In fathering, peace-loving bonobos don't spread the love

Two baby bonobos.

Bonobos have a reputation for being the peaceful, free-loving hippies of the primate world. But, researchers reporting in Current Biology on July 10 have discovered that despite friendly relations between the sexes, particular males have a surprisingly strong advantage over others when it comes to fathering offspring. For example, researchers found in one group that the most reproductively successful bonobo male fathered more than 60 percent of the next generation.

The findings show that the reproductive skew -- the extent to which a single male versus many males sires offspring -- is much higher among bonobos than it is in male-dominated and more aggressive chimpanzees. While the reasons behind that skew aren't yet entirely clear, the researchers suspect that it may come down to a tendency for many females to choose to mate with the same attractive male.

"The funny thing under such a scenario would be that most of the females would have the same preference for Camillo, the alpha male and 'Brad Pitt' of the bonobos at our research site," says Martin Surbeck of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany.

Surbeck and colleagues, including Kevin Langergraber at Arizona State University's School of Human Evolution and Social Change and ASU's Institute of Human Origins, have a long-standing interest in bonobo society and particularly in the relationships between males and females. Bonobos are known for their friendly nature and lack of aggression. In that friendly setting, bonobo males often seem to invest in friendly relationships with particular females. The researchers wondered whether those "friendships" were leading to greater paternity success for those males.

To find out, the researchers tested paternity in 24 bonobo offspring conceived over the 12-year period from 2002 to 2013 in one bonobo community living in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. They compared that paternity data to published data in chimpanzee communities.

The researchers had hypothesized that bonobo females' freedom to choose their mates would mean a more balanced distribution of paternity amongst males in the group. But they found just the opposite. While more work is needed to explore the reasons behind that skew, the researchers say, "if female choice is the mechanisms behind our observation, all females seem to prefer more or less the same male."

There may be other factors at play, the researchers say. Compared to humans and chimpanzees, bonobos tend to spend more time as a larger group. In that setting, lower-ranking males might have fewer opportunities for sneaking time away and copulating with particular females. But female choice most likely plays an important role.

"Unlike chimpanzees, where all adult males outrank all adult females, and even the lowest-ranking males can coerce females into mating, there appears to be a greater role for female choice in bonobos," Langergraber says. "Perhaps they choose high-ranking males."

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Sea spiders move oxygen with pumping guts (not hearts)

This is a photograph of a sea spider.

To keep blood and oxygen flowing throughout their bodies, most animals depend on a beating heart. But researchers reporting in Current Biology on July 10 have discovered that sea spiders use a strange alternative: they move blood and oxygen throughout most of their bodies by pumping their guts.

The sea spiders have an unusual gut in the first place, the researchers say.

"Unlike us, with our centrally located guts that are all confined to a single body cavity, the guts of sea spiders branch multiple times and sections of gut tube go down to the end of every leg," says H. Arthur Woods of the University of Montana, Missoula. "In effect, sea spiders guts are 'space-filling' and ubiquitous in their bodies in the same way that our circulatory systems are space-filling and ubiquitous."

So, how do they use that branching system to move fluids? The answer is gut peristalsis. In fact, the human gut also uses peristalsis -- waves of involuntary constriction and relaxation of muscles -- to mix gut contents and move them along. Sea spiders, which take in oxygen directly through their cuticles, show peristaltic waves that are much more vigorous than would be needed for digestion.

Woods and colleagues made that discovery after an Antarctic mission to explore a phenomenon known as "polar gigantism." Scientists had long observed that polar species, including giant sea spiders, have larger bodies than their more temperate or tropical relatives. That trend raises a lot of intriguing questions about how the polar species manage basic life processes, including how to get enough oxygen into their bodies.

One of the things that make sea spiders a great organism for study is "that they are really skinny and, using a microscope, you can see easily into their bodies," Woods says. In his first season at McMurdo Antarctic Station, Woods found himself spending "a lot of time just watching blood and gut flows in sea spiders."

He soon realized that the sea spiders' hearts were beating only weakly. Their hearts weren't moving any blood beyond the spiders' central portion. In contrast, he noticed, their guts showed very strong and organized waves of peristaltic contractions.

"My 'aha!' moment was to consider that maybe all that sloshing of blood and guts was not about digestion but instead about moving respiratory gases around," he says.

