Like a quantum version of a whirling top, protons have angular momentum, known as spin. But the source of the subatomic particles’ spin has confounded physicists. Now scientists have confirmed that some of that spin comes from a frothing sea of particles known as quarks and their antimatter partners, antiquarks, found inside the proton.

Surprisingly, a less common type of antiquark contributes more to a proton’s spin than a more plentiful variety, scientists with the STAR experiment report March 14 in Physical Review D.
Quarks come in an assortment of types, the most common of which are called up quarks and down quarks. Protons are made up of three main quarks: two up quarks and one down quark. But protons also have a “sea,” or an entourage of transient quarks and antiquarks of different types, including up, down and other varieties (SN: 4/29/17, p. 22).

Previous measurements suggested that the spins of the quarks within this sea contribute to a proton’s overall spin. The new result — made by slamming protons together at a particle accelerator called the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, or RHIC — clinches that idea, says physicist Elke-Caroline Aschenauer of Brookhaven National Lab in Upton, N.Y., where the RHIC is located.

A proton’s sea contains more down antiquarks than up antiquarks. But, counterintuitively, more of the proton’s spin comes from up than down antiquarks, the researchers found. In fact, the down antiquarks actually spin in the opposite direction, slightly subtracting from the proton’s total spin.

“Spin has surprises. Everybody thought it’s simple … and it turns out it’s much more complicated,” Aschenauer says.
Editor’s note: This story was updated April 3, 2019, to correct the subheadline to say that up antiquarks (not up quarks) add more angular momentum than do down antiquarks (not down quarks).

Life after shingles
In “With its burning grip, shingles can do lasting damage” (SN: 3/2/19, p. 22), Aimee Cunningham described the experience of Nora Fox, a woman whose bout with shingles nearly 15 years ago left her with a painful condition called postherpetic neuralgia. Fox hadn’t found any reliable treatments, Cunningham reported.

Fox praised Science News for our portrayal of shingles-related pain. “The cover is excellent and looks just like I felt,” she wrote.

As the story went to press, Fox had a surgery during which doctors placed electrodes under the skin near sites of pain. A device lets Fox control when stimulation is delivered to those areas. But the treatment, called peripheral nerve stimulation, may not work for all patients with postherpetic neuralgia. There are reports in scientific journals of individual patients experiencing relief from their neuropathic pain after the procedure, Cunningham says.
Fox’s husband, Denver C. Fox, sent Science News an update on her pain since the procedure: “There [has] been a significant change to the unbearable pain my wife has endured EVERY afternoon and evening for 14 years, despite trying every possible treatment the MDs knew of.” Shortly after the procedure, “her pain is greatly and markedly diminished.”
Stone Age throwback
Tests with replicas of a 300,000-year-old wooden spear suggest that Neandertals could have hunted from a distance, Bruce Bower reported in “Why modern javelin throwers hurled Neandertal spears at hay bales” (SN: 3/2/19, p. 14).

Reader Brenda Gray suggested that Neandertals’ spears could have been used for fighting instead of hunting.

The ancient spear found in Germany, on which the spear replicas were based, came from sediment that also contained stone tools and thousands of animal bones displaying marks made by stone tools, Bower says. “Such evidence indicates that the spears were used as hunting weapons. Neandertals could have used wooden spears in different ways, but there is no evidence that I know of for Neandertals using spears in warfare,” he says.

Young and restless
Earth’s inner core began hardening sometime after 565 million years ago, Carolyn Gramling reported in “Earth’s core may have hardened just in time to save its magnetic field” (SN: 3/2/19, p. 13). The core may have solidified just in time to strengthen the planet’s magnetic field, saving it from collapse.

Reader John Bunch thought that the timing of the inner core’s solidification “lines up nicely” with the Cambrian explosion, when life rapidly diversified about 542 million years ago. “It leads me to wonder if there may be some cause and effect or some other relationship between the two that’s going on here.”

That extremely low-intensity magnetic field actually roughly lines up with the Avalon explosion, an earlier proliferation of new life forms called the Ediacaran biota, between about 575 million and 542 million years ago, Gramling says. It’s an intriguing coincidence that researchers noted.

Earth’s magnetic field helps protect the planet from radiation. So a weak magnetic field might somehow be linked with the Avalon explosion. One idea is that increased radiation reaching Earth’s surface hundreds of millions of years ago might have increased organisms’ mutation rates, Gramling says. But there just isn’t any evidence to support a causal link at the moment.

A week after two large earthquakes rattled southern California, scientists are scrambling to understand the sequence of events that led to the temblors and what it might tell us about future quakes.

