Latest news with #Lagrange
Mint
6 days ago
- Science
- Mint
Webb telescope discovers its first-ever alien exoplanet. Here's what we know
The James Webb Space Telescope, launched into space in 2021, has directly imaged and discovered a young gas giant exoplanet, which is approximately the size of Saturn, nearly 110 light years away from Earth in the constellation Antlia, reported the news agency Reuters, citing official researchers aware of the development. According to the report, this is the first time that the deep space telescope has discovered an alien exoplanet which was not previously documented by humans. Since the telescope's launch in 2021, the high-tech space equipment has gathered valuable data on various already-known planets beyond our solar system and early universe data. Scientists call these distant planets exoplanets. The Webb telescope is a highly capable piece of space equipment that can see distant planets in terms of light years. The new alien exoplanet is situated nearly 110 light years away from Earth, where every light year, the distance travelled by a ray of light in a year, is 9.5 trillion kilometres, according to the agency report. Most of the 5,900 exoplanets discovered since the 1990s have been detected through indirect methods, like the transit method, which observes the slight dimming of a star's light when a planet passes in front of it. The news report also highlighted that less than 2 per cent of the earlier exoplanets have been directly imaged, like the Webb telescope's current finding. The plant was found using a French-produced chronograph, a device which is used to block out the bright light from a star, equipped on the Webb telescope's Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI). The new exoplanet which is approximately the size of out Saturn orbits its host star called TWA 7 at a distance 52 times greater than Earth's orbital distance around the Sun, as per the agency report. 'Webb opens a new window - in terms of mass and the distance of a planet to the star - of exoplanets that had not been accessible to observations so far. This is important to explore the diversity of exoplanetary systems and understand how they form and evolve,' said astronomer Anne-Marie Lagrange, cited by the news agency. Lagrange also highlighted how the indirect methods provide incredible information for planets close to their stars. However, the imaging is needed to detect and characterise planets which are further away in space. According to the agency report, the star and planet found in the research are practically newborns with about 6 million years in age, compared to our solar system, which is 4.5 billion years old. However, the report also highlighted that the researchers do not yet know the composition of the exoplanet's atmosphere, are are looking forward to the future findings of the Webb telescope to determine an answer. 'Looking forward, I do hope the projects of direct imaging of Earth-like planets and searches for possible signs of life will become a reality,' said Lagrange, as cited in the news agency's report.
Yahoo
7 days ago
- Science
- Yahoo
Smallest Alien World Ever Seen Spotted by JWST in Stunning First
JWST has made another breakthrough. Around a newly formed star just 111 light-years away, the powerful space telescope has officially discovered its first exoplanet. It's called TWA-7b, and it's the smallest world that humanity has ever directly imaged. TWA-7b is a cold gas giant with about a third of the mass of Jupiter, orbiting its red dwarf host star at a staggering distance – 52 times farther than Earth orbits the Sun. In our Solar System, that distance would place TWA-7b out in the Kuiper Belt, far beyond the orbit of Pluto. Related: Stunning Direct Images of Alien Worlds Are Detailed Enough to Reveal Clouds The planet isn't the only remarkable thing here. So detailed are the observations that a team led by astronomer Anne-Marie Lagrange of the Paris Observatory in France has been able to confirm predictions about how planets form, and their interactions with their environment. The discovery, the researchers say, demonstrates the promise of JWST, not just for studying exoplanets indirectly, but for finding and studying them directly, beyond the range other instruments can reach. "The present results show that the JWST Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) has opened up a new window in the study of sub-Jupiter-mass planets using direct imaging," they write in their paper. "Indeed, TWA-7b (about 100 times the mass of Earth) is at least 10 times lighter than the exoplanets directly imaged so far, and planets as light as 25 to 30 Earth masses could have been detected if present." To date, nearly 6,000 exoplanets have been confirmed, out there in the Milky Way galaxy. That's pretty exciting, considering how hard they are to discern. They're very small, very dim, and very far away; the vast majority of them have only ever been