A series of experiments and observations in 12 sea spider species involving video microscopy of tracers in the animals' hemolymph and guts together with experimental manipulation of the guts' ability to contract allowed them to test out and confirm that hypothesis.

The researchers say that the findings highlight the vast evolutionary diversity of solutions to problems that all animals encounter. It's not clear whether the sea spiders' space-filling guts first arose for purely digestive functions and the respiratory benefits came later or vice versa.

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A fresh view on volcanic plumbing systems

The iconic El Capitan at Yosemite National Park in California contains a long-running record of magma injections that never breached the surface, instead freezing into the Earth's crust.

Volcanic eruptions such as Mount St. Helens' in 1980 show the explosiveness of magma moving through Earth's crust. Now geologists are excited about what uplifted granite bodies such as Yosemite's El Capitan say about magma that freezes before it can erupt on the surface.

These granite structures, called magmatic intrusions, form incrementally over time by small pulses of magma that cool and crystalize 5 to 20 kilometers -- 3 to 12 miles -- underground. Many are uplifted and exposed by erosion. They also contain the history of magma injections that occurred tens to hundreds of millions of years ago, says Leif Karlstrom of the University of Oregon.

In a paper placed online July 10 by the journal Nature Geoscience, a three-member research team led by Karlstrom unveiled a new framework for understanding what the pattern of volcanoes seen at the surface implies about the structure of subsurface magma plumbing systems. Some 50 to 90 percent of magma, Karlstrom said, doesn't get through the crust.

"Granitic landscapes in the Yosemite Valley in California and in the North Cascades are iconic, huge cliffs with exposed rock," he said. "If you look closer, the structure of that landscape shows all kinds of intrusive bodies that record different pulses of magma coming into the crust. Our findings hopefully allow you to stare up at El Capitan and make sense of it in some new way."

In the National Science Foundation-funded research, Karlstrom, Scott R. Paterson of the University of Southern California and A. Mark Jellinek of the University of British Columbia examined more than a decade of measurements of size distributions of igneous rock intrusions in the North American Cordillera.

Magma rising in active volcanic regions in places such as the Cascades, Hawaii and Iceland, Karlstrom said, often occurs as narrow, sheet-like intrusions commonly called dikes and sills. This occurs as a cracking process in brittle crustal rocks. Over long timescales, however, the process changes.

These changes are part of a transition into a "reverse energy cascade," in which rising magma injections become trapped and lose energy, the researchers say.

Magma mixes and merges with surrounding rocks as it cools and crystalizes. Heat lost from repeated injections of magma continues to heat crustal rocks, building and the expanding granitic intrusive complexes formed by frozen magma in a viscous, rather than brittle, manner. The resulting structures are seen today where the formations are exposed.

"That act of dumping heat into the crust over time changes the nature of the mechanical response to injections of magma," Karlstrom said. "Earth's crust is a filter for rising melts. You have magma that is generated deep in Earth, and somehow it gets to the surface carrying heat and volatiles, such as carbon dioxide. How that happens is through the crustal magma transport system."

Studying the processes behind magma injections over long timescales, he said, helps build better understanding of volcanoes, their impacts on global climate and where large volcanoes are likely to occur.

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Calm Seas on Saturn's Moon Titan Offer a Smooth Landing for Future Missions

Seas on Saturn moon Titan

The liquid-hydrocarbon lakes and seas on Titan are incredibly calm, suggesting that future missions to the huge Saturn moon could enjoy a smooth ride to the surface, a new study reports.

The waves rippling the three largest lakes in Titan's northern hemisphere are tiny, according to the study — just 0.25 inches (1 centimeter) high by about 8 inches (20 cm) long.

"There's a lot of interest in one day sending probes to the lakes, and when that's done, you want to have a safe landing, and you don't want a lot of wind," study lead author Cyril Grima, a research associate at the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics (UTIG), said in a statement. "Our study shows that because the waves aren't very high, the winds are likely low." [Amazing Photos: Titan, Saturn's Largest Moon]

The 3,200-mile-wide (5,150 kilometers) Titan is the only celestial object besides Earth known to host stable bodies of liquid on its surface. But this liquid isn't water. Titan's weather system is hydrocarbon-based; ethane and methane rain from the skies, flowing in rivers and collecting in large lakes and seas.

Some scientists think these lakes and seas may be capable of supporting life, though any organisms swimming on Titan's surface would doubtless be quite different than the water-dependent life-forms of Earth.

