The eastern sky is all set to throw hints that summer has officially begun. A group of distinct stars called the Summer Triangle is all set to make an elaborate appearance in the night sky.

The Summer Triangle is seen as a sign of the beginning of summer in the Northern Hemisphere and winter in the Southern Hemisphere (where it is known as the Winter Triangle) by astronomers. The Summer Triangle also acts as a cue to spot the Milky Way if you are under dark skies this season.

Also Read |&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/science/cosmic-dance-of-fire-and-ice-esa-unveils-marvellous-photos-of-mysterious-star-system-732593">‘Cosmic dance of fire and ice’: ESA unveils marvellous photos of mysterious star system</a>

Though a pattern of three stars, the Summer Triangle is not a constellation, but an asterism which is a simple pattern formed by stars from different constellations. It includes one bright star from each of three constellations- Vega in Lyra, Deneb in Cygnus and Altair in Aquila.

<h2>How to spot Summer Triangle in the night sky?</h2>

Among the three stars in the triad, Vega is the easiest one to spot. After the Summer Triangle rises in the east, the Vega is the first one to become visible. It is one of the most famous and brightest stars because it is large and quite close to the Earth at only 25 light-years away.&nbsp;

Rising below and to the right of Vega on the horizon is Altair, the 12th brightest star in the night sky. Like Vega, it is bright because it is close, a mere 17 light-years&nbsp;from Earth. Like Vega, Altair is about twice the mass and radius of the sun.&nbsp;

Also Read |&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/science/scientists-spot-two-blazing-quasars-merging-together-in-cosmic-dawn-900-million-years-after-big-bang-732709">Scientists spot two blazing quasars merging together in Cosmic Dawn 900 million years after Big Bang</a>

The third star, Deneb is a bit different when it comes to its spotting and composition. It is the 19th brightest star in the night sky but is much farther away than Vega and Altair- at 2,600 light years away.&nbsp;

Deneb is so bright because it is a supergiant star which is 20 times the mass and around 200 times the radius of the sun. It is one of the farther stars that can be seen with the naked eye.

The Summer Triangle is worth spotting and following throughout the summer. It will be situated across a rich field of the Milky Way, so if you're in a dark sky park or anywhere with low levels of light pollution, find the Summer Triangle, and you will see the Milky Way running through it.

(With inputs from agencies)

The eastern sky is all set to throw hints that summer has officially begun. A group of distinct stars called the Summer Triangle is all set to make an elaborate appearance in the night sky.

The eastern sky is all set to throw hints that summer has officially begun. A group of distinct stars called the Summer Triangle is all set to make an elaborate appearance in the night sky. The Summer Triangle is seen as a sign of the beginning of summer in the Northern Hemisphere and winter in the Southern Hemisphere (where it is known as the Winter Triangle) by astronomers. The Summer Triangle also acts as a cue to spot the Milky Way if you are under dark skies this season. Also Read | ‘Cosmic dance of fire and ice’: ESA unveils marvellous photos of mysterious star system Though a pattern of three stars, the Summer Triangle is not a constellation, but an asterism which is a simple pattern formed by stars from different constellations. It includes one bright star from each of three constellations- Vega in Lyra, Deneb in Cygnus and Altair in Aquila. How to spot Summer Triangle in the night sky? Among the three stars in the triad, Vega is the easiest one to spot. After the Summer Triangle rises in the east, the Vega is the first one to become visible. It is one of the most famous and brightest stars because it is large and quite close to the Earth at only 25 light-years away. Rising below and to the right of Vega on the horizon is Altair, the 12th brightest star in the night sky. Like Vega, it is bright because it is close, a mere 17 light-years from Earth. Like Vega, Altair is about twice the mass and radius of the sun. Also Read | Scientists spot two blazing quasars merging together in Cosmic Dawn 900 million years after Big Bang The third star, Deneb is a bit different when it comes to its spotting and composition. It is the 19th brightest star in the night sky but is much farther away than Vega and Altair- at 2,600 light years away. Deneb is so bright because it is a supergiant star which is 20 times the mass and around 200 times the radius of the sun. It is one of the farther stars that can be seen with the naked eye. The Summer Triangle is worth spotting and following throughout the summer. It will be situated across a rich field of the Milky Way, so if you're in a dark sky park or anywhere with low levels of light pollution, find the Summer Triangle, and you will see the Milky Way running through it. (With inputs from agencies)

'Summer Triangle' of three stars to mark the beginning of summer. Here's how to spot it

A new research has revealed that our home galaxy, the Milky Way, might be forming stars at a much higher rate than previous estimates. The study conducted by the scientists at the University of Würzburg in Germany has surprised the scientific community.