measured indirectly, based on changes their presence wreaks on the light of their stars. We've only actually directly seen around 80 exoplanets. The star TWA-7 is perfectly positioned in space for attempting to directly image an exoplanet. It's around 6.4 million years old, which is the star equivalent of a toddler – so young that it's still surrounded by a leftover disk of the material that fed the baby star as it grew. It's from these disks that planets are born. Material clumps together as it orbits the star, gradually building up until there's enough mass to constitute a world. This process creates gaps in the disk where the new planet carves out a space and creates rings, 'shepherding' the material on either side of the gap, a lot like the shepherd moons of the rings of Saturn. Well, so we think. As Lagrange and her colleagues note, "no planet responsible for these features has been detected yet." TWA-7 is oriented in such a way that its pole is pointing at Earth. That means that astronomers can see the full disk of material around it, divided into three distinct rings. Lagrange and her colleagues pointed JWST at this disk, looking to see if they could identify an exoplanet in one of the gaps between the rings, creating a cavity for itself in the material around TWA-7. "We unambiguously detected a source 1.5 arcseconds from the star, which is best interpreted as a cold, sub-Jupiter-mass planet," they write. Their analysis suggests that this world is about the same mass as Saturn. It's a marvelous discovery, one that dramatically extends the lower mass range for directly detectable exoplanets. It's also possibly only scratching the surface; the researchers believe that JWST is capable of observing worlds that are much less massive than TWA-7b. The telescope is often used to analyze exoplanet atmospheres based on the way starlight changes when it passes through. Direct imaging is an entirely different way of studying exoplanets that can reveal details that are difficult to obtain in any other way. The researchers conclude that TWA-7b is an exciting prospect for further study. "TWA-7b is very well suited for further detailed dynamical modelling of disk-planet interactions," they observe. "As it is angularly well resolved from the star, TWA-7b is suited for direct spectroscopic investigations, providing the opportunity to study the interior and the atmosphere of a non-irradiated sub-Jupiter-mass, cold (about 320 K) exoplanet, and start comparative studies with our much older and cooler Solar System giants." The research has been published in Nature. Record-Sized Comet Seen Belching Jets From Surface as It Heads Our Way Behold! World's Largest Camera Snaps Millions of Galaxies in First Pics 2032 'City-Killer' Impact Threatens Earth's Satellites, Study Finds
Reuters
7 days ago
- Science
- Reuters
For first time, Webb telescope discovers an alien planet
WASHINGTON, June 25 (Reuters) - In addition to providing a trove of information about the early universe, the James Webb Space Telescope since its 2021 launch has obtained valuable data on various already-known planets beyond our solar system, called exoplanets. Now, for the first time, Webb has discovered an exoplanet not previously known. Webb has directly imaged a young gas giant planet roughly the size of Saturn, our solar system's second-largest planet, orbiting a star smaller than the sun located about 110 light-years from Earth in the constellation Antlia, researchers said. A light-year is the distance light travels in a year, 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km). Most of the roughly 5,900 exoplanets discovered since the 1990s have been detected using indirect methods, such as through observation of the slight dimming of a star's light when a planet passes in front of it, called the transit method. Less than 2% of them have been directly imaged, as Webb did with the newly identified planet. While this planet is large when considered in the context of our solar system, it is actually the least massive one ever discovered through direct imaging - 10 times less massive than the previous record holder. This speaks to the sensitivity of Webb's instruments. This discovery was achieved using a French-produced coronagraph, a device that blocks out the bright light from a star, installed on Webb's Mid-Infrared Instrument, or MIRI. "Webb opens a new window - in terms of mass and the distance of a planet to the star - of exoplanets that had not been accessible to observations so far. This is important to explore the diversity of exoplanetary systems and understand how they form and evolve," said astronomer Anne-Marie Lagrange of the French research agency CNRS and LIRA/Observatoire de Paris, lead author of the study published on Wednesday in the journal Nature, opens new tab. The planet orbits its host star, called TWA 7, at a distance about 52 times greater than Earth's orbital distance from the sun. To put that in perspective, our