Hydrogen may be the most common element in the cosmos, but scientists could use it to do something unique: uncover the nature of dark energy, the mysterious force driving the accelerating expansion of the universe.

This new line of dark energy investigation comes from the fact that researchers have determined that the CHIME (Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment) project can detect the faint radio glow of hydrogen from the universe's distant past.

Not only does this represent a faster and much less expensive way to investigate dark energy, but it is a major milestone for CHIME. The instrument was specifically devised to investigate dark energy and its pervasive influence.

"This is a completely new technique for probing the cosmos, delivered by an instrument that was conceived and built by Canadians," CHIME principal investigator Mark Halpern of the University of British Columbia said in a statement. "It's a bold new step in the global cosmology program and a Canadian success story."

Why is dark energy so problematic?

Dark energy is the mysterious force that is accelerating the expansion of the universe. It is so problematic for scientists because it started acting on the fabric of space only after the expansion triggered by the Big Bang had halted.

That's akin to pushing a child on a swing, watching it stop, and then seeing the swing start up again without a push. And, not only that, but the swing starts oscillating faster and faster. Consider scientists akin to very worried parents, who would really like to know where this ghostly push came from and how it is going to proceed.

Just as, if the push on the swing continues, the child could end up in the bushes, or in orbit, the strengthening of dark energy could result in the cold death of the cosmos, or even a "Big Rip" scenario that sees space shredded. Alternatively, if it weakens and allows gravity to reassert dominance, then the universe could collapse back in on itself, resulting in a "Big Crunch" ending that sees the cosmos compressed back into a singularity, as it was at the beginning of time.

Dark energy is now the dominant element of the universe, accounting for 68% of the universe's matter-energy budget. It's little wonder that scientists are very keen to know what this mysterious force is.

So how can hydrogen help the investigation of dark energy?

"Hydrogen is the most common element in the universe and the raw material from which stars form," team member Arnab Chakraborty of the University of Toronto said. "Its faint radio emission acts like a cosmic tracer, revealing how matter is distributed across space."

Previously, CHIME could map the distribution of hydrogen in the early universe but only by cross-correlating its observations with galaxy survey data from other telescopes, operations that cost millions of dollars and can only focus on regions of the universe dense enough to form stars. CHIME has now shown it can map the radio glow of hydrogen all on its own.

Indeed, the team has already begun making steps in this direction using just a tiny fraction of existing CHIME data. Using 94 nights of observations from 2019, they detected a hydrogen signal from when the universe was just 5 billion years old.

"Our data indicate that roughly 2% of the hydrogen in the universe was in neutral atomic form at this time, broadly consistent with other measurements," team member Shabbir Shaikh of Arizona State University said. "By measuring how that hydrogen is distributed and clustered, CHIME gives us a new way to test our understanding of how galaxies form and evolve."

CHIME has now collected seven years of data, and using this, the team is hoping to probe the distribution of hydrogen back to 3 billion years after the Big Bang.

The team's research was published across two papers in The Astrophysical Journal.

Using the NASA X-ray spacecraft Swift combined with radio observations, astronomers have observed a supermassive black hole burping radio jets 300 days after a heavy cosmic meal. The team was also able to roughly estimate the mass of this feeding cosmic titan, which sits at the heart of the Perseus Cluster, a massive collection of thousands of galaxies.

The black hole sits at the center of the galaxy NGC 1275, located around 225 light-years away, and is the brightest galaxy of the Perseus Cluster. The supermassive black hole first flared in X-rays, which indicated an increase in the rate at which it was accreting matter. Actively feeding supermassive black holes sit in regions called active galactic nuclei (AGNs), with their immense gravity heating surrounding matter, causing them to glow brightly. These emissions are boosted by material channeled to the poles of the central black hole, from where it is blasted out as powerful twin jets that shine across the electromagnetic spectrum, particularly in radio waves.

The observation of the following radio jet from the AGN at the heart of NGC 1275 via flaring in radio waves is crucial for understanding the relationship between the disk of matter that surrounds and feeds the black hole, called an accretion disk, and the jets it launches. This so-called disk-jet coupling is key to developing a better picture of how black holes influence star formation in the galaxies in which they sit, and thus the growth of those galaxies.

Making these observations is no mean feat. The ideal spacecraft for observing X-ray emissions is Chandra, but it doesn't observe NGC 1275 frequently enough to observe its long-term behaviour. NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory may lack the power of Chandra, but having launched in 2004, it has collected a vast amount of data regarding NGC 1275 and its central supermassive black hole.

"It is fairly difficult to see the inner region of this AGN because NGC 1275 is at the center of the massive Perseus cluster of galaxies, which adds additional light to our observations," team leader Sarah Ketchum of the University of Michigan told Space.com. "We developed a model that allowed us to remove the cluster emission from archival Swift data, and in doing so, we were able to see the changes in the X-ray flux from gas accreting onto the black hole in NGC 1275, from 2007 to 2025."