A magnitude 6.4 quake struck July 4 near Ridgecrest — about 194 kilometers northeast of Los Angeles — followed by a magnitude 7.1 quake in the same region on July 5. Both quakes occurred not along the famous San Andreas Fault but in a region of crisscrossing faults in the state’s high desert area, known as the Eastern California Shear Zone.

The San Andreas Fault system, which stretches nearly 1,300 kilometers, generally takes center stage when it comes to California’s earthquake activity. That’s where, as the Pacific tectonic plate and the North American tectonic plate slowly grind past each other, sections of ground can lock together for a time, slowly building up strain until they suddenly release, producing powerful quakes.

For the last few tens of millions of years, the San Andreas has been the primary origin of massive earthquakes in the region. Now overdue for a massive earthquake, based on historical precedent, many people fear it’s only a matter of time before the “Big One” strikes.
But as the July 4 and July 5 quakes — and their many aftershocks — show, the San Andreas Fault system isn’t the only source of concern. The state is riddled with faults, says geophysicist Susan Hough of the U.S. Geological Survey in Pasadena, Calif. That’s because almost all of California is part of the general boundary between the plates. The Eastern California Shear Zone alone has been the source of several large quakes in the last few decades, including the magnitude 7.1 Hector Mine quake in 1999, the magnitude 6.7 Northridge quake in 1994 and the magnitude 7.3 Landers quake in 1992 (SN Online: 8/29/18).

Here are three questions scientists are trying to answer in the wake of the most recent quakes.

Which faults ruptured, and how?
The quakes appear to have occurred along previously unmapped faults within a part of the Eastern California Shear Zone known as the Little Lake Fault Zone, a broad bunch of cracks difficult to map, Hough says. “It’s not like the San Andreas, where you can go out and put your hand on a single fault,” she says. And, she adds, the zone also lies within a U.S. Navy base that isn’t generally accessible to geologists for mapping.

But preliminary data do offer some clues. The data suggest that the first rupture may actually have been a twofer: Instead of one fault rupturing, two connected faults, called conjugate faults, may have ruptured nearly simultaneously, producing the initial magnitude 6.4 quake.

It’s possible that the first quake didn’t fully release the strain on that fault, but the second, larger quake did. “My guess is that they will turn out to be complementary,” Hough says.

The jury is still out, though, says Wendy Bohon, a geologist at the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology in Washington, D.C. “What parts of the fault broke, and whether a part of the fault broke twice … I’m waiting to see what the scientific consensus is on that.”
And whether a simultaneous rupture of a conjugate fault is surprising, or may actually be common, isn’t yet clear, she says. “In nature, we see a lot of conjugate fault pairs. I don’t think they normally rupture at the same time — or maybe they do, and we haven’t had enough data to see that.”

Is the center of tectonic action moving away from the San Andreas Fault?
GPS data have revealed exactly how the ground is shifting in California as the giant tectonic plates slide past one another. The San Andreas Fault system bears the brunt of the strain, about 70 percent, those data show. But the Eastern California Shear Zone bears the other 30 percent. And the large quakes witnessed in that region over the last few decades raise a tantalizing possibility, Hough says: We may be witnessing the birth pangs of a new boundary.

“The plate boundary system has been evolving for a long time already,” Hough says. For the last 30 million years or so, the San Andreas Fault system has been the primary locus of action. But just north of Santa Barbara lies the “big bend,” a kink that separates the northern from the southern portion of the fault system. Where the fault bends, the Pacific and North American plates aren’t sliding sideways past one another but colliding.

“The plates are trying to move, but the San Andreas is actually not well aligned with that motion,” she says. But the Eastern California Shear Zone is. And, Hough says, there’s some speculation that it’s a new plate boundary in the making. “But it would happen over millions of years,” she adds. “It’s not going to be in anyone’s lifetime.”

Will these quakes trigger the Big One on the San Andreas?
Such large quakes inevitably raise these fears. Historically, the San Andreas Fault system has produced a massive quake about every 150 years. But “for whatever reason, it has been pretty quiet in the San Andreas since 1906,” when an estimated magnitude 7.9 quake along the northern portion of the fault devastated San Francisco, Hough says. And the southern portion of San Andreas is even more overdue for a massive quake; its last major event was the estimated magnitude 7.9 Fort Tejon quake in 1857, she says.

The recent quakes aren’t likely to change that situation. Subsurface shifting from a large earthquake can affect strain on nearby faults. But it’s unlikely that the quakes either relieved stress or will ultimately trigger another earthquake along the San Andreas Fault system, essentially because they were too far away, Hough says. “The disruption [from one earthquake] of other faults decreases really quickly with distance,” she says (SN Online: 3/28/11).

