NASA’s Perseverance rover has found a diverse menagerie of organic molecules in a Martian crater, a new study reports.

Organic compounds are molecules composed of carbon, and often include other elements such as hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus and sulfur. Previously, scientists had detected several types of organic molecules of Martian origin — in meteorites blasted off Mars by cosmic impacts that landed on Earth, and in Gale Crater on the Red Planet, which NASA’s Curiosity rover has been exploring since 2012.

"They are an exciting clue for astrobiologists, since they are often thought of as building blocks of life," study lead author Sunanda Sharma, a planetary scientist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, told Space.com.

However, "importantly, they can be created by processes not related to life," Sharma emphasized. As such, investigating what organic molecules exist on the Red Planet and how they were created is key to understanding what may or may not be linked to life on Mars.

Related: ‘Anomalous’ metal spheres unlikely to be alien technology, despite Harvard scientist’s claim

"As planetary scientists and astrobiologists, we are very careful with laying out claims — claiming that life is the source of organics or possible biosignatures is a last-resort hypothesis, meaning we would need to rule out any non-biological source of origin," Sharma said.

In the new study, Sharma and her colleagues analyzed data from Perseverance. In February 2021, the rover landed within Jezero Crater, the site of an ancient lake basin that prior work suggested displayed high potential for past habitability. The crater floor also possesses clays and other minerals that may preserve organic materials.

Specifically, the scientists examined data from the Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals (SHERLOC) instrument onboard Perseverance. SHERLOC is the first tool on Mars capable of conducting fine-scale mapping and analysis of organic molecules.

The researchers focused on SHERLOC data from Máaz and Séítah, two rock formations on the Jezero Crater floor. When ultraviolet light from SHERLOC illuminates organic compounds, they can glow much like material beneath a blacklight. The fingerprint of wavelengths in the glow from a molecule can help identify it.

Sharma and her colleagues found signs of organic molecules in all 10 targets that Perseverance drilled into at Máaz and Séítah, covering a span of time from at least about 2.3 billion to 2.6 billion years ago. These "point to the possibility that building blocks of life could have been present for a long time on the surface of Mars, in more than one place," Sharma said.

Close-up image of a mars rock with green and blue dots superimposed over it to represent chemical composition in different areas.

This annotated image shows a rock target called "Garde," as analyzed by the Mars rover Perseverance’s SHERLOC instrument. This data was taken on Sept. 18, 2021, the 207th Martian day, or sol, of the mission. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/LANL/PhotonSys)

The scientists discovered evidence of many different classes of organic molecules. These occurred in a variety of patterns in space within Máaz and Séítah, suggesting they might have originated from a number of different minerals and mechanisms of formation. These organic compounds mostly appeared connected to minerals linked to water.

"Seeing that the possible organic signals differ in terms of type, number of detections and distribution between the two units of the crater floor was surprising and exciting," Sharma said. "That opens the possibility of different formation, preservation or transportation mechanisms across the crater and, more broadly, the surface of Mars."

The scientists could not identify specific organic molecules. "To confirm the presence of organics and their specific types, we would need the samples to be returned to Earth," Sharma said. "That’s our goal."

The scientists detailed their findings online today (July 12) in the journal Nature.

Source: https://www.livescience.com/space/mars/building-blocks-of-life-discovered-on-mars-in-10-different-rock-samples

[Our type of solar system and our planet is not normal in the universe. It is very special, and more and more evidence of this is emerging. I will discuss this in more detail later. But be aware of what the science is revealing. Jan]

Here’s the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Tju7EaSfmM

The first-ever near-complete sauropod skull found in Australia is remarkably similar to fossils from South America, which suggests that dinosaurs roamed across ice-free Antarctica.

A nearly 100 million-year-old, exceptionally well-preserved sauropod skull discovered in Australia may show that dinosaurs trudged across Antarctica from South America to Australia, researchers have revealed.

The near-complete sauropod skull belongs to a species called Diamantinasaurus matildae. Sauropods are known for their extremely long necks, with one dinosaur’s neck stretching farther than a school bus. D. matildae was also a titanosaur, the only group of sauropod dinosaurs to live right until the end of the Cretaceous (145 million to 66 million years ago) before the nonavian dinosaurs went extinct.

