First photos in 100 years of black panther in Africa

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Photos and video by a team from the Institute for Conservation Research of the San Diego Zoo Global and the Loisaba Conservancy in Kenya have confirmed the existence of black panthers – also known as black leopards — living in Laikipia County, Kenya. The panthers were spotted not far from the fictional setting of the movie “Black Panther“.

The panthers, a melanistic color variant of the African leopard – were filmed in Lorok, Laikipia County, Kenya, on remote cameras set up as part of a large-scale study aimed at understanding the population dynamics of leopards.

African leopards have the largest range of any subspecies of leopard, yet observations of melanism are rare. Melanism is a gene mutation occurrence where the coat appears completely black in the daytime, but infrared imagery reveals the leopard’s iconic rosette patterns at night.

Will Burrard-Lucas is the first person to capture a black leopard on film since 1909. Image via Burrard-Lucas Photography/Camtraptions/The Guardian.

After talking to locals and following leopard tracks, wildlife photographer Will Burrard-Lucas used a special camera trap with wireless motion sensors, in hopes of photographing the animals at night. After leaving the cameras for several nights with no luck, Burrard-Lucas returned to his cameras to find an amazing image. Burrard-Lucas wrote in his blog:

I had a quick look at the last trap, not expecting to find much. As I scrolled through the images on the back of the camera, I paused and peered at the photograph below in incomprehension … a pair of eyes surrounded by inky darkness … a black leopard! I couldn’t believe it and it took a few days before it sank in that I had achieved my dream.

Our researchers spotted rare black leopards–sometimes called black panthers–in Laikipia County, Kenya. Learn more: @willbl

Thanks to our partners @LaikipiaCountyG @kwskenya @nature_org  @Loisaba pic.twitter.com/kN25d6beUg

— San Diego Zoo (@sandiegozoo) February 12, 2019

Nicholas Pilfold is a biologist at the San Diego institute and first author of the paper about the findings, published January 29, 2019, in the African Journal of Ecology. He said in an Instagram post containing a video of a black panther walking:

Black panthers are uncommon, only about 11 percent of leopards globally are black. But black panthers in Africa are extremely rare. A new paper confirms black leopards living in Laikipia County, Kenya, and our observations in the paper are collectively the first confirmed cases in Africa in nearly 100 years.

It is certain black panthers have been there all along, but good footage that could confirm it has always been absent until now.

Pbotographer Will Burrard-Lucas wrote in his blog: “In all the pictures I had taken, it was the leopard’s eyes that struck me first. I adjusted my lighting to darken as much of the background as possible. Just before I left, I managed to capture one last picture… eyes in the night…” Image via Will Burrard-Lucas/Burrard-Lucas Photography.

Image via Burrard-Lucas Photography.

This young female black leopard was spotted in the Laikipia Wilderness Camp in Kenya. She appeared 5 times in footage between February- April 2018. Image via Will Burrard-Lucas/Camtraptions/New York Times.

Bottom line: First photos and video of black panther in Africa since 1909.

Source: Confirmation of black leopard (Panthera pardus pardus) living in Laikipia County, Kenya

Via the San Diego Zoo

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Help EarthSky keep going! Please donate what you can to our once-yearly crowd-funding campaign.

Photos and video by a team from the Institute for Conservation Research of the San Diego Zoo Global and the Loisaba Conservancy in Kenya have confirmed the existence of black panthers – also known as black leopards — living in Laikipia County, Kenya. The panthers were spotted not far from the fictional setting of the movie “Black Panther“.

The panthers, a melanistic color variant of the African leopard – were filmed in Lorok, Laikipia County, Kenya, on remote cameras set up as part of a large-scale study aimed at understanding the population dynamics of leopards.

African leopards have the largest range of any subspecies of leopard, yet observations of melanism are rare. Melanism is a gene mutation occurrence where the coat appears completely black in the daytime, but infrared imagery reveals the leopard’s iconic rosette patterns at night.

Will Burrard-Lucas is the first person to capture a black leopard on film since 1909. Image via Burrard-Lucas Photography/Camtraptions/The Guardian.

After talking to locals and following leopard tracks, wildlife photographer Will Burrard-Lucas used a special camera trap with wireless motion sensors, in hopes of photographing the animals at night. After leaving the cameras for several nights with no luck, Burrard-Lucas returned to his cameras to find an amazing image. Burrard-Lucas wrote in his blog:

I had a quick look at the last trap, not expecting to find much. As I scrolled through the images on the back of the camera, I paused and peered at the photograph below in incomprehension … a pair of eyes surrounded by inky darkness … a black leopard! I couldn’t believe it and it took a few days before it sank in that I had achieved my dream.

Our researchers spotted rare black leopards–sometimes called black panthers–in Laikipia County, Kenya. Learn more: @willbl

Thanks to our partners @LaikipiaCountyG @kwskenya @nature_org  @Loisaba pic.twitter.com/kN25d6beUg

— San Diego Zoo (@sandiegozoo) February 12, 2019

Nicholas Pilfold is a biologist at the San Diego institute and first author of the paper about the findings, published January 29, 2019, in the African Journal of Ecology. He said in an Instagram post containing a video of a black panther walking:

Black panthers are uncommon, only about 11 percent of leopards globally are black. But black panthers in Africa are extremely rare. A new paper confirms black leopards living in Laikipia County, Kenya, and our observations in the paper are collectively the first confirmed cases in Africa in nearly 100 years.

It is certain black panthers have been there all along, but good footage that could confirm it has always been absent until now.

