Rock Formations Vulnerable to Vandals and the Elements

A disturbing drone video shot last week shows a group of people pushing over the Duckbill Rock, an sandstone formation in Cape Kiwanda along the Oregon Coast.

In an interview with Oregon TV station KATU, David Kalas, who shot the video, said the vandals told him that they destroyed the formation because a friend of theirs had broken his leg on it. Oregon State Police and state parks officials told the Portland Oregonian that they were reviewing the video, and that the perpetrators might face criminal charges in addition to citations and fines.

But the destruction of the iconic rock highlights an even bigger problem. Many comparable natural formations in parks across the nation are similarly fragile and vulnerable to human visitors who, for whatever reasons, decide to destroy them.

Back in 2013, for example, two men knocked over the Goblins, a 20-million-year-old formation at Goblin Valley State Park in Utah, because they thought it was dangerous to hikers. They eventually pleaded guilty to misdemeanor criminal charges and received probation and fines.

Other formations have been marred by graffiti artists. In June, a woman who pled guilty to defiling rock formations at seven national parks was banned from all 524 million acres of U.S. public lands and sentenced to 200 hours of community service, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Not all people who destroy rock formations are doing it intentionally. Mushroom Rock in California's Death Valley, seen below, is an example of a rock formation that's deteriorated badly over the years due to visitors climbing on it to take pictures.

The Arches National Park in Utah is filled with many potentially vulnerable formations, including the aptly-named Delicate Arch. Another formation such formation at the park is Balanced Rock (below).

Still more beautiful but delicate rock formations can be found at the Escalante-Grand Staircase National Monument, also in Utah. Perhaps the most spectacular are the so-called hoodoos -- precariously slender red, white and brown formations formed by boulders perched atop softer rocks, some of which are several stories in height (below).

Read more at Discovery News

3-D Skull from Doomed Henry VIII Warship Goes Online

Analysis of a ship carpenter's remains showed that he was a muscular man of about 5 feet 7 inches tall in his mid- to late-thirties. His dental health was poor and an abscess in his jaw left him able to chew only on his right side.

British archaeologists on Monday published detailed 3D models of skulls and artifacts found on board English king Henry VIII's warship as part of a digital experiment designed to share knowledge of major historical finds.

One skull, reproduced in a fully interactive model, belonged to a carpenter on board the Mary Rose, the flagship of England's navy when it sank in 1545 as heartbroken Henry VIII watched from the shore.

"An abscess in his upper jaw meant he could only chew on the right side," said details on the website, www.virtualtudors.org. "He also had arthritis in his spine, ribs and left clavicle and a lesion across his right eyebrow which may be the result of an old wound."

More than 280 intact leather shoes were found during the Mary Rose excavation, This one was found near the body of the carpenter.

Relics from the ship, including the carpenter's tools, are also available for fellow archaeologists and scientists to study on the website following lengthy work by scientists at Swansea University in Wales.

The technique is known as photogrammetry, using high-resolution 2D photographs to produce detailed 3D models.

"This digital resource enables researchers around the world to join the project and study virtual 3D reconstructions," said professor Catherine Fletcher.

"Once fully developed, this technology can be applied to many more historic objects, bringing them to an even wider community of researchers while preventing damage to the original remains and artifacts."

The researchers captured 1,000 images of 10 skulls found on the ship to create navigable online models, which they hope other researchers will analyse to eventually recreate full skeletons of some of the 500 men who perished.

The Mary Rose fought three wars with the French but mysteriously keeled over and sank off Portsmouth on July 19, 1545, while fighting off a French invasion fleet.

This small octagonal mirror made of beech wood was one of only two found. Traces of corrosion and a white substance may be the remains of the mirror and fixative.

After a six-year search, the legendary ship was definitively identified in 1971 and around a third of it was raised in 1982, watched live by millions on television.

The public can view a sample of the objects such as a mirror, rigging or a leather shoe on the Virtual Tudors website—a collaboration between Swansea University, the Mary Rose Trust and Oxford University.

Read more at Discovery News

Asteroid Named for Rock Star Freddie Mercury

Astrophysicist Brian May, who in a previous life was the lead guitarist for legendary 1970s British rock band Queens, released a YouTube video on Sunday announcing that an asteroid has been named after Queens' singer Freddie Mercury, who died in 1991.

"You have to have a pretty decent telescope to see it. It's just a dot of light but it's a very special dot of light, and maybe one day we'll get there," May said in the video.