Some preliminary data do suggest that the magnitude 7.1 earthquake produced some slippage, also known as creep, along at least one shallow fault in the southern part of the San Andreas system. But such slow, shallow slips don’t produce earthquakes, Hough says.

However, the quakes could have more significantly perturbed much closer faults, such as the Garlock Fault, which runs roughly west to east along the northern edge of the Mojave Desert. That’s not unprecedented: The 1992 Landers quake may have triggered a magnitude 5.7 quake two weeks later along the Garlock Fault.

“Generations of graduate students are going to be studying these events — the geometry of the faults, how the ground moved,” even how the visible evidence of the rupture, scarring the land surface, erodes over time and obscures its traces, Bohon says.

At the moment, scientists are eagerly trading ideas on social media sites. “It’s the equivalent of listening in on scientists shouting down the hallway: ‘Here’s my data — what do you have?’ ” she says. Those preliminary ideas and explanations will almost certainly evolve as more information comes in, she adds. “It’s early days yet.”

The James Webb Space Telescope’s first peek at the distant universe unveiled galaxies that appear too big to exist.

Six galaxies that formed in the universe’s first 700 million years seem to be up to 100 times more massive than standard cosmological theories predict, astronomer Ivo Labbé and colleagues report February 22 in Nature. “Adding up the stars in those galaxies, it would exceed the total amount of mass available in the universe at that time,” says Labbé, of the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia. “So you know that something is afoot.”
The telescope, also called JWST, released its first view of the early cosmos in July 2022 (SN: 7/11/22). Within days, Labbé and his colleagues had spotted about a dozen objects that looked particularly bright and red, a sign that they could be massive and far away.

“They stand out immediately, you see them as soon as you look at these images,” says astrophysicist Erica Nelson of the University of Colorado Boulder.

Measuring the amount of light each object emits in various wavelengths can give astronomers an idea of how far away each galaxy is, and how many stars it must have to emit all that light. Six of the objects that Nelson, Labbé and colleagues identified look like their light comes from no later than about 700 million years after the Big Bang. Those galaxies appear to hold up to 10 billion times the mass of our sun in stars. One of them might contain the mass of 100 billion suns.

“You shouldn’t have had time to make things that have as many stars as the Milky Way that fast,” Nelson says. Our galaxy contains about 60 billion suns’ worth of stars — and it’s had more than 13 billion years to grow them. “It’s just crazy that these things seem to exist.”

In the standard theories of cosmology, matter in the universe clumped together slowly, with small structures gradually merging to form larger ones. “If there are all these massive galaxies at early times, that’s just not happening,” Nelson says.

One possible explanation is that there’s another, unknown way to form galaxies, Labbé says. “It seems like there’s a channel that’s a fast track, and the fast track creates monsters.”

But it could also be that some of these galaxies host supermassive black holes in their cores, says astronomer Emma Curtis-Lake of the University of Hertfordshire in England, who was not part of the new study. What looks like starlight could instead be light from the gas and dust those black holes are devouring. JWST has already seen a candidate for an active supermassive black hole even earlier in the universe’s history than these galaxies are, she says, so it’s not impossible.
Finding a lot of supermassive black holes at such an early era would also be challenging to explain (SN: 3/16/18). But it wouldn’t require rewriting the standard model of cosmology the way extra-massive galaxies would.

“The formation and growth of black holes at these early times is really not well understood,” she says. “There’s not a tension with cosmology there, just new physics to be understood of how they can form and grow, and we just never had the data before.”

To know for sure what these distant objects are, Curtis-Lake says, astronomers need to confirm the galaxies’ distances and masses using spectra, more precise measurements of the galaxies’ light across many wavelengths (SN: 12/16/22).

JWST has taken spectra for a few of these galaxies already, and more should be coming, Labbé says. “With luck, a year from now, we’ll know a lot more.”

Blurry vision sounds like a reason to visit an eye doctor. But visual fuzziness might actually help some animals catch dinner. Out-of-focus areas created by vertically elongated pupils help predators triangulate the distance to objects, scientists propose August 7 in Science Advances. Prey animals may gain different visual advantages from pupil shapes that provide panoramic views.