Pbotographer Will Burrard-Lucas wrote in his blog: “In all the pictures I had taken, it was the leopard’s eyes that struck me first. I adjusted my lighting to darken as much of the background as possible. Just before I left, I managed to capture one last picture… eyes in the night…” Image via Will Burrard-Lucas/Burrard-Lucas Photography.

Image via Burrard-Lucas Photography.

This young female black leopard was spotted in the Laikipia Wilderness Camp in Kenya. She appeared 5 times in footage between February- April 2018. Image via Will Burrard-Lucas/Camtraptions/New York Times.

Bottom line: First photos and video of black panther in Africa since 1909.

Source: Confirmation of black leopard (Panthera pardus pardus) living in Laikipia County, Kenya

Via the San Diego Zoo

from EarthSky https://ift.tt/2HeXEKY

A mysterious star called Epsilon Aurigae

One of the most puzzling stars in all the heavens is Epsilon Aurigae. It’s an eclipsing binary star, but doesn’t behave exactly as one would expect. The strange brightening and dimming of its light has led to decades-long speculation about what is really going on in this remote star system.

You can see this rather faint third-magnitude star quite easily with the eye alone in a dark sky. As soon as darkness falls, look up high for the brilliant star Capella, the brightest in the constellation Auriga the Charioteer. Close to Capella, note the prominent triangle of starlets called The Kids. Lighting up the apex of this triangle is the star Epsilon Aurigae.

The star is also known by its Arabic name, Almaaz, which means the he-goat.

Artist's concept of Epsilon Aurigae star system, seen from above or below. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

Although Capella looks much brighter than Epsilon, that’s because Capella is so much closer. Capella resides about 42 light-years away, while the star Epsilon might lie over 2,000 light-years distant.

In cycles of 27 years, the light from Epsilon Aurigae dims for a period of 640 to 730 days – about two years. The star’s last dimming happened in 2009-2011. Before that, it dimmed in 1982-1984.

Epsilon is an eclipsing binary star, meaning that a “dark” star routinely eclipses the brighter star. Studies indicate that the dark body in this binary system consists of a star surrounded by a large disk of dust. David Darling has a good description of what’s going on with this star at his website, The Worlds of David Darling:

The bright component of Epsilon Aurigae is a hot-end supergiant F star, slightly more than 1 AU [ed. note: 1 AU = one Astronomical Unit, or one Earth-sun distance] in diameter. Large though this is, every 27.1 years the bright star is eclipsed for two years by something of truly colossal proportions. The prevailing idea is that the mysterious dark component is a star surrounded by a thick ring of obscuring dust set nearly edge on. The supergiant we see and the mystery star are perhaps 30 AU apart, the dust ring about the secondary star is some 20 AU in diameter. The ring has some sort of gap in the middle, as Epsilon Aur brightens a bit at mid-eclipse. We have little idea what lies at the center of the dusty ring. One theoretical model predicts an object with a mass of 4 solar masses, another with a mass of 15 solar masses. It could be one star that has generated a disk through a fierce out-flowing wind or … a pair of class B stars that are themselves in tight orbit.

Competing theories are still vying to explain the puzzle that is Epsilon Aurigae, Auriga the Charioteer’s distant and mysterious star.

A possible model for the Epsilon Aurigae system. One star eclipses the other, and the eclipsing star is surrounding by a dark disk of dust. Image via NASA/JPL-Caltech.

Bottom line: One of the most puzzling stars in all the heavens is the star Epsilon in the constellation Auriga the Charioteer. In cycles of 27 years, Epsilon Aurigae’s light dims for a period of about two years. The star’s last dimming was from 2009 to 2011.

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One of the most puzzling stars in all the heavens is Epsilon Aurigae. It’s an eclipsing binary star, but doesn’t behave exactly as one would expect. The strange brightening and dimming of its light has led to decades-long speculation about what is really going on in this remote star system.

You can see this rather faint third-magnitude star quite easily with the eye alone in a dark sky. As soon as darkness falls, look up high for the brilliant star Capella, the brightest in the constellation Auriga the Charioteer. Close to Capella, note the prominent triangle of starlets called The Kids. Lighting up the apex of this triangle is the star Epsilon Aurigae.

The star is also known by its Arabic name, Almaaz, which means the he-goat.

Artist's concept of Epsilon Aurigae star system, seen from above or below. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

Although Capella looks much brighter than Epsilon, that’s because Capella is so much closer. Capella resides about 42 light-years away, while the star Epsilon might lie over 2,000 light-years distant.

In cycles of 27 years, the light from Epsilon Aurigae dims for a period of 640 to 730 days – about two years. The star’s last dimming happened in 2009-2011. Before that, it dimmed in 1982-1984.

Epsilon is an eclipsing binary star, meaning that a “dark” star routinely eclipses the brighter star. Studies indicate that the dark body in this binary system consists of a star surrounded by a large disk of dust. David Darling has a good description of what’s going on with this star at his website, The Worlds of David Darling:

The bright component of Epsilon Aurigae is a hot-end supergiant F star, slightly more than 1 AU [ed. note: 1 AU = one Astronomical Unit, or one Earth-sun distance] in diameter. Large though this is, every 27.1 years the bright star is eclipsed for two years by something of truly colossal proportions. The prevailing idea is that the mysterious dark component is a star surrounded by a thick ring of obscuring dust set nearly edge on. The supergiant we see and the mystery star are perhaps 30 AU apart, the dust ring about the secondary star is some 20 AU in diameter. The ring has some sort of gap in the middle, as Epsilon Aur brightens a bit at mid-eclipse. We have little idea what lies at the center of the dusty ring. One theoretical model predicts an object with a mass of 4 solar masses, another with a mass of 15 solar masses. It could be one star that has generated a disk through a fierce out-flowing wind or … a pair of class B stars that are themselves in tight orbit.