Ketchum added that the capabilities of Swift were key to this investigation of NGC 1275, which is the ideal laboratory for the study of disk-jet coupling.

"There have been studies on other galaxies with AGN that show evidence of coupling between gas accretion traced in X-ray light and gas ejection in jets, traced in radio light. But NGC 1275 reveals the impact of black hole jets on large spatial scales better than any other system," the University of Michigan researcher continued.

This black hole didn't eat a star

Ketchum and colleagues saw the strongest ever X-ray flare from NGC 1275 in Feb. 2023. Lasting less than 60 days and consisting of two 5-day blasts, this episode saw a doubling of the X-ray brightness of the AGN at the heart of NGC 1275.

The flaring was so extreme that the team had to rule out a tidal disruption event (TDE) as the cause. These occur when an unfortunate star's orbit brings it too close to the immense gravitational influence of a supermassive black hole. This influence generates intense tidal forces that simultaneously squash and squeeze the star, "speghettifying" it and allowing the black hole to snack on some plasma pasta.

"We were able to rule out TDEs as a cause," Ketchum said. "Thus, the flaring was likely caused by a spike in the rate at which matter accreted onto the black hole."

Using Swift data, the team was able to infer the radius over which the AGN emits radiation. Because the size of a black hole is directly correlated with its mass, this meant that the researchers were able to constrain the mass of the black hole at the heart of NGC 1275. They determined that this supermassive black hole has a mass somewhere between 100 million times the mass of the sun and 1 billion solar masses.

The team then compared their data to known radio data to better understand the relationship between the X-ray emission and the radio jets that disrupt gas in NGC 1275.

Ketchum added that she and her colleagues found tentative evidence of around a 300-day delay between the X-ray flaring and the radio wave emission. This indicates the time it takes plasma to travel from the base of the jet to a knot or shock created when it hits surrounding gas or dust.

"This should be tested further in the future. Our X-ray data only sparsely sample the changes in NGC 1275," Ketchum said. "This makes it difficult to determine an exact relationship between the X-ray and radio radiation for large portions of our light curve, so we would need more X-ray data to further study this connection."

The researcher added that if the X-ray flares are produced close to the black hole, an echo of these flares should be seen coming from the accretion disk.

"An emission line from neutral iron is seen in data from NGC 1275, and this may be the echo. However, we likely need many observations with XMM-Newton and XRISM ( X-Ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission) to really establish that connection," Ketchum concluded.

The team's research has been accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, with a pre-peer-review version available on the repository site arXiv.

NASA is asking for ideas to stop static electricity from zapping astronauts or critical hardware during moon missions.

The agency opened a "Lunar Grounding Challenge" to avoid situations where an astronaut on the moon could become "a walking, high voltage capacitor." Submissions for the $150,000 competition are due Jan. 15 and you can see the requirements here.

NASA is hoping to put astronaut boots at the lunar south pole in 2028 during the Artemis 4 or 5 missions, on the first landing mission since NASA's Apollo 17 in 1972. But simulations suggest that both "tribocharging" (electric-charge transfer between two objects) and plasma charging (from ambient gas in the region) could build up electric charge on spacesuits. "This problem is severely compounded when entering lunar shadows and permanently shadowed regions," the agency wrote, referring to deeply cratered areas where the sun does not touch the lunar surface.

The concern is that astronauts' spacesuits could become electrically charged, as there would be an excess of electrons (negatively charged particles) compared with ions (positively charged) in these areas.

"The risk occurs when an astronaut returns to the spacecraft," the agency added. The lander would have a slight positive charge, producing an issue once the "highly negatively-charged astronaut approaches the vehicle."

NASA has asked industry partners for ideas that can help an astronaut avoid "becoming a walking, high voltage capacitor", including issues such as an electrical arc that could damage spacesuits, spark fires in the oxygen atmosphere of a spacecraft, or create electrical shocks. (A Mars simulation in 2018 was reportedly derailed due to a crew experiencing electrical issues, so this problem is not unprecedented.)

The challenge aims to create designs that would safely discharge the astronaut and their spacesuit before an astronaut touches the lander. Among the technical requirements, NASA is looking for something small (in terms of mass, volume and power) that would be able to operate even in the extreme temperature swings of the lunar surface. The technology must also be able to help as many as four extra-vehicular activities (moonwalks) that take place over as long as 10 days.

"In addition, the suspended lunar dust and heavy dust buildup on a suit in these environments significantly increases arcing lengths, allowing sparks to jump across larger gaps than they would in a clean vacuum. Therefore, the solution must aim to avoid a sudden arc that may come into contact with the outer pressure garment — suit — or the lander," NASA wrote in the challenge description.

The challenge will include multiple phases, including a concept design, concept refinement after chatting with reviewers, and then a final selection. NASA did not release a target date in its press release for when the tech would be available for astronauts, but the agency is planning on a long-term moon base for astronaut missions that would be largely ready to go in the 2030s if schedules hold.