A new research has revealed that our home galaxy, the Milky Way, might be forming stars at a much higher rate than previous estimates. The study conducted by the scientists at the University of Würzburg in Germany has surprised the scientific community. The research published in the journal 'Astronomy & Astrophysics' found that stars are forming at a rate four to eight times the mass of the Sun per year — which is two to four times more than current estimates given by astrophysicists. The number becomes even bigger if we count the stars that are not as massive as Sun. Meaning, the Milky way is far more chaotic with 10 to 20 infant stars forming in our neighbourhood annually. Understanding star formation rate is akin to taking the pulse of the galaxy. Scientists have concluded that the more stars a galaxy churns out, the faster it enriches itself with oxygen, iron, and other important elements that stars create. "The star formation rate is very important to understand for galaxy evolution," said astrophysicist Thomas Siegert, associated with the study. WATCH | The Big Space: James Webb Telescope makes shocking discovery, shows extreme promise early on × How star rate formation is calculated? Astronomers find the rate of star formation by estimating the amount of gamma radiation produced following the decay of aluminum-26. This isotope is formed during the birth and death of a star and has a half-life of about 700,000. It has a cyclical effect as the birth and death of stars spews heavier elements into interstellar space. The interstellar dust caused by supernova explosions and the formation of new stars pumps our galaxy with the required elements to repeat the process all over again. Read more: NASA astronaut clicks 'unreal' photo of auroras from space The researchers, however, added the caveat that current models may not present an accurate picture as it is difficult to determine the source's distance. It is perhaps the reason the scientists could only give a range for the star formation rate and not the exact numbers. (With inputs from agencies) WATCH WION LIVE HERE:

Chaos in Milky Way? Stars forming at greater pace than previously thought, study shows

The European Space Agency's Gaia space observatory has reportedly detected several "starquakes" which are similar to tsunami-like earthquakes.

Gaia which was launched in 2013 studies the Milky Way and has created a map of the galaxy but it has now revealed new information about stars and their chemical composition including the colour, age, temperature and brightness level of stars.

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Today <a href="https://twitter.com/ESAGaia?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@ESAGaia</a> releases its new treasure trove of data about our home galaxy!🤩 
 
Astronomers describe strange ‘starquakes’, stellar DNA, asymmetric motions and other fascinating insights in this most detailed Milky Way survey to date. <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/GaiaDR3?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#GaiaDR3</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/GaiaMission?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#GaiaMission</a> <a href="https://t.co/rcOVAuChge">https://t.co/rcOVAuChge</a> <a href="https://t.co/9lt47umuyc">pic.twitter.com/9lt47umuyc</a>
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Gaia spotted starquakes that change the shape of stars, the observation revealed. The agency said the mission had tracked radial oscillations that makes stars swell and shrink while maintaining their shape.

<a href="https://www.wionews.com/science/scientists-for-first-time-discover-radio-emission-covering-giant-galaxy-with-black-hole-485041">Also Read:&nbsp;</a><a href="http://13.235.153.162/science/scientists-for-first-time-discover-radio-emission-covering-giant-galaxy-with-black-hole-485041" hreflang="en">Scientists for first time discover radio emission covering giant galaxy with black hole</a>

However, it has also picked up "large-scale tsunamis". Conny Aerts of KU Leuven in Belgium who is a member of the Gaia mission said: "Starquakes teach us a lot about stars, notably their internal workings. Gaia is opening a goldmine for 'asteroseismology' of massive stars."

In a startling revelation, Gaia found that some stars in our galaxy are made of primordial material and others are made of matter enriched by previous generations of stars.

