AFP

The James Webb Space Telescope captured the iconic “Pillars of Creation,” huge structures of gas and dust teeming with stars, NASA said Wednesday, and the image is as majestic as one could hope.

The twinkling of thousands of stars illuminates the telescope’s first shot of the gigantic gold, copper and brown columns standing in the midst of the cosmos.

At the ends of several pillars are bright red, lava-like spots. “These are ejections from stars that are still forming,” only a few hundred thousand years old, NASA said in a statement.

These “young stars periodically shoot out supersonic jets that collide with clouds of material, like these thick pillars,” the US space agency added.

The “Pillars of Creation” are located 6,500 light years from Earth, in the Eagle Nebula of our Milky Way galaxy.

The pillars were made famous by the Hubble Space Telescope, which first captured them in 1995 and then again in 2014.

But thanks to Webb’s infrared capabilities, the newer telescope — launched into space less than a year ago — can peer through the opacity of the pillars, revealing many new stars forming.

“By popular demand, we had to do the Pillars of Creation” with Webb, Klaus Pontoppidan, the science program manager at the Space Telescope Science Institute, said Wednesday on Twitter.

STScI operates Webb from Baltimore, Maryland.

“There are just so many stars!” Pontoppidan added.

NASA astrophysicist Amber Straughn summed it up: “The universe is beautiful!” she wrote on Twitter.

The image, covering an area of about eight light years, was taken by Webb’s primary imager NIRCam, which captures near-infrared wavelengths — invisible to the human eye.

The colors of the image have been “translated” into visible light.

According to NASA, the new image “will help researchers revamp their models of star formation by identifying far more precise counts of newly formed stars, along with the quantities of gas and dust in the region.”

Operational since July, Webb is the most powerful space telescope ever built, and has already unleashed a raft of unprecedented data. Scientists are hopeful it will herald a new era of discovery.

One of the main goals for the $10-billion telescope is to study the life cycle of stars. Another main research focus is on exoplanets, planets outside Earth’s solar system.

The original Flintstones? The largest genetic study of Neanderthals ever conducted has offered an unprecedented snapshot of a family, including a father and his teenage daughter, who lived in a Siberian cave around 54,000 years ago.

The new research, published in the journal Nature on Wednesday, used DNA sequencing to look at the social life of a Neanderthal community, finding that women were more likely to stray from the cave than men.

Previous archaeological excavations have shown that Neanderthals were more sophisticated than once thought, burying their dead and making elaborate tools and ornaments. 

However little is known about their family structure or how their society was organised.

The sequencing of the first Neanderthal genome in 2010, which won Swedish paleogeneticist Svante Paabo the medicine Nobel prize earlier this month, offered a new way to discover more about our long extinct forerunners.

An international team of researchers focused on multiple Neanderthal remains found in the Chagyrskaya and Okladnikov caves in southern Siberia. 

The scattered fragments of bones were mostly in a single layer in the earth, suggesting the Neanderthals lived around the same time.

“First we had to identify how many individuals we had,” Stephane Peyregne, an evolutionary geneticist at Germany’s Max Planck Institute and one of the study’s co-authors, told AFP.

– ‘Seem much more human’ –

The team used new techniques to extract and isolate the ancient DNA from the remains.

By sequencing the DNA, they established there were 13 Neanderthals, seven males and six females. Five of the group were children or early adolescents.

Eleven were from the Chagyrskaya cave, many of them from the same family including the father and his teenage daughter, as well as a young boy and a woman who were second-degree relatives, such as a cousin, aunt or grandmother.

The researchers also worked out that one man was a maternal relative of the father because he had a genetic phenomenon called heteroplasmy, which only passes down a couple of generations.

“Our study provides a concrete picture of what a Neandertal community may have looked like,” Max Planck’s Benjamin Peter, who supervised the research along with Paabo, said in a statement.

“It makes Neandertals seem much more human to me,” he added.