Competing theories are still vying to explain the puzzle that is Epsilon Aurigae, Auriga the Charioteer’s distant and mysterious star.

A possible model for the Epsilon Aurigae system. One star eclipses the other, and the eclipsing star is surrounding by a dark disk of dust. Image via NASA/JPL-Caltech.

Bottom line: One of the most puzzling stars in all the heavens is the star Epsilon in the constellation Auriga the Charioteer. In cycles of 27 years, Epsilon Aurigae’s light dims for a period of about two years. The star’s last dimming was from 2009 to 2011.

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Donate: Your support means the world to us

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Asteroids stronger and harder to destroy than previously thought

In recent decades, astronomers have become increasingly aware that asteroids and comets do sometimes strike Earth. Funding has increased for studies in which our skies are scanned for asteroids, which is the main reason we hear so often nowadays about asteroids sweeping relatively near the Earth. What’s more, astronomers have met to discuss what might happen if we found an asteroid headed our way. Popular books and movies have taken up this theme, too, with the idea we might send spacecraft to the asteroid to blow it up. But – according to a new study from Johns Hopkins University – blowing up an asteroid might not be easy.

These scientists used a new understanding of how rocks fracture, and a new computer modeling method, to simulate asteroid collisions. Charles El Mir, a recent Ph.D graduate from the Johns Hopkins University’s Department of Mechanical Engineering and the paper’s first author, commented in a statement:

We used to believe that the larger the object, the more easily it would break, because bigger objects are more likely to have flaws. Our findings, however, show that asteroids are stronger than we used to think and require more energy to be completely shattered.

These scientists’ findings will be published in the March 15, 2019 print issue of the peer-reviewed journal Icarus (preprint here).

They said their work can:

… aid in the creation of asteroid impact and deflection strategies, increase understanding of solar system formation and help design asteroid mining efforts.

A frame-by-frame showing how gravity causes asteroid fragments to reaccumulate in the hours following impact. Image via Charles El Mir/Johns Hopkins University.

The statement from Johns Hopkins explained:

Researchers understand physical materials like rocks at a laboratory scale (about the size of your fist), but it has been difficult to translate this understanding to city-size objects like asteroids. In the early 2000s, a different research team created a computer model into which they input various factors such as mass, temperature, and material brittleness, and simulated an asteroid about a kilometer in diameter striking head-on into a 15-mile (25-km) diameter target asteroid at an impact velocity of 3 miles (5 km) per second. Their results suggested that the target asteroid would be completely destroyed by the impact.

In the new study, El Mir and his colleagues, K.T. Ramesh, director of the Hopkins Extreme Materials Institute and Derek Richardson, professor of astronomy at the University of Maryland, entered the same scenario into a new computer model called the Tonge-Ramesh model, which accounts for the more detailed, smaller-scale processes that occur during an asteroid collision. Previous models did not properly account for the limited speed of cracks in the asteroids.

The simulation was separated into two phases: a short-timescale fragmentation phase and a long-timescale gravitational reaccumulation phase. The first phase considered the processes that begin immediately after an asteroid is hit, processes that occur within fractions of a second.

The second, long-timescale phase considers the effect of gravity on the pieces that fly off the asteroid’s surface after the impact, with gravitational reaccumulation occurring over many hours after impact.

In the first phase, after the asteroid was hit, millions of cracks formed and rippled throughout the asteroid, parts of the asteroid flowed like sand, and a crater was created. This phase of the model examined the individual cracks and predicted overall patterns of how those cracks propagate.

The new model showed that the entire asteroid is not broken by the impact, unlike what was previously thought. Instead, the impacted asteroid had a large damaged core that then exerted a strong gravitational pull on the fragments in the second phase of the simulation.

The research team found that the end result of the impact was not just a ‘rubble pile’ – a collection of weak fragments loosely held together by gravity. Instead, the impacted asteroid retained significant strength because it had not cracked completely, indicating that more energy would be needed to destroy asteroids. Meanwhile, the damaged fragments were now redistributed over the large core, providing guidance to those who might want to mine asteroids during future space ventures.

El Mir commented:

Our question was, how much energy does it take to actually destroy an asteroid and break it into pieces?

It may sound like science fiction but a great deal of research considers asteroid collisions. For example, if there’s an asteroid coming at Earth, are we better off breaking it into small pieces, or nudging it to go a different direction? And if the latter, how much force should we hit it with to move it away without causing it to break? These are actual questions under consideration.

Ramesh added:

We are impacted fairly often by small asteroids, such as in the Chelyabinsk event a few years ago. It is only a matter of time before these questions go from being academic to defining our response to a major threat. We need to have a good idea of what we should do when that time comes – and scientific efforts like this one are critical to help us make those decisions.

Bottom line: Researchers at Johns Hopkins employed a new understanding of how rocks fracture, and a new computer modeling method, to simulate asteroid collisions. They found that asteroids are hard to shatter than previously believed.

Source: A new hybrid framework for simulating hypervelocity asteroid impacts and gravitational reaccumulation

Via Johns Hopkins

from EarthSky https://ift.tt/2NGI8IY

In recent decades, astronomers have become increasingly aware that asteroids and comets do sometimes strike Earth. Funding has increased for studies in which our skies are scanned for asteroids, which is the main reason we hear so often nowadays about asteroids sweeping relatively near the Earth. What’s more, astronomers have met to discuss what might happen if we found an asteroid headed our way. Popular books and movies have taken up this theme, too, with the idea we might send spacecraft to the asteroid to blow it up. But – according to a new study from Johns Hopkins University – blowing up an asteroid might not be easy.