Watch:&nbsp;Monster in the heart of Milky Way Galaxy

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"Gaia’s data release 3 contains new and improved details for almost two billion stars in our galaxy," the European Space Agency said, adding, "in this data set is the largest catalogue yet of binary stars, thousands of Solar System objects such as asteroids and moons of planets."

The European Space Agency described the starquakes as tiny motions on the surface of a star that change the shapes of stars. Although Gaia was not built for such an observation but it was able to spot "other vibrations that are more like large-scale tsunamis."

Gaia found strong nonradial starquakes in thousands of stars, the space agency said, including "vibrations" in stars which weren't seen before.

Gaia also revealed the largest chemical map of the galaxy coupled to 3D motions from the solar neighbourhood to smaller galaxies, it added.&nbsp;

(With inputs from Agencies)

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The European Space Agency's Gaia space observatory has reportedly detected several "starquakes" which are similar to tsunami-like earthquakes. Gaia which was launched in 2013 studies the Milky Way and has created a map of the galaxy but it has now revealed new information about stars and their chemical composition including the colour, age, temperature and brightness level of stars.

The European Space Agency's Gaia space observatory has reportedly detected several "starquakes" which are similar to tsunami-like earthquakes. Gaia which was launched in 2013 studies the Milky Way and has created a map of the galaxy but it has now revealed new information about stars and their chemical composition including the colour, age, temperature and brightness level of stars. Today @ESAGaia releases its new treasure trove of data about our home galaxy!🤩 Astronomers describe strange ‘starquakes’, stellar DNA, asymmetric motions and other fascinating insights in this most detailed Milky Way survey to date. #GaiaDR3 #GaiaMission https://t.co/rcOVAuChge pic.twitter.com/9lt47umuyc — ESA Science (@esascience) June 13, 2022 × Gaia spotted starquakes that change the shape of stars, the observation revealed. The agency said the mission had tracked radial oscillations that makes stars swell and shrink while maintaining their shape. Also Read: Scientists for first time discover radio emission covering giant galaxy with black hole However, it has also picked up "large-scale tsunamis". Conny Aerts of KU Leuven in Belgium who is a member of the Gaia mission said: "Starquakes teach us a lot about stars, notably their internal workings. Gaia is opening a goldmine for 'asteroseismology' of massive stars." In a startling revelation, Gaia found that some stars in our galaxy are made of primordial material and others are made of matter enriched by previous generations of stars. Watch: Monster in the heart of Milky Way Galaxy "Gaia’s data release 3 contains new and improved details for almost two billion stars in our galaxy," the European Space Agency said, adding, "in this data set is the largest catalogue yet of binary stars, thousands of Solar System objects such as asteroids and moons of planets." The European Space Agency described the starquakes as tiny motions on the surface of a star that change the shapes of stars. Although Gaia was not built for such an observation but it was able to spot "other vibrations that are more like large-scale tsunamis." Gaia found strong nonradial starquakes in thousands of stars, the space agency said, including "vibrations" in stars which weren't seen before. Gaia also revealed the largest chemical map of the galaxy coupled to 3D motions from the solar neighbourhood to smaller galaxies, it added. (With inputs from Agencies) WATCH WION LIVE HERE You can now write for wionews.com and be a part of the community. Share your stories and opinions with us here.

European Space Agency's Gaia discovers strange ‘starquakes’

One moonless night a little more than a decade ago, Marie Dacke and Eric Warrant, animal vision experts from Lund University in Sweden, made a surprise discovery in South Africa.

The researchers had been watching nocturnal dung beetles, miniature Sisyphuses of the savanna, as they tumbled giant balls of dung. The beetles seemed to be able to roll remarkably straight, even though they had no clear landmarks to reference.

“We thought maybe they were using our cameras, maybe someone had lit a fire somewhere,” Dacke said. “We were really confused.” Then they realized the beetles were guided by the 100,000 light-years-long streak of the Milky Way.

