Park rangers issue warning after making unexpected discovery nearly 30 miles from ocean: 'There are indeed changes in behavior'
A park ranger and their group of tourists recently found something completely unexpected in the middle of the Chilean Patagonia: a fur seal.
And not just a little off course: The marine animal was spotted nearly 30 miles from the ocean.
According to El País, the South American fur seal was discovered by a park ranger with a group of tourists at Torres del Paine National Park, wandering alone in a place where it didn't belong. These animals usually live by the sea, where they hunt fish and rest on rocky shores. So finding one far from water, out in the dry open land, was a big surprise.
Thankfully, the seal wasn't injured. It was a bit dehydrated and confused, but otherwise pretty good.
Still, experts are concerned. "There are indeed changes in behavior," said Mauricio Ruiz, regional director of the National Forest Corporation, per El País.
This is the first time a fur seal has been found so far inland in this part of Argentina. And it's raising some serious questions.
When animals suddenly start showing up in strange places, it's usually not by accident. While some movements are part of natural patterns (animals tend to go where the food is), there's growing concern that rising temperatures, changing water conditions, and shifting food sources are pushing animals to explore new areas.
These types of changes don't just affect animals: When ecosystems start falling apart, it can lead to food shortages and more extreme weather, which are problems that hit closer to home for all of us.
While you may not live near Patagonia or the ocean, there are still meaningful ways you can support wildlife and protect ecosystems close to home.
One of the most effective steps you can take is to support local conservation efforts. A lot of communities have organizations working to protect the environment, and these groups often rely on volunteers, donations, or public support to keep their programs going.
Should the government be paying people to hunt invasive species?
Definitely
Depends on the animal
No way
Just let people do it for free
Click your choice to see results and speak your mind.
You can also make your outdoor space more wildlife-friendly. If you have a yard, consider replacing traditional grass lawns with native plants. Native species require less water, support local pollinators like bees and butterflies, and provide shelter for birds and small animals. Even small changes (like planting a few wildflowers or letting part of your yard grow naturally) can help create mini-refuges for wildlife in your neighborhood.
Finally, stay informed and speak up. Learn about how climate change and habitat loss affect the species around you, and keep talking about it.
It might be just one seal this time, but it's a reminder: Nature is trying to tell us something.
Join our free newsletter for good news and useful tips, and don't miss this cool list of easy ways to help yourself while helping the planet.
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Yahoo
13-06-2025
- Yahoo
Park rangers issue warning after making unexpected discovery nearly 30 miles from ocean: 'There are indeed changes in behavior'
A park ranger and their group of tourists recently found something completely unexpected in the middle of the Chilean Patagonia: a fur seal. And not just a little off course: The marine animal was spotted nearly 30 miles from the ocean. According to El País, the South American fur seal was discovered by a park ranger with a group of tourists at Torres del Paine National Park, wandering alone in a place where it didn't belong. These animals usually live by the sea, where they hunt fish and rest on rocky shores. So finding one far from water, out in the dry open land, was a big surprise. Thankfully, the seal wasn't injured. It was a bit dehydrated and confused, but otherwise pretty good. Still, experts are concerned. "There are indeed changes in behavior," said Mauricio Ruiz, regional director of the National Forest Corporation, per El País. This is the first time a fur seal has been found so far inland in this part of Argentina. And it's raising some serious questions. When animals suddenly start showing up in strange places, it's usually not by accident. While some movements are part of natural patterns (animals tend to go where the food is), there's growing concern that rising temperatures, changing water conditions, and shifting food sources are pushing animals to explore new areas. These types of changes don't just affect animals: When ecosystems start falling apart, it can lead to food shortages and more extreme weather, which are problems that hit closer to home for all of us. While you may not live near Patagonia or the ocean, there are still meaningful ways you can support wildlife and protect ecosystems close to home. One of the most effective steps you can take is to support local conservation efforts. A lot of communities have organizations working to protect the environment, and these groups often rely on volunteers, donations, or public support to keep their programs going. Should the government be paying people to hunt invasive species? Definitely Depends on the animal No way Just let people do it for free Click your choice to see results and speak your mind. You can also make your outdoor space more wildlife-friendly. If you have a yard, consider replacing traditional grass lawns with native plants. Native species require less water, support local pollinators like bees and butterflies, and provide shelter for birds and small animals. Even small changes (like planting a few wildflowers or letting part of your yard grow naturally) can help create mini-refuges for wildlife in your neighborhood. Finally, stay informed and speak up. Learn about how climate change and habitat loss affect the species around you, and keep talking about it. It might be just one seal this time, but it's a reminder: Nature is trying to tell us something. Join our free newsletter for good news and useful tips, and don't miss this cool list of easy ways to help yourself while helping the planet.