Paleontologists excavated the specimen in 2018 from a sheep ranch northwest of Winton, in Queensland, Australia, and nicknamed it "Ann." D. matildae was as long as a tennis court (78 feet or 23.77 meters) and weighed around 27.5 tons (25 metric tons), three times more than Tyrannosaurus rex. The fossils look strikingly similar to bones unearthed in Argentina, which prompted researchers to think that sauropods journeyed between South America and Australia, via Antarctica.

"In analyzing the remains, we found similarities between the Ann skull and the skull of a titanosaur called Sarmientosaurus musacchioi, which lived in South America at about the same time as Diamantinasaurus lived in Queensland," Stephen Poropat, a paleontologist at Curtin University in Perth, Australia, and lead author of a new study into the fossils, said in a statement. "We suggest that sauropods were traveling between Australia and South America, via Antarctica, during the mid Cretaceous."

In the hothouse world of the Cretaceous, Antarctica was blanketed with lush forests and vegetation. Scientists already knew that sauropods roamed the now-frigid landmass, after the first long-necked-dinosaur fossil in Antarctica was discovered in 2011. Some scientists had already theorized that these behemoths used Antarctica to bridge continents. At the time, Australia, New Zealand, Antarctica and South America were joined and formed the last remnant of the supercontinent Gondwana, according to the Australian Museum.

Now, in a study published Wednesday (April 12) in the journal Royal Society Open Science, researchers compared the best-preserved sauropod skull found to date in Australia with others from across the world.

A photo of the site where paleontologists unearthed the skull shows several cars and a tent set up near a dig site on a vast plain
Paleontologists unearthed the 98 million to 95 million-year-old sauropod skull during a dig organized by the Australian Age of Dinosaurs Museum near Winton, Queensland. (Image credit: Australian Age of Dinosaurs Museum)

Using detailed scans of Ann’s remains, the team detected remarkable similarities with a Sarmientosaurus skull that was discovered in the Chubut province in southern Argentina and described in a 2016 study in the journal PLOS One. "These similarities include details of the braincase, the bones forming the back end of the skull near the jaw joint and the shape of the teeth," Poropat said.

Researchers already suspected that these two dinosaurs were closely related, but until now, they lacked the evidence to back it up. "The new skull shores up the idea in a big way," Poropat wrote in The Conversation. "Bone for bone, the skulls of Diamantinasaurus and Sarmientosaurus are extremely similar."

A photo of scientists arranging the sauropod skull remains on a table set to slide into a CT scanner

Dinosaur skulls are an extremely rare find, according to the study. Aside from a few teeth, Ann’s skull is only the second sauropod skull found in Australia, following the discovery in 2016 of a partial cranium belonging to D. matildae. That’s because the heads of sauropods were small relative to their body size and were made up of tiny, delicate bones and decomposed more rapidly than sturdy limbs, Poropat wrote.

“This is a remarkably detailed and information-packed paper," Matthew Lamanna, a paleontologist at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History and co-author of the 2016 study, told Live Science in an email. "The resemblances between the skulls of Diamantinasaurus and the similarly aged Sarmientosaurus from southern South America are pretty striking, and add further support for the hypothesis that titanosaurs moved between Australia and South America during the mid-Cretaceous, presumably via Antarctica."

Source: https://www.livescience.com/animals/dinosaurs/95-million-year-old-land-bridge-across-antarctica-carried-dinosaurs-between-continents

A new unpublished study is making waves on the internet by claiming that one of the brightest stars in the night sky might die in a spectacular explosion within our lifetime.

The study, currently available on the online pre-print serverarXiv, conjectures that the red giant star Betelgeuse, the left shoulder of the constellation Orion also known as Alpha Orionis, may have less than three hundred years’ worth of fuel left in its core. When the star burns through those last drops, its core will collapse into a black hole and in the process blast out the star’s outer layers at enormous speeds of up to 25,000 miles (40,000 kilometers) per second. This fiery demise is what astronomers call a supernova explosion, and in the case of Betelgeuse, it will be a spectacular sight for observers on Earth. Since the star is only 650 light-years from Earth, those layers of gas and dust will shine as bright as the full moon in our sky for several weeks.

The problem is that most astronomers don’t think that Betelgeuse is ready to go bang just yet. So what makes the researchers behind the new paper think otherwise?