Cats, foxes and many other predators that ambush prey have vertical pupils. Through these narrow slits, vertical objects appear sharp over great distances, the scientists report. Horizontal shapes are clear over a more limited distance, quickly going out of focus as an object moves farther away. This rapidly blurring vision should make it easy to detect even subtle changes in distance, the researchers say. That makes blur a good estimate of distance, says study author Martin Banks, a vision scientist at the University of California, Berkeley. A stalking predator might rely upon an object’s fuzziness to judge its location.
The benefits of this mix of visual cues make good sense, says Michael Land, a neurobiologist at the University of Sussex in Brighton, England. A predator that must pounce on its dinner needs to be able to accurately judge distances, he says.
Many herbivores, like horses and deer, have horizontal, rectangular pupils, rather than vertical slits. The authors don’t think these pupils help with depth perception. But rectangular pupils probably have their own advantages, the authors report, including better panoramic vision and shielding of potentially blinding overhead light. These benefits could help grazing prey spot – and flee from – an approaching slit-eyed hunter.
These visual benefits could explain why predators and prey evolved their pupil shapes, Banks’ team says. But vision scientist Ronald Kröger of Lund University in Sweden warns against assuming that an animal’s habits caused the evolution of a certain pupil shape. Counterexamples exist of predators without slit pupils and herbivores with them, he says. Additionally, many predators and prey animals, including most birds – which were excluded from the study’s analysis – have circular pupils.

But evolution is complex, and the new hypotheses about the advantages of pupil shape only address one aspect of the evolution of vision, Banks says. “There are multiple forces that push the eye to evolve in multiple ways.”

The photosynthesizing plankton Emiliania huxleyi has a dramatic relationship with its bacterial frenemies. These duplicitous bugs help E. huxleyi in exchange for nutrients until it becomes more convenient to murder and eat their hosts. Now, scientists have figured out how these treacherous bacteria decide to turn from friend to foe.

One species of these bacteria appears to keep tabs on health-related chemicals produced by E. huxleyi, researchers report January 24 in eLife. The bacteria maintain their friendly facade until their hosts age and weaken, striking as soon as the vulnerable algae can’t afford to keep bribing them with nutrients. The finding could help explain how massive algal blooms come to an end.
The bacteria is “first establishing what we call the ‘first handshake,’” says marine microbiologist Assaf Vardi of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel. “Then it will shift into a pathogen.”

E. huxleyi’s partnership with these bacteria, which belong to a group called Roseobacter, might be best described as a love-hate relationship. The single-celled alga can’t produce the B vitamins it needs on its own, so it offers up nutrients to lure in Roseobacter that can (SN: 7/8/16). The trade is win-win — at least until the bacteria decide they’d be better off slaying and devouring their algal hosts than sticking around in peaceful coexistence.

Sometimes called the “Jekyll-and-Hyde” trait, this kind of bacterial backstabbery shows up everywhere from animal guts to the open seas. But it wasn’t clear before how Roseobacter decide it’s the right moment to murder E. huxleyi.

Vardi’s team exposed a type of Roseobacter that lives with E. huxleyi to chemicals taken from algae that were either young and growing or old and stagnant. The team also introduced the bacteria to extra doses of a certain health-signaling algal chemical.Looking at which genes the bacteria activated in the different experiments revealed how and why they switched from friend to foe.

The bacteria kill their algal pals when exposed to high concentrations of a sulfur-containing chemical called DMSP, the researchers found. E. huxleyi leaks more and more DMSP as it ages. This eventually cues its duplicitous microbial partners to go rogue, kill their aging host, and kick their genes for nutrient-grabbing proteins and flagella — whiplike tails used to swim — into overdrive.

It’s an “eat-and-run strategy,” says Noa Barak-Gavish, a microbiologist at ETH Zurich. “You eat up whatever you can and then swim away to avoid competition … [and] to find alternative hosts.”

DMSP isn’t the only figure in this deadly chemical calculus. E. huxleyi can sate its companion’s bloodlust with a bribe of benzoate, a nutrient that Roseobacter can use but most bacteria can’t.

While it’s clearer now what drives the bacteria to kill their hosts, their murder weapon remains a mystery. Vardi says his group has some hunches to follow up on.

This kind of frenemies relationship could be a key factor in controlling the boom and bust of massive algal blooms if other phytoplankton and bacteria have a similar dynamic, says Mary Ann Moran of the University of Georgia in Athens, who was not involved in the study. Algal blooms can be toxic (SN: 8/28/18). But they also “fix” enormous amounts of carbon dioxide into biomass and are a major source of organic carbon to the ocean.
“Phytoplankton fix half of all the carbon on the planet, and probably 20 percent to 50 percent of what they fix … actually goes right to bacteria,” she says. So if this kind of relationship controls how carbon flows through the ocean, “that is something that we would really like to understand.”

Vikings brought horses and dogs to the British Isles from Scandinavia, a new study suggests.

A chemical analysis of bone fragments from a cemetery in England provides the first solid scientific evidence of animals traveling with Vikings across the North Sea, scientists report February 1 in PLOS ONE.

