Scroll through the UNIVERSE: Incredible interactive map lets you explore nearly 800,000 galaxies - peering back as far as 13.5 billion years
But a team of scientists has now made it possible for you to explore the cosmos from the comfort of your own home.
Their incredible interactive map, dubbed COSMOS-Web, lets you scroll through almost 800,000 galaxies and peer back as far as 13.5 billion years.
That means looking back through 98 per cent of cosmic time almost to the birth of the universe 13.8 billion years ago.
Covering an area of sky about the same size as three full moons, this image combines more than 10,000 photographs from the James Webb Space Telescope.
Professor Caitlin Casey, an astronomer at UC Santa Barbara who co-led the COSMOS collaboration, said: 'Our goal was to construct this deep field of space on a physical scale that far exceeded anything that had been done before.
'If you had a printout of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field on a standard piece of paper, our image would be slightly larger than a 13-foot by 13-foot-wide mural, at the same depth.
'So it's really strikingly large.'
While the data for this map has existed for a while, it was previously in a raw form that needed expert analysis and a supercomputer to interpret.
But over the last two years, an international team of scientists has worked to turn the data behind the largest map of the universe into something that anyone can use.
In the stunning interactive map, at this link, you can zoom out to see hundreds of thousands of galaxies stretch across the sky or zoom in to reveal amazing details.
Using the tools included in the map you can even dive deeper into the data by switching between different imaging tools.
To learn even more, turn on catalogues using the tabs on the left-hand side and click on any galaxy to bring up a vast trove of data.
The researchers have made this available to the public in the hopes that more people will be able to help dig into the data and unpick some of the universe's most puzzling questions.
Professor Casey says: 'The best science is really done when everyone thinks about the same data set differently.
'It's not just for one group of people to figure out the mysteries.'
Six galaxies hidden in the COSMOS-Web map as they were 3 billion, 4 billion, 8 billion, 9 billion and 10 billion years ago (from top left to bottom right). This period spans almost the entirety of cosmic history
Nine galaxies in the map which span all of cosmic time, from upper left to lower right: the present day universe, 3, 4, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 and 13 billion years ago
Already, this enormous set of data is helping scientists understand how galaxies formed at the beginning of time and challenging some basic assumptions in astronomy.
Based on data from the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers expected galaxies to be extremely rare in the first 500 million years.
This is because it takes a long time for stars to form under gravity and get pulled together into larger structures.
But when the researchers looked back at the most distant reaches of the universe, they found there were about 10 times more galaxies than they expected to find.
Professor Casey says: 'Since the telescope turned on we've been wondering 'Are these JWST datasets breaking the cosmological model?'
'Because the universe was producing too much light too early; it had only about 400 million years to form something like a billion solar masses of stars. We just do not know how to make that happen.'
The map is so much more detailed than earlier efforts because of the size of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).
While Hubble's main light-collecting was 7ft 10 inches (2.4m) across, the JWST's is a staggering 21ft (6.5m) wide.
You can use the filters on the map to reveal more information about the universe
By clicking on any galaxy you can pull up a huge amount of data collected by the James Webb Space Telescope
That allows the telescope to collect the faintest traces of light coming from the furthest reaches of the galaxy.
Dr Jeyhan Kartaltepe, associate professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology who co-leads COSMOS-Web, says: 'The sensitivity of JWST lets us see much fainter and more distant galaxies than ever before, so we're able to find galaxies in the very early universe and study their properties in detail.'
Going forward the team behind COSMOS-Web still has a lot more work to do in order to unpack all the data hidden in the map.
They plan to use the JWST spectrographic tools to identify the oldest galaxies in the image and learn more about the chemistry of these early stars.
The Big Bang Theory is a cosmological model, a theory used to describe the beginning and the evolution of our universe.
It says that the universe was in a very hot and dense state before it started to expand 13,7 billion years ago.
This theory is based on fundamental observations.
In 1920, Hubble observed that the distance between galaxies was increasing everywhere in the universe.
This means that galaxies had to be closer to each other in the past.
