The odd red bodies, scientists say, hide stars that models suggest are "too old" to have lived during early cosmic times and black holes that measure up to thousands of times larger than the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way. Scientists believe these objects must have been born in a way unique to the early universe — by a method that seems to have ceased in the cosmos after around 1 billion years of its existence.

The three little red dots are seen as they were when the universe was between 600 million and 800 million years old. Though that may seem like a tremendously long time after the Big Bang, the fact that the universe is 13.8 billion years old means it was no more than 5% of its current age when these objects existed.

By confirming the existence of these dots in the early universe, these JWST findings could challenge what we know about the evolution of galaxies and the supermassive black holes that sit at their hearts.

RELATED: 35 jaw-dropping James Webb Space Telescope images

The team, led by scientists from Penn State University, saw these mysterious crimson cosmic oddities when investigating the early universe with the JWST's Near Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) instrument as part of the RUBIES survey.

"It's very confusing," team member Joel Leja, an assistant professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State, said in a statement. "You can make this uncomfortably fit in our current model of the universe, but only if we evoke some exotic, insanely rapid formation at the beginning of time.

"This is, without a doubt, the most peculiar and interesting set of objects I've seen in my career."

What's behind the dots?

The researchers studied the intensity of different wavelengths of light coming from the little red dots. This revealed signs that the stars are hundreds of millions of years old — far older than is expected for stars at this early stage of the cosmos.

The researchers also saw traces of supermassive black holes within the little red dots' regions with masses equivalent to millions, sometimes even billions, of suns. These black holes are between 100 and 1,000 times as massive as Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way that sits just 26,000 light-years from Earth.

Both of these discoveries are not expected under current models of cosmic evolution, galaxy growth, or supermassive black hole formation. All of these theories suggest galaxies and supermassive black holes grow in lockstep — but this growth takes billions of years.

"We have confirmed that these appear to be packed with ancient stars — hundreds of millions of years old — in a universe that is only [600 million to 800 million years] old. Remarkably, these objects hold the record for the earliest signatures of old starlight," research leader Bingjie Wang, a postdoctoral scholar at Penn State, said in the statement. "It was totally unexpected to find old stars in a very young universe. The standard models of cosmology and galaxy formation have been incredibly successful, yet these luminous objects do not quite fit comfortably into those theories."

The team first spotted the little red dots while using the JWST back in July. At the time, the researchers immediately suspected the objects were actually galaxies that existed roughly 13.5 billion years ago.

Deeper investigation of these objects' light spectra confirmed these as galaxies that lived during the very dawn of time and also revealed that "overgrown" supermassive black holes and impossibly "old" stars were powering the red dots' impressive light output.

The team isn't yet certain how much of the light from the little red dots comes from each of these sources. That means these galaxies are either unexpectedly old and more massive than the Milky Way, having formed far earlier than models predict, or have normal amounts of mass yet overly massive black holes somehow — voids that are vastly more massive than a similar galaxy would have during the current epoch of the cosmos.

"Distinguishing between light from material falling into a black hole and light emitted from stars in these tiny, distant objects is challenging," Wang said. "That inability to tell the difference in the current dataset leaves ample room for interpretation of these intriguing objects."

That's no ordinary supermassive black hole!

Of course, all black holes have light-trapping boundaries called "event horizons," meaning that, however much light they contribute to the little red dots, it must come from the material that surrounds them rather than from within.

The tremendous gravitational influence of the black holes generates turbulent conditions in this material, which also feeds the black hole over time, heating it and causing it to glow brightly. Regions powered by supermassive black holes in this way are called "quasars," and the regions of their galaxies they sit in are known as "active galactic nuclei (AGNs)."

These newly found, "red dot" black hole regions could be different from other quasars, even those the JWST has already seen in the early universe. For instance, the red dot black holes seem to produce far more ultraviolet light than expected. Still, the most shocking thing about these supermassive black holes remains just how massive they seem.

"Normally, supermassive black holes are paired with galaxies," Leja said. "They grow up together and go through all their major life experiences together. But here, we have a fully formed adult black hole living inside of what should be a baby galaxy. 

"That doesn't really make sense because these things should grow together, or at least that’s what we thought."

The red dot galaxies themselves are also surprising. They seem to be much smaller than other galaxies despite having almost as many stars. That means the red dot galaxies seem to consist of between 10 billion and 1 trillion stars crammed into a galaxy a few hundred light-years across with a volume 1,000 times smaller than the Milky Way.