The asteroid, previously known as Asteroid 17473, is about 2 miles in diameter and orbits in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

The asteroid's new designation was made by the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center, located at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Mass.

The asteroid was discovered in 1991 and was renamed on Sunday, Sept. 4, which would have been Mercury's 70th birthday. Word of the asteroid's new name was reported on Tuesday in The New York Times.

From Discovery News

Giant Pandas No Longer 'Endangered' in China

Decades of conservation work in China have paid off for the giant panda, whose status was upgraded Sunday from "endangered" to "vulnerable" due to a population rebound, officials said.

The improvement for the giant panda (Ailuropoda melanoleuca) was announced as part of an update to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List, the world's most comprehensive inventory of plants and animals.

The latest estimates show a population of 1,864 adult giant pandas. Although exact numbers are not available, adding cubs to the projection would mean about 2,060 pandas exist today, said the IUCN.

"Evidence from a series of range-wide national surveys indicate that the previous population decline has been arrested, and the population has started to increase," said the IUCN's updated report.

The cornerstones of the Chinese government's effort to bring back its fuzzy, black-and-white national icon have included an intense effort to replant bamboo forests, which provide food and shelter for the bears.

Through its "rent-a-panda" captive breeding program, China has also loaned some bears to zoos abroad in exchange for cash, and reinvested that money in conservation efforts.

"When push comes to shove, the Chinese have done a really good job with pandas," John Robinson, a primatologist and chief conservation officer at the Wildlife Conservation Society, told AFP.

"So few species are actually downlisted, it really is a reflection of the success of conservation," he said at the IUCN World Conservation Congress, the largest meeting of its kind, which drew more than 9,000 heads of state, policymakers and environmentalists to Honolulu.

According to Simon Stuart, chair of the IUCN Species Survival Commission, the improvement was "not rocket science" but came from the hard work of controlling poaching and replanting bamboo forests.

"This is something to celebrate because it is not a part of the world where we expect this to happen," Stuart told reporters at a press conference to unveil the updated Red List.

Experts warned, however, that the good news for pandas could be short-lived.

A warming planet, driven by fossil fuel burning, is predicted to wipe out more than one-third of the panda's bamboo habitat in the next 80 years.

Read more at Discovery News

Biochemists' discovery could lead to vaccine against 'flesh-eating' bacteria

Group A Strep M protein (seen at center as golden helices) surrounded by two molecules of human C4BP in blue.

Biochemists at the University of California San Diego have uncovered patterns in the outer protein coat of group A Streptococcus that could finally lead to a vaccine against this highly infectious bacteria -- responsible for more than 500,000 deaths a year, including toxic shock syndrome and necrotizing fasciitis or "flesh-eating disease."

In a paper published in this week's issue of Nature Microbiology, the researchers report that they had uncovered "hidden sequence patterns in the major surface protein and virulence factor" of group A Strep, called the M protein, that limit the body's immune response against these bacteria.

"At present, there is no vaccine against group A Strep, and our discovery of hidden sequence patterns has offered up a novel way to devise such a vaccine," said Partho Ghosh, chair of UC San Diego's Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, who headed the team of researchers.

Ghosh said that one of the biggest obstacles to the development of a vaccine against these bacteria is the "hyper-variability" of the M protein. Group A Streptococcus bacteria have a multitude of different strains, each of which displays a different protein on its surface. Because our immune systems must recognize these different proteins before launching an immune response with antibodies specific to the outer protein coat, the hyper-variability of the M proteins make it difficult for our immune systems to attach antibodies specific to each these proteins from different strains.

"When we become infected with a particular strain of group A Strep, we generally mount an immune response against the particular M protein displayed by that strain," explains Ghosh. "But this immunity works only against the infecting strain. We remain vulnerable to infection by other group A Strep strains that display other types of M proteins on their surfaces. This is because the antibody response against the M protein is almost always specific to the sequence of that M protein, and M proteins of different types appear to be unrelated in sequence to one another."

The key to resolving the problem was the recognition that a human protein called C4BP had been discovered by another group of researchers to be recruited to the surface of Group A Strep by many different protein types.

"This was a puzzle, because the antibody response is specific and limited to a single M protein type, while C4BP binds a broad variety of M protein types, perhaps up to 90 percent of them," said Ghosh. "Group A Strep brings C4BP to its surface to dampen the immune response. We wanted to combat this recruitment by blocking the interaction between M proteins and C4BP, but equally as importantly, we wanted to take advantage of the broad recruitment of C4BP by M proteins that would pave a path to the development of a vaccine."

