Mysterious Caribbean Shipwreck Identified

Underwater archaeologists have solved the mystery of a shipwreck filled with sword blades, scissors and mule shoes more than three years after finding it in the waters off the Caribbean coast of Panama.

The vessel has been identified as the Nuestra Señora de Encarnación, a colonial Spanish ship known as a nao, or merchant ship, that sank in 1681 during a storm at the mouth of Panama’s Chagres River.

“This truly is an exciting and intriguing shipwreck,” said project director Frederick “Fritz” Hanselmann, the project director and underwater archaeologist at the Meadows Center for Water and the Environment at Texas State University.

Very few Spanish merchant naos have ever been found, and even fewer have been unearthed in the Encarnacións’s amazing condition.

Resting at a depth of just 40 feet, the 334-year-old wreck is buried in up to 3 feet of muddy sand and silt that preserved the entire lower portion of the ship’s hull.

“The cargo includes a wide variety of artifacts, in particular over 100 wooden boxes containing sword blades, scissors, mule shoes, nails and ceramics,” Hanselmann said.

Originally constructed in Veracruz, Mexico, Encarnación sailed as part of the Tierra Firme fleet, en route to Portobelo, Panama from Cartagena, Colombia.

One of Spain’s great treasure convoys, the Tierra Firme left Spain for the New World every year carrying supplies for the colonists and returning with precious metals, emeralds and pearls. The trade was the backbone of Spain’s colonial economy.

Hanselmann and colleagues stumbled upon the vessel in 2011, during their ongoing search for five ships the 17th century pirate Captain Henry Morgan lost en route to sacking Panama City in 1671. A year before, the team recovered guns that were lost overboard when Morgan’s ships ran aground.

The researchers have no doubt the wreck is the Encarnación.

“The location of the ship is consistent with the story of the wrecking event. The only other vessel that went down immediately after that storm in that location was a small salvage barge. This is no barge,” Hanselmann told Discovery News.

He noted that three other vessels were lost during that storm, but closer to Portobelo.

“Other than the loss of Morgan’s ships in this area 10 years prior, there are no other contemporaneous accounts of Spanish merchant vessel losses off the Chagres,” he said.

According to maritime archaeologist and assistant project director Melanie Damour, the vessel’s construction matches the information currently available on Encarnación.

“We have a substantial amount of preserved hull structure and our measurements are fairly consistent with the construction details we have found so far. In addition, we know that Encarnación was constructed of mahogany and oak, both of which we documented,” Damour said.

Moreover, Encarnación’s cargo manifest matches what has been found in the archaeological record so far.

The ship sank with barrels and wooden boxes filled with swords, mule shoes, tacks, cloth roles, and lead bale seals with inscriptions. Apart from perishable organic material, the items are still in place.

“The contemporary salvage attempts after the wrecking event were mostly unsuccessful as the only thing they could recover was a few bales of cloths,” Chris Horrell, maritime archaeologist and assistant project director, told Discovery News.

Hanselmann noted a certain duality in most of the cargo. The objects themselves provide a snapshot of colonial Spanish life in late 17th century.

“Sword blades, scissors and mule shoes were very common items that had multiple uses and were employed in everyday life,” he said.

“The sword blade could serve as a weapon of the Crown’s soldiers, but could also be utilized for everyday cutting needs. The scissors that could assist in treating wounds would also have other uses in other professions. The mule shoes were necessary not only for transporting silver and gold across the isthmus, but transporting goods and merchandise from one town to the next,” he added.

According to the researchers, the area where the Encarnación lies may and hold up to 30 shipwrecks.

Read more at Discovery News

Giant Squid Lore and Legends Date Back Centuries

A giant squid washed up on New Zealand’s South Island earlier this week, a specimen whose tentacles reached over 16 feet in length. It caused quite a stir when found, and was rescued from birds and other scavengers by a local museum.

According to an ABC News story, “Marine biologist and aquarium owner Megan Lewis… identified it as a mature female. ‘They tend to grow very fast and live not very long,’ Lewis said, noting that the specimen’s head was in ‘pristine condition.’” It’s not clear how the squid died, but since it was intact and its stomach was full it likely wasn’t the result of predation or starvation.