We humans are famous for this sort of thing. The stars beckoned our species to cross seas and kindled the sciences that later let us putter up toward them in rockets. From culture to culture, the Milky Way served as backdrop and inspiration for stories about rivers, trees, gods, serpents and, of course, exploration.

But we were not the only ones looking.

Researchers like Dacke suspect that a wide swath of the animal world might sometimes navigate by starlight — and might be lost as our city lights drown out ever more of it. Her team’s newest study, published Thursday, found that dung beetles became confused under light-swamped skies. The result adds to a small and scattered body of research, conducted over decades, on what the night sky might mean to the other earthlings who can sense it.

These experiments raise the same few, difficult questions: Can animals see the stars? Can animals use them? And what happens when they lose them?

Aquatic Astronomers

In the 1780s, astronomers William and Caroline Herschel scoured the skies for nebulae, finding some that resembled spiral seashells. In the 1920s, Edwin Hubble, at the helm of an enormous telescope, discovered that the Milky Way, Andromeda and Herschel spirals were galactic islands in a vast cosmic sea.

And in the mid-2000s, Nick, a researcher of sorts in Cologne, Germany, swam to his own telescope and plopped into an underwater chair. Then he stuck his head in a tube and, if he saw a star, pressed a paddle. He was rewarded with fish.

Nick, a harbor seal, entered the annals of astronomical history when Guido Dehnhardt, a marine biologist now at the University of Rostock, was studying how marine mammals orient themselves. If seals could discern stars, Dehnhardt and his colleague Björn Mauck hypothesized, that might help explain how the animals are able to complete long swims across otherwise featureless seas.

To test a seal’s astronomical skills, Mauck devised what must be two of scientific history’s most wide-eyed, wonder-infused experiments.

First, the team constructed their seal-o-scope — a tube with no lens, through which Nick was given a tour of the night sky. He consistently pressed his paddle when bright points like Venus, Sirius and Polaris came into view; he could not see as many faint stars as humans can, the researchers determined, but plenty of possible celestial landmarks were still available to him.

Next, Mauck built something even bigger. This time two seals were invited to participate, Nick and his even cleverer brother, Malte.

When ushered back into the pool at a Cologne zoo, the seals entered a dome measuring 15 feet across, its rim resting on a floating ring. The insides of this bespoke aqua-planetarium were lit up with 6,000 simulated stars. “They were immediately swimming across the planetarium and looking at stars like, ‘Oh, what’s that?’” Dehnhardt said. “You got the impression that they really recognized what this is.”

First, the researchers used a laser pointer to direct the seals to where the rim of the dome met the water nearest to Sirius, the Dog Star. If a seal swam over and touched that precise part of the dome with its snout, it received some fish. Then the pointer was aimed directly at Sirius. Again the seal’s task was to swim toward the star and touch the point on the rim directly beneath it.

Then, the researchers dispensed with the laser pointer. No matter which way the star-projector was oriented, both seals could eventually swim in the direction of Sirius. That showed, the researchers argued in a 2008 paper, that seals traversing the open sea had the capacity to use lodestars to guide their travels.

It had taken Nick, the more seasoned astronomer, 11 sessions to reliably touch the wall right under Sirius. But Malte did it the very first time they left him alone in the planetarium. “Malte was an absolutely brilliant seal,” Dehnhardt said.

Coming of Age Under Polaris

While seals might steer by the stars, some birds definitely do, as more than a half-century of experiments inspired by Stephen T. Emlen have demonstrated.

In the early 1960s, Emlen, then a graduate student at the University of Michigan and now an emeritus professor at Cornell, began carrying indigo buntings into a planetarium in the evenings. “I was nocturnal myself,” he said recently.

Indigo buntings migrate at night, flying as far as 2,000 miles. Before they start out, they hop in the direction they plan to go, making their intent apparent to a navigation researcher. Emlen showed that if indigo buntings were exposed to the stars, the birds hopped in a manner indicating that they knew which way was north.

Human observers know that at night, the stars trace circles in the sky as Earth spins on its axis. Those circles shrink for more northern stars — and the northernmost, Polaris, does not seem to circle at all. Once you have learned that, you need only to remember a constellation in the vicinity of north — the Big Dipper works well — to get oriented.