To put that into context, if the Milky Way were reduced to the size of one of these red dot galaxies, then the closest star to the sun (Proxima Centauri, which is 4.2 light-years away) would be within the solar system. Additionally, the distance between the Earth and the Milky Way's supermassive black hole, Sgr A*, would be reduced from 26,000 light-years to just 26 light-years. That would see it and its surroundings appearing in the night sky over Earth.

"These early galaxies would be so dense with stars — stars that must have formed in a way we've never seen, under conditions we would never expect during a period in which we’d never expect to see them," Leja said. "And for whatever reason, the universe stopped making objects like these after just a couple of billion years. They are unique to the early universe."

The team intends to follow up on its findings with more observations of these confusing little red dots to understand the dots' mysteries better. This will include obtaining deeper spectra by pointing the JWST at the red objects for prolonged periods of time to obtain emission spectra of light associated with various elements. This could help unravel the contributions of ancient stars and supermassive black holes in the galaxies.

"There's another way that we could have a breakthrough, and that's just [having] the right idea," Leja concluded. "We have all these puzzle pieces, and they only fit if we ignore the fact that some of them are breaking. This problem is amenable to a stroke of genius that has so far eluded us, all of our collaborators, and the entire scientific community.

"Honestly, it's thrilling to have so much of this mystery left to figure out."

The team's research was published on June 26 in the journal Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Originally posted on Space.com.

A Night with the Valkyries — Jose Miguel Picon Chimelis

In this image, a powerful geomagnetic storm creates a stunning display of multicolored hues across the night sky in Iceland.

"There was a prediction of a KP7 storm [a strong geomagnetic storm that can cause auroras and affect electrical power systems] and I was excited as to what I might see," photographer José Miguel Picón Chimelis said in a statement. 

He took the panoramic photo near Eystrahorn mountain, capturing a scene full of vibrant colors, which he described as "one of the most amazing that I have experienced in my nighttime photography outings."

Solar Pulsation — Wenlian Li

In this vibrant display of energy, photographer Wenlian Li captured an exploding sunspot spewing out glowing plasma from the sun's surface.

 Observations at night — Jakob Sahner 

In this shot from La Palma, one of the Canary Islands in the Atlantic Ocean, the immense Isaac Newton Telescope sits below ominous cosmic clouds from the Cygnus constellation.

"The Cygnus region with its bright and vibrant star-forming regions is one of my favorite parts of the night sky. You can see it in the top right of the image," photographer Jakob Sahner said in the statement.

Cygnus, which translates to "the swan" in Latin, is a northern constellation that sits above the Milky Way.

Related: The Milky Way will be visible without a telescope this summer. Here are the key nights to watch for.

 Arctic Dragon — Carina Letelier Baeza 

Carina Letelier Baeza captured the aurora borealis forming the shape of a dragon. Its tail descends into the horizon, and bright green hues take the shape of wings that tower over the rock pyramids of the Arctic Henge in Iceland.

 Serpentine — Paul Haworth 

Paul Haworth created this entrancing image of radial stars above the ruins of an old jetty and cracked mudflats at Snettisham beach in Norfolk, U.K.

"I named this image 'Serpentine' as I love the curved channel in the mudflat, mirroring the trailing stars, and the wonderful scaly texture of the mud cracks," Haworth said in the statement.

The Galaxy Devourer — ShaRa (Shared Remote Astrophotography) Team 

The interstellar clouds of CG 4 (Cometary Globule 4) form a monstrous shape as if ready to devour the cosmos, in this picture taken by a team of astrophotographers known as ShaRA (Shared Remote Astrophotography).

The peculiar formation of gas clouds and dust is classed as a "cometary globule" because of its comet-like shape, and it's often referred to as "God's Hand" because of its similarity to an arm stretching across the universe. 

Along with these names, a member of the astrophotography team noticed its resemblance to two famous fictional monsters.

"Is this the cosmic sandworm of Arrakis, from 'Dune,' or the terrifying Graboid from the film 'Tremors'?" ShaRa group member Alessandro Ravagnin said in the statement.

 The Blue Details of M45: The Pleiades — Sandor Biliczki 

In this image, Sándor Biliczki captured the beauty of the Pleiades constellation. 

Also known as Messier 45 or the Seven Sisters, the Pleiades consists of thousands of stars but is known for its seven brightest stars and is located 445 light-years from Earth, according to NASA.