"The atmosphere of Titan is very complex, and it does synthesize complex organic molecules — the bricks of life," Grima said. "It may act as a laboratory of sorts, where you can see how basic molecules can be transformed into more complex molecules that could eventually lead to life."

Titan's three largest lakes and their surrounding areas as seen by the Cassini RADAR instrument.

In the new study, Grima and his colleagues analyzed data collected by NASA's Cassini spacecraft, which has been orbiting Saturn since July 2004. Specifically, the team looked at radar measurements of Kraken Mare, Ligeia Mare and Punga Mare that Cassini made in Titan's early summer season. (The largest of these three, Kraken Mare, is about as big as Earth's Caspian Sea.)

The researchers then calculated wave dimensions, using a technique previously developed by Grima.

"Cyril's work is an independent measure of sea roughness and helps to constrain the size and nature of any wind waves," co-author Alex Hayes, an assistant professor of astronomy at Cornell University in New York state, said in the same statement. "From the results, it looks like we are right near the threshold for wave generation, where patches of the sea are smooth and [other] patches are rough."

Titan's early summer had previously been regarded as the start of a windy season on the moon, researchers said. But the new study, which was published June 29 in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters, suggested that this may not be the case.

Titan's surface has been visited once: back in January 2005 by the Huygens lander, which deployed from Cassini. There are currently no firm plans to land another probe on the big moon, but various research groups are working on ideas, including boats and submarines that could explore Titan's seas.

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The LHCb experiment is charmed to announce observation of a new particle with two heavy quarks

XICC_LHCb discovery (00006)

Today at the EPS Conference on High Energy Physics in Venice, the LHCb experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider has reported the observation of Ξcc++ (Xicc++) a new particle containing two charm quarks and one up quark. The existence of this particle from the baryon family was expected by current theories, but physicists have been looking for such baryons with two heavy quarks for many years. The mass of the newly identified particle is about 3621 MeV, which is almost four times heavier than the most familiar baryon, the proton, a property that arises from its doubly charmed quark content. It is the first time that such a particle has been unambiguously detected.

Nearly all the matter that we see around us is made of baryons, which are common particles composed of three quarks, the best-known being protons and neutrons. But there are six types of existing quarks, and theoretically many different potential combinations could form other kinds of baryons. Baryons so far observed are all made of, at most, one heavy quark.

"Finding a doubly heavy-quark baryon is of great interest as it will provide a unique tool to further probe quantum chromodynamics, the theory that describes the strong interaction, one of the four fundamental forces," said Giovanni Passaleva, new Spokesperson of the LHCb collaboration. "Such particles will thus help us improve the predictive power of our theories."

"In contrast to other baryons, in which the three quarks perform an elaborate dance around each other, a doubly heavy baryon is expected to act like a planetary system, where the two heavy quarks play the role of heavy stars orbiting one around the other, with the lighter quark orbiting around this binary system," added Guy Wilkinson, former Spokesperson of the collaboration.

Measuring the properties of the Ξcc++ will help to establish how a system of two heavy quarks and a light quark behaves. Important insights can be obtained by precisely measuring production and decay mechanisms, and the lifetime of this new particle.

The observation of this new baryon proved to be challenging and has been made possible owing to the high production rate of heavy quarks at the LHC and to the unique capabilities of the LHCb experiment, which can identify the decay products with excellent efficiency. The Ξcc++ baryon was identified via its decay into a Λc+ baryon and three lighter mesons K-, π+ and π+.

The observation of the Ξcc++ in LHCb raises the expectations to detect other representatives of the family of doubly-heavy baryons. They will now be searched for at the LHC.

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Changes in brain regions may explain why some prefer order and certainty

A UCLA study has identified changes in brain regions that may hold a key to why some people prefer order and organization and others do not.

Why do some people prefer stable, predictable lives while others prefer frequent changes? Why do some people make rational decisions and others, impulsive and reckless ones? UCLA behavioral neuroscientists have identified changes in two brain regions that may hold answers to these questions.

The research -- reported by Alicia Izquierdo, UCLA associate professor of psychology and a member of UCLA's Brain Research Institute, and her psychology graduate student, Alexandra Stolyarova -- is published in the open-access online science journal eLife.

