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Bubbles built the ‘pillars of creation’
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Wes C. Skiles/Getty
GIANT “whirlpools” in the ocean carry far more water than expected and have a big impact on the weather – though as yet we don’t know exactly what. The areas of swirling water are 100 to 500 kilometres across. These “eddies” generally move west, driven by Earth’s rotation, until they stop spinning. Now, for the first time, the amount of water and heat they carry has been measured. Bo Qiu at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu and colleagues used information from satellites and floating sensors between 1992 and 2010 to spot eddies and study them. They found the eddies move as much water as the biggest ocean currents, bringing over 30 million tonnes of water per second to the east coasts of continents (Science, doi.org/tf5). “The amount of water they can carry westward was a huge surprise,” says Qiu. This is likely to significantly affect the weather. For instance, eddies are probably exacerbating extreme weather near Japan, says Wenju Cai of Australia’s national research agency, CSIRO. Warm water from the huge Kuroshio current is mainly to blame, but eddies carry even more warm water. It’s unclear how eddies will affect weather as the world warms. They are the ocean equivalent of storms, and since storms are predicted to get stronger, eddies might too.
Mysterious meteorite may be rare cosmic shrapnel A FOSSIL meteorite unlike anything seen before has been uncovered in a Swedish quarry. The mysterious rock may be the first known piece of the “bullet” that sparked an explosion of life on early Earth. Roughly 100 fossil meteorites have emerged from the limestone quarry west of Stockholm, all of them part of an iron-poor class called the L chondrites. They date back about 470 million years to the Ordovician period, when Earth experienced a burst of new species.
Now miners working in the quarry have found a meteorite fragment that is not an L chondrite. Analysing its microscopic crystals, Birger Schmitz at Lund University and his colleagues found that the rock dates to the same time period, but is of a kind completely unknown to science (Earth and Planetary Science Letters, doi.org/tfv). The quarry’s meteorites may have been created when two asteroids collided and broke apart between Mars and Jupiter. The larger object spawned the cloud of
L chondrites that bombarded Earth for about 10 million years. According to one popular idea, this intense meteor shower caused just enough destruction to open up ecological niches and drive life to diversify into a richer assortment of species. But the fate and identity of the smaller asteroid has long been a mystery. Schmitz and his team think that the latest fossil is a piece of that second asteroid, bolstering the notion that a violent collision sparked a meteor storm that gave Ordovician life a boost. NASA, ESA, STScI, J. Hester and P. Scowen (Arizona State University)
Huge ‘whirlpools’ drive the weather
Mites infect bees with nastiest virus BLOODSUCKING mites are infecting the UK’s honeybees with a deadly virus that deforms their wings, explaining why the mites are so bad for the bees. Like many pollinating insects, honeybees have been in decline for years. One threat is deformed wing virus, which lurks in most hives. DWV can leave bees with stubby wings and a tottering gait. The disease has become worse in the UK in recent decades, since the arrival around 1992 of the parasitic mite Varroa destructor. David Evans at the University of Warwick, UK, and his team took bees from a mite-free island. These bees had many strains of DWV, but no symptoms. Bees that had been in contact with the mites had far more of a virulent strain of virus (PLoS Pathogens, doi.org/tf7). V. destructor carries many strains, but in experiments their bites only passed the virulent DWV into bees. The biting process seems to aid this nastier DWV, perhaps by bypassing the bee’s immune system in some way. It might be possible to create an antiviral agent to combat the virulent strain, or a safe virus that outcompetes it, suggests Ian Jones at the University of Reading, UK.
Bubbles built the ‘pillars of creation’ BUILDING a cosmic icon may be as easy as blowing bubbles. Simulations of the billowing wind from a massive star may reveal how the “pillars of creation” (pictured) were created. The finger-like columns of gas and dust are part of the Eagle Nebula, about 7000 light years away from Earth. An image snapped by the Hubble Space Telescope in 1995 catapulted the pillars to stardom. The columns are being eroded by ultraviolet radiation from the very massive stars that live in the nebula. To find out if these stars also played a role in creating the pillars, Scott
Balfour at Cardiff University, UK, made a computer simulation of such a massive star and set it to emit different intensities of UV radiation. Winds from the model star created a giant bubble, which swept up dust and gas as it grew. In some versions of the model, the bubble made a halo of trunk-like columns of gas along its rim. But to build structures dense enough to give birth to new stars – like the real pillars – the star’s UV output had to be just right. Balfour presented the work last week at a meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society in Portsmouth, UK.