Betelgeuse is undoubtedly a red giant star that has already burned through its primary fuel hydrogen and is now fusing helium in its core into heavier elements. The point at which a star runs out of hydrogen in its lifetime is unmissable. Stars short on hydrogen need to put extra energy into igniting the helium produced during the fusion of hydrogen, which forces them to expand dozens of times beyond their original size. In the process, they also become cooler and redder.

Astronomers know that Betelgeuse is huge. If it were to sit at the center of our solar system, the scorching gas in its outer atmosphere would reach far enough to engulf even the planet Jupiter. However, the exact width of Betelgeuse is hard to measure. That’s because instead of being one rather smooth ball of plasma, Betelgeuse is a lumpy clump of boiling gas bubbles shrouded in burped out dust clouds. To measure its diameter is therefore not easy, yet, the case for determining Betelgeuse’s remaining lifetime rests on the star’s size.

In the new controversial study, a team of astronomers led by Hideyuki Saio from the Tohoku University in Japan suggests that Betelgeuse is larger than what most researchers believe. This could be possible as Betelgeuse is known to pulsate — expand and shrink, dim and brighten up — at regular intervals. Most obviously, Betelgeuse’s brightness swings up and down every 420 days. Astronomers attribute this brightening to the periodical expansion of the star’s envelope, or roughly spherical outer region, in a phenomenon known as the fundamental mode.

A smattering of stars numbers in the thousands across the image, a deep purple background fades to black inconsistently throughout. A small number of exceptionally bright stars shine evident in the bottom corners and just above right center.

There are other quirks in Betelgeuse’s behavior, also appearing on a regular basis, which astronomers attribute to additional turbulent processes taking place inside the dying star. One of those additional variations takes place on a 2,200-day cycle, and astronomers have no explanation for it. The team led by Saio therefore proposed that this 2,200-day oscillation could, in fact, represent Betelgeuse’s main pulsation mode while the 420-day brightness variation could be a secondary quirk.

Such a scenario, however, requires Betelgeuse to be up to one third wider for these models of its evolution to work, Saio told Space.com in an email.

"To explain the 2,200-day period as fundamental mode requires a much larger radius than the case of fitting the 420-day [period] with fundamental mode," Saio wrote in an email. "A larger radius with a range of observed surface temperature means the intrinsic brightness of Betelgeuse to be higher than previously thought."

But for Betelgeuse to be as wide as the models require, it would also have to be in a later stage of its life, already done burning helium and instead running on carbon, which arose from the previous fusion of helium atoms. Whether a red giant star is burning helium or carbon makes a big difference in terms of how much life it has left. The helium-burning phase of a red giant star’s life lasts tens of thousands of years. When carbon-burning switches on, the end is nigh, at least in cosmic terms, and might come within a few thousand years.

"Although we cannot determine exactly how much carbon remains right now, our evolution models suggest that the carbon exhaustion would occur in less than 300 years," Saio wrote. "After the carbon exhaustion, fusions of further heavier elements would occur in probably a few tens of years, and after that the central part would collapse and a supernova explosion would occur."

That would certainly be exciting for skywatchers. The last time a nearby star went supernova was in 1604. Although stars explode somewhere in the universe on a daily basis, most of them are too far away to be visible without powerful telescopes.

But the question remains: What else is there but models to make Saio and his colleagues think that Betelgeuse is larger than what other astronomers think?

An asymmetrical, blurry sphere sits in the center of a black background. Its face is smeared with dull shades of yellow and pale brown.

In their paper, the researchers point out two measurements of Betelgeuse’s size to support their theory. But this is exactly where the paper has drawn criticism from other astronomers.

Miguel Montargès, a postdoctoral fellow at the Laboratory of Space Studies and Instrumentation in Astrophysics at the Paris Observatory who published papers on Betelgeuse based on observations by the Very Large Telescope in Chile, told Space.com in an earlier interview that "of the tens of measurements of Betelgeuse, [Saio and his colleagues] have selected only two."

László Molnár, an astronomy research fellow at the Konkoly Observatory in Budapest, Hungary, who also published several papers on Betelgeuse said that the measurements picked by Saio and his colleagues to support their theory were likely influenced by clouds of dust and gas around the star that make Betelgeuse appear bigger.

"If we look at the sun, we see a well-defined surface with a very crisp edge," Molnár told Space.com in an email. "But Betelgeuse being a red supergiant, is extremely fluffy and puffy, and the photosphere, what we would call its ‘surface,’ is hidden beneath multiple layers of molecular gas and clouds of dust."