Due to light pollution in Budapest, Biliczki traveled to  Spain to photograph the constellation.

"The Pleiades are a popular target among astrophotographers, but there are still many tiny details to be discovered," Biliczki said in the statement.

A Cosmic Firework: the Geminid Meteor Shower — Jakob Sahner 

This panorama captures the Geminid meteor shower in front of the entire winter Milky Way in the night sky over La Palma.

Jakob Sahner said he could see three meteors per minute within his field of view during the peak of the shower.

 The Scream of a Dying Star — Yann Sainty 

Yann Sainty captured the Cygnus supernova in this haunting image, named "The Scream of a Dying Star."

The name is a reference to 'The Scream,' the famous painting by Edvard Munch, symbolising the scream that continues to echo through space after the star’s death, according to the image caption.

Sainty took advantage of the lack of light pollution and a long exposure time to capture rare details of the Cygnus Loop, such as the outer layers of the supernova remnant.

Martian Dementors  —  Leonardo Di Maggio

Leonardo Di Maggio created this eerie, abstract landscape image using a photo taken from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) — a spacecraft on a mission to find evidence of water on Mars. 

The striking surface feature, named Aganippe Fossa, is a graben — a "ditch-like groove with steep walls on either side," according to the European Space Agency (ESA). Astronomers first spotted it as early as 1930 but only officially named it in 1976, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

The graben is incomplete, with various breaks in the groove from end to end, but it is considered to be a single structure that stretches around 375 miles (600 kilometers). That is longer than the Grand Canyon, which is 277 miles (446 km) from one end to the other, according to the National Park Service. However, the structure is still significantly shorter than Mars' Valles Marineris — the largest canyon in the solar system, which runs for more than 2,500 miles (4,000 km) along the Red Planet's equator.

ESA's Mars Express orbiter captured the newly released photos on December 13, 2023. The satellite has been circling the Red Planet on an elliptical orbit for more than two decades. 

One of the most interesting things in the photo is the surrounding landscape, which varies on either side of the giant crack. To the left, the ground appears to be very uneven and contains several mounds, grooves and ridges. But to the right, the land looks smooth and is painted with "zebra-like" rocky stripes, ESA representatives said. 

This stark difference was likely caused by historic wind erosion to the right of the graben, which wore down the planet's surface in that area. However, it is unclear why the rest of the surrounding landscape was unaffected.

Related: 15 Martian objects that aren't what they seem

Aganippe Fossa is located near the base of Arsia Mons, a 12-mile-tall (20 km) extinct volcano on Mars' Tharsis plateau. This region contains two other major volcanoes, Pavonis Mons and Ascraeus Mons, and together the three dead peaks form a near-perfect line perpendicular to the planet's equator. The trio is flanked by Olympus Mons, the tallest peak in the solar system, which lies just outside of Tharsis and stands over 16 miles (25 km) above the surface — around three times taller than Mount Everest.

The scar was likely caused by a large plume of magma that pooled underneath Arsia Mons long ago, pushing the planet's crust upward and tearing apart the surface, ESA representatives wrote. 

It is currently unclear how old Aganippe Fossa is, but NASA previously estimated that the volcano stopped erupting around 50 million years ago. However, scientists recently discovered evidence of a Martian volcanic eruption as recently as 50,000 years ago, hinting that volcanic activity on the Red Planet is not as ancient as we previously thought.

Similar grabens also exist in Noctis Labyrinthus (meaning "Labyrinth of Night" in Latin) — a massive canyon around the size of Italy, which is situated between Tharsis and Valles Marineris.

The area surrounding Tharsis is one of the most geologically interesting regions on the Red Planet. The region also caught the attention of researchers earlier this year after the discoveries of a giant volcano hidden next to Noctis Labyrinthus and more than 150,000 tons of frozen water across the peaks of the three Tharsis volcanoes.  

The cosmic pyrotechnics come from the nebula L1527, which is located 460 light-years away in the constellation Taurus. 

Similar in shape to an hourglass or a butterfly's wings, the image shows a 100,000-year-old baby star roaring to life inside a gas cloud. Rotating in place, the star is consuming material around its sides while expelling it in vast jets from either pole. 

"This fiery hourglass marks the scene of a very young object in the process of becoming a star," NASA wrote in a statement. "A central protostar grows in the neck of the hourglass, accumulating material from a thin protoplanetary disk, seen edge-on as a dark line."

