The heart of the Milky Way looks like contemporary art in this new radio image:
The MeerKAT telescope array in South Africa provided this image of radio emissions from the center of the Milky Way. Stronger radio signals are shown in red and orange false color. Fainter zones are colored in grayscale, with darker shades indicating stronger emissions.- I. HEYWOOD/SARAO
An image that looks like a trippy Eye of Sauron or splatter of modern art is a new detailed look at the Milky Way’s chaotic center, as seen in radio wavelengths. The image was taken with the MeerKAT radio telescope array in South Africa over three years and 200 hours of observing. It combines 20 separate images into a single mosaic, with the bright, star-dense galactic plane running horizontally. MeerKAT captured radio waves from several astronomical treasures, including supernovas, stellar nurseries, and the energetic region around the supermassive black hole at the galaxy’s center. One puffy supernova remnant can be seen in the bottom right of the image, and the supermassive black hole shows up as the bright orange “eye” in the center. Other intriguing features are the many wispy-looking radio filaments that slice mostly vertically through the image. These filaments, a handful of which were first spotted in the 1980s, are created by accelerated electrons gyrating in a magnetic field and creating a radio glow. But the filaments are hard to explain because there’s no obvious engine to accelerate the particles. However, studying the strands all together could help reveal the secrets behind them. Though the understanding of this phenomenon is in progress, this great discovery gives a true visual of the center of it all, the center of our galaxy.
Biologists Identify First Animal That Uses the Complexity of Human Language: the Song Sparrow:
Becky Matsubara, CC license
The tweets of a little song sparrow and its ‘bird brain’ are a lot more complex and akin to human language than anyone realized. A new study finds that male sparrows deliberately shuffle and mix their song repertoire possibly as a way to keep it interesting for their female audience. The research done by Duke University’s Stephen Nowicki and team found that the male sparrows keep track of the songs they sing so that they can vary them the next time they try to attract a female. When wooing, song sparrows belt up to 12 different two-second songs, a repertoire that can take nearly 30 minutes to get through, since they repeat the same song several times before going on to the next track. In addition to varying the number of repeats, males also shuffle the order of their tunes each time they sing their discography. The sparrows were also found to go through all of their possible sounds before changing and shuffling their calls to the next pattern and is male sparrow was now found to have the longest auditory memory among birds at 30 minutes.
Using radar to monitor burn victims and babies? It's now possible:
Ph.D. candidate Ziqian Zhang and Professor Benjamin Eggleton optimizing the photonic system – the basis of the high-frequency radar. Credit: University of Sydney
University of Sydney scientists have achieved a technology breakthrough with potentially life-saving applications, all using an improved version of radar. Traditionally, radar is associated with airport control towers or military fighter jets, but a new, highly sensitive radar developed at the University of Sydney takes this technology into the human range. Called advanced photonic radar, the ultra-high-resolution device is so sensitive it can detect an object's location, speed, and/or angle in millimeters as opposed to meters. This could enable usage in hospitals to monitor people's vital signs such as breathing and heart rate. In the case of breathing, the radar could continuously detect a person's chest rising and falling. Also, this new technology addresses privacy concerns over video surveillance since all vitals can be taken without taking video of a patient’s face.
Sources:
Using radar to monitor burn victims and babies? It's now possible (phys.org)
The Milky Way’s center looks like contemporary art in this image | Science News