A neon blue pool swirls amongst what look like clouds, all surrounded by a bright red stretch of land. This might look like the surface of an alien planet, but it's actually a salt flat right here on Earth, seen from space.

What is it?

Etosha National Park in northern Namibia hosts the largest salt pan, or piece of land covered with salt and other minerals, in the country.

This image of the Etosha Pan was captured on April 5 of this year by Europe's Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission, which consists of two identical satellites in the same orbit.

The Sentinel-2 pair observe and capture imagery of our planet in different wavelengths using a high-resolution multispectral imager that can see 13 different spectral bands, or ranges of wavelengths.

By looking at our planet from space, and observing it through different wavelengths and colors, we can better understand Earth's topography and how it changes over time. With this image, researchers can better understand this landmark in Namibia, a nation in southwestern Africa.

Why is it incredible?

While this image is strikingly beautiful, the Etosha Pan doesn't exactly look like this in real life. If you were standing close to the pan in the national park, it would look bright white.

While this is a real image, false color has been added, which allows scientists to separate different types of vegetation and topography.

With the false color, the vegetation surrounding the salt pan appears in shades of red, while the salt pan itself looks like a mix of bright, light and dark blues with cloudy sediment floating around.

The varied vegetation captured in this false-color image includes grassland, savannas and mopane trees, which appear bright red. These trees are not only a dominant type of vegetation in areas of this park, they also provide essential shelter and habitats for local wildlife, including elephants, giraffe and leopards.

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has moved a step closer to launching its second-ever interplanetary mission — an ambitious, eight-year exploration of seven asteroids between Mars and Jupiter that will culminate with a landing on the mysteriously red asteroid 269 Justitia.

The mission team unveiled a half-scale model of the homegrown probe that will make that landing during an Oct. 1 press conference in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the UAE. The autonomous craft will ride attached to the main spacecraft MBR Explorer, named after Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, the ruler of Dubai and the UAE's prime minister.

The flight-ready lander is being kept pristine in a vacuum chamber in the capital before being transported to Colorado by Etihad Airways, officials said, where it will be integrated with the main spacecraft, which was developed by the UAE Space Agency.

If all goes to plan, the mission will lift off from Japan in March 2028, kicking off the Emirates Mission to the Asteroid Belt (EMA). The project is an ambitious follow-up to the UAE Space Agency's Hope Mars orbiter, which has been studying the Red Planet since 2021.

"It's a proud moment for us here at the UAE," said Faisal al-Bannai, the secretary general of the Advanced Technology Research Council in Abu Dhabi.

'We don't know what we're going to find'

EMA will conduct high-speed flybys of six asteroids before reaching and orbiting 269 Justitia. It will travel a total of about 3 billion miles (5 billion kilometers), which is equivalent to circling Earth roughly 125,000 times, said Najwa Aaraj, the CEO of the Technology Innovation Institute (TII) in Abu Dhabi, which designed, built and tested the mission's lander.

Along the way, the MBR Explorer will utilize gravity assists from Venus and then Earth to swing deeper into space, zipping past its first three asteroid targets: 10253 Westerwald, 623 Chimaera and 13294 Rockox. A subsequent gravity assist from Mars will fling the spacecraft even farther out, guiding it past three more space rocks: 88055 Ghaf, 23871 Ousha and 59980 Moza.

By 2036, the spacecraft is scheduled to rendezvous with its final and most intriguing target, 269 Justitia. A roughly 30-mile-wide (50 km) object in the middle of the asteroid belt, 269 Justitia is unusual for its remarkably crimson hue.

Its distinct color more closely resembles icy objects in the Kuiper Belt beyond Neptune than its immediate main-belt neighbors. This unique trait has led planetary scientists to hypothesize that the asteroid formed in the frigid outer solar system and migrated inward early in the solar system's history. If true, visiting 269 Justitia would offer a rare, close-up look at pristine material from the distant outer solar system via a much shorter journey.

Scientists are particularly excited that the asteroid may still hold water-related minerals and organic compounds preserved from its origins. Studying its surface could therefore offer clues to how water and organic material were distributed as planets began to form, Elias Tsoutsanis, a chief researcher at TII's propulsion and space research center, said during the press briefing.

"We don't know what we're going to find — that's exploration," Tsoutsanis told reporters. "We're really excited."

According to the mission plan, the MBR Explorer will spend roughly seven months studying 269 Justitia from orbit. Beginning at an altitude of 155 miles (250 km), the spacecraft will gradually lower its path before releasing the lander. The smaller probe will then head toward the asteroid's surface, a descent that should take two to three hours depending on 269 Justitia's precise gravity, which remains unknown.

Although TII describes the mission ending with a landing on the surface of 269 Justitia, the engineering details suggest a more violent endgame. Cruising toward the asteroid's surface at 15 to 27 meters per second (34 to 60 mph) with no meaningful way to slow down, the probe will function less like a traditional lander and more like a planned impactor.

"We don't expect that the probe will survive the touchdown," said Mariam Alhammadi, a researcher in TII leading the mission's electric propulsion.