Scientific American
12-06-2025
- Scientific American
This Revolutionary New Telescope Will Observe the Whole Sky Every Three Days
Astrophysics is, as many astrophysicists will tell you, the story of everything. The nature and evolution of stars, galaxies, galaxy clusters, dark matter and dark energy—and our attempts to understand these things—allow us to pose the ultimate questions and reach for the ultimate answers. But the practitioners of these arts, as the late astronomer Vera Rubin wrote in her autobiography's preface, 'too seldom stress the enormity of our ignorance.' 'No one promised that we would live in the era that would unravel the mysteries of the cosmos,' Rubin wrote. And yet a new observatory named for her, opening its eyes soon, will get us closer than ever before to unraveling some of them. This will be possible because the Vera C. Rubin Observatory will do something revolutionary, rare and relatively old-fashioned: it will just look out at the universe and see what there is to see. Perched on a mountaintop in the Chilean Andes, the telescope is fully assembled and operating, although scientists are not able to use it just yet. A few weeks of testing remain to ensure that its camera—the largest in astronomical history, with a more than 1.5-meter lens—is working as it should. Engineers are monitoring how Earth's gravity causes the telescope's three huge glass mirrors to sag and how this slight slumping will affect the collection and measurement of individual photons, including those that have traveled for billions of light-years to reach us. They are also monitoring how the 350-metric-ton telescope will rapidly pan across seven full moons' worth of sky, stabilize and go completely still, and take two 15-second exposures before doing it all over again all night long. On supporting science journalism If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today. In this fashion, the scope plans to canvas the entire sky visible from Earth's Southern Hemisphere every three nights, remaking an all-sky map over and over again and noticing how it changes. And computer scientists are finalizing plans for how to sift through 20 terabytes of data every night, which is 350 times more than the data collected by the vaunted James Webb Space Telescope each day. Others are making sure interesting objects or sudden cosmic surprises aren't missed among Rubin Observatory's constant stream of images. Software will search for differences between each map and send out an alert about each one; there could be as many as 10 million alerts a night about potential new objects or changes in the maps. From finding Earth-grazing asteroids and tiny failed stars called brown dwarfs to studying the strangely smooth rotation of entire galaxies sculpted by dark matter, the Rubin Observatory's mission will encompass the entire spectrum of visible-light astronomy. The telescope will continue mapping the sky for 10 years. It may be better poised to answer astrophysicists' deepest questions than any observatory built to date. 'The potential for discovery is immense,' said Christian Aganze, a galactic archaeologist at Stanford University, who will use the observatory's data to study the history of the Milky Way. Put more specifically, Rubin Observatory will collect more data in its first year than has been collected from all telescopes in the combined history of humanity. It will double the amount of information available to astronomy—and to anyone trying to understand our place in the universe. The Rubin Observatory's Mission The observatory's goal was not always so broad. Originally named the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), the Rubin Observatory was initially proposed as a dark-matter hunter. Vera Rubin found the first hard evidence for what we now call dark matter, a gargantuan amount of invisible material that shapes the universe and the way galaxies move through it. She and her colleague, the late astronomer Kent Ford, were studying the dynamics of galaxies when they made the discovery in the 1970s. In a spiral galaxy like our Milky Way, the galactic core contains more stars and hence gravity than the outer arms do. This should mean that the objects closer to the core spin around faster than the objects on the outskirts. By observing how stars move around and how their light appears shifted as a result, Rubin and Ford found that the stars on the outskirts were moving just as fast as the ones closer in. They found the phenomenon held across the dozens of galaxies they studied. This pattern defied explanation, unless there was some extra unseen material out there in the far reaches, causing the galaxy to rotate faster on what only appear to be the outer edges. Such dark materials had been proposed in the 1930s, but Rubin's findings showed the power they exerted over regular, visible matter and provided the first evidence that they existed. 