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THE –EST
‘Earendel’ might be the farthest known star
A chance alignment may have revealed a star from the universe’s first billion years.
If confirmed, this star would be the most distant one ever seen, obliterating the
previous record. Light from the object, dubbed “Earendel” from the Old English
word meaning “morning star,” traveled for about 12.9 billion years on its journey
toward Earth. That’s about 4 billion years longer than the former record holder,
astronomer Brian Welch and colleagues report in the March 31 Nature.
The team found the object in Hubble Space Telescope images of a cluster of
galaxies nearer to Earth. Such clusters are so massive that they bend and focus
the light from more distant background objects. Earendel’s light originates from
900 million years after the Big Bang, which took place about 13.8 billion years ago.
Welch, of Johns Hopkins University, and colleagues think the object has at least
50 times the mass of the sun. But the team can’t pin down that value or confirm
that the object is a star without more data. Welch plans to examine Earendel using
the James Webb Space Telescope, and perhaps uncover objects from even earlier in
the universe’s history. “I’m hoping that this record won’t last very long.” — Liz KruesiTHE EVERYDAY EXPLAINED
Upbringing may influence wayfinding ability
Score one for the country mouse. People who grow up outside of cities are bet-
ter at finding their way around than those who grow up as urbanites, a large study
suggests. The results, described in the April 7 Nature, hint that learning to handle
environmental complexity as a child strengthens mental muscles for spatial skills.
Nearly 400,000 people from 38 countries played a video game called Sea Hero
Quest, in which they piloted a boat in search of various targets. On average,
p eople who reported growing up outside of cities, where they would have pre-
sumably encountered lots of meandering paths, were better at finding the t argets
than people who were raised in cities. What’s more, the difference between city
dwellers and outsiders was most prominent in countries where cities tend to have
simple, gridlike layouts. The simpler the cities, the bigger the advantage for peo-
ple outside of them, cognitive scientist Antoine Coutrot of CNRS, who is based in
Lyon, France, and colleagues report. From these data, the team can’t definitively
say that childhood environment is behind the differences. But it’s plausible. Other
bits of demography, including age, gender and education, as well as sense of smell
have been linked to navigational performance. — Laura SandersTEASER
Cellulose helps ice cream
go down smooth
You can never have too much ice cream,
but you can have too much ice in your ice
cream. Adding plant-based nanocrystals to
the frozen treat could help solve the prob-
lem, food scientist Tao Wu of the University
of Tennessee in Knoxville and colleagues
reported March 20 at the American Chemi-
cal Society spring meeting in San Diego.
Small ice crystals in ice cream grow
bigger when temperature fluctuations in
freezers cause the crystals to melt and
reform. Stabilizers such as guar gum slow
crystal growth, but don’t stop it. Once ice
crystals hit 50 micrometers across, ice
cream takes on a grainy texture.
Plant-derived cellulose nanocrystals, or
CNCs, have properties similar to guar gum.
An experiment with a sucrose solution — an
ice cream proxy — and CNCs showed that
after 24 hours, ice crystals stopped grow-
ing and remained at 25 micrometers after a
week, well under the graininess threshold.
In a test with guar gum, ice crystals grew
to over 50 micrometers in just three days.
The finding suggests “nanocrystals are
a lot more potent than the gums,” says food
engineer Richard Hartel of the University
of Wisconsin–Madison. — Anna GibbsA newfound possible star
(arrow) is from the universe’s
first 900 million years, scien-
tists say. It’s visible because a
galaxy cluster magnifies the
light of this object and a back-
ground galaxy (red arc).When compared with ice crystals in an
unadulterated ice cream–like solution (left),
ice crystals in solution with cellulose particles
added (right) stopped growing after 24 hours
and stayed at a desirable size for a week.100 μm