To ensure its two onboard cameras capture essential imagery during the descent, the probe will rely on an attitude-control system to counteract any post-separation spin, Alhammadi said. Should the probe unexpectedly survive the hard landing, she added, its battery is built to last 20 to 50 minutes, providing a narrow but crucial window for it to beam close-ups of the asteroid's surface back to Earth.

The high-velocity impact is also expected to dig a small crater on 269 Justitia, possibly exposing pristine subsurface material. Because this material cannot be imaged from orbit, the team expects the probe's final images to be among the most valuable of the entire mission.

Zero margin for error

Back on Earth, the team faces an unforgiving timeline. To execute the planned flybys, the mission must launch during a narrow three-week window that opens in early March 2028.

"God forbid we miss that — we basically don't have a mission," Mohsen al-Awadhi, the mission director at the UAE Space Agency, told reporters at the press conference. The orbital mechanics are so rigid that another comparable opportunity will not arise for at least 100 years, prompting al-Awadhi to add that he is devoting no time and energy to a backup plan.

Meeting the launch window is just the first hurdle, however. Once deployed in deep space, the lander must operate with absolute autonomy, receiving no commands from Earth or the main MBR Explorer spacecraft, the team says.

"In these eight years, I have no control to call it back — so nothing can go wrong," said Aaraj.

The team is confident that rigorous engineering and testing have produced a probe that can essentially "think for itself." Equipped with AI, it is designed to decide on its own when to capture images and how to filter and rank the most valuable data. Rather than waiting until it reaches its destination, the lander will take images throughout its eight-year cruise and send the best ones back to Earth roughly every six months, according to a TII statement.

Officials declined to disclose the mission's overall cost or say whether it has stayed on budget. The United States' ongoing war in Iran has sparked missile and drone attacks across the UAE, but the mission team has persevered: WIRED reported that they pressed on even as missiles were intercepted overhead.

Looking ahead

Beyond the immediate scientific return, officials said a central pillar of this mission is accelerating the UAE's sovereign deep-space capabilities and fostering its domestic space economy.

The UAE Space Agency, established in 2014, has steadily expanded its portfolio from satellite launches to a Martian orbiter and sending two astronauts to the International Space Station. The EMA probe represents a developmental leap, designed and built in just under two years by a team of roughly 50 local engineers and scientists, many of whom began their careers as entry-level technicians on the Hope Mars mission.

"I don't want to call them my kids — there's a lot of them — but that's how attached I feel to them," al-Awadhi said during the briefing.

The UAE aims to position itself among the world's 10 largest space economies by 2031, targeting a massive expansion of a sector currently valued at about $12 billion. According to al-Bannai, the EMA project is designed to be one of many programs to come. By the time the lander impacts 269 Justitia in 2036, the technology matured during this journey will already be driving the next generation of Emirati spacecraft, he said.

"That's the journey we're on today."

Astronomers investigating mysterious flashes of X-rays believe that these blasts could stem from collisions between neutron stars, the events that forge elements like gold, silver, and platinum.

The event designated EP250704a, was first seen on July 4, 2025, as a blast of gamma rays lasting half a second followed by a bright X-ray emission lasting 10 minutes. After receiving an alert from the joint European-Chinese Einstein probe that witnessed the blast, a team of astronomers started to hunt for its cause by studying the aftermath of the explosion using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT), the Very Large Array (VLA), and other telescopes.

According to astronomer Niccolò Passaleva who led the observations of the X-ray flash with the VLT, this cosmic outburst was unlike any scientists had seen before. "This is the longest-lasting prompt X-ray flash ever observed from a neutron star merger," Passaleva said in a statement. "It is an opportunity to have a front-row seat to the most extreme forces of the universe and discover more of its secrets."

Neutron stars are created when massive stars die in supernova explosions, cramming one or two the mass of the sun into a width akin to a city on Earth and creating material so dense that a single teaspoon of neutron star matter brought to Earth would weigh 10 million tons. When these extreme dead stars slam together, they create environments so turbulent and violent they are capable of forging elements so heavy that even the hearts of stars can't do it. Elements like the gold on your finger.

These collision and merger events, marked by flashes of light called kilonovas, have long been associated with flashes of high-energy gamma-rays that disappear within two seconds, but new research suggests some neutron star mergers could reveal themselves via blasts of X-rays lasting minutes.

In particular, scientists have wondered if neutron star mergers could be the cause of hundreds of X-ray flashes in distant galaxies discovered by the Einstein probe since its launch in 2024. While some of these have been linked to the supernova-explosive death of massive stars that can create a neutron star or a black hole, others have defied explanation. EP250704a is one such X-ray flash.

"When I saw the X-ray data from this new event, I realized something was up," team member Eleonora Troja, part of the Einstein Probe European collaboration, said in the statement.

The team believes that there is something special in the neutron star merger mix that results in these X-ray bursts.

