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'Flying over Berlin' on Europe's Highest Swing

Hotel worker Wendy Sorice swings 120 meters above the rooftops of Berlin. RALF HIRSCHBERGER / AFP/File
Hotel worker Wendy Sorice swings 120 meters above the rooftops of Berlin. RALF HIRSCHBERGER / AFP/File
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'Flying over Berlin' on Europe's Highest Swing

Hotel worker Wendy Sorice swings 120 meters above the rooftops of Berlin. RALF HIRSCHBERGER / AFP/File
Hotel worker Wendy Sorice swings 120 meters above the rooftops of Berlin. RALF HIRSCHBERGER / AFP/File

Pascal Vent let out a nervous laugh as he peered down at the ground from Berlin's newest tourist attraction, a swing on the top of a 40-storey tower block.
Billed as the highest swing in Europe, the contraption on top of a hotel next to Berlin's famous TV tower is a novel way to take in the city -- with a dose of adrenaline thrown in.
Once strapped into a harness, customers are propelled forward so that when they are at the high point of the swing, there is nothing between them and the ground 120 meters (nearly 400 feet) below.
"After the first few swings, you get used to it and you feel free," said Vent, a media worker who wanted to try out the swing for his 36th birthday.
"I came here to feel a bit younger," he said.
The swing, which charges around 20 euros ($22) for five minutes, has attracted more than 100 visitors a day since it opened in June.
Victoria Voigt, a 34-year-old care worker, discovered the attraction via social media.
"It feels a bit like flying," she said.
Wendy Sorice, a 30-year-old hotel worker, described the experience as an "adrenaline rush" and said she could happily have done it for longer than five minutes.
But her boyfriend was not so enthusiastic -- overcome by vertigo, he stayed on the ground to film her instead.
"We wanted to create something simple and easy to access," said Andi Hoefer, managing director of the company that set up the swing, which operates several attractions in Germany.
The company had previously offered base jumping from the top of the building, but it attracted only limited interest.
The swing offers some competition for the 368-meter TV tower, a famous symbol of the former East Germany with sweeping views across Berlin.
"They have sloping windows, but we have a terrace and fresh air," Hoefer said.
And the fact the attraction beats the record for the highest swing in Europe, previously held by a 100-meter swing in Amsterdam? "Pure chance," he said.

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Astronomers Spot Galaxy Shaped Like the Milky Way But is Far More Massive

An artist's impression shows a galactic merger in which the galaxy on the right hosts a quasar at its core, in this handout image released by the European Southern Observatory on May 21, 2025. ESO/M. Kornmesser/Handout via REUTERS
An artist's impression shows a galactic merger in which the galaxy on the right hosts a quasar at its core, in this handout image released by the European Southern Observatory on May 21, 2025. ESO/M. Kornmesser/Handout via REUTERS
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Astronomers Spot Galaxy Shaped Like the Milky Way But is Far More Massive

An artist's impression shows a galactic merger in which the galaxy on the right hosts a quasar at its core, in this handout image released by the European Southern Observatory on May 21, 2025. ESO/M. Kornmesser/Handout via REUTERS
An artist's impression shows a galactic merger in which the galaxy on the right hosts a quasar at its core, in this handout image released by the European Southern Observatory on May 21, 2025. ESO/M. Kornmesser/Handout via REUTERS

Astronomers have observed a galaxy dating to an earlier epoch in the universe's history that surprisingly is shaped much like our Milky Way - a spiral structure with a straight bar of stars and gas running through its center - but far more massive, offering new insight into galactic formation.

The distant galaxy, called J0107a, was observed as it appeared 11.1 billion years ago, when the universe was about a fifth of its current age. The researchers used data from the Chile-based Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and NASA's James Webb Space Telescope to study the galaxy, Reuters reported.

They determined that the galaxy's mass, including its stars and gas, was more than 10 times greater than that of the Milky Way, and it was forming stars at an annual rate approximately 300 times greater. J0107a was more compact than the Milky Way, however.

"The galaxy is a monster galaxy with a high star formation rate and plenty of gas, much more than present-day galaxies," said astronomer Shuo Huang of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, lead author of the study published this week in the journal Nature.

"This discovery," said study co-author Toshiki Saito, an astronomer at Shizuoka University in Japan, "raises the important question: How did such a massive galaxy form in such an early universe?"

While a few galaxies that are undergoing star formation at a similar rate to J0107a exist in today's universe, almost all of them are ones that are in the process of a galactic merger or collision. There was no sign of such circumstances involving this galaxy.

J0107a and the Milky Way have some commonalities.

"They are similarly huge and possess a similar barred structure. However, the Milky Way had plenty of time to form its huge structures, while J0107a didn't," Saito said.

In the first few billion years after the Big Bang event 13.8 billion years ago that initiated the universe, galaxies were turbulent entities and were much richer in gas than those existing currently - factors that fostered extreme bursts of star formation. While galaxies with highly organized structures like the barred spiral shape of the Milky Way are common now, that was not the case 11.1 billion years ago.

"Compared to other monster galaxies in the distant universe (dating to an earlier cosmic epoch) whose shapes are usually disturbed or irregular, it is unexpected that J0107a looks very similar to present-day spiral galaxies," Huang said.

"Theories about the formation of present-day galactic structures may need to be revised," Huang added.

The Webb telescope, as it peers across vast distances back to the early universe, has found that galaxies with a spiral shape appeared much earlier than previously known. J0107a is now one of the earliest-known examples of a barred spiral galaxy.

About two thirds of spiral galaxies observed in the universe today possess a bar structure. The bar is thought to serve as a form of stellar nursery, bringing gas inward from the galaxy's spiral arms. Some of the gas forms what are called molecular clouds.

Gravity causes the contraction of these clouds, with small centers taking shape that heat up and become new stars.

The bar that is part of J0107a measures about 50,000 light years in length, Huang said. A light-year is the distance light travels in a year, 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km).

The Webb telescope "has been studying the morphology of early massive galaxies intensely recently. However, their dynamics are still poorly understood," Saito said.