These scientists used a new understanding of how rocks fracture, and a new computer modeling method, to simulate asteroid collisions. Charles El Mir, a recent Ph.D graduate from the Johns Hopkins University’s Department of Mechanical Engineering and the paper’s first author, commented in a statement:

We used to believe that the larger the object, the more easily it would break, because bigger objects are more likely to have flaws. Our findings, however, show that asteroids are stronger than we used to think and require more energy to be completely shattered.

These scientists’ findings will be published in the March 15, 2019 print issue of the peer-reviewed journal Icarus (preprint here).

They said their work can:

… aid in the creation of asteroid impact and deflection strategies, increase understanding of solar system formation and help design asteroid mining efforts.

A frame-by-frame showing how gravity causes asteroid fragments to reaccumulate in the hours following impact. Image via Charles El Mir/Johns Hopkins University.

The statement from Johns Hopkins explained:

Researchers understand physical materials like rocks at a laboratory scale (about the size of your fist), but it has been difficult to translate this understanding to city-size objects like asteroids. In the early 2000s, a different research team created a computer model into which they input various factors such as mass, temperature, and material brittleness, and simulated an asteroid about a kilometer in diameter striking head-on into a 15-mile (25-km) diameter target asteroid at an impact velocity of 3 miles (5 km) per second. Their results suggested that the target asteroid would be completely destroyed by the impact.

In the new study, El Mir and his colleagues, K.T. Ramesh, director of the Hopkins Extreme Materials Institute and Derek Richardson, professor of astronomy at the University of Maryland, entered the same scenario into a new computer model called the Tonge-Ramesh model, which accounts for the more detailed, smaller-scale processes that occur during an asteroid collision. Previous models did not properly account for the limited speed of cracks in the asteroids.

The simulation was separated into two phases: a short-timescale fragmentation phase and a long-timescale gravitational reaccumulation phase. The first phase considered the processes that begin immediately after an asteroid is hit, processes that occur within fractions of a second.

The second, long-timescale phase considers the effect of gravity on the pieces that fly off the asteroid’s surface after the impact, with gravitational reaccumulation occurring over many hours after impact.

In the first phase, after the asteroid was hit, millions of cracks formed and rippled throughout the asteroid, parts of the asteroid flowed like sand, and a crater was created. This phase of the model examined the individual cracks and predicted overall patterns of how those cracks propagate.

The new model showed that the entire asteroid is not broken by the impact, unlike what was previously thought. Instead, the impacted asteroid had a large damaged core that then exerted a strong gravitational pull on the fragments in the second phase of the simulation.

The research team found that the end result of the impact was not just a ‘rubble pile’ – a collection of weak fragments loosely held together by gravity. Instead, the impacted asteroid retained significant strength because it had not cracked completely, indicating that more energy would be needed to destroy asteroids. Meanwhile, the damaged fragments were now redistributed over the large core, providing guidance to those who might want to mine asteroids during future space ventures.

El Mir commented:

Our question was, how much energy does it take to actually destroy an asteroid and break it into pieces?

It may sound like science fiction but a great deal of research considers asteroid collisions. For example, if there’s an asteroid coming at Earth, are we better off breaking it into small pieces, or nudging it to go a different direction? And if the latter, how much force should we hit it with to move it away without causing it to break? These are actual questions under consideration.

Ramesh added:

We are impacted fairly often by small asteroids, such as in the Chelyabinsk event a few years ago. It is only a matter of time before these questions go from being academic to defining our response to a major threat. We need to have a good idea of what we should do when that time comes – and scientific efforts like this one are critical to help us make those decisions.

Bottom line: Researchers at Johns Hopkins employed a new understanding of how rocks fracture, and a new computer modeling method, to simulate asteroid collisions. They found that asteroids are hard to shatter than previously believed.

Source: A new hybrid framework for simulating hypervelocity asteroid impacts and gravitational reaccumulation

Via Johns Hopkins

from EarthSky https://ift.tt/2NGI8IY

Found: World’s biggest bee

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It turns out that the world’s largest bee is not extinct. An international team of scientists and conservationists spotted and photographed a Wallace’s giant bee in the forests of North Moluccas, an island group in Indonesia, in January 2019.

The Wallace’s giant bee (Megachile pluto) – with a wingspan more than 2.5 inches (6 cm) – is Earth’s largest. Despite its conspicuous size, the big bee has been lost to science since 1981.

Clay Bolt, a natural history photographer specializing in bees, took the first-ever photos and video of a live giant bee. Bolt said in a statement:

It was absolutely breathtaking to see this ‘flying bulldog’ of an insect that we weren’t sure existed anymore.

To see how beautiful and big the species is in real life, to hear the sound of its giant wings thrumming as it flew past my head, was just incredible.

Wallace’s giant bee dwarfs the common honey bee in size. Image © Clay Bolt/claybolt.com.

The female giant bee makes her nest in active termite mounds in trees. She uses her large mandibles to collect sticky tree resin to line the nest and protect it from invading termites. In heat, humidity and sometimes torrential downpours, the team searched dozens of termite mounds in hopes of discovering a giant bee.

It wasn’t until the last day of a five-day stop in an area of interest that the team finally found a single female Wallace’s giant bee living in a termites’ nest in a tree about 8.2 feet (2.5 meters) off the ground.

Simon Robson with a live Wallace’s giant bee in Indonesia. Image via Clay Bolt.

The bee is named after British entomologist Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913), the co-discoverer alongside Charles Darwin of the theory of evolution through natural selection. Wallace discovered the giant bee on the Indonesian island of Bacan. He described the female bee, which is about the length a human thumb, as

… a large black wasp-like insect, with immense jaws like a stag-beetle.

