Tuesday, June 21, 2022

Bad news I forgot to post about

Two recent-ish stories I overlooked posting about:

Salmon really don't like warming water (even in frigid New Zealand oceans):

New Zealand’s biggest king salmon farmer says it is shutting some of its farms after warming seas prompted mass die-offs of fish, warning that it is a “canary in the coalmine” for climate change.

New Zealand is the world’s largest producer of king, or “chinook” salmon, a highly valued breed which fetches a premium on the world market. The country’s farms account for about 85% of global supply, New Zealand King Salmon chief executive Grant Rosewarne said.

Now, increasingly warm summer seas mean the fish at some sites are dying en masse before they can reach maturity, leaving farmers dumping thousands of tonnes of dead fish into local landfills.

I see (now that I Google the topic) that increasing temperatures in Alaska have been a worry for years.  here is a story from early 2022:

ANCHORAGE, Alaska, Feb 25 (Reuters) - With marine heat waves helping to wipe out some of Alaska’s storied salmon runs in recent years, officials have resorted to sending emergency food shipments to affected communities while scientists warn that the industry’s days of traditional harvests may be numbered.

Salmon all but disappeared from the 2,000-mile (3,200-km) Yukon River run last year, as record-high temperatures led to the fish piling up dead in streams and rivers before they were able to spawn. A study published Feb. 15 in the journal Fisheries detailed more than 100 salmon die-offs at freshwater sites around Alaska.

Just how many rogue black holes are wandering the galaxy?  Way, way too many, by the sounds:

A rogue black hole wandering the space lanes of our Milky Way galaxy alone could be the smallest black hole yet found, according to one estimate of its mass.

Earlier this year, astronomers led by Kailash Sahu of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, announced the discovery of the first known isolated stellar-mass black hole

The black hole is 5,000 light-years away and was discovered thanks to the power of its gravity to act as a gravitational lens, magnifying the light of a background star 19,000 light-years away.....

Even though stars with more than 20 solar masses account for just 0.1% of all the stars in the Milky Way, there are so many stars in the Milky Way (an estimated 100–200 billion), and the Milky Way is so old (approximately 13 billion years) that there should now be 100 million or more stellar-mass black holes in our galaxy. 

Many of these are found in binary systems, where their presence is evident from their gravitational pull on their companion star and their accretion of matter from their neighbor. One has even been found inside a star cluster, NGC 1850 in the Large Magellanic Cloud. However, many others will be wandering between the stars, going unnoticed until a chance alignment with a background star means we spot them creating a gravitational lens.

 

 

 

1 comment:

GMB said...

"* Just how many rogue black holes are wandering the galaxy? Way, way too many, by the sounds:.....'

There is not any such thing as a black hole. Nor any evidence for one. Our own supermassive central star (Sagittarius A**) is not a black hole. It shoots superluminal protons out of its poles with such power that it leaves giant bubbles of gamma radiation throughout space. And the rest of its body emits radio waves at very energetic levels. Its radius makes it seriously big. No pin-prick at all. But more akin to the size of the orbit of Mercury around the sun.

Thats a seriously big fucking star.