Welcome back to the Abstract!
How are you? Do you feel emotionally stable? Just checking because our main story this week is about the odds that our dear blessed Sun will release a superflare that wipes out global infrastructure—or worse! TW: Heliophysics.
Then, a palate cleanser with the Firefly Sparkle, its Best Friend, its New Best Friend, and the Canadians we met along the way (it will make sense, I promise). Next, a spotlight on the small but consequential poops that could help fight climate change. Last, there’s a party at tortoise rock, but your RSVP is 35,000 years too late. There’s some real hair-raisers and heart-warmers this week. Enjoy!
Can the Sun Produce Apocalyptic Superflares? IMO Might Be GTK!
Vasilyev, Valeriy et al. “Sun-like stars produce superflares roughly once per century.” Science.
Once again, it is time to salute the almighty Sun. This week, scientists made new strides in addressing a longstanding and rather unsettling mystery: Does the Sun ever produce “superflares,” which are stellar outbursts that are thousands of times more destructive than a typical solar flare? It’s a great question to ask if you are interested in the odds that the Sun might obliterate civilization, and perhaps a whole lot else, within our lifetimes.
Now, new research based on observations of more than 56,000 Sun-like stars suggests that they produce superflares around once every century on average, which is a much higher rate than previous estimates. But before you start drawing up blueprints for a subterranean fortress, let me emphasize that the study does not conclude that the Sun necessarily shares this predilection for carnage. We just do not yet know enough about the risk of solar superflares, which was one motivation for the new study.
“Solar flares have been observed for less than two centuries,” said researchers led by Valeriy Vasilyev of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research. The team noted that the strongest impact in this brief record is the Carrington Event, a massive solar storm in the year 1859 that reached a total energy exceeding 1032 erg (an erg is a very small unit in the centimetre-gram-second system for measuring energy; there are 10 million ergs in one joule).
The Carrington number falls well below the threshold of superflares observed around other main sequence stars like the Sun, which range from 1034 erg to 1036 erg. I don’t have a handy comparison here, but this is the type of energy that could potentially mess with a planet’s atmosphere, wreak havoc on ecosystems, and melt the ice on outer solar system moons.
“It is unknown whether the Sun can unleash [...] superflares, and if so, how frequently that could happen,” the researchers said. “The period of direct solar observation is too short to reach any firm conclusions.”
One window into this mystery is the cosmogenic isotope record, which is an earthly archive of solar activity that shows up in natural sources like ice cores and tree rings (for more details about this record, check out the lead story in a previous column). This record has exposed five confirmed (and three candidate) extreme solar events over the past 10,000 years that would have caused major technological disruptions if they happened today. But there’s no recent evidence that the Sun has unleashed superflares powerful enough to trigger, for instance, an extinction event.
In their study, Vasilyev and his colleagues amassed a huge dataset of Sun-like stars observed by NASA’s retired Kepler space telescope. The team is not the first to plumb the Kepler archive for superflares around Sun-like stars. But the new study is based on a larger observation set that includes objects left out of previous work, such as stars with unknown rotation periods and stars that are not in isolated positions in the sky.
The 56,000+ stars in this sample flare at frequencies that are approximately two orders of magnitude higher than previous measurements, averaging out at once a century. But it will take more research to understand whether the Sun shares this propensity with members of its stellar class, or if superflares only occur in certain circumstances that (hopefully) don’t currently apply to the Sun.
“We cannot exclude the possibility that there is an inherent difference between flaring and non-flaring stars that was not accounted for by our selection criteria,” Vasilyev and his colleagues said. “If so, the flaring stars in the Kepler observations would not be representative of the Sun.”
“If, instead, our sample of Sun-like stars is representative of the Sun’s future behavior, it is substantially more likely to produce a superflare than was previously thought,” they concluded.
There’s one possible solution to the Fermi paradox. Hahaha…sleep tight!
