Astronomers

Some astronomers made a paella at 2,000 meters above sea level in Almería. And they discovered the best cooking point for rice

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If you like cook a paellait is best that you do it on the coast. And not only because of how pleasant the impression of having a rice at the beach bar looking at the sea is. Also because, basically, it will cook better. Astronomers know this well. Calar Alto Observatoryin Almería, who have a curious anecdote with this story. It wasn’t the chef’s fault.. Years ago, the astronomers at the Calar Alto Observatory enjoyed the dishes prepared by a magnificent chef, from a small town in the province of Almería, during their work days. In his municipality he was known precisely for the quality of his rice. However, I had a thorn in my side with the paellas I was trying to prepare at the observatory. Rice never suited him. At least, not as tasty as normally. In Xataka We have spoken about it with Ana Guijarro, one of the astronomers at this observatory. One day she explained to him that he should not martyr himself. The fault was not his, but rather the fact that the facilities They are 2,168 meters above sea level. The physics behind. As we rise meters above sea level, the atmospheric pressure is lower. To understand it, we can visualize it: there is less column of air above our heads, therefore there is also less pressure acting on them. The boiling point of liquids depends on the pressure. If we heat waterthe molecules that make it up will move faster and faster, colliding with each other. When they reach the surface, they may attempt to “escape,” turning into vapor. However, atmospheric pressure pushes them down and prevents this from happening. If the atmospheric pressure decreases, so does the boiling point. That is, the temperature at which the liquid can begin to turn into vapor. At sea level, the boiling temperature of water is 100ºC. However, at 2,168 meters, water boils at approximately 92.6ºC. A cooking class. For rice to cook properly, it is necessary for the starch in its grains to hydrate and gelatinize correctly, and for that to happen, sufficient heat is needed. The problem is that, when a liquid boils, all its energy is invested precisely in that change of state instead of continuing to raise the temperature. The 100ºC at sea level, or 92ºC at higher altitudes, remain stable so that the liquid turns into a gas. Therefore, there is not enough temperature to process the rice grains in the best possible way. And what about Andean rice? In the Andean countries there are many rice-based dishes that are very tasty. The height is even higher than that of the Calar Alto Observatory, but in these places, where they have no choice but to cook at high altitudes, They have a very precious trick: the pressure cooker. Precisely the objective of this utensil is to artificially increase the pressure, so that the boiling point rises and the food can be cooked for longer. It is valid for rice and all types of stews. Even at sea level it is very precious for cooking certain dishes, such as stews. Sometimes physics makes it difficult for us, but there are tricks to deal with it. It’s not just a matter of rice. Ana Guijarro tells us that this does not only happen with rice. “For example, tea or any infusion They don’t taste the same in the mountains, because the water boils at a lower temperature and that affects the extraction of the flavor that these things have.” It is something that can frustrate a chef a lot, but with which people who, like astronomers, usually work many meters above sea level, are more than familiar. Better paella on the beach. In short, the next time you have a paella on the beach, remember that it is the best place you can have it. And everything is much more enjoyable when you know the science behind it. Images | MagnificentJorgechp In Xataka | The paella Taliban have been growing strong for years. More and more evidence points to the contrary.

Astronomers have no doubt that there is extraterrestrial life. Mathematics says that it will take 1,500 years to find it

