It is thought the sun may have engulfed a super-Earth-sized planet early in its history. Now, a new study has gone a step further, suggesting that such an event may have left behind detectable clues inside the sun that could still be visible today.
Nitrogen is a key ingredient in the biomolecules that form the building blocks of life. Yet as an unbonded gas, it is far more likely to drift into space than to lock itself into solid compounds, making it difficult for astronomers to trace its journey to Earth in the distant past.
The joint BepiColombo mission of the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) is settling into orbit around Mercury after an eight-year journey. In early September, BepiColombo's two orbiters, the Mercury Planetary Orbiter and the Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter, separated from the transfer module. The orbiters will enter Mercury's orbit in November and separate from each other in December.
Mars is a terrible place to build a house. It's bitterly cold, blasted by radiation and a near vacuum. Not to mention that the building materials, even for a modest shelter, could spend months hurtling through space before construction begins.
The sun is capable of great things. In massive eruptions, it repeatedly hurls particles and radiation into space. This solar bombardment can be dangerous for technical infrastructure on Earth: For example, satellites and transformers in substations can be damaged.
For years, scientists have relied primarily on radio imaging from techniques like very long baseline interferometry (VLBI) to study jets from the active galactic nuclei of supermassive black holes. This allows for the detection of broad, unresolved features, called components, moving at what appear to be faster-than-light speeds. However, traditional imaging has poor resolution and treats each observation as a separate snapshot in time, limiting information about how the features move.
On a mostly flat plain an hour north of Stockholm lies a collection of large burial mounds dating from an ancient culture at least 2,500 years old. These people were not Vikings; they were northern Germanic Goths, pagan polytheists worshiping the precursors of Odin, Freyr and Thor.
The eROSITA (extended ROentgen Survey with an Imaging Telescope Array) telescope, the primary instrument aboard the Russian-German Spektr-RG space observatory, was developed by the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) and collaborators to study the soft X-ray night sky. The mission launched in 2019 and has delivered deep, sharp images over very large areas of the sky to map the high-energy universe. This past summer, the German eROSITA Consortium made its second data release (DR2), the most comprehensive catalog of the X-ray universe ever released.
Thanks to JAXA, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, and its sample-return capabilities, we're on the cusp of receiving our first sample from the Martian system—not from Mars itself, but from its largest moon, Phobos. JAXA's Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) mission is set to launch in October. It will reach Phobos in 2027 and, if successful, return a sample from the moon to Earth in 2031.
NASA is bringing artificial intelligence to the study of the moon, helping researchers transform how they analyze its surface. In an ongoing collaboration with IBM Research and several academic institutions, NASA has launched the NASA-IBM Lunar Foundation Model, one of the first open-source AI models built specifically for lunar science. The model, trained primarily on data from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), is hosted publicly on Hugging Face for anyone to use, with the complete codebase available on GitHub for testing and experimentation.
Scientists were shocked when they received the first images of Martian gullies. They were even more shocked as those gullies appeared to change over time. Their similarities to gullies seen on Earth were uncanny, but all of Earth's gullies are formed by water runoff, and Mars is too cold and has too sparse an atmosphere to have liquid water on its surface. Whatever has been causing those changing gullies couldn't have been water, so what was it? A new paper from Apolline Leclef of the Institut d'Astrophysique Spatiale at Université Paris-Saclay and her colleagues, available on the arXiv preprint server, shows how they are likely caused by CO2 frost turning into a fluid.
Scientists have discovered that there is ice deep inside planets like Neptune and Uranus and want to find out what form it takes and how it behaves. They cannot dig for it and transport it all the way back to Earth, so they do the next best thing: recreate those extreme conditions in the lab.
As our telescopes have improved and we've been able to peer farther back in time, we've begun finding more fascinating features of the universe. But one thing we haven't found for sure is Population III (Pop III) stars. These were the earliest stars in the universe, formed completely from pristine hydrogen and helium, with no "metals" (i.e., elements heavier than those two) polluting their processes.
The COSMOS field, or Cosmic Evolution Survey Deep Field, is one of the most famous patches of the universe observed by astronomers. Located in the constellation Sextans, this region was photographed by the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) in segments from 2003 to 2005 using its Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS). With support from ground-based and other space-based telescopes, the resulting images were then stitched together to create a stunning picture of cosmic evolution.
A new study suggests that the young stars orbiting the Milky Way's central black hole may have a surprisingly ordinary origin. But the black hole's influence may be what makes their origin look more exotic than it really is. Along with shaping their orbits, it may also destroy their stellar companions. The paper outlining this work was published in Astronomy & Astrophysics on Aug. 11.
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