James' World 2

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We live in a strange universe filled with unexplained phenomena that have perplexed humans since time immemorial. Scientists have pieced together a rough guide to the cosmos—known as the Lambda cold dark matter model (ΛCDM), or more simply, the standard model of cosmology—but many mysteries don’t seem to fit into this otherwise well-corroborated framework, especially as our view of space has gotten ever more precise in recent years.

Scientists are now especially preoccupied with intractable tensions that have emerged from different measurements of two cosmic properties: The rate at which our universe is expanding, known as the Hubble constant (Ho), and a value called sigma-8 (σ8), which describes variations in how matter clumps together across large cosmic scales.

Efforts to measure these properties in space have puzzlingly returned different values. When the Hubble constant is measured based on observations of brilliant stars that act as yardsticks in space, its speed is clocked as about 50,400 miles per hour per million light years. However, when it is measured using the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the oldest light in the universe, it is 46,200 miles per hour per million light years. Meanwhile, the value of sigma-8 is different when measured using the CMB, compared to other observational techniques.

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Cartwheel galaxy cat

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The Universe, truly, is full of wonders, and the James Webb Space Telescope has just given us our best views of one of them yet.

The object in question is a star around 5,600 light-years away, and Webb’s infrared eye has picked out an extraordinary detail: it’s surrounded by what appear to be concentric rings of light radiating outward.

While Webb’s characteristic diffraction spikes are not ‘real’, those concentric rings are – and there’s a wonderful and fascinating explanation for them.

The star is actually a binary pair of rare stars in the constellation of Cygnus, and their interactions produce precise periodic eruptions of dust that are expanding out in shells into the space around the pair over time.

These shells of dust are glowing in infrared, which has allowed an instrument as sensitive as Webb’s MIRI to resolve them in exquisite detail.

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James Webb Space Telescope’s new image of the spectacular nebula around WR 140. (JWST/MIRI/Judy Schmidt)

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The James Webb Space Telescope captured mysterious concentric rings around a distant star that astronomers are still working to explain. 

The image, taken in July, was released on Twitter by citizen scientist Judy Schmidt, prompting a torrent of comments and head-scratching. It shows a star known as WR140 surrounded by regular ripple-like circles that gradually fade away. The circles, however, are not perfectly round, but have a somewhat square-like feel to them, prompting speculations about possible alien origins. 

“I think it’s just nature doing something that is simple, but when we look at it from only one viewpoint it seems impossible, at first, to understand that it is a natural phenomenon,” Schmidt told Space.com in an email. “Why is it shaped the way it is? Why is it so regular?”

Mark McCaughrean, an interdisciplinary scientist in the James Webb Space Telescope Science Working Group and a science advisor to the European Space Agency, called the feature “bonkers” in a Twitter thread. 

“The six-pointed blue structure is an artifact due to optical diffraction from the bright star WR140 in this #JWST MIRI image,” he wrote. “But red curvy-yet-boxy stuff is real, a series of shells around WR140. Actually in space. Around a star.”

He noted that WR140 is what astronomers call a Wolf-Rayet star, which have spat much of their hydrogen into space. These objects are also surrounded by dust, he added, which a companion star is sculpting into the strange shells.

Astronomers will know more soon thanks to a scientific paper currently under review about this mysterious phenomenon. 

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The James Webb Space Telescope captured the star WR 140 surrounded by strange concentric shells. (Image credit: NASA/ESA /CSA /Ryan Lau /JWST ERS Team /Judy Schmidt)

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For many of us, making friends as an adult is intimidating, and sometimes embarrassing or a bit baffling. But we all know those people who appear to be naturals: They balance bustling social calendars, glide easily into conversations with strangers, and seem to get invited to everybody’s wedding. Research shows that these super friends, as I like to call them, really exist: Not only are they better at initiating new friendships, but they also view their friendships as closer and more enduring.

Superfriends tend to have one quality in common—one that allows them to flourish outside of their relationships too. Studies find that people with this trait have better mental health; they’re more satisfied at work, more open to new ideas, and less prejudicial. Research suggests that they feel less regret; that during typically stressful events, like math tests or public-speaking engagements, they keep calm; and that they are less likely to have physical ailments such as heart attacks, headaches, ulcers, and inflammation.

So what is the distinguishing quality of super friends? It’s a secure attachment.

Attachment is the “gut feeling” we project onto ambiguity in our interactions. It’s driven not by a cool assessment of events but by the collapsing of time, the superimposition of the past onto the present. Understanding our attachment style is invaluable, not so we can mentally flog ourselves for biased interpretations but so we can gain more control over our social worlds. When we recognize how we contribute to our own relationship problems, we can try to change course—toward greater security and stronger friendships.

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Ben Hickey

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Last year, the particle physicist Lance Dixon was preparing a lecture when he noticed a striking similarity between two formulas that he planned to include in his slides.

The formulas, called scattering amplitudes, give the probabilities of possible outcomes of particle collisions. One of the scattering amplitudes represented the probability of two gluon particles colliding and producing four gluons; the other gave the probability of two gluons colliding to produce a gluon and a Higgs particle.

“I was getting a little confused because they looked kind of similar,” said Dixon, who is a professor at Stanford University, “and then I realized that the numbers were basically the same — it’s just that the [order] had gotten reversed.”

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The new “antipodal duality” inverts the terms used to calculate one particle scattering process to get the terms for another, in a way that’s similar to inverting the coordinates of points on a sphere.  Kristina Armitage for Quanta Magazine

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