To determine if this was possible, a graduate student in Ghosh's lab, Cosmo Buffalo, collaborated with another graduate student, Sophia Hirakis, in the laboratory of Rommie Amaro, a professor of chemistry and biochemistry who uses computers to study protein structures, to first study the complex interactions between M protein and C4BP.

"This allowed us to understand some detailed features of the interaction," said Ghosh. The research team, which also included an undergraduate researcher, Adrian Bahn-Suh, collaborated extensively with Victor Nizet, an expert in infectious diseases who is a professor at UC San Diego's School of Medicine and Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences.

In their experimental and computational study, the biochemists painstakingly detailed four crystal structures of four different M protein types, each bound to human C4BP.

"These structures revealed that even though the different M protein types appeared to be unrelated in sequence, there were common sequence patterns hidden within the differences that linked all these M proteins together," said Ghosh. "These common patterns are what is used to recruit C4BP to the surface of group A Strep by the different M protein types."

"The idea now is to have antibodies do the same thing as C4BP -- that is, recognize many different M protein types," he added. "That way, the antibody response will not be limited to one M protein type and one strain of group A Strep, but will extend to most, if not all, M protein types and most, if not all strains, of group A Strep."

Read more at Science Daily

First gravitational waves form after 10 million years

This simulation shows how two galaxies merge over a period of 15 million years. The red and the blue dots illustrate the two black holes.

If two galaxies collide, the merging of their central black holes triggers gravitational waves, which ripple throughout space. An international research team involving the University of Zurich has now calculated that this occurs around 10 million years after the two galaxies merge -- much faster than previously assumed.

In his General Theory of Relativity, Albert Einstein predicted gravitational waves over a century ago; this year, they were detected directly for the first time: The American Gravitational Wave Observatory LIGO recorded such curvatures in space from Earth, which were caused by the merging of two massive black holes. And the research on gravitational waves -- and thus the origin of the universe -- continues: From 2034 three satellites are to be launched into space in a project headed by the European Space Agency (ESA) to measure gravitational waves at even lower frequency ranges from space using the Evolved Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (eLISA).

Until now, however, it was not possible to conclusively predict the point at which gravitational waves are triggered and spread throughout space when galaxies merge. An international team of astrophysicists from the University of Zurich, the Institute of Space Technology Islamabad, the University of Heidelberg and the Chinese Academy of Sciences has now calculated this for the first time using an extensive simulation.

Much faster than previously assumed

Every galaxy has a supermassive black hole at its core, which can exhibit millions or even billions of solar masses. In a realistic simulation of the universe, the merging of two roughly 3-billion-year-old galaxies lying relatively close to one another was simulated. With the aid of supercomputers, the researchers calculated the time the two central black holes with around 100 million solar masses needed to emit strong gravitational waves after the galaxies collided.

"The result is surprising," explains Lucio Mayer from the Institute for Computational Science of the University of Zurich: "The merging of the two black holes already triggered the first gravitational waves after 10 million years -- around 100 times faster than previously assumed."

Year-long supercomputer calculation

The computer simulation, which took more than a year, was conducted in China, Zurich and Heidelberg. The project required an innovative computational approach with various numerical codes on different supercomputers. In the process, each supercomputer was responsible for calculating a certain phase of the orbital convergence of the two massive black holes and their parent galaxies.

Read more at Science Daily

The supernova that wasn't: A tale of three cosmic eruptions

Best known for an enormous eruption in the 1840s that created the billowing, hourglass-shaped Homunculus nebula imaged here by the Hubble Space Telescope, Eta Carinae is the most massive and luminous star system within 10,000 light-years.

In the mid-1800s, astronomers surveying the night sky in the Southern Hemisphere noticed something strange: Over the course of a few years, a previously inconspicuous star named Eta Carinae grew brighter and brighter, eventually outshining all other stars except Sirius, before fading again over the next decade, becoming too dim to be seen with the naked eye.

What had happened to cause this outburst? Did 19th-century astronomers witness some strange type of supernova, a star ending its life in a cataclysmic explosion?

"Not quite," says Megan Kiminki, a doctoral student in the University of Arizona's Department of Astronomy and Steward Observatory. "Eta Carinae is what we call a supernova impostor. The star became very bright as it blew off a lot of material, but it was still there."

Indeed, in the mid-20th century Eta Carinae began to brighten again.