Related: James Webb Space Telescope captures star going supernova in a dazzling cloud of dust

Stars can take tens of millions of years to form — growing from billowing clouds of turbulent dust and gas to gently glowing protostars, before developing into gigantic orbs of fusion-powered plasma.

As stars sputter into life, they fling out material in the form of winds and jets of ionized plasma in a process known as stellar feedback.

The gas surrounding the infant star is usually dark, but the star's outflows produce shockwaves in the gas that cause it to glow. The blue-colored region shows carbon-based molecules called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons.

To capture the image, NASA used the James Webb Space Telescope's powerful Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI).

The JWST also imaged the protostar in the near-infrared spectrum, its outflows appearing in the orangey hues of a spectacular cosmic sunset.

Using its Jovian Infrared Auroral Mapper (JIRAM) instrument, a project by the Italian Space Agency originally used to peer beneath Jupiter's thick clouds, Juno has captured infrared images of these lakes peppered across Io's surface, which show hot rings of lava surrounding a cooler crust. In the images, the rings are bright white with a thermal signature between 450 and 1,350 degrees Fahrenheit (232 and 732 degrees Celsius). The rest of the lake is much cooler, measuring at some minus 45 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 43 degrees Celsius). 

"We now have an idea of what is the most frequent type of volcanism on Io: enormous lakes of lava where magma goes up and down," Alessandro Mura, a Juno co-investigator from the National Institute for Astrophysics in Rome, said in a statement. "The lava crust is forced to break against the walls of the lake, forming the typical lava ring seen in Hawaiian lava lakes."

The leading hypothesis is that magma undergoes upwelling in these lava lakes, causing the lakes to rise and fall. When the crust touches the lake's walls — which can be hundreds of meters tall — the friction causes it to break, exposing the lava along the edge of the lake.

RELATED: NASA reveals 'glass-smooth lake of cooling lava' on surface of Jupiter's moon Io

A secondary hypothesis suggests that magma wells up in the middle of the lake, pushing the crust outward until it sinks along the edge of the lake, again exposing the lava and forming those lava rings.

Researchers still have much to study on Io, particularly when it comes to Juno's infrared imagery. "We are just starting to wade into the JIRAM results from the close flybys of Io in December 2023 and February 2024," Scott Bolton, principal investigator for Juno at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, said in the statement. "Combining these new results with Juno’s longer-term campaign to monitor and map the volcanoes on Io’s never-before-seen north and south poles, JIRAM is turning out to be one of the most valuable tools to learn how this tortured world works."

Originally posted on Space.com.

Records show that around every thousand years Earth gets hit by an extreme solar particle event, which could cause severe damage to the ozone layer and increase levels of ultraviolet (UV) radiation at the surface.

We analysed what happens during such an extreme event in a paper published Monday (July 1). We also show that at times when Earth's magnetic field is weak, these events could have a dramatic effect on life across the planet.

RELATED: 'We'll be studying this event for years': Recent auroras may have been the strongest in 500 years, NASA says

Earth’s critical magnetic shield

Earth's magnetic field provides a crucial protective cocoon for life, deflecting electrically charged radiation from the sun. In the normal state, it functions like a gigantic bar magnet with field lines rising from one pole, looping around, and plunging back down at the other pole, in a pattern sometimes described as an "inverted grapefruit." The vertical orientation at the poles allows some ionising cosmic radiation to penetrate down as far as the upper atmosphere, where it interacts with gas molecules to create the glow we know as the aurora.

However, the field changes a great deal over time. In the past century, the north magnetic pole has wandered across northern Canada at a speed of around 40 kilometres per year, and the field has weakened by more than 6%. Geological records show there have been periods of centuries or millennia when the geomagnetic field has been very weak or even entirely absent.

We can see what would happen without Earth's magnetic field by looking at Mars, which lost its global magnetic field in the ancient past, and most of its atmosphere as a result. In May, not long after the aurora, a strong solar particle event hit Mars. It disrupted the operation of the Mars Odyssey spacecraft, and caused radiation levels at the surface of Mars about 30 times higher than what you would receive during a chest X-ray.

The power of protons

The sun's outer atmosphere emits a constant fluctuating stream of electrons and protons known as the "solar wind." However, the sun's surface also sporadically emits bursts of energy, mostly protons, in solar particle events — which are often associated with solar flares.