solar system's outermost planet Neptune orbits about 30 times further from the sun than Earth. The transit method of discovering exoplanets is particularly useful for spotting those orbiting close to their host star rather than much further out like the newly identified one. "Indirect methods provide incredible information for planets close to their stars. Imaging is needed to robustly detect and characterize planets further away, typically 10 times the Earth- to-sun distance," Lagrange said. The birth of a planetary system begins with a large cloud of gas and dust - called a molecular cloud - that collapses under its own gravity to form a central star. Leftover material spinning around the star in what is called a protoplanetary disk forms planets. The star and the planet in this research are practically newborns - about 6 million years old, compared to the age of the sun and our solar system of roughly 4.5 billion years. Because of the angle at which this planetary system is being observed - essentially looking at it from above rather than from the side - the researchers were able to discern the structure of the remaining disk. It has two broad concentric ring-like structures made up of rocky and dusty material and one narrow ring in which the planet is sitting. The researchers do not yet know the composition of the planet's atmosphere, though future Webb observations may provide an answer. They also are not certain whether the planet, being as young as it is, is still gaining mass by accumulating additional material surrounding it. While this planet is the smallest ever directly imaged, it is still much more massive than rocky planets like Earth that might be good candidates in the search for life beyond our solar system. Even with its tremendous capabilities of observing the cosmos in near-infrared and mid-infrared wavelengths, Webb is still not able to directly image Earth-sized exoplanets. "Looking forward, I do hope the projects of direct imaging of Earth-like planets and searches for possible signs of life will become a reality," Lagrange said.
Scoop
22-04-2025
- Science
- Scoop
New Study Reveals How Solar Coronal Holes Spray Solar Wind Like A Sun Garden Hose
Press Release – Skoltech A pioneering study led by solar physicists has revealed how coronal holes propel fast solar wind streams of charged particles that race across our solar system. Scientists from Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology, together with scientists from the University of Graz, Kanzelhöhe Observatory, and Columbia University, have discovered how coronal holes — vast magnetic windows in the Sun's corona — launch fast solar wind streams into space at supersonic speeds, shaping their flow throughout the heliosphere. These findings set the stage for the upcoming Vigil mission to Lagrange point L5 — a dedicated solar sentinel that will monitor our dynamic Sun, transforming deep-space observations into unprecedented early warnings of solar storms to protect critical infrastructure on Earth and in orbit. The study's findings are published in Scientific Reports, Nature. The Sun doesn't just shine — it blows. A relentless stream of charged particles, known as the solar wind, surges outward at hundreds of kilometers per second, drenching Earth and the entire solar system in a flood of electrons, protons, and helium nuclei. But this isn't a smooth breeze — it's a turbulent river with fast and slow currents that spark dazzling auroras and disruptive geomagnetic storms. The fastest streams come from coronal holes — dark, cooler patches in the Sun's outer atmosphere where magnetic fields stretch open and high-speed solar wind streams can escape from the Sun into interplanetary space. Yet how exactly these holes shape the solar wind's behavior remains an open question. When high-speed solar wind streams collide with slower solar wind, they create massive structures called corotating interaction regions that spiral outward as the Sun rotates. Since the Sun rotates every 27 days, a single coronal hole can bombard us repeatedly — a celestial metronome of space weather. A pioneering study led by solar physicists has revealed how coronal holes propel fast solar wind streams of charged particles that race across our solar system. The research also delivers a major advance in space weather forecasting, extending prediction lead times from hours to days. Using a unique observational vantage point at the L5 Lagrange point (60° behind Earth in orbit), scientists can now better predict when these solar winds will reach Earth. The team solved a key puzzle — why solar wind measurements differ between L5 and Earth-orbiting L1 observatories. They traced the variations to three critical factors — the combined effect of smaller coronal holes, their precise locations on the Sun's surface, and the latitudinal position of spacecraft detecting the solar wind. These findings underscore the importance of future missions to L5 and L4 Lagrange points, like ESA's Vigil, to improve early warnings for geomagnetic storms — helping protect satellites, aviation, and power grids from disruptive space weather. 