In the 1990s, researchers unearthed the cremated remains of a human adult and child as well as of a dog, horse and probable pig from a burial mound in a Viking cemetery in Derbyshire, England. In previous work, radiocarbon dating of femur, skull and rib fragments revealed that the inhabitants all died sometime between the eighth and 10th centuries. That date was narrowed down to the year 873, thanks to the ninth-century Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which records that a Viking army wintered near the site that year.
Where the animals came from has been a mystery. Norse raiders are known to have stolen horses from people in England around the time. And researchers have generally thought that Viking boats at the time were too small to allow for much transport of animals from Scandinavia to the British Isles. One entry in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle describes Vikings moving from France to England along with their horses in the year 892, but no physical evidence of such activity had been found before.

In the new work, Tessi Löffelmann and colleagues turned to certain forms, or isotopes, of strontium to unravel the individuals’ provenance. The element accumulates in bones over time through diet, leaving a distinct signature of where an individual has lived (SN: 4/2/19).
Strontium ratios in the child’s remains matched those of shrubs growing at the burial site, suggesting the child spent most, if not all, of its life in England. The ratios of the adult and three animals, on the other hand, differed substantially from the local fauna, the team found. That suggests the individuals hadn’t spent much time in the country before they died. Instead, their ratios were similar to ones found in the Baltic Shield region in Norway, central and northern Sweden and Finland, suggesting a Scandinavian origin.

“One of the joys of isotope analysis is that you are able to really pinpoint things that previously we could discuss endlessly,” says Marianne Moen, an archeologist at the University of Oslo who was not involved in the study. Using strontium to analyze more cremated remains, which can elude common forms of isotope analysis including carbon and nitrogen, “is the next logical chapter for understanding prehistoric mobility.”

Isotope analysis helped reveal where these individuals lived and when they died, but it couldn’t answer why the dog, horse and pig made the journey to England in the first place. That’s where historical records can help, says Löffelmann, of Durham University in England and Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Belgium.

For Löffelmann, the small sizes of early Norse ships combined with the fact that the animals and people were buried together suggest Vikings may have initially brought animals with them for companionship, not just function.

“It could have only been selected animals that made that journey,” she says. “They were important to what the person was.… They went through life together, and now they’re going through death.”

A crucial link in the life cycle of one parasitic plant may be found in a surprising place — the bellies of the descendants of an ancient line of rabbits.

Given their propensity for nibbling on gardens and darting across suburban lawns, it can be easy to forget that rabbits are wild animals. But a living reminder of their wildness can be found on two of Japan’s Ryukyu Islands, if you have the patience to look for it: the endangered Amami rabbit, a “living fossil” that looks strikingly similar to ancient Asian rabbits.
One estimate suggests there are fewer than 5,000 of the animals left in the wild. The lives of Amamis (Pentalagus furnessi) are shrouded in mystery due to their rarity, but they seem to play a surprising ecological role as seed dispersers, researchers report January 23 in Ecology.

Seed dispersal is the main point in a plant’s life cycle when it can move to a new location (SN: 11/14/22). So dispersal is crucially important for understanding how plant populations are maintained and how species will respond to climate change, says Haldre Rogers, a biologist at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, who was not involved with the study. Despite this, seed dispersal hasn’t received much attention, she says. “We don’t know what disperses the seeds of most plants in the world.”

Locals from the Ryukyu Islands were the first to notice that the “iconic yet endangered” Amami rabbit was nibbling on the fruit of another local species, the plant Balanophora yuwanensis, says Kenji Suetsugu, a biologist at Kobe University in Japan.

Rabbits generally like to eat vegetative tissue from plants, like leaves and stems, and so haven’t been thought to contribute much to spreading seeds, which are often housed in fleshy fruits.

To confirm what the locals reported, Suetsugu and graduate student Hiromu Hashiwaki set up camera traps around the island to catch the rabbits in the act. The researchers were able to record rabbits munching on Balanophora fruits 11 times, but still needed to check whether the seeds survived their trip through the bunny tummies.
So the team headed out to the subtropical islands and scooped up rabbit poop, finding Balanophora seeds inside that could still be grown. By swallowing the seeds and pooping them out elsewhere, the Amami rabbits were clearly acting as seed dispersers.

Balanophora plants are parasitic and don’t have chlorophyll, so they can’t use photosynthesis to make food of their own (SN: 3/2/17). Instead, they suck energy away from a host plant. This means where their seeds end up matters, and the Amami rabbits “may facilitate the placement of seeds near the roots of a compatible host” by pooping in underground burrows, Suetsugu says. “Thus, the rabbits likely provide a crucial link between Balanophora and its hosts” that remains to be further explored, he says.
Understanding the ecology of an endangered species like the Amami rabbit can help with conserving both it and the plants that depend on it.