For centuries scientists had no definitive evidence that the giant squid (genus Architeuthis) actually existed. They are creatures of the deep sea and spend most of their lives far away from mankind’s prying eyes. On the rare occasion that a giant squid was found washed up on a beach (most often in Newfoundland and New Zealand), they were invariably dead and decomposing.

The giant squid’s imposing size and fearsome appearance has long cast them as predatory monsters in human imaginations and fictional depictions (Jules Verne’s novel “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea” describes an attack on a submarine by a giant squid).

In his book “The Search for the Giant Squid” marine biologist Richard Ellis notes that “There is probably no apparition more terrifying than a gigantic, saucer-eyed creature of the depths… Even the man-eating shark pales by comparison to such a horror… An animal that can reach a length of 60 feet is already intimidating, and if it happens to have eight squirmy arms, two feeding tentacles, gigantic unblinking eyes, and a gnashing beak, it becomes the stuff of nightmares.”

It’s a Lovecraftian horror that resonates in the human psyche, though the giant squid are not aggressive against humans and typically feed on other squid and deep-sea fish.

It’s likely that the giant squid served as the basis for centuries of sea monster reports. Ancient sea stories told of the fearsome Kraken, a huge many-tentacled beast, said to attack ships and sailors on the high seas (known to modern audiences in Liam Neeson’s “Clash of the Titans” command to “Release the Kraken!”).

The Kraken was first described in early Scandinavian mythology, a marine colossus so large that its body appeared as a series of small islands. Lured by the promise of fresh water and provisions, sailors would approach just before huge tentacles would rise out of the water and drag them to their doom (this legend was faithfully and dramatically depicted in the 2006 film “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest”).

Aside from the occasional specimens recovered and preserved in museums, another important piece of the giant squid puzzle was found in and on sperm whales. Whalers would occasionally notice huge scars on whale skins indicating a battle with some sort of obviously huge and powerful animal.

Read more at Discovery News

Common Bacterium Cures Bats' White-nose Syndrome

A common bacterium we find in everyday things, like food flavorings, is giving scientists hope that bat populations can be saved from deadly White-nose Syndrome.

The new treatment was developed in Missouri by Forest Service scientists Sybill Amelon and Dan Lindner, and Chris Cornelison of Georgia State University.

The bacterium, Rhodococcus rhodochrous, dwells in pretty much all soils found in North America and is safe for plants and animals. In fact, it’s been used in more than one industrial application, including flavorings for our food, for over half a century, according to the U.S. Forest Service.

This time, the researchers grew the bacterium on cobalt, which produced so-called volatile organic compounds (VOCs) that stop the fungus, Psuedogymnoascus destructans, from growing.

“The amazing part about this is that these compounds diffuse through the air and act at very low concentrations, so the bats are treated by exposing them to air containing the VOCs (the compounds do not need to be ‘directly’ applied to the bats),” according to a USFS press release.

However, more than one chemical is created from the reaction, so the scientists’ next step is to isolate which chemical is the one that stops the fungus from growing.

White-nose Syndrome attacks a bat’s nose, ears, and wings while it hibernates, when the animal’s temperature is at its lowest. All infected bats in a colony die, usually because their immune systems are compromised and they use twice as much energy during hibernation as healthy bats do, shedding precious fat reserves too early, according to researchers.

The disease has been plowing through bat populations since the early 2000s, killing nearly 6 million bats since 2006, according to WhiteNoseSyndrome.org. Twenty-six U.S. states have confirmed the presence of the disease.

If there’s no cure found for White-nose Syndrome, many scientists fear that bats will be extinct within a few decades.

Read more at Discovery News

Blues Legend B.B. King Dies, Aged 89

Patty King confirmed on CNN that her father, a singular figure in music history, died late Thursday.

The guitar legend, who had kept a rigorous touring schedule until last year, had issued a statement on May 1 saying that he was entering hospice care at his home in Las Vegas.