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We have been sending signals to the cosmos for almost a century through high-power radio transmissions or even with military radars that exist around the entire planet. Little by little, humanity has been creating an electromagnetic “bubble” that expands at the speed of light, but unfortunately for some, we have not yet received a response to all these signals, and it is easy to fall into pessimism about the absence of other living beings beyond our atmosphere. The mathematics. The question here is not if we will connect with extraterrestrial intelligence, but when. And here the scientific community has great optimismsince the astronomical community is not based on UFO sightings, but on pure statistics. Here institutions like SETI They have been scanning the sky for decadesand although there is still no evidence of interference or signals of artificial origin, the conviction that we are not alone is stronger than ever. The bubble. To understand why scientists are so sure of this, you first have to look at the scale of the problem in our Milky Way, which is 100,000 light years across. This monstrous figure collides with our radio bubble that barely touches 100 light years, so on a galactic scale, we have not even crossed the street. This is where the famous Fermi paradox comes into play, which suggests that, if the universe is so vast and old, there should be someone around us, and that is why the question this researcher asked went down in history: where is everyone? The answer most supported by modern astrobiology is based on the “Mediocrity Principle”, an astronomical concept that maintains that there is nothing special about Earth and suggests that, if life arose here under certain physical and chemical conditions, it is statistically inevitable that it has arisen on a fraction of the billions of exoplanets that orbit habitable zones in our galaxy. Investigation continues. In 2016, an influential study from Cornell University put numbers to this paradox. To do this, the Drake equation was crossed with the expansion of our radio bubble with the aim of calculating how far our signal would have to travel to reach a sufficient number of stars to guarantee, by pure statistical probability, an answer. The result yielded a figure that has become a recurring reference in spatial dissemination: contact should not be expected before about 1,500 years. According to this mathematical model, for our signals to reach extraterrestrial ears requires that we cover at least half of the galaxy. Until then, it will seem like we are alone, even though the universe teems with life. Where do we look? While the 1,500-year clock continues to tick, scientists are not standing idly by, and that is why we have initiatives like SETI that they are not just looking to hear somethingbut to understand how we should listen to it. And for decades, the search for life has focused on very specific radio frequencies, highlighting the famous 1420 MHz hydrogen emission line, assuming that any advanced civilization would use that universal frequency to communicate. But… What if it’s not like that? New approaches aim to diversify the search towards broader technosignatures, since it is no longer just a matter of searching for an intentional “hello” in the form of a radio wave, but rather detecting electromagnetic pollution from other civilizations, the use of optical lasers for interplanetary communication, or even searching for signals at low-frequency radio frequencies that until now had been ignored or discarded by terrestrial interference. Images | Graham Holtshausen In Xataka | If we want to find extraterrestrial life, we already know where in space we should look: the “terminator zone”

Starlink has been ruining astronomers’ nights for years. Now it turns out that their launches are leaving their mark on the climate

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Much has been said about the great light pollution that generate the Starlink satellites from SpaceX. However, not so much has been said about something that, if we think about it, is much more evident. Air pollution derived from launches. Any space launch, in fact, can generate this type of contamination. However, satellite trains require such a large number of launches that it is not unusual for them to be of particular concern to scientists today. 15,000 satellites and counting. A team of British and American scientists has carried out Recently a study brought this problem to the fore and predicted what the effects could be in the short term. This investigation indicates that there are currently around 15,000 telecommunications satellites in orbit, more than 10,000 of which belong to SpaceX. This represents three times as many satellites as in 2020 and the worst thing is that the number continues to increase. As a consequence, according to the simulations of these researchers, by 2029, these satellites could account for 40% of the atmospheric pollution derived from space activity. Also have calculated that by then this sector will be releasing around 870 tons of soot into the atmosphere annually. It would be more or less the same amount released by all cars in the United Kingdom, so action must be taken as soon as possible. Launch and reentry problems. The two key points at which these trains of satellites will put our planet’s climate on the ropes are launch and re-entry. With the first, a large amount of black carbon. These are fine carbon particles that come from the incomplete combustion of fossil fuels. Regarding reentry, it mainly releases aluminum oxides. The satellites must be changed every 5 years. Later, when orbital conditions are favorable, this re-entry can occur, the price for which for the planet is also very expensive. The effects. Black carbon is harmful to the Earth’s climate on two levels. On the one hand, the particles that make it up have a great capacity to retain the heat of the Sun. That is why they play a very important role in the global warming of our planet. On the other hand, they can affect cloud formation in two different ways. Sometimes they prevent their formation, causing droughts, and other times they trigger extreme rainfall. Regarding aluminum oxides, can damage the ozone layerwith all the harmful effects that this entails. The place matters. The main problem with the release of these polluting substances is that it occurs in the highest layers of the atmosphere. The contamination at this height, if space activity did not exist, would be residual. However, the launches deposit that black carbon there, which remains for 2 to 3 years, retaining heat and affecting the clouds. That is why black carbon derived from space activity is estimated to have a much greater effect on the climate than that of ships, cars or power plants, for example. What is to come is very dangerous. It is said that Elon Musk wants to launch a million satellites into space. This is possibly an exaggerated figure. But it is clear that SpaceX has enormous objectives set. In fact, already It is even looking for launch platforms outside the United Statesbecause in his native country there is no room for such ambition. To all this we must add that other companies have increasingly ambitious objectives with their own satellite trains. This is, for example, the case of Amazon with Leo. The situation can become very worrying if alternatives are not sought, such as less polluting fuels for launches or more durable satellites that require fewer re-entries. Science will probably take us there at some point; but, in the meantime, the consequences for the planet will become worse and worse. We have time to solve it, but we must act now. Images | Gwendolyn Kurzen In Xataka | In 2018, Elon Musk put his own car into orbit. Eight years later it is still circling the Earth