The bee wasn’t seen again until 1981, when an entomologist rediscovered it on three Indonesian islands and was able to observe some of its behavior, including how it uses its mandibles to gather resin and wood for its nests. Since then, other teams have looked for the bee, but with no luck.

Natural history photographer Clay Bolt makes the first ever photos of a living Wallace’s giant bee at its nest, which is found in active termite mounds in the North Moluccas, Indonesia. Image © Simon Robson.

The find resurrects hope that more of the region’s forests still harbor this very rare species, said team member Simon Robson from the School of Life and Environmental Sciences at the University of Sydney. He said:

Amid such a well-documented global decline in insect diversity it’s wonderful to discover that this iconic species is still hanging on.

Although little is known about the bee, the species depends on primary lowland forest for resin and the nests of tree-dwelling termites, Bolt said. In Indonesia, forest destruction for agriculture, however, threatens the habitat for this species and many others.

Photographer Clay Bolt, left, and a guide, Iswan, photographing the bee’s nest in the North Moluccas of Indonesia. Image via Simon Robson/New York Times.

Bottom line: Researchers found and photographed a Wallace’s giant bee – the world’s largest bee and feared extinct – in Indonesia in January 2019.

Via University of Sydney

from EarthSky https://ift.tt/2tN9tjz

Help EarthSky keep going! Please donate what you can to our once-yearly crowd-funding campaign.

It turns out that the world’s largest bee is not extinct. An international team of scientists and conservationists spotted and photographed a Wallace’s giant bee in the forests of North Moluccas, an island group in Indonesia, in January 2019.

The Wallace’s giant bee (Megachile pluto) – with a wingspan more than 2.5 inches (6 cm) – is Earth’s largest. Despite its conspicuous size, the big bee has been lost to science since 1981.

Clay Bolt, a natural history photographer specializing in bees, took the first-ever photos and video of a live giant bee. Bolt said in a statement:

It was absolutely breathtaking to see this ‘flying bulldog’ of an insect that we weren’t sure existed anymore.

To see how beautiful and big the species is in real life, to hear the sound of its giant wings thrumming as it flew past my head, was just incredible.

Wallace’s giant bee dwarfs the common honey bee in size. Image © Clay Bolt/claybolt.com.

The female giant bee makes her nest in active termite mounds in trees. She uses her large mandibles to collect sticky tree resin to line the nest and protect it from invading termites. In heat, humidity and sometimes torrential downpours, the team searched dozens of termite mounds in hopes of discovering a giant bee.

It wasn’t until the last day of a five-day stop in an area of interest that the team finally found a single female Wallace’s giant bee living in a termites’ nest in a tree about 8.2 feet (2.5 meters) off the ground.

Simon Robson with a live Wallace’s giant bee in Indonesia. Image via Clay Bolt.

The bee is named after British entomologist Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913), the co-discoverer alongside Charles Darwin of the theory of evolution through natural selection. Wallace discovered the giant bee on the Indonesian island of Bacan. He described the female bee, which is about the length a human thumb, as

… a large black wasp-like insect, with immense jaws like a stag-beetle.

The bee wasn’t seen again until 1981, when an entomologist rediscovered it on three Indonesian islands and was able to observe some of its behavior, including how it uses its mandibles to gather resin and wood for its nests. Since then, other teams have looked for the bee, but with no luck.

Natural history photographer Clay Bolt makes the first ever photos of a living Wallace’s giant bee at its nest, which is found in active termite mounds in the North Moluccas, Indonesia. Image © Simon Robson.

The find resurrects hope that more of the region’s forests still harbor this very rare species, said team member Simon Robson from the School of Life and Environmental Sciences at the University of Sydney. He said:

Amid such a well-documented global decline in insect diversity it’s wonderful to discover that this iconic species is still hanging on.

Although little is known about the bee, the species depends on primary lowland forest for resin and the nests of tree-dwelling termites, Bolt said. In Indonesia, forest destruction for agriculture, however, threatens the habitat for this species and many others.

Photographer Clay Bolt, left, and a guide, Iswan, photographing the bee’s nest in the North Moluccas of Indonesia. Image via Simon Robson/New York Times.

Bottom line: Researchers found and photographed a Wallace’s giant bee – the world’s largest bee and feared extinct – in Indonesia in January 2019.

Via University of Sydney

from EarthSky https://ift.tt/2tN9tjz

An ancient white dwarf star with rings

Artist’s illustration of the white dwarf star LSPM J0207+3331, with multiple rings. Image via Goddard Space Flight Center/Scott Wiessinger.

Rings are a common phenomenon in our universe. In recent decades, we’ve learned that gas and ice giant planets can have rings; in our solar system, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune all have them. Even some asteroids are now known to have their own ring systems. Stars – especially young stars in the process of making their own solar systems – have rings. And even some white dwarf stars – which are small, dense stars in an advanced stage of their evolution – are known to have rings. They’re typically found for young white dwarfs. Now – thanks to the help of a citizen scientist – multiple rings have been found for a much older white dwarf. Astronomers say these rings are a real puzzle!

Astronomers announced this finding in a peer-reviewed paper published in the February 19, 2019 issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

A citizen scientist – Melina Thévenot – made the discovery. She’s a volunteer with the NASA-led Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 project. The white dwarf star is labeled LSPM J0207+3331. It’s about 145 light-years away in the direction to our constellation Capricornus the Sea Goat. In 2014, J0207 was found to be the oldest and coldest known white dwarf yet. It’s an Earth-sized core remnant of a once-sunlike star that has died.