Protons are much heavier than electrons and carry more energy so they reach lower altitudes in Earth's atmosphere, exciting gas molecules in the air. However, these excited molecules emit only X-rays, which are invisible to the naked eye.

Hundreds of weak solar particle events occur every solar cycle (roughly 11 years) but scientists have found traces of much stronger events throughout Earth's history. Some of the most extreme were thousands of times stronger than anything recorded with modern instruments.

Extreme solar particle events

These extreme solar particle events occur roughly every few millennia. The most recent one happened around 993 AD, and was used to show that Viking buildings in Canada used timber cut in 1021 AD.

Less ozone, more radiation

Beyond their immediate effect, solar particle events can also kickstart a chain of chemical reactions in the upper atmosphere that can deplete ozone. Ozone absorbs harmful solar UV radiation, which can damage eyesight and also DNA (increasing the risk of skin cancer), as well as impacting the climate.

In our new study, we used large computer models of global atmospheric chemistry to examine the impacts of an extreme solar particle event.

We found such an event could deplete ozone levels for a year or so, raising UV levels at the surface and increasing DNA damage. But if a solar proton event arrived during a period when Earth's magnetic field was very weak then ozone damage would last six years, increasing UV levels by 25% and boosting the rate of solar-induced DNA damage by up to 50%.

Particle blasts from the past

How likely is this deadly combination of weak magnetic field and extreme solar proton events? Given how often each of them occurs, it appears likely they happen together relatively often.

In fact, this combination of events may explain several mysterious occurrences in Earth's past.

The most recent period of weak magnetic field — including a temporary switch in north and south poles — began 42,000 years ago and lasted about 1,000 years. Several major evolutionary events occurred around this time, such as the disappearance of the last Neanderthals in Europe and the extinctions of marsupial megafauna including giant wombats and kangaroos in Australia.

An even bigger evolutionary event has also been linked to Earth's geomagnetic field. The origin of multicellular animals at the end of the Ediacaran period (from 565 million years ago), recorded in fossils in South Australia's Flinders Ranges, occurred after a 26-million-year period of weak or absent magnetic field.

Similarly, the rapid evolution of diverse groups of animals in the Cambrian Explosion (around 539 million years ago) has also been related to geomagnetism and high UV levels. The simultaneous evolution of eyes and hard body shells in multiple unrelated groups has been described as the best means to both detect and avoid the harmful incoming UV rays, in a "flight from light."

We are still only starting to explore the role of solar activity and Earth's magnetic field in the history of life.

This edited article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

A warp drive is a hypothetical device that enables an object to travel faster than light. In theory, the device creates an invisible sphere around an object, known as a warp bubble, that contracts the space-time in front of it while expanding the space-time behind it. This essentially moves the universe around the object, enabling it to get from point A to B faster than light.

The warp drive concept was first theorized in science fiction books in the 1940s and 1950s but was popularized from the 1960s onwards thanks to the Star Trek franchise. 

In 1994, theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre proposed the first real-world version of the device, known as an Alcubierre drive. However, while the physics of Alcubierre's concept checks out, it requires the use of large amounts of "negative energy" — energy with a value below zero — which we currently have no idea how to create. This is in addition to other issues, like creating closed space-time loops that violate causality or being able to control a warp bubble once it's formed. However, that doesn't mean we won't eventually figure it all out. 

"Some bright soul is going to have a new idea, something quite different from our current understanding of physics," Don Lincoln, a physicist at Fermilab in Illinois, wrote in a 2023 article on the subject. "Then, maybe — just maybe — we will be able to boldly go where no one has gone before."

And while warp drives are a far cry from our current capabilities, that doesn't mean that some super-advanced alien civilization hasn't already come up with the answers.

Related: Sci-fi inspired tractor beams are real, and could solve a major space junk problem 

In the new paper, uploaded June 4 to the preprint server arXiv, researchers argued that we could spot warp drives by looking for specific ripples in space-time, known as gravitational waves, given off by warp bubbles. (This paper has not yet been peer-reviewed.)

"Any matter moving around in an irregular way can potentially create gravitational waves," study co-author Katy Clough, a theoretical physicist at Queen Mary University of London, told Live Science in an email. "If you run around in a circle with a friend, you will create gravitational waves too, they are just very small."