Violent expulsions of these materials are typical for red giant stars. In the case of Betelgeuse, astronomers observed one such massive cloud emerge from within the star in 2019, causing the star to temporarily dim.

Molnár and his team made their own measurements of Betelgeuse’s size, which are more aligned with what most scientists think.

The release of Saio’s paper coincides with an unusual brightening of Betelgeuse that led some enthusiasts to speculate that the star might be about to explode. But neither Molnár nor Montargès are convinced. Betelgeuse, Montargès said, is actually too bright to be in its death throes due to the fact that expulsions of material typically make older red giants gradually dim. Betelgeuse, on the contrary, despite its regular pulsations, has been a fixture in the top ten brightest stars of our sky for at least the past 100 years.

The paper has not yet been peer-reviewed and published, so some of its shortcomings might get addressed before it gets officially released.

Source: https://www.space.com/betelgeuse-supernova-in-our-lifetime-study-unsure

[I've known about neutrinos for a very long time. They are totally amazing and weird. And they are passing through your body all the time. Even more bizarre, neutrinos pass through the ENTIRE EARTH. Neutrinos can come at you from above, but also from BELOW! Yes, they can pass through the entire Earth and come out the other side!! As always, these are wonderful European Race discoveries. Jan]

Neutrino map of the galaxy is 1st view of the Milky Way in ‘anything other than light’

By Ben Turner
published 4 days ago

Scientists at the IceCube Neutrino Observatory have used 60,000 neutrinos to create the first map of the Milky Way made with matter and not light.

Scientists have traced the galactic origins of thousands of "ghost particles" known as neutrinos to create the first-ever portrait of the Milky Way made from matter and not light — and it’s given them a brand-new way to study the universe.

The groundbreaking image was snapped by capturing the neutrinos as they fell through the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, a gigantic detector buried deep inside the South Pole’s ice.

Neutrinos earn their spooky nickname because their nonexistent electrical charge and almost-zero mass mean they barely interact with other types of matter. As such, neutrinos fly straight through regular matter at close to the speed of light.

Yet by slowing these neutrinos, physicists have finally traced the particles’ origins billions of light-years away to ancient, cataclysmic stellar explosions and cosmic-ray collisions. The researchers published their findings June 29 in the journal Science.

"The capabilities provided by the highly sensitive IceCube detector, coupled with new data analysis tools, have given us an entirely new view of our galaxy — one that had only been hinted at before," Denise Caldwell, director of the National Science Foundation’s physics division, which funded the research, said in a statement. "As these capabilities continue to be refined, we can look forward to watching this picture emerge with ever-increasing resolution, potentially revealing hidden features of our galaxy never before seen by humanity."

Every second, about 100 billion neutrinos pass through each square centimeter of your body. The tiny particles are everywhere — produced in the nuclear fire of stars, in enormous supernova explosions, by cosmic rays and radioactive decay, and in particle accelerators and nuclear reactors on Earth. In fact, neutrinos, which were first discovered zipping out of a nuclear reactor in 1956, are second only to photons as the most abundant subatomic particles in the universe.

Despite their ubiquity, the chargeless and near-massless particles’ minimal interactions with other matter make neutrinos incredibly difficult to detect. Many famous neutrino-detection experiments have spotted the steady bombardment of neutrinos sent to us from the sun, but this cascade also masks neutrinos from more unusual sources, such as gigantic star explosions called supernovas and particle showers produced by cosmic rays.

To capture the neutrinos, particle physicists turned to IceCube, located at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica. The gigantic detector consists of more than 5,000 optical sensors beaded across 86 strings that dangle into holes drilled up to 1.56 miles (2.5 kilometers) into the Antarctic ice.

While many neutrinos pass completely unimpeded through the Earth, they do occasionally interact with water molecules, creating particle byproducts called muons that can be witnessed as flashes of light inside the detector’s sensors. From the patterns these flashes make, scientists can reconstruct the energy, and sometimes the sources, of the neutrinos.

Finding a neutrino’s starting point depends on how clear its direction is recorded in the detector; some have very obvious initial directions, whereas others produce cascading "fuzz balls of light" that obscure their origins, lead author Naoko Kurahashi Neilson, a physicist at Drexel University in Philadelphia, said in the statement.