News of King’s death elicited an array of tributes from musicians across genres who credited the guitarist as a towering influence.

“BB, anyone could play a thousand notes and never say what you said in one. #RIP,” a younger star guitarist and singer, Lenny Kravitz, wrote on Twitter.

The Canadian singer Bryan Adams tweeted: “RIP BB King, one of the best blues guitarists ever, maybe the best. He could do more on one note than anyone.”

Born in poverty in Mississippi as Riley B. King, the future legend learned to play a guitar that was given to him at age 12 by a plantation owner.

King mastered the instrument and he later christened his trusty guitar Lucille as he brought the blues to a mainstream audience — and also helped chart the course of rock.

He was invited in 1968 to perform at San Francisco’s Fillmore West, a haven for hippies, and a year later opened 18 US concerts for the Rolling Stones.

King’s signature song was “The Thrill is Gone” — full of the feelings of angst so often identified with the blues, interspersed with biting guitar licks.

In 2003, Rolling Stone magazine ranked him the third greatest guitar legend after Jimi Hendrix and Duane Allman and one ahead of Eric Clapton.

King developed his distinct style in the 1950s as he toured incessantly with his band. A natural entertainer on stage, he wove stories from the poor south with tales and jokes from his often colorful love life.

– Well-chosen notes–

His guitar playing focused not on speed or on sweeping chords but instead on well-chosen, sharp single notes.

He never took up the slide guitar like most Delta bluesmen, but substituted with a vibrato from his left hand on the neck that rounded out his unique sound.

King in his prime put in more than 300 concerts a year. Despite suffering Type II diabetes for the past two decades, until recently he kept up a touring schedule that would tire many musicians far younger than him.

But fans noticed that his recent performances became increasingly erratic and he finally ended his touring after falling ill at a show in Chicago in October.

“I have a disease which I believe might be contagious,” he told AFP in an interview in 2007. “It’s called ‘need more.’”

But another reason King stayed on the road was in hopes of keeping the blues alive.

“With the exception of satellite radio today I don’t hear no blues playing on the radio,” he told AFP. “So one of the reasons I travel a lot is so I can carry the music to the people. Because if I don’t carry it, it don’t go on the air.”

Read more at Discovery News

Cosmic 'Dinosaur Egg' Ready to Hatch

The youngest example of one of the oldest objects in the universe may have been discovered by astronomers, who say it appears ready to hatch millions of stars.

The object, which astronomers are calling the “Firecracker,” is a dense, massive cloud of molecular gas and may be the youngest example of what’s known as a globular cluster. Millions of stars can form from the material inside a globular cluster, but observations show that not a single star twinkles within the depths of the newly discovered Firecracker. You can see a video of this incredible discovery on Space.com.

“We may be witnessing one of the most ancient and extreme modes of star formation in the universe,” lead author Kelsey Johnson, an astronomer at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, said in a statement. “This remarkable object looks like it was plucked straight out of the early universe. To discover something that has all the characteristics of a globular cluster, yet has not begun making stars, is like finding a dinosaur egg that’s about to hatch.”

Beating the odds

Globular clusters are common throughout the universe — the Milky Way contains over 150 known clusters, and may hide others. As the dense clouds form new stars, heat and radiation from the newborns change the environment around them, making it difficult for scientists to understand the original conditions that birthed the clusters.

Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), Johnson and her team studied a famous pair of interacting galaxies, NGC 4038 and NGC 4039, known as the Antennae galaxies. The forces generated by the two merging galaxies, which lie approximately 50 million light-years away, trigger star formation at a rapid clip.

But in one region, dubbed the Firecracker by the researchers, star formation has yet to begin. This allows the astronomers a first-ever look at the conditions that may have led to the creation of most, if not all, of these massive clusters.

“Until now, clouds with this potential have only been seen as teenagers, after star formation has begun,” Johnson said. “That meant that the nursery had already been disturbed. To understand how a globular cluster forms, you need to see its true beginnings.”