In 1964, Wilson and Penzias discovered the cosmic background radiation, which is a like a fossil of radiation emitted during the beginning of the universe, when it was hot and dense.
The cosmic background radiation is observable everywhere in the universe.
The composition of the universe - that is, the the number of atoms of different elements - is consistent with the Big Bang Theory.
So far, this theory is the only one that can explain why we observe an abundance of primordial elements in the universe.
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The Guardian
34 minutes ago
- The Guardian
‘The film wouldn't even be made today': the story behind Back to the Future at 40
The actor Lea Thompson has had a distinguished screen career but hesitated to share it with her daughters when they were growing up. 'I did not show them most of my stuff because I end up kissing people all the time and it was traumatic to my children,' she recalls. 'Even when they were little the headline was, 'Mom is kissing someone that's not Dad and it's making me cry!'' Thompson's most celebrated role would be especially hard to explain. As Lorraine Baines in Back to the Future, she falls in lust with her own son, Marty McFly, a teenage time traveller from 1985 who plunges into 1955 at the wheel of a DeLorean car. Back to the Future, released 40 years ago on Thursday, is both entirely of its time and entirely timeless. It was a box office summer smash, set a benchmark for time travel movies and was quoted by everyone from President Ronald Reagan to Avengers: Endgame. It is arguably a perfect film, without a duff note or a scene out of place, a fantastic parable as endlessly watchable as It's a Wonderful Life or Groundhog Day. It also, inevitably, reflects the preoccupations of its day. An early sequence features Libyan terrorists from the era of Muammar Gaddafi, a caricature wisely dropped from a stage musical adaptation. In one scene the young George McFly turns peeping tom as he spies on Lorraine getting undressed. To some, the film's ending equates personal fulfilment with Reagan-fuelled materialism. It caught lightning in a bottle in a way that is unrepeatable. 'If you made Back to the Future in 2025 and they went back 30 years, it would be 1995 and nothing would look that different,' Thompson, 64, says by phone from a shoot in Vancouver, Canada. 'The phones would be different but it wouldn't be like the strange difference between the 80s and the 50s and how different the world was.' Bob Gale, co-writer of the screenplay, agrees everything fell into the right place at the right time, including the central partnership between young Marty (Michael J Fox) and white-haired scientist Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd). The 74-year-old says from Los Angeles: 'Oh man, the film wouldn't even be made today. We'd go into the studio and they'd say, what's the deal with this relationship between Marty and Doc? They'd start interpreting paedophilia or something. There would be a lot of things they have problems with.' Gale had met the film's director, Robert Zemeckis, at the USC School of Cinema in 1972 and together they sold several TV scripts to Universal Studios, caught the eye of Steven Spielberg and John Milius and collaborated on three films. The pair had always wanted to make a time travel movie but couldn't find the right hook. Then Gale had an epiphany. 'We put a time travel story on the back burner until I found my dad's high school yearbook and boom, that was when the lightning bolt hit me and I said, ha, this would be cool: kid goes back in time and ends up in high school with his dad!' Gale and Zemeckis pitched the script more than 40 times over four years but studios found it too risky or risque. But Spielberg saw its potential and came in as executive producer. After Zemeckis scored a hit with Romancing the Stone in 1984, Universal gave the green light. The character of Doc Brown was inspired by Gale's childhood neighbour, a photographer who showed him the 'magic' of developing pictures in a darkroom, and the educational TV show Mr Wizard which demonstrated scientific principles. Then Lloyd came in and added an interpretation based on part Albert Einstein, part Leopold Stokowski. Thompson was cast as Lorraine after a successful audition. She felt that her background as a ballet and modern dancer gave her a strong awareness of the movement and physicality required to play both versions of Lorraine: one young and airy, the other middle-aged and beaten down by life. 'I was perfectly poised for that character,' she says. 