'What you see in a spiral galaxy is not what you get,' Rubin once wrote. To date, no one has directly seen dark matter or come to understand its physical nature, including the particles that comprise it in the same way we know the electrons, protons and neutrons that make up regular matter, including galaxies, giraffes and us. Early plans for the LSST sought to shed light on dark matter by mapping its distribution throughout the universe via its gravitational effects. Astronomers also wanted to study how the cosmos is expanding through the work of an equally mysterious companion force called dark energy. But as design on the telescope systems began, astronomers quickly realized the LSST could do much more than study dark matter—it could study almost anything, seen or unseen. 'It is not a telescope that you will be sending proposals saying, 'I want to look over here.' The purpose is the survey,' says Guillem Megias Homar, a doctoral student at Stanford University and member of the telescope team. Mirrors and Cameras The open-ended surveying mission is a boon for astronomers, but it comes with intense design challenges. The telescope has to move across a swath of sky in just a few seconds and stop jittering almost immediately so that its images are clear. At other observatories, where astronomers choose targets ahead of time and plan what they're looking for, telescope engineers have maybe 10 minutes to stop the glass from wobbling in between taking images. Rubin Observatory gets five seconds, says Sandrine Thomas of the U.S. National Science Foundation National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory (NOIRLab), a deputy director of the observatory's construction. 'When you want to move that amount of mass very quickly and be stable, you can't have a very long telescope; otherwise the top wobbles,' she says. 'The light cannot go a long way before it loses focus, and that creates a lot of challenges.' To make the system more compact, Rubin Observatory's main telescope has a unique three-mirror structure. The primary and tertiary mirrors were fabricated to share the same piece of glass. Light bounces off the ring-shaped primary mirror and shines upward into a separate, secondary mirror, itself the largest convex mirror ever made. The secondary mirror again bounces the light back toward the tertiary mirror, which is inside the primary mirror's outer ring. The third mirror reflects light into the camera's sensitive detectors. The primary mirror and tertiary mirror combined give the telescope a collecting area of 6.67 meters. The secondary mirror has a 1.8-meter hole in the middle that the camera and its electronics fit into. And the tertiary mirror has a hole, too, for equipment designed to align the telescope and stop it from wobbling. The camera is a 10-meter-by-10-meter steel cube, small and compact. Margaux Lopez, a mechanical engineer, started working for the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory after graduating from the California Institute of Technology in 2015 and has been working on the camera ever since. 'The point of this project is to collect a wild amount of data,' she says. 'How we actually do that is to see more of the sky at once, take more images at night and get more detail in each photo—that's the trifecta.' Astronomers often use the full moon's disk to describe a telescope's field of view; for an optical telescope, Rubin Observatory's view is unparalleled. The Hubble Space Telescope observes about one percent of a full moon, and JWST observes about 75 percent of the moon's disk. Each Rubin Observatory image captures an area about 45 times the size of the full moon, Lopez says. 'We are just seeing a wildly larger amount of sky with every image we take and getting an equal or greater amount of detail, even though the field of view is so big,' she says. The camera can take images in six filters, from the near ultraviolet to the near-infrared range. But astronomers must understand how the camera itself affects the images. Dark matter distorts the direction of photons streaming from distant galaxies, but so does the optics system, Megias Homar says. 'We really need to be sure about this. How is it affecting the light itself? If there is turbulence in the atmosphere or in the optics, a dot can become blurry,' Megias Homar says. He spent his doctoral program working on Rubin Observatory's optics system to understand this issue better. Mountaintop Observing After construction was complete, the telescope parts had to travel from California and Arizona to the top of Cerro Pachón, an 8,799-foot, seismically active peak in the Chilean Andes. Lopez and her colleagues chartered a Boeing 747 freighter jet to bring the camera from San Francisco to Santiago, Chile, in May 2024. The subsequent trip to La Serena, the city nearest the telescope's mountaintop home, required a 12-hour truck ride. Lopez monitored every step of the journey, even dealing with a trucking strike that threatened to blockade the route to Cerro Pachón. Finally, the camera made it to the literal mountaintop, where Lopez took it apart and checked everything. Teams of engineers, including Megias Homar, spent months testing the camera and its companion commissioning camera, a smaller version of the real thing that astronomers used to test all telescope systems, which went live on the sky in October 2024. The engineers shifted to nighttime work, sleeping during sunlight hours like astronomers do when they are at the observatory. 