Astronomers’ trick to hunt hundreds of nearby exoplanets: look for suspiciously “quiet” stars

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The hunt for exoplanets in the universe has always depended on our ability to observe the invisible. Until now we have mainly noticed the flickering of a star when it passes in front of one of these planets or the subtle gravitational wobble that it causes, but we have never seen them directly. Now a team of astronomers has perfected a much more ingenious method: searching for planets based on the “false” magnetic tranquility of their stars. And now it works. The project known as Dispersed Matter Planet Project (DMPP) has just confirm the discovery of seven new planets spread across five star systems, and its projections indicate that there could be hundreds of rocky worlds hidden in our closest cosmic neighborhood. And we have not been able to ‘see’ all of these with our traditional systems. How it works. The DMPP method is fascinating because it turns the traditional way of observing the universe on its head. Now, instead of looking for active stars, the team selects bright, very nearby stars that have anomalously low calcium emission. In fact, they show levels of magnetic activity below their basal level. But these samples do not indicate that the star is without activity, but rather that it is hidden. Here astronomers have discovered that these systems host planets very close to the star, which due to the intense heat are evaporating. From this gas that is released from these worlds, a kind of ‘shield’ or orbital cloud is formed that absorbs radiation and hides the activity of the stellar chromosphere. That is, the star’s apparent inactivity is the gas “fingerprint” of a disintegrating planet. Its precision. To confirm these suspicions, the team does not stop at observing the gas, since it uses very high precision radial velocity spectrographs such as HARPS-Nwhich are capable of measuring minute variations in the star’s motion. One of the most intriguing case studies of the project is the system DMPP-4located about 25 parsecs away. In this star, candidates for planets with sub-Neptunian masses have already been detected, on the order of between 8 and 12.2 times the mass of the Earth, orbiting at breakneck speeds, with “years” that last only between 2 and 5 days. Where are they? These planets inhabit what astronomers know as the “Neptunian Desert,” a region very close to the star where planets the size of Neptune are rarely found. The leading theory is that these worlds are actually rocky cores of ancient Neptunes that migrated into the system and whose atmospheres were swept away by intense stellar radiation. Many to discover. The implications of this study are massive for modern astrophysics, as data from the DMPP project suggests that between 10% and 20% of these low magnetic activity stars could host compact systems of rocky planets that we have not known about until now. This not only helps explain certain anomalies in the historical catalogs of the Kepler telescope, but gives us a treasure map. As they are star systems so bright and close to Earth, these newly discovered exoplanets become the perfect candidates to be observed by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the future generation of Extremely Large Telescopes (ELT). Images | NASA Hubble Space Telescope In Xataka | A new “solar system” has just been discovered. There’s just one problem: it shouldn’t exist.