According to John Debes, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore:

This white dwarf is so old that whatever process is feeding material into its rings must operate on billion-year timescales. Most of the models scientists have created to explain rings around white dwarfs only work well up to around 100 million years …

Citizen scientists working on Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 scrutinize “flipbooks” of images from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer. This animation shows a flipbook containing the ring-bearing white dwarf LSPM J0207+3331 (circled).
Image Backyard Worlds: Planet 9/NASA.

J0207 is estimated to be 3 billion years old. That estimate is based on its temperature of just over 10,500 degrees Fahrenheit (5,800 degrees Celsius). The presence of dust around J0207 became evident in data from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission.

Now J0207 is not only the oldest and coldest white dwarf known; it’s also the oldest and coldest white dwarf with a ring system.

Citizen scientist Thévenot made the discovery while searching through the European Space Agency’s (ESA’s) Gaia archives for brown dwarfs – objects too large to be planets but too small to be stars. In other words, as so often happens in science, she wasn’t looking for white dwarf rings; she was looking for something else.

After noticing an object that might be a brown dwarf, she then looked at the object in WISE’s infrared data. That way of looking showed the object was too bright and too distant to be a brown dwarf. She passed on the findings to the Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 team, and Adam Burgasser at the University of California, San Diego was asked to conduct follow-up observations with the Keck II telescope at the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii.

The Keck observations confirmed the earlier ones. As noted by Thévenot:

That is a really motivating aspect of the search. The researchers will move their telescopes to look at worlds you have discovered. What I especially enjoy, though, is the interaction with the awesome research team. Everyone is very kind, and they are always trying to make the best out of our discoveries.

Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 volunteers scour infrared images from NASA, searching animated blinks for moving objects in our cosmic neighborhood. But sometimes they find unexpected oddities, like J0207. In this set of images, J0207 shows a bluish tinge in visible light (top), but also sports a strikingly orange hue in the infrared (bottom), indicating the unexpected presence of circumstellar dust rings. Image via Digitized Sky Survey/WISE/NEOWISE, Aaron Meisner (NOAO)/ Eurekalert.

So how did this very old and cold white dwarf – LSPM J0207+3331 – get its rings? Scientists aren’t sure yet, but the answer likely has to do with the stuff left in orbit around the white dwarfs, even after the star has entered the white dwarf stage. In other words, white dwarf stars were once ordinary stars like our sun. Some likely had their own solar systems. NASA explained:

… some white dwarfs — between 1 and 4 percent — show infrared emission indicating they’re surrounded by dusty disks or rings. Scientists think the dust may arise from distant asteroids and comets kicked closer to the star by gravitational interactions with displaced planets. As these small bodies approach the white dwarf, the star’s strong gravity tears them apart in a process called tidal disruption.

The debris forms a ring of dust that will slowly spiral down onto the surface of the star.

Older white dwarfs are thought to be less likely to have rings, since – the longer time passes for any given white dwarf system – the more interactions will have already occurred, leaving less material in orbit to provide dust for the rings. Debes compared the process to grains of sand falling through an hourglass. Eventually, all the grains in the top of the hourglass will become depleted.

Yet J0207 is known to be an old white dwarf, and it does have rings. It’s thought the star may have multiple rings, not just one. Astronomers say there may be a thin ring at the point where the star’s gravitational tides break up the asteroids, and a wider ring closer to the white dwarf star itself.

It’s a puzzle!

White dwarfs are thought to form when a sunlike star runs out of fuel and swells into a red giant, ejecting at least half of its mass. What gets left behind is a very hot white dwarf star about the size of Earth. This senario will eventually happen to our own sun, several billion years from now. This illustration shows a very famous white dwarf called Sirius B. Image via ESA.

By the way, Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 currently has over 150,000 volunteer citizen scientists. As explained by Marc Kuchner, a co-author of the paper and astrophysicist at Goddard Space Flight Center:

We built Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 mostly to search for brown dwarfs and new planets in the solar system. But working with citizen scientists always leads to surprises. They are voracious – the project just celebrated its second birthday, and they’ve already discovered more than 1,000 likely brown dwarfs. Now that we’ve rebooted the website with double the amount of WISE data, we’re looking forward to even more exciting discoveries.

Bottom line: Thanks to a citizen scientist, astronomers have now found the oldest and coldest white dwarf star known to have rings.

Source: A 3 Gyr White Dwarf with Warm Dust Discovered via the Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 Citizen Science Project

Via NASA

from EarthSky https://ift.tt/2tONzfS

Artist’s illustration of the white dwarf star LSPM J0207+3331, with multiple rings. Image via Goddard Space Flight Center/Scott Wiessinger.

Rings are a common phenomenon in our universe. In recent decades, we’ve learned that gas and ice giant planets can have rings; in our solar system, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune all have them. Even some asteroids are now known to have their own ring systems. Stars – especially young stars in the process of making their own solar systems – have rings. And even some white dwarf stars – which are small, dense stars in an advanced stage of their evolution – are known to have rings. They’re typically found for young white dwarfs. Now – thanks to the help of a citizen scientist – multiple rings have been found for a much older white dwarf. Astronomers say these rings are a real puzzle!

Astronomers announced this finding in a peer-reviewed paper published in the February 19, 2019 issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

A citizen scientist – Melina Thévenot – made the discovery. She’s a volunteer with the NASA-led Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 project. The white dwarf star is labeled LSPM J0207+3331. It’s about 145 light-years away in the direction to our constellation Capricornus the Sea Goat. In 2014, J0207 was found to be the oldest and coldest known white dwarf yet. It’s an Earth-sized core remnant of a once-sunlike star that has died.