Emlen wondered whether buntings employed a similar trick. If he covered up Polaris in the planetarium, could they still find north? Indeed they could, he discovered. What if he blotted out just the Big Dipper or just Cassiopeia? Now the birds’ performance varied. And if he erased all the northernmost constellations together? The birds were lost.

Later, Emlen enlisted young indigo buntings that had just left their nests. Over the summer, he tweaked the planetarium projector so that the sky rotated around Betelgeuse, the red giant star at Orion’s shoulder, rather than Polaris.

Sure enough, come autumn, the buntings indicated with their hops that they thought Betelgeuse guided the way north. This suggested that the bird’s stargazing skills were learned, not derived from some star map encoded in their genes, Emlen and his colleagues argued. In the glittering dark, each young bunting had apparently spent some time looking up, studying, as the stars traced circles in the night sky.

Lost on a Starless Night

Around the time Nick and Malte learned to spot Sirius, Dacke and Warrant had their eureka moment in South Africa with dung beetles.

After a dung beetle arrives on a dung pile, it painstakingly cobbles together a snowball of dung larger than itself. Then it climbs up onto the ball and spins around, scanning, as if deciphering the celestial scene.

Through a dung beetle’s compound eyes, stars appear as blobs, not as points of light. But those same eyes are more sensitive than ours to dim objects like the dappled patterns of the Milky Way.

After its spinning scan, a beetle rolls its ball in a straight line away from the dung pile for a few minutes, on a random heading. (This seems to minimize the likelihood that two beetles will meet, which often results in a fight.) Dacke found that the beetles seem to keep themselves rolling straight by confirming that the intragalactic scene they were heading toward still matched the earlier reference image.

But a funny thing happened as Dacke’s team kept studying this behavior: They had an increasingly difficult time locating the Milky Way in the sky. “I ended up spending one night cycling off into the forest,” said James Foster, who joined the project as a graduate student and is now a postdoc in zoology at the University of Würzburg in Germany.

That is a common experience; roughly 4 in 5 Americans, 2 in 3 Europeans, and 1 in 3 people in the world reside somewhere too bright at night for the Milky Way to be visible, a 2016 study showed, and the fraction of our planet that is illuminated at night grows larger every year.

Dacke and Foster resolved to test whether washed-out skies might also matter to their study subjects. In their latest experiments, published Thursday in Current Biology, they shined spotlights on the beetles and brought them to the roof of the Wits University biology building in central Johannesburg.

They found two effects, neither of them good. When a beetle’s sky was dominated by a single glaring light, it could still go straight — but instead of rolling off in a random direction, it made a beeline for the beacon. More confusing were the featureless, light-swamped skies you might expect in suburbs; the beetles just went in circles.

Other species may be similarly affected. The stars have always been more or less constant while landmarks erode and the planet’s magnetic field shifts. But now, rather abruptly, they are fading out. “What we’ve seen on a much smaller scale with the dung beetles could have huge impacts on birds and seals and migratory moths,” Foster said.

With their studies concluded, science’s pioneering animal astronomers have gone on to different fates. A few of the South African dung beetles now live in the lab in Lund, where the researchers sometimes study them under a fully simulated sky.

Emlen kept the Betelgeuse-beguiled indigo buntings in his lab through the winter and released them in the spring. Hopefully, he said, they recalibrated to the true north before beginning their first migration.

And Nick the seal is still an active contributor to fields like acoustics, hydrodynamics and optics, although Malte died a few years ago. Nick now lives in a sprawling harbor lab that opens to the Baltic Sea; at night, he and the other seals in the enclosure can see fantastic skies overhead, Dehnhardt said.

“But whether they use it,” he said, “I don’t know.” 
&nbsp;

One moonless night a little more than a decade ago, Marie Dacke and Eric Warrant, animal vision experts from Lund University in Sweden, made a surprise discovery in South Africa.