'I understood both the dark and the light of Lorraine McFly and understood the hilarity of being super sexually attracted to your son. I thought that was frickin' hilarious. I understood the subversive comedy of it.' Thompson has previously worked with Eric Stoltz, who was cast in the lead role of Marty at the behest of Sidney Sheinberg, a Universal executive who had nurtured Spielberg and put Jaws into production. But over weeks of filming, starting in November 1984, it became apparent that Stoltz's serious tone was not working. Gale recalls: 'He wasn't giving us the kind of humour that we thought the character should have. He actually thought the movie turned out to be a tragedy because he ends up in a 1985 where a lot of his life is different. People can argue about that: did the memories of his new past ripple into his brain, did he remember both his lives? That's an interesting conversation to have and it gets more interesting the more beer you drink.' Eventually it fell to Zemeckis to inform Stoltz that his services were no longer required. Gale continues: 'He said he thought that possibly Eric was relieved: it was not like a devastating blow to him. This is just hindsight and speculation but maybe Eric's agents thought that it would be a good career move for him to do a movie like this that had Spielberg involved. Who knows?' Stoltz's abrupt departure came as a shock to the rest of the cast. Thompson says: 'It was horrible. He was my friend and obviously a wonderful actor. Everybody wants to think that making a movie is fun and that we're laughing for the 14 hours we're standing in the middle of a street somewhere. 'But it's also scary because you need to feel like you've made a little family for that brief amount of time. So the minute someone gets fired, you're like, oh wait, this is a big business, this is serious, this is millions of dollars being spent.' Stoltz was replaced by the young Canadian actor Michael J Fox, whom Zemeckis and Gale had wanted in the first place, and several scenes had to be reshot. Fox was simultaneously working on the sitcom Family Ties so was often sleep-deprived. But his boundless charm, frazzled energy and comic timing – including ad libs – were the missing piece of the jigsaw. Thompson comments: 'He is gifted but he also worked extremely hard at his shtick like the great comedians of the 20s, 30s and 40s: the falling over, the double take, the spit take, the physical comedy, the working on a bit for hours and hours like the greats, like Laurel and Hardy and Charlie Chaplin. Michael understood that. 'Being a dancer, I was fascinated and kind of weirdly repelled because it didn't seem like the acting that we were all trying to emulate: the De Niro kind of super reality-based acting that we were in awe of in the 80s, coming out of the great films of the 70s. I feel like Eric Stoltz, who is a brilliant actor, was trying to do more of that. Michael was the face of this new acting, especially comedy acting, which was in a way a throwback and a different energy.' It was this lightness of touch that enabled Fox and Thompson to carry off moments that might otherwise have seemed weird, disturbing and oedipal. When 1950s Lorraine – who has no idea that Marty is her future son – eventually kisses him inside a car, she reports that it is like 'kissing my brother' and the romantic tension dissolves, much to the audience's relief. Thompson says: 'It was a difficult part and it was a very dangerous thread to put through a needle. I have to fall out of love with him just by kissing him and I remember Bob Zemeckis obsessing about that moment. It was also a hard shot to get because it was a vintage car and they couldn't take it apart. Bob was also worried about the moment when I had to fall back in love with George [Marty's father] after he punches Biff. 'For those moments to be so important is part of the beauty of the movie. These are 'small' people; these are not 'great' people; they're not doing 'great' things. These are people who live in a little tiny house in Hill Valley and to make the moments of falling out of love and falling in love so beautiful with that incredible score is fascinating.' Back to the Future was the biggest hit of the year, grossing more than $200m in the US and entering the cultural mainstream. When Doc asks Marty who is president in 1985, Marty replies Ronald Reagan and Brown says in disbelief: 'Ronald Reagan? The actor? Then who's vice-president? Jerry Lewis?' Reagan, a voracious film viewer, was so amused by the joke that he made the projectionist stop and rewind it. He went on to name-check the film and quote its line, 'Where we're going, we don't need roads,' in his 1986 State of the Union address. Thompson, whose daughters are the actors Madelyn Deutch and Zoey Deutch, was amazed by Back to the Future's success. 