While most globular clusters formed around 12 billion years ago, when the first galaxies started out, a smaller population was created in more recent times by the merger of existing galaxies. The window for formation is relatively short, as the clusters are thought to evolve out of their star-free stage within a million years. Such clouds are rare, as they may be torn apart by gravitational forces.

“The survival rate for a massive young star cluster to remain intact is very low –around 1 percent,” said Johnson.

Read more at Discovery News

Can We Just Save This Adorable Parrot for Christ’s Sake?

I mean, look at this thing.

There are two things you need to know about New Zealand: It’s impossibly green, and you can’t throw a rock without hitting a sheep (don’t actually throw rocks at sheep, it’s just a figure of speech). The place is lousy with them, and for that you can thank Captain Cook, who introduced them in 1773. It was just one of the many mammals humans have brought to New Zealand, which has historically had zero mammals other than bats. Now, they’re everywhere—rats, cats, dogs, and about eleventy million sheep.

And it’s an ecological nightmare. Rats eat eggs and cats eat birds, and the endemic wildlife is suffering for it. Almost half of New Zealand’s native bird species are now extinct, while a particularly bizarre bird is teetering on the edge: the kakapo. It is the world’s only flightless parrot. It can live 100 years. Its sex life is best described as … involved. And there are just 126 left in the wild. But those 126 birds have guardians, dedicated rangers who’ve sequestered them on three small mammal-free islands, tracking them and feeding them and slowly, ever so slowly, boosting their numbers.

Back in the 19th century, New Zealand was positively swarming with kakapo, according to biologist Andrew Digby of New Zealand’s Department of Conservation. Hundreds of thousands of them, perhaps millions. “With early European explorers in the 1800s,” he says, “there’s records of them saying that they’d have a dozen of them land in their camp at night and make so much noise that they couldn’t sleep. They used to say they’d catch them just by shaking a tree, and then they’d get a couple of birds falling out.”

But the introduced mammalian predators have been pecking away at the kakapo’s numbers, until in the 1970s scientists feared only a population of males was left—not exactly good news for a species. But another population of kakapo, with females, was soon found on Stewart Island at the southern tip of New Zealand. Thus the kakapo was saved, but its numbers continued dwindling until hitting their lowest in the mid-1990s: 50. Ever since, though, conservation efforts have slowly but surely been bringing the kakapo back.

Feeding kakapo does two things: Gives them energy for the mating season and results in hilarious pictures.

So why are kakapo so vulnerable to mammals? Well, they’d evolved over 18 million years without having the furry things around. They took up the terrestrial life because, simply put, they could. They blend in well with the undergrowth and there were no mammalian predators stalking about in search of eggs, so it made sense to give up flight, which is highly energy intensive. It’s among the many illustrations that there’s no such thing as “progress” in evolution. Sure, flight was an impressive achievement in the history of life on Earth, but if it no longer behooves a species to fly, it can be better to evolve it away. Unfortunately for a kakapo, the introduction of mammals made this evolutionary path rather problematic.

Counterintuitively, the kakapo actually has relatively huge wings for a flightless bird (its flightless counterpart in New Zealand, the kiwi, has wings that have almost disappeared entirely), which it uses to glide out of trees—or, more accurately, awkwardly tumble out of them. Kakapo are accomplished climbers, using their talons and beak to make their way as much as 100 feet up into the canopy in search of berries. “And sometimes in the summer when the females are breeding they’re in such a hurry, they need to get the food back to their chicks as quickly as possible,” Digby says. “So rather than climbing back down they’ll just jump off from high up in the tree. They’re tens of meters up, and they’ll sort of crash to the ground.”

Indeed, scientists will find them injured from such stunts—but it’s worth it for the birds to get back and protect their young ‘uns from things like owls (which are too small to go after adult kakapo). There is much at stake here, and not just because the species is in trouble, but because kakapo only mate every three years. This coincides with the fruiting of the rimu tree, which produces the caloric energy that fuels the kakapo’s bizarre mating ritual.