According to John Debes, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore:

This white dwarf is so old that whatever process is feeding material into its rings must operate on billion-year timescales. Most of the models scientists have created to explain rings around white dwarfs only work well up to around 100 million years …

Citizen scientists working on Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 scrutinize “flipbooks” of images from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer. This animation shows a flipbook containing the ring-bearing white dwarf LSPM J0207+3331 (circled).
Image Backyard Worlds: Planet 9/NASA.

J0207 is estimated to be 3 billion years old. That estimate is based on its temperature of just over 10,500 degrees Fahrenheit (5,800 degrees Celsius). The presence of dust around J0207 became evident in data from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission.

Now J0207 is not only the oldest and coldest white dwarf known; it’s also the oldest and coldest white dwarf with a ring system.

Citizen scientist Thévenot made the discovery while searching through the European Space Agency’s (ESA’s) Gaia archives for brown dwarfs – objects too large to be planets but too small to be stars. In other words, as so often happens in science, she wasn’t looking for white dwarf rings; she was looking for something else.

After noticing an object that might be a brown dwarf, she then looked at the object in WISE’s infrared data. That way of looking showed the object was too bright and too distant to be a brown dwarf. She passed on the findings to the Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 team, and Adam Burgasser at the University of California, San Diego was asked to conduct follow-up observations with the Keck II telescope at the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii.

The Keck observations confirmed the earlier ones. As noted by Thévenot:

That is a really motivating aspect of the search. The researchers will move their telescopes to look at worlds you have discovered. What I especially enjoy, though, is the interaction with the awesome research team. Everyone is very kind, and they are always trying to make the best out of our discoveries.

Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 volunteers scour infrared images from NASA, searching animated blinks for moving objects in our cosmic neighborhood. But sometimes they find unexpected oddities, like J0207. In this set of images, J0207 shows a bluish tinge in visible light (top), but also sports a strikingly orange hue in the infrared (bottom), indicating the unexpected presence of circumstellar dust rings. Image via Digitized Sky Survey/WISE/NEOWISE, Aaron Meisner (NOAO)/ Eurekalert.

So how did this very old and cold white dwarf – LSPM J0207+3331 – get its rings? Scientists aren’t sure yet, but the answer likely has to do with the stuff left in orbit around the white dwarfs, even after the star has entered the white dwarf stage. In other words, white dwarf stars were once ordinary stars like our sun. Some likely had their own solar systems. NASA explained:

… some white dwarfs — between 1 and 4 percent — show infrared emission indicating they’re surrounded by dusty disks or rings. Scientists think the dust may arise from distant asteroids and comets kicked closer to the star by gravitational interactions with displaced planets. As these small bodies approach the white dwarf, the star’s strong gravity tears them apart in a process called tidal disruption.

The debris forms a ring of dust that will slowly spiral down onto the surface of the star.

Older white dwarfs are thought to be less likely to have rings, since – the longer time passes for any given white dwarf system – the more interactions will have already occurred, leaving less material in orbit to provide dust for the rings. Debes compared the process to grains of sand falling through an hourglass. Eventually, all the grains in the top of the hourglass will become depleted.

Yet J0207 is known to be an old white dwarf, and it does have rings. It’s thought the star may have multiple rings, not just one. Astronomers say there may be a thin ring at the point where the star’s gravitational tides break up the asteroids, and a wider ring closer to the white dwarf star itself.

It’s a puzzle!

White dwarfs are thought to form when a sunlike star runs out of fuel and swells into a red giant, ejecting at least half of its mass. What gets left behind is a very hot white dwarf star about the size of Earth. This senario will eventually happen to our own sun, several billion years from now. This illustration shows a very famous white dwarf called Sirius B. Image via ESA.

By the way, Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 currently has over 150,000 volunteer citizen scientists. As explained by Marc Kuchner, a co-author of the paper and astrophysicist at Goddard Space Flight Center:

We built Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 mostly to search for brown dwarfs and new planets in the solar system. But working with citizen scientists always leads to surprises. They are voracious – the project just celebrated its second birthday, and they’ve already discovered more than 1,000 likely brown dwarfs. Now that we’ve rebooted the website with double the amount of WISE data, we’re looking forward to even more exciting discoveries.

Bottom line: Thanks to a citizen scientist, astronomers have now found the oldest and coldest white dwarf star known to have rings.

Source: A 3 Gyr White Dwarf with Warm Dust Discovered via the Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 Citizen Science Project

Via NASA

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Bees change scent as they age

Help EarthSky keep going! Please donate what you can to our once-yearly crowd-funding campaign.

New research on honey bees offers insight into how these social insects recognize each other. The study published February 5, 2019, in the journal eLife reports that honey bees (Apis mellifera) develop different scent profiles as they age, and the guard bees at the hive’s door respond in a different way to returning foragers than they do to younger bees who have never ventured out.

Most bee researchers have thought that bees recognize and respond to a scent that is the homogenized scent of all of the members of their own colony, as is the case with some ants and other insects. It was thought that honey bees got that scent by rubbing up against their nest-mates, transferring compounds between each other. Cassondra L. Vernier, a graduate student at Washington University, is first author of the new study. She said in a statement:

You would expect, then, that even younger bees would have a very similar pheromonal profile as older bees. When in fact that is not what we saw.

But the new study suggests that honey bees’ nest-mate recognition depends instead on an innate developmental process that is associated with age-dependent division of labor.

Image via The Honey Bee Coalition.

A honey bee hatches and grows up deep inside a hive surrounded by 40,000 of her closest relatives. Only after she’s three weeks old does she leave the nest to look for pollen and nectar. According to the new research, that’s also when she becomes recognizable to other bees.