'But when I look at the movie, I do understand the happy accident of why it's become the movie it's become to generation after generation. The themes are powerful. The execution was amazing. The casting was great. The idea was brilliant. It was a perfect script. Those things don't come together usually.' And if she had her own time machine, where would she go? 'If I could be a man, I might go back to Shakespeare but as a woman you don't want to go anywhere in time. Time has been hard on women. So for me, whenever I'm asked this question, it's not a lighthearted answer. I can only give you a political answer.' The film ends with Doc whisking Marty and girlfriend Jennifer into the DeLorean and taking off into the sky. But Gale points out that the message 'to be continued' was added only for the home video release, as a way to announce a sequel, rather than being in the original theatrical run. Back to the Future Part II, part of which takes place in 2015, brought back most of the main characters including the villain Biff Tannen, who becomes a successful businessman who opens a 27-storey casino and uses his money to gain political influence. Many viewers have drawn a comparison with Donald Trump. Gale explains: 'Biff in the first movie is not based on Donald Trump; Biff is just an archetype bully. When Biff owns a casino, there was a Trump influence in that, absolutely. Trump had to put his name on all of his hotels and his casinos and that's what Biff does too. 'But when people say, oh, Biff was based on Donald Trump, well, no, that wasn't the inspiration for the character. Everybody has a bully in their life and that's who Biff was. There's nothing that resembles Donald Trump in Biff in Part I.' Back to the Future Part III, in which Marty and Doc and thrown back to the old west, was released in 1990. A year later Fox was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease at the age of 29. He went public with his diagnosis in 1998 and became a prominent advocate for research and awareness. He also continued acting, with roles in shows such as The Good Wife and Curb Your Enthusiasm, and in October will publish a Back to the Future memoir entitled Future Boy. Thompson, whose brothers both have Parkinson's, sees Fox twice a year. 'He's endlessly inspiring. He's very smart and he's done the spiritual work, the psychological work on himself to not be bitter about something awful happening to him but also be honest: this sucks.' Time's arrow moves in one direction but Back to the Future found a way to stage a comeback. One night after seeing the Mel Brooks musical The Producers in New York, Zemeckis's wife Leslie suggested that Back to the Future would make a good musical. Gale duly wrote the book and was a producer of the show, which premiered in Manchester in 2020 and has since played in London, New York and around the world. Gale says: 'It was total euphoria. The first time I saw the dress rehearsal with the DeLorean, before we had an audience, I went out of my mind how great it was, and then to see the audience going completely out of their minds with everything was just such a joyous validation. 'I'm so blessed to have a job where I get to make people happy. That's a great thing to be able to do and get paid for that. I don't ever take any of this for granted. I'm having a great time and the idea that Back to the Future is still with us after all these years, as popular as it ever was, is a blessing. I think about it all the time that if we had not put Michael J Fox in the movie, you and I probably wouldn't even be having this conversation right now.' Why, indeed, are we still talking about Back to the Future four decades later? 'Every person in the world wonders, how did I get here, how did my parents meet? The idea that your parents were once children is staggering when you realise it when you're about seven or eight years old. 'Your parents are these godlike creatures, and they're always saying, well, when I was your age, and you're going, what are they talking about, how could they have ever been my age? Then at some point it all comes together. If you have a younger sibling and you're watching them grow up, you realise, oh, my God, my parents were once screw-ups like me!' And if Gale had a time machine, where would he go? 'I don't think I would go to the future because I'd be too scared,' he says. 'We all see what happens when you know too much about the future. My mom, before she was married, was a professional musician, a violinist, and she had a nightclub act in St Louis called Maxine and Her Men. I'd like to travel back in time to 1947 and see my mother performing in a nightclub. That's what I would do.'
