Edinburgh
“I’M NOT afraid to say that I’m afraid,” said Garry Kasparov last month after his fifth game against Deep Blue 2. The match between man and machine was all square as Kasparov spoke to the watching chess aficionados and world press assembled at the Equitable Center on New York’s Seventh Avenue.
It was a chilling moment for all of us, raising to an extraordinary pitch the tension surrounding the final game next day.
Then it came.
On his seventh move, sixth game, Kasparov played the wrong pawn in a well-known opening. Deep Blue’s immediate knight sacrifice sprung a trap from which there is little escape. Kasparov’s face on the big screen in the auditorium stared in horror. Then he buried his head in his hands. After Deep Blue had played its 19th move, Kasparov resigned the game-the shortest losing game of his career-and the match.
Kasparov has an unprecedented chess rating of 2805. Grandmaster Joel Benjamin, who worked with the IBM team that put Deep Blue 2 together, rates the machine at 2700. According to the statistics of the rating system, this kind of lead should allow Kasparov to win twice as many games over Deep Blue as he loses. Chess masters had expected that a week of his usual confident superchess would be enough to destroy Deep Blue. How then did catastrophe overtake the greatest chess player that the world has ever seen?
This was a battle between two different ways of playing chess. Deep Blue plays chess like no human on Earth. Kasparov was eager to learn more about the machine’s foibles. He had shocked the chess…
![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)
