May 30, 2024: We need to move beyond hurricane categories, a new way for black holes to form, and life on Iceland's erupting volcano. —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor | | | • The volcano near Grindavík, Iceland, is erupting again. Here's what life's like living on an active volcano. | 10 min read | | | • Hundreds of thousands more Black people in the U.S. would qualify for a lung disease diagnosis and disability payments if lung-function measurements weren't adjusted for race, a new study shows. | 5 min read | | | • Nearly 90 percent of avocados smashed onto brunch-lovers' toasts come from Mexico. And growing them is hurting the environment. | 5 min read | | | The Atlantic hurricane season opens on Saturday, and scientists expect it to be a brutal one. NOAA is predicting 17 to 25 named storms before November 30—the most the agency has ever forecast this early in the year. If those storms hit land, they can endanger people's lives. We tend to talk about hurricanes in terms of their Saffir-Simpson category (on which the worst storms are Category 5), which reflects only peak sustained wind speeds. Experts want less emphasis on category and more communication of specific hazards, such as NOAA's recent launch of a storm surge warning system.
Why this matters: When people in the path of a hurricane evaluate risk based solely on the storm's Saffir-Simpson category, they can be left vulnerable to other threats, particularly flooding. Some 90 percent of hurricane fatalities between 2013 and 2023 came from water hazards, rather than wind hazards.
What the experts say: "Hurricanes aren't just the wind; they're not just the surge; they're not just the rain," says Phil Klotzbach, an atmospheric scientist at Colorado State University. "All these threats are coming from the same system." --Meghan Bartels, news reporter | | | Last year, astronomers detected powerful X-rays coming from a disk of gas swirling at the heart of a distant galaxy. It turned out to be a giant black hole with a mass approximately equal to its entire host galaxy (called UHZ1). The black hole appeared to have formed a mere 470 million years after the big bang. Black holes traditionally form from massive stellar explosions and then "feed" on surrounding stars. But at such a young age, there wouldn't have been sufficient time for large enough stars to fuel this black hole's formation. How did it get so big so fast?
How it works: Nearly 20 years ago, astrophysicist Priyamvada Natarajan proposed another way that black holes might form: a swirling disk of gas, radiated by nearby stars, could collapse directly into a black hole. And what would astronomer's expect to see if this prediction was accurate? An extremely bright, actively feeding black hole that essentially outshines all the stars in its galaxy–precisely what NASA's Chandra X-ray telescope and the James Webb Telescope spotted last year in UHZ1.
What the experts say: "By complete coincidence, the spectrum from one galaxy matched unbelievably well with the prediction plots we made in 2017 of a hypothetical detection," Natarajan told Scientific American. "It was gobsmacking. It checks off every predicted property. It's very compelling evidence that direct-collapse black holes do form in the early universe. This is no longer just a speculation." | | |  | The most distant black hole ever detected in X-rays is located in the galaxy UHZ1, imaged with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory (purple) and infrared data from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (red, green, blue).X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO/Ákos Bogdán; Infrared: NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/L. Frattare & K. Arcand | | | • Voyager 1 just keeps on truckin', writes Saswato R. Das, a science and technology writer. Despite speculation by its creators that the craft's mechanical scan platform and other detectors might not last, Voyager 1 continues to send back data, exceeding its original mission of observing the solar system. "Thousands of years from now, maybe when the human race has left this planet, Voyager 1, the tiny little spacecraft that could, will still continue its inexorable journey to the stars," he says. | 4 min read | | | I wonder how likely it is that news coverage of hurricanes will ever let go of the fixation on "category" for storm classification. Other risk warnings (storm surge, flooding) may prove more useful, but there's something so catchy about hurricane categorization! Ideas that hang on, perhaps outliving their usefulness or even scientific accuracy, might be called "dead dogma," a term that 19th century English philosopher John Stuart Mill coined for beliefs that are so ingrained that we stop questioning them altogether. This is where science truly shines--by casting fresh doubt, fresh findings and new understanding on even our most socially accepted ideas. | —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor | | Subscribe to this and all of our newsletters . | | | | Scientific American
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