'Bring Ya Ya home': How a panda in the US turbocharged Chinese nationalist sentimentĪnd the elderly panda blew up China’s internet again this week after she ended her month long quarantine on Sunday. About five hundred people attended a farewell party for the Panda. Ya Ya, a Giant Panda at the Memphis Zoo eats bamboo on Saturday, April 8, 2023, in Memphis, Tenn. Her return was huge news in China with an outpouring of nationalist sentiment online and her arrival heralded as a patriotic homecoming. Ya Ya was transported to Shanghai on April 4 after months of heated discussion on Chinese social media about whether she had received adequate care and attention while in the US – accusations first levied by animal advocates in 2021, and denied repeatedly by the Memphis Zoo. But her scheduled return last month came to symbolize deteriorating relations between the world’s two superpowers, which have fallen to their lowest point in half a century. Ya Ya was loaned to Memphis Zoo back in 2003 at a high-point in US-China relations. On Weibo, China’s heavily restricted version of Twitter, a hashtag tracking Ya Ya’s return quickly gained over 230 million views, topping the trending charts on Monday. The subheading and main text of this article were amended on 6 June 2023 to correctly refer to Betelgeuse as a red supergiant star, rather than a red giant star.Giant panda Ya Ya has become an internet sensation again after Chinese state media showed images of her arriving at her new home in Beijing on Sunday, following an end to her quarantine since returning from the United States. “Theoretically it probably hasn’t, but theoretically it could have exploded and we wouldn’t know.” We’re also watching this in the past, she explains: the light from Betelgeuse is more than 600 years old. “I mean, I’ve always got all of my fingers and toes crossed that maybe we’ll get lucky.” While Betelgeuse is very unlikely to explode in our lifetimes, “we don’t know”, says Webb. As the two figures battle, Nyeeruna’s fire magic grows brighter, dimmer and brighter again. In the cosmology of the Kokatha Mula people in South Australia, Betelgeuse marks the right hand and fire magic of a hunter named Nyeeruna – this is the hunter’s fire magic, which he uses to try to overpower a protective older sister named Kambugudha. In Greek astronomy, Betelgeuse ( pronounced “beetlejuice”, like the Tim Burton film character) marks one of the shoulders in the constellation Orion, but its name comes from the Arabic bat al-jawzāʾ, which means “the giant’s shoulder”.Īboriginal Australians discovered the star’s bright and dim cycles long before western astronomers, who until 1596 believed that stars were “unchanging and unvariable”, according to the Conversation. “Since the dimming, Betelgeuse’s light and radial velocity curves have been markedly different from its past,” the authors write. The paper Dupree co-authored with other scientists from Harvard and the University of California, Berkeley, concludes that it will be five to 10 years before Betelgeuse returns to its normal 400-day cycles. “So it’s pushed all of this mass away and now its core and its stability are still trying to recover.” And a similar thing happened with poor Betelguese,” says Webb. “If we were to throw one of our arms away from us, it changes the way our forces move in our body. That lump was several times the mass of Earth’s moon, says Webb. The great dimming was caused by the star spitting out a lump of gas and dust, like chewing gum: or what scientists call a “surface mass ejection” caused by an “anomalously hot convective plume”. The Egyptians described the appearance of a “second sun” in the sky, says Webb. There are records from ancient Egypt of what appears to be a star exploding as a supernova. When it does eventually explode, it could – over the course of a week – grow so bright that it will be visible during daylight, and cast shadows at night. Observing its behaviour gives important insights into the behaviour of red supergiants before supernova explosions. “One of the coolest things about Betelgeuse is that we’re watching the final stages of big star evolution play out almost in real time for us, which we’ve never really been able to study in this much depth before,” says Dr Sara Webb, an astrophysicist at Swinburne University of Technology in Australia. As days grow shorter in the northern hemisphere, it will be visible there too.īetelgeuse is expected to explode some time in the next 10,000 to 100,000 years. In the southern hemisphere sky it can be spotted glowing brightly in the early evening, at the shoulder of the Orion constellation.
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