A star 1,540 times larger than the Sun is mutating in real time and it is something that baffles astronomers

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The universe is rarely in a hurry, since stellar processes usually be measured in millions or billions of yearsso witnessing the metamorphosis of a great star in the span of a single human life is practically unheard of. And this is precisely what is happening with WOH G64a true cosmic monster located in the Large Magellanic Cloudabout 163,000 light years from Earth. Big changes. Astronomers have been analyzing this astronomical giant for years, and now the red supergiant is changing radically in front of our telescopes as it heats up rapidly and opens a heated scientific debate. The question that the community is asking itself right now is whether we are facing the transformation towards a very rare yellow hypergiant or if it is simply the fierce interaction of a binary system before collapsing. What we knew. Discovered in the 1970s, WOH G64 has long held the title of one of the largest stars known. The data we know about it is no wonder, since it has a radius 1,540 times greater than that of our Sun, an approximate mass of 28 solar masses and shines 282,000 times brighter than our star. Despite its enormous size, it is an extremely young star, since it is barely 5 million years old. And if we put it into context, in the ruthless world of astrophysics, the largest stars “live fast and die young”, devouring the fuel inside them at great speed. The script twist. Until recently, everything fit the classic profile of an extreme red supergiant, placing its temperature at 3,400 ± 25 degrees Kelvin. But a turning point came in the last decade after the data published in Nature Asia which pointed out that the star suffered a mysterious dimming in 2011, followed by a sudden warming of more than 1,000 ºC and significant chemical alterations in the atmosphere. Now, a new study analyzes the photometry and optical spectroscopy accumulated over more than thirty years of this star. And the conclusion they have reached is that between 2013 and 2014, WOH G64 began to transition from red supergiant to yellow hypergiant. What are they? Yellow hypergiants are an exceptionally rare transition phase of which we barely have data and, above all, it is very ephemeral. In this case, the dramatic thermal evolution could be due to the star having partially ejected its outer envelope or to its stellar companion aggressively stripping away material. The debate is served. As is often the case on the frontier of astrophysics, not everyone agrees that the transition is complete. Rigorous science requires fact-checking constant, and recent research adds nuance to this story. This same year, one study pointed out because the star continues to maintain its classic red supergiant characteristics, questioning whether it has become a rare yellow hypergiant. The most logical explanation they see in this case is that the interaction with its companion star is causing these large temperature changes. This generates a great debate, since it goes completely against the other part of astrophysics that is convinced that we are facing a great twist in the script. A supernova. The big question that everyone is asking is how this titan will end, and some voices suggest that we are seeing the prelude to an imminent supernova. However, in astronomical terms, “imminent” is an elastic concept, since core collapse could occur in a time frame ranging from 100 to a few thousand years. And even if it collapses, even a spectacular explosion is not guaranteed. Although there is also the possibility that it fails in its attempt to explode and, instead, collapses directly in on itself, silently forming a black hole. Likewise, what happens seems to be something that our next generations will see. Images | European Southern Observatory In Xataka | We have analyzed the universe for 20 years looking for ET and all we have are 100 signals that China is now investigating

Some astronomers analyzed the “Big Bang sound.” Now they believe that the Earth is in a vacuum of 2,000 million light years

