New Scientist Australian Edition 23-Jul-22

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HOW hot do you want it? That’s the question facing world leaders this week as heat records were broken, forests burned, economies were disrupted and people died. The lethal heat should act as a wake-up call for politicians about the urgency of acting on carbon emissions, not least leaders in the UK, which provisionally hit a previously unthinkable 40.3°C as New Scientist went to press (see page 7). You might imagine the response would be an emergency political mobilisation like the one triggered by the covid-19 pandemic. Yet there was no breakthrough announcement from 40 countries at the annual Petersberg Climate Dialogue held in Berlin this week. Climate action has barely been mentioned by politicians competing to be the new leader of the Conservative party and next UK prime minister,…

THE maximum temperature in the UK exceeded 40°C for the first time ever as New Scientist went to press, during a heatwave that hit much of the country, closing schools and disrupting transport. The provisional temperature reported at London Heathrow at 12.50pm on 19 July was 40.2°C, followed by 40.3°C at Coningsby, Lincolnshire. Heat records normally go up in small increments, but this is 1.5°C more than the record before this heatwave, of 38.7°C from 2019. Climate scientists say that 40°C would be extremely unlikely in the UK without climate change, and that heatwaves have been made more likely and more intense by global warming. The UK also recorded its provisional hottest ever overnight temperature between Monday and Tuesday, at 25.8°C in London. Europe is sweltering in extreme heat, triggering…

IT HAS been just over a week since we got our first glimpse of the power of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), with a sneak peek unveiled by US president Joe Biden on 11 July ahead of a presentation from NASA and its partners on 12 July. Despite technical hitches – streaming video around the world is somehow more difficult than capturing starlight from across the universe, it seems – astronomers took visible glee in being able to share their new views of the cosmos with everyone else. “JWST has produced images worthy of the history books in just six months since it launched” The reaction to these images has almost universally been one of wonder and excitement. They are all the more impressive for how quickly JWST has…

One of the brightest nebulae in the sky, the Carina Nebula is a huge cloud of gas and nascent stars. It is about 7600 light years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Carina. The top part of the image is full of huge, hot stars, shining onto the stellar nursery at the bottom of the picture. “Today, for the first time, we’re seeing brand new stars that were completely hidden from our view,” said JWST scientist Amber Straughn at the 12 July release of the telescope’s first images. “We see examples of bubbles and cavities and jets that are being blown out by these newborn stars. We even see some galaxies sort of lurking in the background up here. We see examples of structures that honestly we don’t even…

THE spectrum of light from an inconspicuous red galaxy in JWST’s “deep field” image (see page 13) has set astronomers’ hearts aflutter. Produced by the telescope’s NIRSpec instrument, which uses tiny windows to isolate and analyse the light from objects within the telescope’s field of view, it is an unprecedented insight into a galaxy present in the early universe. Such had been the secrecy around the capture and release of the first JWST observations that some of the NIRSpec team weren’t even aware of the existence of the spectrum until the public announcement on 12 July. But there was one feature of the data that NIRSpec team member Andrew Bunker, at the University of Oxford, saw was “a real step [forward] within minutes of the data being released”. Among the…