An animal need not be in obvious peril for a change in its number to affect seed dispersal, with potentially negative consequences for the ecosystem. For example, “we think of robins as super common … but they’ve declined a lot in the last 50 years,” Rogers says. “Half as many robins means half as many seeds are getting moved around, even though no one’s worried about robins as a conservation issue.”

This is the first picture of an exoplanet from the James Webb Space Telescope.

“We’re actually measuring photons from the atmosphere of the planet itself,” says astronomer Sasha Hinkley of the University of Exeter in England. Seeing those particles of light, “to me, that’s very exciting.”

The planet is about seven times the mass of Jupiter and lies more than 100 times farther from its star than Earth sits from the sun, direct observations of exoplanet HIP 65426 b show. It’s also young, about 10 million or 20 million years old, compared with the more than 4-billion-year-old Earth, Hinkley and colleagues report in a study submitted August 31 at arXiv.org.
Those three features — size, distance and youth — made HIP 65426 b relatively easy to see, and so a good planet to test JWST’s observing abilities. And the telescope has once again surpassed astronomers’ expectations (SN: 7/11/22).

“We’ve demonstrated really how powerful JWST is as an instrument for the direct imaging of exoplanets,” says exoplanet astronomer and coauthor Aarynn Carter of the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Astronomers have found more than 5,000 planets orbiting other stars (SN: 3/22/22). But almost all of those planets were detected indirectly, either by the planets tugging on the stars with their gravity or blocking starlight as they cross between the star and a telescope’s view.

To see a planet directly, astronomers have to block out the light from its star and let the planet’s own light shine, a tricky process. It’s been done before, but for only about 20 planets total (SN: 11/13/08; SN: 3/14/13; SN: 7/22/20).

“In every area of exoplanet discovery, nature has been very generous,” says MIT astrophysicist Sara Seager, who was not involved in the JWST discovery. “This is the one area where nature didn’t really come through.”

In 2017, astronomers discovered HIP 65426 b and took a direct image of it using an instrument on the Very Large Telescope in Chile. But because that telescope is on the ground, it can’t see all the light coming from the exoplanet. Earth’s atmosphere absorbs a lot of the planet’s infrared wavelengths — exactly the wavelengths JWST excels at observing. The space telescope observed the planet on July 17 and July 30, capturing its glow in four different infrared wavelengths.

“These are wavelengths of light that we’ve never ever seen exoplanets in before,” Hinkley says. “I’ve literally been waiting for this day for six years. It feels amazing.”

Pictures in these wavelengths will help reveal how planets formed and what their atmospheres are made of.

“Direct imaging is our future,” Seager says. “It’s amazing to see the Webb performing so well.”

While the team has not yet studied the atmosphere of HIP 65426 b in detail, it did report the first spectrum — a measurement of light in a range of wavelengths — of an object orbiting a different star. The spectrum allows a deeper look into the object’s chemistry and atmosphere, astronomer Brittany Miles of UC Santa Cruz and colleagues reported September 1 at arXiv.org.

That object is called VHS 1256 b. It’s as heavy as 20 Jupiters, so it may be more like a transition object between a planet and a star, called a brown dwarf, than a giant planet. JWST found evidence that the amounts of carbon monoxide and methane in the atmosphere of the orb are out of equilibrium. That means the atmosphere is getting mixed up, with winds or currents pulling molecules from lower depths to its top and vice versa. The telescope also saw signs of sand clouds, a common feature in brown dwarf atmospheres (SN: 7/8/22).

“This is probably a violent and turbulent atmosphere that is filled with clouds,” Hinkley says.

HIP 65426 b and VHS 1256 b are unlike anything we see in our solar system. They’re more than three times the distance of Uranus from their stars, which suggests they formed in a totally different way from more familiar planets. In future work, astronomers hope to use JWST to image smaller planets that sit closer to their stars.

“What we’d like to do is get down to study Earths, wouldn’t we? We’d really like to get that first image of an Earth orbiting another star,” Hinkley says. That’s probably out of JWST’s reach — Earth-sized planets are still too small see. But a Saturn? That may be something JWST could focus its sights on. Those three features — size, distance and youth — made HIP 65426 b relatively easy to see, and so a good planet to test JWST’s observing abilities. And the telescope has once again surpassed astronomers’ expectations (SN: 7/11/22).

“We’ve demonstrated really how powerful JWST is as an instrument for the direct imaging of exoplanets,” says exoplanet astronomer and coauthor Aarynn Carter of the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Astronomers have found more than 5,000 planets orbiting other stars (SN: 3/22/22). But almost all of those planets were detected indirectly, either by the planets tugging on the stars with their gravity or blocking starlight as they cross between the star and a telescope’s view.