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Cosmology has a huge problem. It is known as hubble tension and suggests that the nearby universe is expanding faster than the distant and primitive universe He is telling us. Something does not fit. Now, a disturbing study offers a solution. The big problem of cosmology. Hubble tension is One of the biggest headaches of modern physics. On the one hand, we have the measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the oldest light in the universe. When applying the standard cosmological model (LBDACDM), these observations show a 67.4 km/s/mpc hubble constant. On the other hand, when The expansion of the universe is measured Using nearby objects such as standard candles (a type of supernova), a significantly higher value is obtained: about 73 km/s/mpc. This difference, that the most recent data places in a tension of more than 5Sigma (a level that in particle physics is considered a discovery), refuses to disappear. A disturbing explanation. A new study Prepublished in Arxiv proposes a solution as elegant as depressing. That the discrepancy is not in our measurements, but in our location. According to Indranil Cosmologists Banik and Vasileios Kalaitzidis, we could be living in the center of a gigantic cosmic vacuum, a “bubble” of 2,000 million light years in diameter with a density 20% lower than the universal average. The test, they affirm, It is in the “Big Bang sound”. A local vacuum. The idea of the local vacuum is not new: it is known as the empty KBC (Keenan-Barger-Cowie, in honor of the astronomers who proposed the idea based on the galaxies count). If our galaxy, the Milky Way, were in a region with less matter than normal, the severity of the surrounding, densest areas, would “throw away” out. This effect, added to the general expansion of the universe, would cause nearby galaxies to move away from us faster than normal. “This would give the appearance of a faster local expansion rate,” explains Indranil Banik, of the New Research. The Hubble tension problem would thus become a local phenomenon, without the need to revolutionize the entire cosmological model. The sound of the Big Bang as proof. What the new study of Banik and Kalaitzidis contributes is a much more fundamental test based on barionic acoustic oscillations. Although we call them “the sound of the Big Bang”, they are not sound waves that we can hear. They are the traces that left the pressure waves that spread through the superdense plasma of the primitive universe. These waves were “frozen” about 380,000 years after the Big Bang and created A characteristic pattern in the distribution of matter. This pattern works as a cosmic rule of about 500 million light years in length, which astronomers use to measure the expansion of the universe to different eras. The results. The team analyzed 20 years of measurements and compared them with two scenarios: on the one hand, the homogeneous standard model, without emptiness; and on the other, the model that includes the empty KBC. The results, presented at the National Astronomy Meeting 2025 of the Astronomical Society Royal, are blunt. According to the statistical analysis of the study, the model with a local vacuum conforms to the data in a spectacularly better way. While the standard model has a 3.3sigma voltage with observations, vacuum models reduce it to only 1.1sigma –1.4sigma. Calmly. The researchers consider “demonstrated” that A vacuum model is about 100 million times more likely than a model without emptiness. However, it is a preliminary study, which has not yet gone through the pairs review. Previous studies set very strict limits to the existence of such an influential vacuum, concluding that it is not enough to explain the entire Hubble tension. They also propose early dark energy as a solution. But Banik’s work offers one of the strongest evidence to date that the Earth could be in a very lonely region of the universe. Image | Greg Rakozy (UNSPLASH) In Xataka | The James Webb and Hubble telescope coincide in the expansion of the universe. And physics fails to explain why

Astronomers have been theorizing about “planets kamikaze.” They just found one and is 100 times more violent than it was believed