Which goes as follows. Toward the end of the year, right around Christmas, male kakapo ascend hills all around the three islands they call home. Here they build networks known as “tracks and bowls,” which are, as you’d expect, depressions that the males scrape out of the dirt and connect with trails. Every night they sit in these bowls, puffing themselves up and booming an unexpectedly deep sound that can travel more than four miles. The males will do this for eight hours a night for months on end, booming booming booming, to attract females, who will mate with suitable fellas for up to 45 minutes a go. (A kakapo has also mated on at least one occasion with the head of a BBC presenter, as you can see below.) “So it’s a pretty unusual mating system,” Digby says. “And this booming noise is kind of weird. You feel it in your stomach. It’s not just hearing it, it’s just a really, really low frequency.”

Females will typically lay a single egg—just one egg every three years. The good news is that kakapo may live for up to a century, making for a whole lot of breeding seasons. The bad news is that when you have such small populations, inbreeding is inevitable.

This is where the rangers come in.

An artificial insemination of a kakapo.

Humans Cleaning Up Human Messes

The Department of Conservation’s four permanent rangers, who rotate between the three kakapo islands, are obsessively monitoring the 126 remaining birds. Transmitters tell them not only where each bird is, but who is mating with whom. “So we want to make sure that we don’t have birds too closely related that are mating with each other,” Digby says. “Brothers and sisters, that sort of stuff.”

They’ll also preempt the birds by artificially inseminating them, because inbreeding can severely lower the fertility of female kakapo. Plus, genetic diversity in general is pivotal in any population, and especially so in such a small one. Genetic diversity means healthy variation among animals, and healthy variation allows a species to better adapt to its environment. Those with advantageous variations survive to mate and pass the genes responsible for them along, while their less fit peers perish, helping the species adapt. Plus variation means a species can better handle outbreaks of disease: Some individuals will be better equipped to fight it and pass down those convenient genes. If a population is inbred, though, it may be that none of the individuals can fight it.

Kakapo chicks.

Accordingly, an outbreak among kakapos could be devastating. So their islands are under strict biocontrol. Not only are visitors’ bags checked for rats and mice, but everything is sprayed with disinfectant to snuff out any diseases.

However precarious the kakapo’s existence may be, so far the program seems to be working. More birds are being born than are dying, so the population is growing, and Digby is realistically optimistic.

Read more at Wired Science

First Warm-Blooded Fish Identified

The opah, or moonfish, is the first known fully warm-blooded fish, according to a study published in the journal Science.

The determination helps to explain why opah are such high performance predators that have a keen sense of vision, swim speedily, react quickly, and have the stamina to chase down fast-moving prey.

“Before this discovery I was under the impression this was a slow moving fish, like most other fish in cold environments,” lead author Nicholas Wegner said in a press release. “But because it can warm its body, it turns out to be a very active predator that chases down agile prey like squid and can migrate long distances.”

Wegner is a fisheries biologist at NOAA Fisheries’ Southwest Fisheries Science Center in La Jolla. He first became aware that opah were unlike other fish when a colleague, Owyn Snodgrass, collected a sample of an opah’s gill tissue.

Wegner noticed that the tissue had blood vessels to carry warm blood into the fish’s gills. The blood vessels then wound around those carrying cold blood back to the body core after absorbing oxygen from water. Engineers call this a “counter-current heat exchange.”

In this case, the car radiator-like system means that warm blood leaving the fish’s body core helps to heat up cold blood returning from the respiratory surface of the gills where it absorbs oxygen.

Opah live up to 1000 feet beneath the ocean’s surface in very cold, dimly lit waters, making this discovery all the more remarkable.

The researchers found that the industrious fish constantly flap its fins, which generate body heat. The flapping also speeds up the opah’s metabolism, movement and reaction times.

Temperature measurements found that the opah’s body is about 41 degrees Fahrenheit higher than the surrounding chilly waters. While such a temperature is a drop in the bucket compared to the body temps of humans and other mammals, we are not living in a perpetually cold environment as these fish are.

“There has never been anything like this seen in a fish’s gills before,” Wegner said. “This is a cool innovation by these animals that gives them a competitive edge. The concept of counter-current heat exchange was invented in fish long before we thought of it.”