To see a planet directly, astronomers have to block out the light from its star and let the planet’s own light shine, a tricky process. It’s been done before, but for only about 20 planets total (SN: 11/13/08; SN: 3/14/13; SN: 7/22/20).

“In every area of exoplanet discovery, nature has been very generous,” says MIT astrophysicist Sara Seager, who was not involved in the JWST discovery. “This is the one area where nature didn’t really come through.”

In 2017, astronomers discovered HIP 65426 b and took a direct image of it using an instrument on the Very Large Telescope in Chile. But because that telescope is on the ground, it can’t see all the light coming from the exoplanet. Earth’s atmosphere absorbs a lot of the planet’s infrared wavelengths — exactly the wavelengths JWST excels at observing. The space telescope observed the planet on July 17 and July 30, capturing its glow in four different infrared wavelengths.

“These are wavelengths of light that we’ve never ever seen exoplanets in before,” Hinkley says. “I’ve literally been waiting for this day for six years. It feels amazing.”

Pictures in these wavelengths will help reveal how planets formed and what their atmospheres are made of.

“Direct imaging is our future,” Seager says. “It’s amazing to see the Webb performing so well.”

While the team has not yet studied the atmosphere of HIP 65426 b in detail, it did report the first spectrum — a measurement of light in a range of wavelengths — of an object orbiting a different star. The spectrum allows a deeper look into the object’s chemistry and atmosphere, astronomer Brittany Miles of UC Santa Cruz and colleagues reported September 1 at arXiv.org.

That object is called VHS 1256 b. It’s as heavy as 20 Jupiters, so it may be more like a transition object between a planet and a star, called a brown dwarf, than a giant planet. JWST found evidence that the amounts of carbon monoxide and methane in the atmosphere of the orb are out of equilibrium. That means the atmosphere is getting mixed up, with winds or currents pulling molecules from lower depths to its top and vice versa. The telescope also saw signs of sand clouds, a common feature in brown dwarf atmospheres (SN: 7/8/22).

“This is probably a violent and turbulent atmosphere that is filled with clouds,” Hinkley says.

HIP 65426 b and VHS 1256 b are unlike anything we see in our solar system. They’re more than three times the distance of Uranus from their stars, which suggests they formed in a totally different way from more familiar planets. In future work, astronomers hope to use JWST to image smaller planets that sit closer to their stars.

“What we’d like to do is get down to study Earths, wouldn’t we? We’d really like to get that first image of an Earth orbiting another star,” Hinkley says. That’s probably out of JWST’s reach — Earth-sized planets are still too small see. But a Saturn? That may be something JWST could focus its sights on.

For all the coronavirus variants that have thrown pandemic curve balls — including alpha, beta, gamma and delta — COVID-19 vaccines have stayed the same. That could change this fall.

On June 28, an advisory committee to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration met to discuss whether vaccine developers should update their jabs to include a portion of the omicron variant — the version of the coronavirus that currently dominates the globe. The verdict: The omicron variant is different enough that it’s time to change the vaccines. Those shots should be a dual mix that includes both a piece of the nearly identical omicron subvariants BA.4/BA.5 and the virus from the original vaccines, the FDA announced June 30.

“This doesn’t mean that we are saying that there will be boosters recommended for everyone in the fall,” Amanda Cohn, chief medical officer for vaccine policy at the U.S Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said at the meeting. “But my belief is that this gives us the right vaccine for preparation for boosters in the fall.”
The decision to update COVID-19 vaccines didn’t come out of nowhere. In the two-plus years that the coronavirus has been spreading around the world, it has had a few “updates” of its own — mutating some of its proteins that allow the virus to more effectively infect our cells or hide from our immune systems.

Vaccine developers had previously crafted vaccines to tackle the beta variant that was first identified in South Africa in late 2020. Those were scrapped after studies showed that current vaccines remained effective.

The current vaccines gave our immune systems the tools to recognize variants such as beta and alpha, which each had a handful of changes from the original SARS-CoV-2 virus that sparked the pandemic. But the omicron variant is a slipperier foe. Lots more viral mutations combined with our own waning immunity mean that once omicron can gain a foothold in the body, vaccine protection isn’t as good as it once was at fending off COVID-19 symptoms (SN: 6/27/22).

The shots still largely protect people from developing severe symptoms, but there has been an uptick in hospitalizations, especially among older people, Heather Scobie, deputy team lead of the CDC’s Surveillance and Analytics Epidemiology Task Force said at the meeting. Deaths among older age groups are also beginning to increase. And while it’s impossible to predict the future, we could be in for another tough fall and winter, epidemiologist Justin Lessler of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill said at the meeting. From March 2022 to March 2023, simulations project that deaths from COVID-19 in the United States might number in the tens to hundreds of thousands.

