Southern Ocean cooling trend explained

One of the strangest facts in computer science is that it’s really hard to generate true random numbers. For a computer, anyway. I can do it just fine: 173, 401, 530. That’s right off the top of my head, true randomness. Scientists: If you need a random number, please contact me by email, night or day. However, a multi-institutional group of researchers now reports generating “demonstrated certified randomness” using a 56-qubit quantum computer. A study in Frontiers in Marine Science reports evidence of deep ecosystem consequences following the disappearance of great white sharks from False Bay, South Africa. And in actually great medical news, a team at McMaster University discovered a new class of antibiotics.

Additionally, researchers believe they’ve determined why climate models failed to predict the 40-year cooling trend in the Southern Ocean; astronomers reported a new technique to find hidden black holes; and researchers produced the deepest image of the cosmic microwave background to date:

Models corrected

Climate models have long predicted warming of the Southern Ocean, so the cause of the progressive cooling trend of the last 40 years has been a mystery. Researchers at Stanford University believe those models failed to account for meltwater quantities and underestimated rainfall.

Rising temperatures are melting the ice sheet, causing more precipitation, and as a result, the upper layer of the Southern Ocean is becoming less salty as freshwater infiltrates. This means the water is less dense, creating what the researchers describe as a lid that inhibits the mixture of warmer water from the deep to the colder water at the surface. This dynamic was not represented in climate models predicting a warmer Southern Ocean.

The researchers also found that location was important in the cooling dynamic. Southern Ocean surface temperatures were more sensitive to freshwater flux along the coast rather than more widely spread rainfall. Earle Wilson, an assistant professor of Earth system science at Stanford, says, “Applying freshwater near the Antarctic margin has a bigger influence on sea ice formation and the seasonal cycle of sea ice extent, which then has downstream impacts on sea surface temperature. This was a surprising result that we are eager to explore further in future work.”

Baby universe, part 1

An international team of scientists recently detected mysterious radio signals within a cloud of hot gas and dust 12.9 billion light-years away, which is kind of equivalent to hearing mysterious “meows” from somewhere inside a basket of dirty laundry. You know something is in there. Maybe you have some idea what it might be. There’s a handful of clues and perhaps some previous knowledge that could be applicable.

Using the Atacama Large Millimeter Array, the researchers made the sharpest-ever observations of the hot molecular gas cloud and determined that the kitty in the laundry was a supermassive black hole that existed 12.9 billion years ago, when the universe was in its infancy. The ultra-high-resolution observations allowed them to observe the heating mechanisms that affect gas within just a few hundred light-years of the black hole and represent a new technique for finding similar objects. The radio waves detected by ALMA are not absorbed by dust or gas, making the instrument uniquely powerful for detecting black holes.

Additionally, the study suggests that there could be an enormous population of black holes shrouded in dust and gas. The researchers intend to apply similar techniques to identify similar black holes.

Baby universe, part 2

Using the power of the Atacama Cosmology Telescope, an international research team spent four years producing the most precise image of the universe in its infancy, an image of the cosmic microwave background 12.9 billion years ago. The new measurements provide a refined estimate of the age of the universe, about 13.8 billion years old, with high certainty.

Additionally, the measurement reconfirms one of the two conflicting measurements physicists call the Hubble tension. Measurements of the cosmic microwave background have consistently yielded a universal expansion rate of 67 to 68 kilometers per second per megaparsec; measurements derived from the motion of nearby galaxies indicate an expansion rate of 73 to 74 km/s/Mpc. The new observation confirms the lower rate yet again.

Professor Erminia Calabrese, director of research at Cardiff University’s School of Physics and Astronomy, says, “We’ve been able to measure more precisely than ever before that the observable universe extends almost 50 billion light years in all directions from us, and contains as much mass as 1,900 ‘zetta-suns’, or almost 2 trillion trillion suns.”

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