One moonless night a little more than a decade ago, Marie Dacke and Eric Warrant, animal vision experts from Lund University in Sweden, made a surprise discovery in South Africa. The researchers had been watching nocturnal dung beetles, miniature Sisyphuses of the savanna, as they tumbled giant balls of dung. The beetles seemed to be able to roll remarkably straight, even though they had no clear landmarks to reference. “We thought maybe they were using our cameras, maybe someone had lit a fire somewhere,” Dacke said. “We were really confused.” Then they realized the beetles were guided by the 100,000 light-years-long streak of the Milky Way. We humans are famous for this sort of thing. The stars beckoned our species to cross seas and kindled the sciences that later let us putter up toward them in rockets. From culture to culture, the Milky Way served as backdrop and inspiration for stories about rivers, trees, gods, serpents and, of course, exploration. But we were not the only ones looking. Researchers like Dacke suspect that a wide swath of the animal world might sometimes navigate by starlight — and might be lost as our city lights drown out ever more of it. Her team’s newest study, published Thursday, found that dung beetles became confused under light-swamped skies. The result adds to a small and scattered body of research, conducted over decades, on what the night sky might mean to the other earthlings who can sense it. These experiments raise the same few, difficult questions: Can animals see the stars? Can animals use them? And what happens when they lose them? Aquatic Astronomers In the 1780s, astronomers William and Caroline Herschel scoured the skies for nebulae, finding some that resembled spiral seashells. In the 1920s, Edwin Hubble, at the helm of an enormous telescope, discovered that the Milky Way, Andromeda and Herschel spirals were galactic islands in a vast cosmic sea. And in the mid-2000s, Nick, a researcher of sorts in Cologne, Germany, swam to his own telescope and plopped into an underwater chair. Then he stuck his head in a tube and, if he saw a star, pressed a paddle. He was rewarded with fish. Nick, a harbor seal, entered the annals of astronomical history when Guido Dehnhardt, a marine biologist now at the University of Rostock, was studying how marine mammals orient themselves. If seals could discern stars, Dehnhardt and his colleague Björn Mauck hypothesized, that might help explain how the animals are able to complete long swims across otherwise featureless seas. To test a seal’s astronomical skills, Mauck devised what must be two of scientific history’s most wide-eyed, wonder-infused experiments. First, the team constructed their seal-o-scope — a tube with no lens, through which Nick was given a tour of the night sky. He consistently pressed his paddle when bright points like Venus, Sirius and Polaris came into view; he could not see as many faint stars as humans can, the researchers determined, but plenty of possible celestial landmarks were still available to him. Next, Mauck built something even bigger. This time two seals were invited to participate, Nick and his even cleverer brother, Malte. When ushered back into the pool at a Cologne zoo, the seals entered a dome measuring 15 feet across, its rim resting on a floating ring. The insides of this bespoke aqua-planetarium were lit up with 6,000 simulated stars. “They were immediately swimming across the planetarium and looking at stars like, ‘Oh, what’s that?’” Dehnhardt said. “You got the impression that they really recognized what this is.” First, the researchers used a laser pointer to direct the seals to where the rim of the dome met the water nearest to Sirius, the Dog Star. If a seal swam over and touched that precise part of the dome with its snout, it received some fish. Then the pointer was aimed directly at Sirius. Again the seal’s task was to swim toward the star and touch the point on the rim directly beneath it. Then, the researchers dispensed with the laser pointer. No matter which way the star-projector was oriented, both seals could eventually swim in the direction of Sirius. That showed, the researchers argued in a 2008 paper, that seals traversing the open sea had the capacity to use lodestars to guide their travels. It had taken Nick, the more seasoned astronomer, 11 sessions to reliably touch the wall right under Sirius. But Malte did it the very first time they left him alone in the planetarium. “Malte was an absolutely brilliant seal,” Dehnhardt said. Coming of Age Under Polaris While seals might steer by the stars, some birds definitely do, as more than a half-century of experiments inspired by Stephen T. Emlen have demonstrated. In the early 1960s, Emlen, then a graduate student at the University of Michigan and now an emeritus professor at Cornell, began carrying indigo buntings into a planetarium in the evenings. “I was nocturnal myself,” he said recently. Indigo buntings migrate at night, flying as far as 2,000 