Certain other fish, such as some sharks and tuna, have what’s known as “regional endothermy,” or limited warm-bloodedness. It allows them to stay active in colder depths, as well as shallower waters. But the fully warm-blooded opah are unlike all other fish, at least so far as we know it.

Read more at Discovery News

Gold-Filled Tomb Found at Construction Site in China

A Ming Dynasty tomb containing gold treasures has been discovered at a construction site in Nanjing, China. However, the real treasures may be two stone epitaphs that tell the story of the person buried there — Lady Mei, a woman who went from being a concubine to becoming a political and military strategist.

The epitaphs, found inside the brick tomb, reveal that Lady Mei was a 21-year-old "unwashed and unkempt" woman who "called herself the survivor." Later she became the mother of a duke who ruled a province in southwest China. Lady Mei came to wield much power, providing her son with "strategies for bringing peace to the barbarian tribes and pacifying faraway lands," according to the epitaphs, which were translated from Chinese.

The treasures in her more than 500-year-old tomb include gold bracelets, a gold fragrance box and gold hairpins, all inlaid with a mix of gemstones, including sapphires, rubies and turquoise.

Archaeologists from Nanjing Municipal Museum and the Jiangning District Museum of Nanjing City excavated the tomb in 2008, and their findings were recently translated into English and published in the journal Chinese Cultural Relics. Lady Mei's coffin was damaged by water, but her skeletal remains were found.

From "survivor" to "dowager duchess"

Researchers say that Lady Mei was one of three wives of Mu Bin, a Duke of Qian who ruled Yunnan, a province in southwest China on the country's frontier.

Born in 1430, she probably would have been about 15 years old when she married the duke, who would've been more than 30 years older than her, researchers say.

She probably didn't enjoy the same status as his other two wives. "Lady Mei was probably a concubine whom he married after he went to guard and rule Yunnan," wrote researchers in the journal article.

But while Lady Mei was a concubine, her own family appears to have had some wealth: Her great-great grandfather "Cheng" was a general who "won every battle" and was granted a fiefdom over "1,000 households," read the epitaphs.

Lady Mei's life changed when she gave birth to the duke's son, Mu Zong, who was 10 months old when the duke died. The newly widowed Lady Mei "was only 21 years of age. She was unwashed and unkempt, and called herself the survivor," the epitaphs say.

She took charge of Mu Zong's upbringing, grooming him to be the next duke.

"She raised the third-generation duke. She managed the family with strong discipline and diligence, and kept the internal domestic affairs in great order, and no one had any complaint," the epitaphs read.

Lady Mei "urged him to study hard mornings and evenings, and taught him loyalty and filial devotion, as well as services of duty."

When Mu Zong came of age, he and Lady Mei traveled to meet the emperor, who charged him with controlling Yunnan, the province his father had ruled. The emperor was pleased with Lady Mei and, sometime after the meeting, awarded her the title of "Dowager Duchess," according to the epitaphs.

As Mu Zong began his rule over Yunnan, he relied on his mother for advice.

"Every morning when the third-generation duke got up, after taking care of official business, he returned to pay respect to the Dowager Duchess in the main hall," the epitaphs read.

"The Dowager Duchess would always talk to the third-generation duke about her loyalty to the emperor, and kind concerns for the people under the rule of the departed former duke, and strategies for bringing peace to the barbarian tribes and pacifying faraway lands."

Lady Mei's death
Lady Mei died at age 45 in the year 1474. The epitaphs say that she passed away of illness in southern Yunnan and was brought to Nanjing for burial.

"On the day of her death, the people of Yunnan, military servicemen or civilians, old and young, all mourned and grieved for her as if their own parents had passed away," the epitaphs read.

"When the obituary reached the imperial court, the emperor sent out officials and ordered them to consecrate and prepare for the funeral and burial."

The epitaphs praise her role in nurturing the young duke and preparing him for the responsibilities of ruling Yunnan. "Using her love and her hard work, she raised and educated the child, and brought him up to be a man of ability and good moral character …" the epitaphs read.