The new experiments, which involved studying the orbitofrontal cortex and basolateral amygdala brain regions, assessed the ability of rats to work for rewards under both stable and variable conditions. Rats earned sugar pellets after choosing between two images displayed side by side. The animals made their selections by using their noses to touch a screen the size of an iPad. When a rat touched one image, it received a sugar pellet at a predictable time -- generally 10 seconds later. When the rat touched the other image, it received a sugar pellet at a time that varied. This was the riskier option as the rats might have to wait as little as five seconds or as long as 15 seconds. The rats did this for a month at a time, as long as 45 minutes each day.

The researchers discovered that the rats learned the task and were able to detect the fluctuations in wait times. When the rats experienced more variation in those wait times for their reward, the amount of the brain protein gephyrin in the basolateral amygdala region doubled, Izquierdo and Stolyarova reported.

In some of the trials, the researchers made one option better than the other, with a shorter wait time. All rats were able to learn the pattern and make the better choice. They showed some evidence of learning on the first day and did better the second day and on subsequent days. In a group of rats without a functional basolateral amygdala, the rats learned more slowly about the changes, but caught up about two days later.

Rats without a functional orbitofrontal cortex, however, did not learn at all, and instead treated each experience as a "reset" button, the researchers report. It is as if these rats did not have a record of the full range of possible outcomes. The important role for the orbitofrontal cortex surprised Izquierdo, who said there was more evidence that the basolateral amygdala would be important in conditions of uncertainty, and not as much for the orbitofrontal cortex.

Stolyarova and Izquierdo are the first scientists to link gephyrin levels to the experience of reward. They report that when the rats experienced risk, the brain protein GluN1 also increased significantly in the basolateral amygdala.

"I think the experience of uncertainty is making these changes occur in these brain regions," Izquierdo said.

All rats chose the risky option more often. The exception was the rats without a functional basolateral amygdala; those animals stayed risk-averse throughout the experiments.

The orbitofrontal cortex and basolateral amygdala share anatomical connections, and both regions are involved in decision-making, earlier research has shown. The new research indicates this is especially so during changing or uncertain circumstances.

Changes in these brain regions and brain proteins may help to explain a person's preference for uncertain outcomes, Izquierdo said. Humans have individual differences in orbitofrontal cortex and basolateral amygdala function and in the expression of these proteins, she noted.

For example, variations in the gephyrin gene have been linked to autism, and a feature of the disorder is a strong preference for order and certainty.

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Strange silk: Why rappelling spiders don't spin out of control

The golden silk orb weaver (Nephila pilipes) creates dragline silk that prevents it from spinning while hanging from its web.

The last time you watched a spider drop from the ceiling on a line of silk, it likely descended gracefully on its dragline instead of spiraling uncontrollably, because spider silk has an unusual ability to resist twisting forces.

In a new paper appearing this week in Applied Physics Letters, from AIP Publishing, researchers from China and the U.K. showed that unlike human hair, metal wires or synthetic fibers, spider silk partially yields when twisted. This property quickly dissipates the energy that would otherwise send an excited spider spinning on the end of its silk.

"Spider silk is very different from other, more conventional materials," said Dabiao Liu of Huazhong University of Science and Technology. "We find that the dragline from the web hardly twists, so we want to know why."

A greater understanding of how spider silk resists spinning could lead to biomimetic fibers that mimic these properties for multiple potential uses such as in violin strings, helicopter rescue ladders and parachute cords. "If we understood how spider silk achieves this, then maybe we could incorporate the properties into our own synthetic ropes," said David Dunstan of Queen Mary University of London.

Spiders use dragline silk for the outer rim and spokes of their webs, and as a lifeline when dropping to the ground. The material has intrigued scientists because of its incredible strength, stretchiness and ability to conduct heat, but little research has focused on its torsional properties -- how it responds to twisting.

Researchers used a torsion pendulum, the same tool used by Henry Cavendish to weigh the Earth in the 1790s, to investigate dragline silk from two species of golden silk orb weavers. They collected strands of silk from captive spiders and suspended the strands inside a cylinder using two washers at the end to mimic a spider. The cylinder isolated the silk from environmental disturbances and kept the strand at a constant humidity, because water can cause the fibers to contract. A rotating turntable twisted the silk while a high-speed camera recorded the silk's back and forth oscillations over hundreds of cycles.

Unlike synthetic fibers and metals, spider silk deforms slightly when twisted, which releases more than 75 percent of its potential energy, and the oscillations rapidly slow. After twisting, the silk partially snaps back.