Merging with a magnetar

All neutron stars are created the same way from the collapsing core of a massive star, but not all neutron stars are equal.

Just as an ice skater pulls in their arms to increase the speed of a spin, the rapid reduction in radius of a collapsing stellar core can "spin up" the rotation of a neutron star to 'over 700 times per second. This collapse can have another consequence too.

It turns out that magnetic fields get stronger when magnetic field lines are pushed closer together. That means the collapse of a stellar core with an already powerful magnetic field can create a neutron star with the strongest magnetic field in the universe. Those neutron stars have a special name: magnetars.

The team behind this research thinks that the neutron star merger in question involved at least one magnetar.

"If the remnant of the collision is a magnetar, it could keep bursting for longer," Troja said. "Magnetars are rapidly spinning neutron stars with huge magnetic fields. When they dump their magnetic power into the surroundings, they can make any explosion brighter and longer-lasting."

The researchers ruled out a supernova as the cause of the X-ray burst and were also able to determine that the light from this collision has been travelling to Earth for 6 billion years.

Discovering more of these extreme X-ray flashes could help astronomers determine how often magnetars are formed through these neutron star mergers, Passaleva said in the statement.

The team's research was published in the journal Science Bulletin.

A new genetically engineered microbe may one day help humanity settle Mars, a nonprofit biotechnology research startup suggests.

Our species has launched nearly 50 missions to Mars since 1960, all of them robotic. If everything goes according to plan, they've all been building toward crewed Red Planet flight, which remains a high priority for national space agencies and private companies alike.

Ideally, human crews there will not rely on shipment after shipment from Earth, but can instead make use of any resources they can unearth on Mars for air, food, water, building supplies and more. Perhaps the most radical possible outcome from this approach is the concept of terraforming Mars — transforming the cold, arid world to support life as we know it.

Now, researchers at Pioneer Labs in Emeryville, California, have developed a microbe they suggest may be a useful, safe first step toward terraforming Mars.

"On Mars, nature will do the same jobs for us that she does on Earth — create fertile soil, shelter, oxygen and food," Erika DeBenedictis, CEO of Pioneer Labs, told Space.com.

A key problem with the idea of terraforming Mars is that the Red Planet's surface is essentially toxic. While raw materials potentially useful for Earth life are found in abundance on Mars, they are mixed in the soil with toxins such as perchlorate, as well as salts that would make growth difficult for most organisms.

Previous strategies for growing plants on Mars included rinsing these poisons out, bringing supplemental fertilizers from Earth, or avoiding Martian soil entirely and using hydroponics. However, Pioneer Labs argues that these approaches do not scale up well in terms of time and expense.

The organization has developed a microbe, dubbed sPL.001, that can live off artificial, chemically accurate versions of Martian dirt, water and air. It can do this with having the toxins removed, or with fertilizer added. Moreover, it can generate bioplastics — a class of materials used nowadays on Earth for items as diverse as compostable cups and 3D printing filaments — that could be useful for building habitats on the Red Planet.

"Mars has all the raw materials for life in abundance," DeBenedictis said. "Life can grow entirely using nutrients in unprocessed Martian regolith. That’s special and different from other places, like the moon, which doesn’t have nutrients in the regolith."

In a new study, the scientists revealed how they took Earth microbes that could manufacture bioplastics and slowly exposed them to more and more Mars-like conditions over time.

"It wasn’t obvious this was going to work," DeBenedictis said. "The first time we tested growth of terrestrial microbes in Mars conditions, none of them grew! We had to keep going and test a lot more organisms before we realized we had just gotten unlucky the first time."

Eventually, the scientists evolved a tolerance for toxins normally found in Martian soil.

"It was so cool to see these microbes start growing better on simulated Mars nutrients," DeBenedictis said. "Life finds a way!"

To survive, the new microbe needs to grow inside a stirred, heated bioreactor that protects it from extreme temperature, radiation and the thin Martian atmosphere. It must also receive a processed form of air that gives the microbe the valuable nutrient nitrogen in the form of acetate, as normal Martian air has nitrogen levels too dilute for the microbes to live off. The organism is also not photosynthetic, so it cannot make its own food.

In another study, the researchers suggested that these limitations ensure their microbe cannot survive if it ever found its way outside on Mars. These measures reduce the risk that their microbe might contaminate the Red Planet as an invasive organism, especially if Mars ever did develop life of its own that might still exist in underground aquifers or within ancient salt crystals.

Samuel McKee, a DNA repair scientist at the University of Reading in England, found it believable that such a microbe could not accidentally terraform Mars.

"Many adapted or edited microbes on Earth do not survive outside of a fixed environment despite their evolution, or without a certain food supply," McKee, who did not take part in the new research, told Space.com.

In a third study, the scientists estimated that, thanks to the microbe, mission planners could fit everything needed to build a city on Mars onto a single rocket.