By feeding more than 60,000 detected neutrino cascades collected over 10 years into a machine-learning algorithm, the physicists built up a stunning picture: an ethereal, blue-tinged image showing the neutrinos’ sources all across our galaxy.

The map showed that the neutrinos were being overwhelmingly produced in regions with previously detected high gamma-ray counts, confirming past suspicions that many ghost particles are summoned as byproducts of cosmic rays smashing into interstellar gas. It also left the physicists awestruck.

"I remember saying, ‘At this point in human history, we’re the first ones to see our galaxy in anything other than light,’" Neilson said.

Just like previous revolutionary advances such as radio astronomy, infrared astronomy and gravitational wave detection, neutrino mapping has given us a completely new way to peer out into the universe. Now, it’s time to see what we find.

Source: https://www.livescience.com/physics-mathematics/particle-physics/ghost-particle-image-is-the-1st-view-of-our-galaxy-in-anything-other-than-light?utm_term=23709803-D360-4259-9C73-BE4FF46B5C71&utm_campaign=368B3745-DDE0-4A69-A2E8-62503D85375D&utm_medium=email&utm_content=2D5C159E-DF3C-4887-B039-4BED38DE05F5&utm_source=SmartBrief

[There are images and even a video at the source link below. Jan]

A runaway supermassive black hole ejected from its own galaxy, possibly in a tussle with two other black holes, is being trailed by a 200,000 light-year-long chain of infant stars, a new study reports.

The incredible sight, which is like nothing astronomers have spotted before, was identified by the Hubble Space Telescope in a happy accident.

The supermassive black hole, with a mass equivalent to 20 million suns, is traveling so fast that it would cover the distance between Earth and the moon in just 14 minutes.

An illustration of a runaway black hole ejected from its host galaxy and followed by a trail of infant stars.
An illustration of a runaway black hole ejected from its host galaxy and followed by a trail of infant stars. (Image credit: NASA, ESA, Leah Hustak (STScI))

As it travels, the cosmic runaway is piling up gas in front of it. When dense regions of gas like those left in the wake of this rogue black hole collapse, new stars are born. A supermassive black hole cruising through clouds of gas would normally feed on it, a process called accretion. But this runaway cosmic monster is moving too fast to grab a bite.

As a result, the rogue black hole is actively creating a corridor of infant stars, and these are forming a tail that tracks right back to the supermassive black hole’s galaxy of origin, researchers said. And this tail is half as bright as that galaxy, meaning it must be absolutely brimming with stars.

"We think we’re seeing a wake behind the black hole where the gas cools and is able to form stars. So, we’re looking at star formation trailing the black hole," study lead author Pieter van Dokkum, of Yale University, said in a statement. "What we’re seeing is the aftermath. Like the wake behind a ship, we’re seeing the wake behind the black hole. It didn’t look like anything we’ve seen before."

At the outermost tip of the column of stars in a knot of ionized oxygen that is incredibly bright. The team believes that this is the result of the black hole striking gas, shocking it and heating it.

"Gas in front of it gets shocked because of this supersonic, very-high-velocity impact of the black hole moving through the gas," said van Dokkum. "How it works exactly is not really known."

Something else that isn’t totally clear yet is how the supermassive black hole came to be launched out of its host galaxy.
Click here for more Space.com videos…
Kicked out by a cosmic cuckoo

The team thinks that the ejected black hole could have escaped its host galaxy as the result of multiple collisions of supermassive black holes, the first occurring when two galaxies merged 50 million years ago, bringing two cosmic titans close together.

As these supermassive black holes circled around each other, another galaxy entered the mix, carrying with it another supermassive black hole. Following the old adage "two’s company and three’s a crowd," the interaction between the three black holes was chaotic and led to one black hole stealing momentum from the others and hurtling off into space.

That means there’s a good chance that the interloper black hole introduced itself to the system and eventually replaced one of the original black holes, like a cosmic cuckoo.

As the runaway black hole blasted away from its former companions, the new pairing would have moved in the opposite direction. And there are hints at a runaway black-hole binary on the opposite side of the host galaxy to the black hole racing through space with its stellar tail.

The next step for this research will be to search for evidence of these binary black holes with NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the Chandra X-ray Observatory, study team members aid.
Related stories:

Scientists will be hoping for the same good fortune experienced by van Dokkum and his team when they initially made the extraordinary observation of this massive cosmic runaway.