The Independent
3 hours ago
- The Independent
Air pollution and herbal medicines could be behind lung cancer in non-smokers, study finds
Air pollution and traditional herbal medicines could be major risk factors contributing to the development of lung cancer in people with no history of smoking, a groundbreaking new study has found. While smoking is a major risk factor for lung cancer, rates of the malignancy appear to be increasing among those who have never smoked, even with tobacco use declining globally. Previous studies have shown that lung cancer disproportionately affects non-smoking women, particularly those with Asian ancestry, and is more prevalent in East Asia than in Western nations. Now, a new study, published on Wednesday in the journal Nature, provides compelling evidence that air pollution and herbal medicines could be behind genetic mutations linked to the development of lung cancer in non-smokers. 'We are seeing this problematic trend that never-smokers are increasingly getting lung cancer, but we haven't understood why,' said Ludmil Alexandrov, an author of the study from the University of California San Diego. 'Our research shows that air pollution is strongly associated with the same types of DNA mutations we typically associate with smoking.' Most lung cancer prevalence studies haven't separated data of smokers from that of non-smokers, providing limited insights into potential causes in those patients. The latest study collected data from never-smokers worldwide and used genomics to find environmental factors likely behind these cancers. 'This is an urgent and growing global problem that we are working to understand regarding never-smokers,' said Maria Teresa Landi, co-author of the study from the US National Cancer Institute. While previous studies have shown a potential link between air pollution and lung cancer in never-smokers, the new research goes further by revealing a genomic link. In this comprehensive study, scientists analysed lung tumours from 871 never-smokers living in 28 regions with different levels of air pollution across Africa, Asia, Europe and North America. Researchers used genome sequencing methods to identify distinct patterns of genetic mutations which act like molecular fingerprints of past exposures. They then compared the genomic data with pollution estimates based on satellite and ground-level measurements of fine particulate matter. This helped them estimate long-term exposure of the patients to air pollution. The study found that never-smokers living in more polluted environments had significantly more mutations in their lung tumours, particularly the kinds which directly promote cancer development. Scientists also found more molecular signatures in this group, which are linked to cancer and serve as a record of all past exposures to mutation-causing environmental factors. For instance, these individuals had a nearly 4-fold increase in a mutational signature molecule linked to tobacco smoking and a 76 per cent increase in another signature linked to ageing. 'What we see is that air pollution is associated with an increase in somatic mutations, including those that fall under known mutational signatures attributed to tobacco smoking and ageing,' said Marcos Díaz-Gay, co-author of the study. Scientists found that the more pollution someone was exposed to, the more mutations were found in their lung tumours, as well as greater signs of their cells undergoing accelerated ageing. Another environmental risk unravelled by the study was aristolochic acid, a known cancer-causing chemical found in some traditional Chinese and Ayurvedic herbal medicines. This chemical, extracted from plants of the birthwort family, was found linked to a signature mutation in lung tumours of never-smokers from Taiwan. Although ingestion of this plant chemical has been linked previously to bladder, gut, kidney, and liver cancers, the latest study is the first to report evidence that it may contribute to lung cancer. 'This raises new concerns about how traditional remedies might unintentionally raise cancer risk,' Dr Landi said. 'It also presents a public health opportunity for cancer prevention, particularly in Asia.' The study also found an intriguing new mutation signature which appears in the lung tumours of most never-smokers but is absent in smokers. 'We don't yet know what's driving it,' Dr Alexandrov said. 'This is something entirely different, and it opens up a whole new area of investigation.'