'That was the first time we saw images. For a whole month, I was going to sleep at 6 A.M. and feeling like an astronomer,' Megias Homar says. He worked with engineers and astronomers who have been planning and designing the LSST project since its inception. One person told Megias Homar they began working on it in 1996. 'I was born in 1997, so that was really humbling,' he says. Thomas has been part of the team for 10 years but got her start as an observer on a mountain next door to Rubin Observatory. 'When I joined the project, I did not appreciate how different this discovery machine or even this observatory was. I am coming from a normal, classical type of observing, which is submitting your proposal, maybe getting some time, maybe not,' she recalls. 'Bringing this amount of data to the community, to me, is just extremely rich.' For astronomers and astrophysicists, the richness is almost giddying. Rubin Observatory's 10-year main mission will provide a sort of time-lapse movie of the cosmos that will show other observatories where to look for new discoveries. A decade is not a long time in the history of the universe, but it is longer than anyone has ever stared at the sky. Telescope's First Light Galactic archaeologists like Aganze are hoping to study the history of our galaxy and how dark matter might be sculpting its evolution, just like the distant spiral galaxies Vera Rubin glimpsed a half century ago. Recent surveys from telescopes like the Gaia satellite show that the Milky Way is surrounded by streams of stars that might shed light on the dark matter halo that surrounds us. Galaxy streams can help astronomers understand when galaxy formation shuts off or how much dark matter must be around a smattering of stars for it to agglomerate into a galaxy. With Rubin Observatory, researchers should be able to see all the stars in a galactic stream, detect the stream's shape and even figure out what its associated dark matter must be like, Aganze says. And we could potentially do this for 100 or 200 galaxy streams around the Milky Way. 'If little dark matter clumps mess up the stars, we should be able to see it. We should be even able to put constraints on the dark matter—is it cold, warm or self-interacting?' Aganze says, describing three main theories for dark matter's properties. '[Rubin Observatory] is going to be great for this kind of science. We should definitely be able to march forward the limits of galaxy formation and the little dark matter halos.' The observatory will also find millions of new objects in our solar system, including 90 percent of all large asteroids that fly past Earth and thousands of tiny worlds far beyond Neptune's orbit. By essentially producing a time-lapse video, the observatory will unveil countless new transient and time-sensitive phenomena in the distant cosmos, such as quasars streaming from supermassive black holes. It will carefully scrutinize a special type of exploding binary star called a type Ia supernova that is essential for astronomy measurements and can shed more light on the nature of dark energy. Astronomers plan to share images from the camera—'first look,' as they are calling it—on June 23. Megias Homar says he is excited for the weeks ahead but admits that his first concern will be the optical system. 'I will be worried that this thing is working; that is where my mind is going to go first,' he says. And then he will turn his attention to the main mission: looking out at the cosmos. Astronomers eager to use the Rubin Observatory frequently talk about the value of just looking at the universe. Basic research is a public good, they say, that can provide new insight into our history while improving our shared future. 'It feels very much like a project based on curiosity,' Lopez says. 'Humans have always wanted to go to the top of the tallest mountain or the furthest reaches of the ocean, and this feels like one of those types of things. Let's create the coolest instrument we can to find out more about who we are.' Nobody ever promised that this generation of astronomers could unravel the mysteries of the cosmos, as Rubin herself reminds us. But right now we live in a time when we can try.
