Video: Typhoon Haiyan moves towards the Philippines
An angry Haiyan as seen by Japan Meteorological Agency’s MTSAT satellite at 01:57 GMT on 8 November 2013 (Image: NOAA) What typhoon Haiyan might look like if it were over the Atlantic Ocean off the US east coast (Image: Rick Kohrs, SSEC via CIMSS, University of Wisconsin)
One of the strongest typhoons on record has blasted the Philippines. The storm crashed through the central islands of the archipelago on its way back out to sea. Contact has been lost with many of the affected areas, so it is unclear how many people have been killed or injured, but .
Typhoon Haiyan is probably the , according to meteorologist Jeff Masters of US-based company Weather Underground. The US navy’s Joint Typhoon Warning Center says , with gusts as strong as 324 km/h.
A few typhoons in the 1960s were thought to have had stronger winds, but they have since been downgraded after it emerged that the measurements were unreliable.
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Haiyan formed in the central Pacific earlier this week and headed west. It on 6 November, and struck the Philippines last night as a category 5 storm, threatening the second-largest city, Cebu.
According to the , Haiyan has now moved out to sea and is , towards .
The storm is expected to gradually weaken to category 4 over the sea before .
Vietnam’s National Centre for Hydro-Meteorological Forecasting has issued a , while the China Meteorological Agency has launched a .
![Astronomers have long known that understanding how star clusters come to be is key to unlocking other secrets of galactic evolution. Stars form in clusters, created when clouds of gas collapse under gravity. As more and more stars are born in a collapsing cloud, strong stellar winds, harsh ultraviolet radiation and the supernova explosions of massive stars eventually disperse the cloud, and their light can bear down on other star-forming regions in the galaxy. This process is called stellar feedback, and it means that most of the gas in a galaxy never gets used for star formation. Researching how star clusters develop can answer questions about star formation at a galactic scale. Now, the state of the art has been further developed with both Hubble and Webb working together to provide a broad-spectrum view of thousands of young star clusters. An international team of astronomers has pored over images of four nearby galaxies from the FEAST observing programme (#1783), trying to solve this mystery. Their results show that it is the most massive star clusters that clear away their gaseous shroud the fastest, and begin lighting their galaxy the earliest. The team identified nearly 9000 star clusters in the four galaxies in different evolutionary stages: young clusters just starting to emerge from their natal clouds of gas, clusters that had partially dispersed the gas (both from Webb images), and fully unobstructed clusters visible in optical light (found in Hubble images). With Webb???s ability to peer inside the gas clouds, they were able to then estimate the mass and age of each cluster from its light spectrum. This image shows a section of one of the spiral arms of Messier 51 (M51), one of the four galaxies studied in this work, as seen by Webb???s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam). The thick clumps of star-forming gas are shown here in red and orange, representing infrared light emitted by ionised gas, dust grains, and complex molecules such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). Within these gas complexes, each tens or hundreds of light years across, Webb reveals the dense, extremely bright clusters of massive stars that have just recently formed. The countless stars strewn across the arm of the galaxy, many of which would be invisible to our eyes behind layers of dust, are also laid bare in infrared light. [Image description: A large, long portion of one of the spiral arms in galaxy M51. Red-orange, clumpy filaments of gas and dust that stretch in a chain from left to right comprise the arm. Shining cyan bubbles light up parts of the gas clouds from within, and gaps expose bright star clusters in these bubbles as glowing white dots. The whole image is dotted with small stars. A faint blue glow around the arm colours the otherwise dark background.]](https://images.newscientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/13114322/SEI_296271016.jpg)