The aftermath of the "Great Eruption" of the mid-1800s, which is now readily visible through a small telescope if you happen to be in the Southern Hemisphere, made Eta Carinae a celebrity among objects in the universe known for their bizarre beauty. An hourglass-shaped, billowing cloud of glowing gas and dust enshrouds the star and its companion. Known as the Homunculus nebula, the cloud consists of stellar material hurled into space during the Great Eruption, drifting away at 2 million miles per hour.

By carefully analyzing images of Eta Carinae taken with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, Kiminki and her team were surprised to discover that the Great Eruption was only the latest in a series of massive outbursts launched by the star system since the 13th century. Published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, the paper was co-authored by Nathan Smith, associate professor in the UA's Department of Astronomy, and Megan Reiter, who obtained her Ph.D. from the same department last year and is now a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan.

The expansion rate of gas that was far outside the Homunculus indicated that it was moving slowly and must have been ejected centuries before the observed 19th-century brightening. In fact, the motions of the outer material point to two separate eruptions in the mid-13th and mid-16th centuries.

For scientists trying to piece together what makes star systems such as Eta Carinae tick, the findings are like the stereotypical smoking gun in a detective story.

"From the first reports of its 19th-century outburst up to the most recent data obtained with advanced capabilities on modern telescopes, Eta Carinae continues to baffle us," Smith says. "The most important unsolved problem has always been the underlying cause of its eruption, and now we find that there were multiple previous eruptions. This is a bit like reconstructing the eruption history of a volcano by discovering ancient lava flows."

Although the glowing gases of the Homunculus nebula prevent astronomers from getting a clear look at what's inside, they have figured out that Eta Carinae is a binary system of two very massive stars that orbit each other every 5.5 years. Both are much bigger than our sun and at least one of them is nearing the end of its life.

"These are very large stars that appear very volatile, even when they're not blowing off nebulae," Kiminki says. "They have a dense core and very fluffy envelopes. If you replaced our sun by the larger of the two, which has about 90-100 solar masses, it could very well extend into the orbit of Mars."

Because the Homunculus nebula is such an iconic and visually stunning object, it has been a popular target of astronomical observations. A total of eight images, taken over the course of two decades with Hubble, turned out to be a treasure trove for Kiminki and her co-authors.

The original goal of the team's observing program was to measure proper motions of stars and protostellar jets -- fast streams of matter ejected by young stars during formation -- in the Carina Nebula, but the same data also provided a powerful way to measure the motion of debris ejected by Eta Carinae itself.

"As I was aligning the images, I noticed that the one that Eta Carinae in it was more difficult to align," Kiminki says. "We can only use objects as alignment points that aren't moving, and I thought, 'Wow, a lot of this stuff is really moving.' And then we decided to take a closer look."

By aligning the multi-epoch images of the nebula, the team was able to track the movement of more than 800 blobs of gas Eta Carinae had ejected over time and derived a likely ejection date for each. The analyses showed that the Homunculus nebula and the observed 19th-century brightening tell only part of the story. Measuring the speed with which wisps of ejected material expand outward into space revealed that they must have resulted from two separate eruptions that occurred about 600 and 300 years before the Great Eruption of the 19th century.

In addition to having a separate origin in time, the older material also showed a very different geometry from the Homunculus, where material was ejected out from the star's poles and appears symmetric about its rotation axis.

"We found one of the prior eruptions was similarly symmetric, but at a totally different angle from the axis of the Great Eruption," Kiminki explains. "Even more surprising was that the oldest eruption was very one-sided, suggesting two stars were involved, because it would be very unlikely for one star to blow material out toward just one side."

Though perplexing, the findings are a big step forward for astronomers trying to understand what causes the frequent outbursts.

"We don't really know what's going on with Eta Carinae," Kiminki says. "But knowing that Eta Carinae erupted at least three times tells us that whatever causes those eruptions must be a recurring process, because it wouldn't be very likely that each eruption is caused by a different mechanism."

"Even though we still have not figured out the underlying physical mechanism that caused the 19th-century eruption, we now know that it isn't a one-time event," Smith says. "That makes it harder to understand, but it is also a critical piece of the puzzle of how very massive stars die. Stars like Eta Carinae apparently refuse to go quietly into the night."

Read more at Science Daily

Toothy Remains of 'Loch Monster' Unveiled

Scotland's Loch Ness Monster remains a mythical mystery, but a ferocious-looking creature that was definitely fact and not fiction -- the Storr Lochs Monster -- has just been unveiled by scientists.

