Daily Archives: March 6, 2024

Extraordinary. Dune 2 Much

While giant "star dunes" have been observed all over the world, their age and origin have remained something of a mystery but now, new findings could shed light on these magnificent desert structures.

In an interview withThe Guardian, Earth scientist Geoff Duller, one of the researchers behind a new paper about a star dune he and his colleagues studied in the Sahara called Lala Lallia, touted how amazing these slow-moving structures are.

"They are extraordinary things, one of the natural wonders of the world," Duller, who chairs Wales' University of Aberystwyth, told the British newspaper. "From the ground they look like pyramids but from the air you see a peak and radiating off it in three or four directions these arms that make them look like stars."

Created by winds blowing in three different directions, the structures are extraordinary for a whole 'nother reason as well: they appear to move about 19 inches per year, adding to their mystery.

As noted in a press release from Wales' Aberystwyth University about the research, which was just published in the journal Scientific Advances, star dunes like Lala Lallia have been observed in deserts all over the world and elsewhere in our Solar System, but have rarely been found on Earth's rocky geological record. It now appears that part of the reason why they haven't been found written in stone is because, as it turns out, they're pretty young.

"These findings will probably surprise a lot of people as we can see how quickly this enormous dune formed," Duller explained.

"Quickly," however, is a relative term.

As the geographer and his colleagues at the University College London found using a bespoke sand luminescence dating technique, the oldest parts of Lala Lallia which means "highest sacred point" in the Berber language are some 13,000 years old.

While that seems ancient by human standards, it is indeed fairly recent on the geographic scale, which deals in the hundreds of thousands and millions of years when discussing mountains and other such venerable formations.

What's more, the youngest part of the dune formed within the last thousand years, which is the blink of an eye on a geological time scale.

At more than 200 feet high and nearly 2,300 feet wide, Lala Lallia isn't even the planet's largest sand star. That distinction, as the school's press release notes, belongs to the star dunes of China's Badain Jaran Desert that reach almost 1,000 feet into the sky.

More on deserts: NASA Rover Spots Dead Mars Helicopter in Its "Final Resting Place"

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Scientists Intrigued by Moving Sand Dune With Star-Like Arms - Futurism

1 March 2024, 15:45 | Updated: 1 March 2024, 15:57

As Dune: Part Two arrives in cinemas, heres how Hans Zimmer created his most futuristic soundtrack for Denis Villeneuves pair of sci-fi epics.

Hans Zimmers epic score to Dune: Part One was met with an incredible reaction when it landed in 2021.

Acclaimed by both critics and fans alike, his otherworldly futuristic soundscape captured the inhospitable desert landscape of Arrakis and perilous undertones of political plotting, coups and assassinations.

Zimmers score relied heavily on strings, percussion and choral chants, with intoxicating harmonies and dramatic drumbeats that bring you right to the heart of the films drama in the way that only a master composer like Hans Zimmer can.

As Part Two is released, heres everything we know so far about the music to Denis Villeneuves Dune series.

Read more: Hans Zimmer wins Oscar for Dune, accepts award in his dressing gown

Watch the trailer for Dune 2

Zimmers score to the first Dune film was incredibly inventive, with custom-built instruments and an unforgettably haunting vocal riff, that all worked to earn him his second Oscar for best original score.

The legendary composer told Vanity Fair how he enlisted the help of musician and sculptor Chas Smith to build a large-scale metal house in California, which also doubled as a percussive musical instrument.

He also constructed flute-like instruments from PVC pipes, for a more breathy and less resonant sound, and asked his cellist Tina Guo to make her instrument sound like a Tibetan warhorn.

Read more: The 10 best Hans Zimmer soundtracks

Jonathan Ross recaps the last 10 years of Oscar-winning film scores!

Much of the Dune universe is built around the fictional Fremen language, spoken by the Fremen people who occupy the planet Arrakis the universes only source of the valuable drug, called spice.

To develop the Fremen language, Villeneuve worked with legendary linguist David J. Peterson, who was also responsible for six languages featured in Game of Thrones.

Zimmer has also said that he worked with a linguist to devise the vocal chants featured in his soundtrack, but its unclear if the language and linguist are the same as that used in the films script.

Read more: The 10 best Hans Zimmer soundtracks

One of the most immediately identifiable features of Zimmers Dune score is a gravelly-voiced vocal riff, sung by a woman.

Female voices played a large part in Zimmers score, as he told Vanity Fair: The one thing that I thought was more important than anything else in the world the human voice. The one thing that would not age, the one thing that in the future would still be valid.

For the soundtracks signature riff, which Zimmer called the cry of a banshee, the composer called in vocalist Loire Cotler.

Originally posted here:
Dune soundtracks: everything you need to know about Hans Zimmers futuristic scores - Classic FM

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has spotted arare and"extremely red" supermassive black hole lurking in one of the most ancient corners of the universe.

Astronomers suggest the vermilion black hole was the result of an expanding universe just 700 million years following the Big Bang, as detailed in a paper published this month in the journal Nature. Its colors are likely due to a thick layer of dust blocking much of its light, they posit.

While the cosmic monster was technically first discovered last year, researchers have now found that it's far more massive than any other object of its kind in the area, making it a highly unusual find that could rewrite the way we understand how supermassive black holes grow relative to their host galaxies.

The team studied data collected by the James Webb that examined a group of distant galaxies in the central core of Pandora's Cluster, also known as Abell 2744, some 4 billion light-years from Earth.

Thanks to gravitational lensing, an effect caused by massive objects bending the surrounding spacetime, astronomers were able to get a detailed look at even more distant galaxies beyond it.

"We were very excited when JWST started sending its first data," said co-lead and Ben-Gurion University postdoctoral researcher Lukas Furtak in a statement, recalling coming across "three very compact yet red-blooming objects" that "prominently stood out and caught our eyes."

Thanks to their appearance, Furtak and his colleagues concluded the three objects which turned out to be images of the same source had to be a "quasar-like object." Quasars are galactic cores that emit huge amounts of electromagnetic radiation caused by a supermassive black hole in its center sucking up nearby gas and dust.

"Analysis of the object's colors indicated that it was not a typical star-forming galaxy," said program co-lead and University of Pittsburgh observational astronomer Rachel Bezanson in the statement. "Together with its compact size, it became evident this was likely a supermassive black hole, although it was still different from other quasars found at those early times."

Thanks to detailed measurements of the object's redshift, the amount the wavelength of light stretches relative to how fast a celestial object is moving compared to us, the team was also able to determine its mass.

According to those calculations, it's extremely massive, potentially packing a sizable percentage of the mass of its host galaxy into a tiny region, raising some intriguing questions as to how the growth of black holes and their host galaxies are related.

"In a way, it's the astrophysical equivalent of the chicken and egg problem," said co-lead and Ben-Gurion University professor Adi Zitrin in the statement. "We do not currently know which came first the galaxy or black hole, how massive the first black holes were, and how they grew."

More on black holes: James Webb Finds Most Ancient Black Hole Ever Discovered

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James Webb Spots "Extremely Red" Black Hole - Futurism