The team suspects that this unusual behavior is linked to the silk's complex physical structure, consisting of a core of multiple fibrils inside a skin. Each fibril has segments of amino acids in organized sheets and others in unstructured looping chains. They propose that torsion causes the sheets to stretch like elastic, and warp the hydrogen bonds linking the chains, which deform like plastic. The sheets can recover their original shape, but the chains remain partially deformed. The pendulum exhibits this change with reduced magnitude of the silk's oscillations, as well as a shifting of the equilibrium point of the oscillation.

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Earth's magnetic field 'simpler than we thought'

The geomagnetic field is critical to life on Earth. Without it, charged particles from the sun (the "solar wind") would blow away the atmosphere, scientists say.

Scientists have identified patterns in Earth's magnetic field that evolve on the order of 1,000 years, providing new insight into how the field works and adding a measure of predictability to changes in the field not previously known.

The discovery also will allow researchers to study the planet's past with finer resolution by using this geomagnetic "fingerprint" to compare sediment cores taken from the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

Results of the research, which was supported by the National Science Foundation, were recently published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters.

The geomagnetic field is critical to life on Earth. Without it, charged particles from the sun (the "solar wind") would blow away the atmosphere, scientists say. The field also aids in human navigation and animal migrations in ways scientists are only beginning to understand. Centuries of human observation, as well as the geologic record, show our field changes dramatically in its strength and structure over time.

Yet in spite of its importance, many questions remain unanswered about why and how these changes occur. The simplest form of magnetic field comes from a dipole: a pair of equally and oppositely charged poles, like a bar magnet.

"We've known for some time that Earth is not a perfect dipole, and we can see these imperfections in the historical record," said Maureen "Mo" Walczak, a post-doctoral researcher at Oregon State University and lead author on the study. "We are finding that non-dipolar structures are not evanescent, unpredictable things. They are very long-lived, recurring over 10,000 years -- persistent in their location throughout the Holocene.

"This is something of a Holy Grail discovery," she added, "though it is not perfect. It is an important first step in better understanding the magnetic field, and synchronizing sediment core data at a finer scale."

Some 800,000 years ago, a magnetic compass' needle would have pointed south because Earth's magnetic field was reversed. These reversals typically happen every several hundred thousand years.

While scientists are well aware of the pattern of reversals in Earth's magnetic field, a secondary pattern of geomagnetic "wobble" within periods of stable polarity, known as paleomagnetic secular variation, or PSV, may be a key to understanding why some geomagnetic changes occur.

Earth's magnetic field does not align perfectly with the axis of rotation, which is why "true north" differs from "magnetic north," the researchers say. In the Northern Hemisphere this disparity in the modern field is apparently driven by regions of high geomagnetic intensity that are centered beneath North America and Asia.

"What we have not known is whether this snapshot has any longer-term meaning -- and what we have found out is that it does," said Joseph Stoner, an Oregon State University paleomagnetic specialist and co-author on the study.

When the magnetic field is stronger beneath North America, or in the "North American Mode," it drives steep inclinations and high intensities in the North Pacific, and low intensities in Europe with westward declinations in the North Atlantic. This is more consistent with the historical record.

The alternate "European mode" is in some ways the opposite, with shallow inclination and low intensity in North Pacific, and eastward declinations in the North Atlantic and high intensities in Europe.

"As it turns out, the magnetic field is somewhat less complicated than we thought," Stoner said. "It is a fairly simple oscillation that appears to result from geomagnetic intensity variations at just a few recurrent locations with large spatial impacts. We're not yet sure what drives this variation, though it is likely a combination of factors including convection of the outer core that may be biased in configuration by the lowermost mantle."

The researchers were able to identify the pattern by studying two high-resolution sediment cores from the Gulf of Alaska that allowed them to develop a 17,400-year reconstruction of the PSV in that region. They then compared those records with sediment cores from other sites in the Pacific Ocean to capture a magnetic fingerprint, which is based on the orientation of the magnetite in the sediment, which acts as a magnetic recorder of the past.

The common magnetic signal found in the cores now covers an area spanning from Alaska to Oregon, and over to Hawaii.

"Magnetic alignment of distant environmental reconstructions using reversals in the paleomagnetic record provides insights into the past on a scale of hundreds of thousands of years," Walczak said. "Development of the coherent PSV stratigraphy will let us look at the record on a scale possibly as short as a few centuries, compare events between ocean basins, and really get down to the nitty-gritty of how climate anomalies are propagated around the planet on a scale relevant to human society."