The remains of the Storr Lochs Monster now comprise the most complete skeleton of a sea-living reptile from the Age of Dinosaurs that has ever been discovered in Scotland, according to Steve Brusatte of the University of Edinburgh and his colleagues. The scientists say that its fossils were originally found on the Isle of Skye by Norrie Gillies, the then manager of the SSE Storr Lochs Power Station who has since died at age 93.

The Storr Lochs Monster has been identified as an ichthyosaur. These were a family of now-extinct marine reptiles that thrived in prehistoric seas at the same time that dinosaurs dominated terrestrial ecosystems.

"Ichthyosaurs like the Storr Lochs Monster ruled the waves while dinosaurs thundered across the land," Brusatte said in a press release. "Their bones are exceptionally rare in Scotland, which makes this specimen one of the crown jewels of Scottish fossils. It's all thanks to the keen eye of an amateur collector that this remarkable fossil was ever found in the first place, which goes to show that you don't need an advanced degree to make huge scientific discoveries."

The researchers -- due to a partnership between the University of Edinburgh, National Museums Scotland and the energy company SSE -- were able to extract the ichthyosaur's remains from the rock that encased it for millions of years.

The fossils show that the over 13-feet-long Storr Lochs Monster was an especially toothy ichthyosaur that lived around 170 million years ago. When alive, it would use its pointed head filled with hundreds of cone-shaped teeth to feast on fish and squid, and probably almost anything else that had the misfortune of coming into its way.

Further research may reveal how ichthyosaurs evolved during the Middle Jurassic Period (176 to 161 million years ago), a part of Earth's history that has long been shrouded in mystery owing to a lack of fossil evidence. The Isle of Skye, which is connected to Scotland's northwest coast by bridge, is one of the few places in the world where fossils from this period can be found.

Nick Fraser of National Museums Scotland's natural sciences division said, "The Storr Lochs Monster highlights the rich fossil heritage of Skye."

SSE's Michael Pibworth hopes that the Storr Lochs Monster "will indeed prove to be a 'crown jewel' in Scotland's Jurassic history and thanks to the foresight of the Gillies family, enjoyed by generations to come."

From Discovery News

First stars formed even later than previously thought

Cosmic reionisation.

ESA's Planck satellite has revealed that the first stars in the Universe started forming later than previous observations of the Cosmic Microwave Background indicated. This new analysis also shows that these stars were the only sources needed to account for reionising atoms in the cosmos, having completed half of this process when the Universe had reached an age of 700 million years.

With the multitude of stars and galaxies that populate the present Universe, it's hard to imagine how different our 13.8 billion year cosmos was when it was only a few seconds old. At that early phase, it was a hot, dense primordial soup of particles, mostly electrons, protons, neutrinos, and photons -- the particles of light.

In such a dense environment the Universe appeared like an 'opaque' fog, as light particles could not travel any significant distance before colliding with electrons.

As the cosmos expanded, the Universe grew cooler and more rarefied and, after about 380,000 years, finally became 'transparent'. By then, particle collisions were extremely sporadic and photons could travel freely across the cosmos.

Today, telescopes like Planck can observe this fossil light across the entire sky as the Cosmic Microwave Background, or CMB. Its distribution on the sky reveals tiny fluctuations that contain a wealth of information about the history, composition and geometry of the Universe.

The release of the CMB happened at the time when electrons and protons joined to form hydrogen atoms. This is the first moment in the history of the cosmos when matter was in an electrically neutral state.

After that, a few hundred million years passed before these atoms could assemble and eventually give rise to the Universe's first generation of stars.

As these first stars came to life, they filled their surroundings with light, which subsequently split neutral atoms apart, turning them back into their constituent particles: electrons and protons. Scientists refer to this as the 'epoch of reionisation'. It did not take long for most material in the Universe to become completely ionised, and -- except in a very few, isolated places -- it has been like that ever since.

Observations of very distant galaxies hosting supermassive black holes indicate that the Universe had been completely reionised by the time it was about 900 million years old. The starting point of this process, however, is much harder to determine and has been a hotly debated topic in recent years.

"The CMB can tell us when the epoch of reionisation started and, in turn, when the first stars formed in the Universe," explains Jan Tauber, Planck project scientist at ESA.

To make this measurement, scientists exploit the fact that a fraction of the CMB is polarised: part of the light vibrates in a preferred direction. This results from CMB photons bouncing off electrons -- something that happened very frequently in the primordial soup, before the CMB was released, and then again later, after reionisation, when light from the first stars brought free electrons back onto the cosmic stage.