5 July 2014 | NewScientist | 15
Wes C. Skiles/Getty
GIANT “whirlpools” in the ocean carry far more water than expected and have a big impact on the weather – though as yet we don’t know exactly what. The areas of swirling water are 100 to 500 kilometres across. These “eddies” generally move west, driven by Earth’s rotation, until they stop spinning. Now, for the first time, the amount of water and heat they carry has been measured. Bo Qiu at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu and colleagues used information from satellites and floating sensors between 1992 and 2010 to spot eddies and study them. They found the eddies move as much water as the biggest ocean currents, bringing over 30 million tonnes of water per second to the east coasts of continents (Science, doi.org/tf5). “The amount of water they can carry westward was a huge surprise,” says Qiu. This is likely to significantly affect the weather. For instance, eddies are probably exacerbating extreme weather near Japan, says Wenju Cai of Australia’s national research agency, CSIRO. Warm water from the huge Kuroshio current is mainly to blame, but eddies carry even more warm water. It’s unclear how eddies will affect weather as the world warms. They are the ocean equivalent of storms, and since storms are predicted to get stronger, eddies might too.
Mysterious meteorite may be rare cosmic shrapnel A FOSSIL meteorite unlike anything seen before has been uncovered in a Swedish quarry. The mysterious rock may be the first known piece of the “bullet” that sparked an explosion of life on early Earth. Roughly 100 fossil meteorites have emerged from the limestone quarry west of Stockholm, all of them part of an iron-poor class called the L chondrites. They date back about 470 million years to the Ordovician period, when Earth experienced a burst of new species.
Now miners working in the quarry have found a meteorite fragment that is not an L chondrite. Analysing its microscopic crystals, Birger Schmitz at Lund University and his colleagues found that the rock dates to the same time period, but is of a kind completely unknown to science (Earth and Planetary Science Letters, doi.org/tfv). The quarry’s meteorites may have been created when two asteroids collided and broke apart between Mars and Jupiter. The larger object spawned the cloud of
L chondrites that bombarded Earth for about 10 million years. According to one popular idea, this intense meteor shower caused just enough destruction to open up ecological niches and drive life to diversify into a richer assortment of species. But the fate and identity of the smaller asteroid has long been a mystery. Schmitz and his team think that the latest fossil is a piece of that second asteroid, bolstering the notion that a violent collision sparked a meteor storm that gave Ordovician life a boost. NASA, ESA, STScI, J. Hester and P. Scowen (Arizona State University)
Huge ‘whirlpools’ drive the weather
Mites infect bees with nastiest virus BLOODSUCKING mites are infecting the UK’s honeybees with a deadly virus that deforms their wings, explaining why the mites are so bad for the bees. Like many pollinating insects, honeybees have been in decline for years. One threat is deformed wing virus, which lurks in most hives. DWV can leave bees with stubby wings and a tottering gait. The disease has become worse in the UK in recent decades, since the arrival around 1992 of the parasitic mite Varroa destructor. David Evans at the University of Warwick, UK, and his team took bees from a mite-free island. These bees had many strains of DWV, but no symptoms. Bees that had been in contact with the mites had far more of a virulent strain of virus (PLoS Pathogens, doi.org/tf7). V. destructor carries many strains, but in experiments their bites only passed the virulent DWV into bees. The biting process seems to aid this nastier DWV, perhaps by bypassing the bee’s immune system in some way. It might be possible to create an antiviral agent to combat the virulent strain, or a safe virus that outcompetes it, suggests Ian Jones at the University of Reading, UK.
Bubbles built the ‘pillars of creation’ BUILDING a cosmic icon may be as easy as blowing bubbles. Simulations of the billowing wind from a massive star may reveal how the “pillars of creation” (pictured) were created. The finger-like columns of gas and dust are part of the Eagle Nebula, about 7000 light years away from Earth. An image snapped by the Hubble Space Telescope in 1995 catapulted the pillars to stardom. The columns are being eroded by ultraviolet radiation from the very massive stars that live in the nebula. To find out if these stars also played a role in creating the pillars, Scott
Balfour at Cardiff University, UK, made a computer simulation of such a massive star and set it to emit different intensities of UV radiation. Winds from the model star created a giant bubble, which swept up dust and gas as it grew. In some versions of the model, the bubble made a halo of trunk-like columns of gas along its rim. But to build structures dense enough to give birth to new stars – like the real pillars – the star’s UV output had to be just right. Balfour presented the work last week at a meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society in Portsmouth, UK.
5 July 2014 | NewScientist | 15