Yahoo
05-06-2025
- Yahoo
A new observatory is assembling the most complete time-lapse record of the night sky ever
On 23 June 2025, the world will get a look at the first images from one of the most powerful telescopes ever built: the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. Perched high in the Chilean Andes, the observatory will take hundreds of images of the southern hemisphere sky, every night for 10 years. In doing so, it will create the most complete time-lapse record of our Universe ever assembled. This scientific effort is known as the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). Rather than focusing on small patches of sky, the Rubin Observatory will scan the entire visible southern sky every few nights. Scientists will use this rolling deep-sky snapshot to track supernovae (exploding stars), asteroids, black holes, and galaxies as they evolve and change in real time. This is astronomy not as a static snapshot, but as a cosmic story unfolding night by night. At the heart of the observatory lies a remarkable piece of engineering: a digital camera the size of a small car and weighing over three tonnes. With a staggering 3,200 megapixels, each image it captures has enough detail to spot a golf ball from 25km away. Get your news from actual experts, straight to your inbox. Sign up to our daily newsletter to receive all The Conversation UK's latest coverage of news and research, from politics and business to the arts and sciences. Each image is so detailed that it would take hundreds of ultra-high-definition TV screens to display it in full. To capture the universe in colour, the camera uses enormous filters — each about the size of a dustbin lid — that allow through different types of light, from ultraviolet to near-infrared. The observatory was first proposed in 2001, and construction at the Cerro Pachón ridge site in northern Chile began in April 2015. The first observations with a low-resolution test camera were carried out in October 2024, setting up the first images using the main camera, to be unveiled in June. The observatory is designed to tackle some of astronomy's biggest questions. For instance, by measuring how galaxies cluster and move, the Rubin Observatory will help scientists investigate the nature of dark energy, the mysterious force driving the accelerating expansion of the Universe. As a primary goal, it will map the large-scale structure of the Universe and investigate dark matter, the invisible form of matter that makes up 27% of the cosmos. Dark matter acts as the 'scaffolding' of the universe, a web-like structure that provides a framework for the formation of galaxies. The observatory is named after the US astronomer Dr Vera Rubin, whose groundbreaking work uncovered the first strong evidence for dark matter – the very phenomenon this telescope will explore in unprecedented detail. As a woman in a male-dominated field, Rubin overcame numerous obstacles and remained a tireless advocate for equality in science. She died in 2016 at the age of 88, and her name on this observatory is a tribute not only to her science, but to her perseverance and her legacy of inclusion. Closer to home, Rubin will help find and track millions of asteroids and other objects that come near Earth – helping warn astronomers of any potential collisions. The observatory will also monitor stars that change in brightness, which can reveal planets orbiting them. And it will capture rare and fleeting cosmic events, such as the collision of very dense objects called neutron stars, which release sudden bursts of light and ripples in space known as gravitational waves. What makes this observatory particularly exciting is not just what we expect it to find, but what we can't yet imagine. Many astronomical breakthroughs have come from chance: strange flashes in the night sky and puzzling movements of objects. Rubin's massive, continuous data stream could reveal entirely new classes of objects or unknown physical processes. But capturing this 'movie of the universe' depends on something we often take for granted: dark skies. One of the growing challenges facing astronomers is light pollution from satellite mega-constellations – a group of many satellites working together. These satellites reflect sunlight and can leave bright streaks across telescope images, potentially interfering with the very discoveries Rubin is designed to make. While software can detect and remove some of these trails, doing so adds complexity, cost and can degrade the data. Fortunately, solutions are already being explored. Rubin Observatory staff are developing simulation tools to predict and reduce satellite interference. They are also working with satellite operators to dim or reposition spacecraft. These efforts are essential – not just for Rubin, but for the future of space science more broadly. Rubin is a collaboration between the US National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy, with global partners contributing to data processing and scientific analysis. Importantly, much of the data will be publicly available, offering researchers, students and citizen scientists around the world the chance to make discoveries of their own. The 'first-look' event, which will unveil the first images from the observatory, will be livestreamed in English and Spanish, and celebrations are planned at venues around the world. For astronomers, this is a once-in-a-generation moment – a project that will transform our view of the universe, spark public imagination and generate scientific insights for decades to come. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. Noelia Noël does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
