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'The Goblin' discovery redefining solar system
An extremely distant dwarf planet, named The Goblin, has been discovered in observations that are redefining the outer reaches of the solar system.
Astronomers made the discovery while hunting for a hypothetical massive planet, known as Planet Nine, that is suspected to be in orbit far beyond Pluto in a mysterious region known as the Oort Cloud. Planet Nine has not yet been seen directly, but The Goblin appears to be under the gravitational influence of a giant unseen object, adding to astronomers’ certainty that it is out there.
The newly discovered icy world, estimated to be just 300km across, is in an extremely elongated orbit. At its closest, it gets about two and a half times as far from the sun as Pluto. Then it heads off to the outermost fringes of the solar system, to almost 60 times further out than Pluto, taking an astounding 40,000 years to loop once around the sun. For 99% of its orbit, it would be too faint to see.
Plants engineered to always be on defensive mode
A tiny weed that slithers up through sidewalk cracks is helping scientists understand the sacrifices that plants make to protect themselves from pests.
All plants have a bundle of what are known as JAZ genes. Those genes provide the instructions to make JAZ proteins, which help plants control the use of the defensive chemicals. Over a decade, the team disrupted the activity of 10 of the 13 JAZ genes found in Arabidopsis plants to hinder production of those proteins.
As a result, the engineered plants were nearly permanently in defensive mode, which ultimately made them shorter, weaker and with fewer viable seeds than their normal counterparts, the scientists found. Brown and withered leaves also revealed that the engineered plants were starved of carbon, meaning they weren’t getting enough food. Maintaining such a defensive strategy consumes energy that the plant could otherwise use for growth or reproduction, the researchers speculate.
For now, it’s unclear how applicable these insights from Arabidopsis are to other plants, including major grain crops, says Georg Jander, a chemical ecologist at Cornell University. But through such research, the team hopes to illuminate new ways to protect crops from foraging insects without sacrificing crop yield or dousing fields in pesticides.