NASA’s Hubble Spots an Out-of-Sync Galaxy

The spiral galaxy NGC 4698 shines in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.

ESA/Hubble & NASA, D. Thilker, the MAUVE-HST Team

Though the spiral galaxy in this new image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope seems serene, it hides a chaotic secret. This galaxy is NGC 4698, and it lies about 55 million light-years away in the constellation Virgo. It’s one of over a thousand galaxies in the Virgo Cluster, the nearest large cluster of galaxies bound together by gravity.

As a spiral galaxy similar to our own Milky Way galaxy, NGC 4698 has spiral arms that curl around within a thin disk of stars, gas, and dust. These arms are marked by opaque clumps of brown dust and dotted with small collections of bright blue stars. Unlike many other spiral galaxies, like this one recently photographed by Hubble, NGC 4698’s delicate spiral arms are only prominent in the outer reaches of the disk; spiral arms often wind down to the very center of a galaxy, but NGC 4698’s spiral arms appear to shy away from its glowing center. The arms instead hover in a ring-like structure around the perimeter of the galaxy.

NGC 4698’s center is dominated by an elongated galactic bulge . The diffuse off-white glow of the galaxy’s bulge comes from stars smaller, older, and cooler than the massive blue stars that dot the galaxy’s outer disk. These tightly packed stars orbit a supermassive black hole containing millions of times the Sun’s mass. Scientists have found signs that this black hole is actively growing, drawing gas inward with its gravitational pull.

With a flat, starry disk and diffusely glowing center, NGC 4698 looks a lot like a typical spiral galaxy — but this galaxy is far from normal. NGC 4698 is one of only a few known spiral galaxies with a bulge that extends out from the disk at a right angle. The elongation is faintly visible in this Hubble image, which shows the ghostly glow of the starry bulge peeking above and below the dusty disk. What’s more, the stars and gas nearest the galaxy’s center rotate perpendicular to the rest of the disk!

What could cause a galaxy to be so out of sync? Astronomers have found that the culprit likely lies outside the galaxy. If NGC 4698 funneled in gas from an outside source, the newly collected gas could have formed a disk of gas and stars in the galaxy’s center, at an angle relative to the rest of the disk. Some observations suggest that this galaxy once experienced a minor galactic merger, as evidenced by a short ‘tail’ of hydrogen streaming from one side of the galaxy.

The data used to create this image come from an observing program focusing on galaxies in the Virgo Cluster. This program zooms in on the details of these relatively nearby galaxies, such as individual star clusters and nebulae. At the same time, researchers will use these data to take stock of the larger picture, learning how a galaxy’s journey through a cluster affects the galaxy’s evolution and ability to form new stars.

Text credit: ESA/Hubble

Elizabeth Tammi 

Source: NASA’s Hubble Spots an Out-of-Sync Galaxy - NASA Science   

Why Modern Europeans Turn Up Their Noses at Bugs, But Neanderthals Didn’t

Insects are, by most measures, an excellent food. They pack in protein, need a fraction of the land and water that livestock does, and over 1,600 species are already recognized as edible somewhere on Earth. Hundreds of millions of people eat them regularly. And yet in most of Europe and the wider West, the idea of biting into a cricket or a grasshopper still provokes a shudder rather than an appetite. A new study in Science Advances suggests that reaction might be older, and more biological, than we assumed.

Researchers from the Institute of Evolutionary Biology, a joint center of the Spanish National Research Council and Pompeu Fabra University, went looking for direct evidence of ancient insect-eating. Their tool of choice was dental calculus, the calcified plaque that builds up on teeth and, crucially, traps and preserves DNA from whatever its owner was chewing on. The team screened 745 samples of this ancient tartar, taken from modern humans who lived as far back as 33,000 years ago, alongside comparative samples from Neanderthals, chimpanzees, and gorillas.

A Diet Poor in Bugs, for a Very Long Time

The results were fairly one-sided. Modern humans living across northern Eurasia carried only faint traces of insect DNA in their dental calculus far less than what turned up in Neanderthal samples, and well below the levels found in chimpanzees, who supplement their diet with insects, especially during lean seasons. Insect-eating, in other words, looks like it was occasional and largely incidental for our own species in this part of the world, rather than a deliberate dietary strategy.

The genetic side of the study backs this up. The researchers looked at chitinase genes, which produce enzymes that help break down chitin, the tough material that makes up insect exoskeletons. In northern Eurasian populations, these genes carry mutations linked to a reduced ability to digest chitin, and that genetic signature has held steady for roughly 9,000 years, since agriculture began reshaping how people ate.

“Pablo Librado, who led the study, frames it as evidence that the West’s aversion to eating insects isn’t just a matter of modern taste or culture, it appears to be rooted in a much longer ecological and evolutionary story.”

Neanderthals Ate More Bugs Than We Did

Neanderthals told a different story entirely. Despite living in many of the same landscapes as anatomically modern humans, their dental calculus held considerably more insect DNA, on par with the levels seen in western chimpanzees. The most common signals came from Diptera, the order that includes flies and mosquitoes, with mosquito DNA showing up especially often.

That detail lines up with a hypothesis some researchers have floated before: that Neanderthals regularly ate animal carcasses that had already attracted fly larvae, and may even have stored meat in ponds or marshy spots, environments where mosquitoes would have happily laid their eggs alongside it. The genetics reinforce the picture, Neanderthal chitinase genes look built for more efficient insect digestion, a trait also seen in the single Denisovan specimen included in the analysis.

Geography Left Its Mark on Our Genes

Zooming out to modern populations, the pattern holds: people living closer to the tropics are more likely to carry gene variants tied to stronger expression of the chitin-digesting enzymes chitinase acid and chitobiase. First author Manuel Piñero points out that tropical environments simply make insect-eating worthwhile, social insects like termites and locusts exist in the kind of biomass and year-round abundance needed to offset the energy spent gathering them, with the added bonus of natural pest control.

As populations spread toward higher latitudes, where insects are scarcer and harder to collect in bulk, expression of those digestive enzymes gradually faded. That geographic split has persisted for at least nine millennia, and it looks less like a cultural quirk and more like biology quietly following ecology.

Could Bugs Make a Comeback?

None of this necessarily closes the door on insects as food in the West. Modern processing can extract the nutritional value of insects without requiring anyone to chew through much chitin, and industrial-scale insect farming sidesteps the collection problem that shaped ancient diets in the first place. The same research group is now studying how insect domestication is unfolding, comparing the genomes of farmed insect species against their wild, pre-domestication relatives.

It’s a neat illustration of how deep some of our food preferences run, and a reminder that closing the gap between “sustainable protein source” and “dinner” might take more than just a good recipe.

Original paper: Piñero, M. & Librado, P. (2026). Genomic evidence for limited entomophagy in ancient Europeans. Science Advances, 12(23). 

Source: Why Modern Europeans Turn Up Their Noses at Bugs, But Neanderthals Didn’t