"This is pure serendipity that we stumbled across it," van Dokkum concluded. "I was just scanning through the Hubble image, and then I noticed that we have a little streak. I immediately thought, ‘Oh, a cosmic ray hitting the camera detector and causing a linear imaging artifact.’ When we eliminated cosmic rays, we realized it was still there."

The team’s research was published on April 6 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Source: https://www.space.com/runaway-supermassive-black-hole-hubble-telescope?utm_term=AF536F6D-055D-443A-91F7-FD448D0CCA73&utm_campaign=58E4DE65-C57F-4CD3-9

[Just read this and be amazed at what this British technology can do. It's just insane! But as always, Western Civilization does the impossible. This is very important because near Earth space is getting filled with tiny pieces of debris that will destroy spacecraft and endanger lives. Jan]

The technology will be able to extrapolate the trajectory of the smallest pieces of space junk.

A new method of tracking tiny pieces of space junk has passed its first demonstration test in orbit, according to its builders ODIN Space of London.

Over the past two years, ODIN has been developing and qualifying technology to detect and track space junk that is too small to register using existing methods. The company’s first demonstration sensor was integrated into the D-Orbit ION satellite, which hitched a ride to orbit as part of SpaceX’s Transporter-8 mission that launched June 12.

Now, after more than a week on orbit, ODIN has confirmed with D-Orbit that their onboard sensor is operational, and picked up faint acoustic vibrations from its host satellite. For this demo flight, ODIN’s debris sensor was set to an exceptionally high sensitivity, to ensure even the smallest of readings from the ION satellite could be detected.

There are tens of thousands of pieces of trackable debris in orbit around Earth, with that number expected to increase exponentially into the 2030s and beyond with the continuing growth of the space economy. Using current technology, only pieces of debris larger than around 4 inches (10 centimeters) are able to be tracked. ODIN hopes its technology will help track sub-centimeter debris, which travel in near invisibility, at bullet speeds, and pose threats to satellites, space stations and other on-orbit infrastructure.

"We’ll now focus on providing our customers with the next generation of space data and sending many more sensors to every orbit," said ODIN CEO and co-founder James New in an ODIN press release, adding, "by understanding how lethal, sub-centimeter debris behaves, we can protect space assets, maximize growth and drive sustainability in space."

Now, ODIN plans to scale up the technology in order to bring the technology to the commercial market. Once operational, ODIN’s sub-centimeter sensor will be able to track the size, location and, for the first time, the speed and trajectory of debris measuring as small as 1/250th of an inch (0.1 millimeters).

With this trajectory mapping, ODIN strives to build complex models of sub-centimeter debris to improve situational awareness for thousands of satellites in Earth orbit.

Source: https://www.space.com/odin-space-completes-debris-tracking-demo?utm_term=AF536F6D-055D-443A-91F7-FD448D0CCA73&utm_campaign=58E4DE65-C57F-4CD3-9A5A-609994E2C5A9&utm_medium=email&utm_content=E5039B48-7782-41C2-91B9-8DC8DA3B43A5&utm_source=SmartBrief

[This German lady scientist is interesting. Jan]

Here’s the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-jIplX6Wjw

[There were a LOT of nuclear tests in America, on American soil, mostly in Nevada. There have been all kinds of nuclear tests, in the air, at sea, in space, underground, etc. Scientists, especially American scientists, tested and measured nuclear explosions under every conceivable kind of condition. In the final years, underground nuclear testing was the most common and safe way to do it. Atmospheric tests were the most dangerous because of winds. Jan]