"It is in the tiny fluctuations of the CMB polarisation that we can see the influence of the reionisation process and deduce when it began," adds Tauber.

A first estimate of the epoch of reionisation came in 2003 from NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), suggesting that this process might have started early in cosmic history, when the Universe was only a couple of hundred million years old. This result was problematic, because there is no evidence that any stars had formed by then, which would mean postulating the existence of other, exotic sources that could have caused the reionisation at that time.

This first estimate was soon to be corrected, as subsequent data from WMAP pushed the starting time to later epochs, indicating that the Universe had not been significantly reionised until at least some 450 million years into its history.

This eased, but did not completely solve the puzzle: although the earliest of the first stars have been observed to be present already when the Universe was 300 to 400 million years old, it remained unclear whether these stars were the main culprits for reionising fully the cosmos or whether additional, more exotic sources must have played a role too.

In 2015, the Planck Collaboration provided new data to tackle the problem, moving the reionisation epoch even later in cosmic history and revealing that this process was about half-way through when the Universe was around 550 million years old. The result was based on Planck's first all-sky maps of the CMB polarisation, obtained with its Low-Frequency Instrument (LFI).

Now, a new analysis of data from Planck's other detector, the High-Frequency Instrument (HFI), which is more sensitive to this phenomenon than any other so far, shows that reionisation started even later -- much later than any previous data have suggested.

"The highly sensitive measurements from HFI have clearly demonstrated that reionisation was a very quick process, starting fairly late in cosmic history and having half-reionised the Universe by the time it was about 700 million years old," says Jean-Loup Puget from Institut d'Astrophysique Spatiale in Orsay, France, principal investigator of Planck's HFI.

"These results are now helping us to model the beginning of the reionisation phase."

"We have also confirmed that no other agents are needed, besides the first stars, to reionise the Universe," adds Matthieu Tristram, a Planck Collaboration scientist at Laboratoire de l'Accélérateur Linéaire in Orsay, France.

The new study locates the formation of the first stars much later than previously thought on the cosmic timeline, suggesting that the first generation of galaxies are well within the observational reach of future astronomical facilities, and possibly even some current ones.

Read more at Science Daily

New light on the complex nature of 'hot Jupiter' atmospheres

Artistic illustration of the gas giant planet HD 209458b.

Fascinating new light could be shed on the complex atmospheres of planets which orbit stars outside our own solar system, thanks to pioneering new research.

A team of international researchers, led by astrophysicists from the University of Exeter, Columbia University and NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, used state-of -the-art modelling techniques to extensively study the atmosphere of a 'hot Jupiter' found 150 lightyears from Earth.

The scientists adapted the state-of-the art computer model used by the Met Office to study Earth's atmosphere to perform simulations of these exotic distant worlds that are the size of Jupiter, but orbiting more closely to their parent star than Mercury does to the Sun.

The results were compared to observations carried out using the powerful Spitzer Space Telescope, probing our understanding of the conditions within the atmospheres of these planets.

The research revealed results that were largely consistent with existing observations, most notably around the effect of heat transport in the upper atmospheres of the exoplanets where extreme velocity winds carry heat so rapidly that the hottest part of the atmosphere is shifted away from the closest point to the star, where it would be expected to be.

However, the study also revealed some intriguing discrepancies, including significant differences between the observed and expected brightness of the hot Jupiter's `nightside' -- or the hemisphere facing away from the star.

The team are now calling on further studies to be conducted to unlock the secrets of how these planets evolve in such close proximity to their host.

Dr Nathan Mayne, Senior Lecturer in Astrophysics at the University of Exeter and one of the authors of the study said: "This research is not only important in developing our understanding of this exotic class of planets, but also represents the first steps to building a deeper understanding of how planetary atmospheres and climates work across a range of conditions, including those more conducive to life.

"Additionally, over a longer timescale, by keeping close connection between astrophysicists and climate researchers, this programme will aid in the understanding of our own changing climate."

The Met Office weather and climate prediction model is one of the most advanced models of its kind. However, this research applies this model to a planet with conditions far from that present on Earth, with temperatures exceeding one thousand degrees and an atmosphere spanning pressures orders of magnitude larger.

A key finding of this research indicates that there is still no clear understanding of how the material that is moving from the hot dayside of the planet onto the cold nightside both cools and alters it chemical composition.

Additionally, the team found intriguing hints that the deeper atmosphere, inaccessible to observations, supports large-scale, slow moving circulations potentially altering the temperature structure deep in the hot Jupiter's atmosphere.

Read more at Science Daily