Medical News Today
5 hours ago
- Medical News Today
Low-fat vegan diet may be better for weight loss than a Mediterranean diet
Dietary acid load has to do with how a person's food patterns contribute to the acid-base balance in the body. Research is ongoing about dietary acid load and how it impacts health outcomes. A recent analysis found that following a low-fat vegan diet may lower dietary acid load and that this effect may help with weight loss. Dietary acid load has become a focus of recent research. It has to do with how diet contributes to the body's acid-base balance.A high dietary acid load is potentially dangerous and may affect components like kidney function and weight. A recent secondary analysis published in Frontiers in Nutrition explored how following a low-fat vegan diet affected dietary acid load and how this related to weight found that compared to the Mediterranean diet, following a low-fat vegan diet led to a lower dietary acid results suggest that decreasing the dietary acid load via this diet may help with weight loss. How a low-fat vegan diet leads to weight lossSome foods contribute to a higher dietary acid load while others decrease it. Study author Hana Kahleova, MD, PhD explained the following to Medical News Today: 'Animal products including meat, fish, eggs, and cheese cause the body to produce more acid, increasing dietary acid load, which is linked to chronic inflammation that disrupts metabolism and can lead to increased body weight. Plant-based diets, on the other hand, which are more alkaline, are associated with weight loss, improved insulin sensitivity, and lower blood pressure.' This research was a secondary analysis of a previous study involving overweight adult participants who followed the Mediterranean diet and a low-fat vegan diet. In the current analysis, researchers sought to look at dietary acid load in these diets and how it related to weight. The original study was of a group of 62 overweight adults. The participants were divided into two groups. One group was on a Mediterranean diet, and the other was on a low-fat vegan diet for 16 weeks. After a 4-week break, the groups switched to the other diet. Participants kept track of what they ate via food diaries at certain weeks, and researchers also had data on physical activity and body composition. Researchers used two scoring systems to calculate participant dietary acid load. The authors explain that one estimation looks at five nutrients, and the other does as well but also takes into account weight and height. Overall, both dietary acid load scores decreased on the low-fat vegan diet but stayed the same on the Mediterranean also found that participants lost weight, likely primarily from decreased body fat, while on the low-fat vegan diet but did not lose weight while on the Mediterranean diet. Researchers also found that changes in dietary acid load were positively associated with weight changes. So, a decrease in dietary acid load was associated with a decrease in body associations did decrease when researchers adjusted 'for changes in energy intake' in the first 16 weeks of the study. However, in the second 16 weeks of the study, the associations were still significant after the adjustment. Thus, researchers conclude that 'compared with the Mediterranean diet, dietary acid load significantly decreased on a vegan diet and was associated with weight loss, independent of energy intake.'Further research required to confirm findingsThis research does have certain limitations. Firstly, the original study had limitations such as a small number of participants, a short intervention time, and data from only one center. However, researchers note that the time on each diet was long enough for adaptation to occur. Since the participants were volunteers, the authors acknowledge that the study sample 'may not represent the general population.' The other major limitation was that the analysis relied on dietary reports from participants. Data on physical activity was also participant-reported. Researchers also acknowledge the risk of attrition in studies about diet and that 16% of participants did not finish the they also note that there was high dietary adherence throughout the study. Kahleova explained that 'future studies can focus on the most effective strategies to alkalize the diet and look at possible links with diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and other chronic diseases.'The authors of the study also note that there is a need for randomized trials that examine how the Mediterranean diet impacts dietary acid load. Mir Ali, MD, a board-certified general surgeon, bariatric surgeon and medical director of MemorialCare Surgical Weight Loss Center at Orange Coast Medical Center in Fountain Valley, CA, who was not involved in the study, also noted that it 'shows that a low-fat vegan diet may be superior to a diet containing animal products; again, further research is required to further elucidate the benefits and mechanism.' Who most benefits from a low-fat vegan diet?This research suggests that diets that contribute to a lower dietary acid load offer certain benefits and that the alkalizing effect of a low-fat vegan diet might help with weight loss. It highlights another potential benefit of following a low-fat vegan diet, which people can do with guidance from dietary experts. Alexander S. Ford, DO, a board-certified osteopathic family physician and registered dietitian, not involved in the current research, noted the following about the study to MNT: 'While a low-fat vegan diet may not be appropriate for every individual, the results of this study showed lower dietary acid loads in low-fat vegan diets versus the Mediterranean diet, a benefit linked to weight loss, independent of caloric intake, while promoting an alkalizing effect on the body that could benefit individuals with chronic diseases like morbid obesity and other conditions such as gout, arterial diseases, and rheumatoid arthritis, that have pro-inflammatory linkages.' Ford also noted that the study also supports the importance of following a well-balanced diet: 'This study also reemphasizes the importance of consuming a balanced diet, adequate in fruits, vegetables, and other plant-based foods. This emphasis should reassure you that regardless of your diet preference, a balanced diet is good for maintaining great health.'