Genetic analysis showed that the group did not interbreed with its nearby relatives such as humans and Denisovans, hominins discovered by Paabo in caves just a few hundred kilometres away.

However we know that Neanderthals did breed with homo sapiens at some point — Paabo’s research also revealed that almost all modern humans have a little Neanderthal DNA.

– Rampant inbreeding –

The community of around 10 to 20 Neanderthals seems to have instead bred largely among themselves, displaying very little genetic diversity, the study found.

Neanderthals existed between 430,000 to 40,000 years ago, so this group was living in the twilight of its species.

The study compared the community’s level of inbreeding to endangered mountain gorillas. Another explanation for the inbreeding could be that the Neanderthals lived in an isolated region.

“We are probably dealing with a very subdivided population,” Peyregne said.

The researchers found that the group’s Y-chromosomes, which are inherited from father to son, were far less diverse than its mitochondrial DNA, which is inherited from mothers.

This suggests that the women travelled more frequently to interact and breed with different groups of Neanderthals, while the men largely stayed home.

Antoine Balzeau, a palaeoanthropologist at France’s National Museum of Natural History, said that fossils found in the Sidron Cave in Spain prompted suggestions of a similar Neanderthal community there, but far less complete genetic material is available.

Balzeau, who was not involved in the latest study, said it was “a very interesting technical feat”.

But “it will have to be compared with other groups” of Neanderthals, he added.

The EU’s proposals to rein in soaring energy prices are too “timid” and could lead to a “breakdown in confidence” in European institutions, Spain’s Energy Minister Teresa Ribera said Wednesday during an interview with AFP on the eve of an EU leaders summit.

Energy prices and inflation have surged across the 27-nation European Union as Moscow slashed gas supplies apparently in response to EU sanctions over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February.

As winter approaches, the European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, has been under intense pressure to tackle soaring heating bills for household and businesses.

On Tuesday it unveiled its latest proposals which put the emphasis on joint purchasing among EU countries in order to better command lower prices to refill gas reserves.

“The proposals are, in my view, still too timid: we are still missing concrete measures regarding the vast majority of subjects,” Ribera said.

While there has been a “real effort” to tackle the energy crisis over the past year, it is “frustrating to see” that “Europe’s reaction in the face of this challenge is slow and laboured,” she added.

Spain, the fourth largest eurozone economy, has been one of the loudest voices within the bloc calling for a vigorous reform of the EU’s energy market.

The commission’s latest plan — which will be taken up at a two-day summit of EU leaders which begins Thursday in Brussels — does not include an immediate gas price cap.

A large group of EU countries, led by Italy, have pushed hard for some form of price cap, which is opposed by Germany which fears scaring off alternative suppliers that have stepped in to replace Russia as the bloc’s main source of gas.

“I think it is important to go a bit faster on this issue,” Ribera said.

“We shouldn’t have to ask the Commission four times the same thing to have a proposal. But I trust that the Commission will speed up and make the proposals. It would be risky not to take the decisions in time.”

– ‘Tough situation’ –

The skyrocketing energy prices have fuelled large protests in several European nations against rising inflation and to demand higher wages.

“The energy crisis causes a tough situation for families and for the productive fabric. If we do not respond quickly enough, there may be a breakdown of confidence in the European institutions,” Ribera said.

“The current situation is a very important stress test for Europe,” she added.

Ribera said she was “moderately””optimistic that Spain will be able to convince France to lift its opposition to the construction of a new gas pipeline across the Pyrenees mountains.

With Russia withholding gas deliveries to most of Europe in reaction to sanctions over its invasion of Ukraine, there has been a resurgence of interest — especially from Germany — in a link to bring in much-needed supplies from Spain to the rest of the continent.

Plans for such a pipeline, known as MidCat, emerged a decade ago but were dropped in 2019 over regulatory and funding issues. 

“We respect and understand some of France’s arguments but not all,” Ribera said.

“It is important to find a European solution to the problem, and that the demand for help from Germany and other member states be heard.”