A switch to omicron-containing jabs may give people an extra layer of protection for the upcoming winter. Pfizer-BioNTech presented data at the meeting showing that updated versions of its mRNA shot gave clinical trial participants a boost of antibodies that recognize omicron. One version included omicron alone, while the other is a twofer, or bivalent, jab that mixes the original formulation with omicron. Moderna’s bivalent shot boosted antibodies too. Novavax, which developed a protein-based vaccine that the FDA is still mulling whether to authorize for emergency use, doesn’t have an omicron-based vaccine yet, though the company said its original shot gives people broad protection, generating antibodies that probably will recognize omicron.

Pfizer and Moderna both updated their vaccines using a version of omicron called BA.1, which was the dominant variant in the United States in December and January. But BA.1 has siblings and has already been outcompeted by some of them.
Since omicron first appeared late last year, “we’ve seen a relatively troubling, rapid evolution of SARS-CoV-2,” Peter Marks, director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, said at the advisory meeting.

Now, omicron subvariants BA.2, BA.2.12.1, BA.4 and BA.5 are the dominant versions in the United States and other countries. The CDC estimates that roughly half of new U.S. infections the week ending June 25 were caused by either BA.4 or BA.5. By the time the fall rolls around, yet another new version of omicron — or a different variant entirely — may join their ranks. The big question is which of these subvariants to include in the vaccines to give people the best protection possible.

BA.1, the version already in the updated vaccines, may be the right choice, virologist Kanta Subbarao said at the FDA advisory meeting. An advisory committee to the World Health Organization, which Subbarao chairs, recommended on June 17 that vaccines may need to be tweaked to include omicron, likely BA.1. “We’re not trying to match [what variants] may circulate,” Subbarao said. Instead, the goal is to make sure that the immune system is as prepared as possible to recognize a wide variety of variants, not just specific ones. The hope is that the broader the immune response, the better our bodies will be at fighting the virus off even as it evolves.

The variant that is farthest removed from the original virus is probably the best candidate to accomplish that goal, said Subbarao, who is director of the WHO’s Collaborating Center for Reference and Research on Influenza at the Doherty Institute in Melbourne, Australia. Computational analyses of how antibodies recognize different versions of the coronavirus suggest that BA.1 is probably the original coronavirus variant’s most distant sibling, she said.

Some members of the FDA advisory committee disagreed with choosing BA.1, instead saying that they’d prefer vaccines that include a portion of BA.4 or BA.5. With BA.1 largely gone, it may be better to follow the proverbial hockey puck where it’s going rather than where it’s been, said Bruce Gellin, chief of Global Public Health Strategy with the Rockefeller Foundation in Washington, D.C. Plus, BA.4 and BA.5 are also vastly different from the original variant. Both have identical spike proteins, which the virus uses to break into cells and the vaccines use to teach our bodies to recognize an infection. So when it comes to making vaccines, the two are somewhat interchangeable.
There are some real-world data suggesting that current vaccines offer the least amount of protection from BA.4 and BA.5 compared with other omicron subvariants, Marks said. Pfizer also presented data showing results from a test in mice of a bivalent jab with the original coronavirus strain plus BA.4/BA.5. The shot sparked a broad immune response that boosted antibodies against four omicron subvariants. It’s unclear what that means for people.

Not everyone on the FDA advisory committee agreed that an update now is necessary — two members voted against it. Pediatrician Henry Bernstein of Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell in Uniondale, N.Y., noted that the current vaccines are still effective against severe disease and that there aren’t enough data to show that any changes would boost vaccine effectiveness. Pediatric infectious disease specialist Paul Offit of Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia said that he agrees that vaccines should help people broaden their immune responses, but he’s not yet convinced omicron is the right variant for it.

Plenty of other open questions remain too. The FDA could have authorized either a vaccine that contains omicron alone or a bivalent shot. Some data presented at the meeting hinted that a bivalent dose might spark immunity that could be more durable, but that’s still unknown. Pfizer and Moderna tested their updated shots in adults. It’s unclear what the results mean for kids. Also unknown is whether people who have never been vaccinated against COVID-19 could eventually start with such an omicron-based vaccine instead of the original two doses.

Maybe researchers will get some answers before boosters start in the fall. But health agencies needed to make decisions now, so vaccine developers have a chance to make the shots in the first place. Unfortunately, we’re always lagging behind the virus, said pediatrician Hayley Gans of Stanford University. “We can’t always wait for the data to catch up.”