It’s the end of another year – and the beginning, say many, of a new geological epoch.
The Anthropocene is upon us. We’ve harnessed the world and exploited virtually all its materials, living and unliving. Nature – what is left of it – is in our hands, and what happens from here will be entirely our fault.
How should we celebrate this extraordinary occasion? What should we give each other when it comes time to lay the presents under the non-recyclable plastic tree?
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For the kids, perhaps a de-extinction kit – soon for elephants, certainly snow leopards. For the older children, maybe anti-surveillance make-up. And what about Mum and Dad – antique tinned fish, or a six-month subscription to the Clean Water Company?
We want you to tell us what you’d like for Christmases hence, now the world is wholly, terribly ours. Think up an Anthropocene gift, something that reflects this weird and wonderful future where the natural world is all but gone and only our designed, manufactured world survives.
Post a short description on our Facebook page, at , or even mock it up and send us a photograph. We’ll feature all the best gift ideas on the New ¾«¶«´«Ã½ website over Christmas. Try and get your entries in early if you want them to be featured, and in any event by 2 December.
Image credit: Alan Powdrill/Getty
![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)