"The biggest limitation of what we’ve done is that simulated Mars isn’t actual Mars," DeBenedictis said. "We reconstructed the relevant chemistry of Martian regolith as carefully as we could from high-quality rover data from multiple locations on Mars. But ultimately, the real test will be doing this with actual Martian regolith."

Such research could find use beyond Mars.

"I am excited about how these avenues of research could impact our dealing with climate change on Earth or extreme environment habitats," McKee said. "Microbes can be utilized to generate much of the material and needs we have thanks to gene editing."

All in all, "we will be watching with anticipation when these microbes are finally launched to the Martian surface," McKee said.

Are there secret underground caves on the moon? NASA has a new program that aims to find out.

Though we see it in the sky most nights, the moon still holds an incredible amount of mystery. One such mystery is a large underground cave, or a cavernous tube carved out by ancient lava, that scientists think extends past a particular pit on the moon's surface. And to get to the bottom of it, NASA has selected a project known as GIMLI (the Geophysical Instruments for Marius Lunar pit Investigation, not the character from Lord of the Rings). GIMLI was selected along with two other programs that are all intended to expand our understanding of the moon to better support a future moon base, which NASA aims to build near the south pole.

"NASA Science is building the ultimate interplanetary survival guide to ensure that science goes first to the lunar surface to provide our future astronaut crews with the vital information, resources, and safety precautions needed ahead of time to survive the night on the moon," Nicky Fox, NASA's associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate, said in a statement.

Lunar mysteries

The site of this investigation will be the Marius Hill Pit, which was discovered in 2009 by Japan's Kaguya moon orbiter. You can see the pit clearly in the probe's images. But researchers think that there's more there than just a large hole in the lunar surface.

They think it's possible that the pit is connected to a vast, underground cave likely created by lava flowing in the ancient past. If true, this could shed light on the history of volcanic activity on the moon.

"Confirming a substantial lava tube would give us an insight into how volcanism operated on the moon," GIMLI deputy principal investigator Gareth Morgan said in a different statement. "Lava tubes are a common feature of basaltic volcanism on Earth, so identifying them on the moon means we could use knowledge of such terrestrial caves to better understand lunar history."

Even more, if researchers confirm the presence of this lava tube, astronauts could potentially use it as a natural shelter on the lunar surface. These lava-made caves would provide general shelter as well as protection from the extreme temperatures and radiation exposure experienced on the moon's surface. Lava tubes could also be a safe "bunker" of sorts where future astronauts could be shielded from micrometeorites. While a future moon base will probably have human-made shelters included, natural caves could be an incredible, existing resource that astronauts could tap into.

How to find a moon cave

GIMLI will work directly on the lunar surface, scanning beneath to look for signs of the lava tube. This investigation comes from a proposal led by the nonprofit Planetary Science Institute (PSI) and will be funded through NASA's Payloads and Research Investigations on the Surface of the Moon (PRISM) program.

The investigation is partnering with Honeybee Robotics to help build the equipment and instrumentation that will be necessary for the study. This gear will get to the moon aboard a lander and rover via NASA's Commercial Lunar Payloads Services program, and the data collected will be studied by a team led by PSI associate director and senior scientist Than Putzig. The work done by PSI will be in partnership with the Norwegian Space Agency.

From the lunar surface, GIMLI will gather data using ground-penetrating radar, seismic sensors and a gravimeter to better understand what's really happening underneath the surface. These measurements will allow GIMLI to determine if there is a subsurface lava tube and, if so, how big it is. Could it fit an entire astronaut crew? We will have to wait and see.

Astronomers have discovered the most distant Fast Radio Burst (FRB) ever detected. Not only could this help untangle the mystery of what causes these powerful but brief explosions of radio waves, but because FRBs are incredible celestial messengers, it could also reveal details of 11 billion years of cosmic evolution.

This FRB, designated FRB 20240304B, was first observed by astronomers using the MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa. Then, using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers tracked it back to its home galaxy, located around 11 billion light-years away. This revealed that FRB 20240304B has been travelling to Earth since the universe was just 3 billion years old or so.

That doesn't just make this FRB 20240304B the most distant and earliest FRB ever detected; it more than doubles the distance of the previous record holder!

"This is an extraordinary glimpse into the distant universe," team co-leader Manisha Caleb from the Sydney Institute for Astronomy said in a statement sent to Space.com. "We have caught a fast radio burst from a time when the universe was only about three billion years old, and we have used that brief flash of radio light to learn about the matter it has travelled through over billions of years."

The team's research was published on Thursday (Oct. 8) in the journal Science.

A record breaking cosmic messenger

Fast Radio Bursts are mysterious blasts of radio waves that usually flare just once, and in the mere milliseconds they last, emit many times more energy than the sun can radiate in a year.

As these powerful millisecond-long blasts of radio waves travel billions of light-years to reach Earth, they pass through gas and dust in galaxies and through the "cosmic fog" lying between these galaxies, the so-called intergalactic medium. By measuring how much the signal slows down, scientists can effectively weigh this fog of gas to map the distribution of matter in galaxies.