'Imagine watering your garden with a hose,' explains lead author Associate Professor Tatiana Podladchikova, who heads the Engineering Center at Skoltech. 'If you stand directly in front of the stream, you get hit hard. But if you're off to the side, you only catch splashes. This 'garden hose effect' explains why satellites directly aligned with a solar wind stream measure higher speeds than those at an angle. Our study shows this effect is most pronounced for smaller coronal holes at higher solar latitudes, and depends strongly on the latitudinal separation between spacecraft. In contrast, larger coronal holes deliver solar wind more uniformly across the heliosphere.' These findings will not only improve space weather forecasting and advance the fundamental understanding of the solar-terrestrial environment but also underscore the importance of continued exploration from diverse vantage points like L5 and L4 to fully unravel the Sun's influence on the Solar System, enriching the broader field of heliophysics and space exploration. Skoltech is a private international university in Russia, cultivating a new generation of leaders in technology, science, and business. As a factory of technologies, it conducts research in breakthrough fields and promotes technological innovation to solve critical problems that face Russia and the world. Skoltech focuses on six priority areas: life sciences, health, and agro; telecommunications, photonics, and quantum technologies; artificial intelligence; advanced materials and engineering; energy efficiency and the energy transition; and advanced studies. Established in 2011 in collaboration with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Skoltech was listed among the world's top 100 young universities by the Nature Index in its both editions (2019, 2021). On the Institute ranks as Russian university No. 2 overall and No. 1 for genetics and materials science. In the recent SCImago Institutions Rankings, Skoltech placed first nationwide for computer science. Website:
Atlantic
23-03-2025
- Health
- Atlantic
An ‘Impossible' Disease Outbreak in the Alps
In March 2009, after a long night on duty at the hospital, Emmeline Lagrange took a deep breath and prepared to place a devastating phone call. Lagrange, a neurologist, had diagnosed a 42-year-old woman with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS. The woman lived in a small village in the French Alps, an hour and a half drive away from Lagrange's office in Grenoble Alpes University Hospital. Because ALS is rare, Lagrange expected that the patient's general practitioner, Valerie Foucault, had never seen a case before. Snow fell outside Lagrange's window as she got ready to describe how ALS inevitably paralyzes and kills its victims. But to her surprise, as soon as she shared the diagnosis, Foucault responded, 'I know this disease very well, because she is the fourth in my village.' ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease, occurs in roughly two to three people out of every 100,000 in Europe. (The rate is slightly higher in the United States.) But every so often, hot spots emerge. Elevated ALS rates have been observed around a lagoon in France, surrounding a lake in New Hampshire, within a single apartment building in Montreal, and on the eastern—but not western—flank of Italy's Mount Etna. Such patterns have confounded scientists, who have spent 150 years searching for what causes the disease. Much of the recent research has focused on the genetics of ALS, but clusters provocatively suggest that environmental factors have a leading role. And each new cluster offers scientists a rare chance to clarify what those environmental influences may be—if they can study it fast enough. Many clusters fade away as mysteriously as they once appeared. After the call, Lagrange was uneasy; she had a hunch about how much work lay ahead of her. For the next decade, she and a team of scientists investigated the cluster in the Alps, which eventually grew to include 16 people—a total 10 times higher than the area's small population should have produced. Even during that first call, when Lagrange knew about only four cases of ALS, she felt dazed by the implications, and by Foucault's desperate plea for help. If something in the village was behind the disturbing numbers, Foucault had no idea what it was. 'She was really upset,' Lagrange remembers. 'She said to me, 'This is impossible; you must stop this.'' For some people, the trouble begins in the throat. As their muscles waste, swallowing liquids becomes a strenuous activity. Others may first notice difficulty moving an arm or a leg. 'Every day, we see that they lose something,' Foucault said of her patients. 