The Adventures of the Firefly Sparkle and Friends
Once upon a time, there was a baby galaxy called the Firefly Sparkle. It sounds like it hails from the My Little Pony universe, but the Firefly Sparkle was born during cosmic dawn, an era that unfolded a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. New observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have revealed incredible details about this galactic infant, including the presence of two neighboring galaxies called Firefly-Best Friend and Firefly-New Best Friend.
“The Firefly Sparkle exhibits traits of a young, gas-rich galaxy in its early formation stage,” said researchers co-led by Lamiya Mowla of Wellesley University and Kartheik Iyer of Columbia University. “These observations provide our first spectrophotometric view of a typical galaxy in its early stages, in a 600-million-year-old Universe.”
Because looking deep into space means looking back in time, we can only observe the version of the Firefly Sparkle and its Best Friends that existed at cosmic dawn. In this early era, the Firefly Sparkle was about 10,000 times less massive than the present Milky Way, but it’s possible that it has ultimately evolved into a galaxy similar to our own somewhere out there beyond our observational limits.
In addition to being a mind-boggler, the study gets extra points for its basis on the Canadian Unbiased Cluster Survey, or CANUCS, which is a specialized JWST experiment run by Canadian researchers. We stand on guard for a top-tier acronym. o7
The Tiny Poops that Could Help Save the World
I never would have expected the phrase “fecal pellet density” to lift my spirits, but research into the salvatory power of zooplankton poop has managed to do just that this week.
Zooplankton, a diverse group of tiny aquatic animals, are a key valve in the so-called “biological pump” that removes greenhouse gases from the atmosphere and stores it in seafloor sediments. One speculative solution to the climate crisis is to make this pump more efficient in order to lock away more of the gasses that are contributing to global warming.
Now, scientists have discovered that sprinkling a little bit of clay dust over an algal bloom, which is a food source for zooplankton, provides some heft to the animals’ excrement. As a consequence, more carbon gas gets pulled down by the clay poop anchors to ocean depths conducive to sequestration.
One zooplankton species produced “denser fecal pellets with 1.8- to 3.6-fold higher sinking velocity compared to controls,” said researchers led by Diksha Sharma of Dartmouth College. “These findings provide insights into how atmospheric dust-derived clay minerals interact with marine microorganisms to enhance the biological carbon pump, facilitating the burial of organic carbon at depths where it is less likely to exchange with the atmosphere.”
And that’s why my vote for Time’s Person of the Year is: Fecal Pellets.
There’s a Party at Tortoise Rock and Your Ancestors Are Invited
Some 35,000 years ago, dozens of people gathered for communal rituals around an engraved tortoise in a hidden chamber of Manot Cave in Israel. That’s the conclusion reached by archaeologists who discovered what they believe is a concealed “ritual compound…in the deepest and darkest part of Manot Cave” that was centered around a geometric depiction of a tortoise on a dolomite boulder.
“Thus far, Manot Cave is the only site in the Levant to yield clear evidence for the existence of a communal ritual compound in the Upper Paleolithic,” a period that spans approximately 50,000 to 12,000 years ago, said researchers led by Omry Barzilai of the University of Haifa.
“The reasoning behind the Manot artist’s choice to represent the tortoise in a semi-abstract and symbolic manner remains unknown,” the team added. “Beyond their dietary importance, tortoises probably played a major role in the spiritual world of the Paleolithic people, possibly because of the resemblance in form and function between the shell and the cave, both providing shelter and protection. In the Epipaleolithic period, tortoise remains have also been associated with burial practices.”
The study is worth a look for the images, as well as the slick 3D reconstruction of Manot Cave. This site was discovered quite recently, in 2008, after a bulldozer broke through its roof, but it has already yielded major finds about its human occupants as far back as 55,000 years ago.
Move over, tinsel and string lights: This holiday season, we’re bringing back ritual engraved tortoises. Sometimes, the old ways are best.
Thanks for reading! See you next week.