Read more at Discovery News

Surprise Quasar Quartet Defies Explanation

Astronomers have found a quartet of quasars embedded in a single cloud of cold gas, a discovery that challenges currently held theories about how these rare objects form.

“The discovery is significant both because there are four of them, and because they are so close together,” lead researcher Joseph Hennawi, with the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany, told Discovery News.

Astronomers are lucky to catch a glimpse of a single quasar, which appear for a tiny sliver of time at the peak of a supermassive black hole’s feeding frenzy.

The influx of material into a galaxy’s central black hole – areas where gravity is so strong that not even photons of light can escape -- doesn’t last long, but the turmoil causes the region around the black hole to shine hundreds of times brighter than its host galaxy, becoming the most luminous objects in the universe.

Quasars are typically solitary beasts, separated by hundreds of millions of light years. About 100 have been found in pairs. Only two sets of triplets have been discovered, and now, a single quartet.

“This was extremely surprising, as we knew that quasars are very rare objects, and it should be extremely unlikely to find four of them so close together,” Hennawi wrote in an email.

The newly found foursome are within 650,000 light years of one another, which is equivalent to about 25 percent of the distance between Milky Way and its nearest big neighbor galaxy Andromeda, he added.

The odds that the discovery is a chance encounter are one in 10 million, Hennawi said, raising the prospect that quasars are more likely to occur in specific environments than current models predict.

The quadruple quasar, for example, is embedded in a single dense cloud of cold hydrogen gas. It also is located in a massive proto-cluster of galaxies.

“It may be that quasar episodes are more likely to be triggered in such an unusual environment, which is rich in both gas and galaxies” – conditions that were thought to be mutually exclusive, Hennawi said.

“Current models of how structure forms in the universe would never predict that there would be so much cool, dense gas around. Instead, those models predict that the gas in such a massive object should be 1,000 times hotter and 1,000 times less dense,” he said.

Read more at Discovery News

Mysterious New Type of Star Cluster Carries Extra Baggage

Astronomers studying the globular star clusters orbiting the giant elliptical galaxy Centaurus A (NGC 5128) have stumbled upon a fascinating discovery — the clusters are too massive.

What does this mean? Well, it could be that each of the dozens of clusters studied are packed with dark matter or may even by hiding a massive black hole, but neither of the explanations make any sense.

Globular star clusters are ancient ensembles of thousands of stars that can be found orbiting galaxies like our Milky Way. Their study is critical to help us understand how galaxies on the whole evolve as the stars they are known to contain are often as old as the galaxies they orbit.

“Globular clusters and their constituent stars are keys to understanding the formation and evolution of galaxies. For decades, astronomers thought that the stars that made up a given globular cluster all shared the same ages and chemical compositions — but we now know that they are stranger and more complicated creatures,” said Matt Taylor, a PhD student at the Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile, Santiago, Chile, and lead author of the study.

Using the FLAMES instrument on the ESO’s Very Large Telescope at the Paranal Observatory in Chile, Taylor and his team surveyed 125 of the around 2,000 globular clusters in orbit around Centaurus A and gauged their masses. Usually, the mass of a globular cluster can be derived by measuring their brightness. The brighter the cluster, the more stars it has and the more massive it is.

As expected, for the most part, this brightness-mass relationship held true. But something strange started to emerge from the data — some of the clusters were more massive than the brightness data suggested. What’s more, the more massive these strange clusters were, the greater the fraction of their mass was dark.

Naturally, the researchers’ suspicions are focusing on these clusters amassing a reservoir of dark matter. But globular star clusters are not thought to contain significant quantities of invisible stuff. Perhaps, therefore, these islands of stars have massive black holes in their cores, or maybe a massive graveyard of other stellar corpses, like the burnt-out husks of stars like neutron stars? For now, where this extra baggage comes from remains mystery.

“Our discovery of star clusters with unexpectedly high masses for the amount of stars they contain hints that there might be multiple families of globular clusters, with differing formation histories. Apparently some star clusters look like, walk like, and smell like run-of-the-mill globulars, but there may quite literally be more to them than meets the eye,” added co-author Thomas Puzia, also at the Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile.

Read more at Discovery News