'You lose a finger, or you lose your laugh.' Eventually, enough motor neurons in the brain or spinal cord die that people simply cannot breathe. Lou Gehrig died two years after his diagnosis, when he was just 37. Stephen Hawking, an anomaly, lived with ALS until he was 76. Five to 10 percent of people with ALS have a family member with the disease. In the 2000s, advancements in DNA sequencing led to a swell of genetic research that found that about two-thirds of those familial cases are connected to a handful of genetic mutations. But only one in 10 cases of ALS in which patients have no family history of the disease can be connected to genetic abnormalities. 'What we have to then explain is how, in the absence of genetic mutation, you get to the same destination,' Neil Schneider, the director of Columbia's Eleanor and Lou Gehrig ALS Center, told me. Scientists have come up with several hypotheses for how ALS develops, each more complicated and harder to study than genetics alone. One suggests that ALS is caused by a combination of genetic disposition and environmental exposures throughout a lifetime. Another suggests that the disease develops after one person receives six cumulative 'hits,' which can be genetic mutations, exposures to toxins, and perhaps even lifestyle factors such as smoking. Each time a cluster appears, researchers have tried to pin down the exact environmental hazards, professions, and activities that might be linked to it. After World War II, a neurodegenerative disease that looked just like ALS—though some patients also showed features of Parkinson's and dementia—surged in Guam, predominantly among the native Chamorro people. 'Imagine walking into a village where 25 percent of the people are dying from ALS,' says Paul Alan Cox, an ethnobotanist who studied the outbreak. 'It was like an Agatha Christie novel: Who's the murderer?' Early research tried to pin the deaths on an unlikely culprit: the highly toxic cycad plant and its seeds, which locals ground into flour to make tortillas. Cox and his colleagues hypothesize that human cells mistake a compound called BMAA found in the plant for another amino acid, leading to misfolded proteins in the brain. Peter Spencer, an environmental neuroscientist at Oregon Health & Science University, has argued for a different explanation: The body converts cycasin, a compound also found in the plant's seeds, into a toxic chemical that can cause DNA damage and, eventually, neurodegeneration. Each theory faced its own criticism, and a consensus was never reached—except for perhaps an overarching tacit agreement that the environment was somehow integral to the story. By the end of the 20th century, the Guam cluster had all but vanished. Genetic mutations are precise; the world is messy. This is partly why ALS research still focuses on genes, Evelyn Talbott, an environmental epidemiologist at the University of Pittsburgh, told me. It's also why clusters, muddled as they might be, are so valuable: They give scientists the chance to find what's lurking in the mess. Montchavin was a mining town until 1886, when the mine closed, leaving the village largely deserted. In 1973, it was connected to a larger network of winter-tourism destinations in the Alps. On a sunny December afternoon, the week before ski season officially began, I met Foucault outside of the church in the center of Bellentre, a town of 900 whose borders include Montchavin and neighboring villages. The mountains loomed over us, not yet capped with much snow, as she greeted me in a puffer coat. She led me briskly up a steep hill, chatting in a mix of French and English, until we arrived at her home, which she occasionally uses as an office to see patients. Foucault made us a pot of black tea, then set down a notepad of scrawled diagnoses and death dates on the table beside her. The first person Foucault knew with ALS lived a stone's throw from where we were sitting, in a house down the hill; he had been diagnosed in 1991. The second case was a ski instructor, Daniel, who lived in Montchavin and had a chalet near Les Coches, a ski village five minutes up a switchback road by car. Daniel, whose family requested that I use only his first name for medical privacy, had told Foucault in 2000 that he was having trouble speaking, so she'd sent him to a larynx specialist. When the specialist found nothing wrong with his throat, Daniel was referred to a neurologist in Grenoble, who diagnosed him with ALS. In 2005, after Foucault heard that the husband of one of her general-medicine patients had been diagnosed with ALS, she called her father, a heart doctor in Normandy. 