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Sticking your neck out: How did plesiosaurs swim with such long necks?

This is a side view of the plesiosaur model in the hydrodynamic simulation.

When dinosaurs ruled the land, plesiosaurs ruled the oceans. Famous for their incredibly long necks -- some of which were up to 7 metres long -- plesiosaurs have remained an evolutionary mystery for hundreds of years. Pernille V. Troelsen, a PhD student at Liverpool John Moores University, UK is simulating plesiosaur locomotion with a 3D model to understand how they could swim with such long necks.

"A steady neck would be more hydrodynamic than a bent neck, and due to the pressure on a bent neck, plesiosaurs would probably only bend them when moving at slow speeds or when floating,' says Ms Troelsen.

She reveals that not only increasing the bend in a plesiosaurs neck would have a big effect on the production of 'hydrodynamic drag', but the location of the bending may also play a large role. She adds that plesiosaurs would likely have had a more patient hunting style similar to today's crocodiles and snakes.

"We have some ideas about why they had long necks and they mainly concern feeding strategies, but we still don't fully understand how they moved," explains Ms Troelsen. "These were extremely successful animals that existed for 140 million years, but we don't have any living equivalents to compare with."

Several possible theories suggest that plesiosaurs may have developed long necks to extend their feeding range. By laying immobile on the sea floor or floating at the surface and using their protruding necks to hunt, they may have been able to sneak up on their prey more easily, or simply been more effective at snapping up fast-moving prey.

To test the hydrodynamic effects of different neck bending degrees and locations, Ms Troelsen created a digital 3D model based on a simplified plesiosaur body shape and uses computational fluid dynamics to visualise and determine how bending the neck affects the flow of water around the animal.

To improve these 3D models for in future, Ms Troelsen will be looking at fossil evidence for more information about the shape and bendiness of plesiosaur necks: "Further studies will include digitized neck vertebrae from actual plesiosaurs which will allow us to have an even more realistic approach."

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Hubble pushed beyond limits to spot clumps of new stars in distant galaxy

In this Hubble photograph of a distant galaxy cluster, a spotty blue arc stands out against a background of red galaxies. That arc is actually three separate images of the same background galaxy. The background galaxy has been gravitationally lensed, its light magnified and distorted by the intervening galaxy cluster. On the right: How the galaxy would look to Hubble without distortions.

When it comes to the distant universe, even the keen vision of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope can only go so far. Teasing out finer details requires clever thinking and a little help from a cosmic alignment with a gravitational lens.

By applying a new computational analysis to a galaxy magnified by a gravitational lens, astronomers have obtained images 10 times sharper than what Hubble could achieve on its own. The results show an edge-on disk galaxy studded with brilliant patches of newly formed stars.

"When we saw the reconstructed image we said, 'Wow, it looks like fireworks are going off everywhere,'" said astronomer Jane Rigby of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

The galaxy in question is so far away that we see it as it appeared 11 billion years ago, only 2.7 billion years after the big bang. It is one of more than 70 strongly lensed galaxies studied by the Hubble Space Telescope, following up targets selected by the Sloan Giant Arcs Survey, which discovered hundreds of strongly lensed galaxies by searching Sloan Digital Sky Survey imaging data covering one-fourth of the sky.

The gravity of a giant cluster of galaxies between the target galaxy and Earth distorts the more distant galaxy's light, stretching it into an arc and also magnifying it almost 30 times. The team had to develop special computer code to remove the distortions caused by the gravitational lens, and reveal the disk galaxy as it would normally appear.

The resulting reconstructed image revealed two dozen clumps of newborn stars, each spanning about 200 to 300 light-years. This contradicted theories suggesting that star-forming regions in the distant, early universe were much larger, 3,000 light-years or more in size.

"There are star-forming knots as far down in size as we can see," said doctoral student Traci Johnson of the University of Michigan, lead author of two of the three papers describing the research.

Without the magnification boost of the gravitational lens, Johnson added, the disk galaxy would appear perfectly smooth and unremarkable to Hubble. This would give astronomers a very different picture of where stars are forming.

While Hubble highlighted new stars within the lensed galaxy, NASA's James Webb Space Telescope will uncover older, redder stars that formed even earlier in the galaxy's history. It will also peer through any obscuring dust within the galaxy.

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