That makes them crucial tools for understanding how galaxies use gas and dust to form stars and grow. Thus, FRBs are a metaphorical cosmic 'fossil record' blasting through space at light speed with the energy of a multitude of stars.

With that in mind, it is little wonder that as a record-breaking example of a fast radio burst, FRB 20240304B has already shocked astronomers. It did this by delivering a surprise about its home galaxy.

"The galaxy hosting this burst is surprisingly small, metal-poor and undergoing a very active episode of star formation," team member Laura Driessen, of the University of Sydney, said. "That gives us an important clue about the environments in which FRBs are born and shows that these brief radio flashes can tell us not only about the distant universe, but also about how galaxies and their stellar populations evolve."

One of the leading suspects in the creation of FRBs are magnetars, a type of neutron star created when a massive star collapses and dies in a supernova explosion. Unlike "standard" neutron stars, magnetars have fearsomely strong magnetic fields  — the strongest magnetic fields in the known universe, in fact.

There are different theories about how magnetars are born: one involving existing older neutron stars colliding and merging, the other involving environments with burgeoning star formation.

The galaxy from which FRB 20240304B originates seems to support that latter formation route, as it is young in the midst of "starburst," a period of extreme star formation.

Scientists will work on the mystery of the FRB/magnetar connection. In the meantime, this newly detected and tracked blast of radio waves definitely has expanded the boundaries of the cosmos that can be probed with FRBs.

"In principle, sufficiently powerful bursts could be detectable from the very early universe," team member Kavya Shaji said.

That means that FRBs are emerging as a promising way to study the first stars and galaxies in the universe. This is even more exciting considering that this research validates teaming the JWST with radio telescopes to detect and track FRBs back to their points of origin.

"Our results further show the amazing capability of the JWST, where we can push boundaries beyond what was previously possible," team member Themiya Nanayakkara of the University of Sydney said.

Imagine the sun has just risen as you wake to the soft sounds of Martian dust swirling outside. You look out and what do you see? A beautiful mountain range, bathed in golden light.

While this imaginary scenario might not be possible today, if future astronauts ever get to enjoy their morning coffee on the Red Planet, this is what they might see.

What is it?

NASA's Curiosity rover recently captured a stunning new panorama of dawn breaking over a Mars mountain range

The panorama, made using six different shots captured of the view, showcases Martian cliffs on the northwestern edge of Mount Sharp.

Curiosity has been exploring this 3-mile-tall (5-kilometer-tall) mountain for over a decade. Crawling up the mountain since 2014, the rover has explored all sorts of strange and unusual terrain. And now? It has captured a beautiful, peaceful Martian morning.

Why is it incredible?

Looking at this image, it seems almost Earth-like. Despite the complete lack of plant life (or any life that we're aware of), the view is reminiscent of mountains rising out of the deserts on our very own planet.

But what might feel like a familiar sight in a national park is an entirely different planet.

And by enjoying this view (and analyzing it scientifically), researchers can better understand how features like the cliffs on Mount Sharp formed.

Mars was once home to a variety of bodies of water like lakes and rivers. But what happened to the planet once it lost its atmosphere and, subsequently, its liquid surface water? How did the minerals left behind from these streams and lakes affect the Martian topography? These are just some of the many questions researchers aim to answer with observations like this.

Astronomers have observed a "vampire" star feeding on a brown dwarf companion for the first time. It is a slow and gruesome death that could last for billions of years, despite the fact that the star is snacking on the equivalent of 5.2 trillion quarter-pounder burgers every second.

Brown dwarfs straddle the line between planets and stars, with masses from 13 to 80 times that of Jupiter or 0.013 to 0.08 times that of the sun. They get their unfortunate nickname "failed stars" because, though they form from a collapsing cloud of dense gas, they fail to gather enough mass to trigger the nuclear fusion of hydrogen to helium in their cores, the process that defines what a star is.

This newly discovered brown dwarf, found to be a snack for a small companion star, is located in the system ZTF J0440+2325, which dwells around 300 light-years from Earth. This represents the first time astronomers have seen a low-mass star acting as a stellar vampire, stealing material from a low-mass stellar companion. The slow rate at which this is occurring indicates this cosmic vampirism will last for hundreds of thousands to billions of years.

"When we think of stars interacting with planets or brown dwarfs, the picture is always that the star eventually swallows the other thing," team member Kevin Burdge of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) said in a statement. "This is what will happen to the Earth when the sun becomes a red giant. But here, we've found an alternative: Instead of swallowing the thing up, the star can gradually eat it for billions of years."

A strange cosmic triangle

This new system was first observed in observations of the sky conducted by the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) in the form of a strange light triangle that repeatedly appeared in the data.

"I remember first looking at this and thinking: Stars don't make triangular waveforms like this," Burdge explained.

At the time, Burdge and colleagues were hunting for so-called "black widow pulsars" that contain a stellar remnant called a neutron star feasting on a companion star much like how the arachnid of the same name devours its prey. However, because these systems contain a low-mass object gravitationally tugging on a high-mass companion, there is usually a "wobble" in their light signature, and the team found no "wobble" in this particular light signature.