'It's not normal,' he told her. A few years later, she saw one of her patients, the 42-year-old woman, in the village center with her arm hanging limp from her body. Even before the woman received her ALS diagnosis from Lagrange, Foucault suspected the worst. After her call with Foucault, Lagrange assembled a team of neurologists and collaborators from the French government to search for an environmental spark that might have set off the cluster in Montchavin. They tested for heavy metals in the drinking water, toxins in the soil, and pollutants in the air. When the village was turned into a ski destination in the 1970s, builders had repurposed wood from old train cars to build garden beds—so the team checked the environment for creosote, a chemical used in the manufacture of those train cars. They screened for compounds from an artificial snow used in the '80s. They checked gardens, wells, and even the brain of one deceased ALS patient. Years passed, and nothing significant was found. The day after I had tea with Foucault, I visited Lagrange at the hospital. Her voice faltered as she ruffled through the piles of papers from their investigation on her desk. She'd cared for most of Montchavin's ALS patients from their diagnosis to death. She worked in Montchavin on the weekends and took her family vacations there. 'I felt responsible for them,' she said. 'People were telling me, This is genetic. They all live together; they must be cousins. I knew it was not so.' Lagrange's team had tested the genomes of 12 people in the Montchavin cluster, and none had mutations that were associated with ALS. Nor did any of the patients have parents, grandparents, or great-grandparents with ALS. But their lives did overlap in other meaningful ways. The first Montchavin cases worked together as ski instructors and had chalets in a wooded patch of land called L'Orgère, up the mountain. Many of them hiked together; others simply enjoyed spending time in nature. 'We thought they must have something in common, something that they would eat or drink,' Lagrange told me, sitting in her desk chair in a white lab coat and thick brown-framed glasses. She handed me a daunting packet: a questionnaire she'd developed for the ALS patients, their families, and hundreds of people without the disease who lived in the area. The survey, which took about three hours to complete, asked about lifestyle, eating habits, hobbies, jobs, everywhere they had lived, and more. It revealed that the ALS patients consistently ate three foods that the controls didn't: game, dandelion greens, and wild mushrooms. Lagrange's team didn't immediately suspect the mushrooms. But Spencer, the environmental neuroscientist in Oregon, did after he saw one of Lagrange's colleagues present on the Montchavin cluster at a 2017 conference. Having researched the role of the cycad seed in the Guam cluster, Spencer knew that some mushrooms contain toxins that can powerfully affect the nervous system. Spencer joined the research group, and in 2018, he accompanied Lagrange to Montchavin to distribute more surveys and conduct in-person interviews about the victims' and other locals' diets— the pair had particular interest in people's mushroom consumption. From the responses, the team learned that the ALS patients were not the only mushroom foragers in town, but they shared an affinity for a particular species that local interviewees without ALS said they never touched: the false morel. A false morel looks like a brain that has been left out in the sun. Its cap is a shriveled mass of brown folds, darker than the caramel hue of the true morel. One species, Gyromitra esculenta, grew around Montchavin and was especially abundant near the ski chalets in spring if enough snow had fallen the preceding winter. France has a rich foraging culture, and the false morel was just one of many species mushroom enthusiasts in Montchavin might pick up to sauté with butter and herbs. The false morel contains gyromitrin, a toxin that sickens some number of foragers around the world every year; half of the ALS victims in Montchavin reported a time when they had acute mushroom poisoning. And according to Spencer, the human body may also metabolize gyromitrin into a compound that, over time, might lead to similar DNA damage as cycad seeds. No one can yet say that the false morel caused ALS in Montchavin; Lagrange plans to test the mushroom or its toxin in animal models to help establish whether it leads to neurodegeneration. Nevertheless, Spencer feels that the connection between Montchavin and Guam is profound—that the cluster in the Alps is another indication that environmental triggers can be strongly associated with neurodegenerative disease. Once you start looking, the sheer variety of potential environmental catalysts for ALS becomes overwhelming: pesticides, heavy metals, air pollution, bodies of water with cyanobacteria blooms. Military service is associated with higher ALS risk, as is being a professional football player, a painter, a farmer, or a mechanic. Because of how wide-ranging these findings are, some researchers doubt the utility of environmental research for people with ALS. Maybe the causes are too varied to add up to a meaningful story about ALS, and each leads to clusters in a different way. Or perhaps, Jeffrey Rothstein, a Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine neurologist, told me, a cluster means nothing; it's simply a rare statistical aberration. 