miles. Before they start out, they hop in the direction they plan to go, making their intent apparent to a navigation researcher. Emlen showed that if indigo buntings were exposed to the stars, the birds hopped in a manner indicating that they knew which way was north. Human observers know that at night, the stars trace circles in the sky as Earth spins on its axis. Those circles shrink for more northern stars — and the northernmost, Polaris, does not seem to circle at all. Once you have learned that, you need only to remember a constellation in the vicinity of north — the Big Dipper works well — to get oriented. Emlen wondered whether buntings employed a similar trick. If he covered up Polaris in the planetarium, could they still find north? Indeed they could, he discovered. What if he blotted out just the Big Dipper or just Cassiopeia? Now the birds’ performance varied. And if he erased all the northernmost constellations together? The birds were lost. Later, Emlen enlisted young indigo buntings that had just left their nests. Over the summer, he tweaked the planetarium projector so that the sky rotated around Betelgeuse, the red giant star at Orion’s shoulder, rather than Polaris. Sure enough, come autumn, the buntings indicated with their hops that they thought Betelgeuse guided the way north. This suggested that the bird’s stargazing skills were learned, not derived from some star map encoded in their genes, Emlen and his colleagues argued. In the glittering dark, each young bunting had apparently spent some time looking up, studying, as the stars traced circles in the night sky. Lost on a Starless Night Around the time Nick and Malte learned to spot Sirius, Dacke and Warrant had their eureka moment in South Africa with dung beetles. After a dung beetle arrives on a dung pile, it painstakingly cobbles together a snowball of dung larger than itself. Then it climbs up onto the ball and spins around, scanning, as if deciphering the celestial scene. Through a dung beetle’s compound eyes, stars appear as blobs, not as points of light. But those same eyes are more sensitive than ours to dim objects like the dappled patterns of the Milky Way. After its spinning scan, a beetle rolls its ball in a straight line away from the dung pile for a few minutes, on a random heading. (This seems to minimize the likelihood that two beetles will meet, which often results in a fight.) Dacke found that the beetles seem to keep themselves rolling straight by confirming that the intragalactic scene they were heading toward still matched the earlier reference image. But a funny thing happened as Dacke’s team kept studying this behavior: They had an increasingly difficult time locating the Milky Way in the sky. “I ended up spending one night cycling off into the forest,” said James Foster, who joined the project as a graduate student and is now a postdoc in zoology at the University of Würzburg in Germany. That is a common experience; roughly 4 in 5 Americans, 2 in 3 Europeans, and 1 in 3 people in the world reside somewhere too bright at night for the Milky Way to be visible, a 2016 study showed, and the fraction of our planet that is illuminated at night grows larger every year. Dacke and Foster resolved to test whether washed-out skies might also matter to their study subjects. In their latest experiments, published Thursday in Current Biology, they shined spotlights on the beetles and brought them to the roof of the Wits University biology building in central Johannesburg. They found two effects, neither of them good. When a beetle’s sky was dominated by a single glaring light, it could still go straight — but instead of rolling off in a random direction, it made a beeline for the beacon. More confusing were the featureless, light-swamped skies you might expect in suburbs; the beetles just went in circles. Other species may be similarly affected. The stars have always been more or less constant while landmarks erode and the planet’s magnetic field shifts. But now, rather abruptly, they are fading out. “What we’ve seen on a much smaller scale with the dung beetles could have huge impacts on birds and seals and migratory moths,” Foster said. With their studies concluded, science’s pioneering animal astronomers have gone on to different fates. A few of the South African dung beetles now live in the lab in Lund, where the researchers sometimes study them under a fully simulated sky. Emlen kept the Betelgeuse-beguiled indigo buntings in his lab through the winter and released them in the spring. Hopefully, he said, they recalibrated to the true north before beginning their first migration. And Nick the seal is still an active contributor to fields like acoustics, hydrodynamics and optics, although Malte died a few years ago. Nick now lives in a sprawling harbor lab that opens to the Baltic Sea; at night, he and the other seals in the enclosure can see fantastic skies overhead, Dehnhardt said. “But whether they use it,” he said, “I don’t know.”

