Science
Maori legend of man-eating bird is true
Creature that features in New Zealand folklore really existed, scientists say
A Maori legend about a giant, man-eating bird has been confirmed by scientists. Te Hokioi was a huge black-and-white predator with a red crest and yellow-green tinged wingtips, in an account given to Sir George Gray, an early governor of New Zealand. It was said to be named after its cry and to have “raced the hawk to the heavens”. Scientists now think the stories handed down by word of mouth and depicted in rock drawings refer to Haast’s eagle, a raptor that became extinct just 500 years ago, say the authors of a study in The Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.
‘The Eagle has landed’: A space geek remembers the moon shot
As a 10-year-old ’space geek’, Paul Rodgers was glued to the television when Neil Armstrong uttered the immortal words, ‘The Eagle has landed.’ Forty years on, he looks back at mankind’s giant leap – and the Cold War politics that turned the space race into a mad dash
The first sign of trouble came when the Eagle was five minutes into its descent, 33,500ft above the Moon’s surface. A shrill alarm rang through the cramped, seatless cabin in which two astronauts stood facing the stars. An error message flashed up on their primitive computer’s tiny read-out: “1202″. Neither Neil Armstrong nor Buzz Aldrin knew what it meant. It was left to Steve Bales, a 26-year-old technician at Mission Control in Houston to decide they should keep going. The error, he was fairly sure, would fix itself, and he repeatedly called “Go!” as the alarm sounded four more times. Keep reading this article »
MRI boost gives view into lungs
British scientists have boosted the power of an MRI scanner 1,000,000%, giving doctors a window into living, breathing lungs for the first time. The technique, called hyperpolarisation, makes the signal detected by a standard magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner so strong it reveals details that could only be seen previously by slicing the patient open. Keep reading this article »
Bubble reveals secrets of how stars form
British astronomers have looked deep inside a distant galaxy for the first time to unravel the mystery of how stars are made.
Their observations revealed a gigantic magnetic pump funnelling cosmic dust into the centre of the galaxy, where it piles up until it forms a ball dense enough to spark a nuclear chain reaction. Jane Greaves, the leader of the four-member team, said it was like having an ultrasound scan that shows how stars are formed in a galactic womb.
The galaxy Dr Greaves studied, M82, is 11 million light years from Earth in the constellation Ursa Major, the Plough. It can be seen from Britain with powerful binoculars or a good amateur telescope.
M82 is going through a phase known as a “starburst”, producing 50 times as many new suns as our own Milky Way does. Dr Karen Wills, a researcher at the University of Sheffield, said: “It seems likely that all galaxies, including our own, have gone through a starburst phase at some point. So learning about M82 allows us to find out about the way in which galaxies have evolved from the early Universe to the present day.”
Until now, astronomers have been unable to see what goes on in other galaxies because their view is blocked by cosmic dust. But Dr Greaves and her team used the faint heat radiation from the dust itself to chart M82’s inner workings.
Their computer-enhanced photographs show a huge magnetic bubble, 3,000 light years (18,000 billion miles) across in the centre of the galaxy. Its structure is revealed by the glowing dust motes that have been pulled on to its force lines, like iron filings around a bar magnet.
The bubble is strikingly different from those seen in normal galaxies; spirals like the Milky Way have well-ordered, flat magnetic fields, or plumes of magnetic force lines spouting from their poles. “We were really surprised to see the huge bubble,” said Dr Greaves. “This is a new feature of galaxies that we didn’t know about before and could show how magnetic fields help shape the evolution of starburst regions.”
Exactly how the magnetic field was formed is still not known, but a near-collision with another galaxy, M81, is thought to have been responsible. Although galaxies can pass through each other without any individual stars hitting each other, even a close call involves massive tidal forces that can stir up the dust to set off a starburst.
Dr Greaves’ team at the James Clerk Maxwell telescope in Hawaii used a sub-millimetre camera called Scuba – which takes pictures in wavelengths between infrared and microwave – and a polarimeter, which works on the same principle as polarised sunglasses.
At present, the camera is not sensitive enough to pick out individual stars being formed, but a new camera being developed by the Royal Observatory Edinburgh will be 10 times as accurate, allowing Dr Greaves to see concentrations of dust just a few light years across.