'Patients are always looking for some reason why they have such a terrible disease,' he said. 'There's been plenty of blips like this over time in ALS, and each one has its own little thought of what's causing it, and they've all gone nowhere.' 'A lot of people look askew to the idea that there are clusters,' Eva Feldman, a neurologist at the University of Michigan, told me. But she sees evidence of clusters all the time in her practice. Once, she saw three women with ALS who'd grown up within blocks of one another in the Grand Rapids area. Her research has shown an association between ALS and organic pollutants, particularly pesticides. Feldman thinks that the importance and scope of environmental triggers for ALS can be pinpointed only by investigating clusters more thoroughly. To start, she told me, doctors should be required to disclose every case of ALS to state officials. Feldman is also planning what she says is the first-ever prospective study on ALS in the U.S., following 4,000 healthy production workers in Michigan. She believes that clusters have significance and that because doctors can't do much to stop ALS once it starts, 'we would be naive to throw out any new ideas' about how to prevent it from occurring in the first place. Even for the people whose lives were upended by the Montchavin cluster, the idea that mushrooms could be linked to such suffering can be difficult to accept. Those who ate them knew the mushrooms could cause unpleasant side effects, but they believed that cooking them removed most of the danger. When I asked Claude Houbart, whose father, Gilles, died in 2019, about his mushroom habits, she called her mother and put her on speakerphone. Claude's mother said she knew Gilles ate false morels, but she never cooked them for herself or the family—simply because she didn't want to risk upset stomachs. Daniel, Foucault's second ALS patient, also kept his foraging hobby out of the home. He never ate false morels in front of his wife, Brigitte, though she knew he picked wild mushrooms with friends. 'I am a bit reluctant when it comes to mushrooms; I would have never cooked them,' Brigitte told me, sitting at her kitchen table in Montchavin, surrounded by photos of Daniel and their now-adult children. After Daniel died in 2008, Brigitte and her family spread his ashes in the woods where he'd spent so much of his time. 'He didn't want a tomb like everyone else,' she said. 'When we walk in the forest, we think about him.' Hervé Fino, a retired vacation-company manager who has lived in the Alps for 41 years, learned to forage in Montchavin. Bundled in a plaid overcoat inside a wood-paneled rental chalet, Fino recalled local foragers telling him that false morels were edible as long as they were well cooked, but he never ate the mushrooms himself, fearing their digestive effects. Fino told me about one of his friends who regularly gathered false morels, and once made himself a false-morel omelet when his wife was out of town. 'He was sick for two days, very ill,' Fino said. Later, that same friend was diagnosed with ALS. He died by suicide. In a gruff voice, Fino speculated about what besides the mushroom might have caused the disease. His friend fell into an icy-cold brook two days before he was diagnosed—'Perhaps the shock triggered the disease?' Another woman owned a failing restaurant next to the cable car—maybe the stress had something to do with it. He shrugged his shoulders. Those events didn't seem right either, not momentous enough to so dramatically alter someone's fate. Maybe no single explanation ever will. Claude told me she understands why people are skeptical. 'Eating a mushroom and then dying in that way?' she said. 'Come on.' Before leaving Montchavin, I walked through L'Orgère, the area where the first ALS patients had their ski cabins. The windows were dark, and below, the village of Montchavin was mostly empty before the tourist season began. Clumps of snow started to fall, hopefully enough to satisfy the skiers. Recent winters in the French Alps have been warm and dry—not the right conditions for false morels. 'There are no more Gyromitra in Montchavin,' Lagrange said. In her view, Montchavin has joined the ranks of ALS clusters come and gone; no one has been diagnosed there since 2019, and it's been longer since Lagrange's team has turned up a fresh false-morel specimen. Even so, on my walk, I couldn't help but scan for mushrooms, nor could I shake the feeling that my surroundings were not as benign as I'd once believed. Fino said he still keeps an eye out for false morels too. He would never pluck them from the ground to bring home, and yet, he hasn't stopped looking. One day in 2023, after he parked his car near a ski lift, his gaze caught on a lumpy spot near his feet. Two dark-brown mushrooms stuck out of the damp soil.