What animals see in the stars, and what they stand to lose

Our powerful telescopes have been looking for life outside Earth, but have you ever wondered if other solar systems are 'looking back' at us, for life on our planet?

If so, how many of the stars outside our solar system could 'see' us?

Scientists may have the answer.&nbsp; 
 
<a href="https://www.wionews.com/science/aliens-on-1000-nearby-stars-could-see-us-new-study-suggests-337578">Also read | Aliens on 1000 nearby stars could see us, new study suggests</a> 
 
They have reported that 1,715 stars within 100 parsecs from the Sun are in the right position to have spotted life on a transiting Earth since early human civilisation about 5,000 years ago.

One parsec is 3.26 light years.

An additional 319 stars will enter this special vantage point in the next 5,000 years, according to a study by scientists&nbsp;at Cornell University, published in the journal Nature. 
 
<a href="https://www.wionews.com/science/scientists-recently-scanned-10-million-stars-for-alien-technology-what-did-they-find-326020">Also read: Scientists recently scanned 10 million stars for alien technology, what did they find?</a> 
 
Among these stars are seven known exoplanet hosts, including Ross-128, which saw Earth transit the Sun in the past, and Teegarden’s Star and Trappist-1, which will start to see it in 29 and 1,642 years, respectively, said the study.&nbsp; 
 
<a href="https://www.wionews.com/entertainment/strange-news-alert-miley-cyrus-demi-lovato-reveal-seeing-aliens-and-ufo-337403">Also read:&nbsp;Strange news alert! Miley Cyrus, Demi Lovato reveal seeing aliens and UFO</a>

"We found that human-made radio waves have already swept over 75 of the closest stars on our list,' said Lisa Kaltenegger and Jackie Faherty, the authors of the study.

Our powerful telescopes have been looking for life outside Earth, but have you ever wondered if other solar systems are 'looking back' at us, for life on our planet?

Our powerful telescopes have been looking for life outside Earth, but have you ever wondered if other solar systems are 'looking back' at us, for life on our planet? If so, how many of the stars outside our solar system could 'see' us? Scientists may have the answer. Also read | Aliens on 1000 nearby stars could see us, new study suggests They have reported that 1,715 stars within 100 parsecs from the Sun are in the right position to have spotted life on a transiting Earth since early human civilisation about 5,000 years ago. One parsec is 3.26 light years. An additional 319 stars will enter this special vantage point in the next 5,000 years, according to a study by scientists at Cornell University, published in the journal Nature. Also read: Scientists recently scanned 10 million stars for alien technology, what did they find? Among these stars are seven known exoplanet hosts, including Ross-128, which saw Earth transit the Sun in the past, and Teegarden’s Star and Trappist-1, which will start to see it in 29 and 1,642 years, respectively, said the study. Also read: Strange news alert! Miley Cyrus, Demi Lovato reveal seeing aliens and UFO "We found that human-made radio waves have already swept over 75 of the closest stars on our list,' said Lisa Kaltenegger and Jackie Faherty, the authors of the study.

Do you know how many stars may have 'seen' life on earth? Scientists have the answer

Is there life on planets outside our solar system? How did stars and galaxies form in the earliest years of the universe? How do black holes shape galaxies? Scientists are expected to explore those and other fundamental questions about the universe when they peer deep into the night sky using a new telescope planned for the summit of Hawaii's tallest mountain. But the Thirty Meter Telescope is a decade away from being built. And Native Hawaiian protesters have tried to thwart the start of construction by blocking a road to the mountain. They say installing yet another observatory on Mauna Kea's peak would further defile a place they consider sacred. The large size of the telescope's mirror means it would collect more light, allowing it to see faint, far-away objects such as stars and galaxies dating back as long as 13 billion years. Hundreds of demonstrators are gathered at the base of Hawaii's tallest mountain to protest the construction of a giant telescope on land that some Native Hawaiians consider sacred. Groups of activists sang and prayed at the base of the mountain on Sunday afternoon. They declared the area, which is well off the highway at the intersection of the mountain's access road, a place of refuge and safety.

A plan to build the world's largest telescope, Hawaiians protest it's build