Here’s the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCf_yEoLj9o

[This topic is nasty but belongs in the field of human science. I have been following, out of pure curiosity the nightmare problem of the 5 people in the tiny submarine that went down to the Titanic and they are now lost on the sea bed. I had just pondered their fate. I thought at first that the most likely scenario is that maybe the submarine imploded and they all just died. From every angle, human survival in this case is IMPOSSIBLE. I looked at this as done and dusted, these people died. Regardless of what happened, they are DEAD. The thing that piqued my interest was that sonars were picking up tapping noises every 30 minutes which sounded like people trapped in the submarine knocking on it so that they could be found. There are many safety issues with the submarine like: Why didn't they have some cheap transponders on it which send out messages that are easy to find. That, for example, is a very simple, and very effective solution. But, that clearly was not done. The tapping noises were heard yesterday and last night. So it seems as if these people are genuinely alive. The temperature down there is extremely cold. So I thought that between the cold and oxygen deprivation they WILL DIE. There is ZERO HOPE. Then I wondered if some would not die before others? What if some die and others can then continue breathing oxygen? I must say, I had thought that the final outcome of this is that it may take them days, weeks or months, or longer to eventually find the submarine and they'll open it and it will be a forensic coffin and a year or more from now we'll find out how long they lived and when they died. But check out what a doctor and an admiral have to say. This is quite bizarre and it is how the human body adapts! Jan]

It is a claustrophobic, terrifying prospect – being trapped in a 22ft submersible, potentially thousands of feet underwater, with oxygen running out.

The exact whereabouts of the Titanic submersible and the condition of the five crew onboard are unknown. It is thought that, if the vessel is still intact, it may have just a few hours of oxygen remaining, creating a race against time to find the sub before it is too late.

However, that timeline is not necessarily rigid. Dr Ken LeDez, a hyperbaric medicine expert at Memorial University in St John’s, Newfoundland, has told BBC News that, depending on conditions, some of those aboard could survive longer than expected.

"It depends on how cold they get and how effective they are at conserving oxygen," he said, adding that shivering will use up a lot of oxygen, while wrapping up in a huddle can help to conserve heat.

He said running out of oxygen is a gradual process. "It’s not like switching off a light, it’s like climbing a mountain – as the temperature gets colder and metabolism falls [it depends] how fast you ascend that mountain," he said.

While admitting that we do not know the full situation inside the submersible, Dr LeDez said conditions could be different person-to-person, and that although it is a "disturbing conversation", some could survive longer than others.

On Wednesday, Rear Admiral John Mauger from the US Coast Guard said there were a number of unknowns in the search and rescue mission.

"We do not know the rate of consumption of oxygen per occupant on the sub," Rear Adm Mauger told the BBC.

Dr LeDez also said that running out of oxygen is not the only danger those on board face.

The vessel may have lost electrical power, which is likely to have a role in controlling the amount of oxygen and carbon dioxide inside the vessel.

As the oxygen level falls, the proportion of carbon dioxide being breathed out by the crew will be rising, with potentially fatal consequences.

"As levels of carbon dioxide build up, then it becomes sedative, it becomes like an anaesthetic gas, and you will go to sleep."

Too much of the gas in a person’s bloodstream, known as hypercapnia, can kill them if not treated.

Former Royal Navy submarine captain Ryan Ramsey says he looked at videos online of the inside of Titan and could not see a carbon dioxide removal system, known as scrubbers.

"That for me is the greatest problem of all of them," he says.
line

At the same time, the crew are at risk from hypothermia, where the body gets too cold.

According to Capt Ramsey, if the sub is on the seabed, the water temperature will be about 0C. If it has also lost electricity, it will not be generating any power and therefore cannot generate heat.

But hypothermia "could be their friend", said Dr LeDez.

"There is a possibility if they cool down enough and lose consciousness they could live through it – rescuers know this," he said, adding that the body will automatically try to adapt to survive.

However on the flip side, hypothermia, the lack of oxygen and the build-up of carbon dioxide within the sub mean the crew’s ability to make contact with the search and rescue mission, such as by banging on the hull at regular intervals to try and attract attention, will dwindle.

"If they’re unconscious, they’re not going to be able to do much to help themselves," says Dr LeDez.

While the Coast Guard has warned there is probably little oxygen left, the crew may be able to conserve their supplies – at least for a while.

Mr Ramsey says slowing their breathing would also help but admits this could be difficult considering the stress they would be under.

Dr LeDez says they could also spread out carbon dioxide-absorbing granules or reduce their power use if they still have electricity.

In terms of food and water, the Coast Guard said the crew had some "limited rations" on board but couldn’t say how much.

Despite all these challenges, Dr LeDez urges against cancelling the search-and-rescue operation too soon, saying they might be able to survive even when oxygen levels are very low.

"If anybody can survive in it, you know, it’s these individuals," he says. "It just depends on them having power and depends on them having light to be able to find things and make these controls, but absolutely, they could still be alive."

Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-65981277