Objects traveling at warp speed would not produce any gravitational waves as they zip across the galaxy. However, the creation and subsequent destruction of warp bubbles at the start and end of a journey would produce gravitational waves — especially during the latter phase, which researchers have dubbed a "containment failure."

"The collapse of the warp bubble is quite messy, with the exotic matter that was contained in the wall of the bubble sloshing around and the curvature of space-time that was in the bubble wall also dispersing," Clough said. This would likely create a "strong gravitational wave event," with a specific wavelength, she added.

Astronomers can already spot gravitational waves thanks to state-of-the-art observatories like the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO), which is helping scientists tackle some of the biggest questions about phenomena such as wobbling dark matter and black hole collisions. However, warp drives would produce very different gravitational waves to these, which means observatories like LIGO are not fine-tuned to look for them.

To spot warp drives, scientists would have to spend time scouring the cosmos for gravitational waves in different wavelengths without knowing whether there is even anything to find — which could be a massive waste of time and money. 

"Whether we see signals is something we can't know until we look," Clough said. "Even though I am skeptical about the likelihood of seeing anything, I do think it is sufficiently interesting to be worth a try."

A satellite galaxy is a clump of stars, either in a circular blob or a halo-like shape, that orbit the Milky Way independently from the rest of the galaxy. Our galaxy's largest-known satellite is the Large Magellanic Cloud, which holds around 30 billion stars and can be viewed with the naked eye. Other known satellites only contain a few hundred thousand or a couple of million stars.

A 2020 census of known satellite galaxies suggests scientists have found a maximum of around 60 satellite galaxies orbiting the Milky Way. However, there is some uncertainty about the true number of satellite galaxies, largely because scientists disagree over how large these star clusters should be and how far they should lie from the galactic center to be counted as true satellites, according to NASA. 

Related: The Milky Way will be visible without a telescope this summer. Here are the key nights to watch for.

But  most astronomers agree that there should be many more, currently unknown, satellite galaxies out there. Based on our current understanding of dark matter — which doesn't react with light but interacts gravitationally with visible matter and makes up around 27% of the universe's mass — researchers have long assumed that the Milky Way should have around 220 satellite galaxies. Our inability to spot many more of these is often referred to as the "missing satellites problem." 

In a new study, published June 8 in the journal Publications of the Astronomical Society of Japan, researchers discovered two new potential satellite galaxies, Sextans II and Virgo III. The satellites are located around 411,000 and 492,000 light-years from Earth respectively and are likely both ultra-compact dwarf galaxies (UCDs) — collections of old stars clumped tightly together, making them brighter than other satellite galaxies. 

However, the discoveries do not help solve the missing satellites problem. Instead, the location and orientation of these potential satellites hints that there are even more satellite galaxies than scientists initially realized. This raises a new problem, which researchers have dubbed the "too many satellites problem." 

Related: Does the Milky Way orbit anything?

Researchers discovered the UCDs using the Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC) attached to Japan's Subaru Telescope at Mauna Kea Observatories in Hawaii. This instrument has spent the last few years searching a region of space around 33 light-years across. Based on the estimated 220 satellite galaxies postulated by the missing satellites problem, an area of this size should have around four satellite galaxies on average, Universe Today recently reported.

However, the latest discoveries bring the total number of satellites found by HSC in this area to nine. If this concentration of satellites is consistent around the Milky Way, it would mean that there could be at least 500 satellite galaxies around the Milky Way, researchers wrote in a statement. 

In the past, scientists have proposed multiple solutions to the missing satellites problem, including that some satellite galaxies are hiding behind larger satellites and that others are so diffuse they are almost impossible to detect with current technology. However, these factors are unlikely to be able to explain an overabundance of stars, leaving scientists with no real way to explain the new results.

"The next step is to use a more powerful telescope that captures a wider view of the sky," study co-author Masahi Chiba, an astronomer at Tohoku University in Japan, said in the statement. This should help clarify how common satellite galaxies really are, he added.

One such telescope is the upcoming Vera C. Rubin Observatory — a state-of-the-art facility equipped with the world's largest digital camera, which is expected to come online in 2025, Chiba said. "I hope that many new satellite galaxies will be discovered."

Sadly, most people in North America and Europe have no chance of seeing the Milky Way unless they travel to a dark-sky location. It's also necessary to avoid strong moonlight, which makes only about 10 days per month in the summer months suitable for easily seeing the Milky Way after dark. So it's not surprising that an estimated 80% of North Americans have never seen the Milky Way.

