Digest of science news for the week that we didn’t write anything about
The ozone hole over Antarctica has grown to three times the size of Brazil
According to observations from the European Space Agency’s Copernicus Sentinel-5P satellite, on September 16, 2023, the area of the ozone hole over Antarctica reached approximately 26 million sq. km, making it one of the largest seasonal holes on record. The real maximum of the ozone hole occurred in 2000, when its area reached almost 28.4 million square meters. km.
Ozone is a naturally occurring gas found in the stratosphere that protects us from ultraviolet radiation from the sun. In 1985, a hole in the ozone layer was discovered over Antarctica, which was later linked to human use of carbon-depleting substances. We have since banned the use of these substances and are monitoring the size of the hole.
However, the ozone hole continues to wax and wane seasonally in response to temperature changes and winds in the stratosphere, peaking between mid-September and mid-October. “Our operational ozone monitoring and forecasting service shows that the 2023 ozone hole started very early and has been growing rapidly since mid-August,” Antje Inness, senior scientist at the Copernicus atmospheric monitoring service, said in a statement.
A formation similar to a collapsed lava tube was found on the Moon
The Moon was once a geologically active body – it had volcanoes, lava flows and a magnetic field created as a result of the activity of its interior. The Moon’s airless environment has perfectly preserved evidence of this past, and today it can be seen in the form of dark deposits, volcanic domes and cones. But the most recognizable are the so-called “twisting rills” [борозды]”, which are believed to be ancient lava tubes that subsequently collapsed. Recently, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera captured images of a 48 km long rill stretching across the northern hemisphere.
Lava tubes have been observed throughout the solar system, including the Moon, Mars and Mercury. Like lava tubes on Earth, they were formed during volcanic eruptions when flowing lava cooled and crusted on the surface. This crust sealed the flowing lava inside, allowing it to flow long distances before solidifying. Over time, these pipes can be destroyed by seismic activity or impacts, forming a chain of pits and holes that radiate away from the volcanic formations.
Lightning seen on Venus may not be lightning at all
The Parker Solar Probe may have finally picked up signals that will allow us to identify the culprit behind the mysterious lightning storms on Venus. The discovery happened in 2021, when Parker was making a planned flyby of the planet, trying to use the planet’s gravitational pull to get closer to his main object of study.
As they say in new job, flashes of light on Venus that many experts associate with lightning may not be lightning at all. Rather, they are associated with disturbances in the magnetic fields surrounding the planet. Of course, this does not mean that there is no lightning on Venus – perhaps there is simply not as much of it as we previously thought.
“The debate about lightning on Venus has been going on for about 40 years,” George said. “I hope that with new data we can help resolve these debates.”
Essentially, although Venus appears to be rife with lightning based on signals scientists have collected over time, something doesn’t add up. For example, a 2021 study, the statement said, failed to detect radio waves that would be expected from lightning on the planet, and a paper published in August this year suggested that some flashes of light usually attributed to Venusian lightning were actually They are actually meteors burning up in the planet’s atmosphere.
Webb’s photo of the Orion Nebula shows dozens of paired orphan planets
Webb Space Telescope did two stunning wide-angle mosaic photographs of the grandiose Orion Nebula, a major star-forming region and one of the closest stellar nurseries to the solar system. It is located only 1344 light years away.
The huge mosaic of more than 3,000 individual images has also been added to the European Space Agency’s ESASky app, an interactive all-sky map with an easy-to-use interface that allows users to view amazing images of the universe from the likes of the James Webb Space Telescope and Hubble Space Telescope.
The Orion Nebula is teeming with nascent stars nestled in swelling clouds of molecular gas. It is known that there are about 2,800 young stars in the nebula, and even more stellar embryos are hidden in a dense curtain of gas and dust. Webb’s near-infrared camera, known as NIRCam, can penetrate much of this gas and dust, allowing it to detect protostellar disks, outflows from growing stars, and even free-floating planets.
At the same time, Webb discovered about 40 pairs of free-floating gas giant planets, or Jupiter Mass Binary Objects (JMBO).
Free-floating planets have already been found in the Orion Nebula, but JuMBOs are surprising in that they appear to form pairs. Astronomers still cannot answer the question: did JuMBO (and other free-floating planets) form directly from the gas of the Orion Nebula as failed stars, or were they snatched from a planetary system, perhaps by the gravity of a nearby star that tore them from their orbits? ?
Wrinkles on Mercury’s surface indicate the planet continues to shrink
Planetary scientists have long known that Mercury has been shrinking over billions of years.
Despite the fact that Mercury is the closest planet to the Sun, its inner surface is cooled due to the leakage of internal heat. This means that the rocks (and, accordingly, the metals) from which it consists should decrease somewhat in volume.
However, it is unknown to what extent the planet continues to shrink today, and if so, how long it will continue to do so. Now our new work, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, offers your version of what is happening.
As Mercury’s interior shrinks, its surface (crust) occupies less and less area. In response to this, “thrust faults” – when one section of the relief moves onto the neighboring one. This is similar to the wrinkles that form on an apple as it ages, only the apple wrinkles due to drying out, and Mercury – due to thermal compression of its insides.
The first evidence of Mercury’s compression came in 1974, when the Mariner 10 spacecraft transmitted photographs of kilometer-long scarps (slopes resembling ramps) stretching across hundreds of kilometers of terrain. In the photographs of the Messenger, which made an orbital flight around Mercury in 2011-2015, many more “lobate scars” (as they came to be called) were discovered in all parts of the globe.
From these observations, it can be concluded that beneath each slope, gentle geological faults called thrust faults approach the surface, which are a consequence of the fact that the radius of Mercury has decreased by a total of about 7 km.
Developed AI capable of designing robots from scratch
A team of researchers led by Northwestern University has developed the first artificial intelligence (AI) to date that can intelligently design robots from scratch.
To test the new AI, the researchers gave the system a simple task: create a robot that can walk on a flat surface. While nature took billions of years to evolve the first walking species, a new algorithm has reduced evolution to lightning speed – creating a successfully walking robot in just a few seconds.
But the artificial intelligence program isn’t just fast. It also runs on a simple personal computer and is capable of designing completely new structures from scratch. This is in stark contrast to other artificial intelligence systems, which often require power-hungry supercomputers and enormous amounts of data. And even after processing all this data, such systems find themselves tied to the limitations of human creativity – they only imitate past human work, unable to generate new ideas.
“We discovered a very fast AI-driven design algorithm that bypasses evolutionary bottlenecks without relying on the biases of human designers,” said Sam Kriegman, lead author of the work at Northwestern University. “We told the AI we wanted a robot that could walk on the ground. Then we just pressed a button and in the blink of an eye it created a blueprint for a robot that was unlike any animal that had ever walked on the ground. I call this process ” instant evolution.”