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We already know A good handful of exoplanetsbut astronomers of the European Space Agency have just added a fascinating category to the catalog of strange worlds. The Kamikaze planets. Using the Cheops space telescope, The first exoplature observatory of EuropeESA researchers have first observed a planet that causes flares in their own star, a suicidal custom that will end up sealing their own destiny. The “Kamikaze planets” are actually a phenomenon of cosmic self -destruction that has been theorizing since the 1990s. But it had never been observed directly, so far. And what astronomers have seen is a hundred times more energy than anyone had imagined. A violent neighborhood. The protagonist of this story is Hip 67522, a solar system located about 490 light years from Earth. Its star is a bit larger and cold than our sun, but it is very different: while the sun exceeds median age with 4.5 billion years, Hip 67522 is a teenage star of just 17 million years. Like any teenager, this star is full of energy, with a very agitated nucleus that does not stop turning, which makes it a very potent magnet. Around this violent cosmic magnet two planets turn. The one that interests us is the closest, Hip 67522 B, a world that completes an orbit in just seven days. The planet that plays with fire. Since they began to discover exoplanets, astronomers wonder if there are worlds orbiting enough close to their star to disturb their magnetic field and, in essence, “prick it” so that great flares are unleashed. Cheops space telescope observations They demonstrated that the planet Hip 67522 B is so close to its star that its own magnetic influence interacts with that of its host. The planet acts as a whip: as the star orbits, energy is accumulated in the form of waves along the lines of the star magnetic field. When these energy waves collide with the surface of the star, they trigger a gigantic solar flare, much more violent than expected. And absolutely destructive for the planet. Up to 15 lashes captured in camera. The Cheops telescope detected a total of 15 flares, almost all produced while the planet was ahead of the star from our perspective. This synchronization is the definitive proof: the fact that the flares occur just when the planet passes between us and the star confirms that it is the planet who is causing them. The tragic part of this story is that the planet is causing these gigantic energy explosions in its own direction. Hip 67522 B is being bombarded with six times more radiation than I would receive if it would simply stay still. The planet is shrinking. According to astronomers, in the next 100 million years it could go from being a gaseous giant of Jupiter’s size to a planet of Neptune size. It is a slow -chanted cosmic suicide. Image | THAT In Xataka | Astronomers have discovered a planet that should not exist: great as a jupiter and light like sugar cotton

Astronomers have seen live the awakening of a giant black hole. They had never detected something so violent

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Good morning, Ansky. SDSS1335+0728 was a black hole so boring that it didn’t even have a nickname. Located 300 million light years, in the constellation of Virgo, he had been asleep from our point of view. But go aroused. The supermassive black hole has aroused in such a violent way that it has left fascinated and somewhat baffled astronomers. Now it is an active galactic nucleus (AGN) dodged affectionately “Ansky”. Years of study. The galaxy where Ansky is began to shine unexpectedly in visible light at the end of 2019. Chilean astronomer Paula Sánchez Sáez, of the Southern European Observatory (ESO), leads the first team that detected activation. “When we saw Ansky illuminate in optical images, we activate monitoring observations with the NASA X -ray space telescope and review archived data of the erosite German telescope,” Paula says in a statement. “But at that time we did not see evidence of X -ray emissions.” The surprise arrived in February 2024. A second team led by Lorena Hernández-García, from the University of Valparaíso (in Chile), saw how Ansky began to emit gusts of incredibly energy and regular X-ray. “It is the first time we observed such an event in a black hole that seems to be waking up,” Lorena explains. Out of the ordinary. He XMM-Newton telescope From the European Space Agency it has allowed to measure the faint x -ray light that comes to us from the explosions, which has been key to measuring how much energy releases Ansky in each “flash”. Known as “quasiperiódicas eruptions” (QPES), X -ray emissions turned out to be ten times longer and ten times luminous than other supermassive black holes. Each eruption of Ansky releases a hundred times more energy than the Qpes observed so far. In addition, it had never seen a time between eruptions so wide, with a cadence of four and a half days. Ansky takes astronomical models to the limit and challenges our current ideas on how these flashes are generated. What causes these explosions? The most accepted theory about the QPES is that they are caused by the interaction of an object (such as a smaller star or hole) with the accretion disc (the hot and bright material that revolves around the black hole before being engulf). They usually occur when the Black hole is eaten a starbut it does not seem to be the case of Ansky. This has led the international astronomer team to consider other possibilities. Perhaps the accretion disk will be formed from gas captured from the galactic environment, and the flares are the result of highly energetic shock waves caused by a smaller object that orbit and disturbed repeatedly the disc. Gravitational waves. Notice Real Time Awakening It is an unprecedented opportunity to check if their energy eruptions could be related to gravitational waves, predicted by Einstein’s relativity and detected for the first time a few years ago. The smooth mission of ESA and NASA will try to observe these disturbances in the space-time fabric from point L1 of Lagrange after its launch in an Ariane 6 rocket planned for 2035. Image | THAT In Xataka | We knew that the supermassive black holes were huge. Thanks to James Webb, now we know we were short

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