According to Capture The Atlas, it's possible to see the Milky Way from the Northern Hemisphere from March to September. From the Southern Hemisphere, that window expands by about a month on each side.

Your latitude on Earth makes a difference, but generally, the Milky Way is visible in the early morning from March to June and in the evening from July to early October. For example, if you want to see the Milky Way in March, you'll have to be up at 4 a.m. By September, it's an after-sunset event.

There are also other factors to consider. You need moonless night skies, prioritizing the 10 nights around the new moon — when the moon is not in the night sky — specifically from the last quarter moon to three nights after the new moon (when a crescent moon will set soon after dark).

That means these dates are the best times to see the Milky Way this summer and fall:

• June 28 - July 8
• July 28 - Aug. 7
• Aug. 26 - Sept. 6
• Sept. 24 - Oct. 5

Sunset and sunrise times, particularly in July and August, should also be considered, as they restrict the hours of darkness. This is when you're most likely to see the Milky Way right after sunset. However, you'll need total darkness to get a good view. 

Don't forget to let your eyes adapt to the dark for at least 20 minutes before your skywatching session. That means not looking at a smartphone or any other bright, white light source after the sun sets. The best way to find a dark spot is to use DarkSky's Find a Dark Sky Place or the Dark Site Finder or consult a light pollution map.

With suitably dark skies, you can see the band of the Milky Way with the naked eye — but a good small telescope or a pair of stargazing binoculars can help you zoom in on objects of interest and take advantage of some of 2024's best stargazing opportunities yet to come.

The farther south you are, the deeper into the Milky Way you will see. For example, the constellation Sagittarius — home to the galaxy's bright central black hole — is low on the southern horizon as seen from New York state at 41 degrees north. From Miami, at 26 degrees north, Sagittarius will appear 15 degrees higher in the sky. But that only applies to the constellation's maximum height, since Sagittarius will appear to rise (in the southeast) as the night progresses and then sink.

Hydrothermal vents are both a source of chemical energy and heat, and are one of the possible locations for the origin of life on Earth. Planetary scientists have theorized that hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the oceans beneath the ice on moons of Jupiter like Europa and Ganymede, and the Saturn satellite Enceladus, could help warm those oceans and kickstart the biochemistry of life.

The problem is that modeling of these vents has focused on the extremely high-temperature ones — the "black smokers" powered by volcanic activity. While these super-hot vents can siphon energy from Earth's hot core, the icy moons do not have hot cores, meaning there's been a question mark over whether such vents could survive long enough to create the long-term conditions for life. 

However, super-hot vents are not the dominant form of venting in Earth's oceans. On Earth, a much larger volume of water passes through lower-temperature vents.

"The flow of water through low-temperature venting is equivalent, in terms of the amount of water being discharged, to all the rivers and streams on Earth, and is responsible for about a quarter of Earth's heat loss," said Andrew Fisher of the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), in a statement. "The entire volume of the ocean is pumped in and out of the seafloor about every half-million years."

Fisher led a team from UCSC that modeled the proliferation of such low-temperature vents on Europa and Enceladus. Given the absence of data about the oceans on these moons, Fisher's team based their simulations on the circulation system in the northwestern Pacific Ocean, specifically the eastern flank of the Juan de Fuca Ridge, where cool seawater sinks and flows down into the rock in the seabed via extinct volcanic cavities called seamounts. The water travels through the rock for about 30 miles (50 kilometers), being heated in the process, before rising up through another seamount. 

"The water gathers heat as it flows and comes out warmer than when it flowed in, and with very different chemistry," said study team member Kristin Dickerson, also of UCSC.

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Applying this circulation model to Europa and Enceladus, the researchers altered properties such as gravity, temperature, the composition of the bedrock and how deep the water circulates, to better fit potential conditions on the ocean moons. 

They found that not only could moderately warm vents be maintained over a wide range of conditions on these moons, but that the low gravity allowed for warmer temperatures emanating from the vents. In addition, the low efficiency of heat extraction from the core of the moons (which are thought to be pretty cool in the first place) in the low gravity would allow such moderate- to low-temperature vents to be maintained for possibly billions of years.

"This study suggests that low-temperature — not too hot for life — hydrothermal systems could have been sustained on ocean worlds beyond Earth over timescales comparable to that required for life to take hold on Earth," said Fisher.

The research was published on June 24 in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets.

Originally posted on Space.com.