally started to reveal the secrets of these giant, invisible auroras, but there's still a lot we have to learn. The world's most powerful space telescope has taken us a little bit further: new observations from JWST, obtained on 25 December 2023, reveal features astronomers have never seen before. "What a Christmas present it was – it just blew me away!" says astronomer Jonathan Nichols of the University of Leicester in the UK. "We wanted to see how quickly the auroras change, expecting it to fade in and out ponderously, perhaps over a quarter of an hour or so. Instead we observed the whole auroral region fizzing and popping with light, sometimes varying by the second." The auroras on Jupiter are generated in a similar way to the auroras on Earth. Particles are slurped up into the planetary magnetosphere, and accelerated to tremendous speeds as they are whisked away to the poles. At the poles, they are dumped out into the atmosphere, where their ionizing interactions with atmospheric particles generate a glow. For Earth, those particles are predominantly solar in origin, which is why we see auroras when the Sun ejects particularly powerful outflows – such as coronal mass ejections or strong solar winds. That happens on Jupiter, too, but the main source of the Jovian auroras is much closer to home: its volcanic moon Io, which is always spewing forth sulfur dioxide. This gas forms a huge torus, a reservoir that constantly feeds into the planet's auroras. One of the molecules floating around in Jupiter's atmosphere that creates an infrared glow is the trihydrogen cation (H3+), a charged ion made up of three hydrogen atoms. Trihydrogen ions can be used to study the energy budget of an aurora, so Nichols and his colleagues used the JWST observations to track the behavior of molecules in the Jovian aurora, using simultaneous ultraviolet Hubble observations to contextualize the emission. "Bizarrely, the brightest light observed by Webb had no real counterpart in Hubble's pictures. This has left us scratching our heads," Nichols says. "In order to cause the combination of brightness seen by both Webb and Hubble, we need to have an apparently impossible combination of high quantities of very low energy particles hitting the atmosphere – like a tempest of drizzle! We still don't understand how this happens." It's pretty in keeping with Jupiter, which does a lot of very strange things that we don't understand very well. But with an ever-growing arsenal of powerful telescopes and probes, scientists are, little by little, finding the peculiar pieces of the Jovian puzzle. This new information, while currently somewhat baffling, is just such a puzzle piece. How it fits into the bigger picture might just need a few more pieces. Future modeling work, for instance, could help explain features of the auroral emission that currently baffle scientists. Meanwhile, the collection of more observations across a range of wavelengths is ongoing. The good thing is that, since the auroras are always there, there's no waiting for just the right moment. Any observation of Jupiter in the right light is going to capture something of the magnificent radiation thereon. The findings have been published in Nature Communications. Survey of More Than 1,300 Stars Uncovers Unexplained Pulses of Light Failed Soviet Probe Plunges Back to Earth After 53 Years Stuck in Orbit New Signals Hint at a Lost Ocean of Water Concealed Within Mars
Yahoo
02-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
'Everything about Jupiter is extreme:' NASA learns more about gas giant, its volcanic moon
It's a world home to gigantic storms bigger than Australia, 100-mph winds pummeling its northern reaches and a rocky moon riddled with lava-spewing volcanoes. Welcome to Jupiter. NASA scientists have for years sought to understand the gas giant, whose mass is more than the rest of the planets in our solar system combined. Now, thanks to the efforts of the U.S. space agency's Juno probe, Jupiter's secrets are being revealed like never before. New data from the orbiter has unveiled some of the treacherous conditions of not only Jupiter, but its moon Io, the most volcanic body in the solar system. The findings, which come after Juno has flown close to the planet to peer under its cloud covered atmosphere, shed light on Jupiter's fierce winds and violent cyclones. On the fiery Io, the innermost and third-largest of Jupiter's four Galilean moons, Juno's observations have provided more insights about its incessant volcanic activity. Here's everything to know about NASA's latest findings, announced Tuesday, April 29. More about Io: Jupiter moon of Io is famed for its volcanoes. NASA just spotted the most powerful one yet NASA's Juno spacecraft launched in August 2011 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on Florida's Atlantic coast. Since it arrived in 2016 at Jupiter's orbit, the vehicle, which looks something like a three-bladed cosmic fan, has been probing beneath the gas giant's dense clouds seeking answers about the origin and evolution of the gas giant. That extended mission, which is slated to end in September 2025, also extends to Jupiter's rings and many moons. Juno's trajectory passes by Io every other orbit, flying over the same part of the moon each time. Though Io is not much larger than Earth's own moon, the two celestial bodies couldn't be more different. While our moon is relatively calm, Io is considered to be the most volcanically active world in our solar system. And while Earth, of course, has plenty of active volcanoes of its own, eruptions on the Jovian moon have attracted scientific interest because they are thought to be caused by very different factors. The rocky moon, which was first discovered by the ancient astronomer Galileo in 1610, is named for a mythological woman transformed into a cow during a marital dispute. Because Io is so close to its massive host planet, the moon is subjected to a tremendous gravitational pull as it orbits Jupiter once about every 42 hours, according to the Planetary Society. This, at times, pulls the moon closer to Jupiter, and, at times, pushes it farther away, weakening the planet's gravitational influence. The constant stretching and squeezing creates tidal forces that generate heat within the moon, keeping its subsurface crust in liquid magma form that seeks any available escape route to relieve the pressure. As a result, the hectic conditions are perfect for Io's approximately 400 active volcanoes to endlessly spew lava dozens of miles into the air exceeding temperatures of 1,832 degrees Fahrenheit. Years of data from NASA's Juno mission has provided scientists with a trove of information about the conditions of both Jupiter and Io. For instance, the findings helped Juno team members track the movements of Jupiter's massive northern polar cyclone, as well as eight others surrounding it. The data resulted in helping the team develop a new model to study the fast-moving jet stream that encircles Jupiter's north pole where the cyclones rage. 'Everything about Jupiter is extreme," Scott Bolton, principal investigator of Juno, said in a statement. 'As Juno's orbit takes us to new regions of Jupiter's complex system, we're getting a closer look at the immensity of energy this gas giant wields.' Meanwhile, Juno's data also revealed for the first time the subsurface temperature of Io a key insight into the moon's inner structure and volcanic activity. What's more, a massive volcanic hot spot on the moon's southern hemisphere that Juno observed during its third-ever flyby of the moon on Dec. 27, 2024, appears to still be active, according to NASA. The volcanic activity spotted on a planet famed for such eruptions was not only larger than Earth's Lake Superior, but was observed belching out eruptions six times the total energy of all the world's power plants combined. Juno mission scientists expect more observations May 6, when the solar-powered spacecraft flies by the moon again at a distance of about 55,300 miles. The team members presented their findings April 29 during a news briefing in Vienna during the European Geosciences Union General Assembly. Eric Lagatta is the Space Connect reporter for the USA TODAY Network. Reach him at elagatta@ This article originally appeared on Florida Today: NASA's Juno probe glimpses 'extreme' Jupiter, its volcanic moon Io