The research team compared the scent profiles of bees on the day they were born and at one week, two weeks, and three weeks of age. The three-week-old bees had significantly different profiles than their younger siblings. A three-week-old foraging bee also has a very different job to support the hive than a younger bee, who spends her time as a nurse caring for bee larvae and building the waxy honeycomb structures in the hive.

Graduate student Cassondra Vernier conducted lab experiments and observed hours of bee interactions at the entrance to the hive. She is shown here at Tyson Research Center, Washington University’s environmental field station. Image via Washington University.

The researchers wanted to know whether the differences they saw were based on age alone, or were somehow tied to the older bees’ foraging activities. Bees that leave the hive to collect nectar encounter lots of scents on flowers and other surfaces they touch, as well as sunshine and rain that could affect their body coatings and the way they smell.

So the researchers compared the scent profiles of foraging-age bees that were held in the hive and not permitted to forage with bees that were able to venture out. It turned out that these two groups were also significantly different. Yehuda Ben-Shahar, Associate Professor of Biology at Washington University is a study co-author. Ben-Shahar said:

What we found is that it’s actually a combination of both — of being at the age for foraging, and actually performing the foraging activities.

Not every bee in the hive notices the difference in scent profiles. Guard bees are the only ones who care to identify outsiders. Ben-Shahar said:

They sit in the entrance and they have a very specific posture. They’re very attentive. Their forelegs are usually raised, and they’re very alert. Still, it is hard to know who they are until they react to somebody.

Place a one-day-old, one-week-old, or two-week-old outsider on the stoop in front of a guard, and she is likely to be able to waltz on through, say the researchers. But it’s a different story after three weeks of age — when guards bite, sting and/or drag outsiders away from the door.

Bottom line: A new study finds that honey bees develop different scent profiles as they age.

Source: The cuticular hydrocarbon profiles of honey bee workers develop via a socially-modulated innate process

Via Washington University

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Help EarthSky keep going! Please donate what you can to our once-yearly crowd-funding campaign.

New research on honey bees offers insight into how these social insects recognize each other. The study published February 5, 2019, in the journal eLife reports that honey bees (Apis mellifera) develop different scent profiles as they age, and the guard bees at the hive’s door respond in a different way to returning foragers than they do to younger bees who have never ventured out.

Most bee researchers have thought that bees recognize and respond to a scent that is the homogenized scent of all of the members of their own colony, as is the case with some ants and other insects. It was thought that honey bees got that scent by rubbing up against their nest-mates, transferring compounds between each other. Cassondra L. Vernier, a graduate student at Washington University, is first author of the new study. She said in a statement:

You would expect, then, that even younger bees would have a very similar pheromonal profile as older bees. When in fact that is not what we saw.

But the new study suggests that honey bees’ nest-mate recognition depends instead on an innate developmental process that is associated with age-dependent division of labor.

Image via The Honey Bee Coalition.

A honey bee hatches and grows up deep inside a hive surrounded by 40,000 of her closest relatives. Only after she’s three weeks old does she leave the nest to look for pollen and nectar. According to the new research, that’s also when she becomes recognizable to other bees.

The research team compared the scent profiles of bees on the day they were born and at one week, two weeks, and three weeks of age. The three-week-old bees had significantly different profiles than their younger siblings. A three-week-old foraging bee also has a very different job to support the hive than a younger bee, who spends her time as a nurse caring for bee larvae and building the waxy honeycomb structures in the hive.

Graduate student Cassondra Vernier conducted lab experiments and observed hours of bee interactions at the entrance to the hive. She is shown here at Tyson Research Center, Washington University’s environmental field station. Image via Washington University.

The researchers wanted to know whether the differences they saw were based on age alone, or were somehow tied to the older bees’ foraging activities. Bees that leave the hive to collect nectar encounter lots of scents on flowers and other surfaces they touch, as well as sunshine and rain that could affect their body coatings and the way they smell.

So the researchers compared the scent profiles of foraging-age bees that were held in the hive and not permitted to forage with bees that were able to venture out. It turned out that these two groups were also significantly different. Yehuda Ben-Shahar, Associate Professor of Biology at Washington University is a study co-author. Ben-Shahar said:

What we found is that it’s actually a combination of both — of being at the age for foraging, and actually performing the foraging activities.

Not every bee in the hive notices the difference in scent profiles. Guard bees are the only ones who care to identify outsiders. Ben-Shahar said:

They sit in the entrance and they have a very specific posture. They’re very attentive. Their forelegs are usually raised, and they’re very alert. Still, it is hard to know who they are until they react to somebody.

Place a one-day-old, one-week-old, or two-week-old outsider on the stoop in front of a guard, and she is likely to be able to waltz on through, say the researchers. But it’s a different story after three weeks of age — when guards bite, sting and/or drag outsiders away from the door.

Bottom line: A new study finds that honey bees develop different scent profiles as they age.

Source: The cuticular hydrocarbon profiles of honey bee workers develop via a socially-modulated innate process

Via Washington University

from EarthSky https://ift.tt/2IPD5Ht

North Star over New Mexico

View larger at EarthSky Community Photos. | The North Star – Polaris – over New Mexico. Mike Lewinski in Tres Piedras caught this image on February 27, 2019.

Read more: Polaris is the North Star

Read more: What are star trails, and how can I capture them?

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View larger at EarthSky Community Photos. | The North Star – Polaris – over New Mexico. Mike Lewinski in Tres Piedras caught this image on February 27, 2019.

Read more: Polaris is the North Star

Read more: What are star trails, and how can I capture them?

Help EarthSky keep going! Please donate what you can to our annual crowd-funding campaign.

from EarthSky https://ift.tt/2Hc9e9H