"We weren't seeing that whipping back and forth here," said Burdge. "It didn't make any sense. We couldn't explain what this was."

Ruling out a black widow pulsar as the origin of this strange repeating light signal in ZTF data, Burdge and colleagues followed another hunch; proposing that this is a more balanced system with objects of similar masses.

"If you have less mass in the system overall, things can gently orbit each other without whipping back and forth," Burdge said. "That was the idea. But we never had any proof. And this weird triangle just sat for years."

That was until Burdge and colleagues revisited it, determining it originated from within the boundary of the Milky Way. Designating the source ZTF J0440+2325, the team followed up with multiple telescopes. With further observations, they found a slight wobble, less than seen for black widow pulsars but not insignificant.

"That was the real clincher for this system," team member Aaron Householder of MIT said. "When we measured that wobble, we found we were not seeing a black widow. This was a low-mass star that’s orbited by a brown dwarf. The wobble was too small in amplitude to be anything else."

What else do we know about ZTF J0440+2325

The researchers were able to figure out that the brown dwarf takes around 87 minutes to orbit the star feeding upon it. That means that this entire system could fit within the sun.

The team was also able to determine the mass of both bodies in ZTF J0440+2325. The star has a mass around 85 times the mass of Jupiter, with the brown dwarf has a mass around 25 times the mass of the gas giant.

Though the star is stripping and accreting matter like black holes sometimes do with stars, the huge difference in size between the star in ZTF J0440+2325 and a typical black hole means this proceeds differently. That is because, despite having many times more mass than the sun, black holes are smaller than the sun with radii ranging from 6 miles to 190 miles (9 kilometers to 300 kilometers).

When a black hole strips matter from a star, this stolen material forms an accretion disk around the black hole that then gradually feeds it. In the case of this system, the stolen brown dwarf matter is falling directly to the star.

"The difference here is: The thing absorbing matter is not a tiny black hole but a star, which is relatively big in size," Burdge said. "So matter just pummels directly onto the surface, at very high speeds, like an asteroid hitting the moon."

The team estimated the rate at which matter falls from the brown dwarf to the star, finding it to be the equivalent of 1/100,000 of Earth's mass per year. That's about 5.2 billion quarter-pounder burgers every second, or maybe 1.2 trillion 1-pound burritos if burgers aren't your speed.

That seems like a lot, but it is just a tiny fraction of the brown dwarf's total mass, making this a slow and steady transfer of material that could go on for billions of years.

This neatly loops back to the initial puzzle that began the investigation into this system in the first place: that weird triangle light signature. Viewed from a distance, the steady feeding process would proceed like a triangle as the victim brown dwarf orbits the star that is eating it.

"It's like you've got this continuous fireball on one of the objects, and as one orbits the other, that hotspot comes in and out of view, and the peak of the triangle signal is when you’re looking right at the fireball," Burdge said.

The team now intends to hunt for more similar systems within the Milky Way.

"It's inspiring a lot of new searches on our part,” Householder concluded. "I think we're going to learn a lot about a different kind of way that planets and brown dwarfs interact with their host stars."

The team's findings were published on Monday (Oct. 5) in the journal Nature Astronomy.

A colossal mashup of stars, protostars, gas and dust swirl brightly in this new photo captured by the James Webb Space Telescope.

What is it?

JWST captured the inner workings of the nebula NGC 7129 in this spectacular new image. The detail in this snapshot really highlights the chaos happening within the nebula, nicknamed the Flower Bud Nebula.

3,300 light-years away, the nebula is home to a variety of stars at different stages of development. But this stellar nursery is also thought to be home to over 100 stars under a million years old, which is quite young and early in their lives.

Stars begin to form from the gas and dust in molecular clouds in nebulas such as this, a region NASA refers to as a "cauldron of cosmic creation" in the statement accompanying the new image. Because their earliest years are spent shrouded in clouds of dust, these nascent stars can be hard to spot. But with JWST's ability to see into the near and mid-infrared, scientists were finally able to look through the dust to get a clear look at the stars forming inside.

Specifically, this image was captured by JWST's NIRCam (Near-InfraRed Camera) instrument, which peers into the near-infrared, a wavelength range that encompasses the light from faint stars and galaxies.

Why is it incredible?

This isn't the first time that we've looked at the Flower Bud Nebula. And by looking at the nebula in different wavelengths with different observatories, we've learned quite a bit about it.

However, with these new observations from JWST, scientists have unprecedented detailed views of the stars and protostars still forming amidst the gas and dust.

With sharper views in the near-infrared, scientists might be able to learn more about these still-forming stars, the incredible, powerful jets of superheated material they can expel and how these objects interact with their surroundings.

Astronomers have discovered the most distant and earliest blazar, comprised of an erupting supermassive black hole aiming its plasma jets directly at Earth.

Blazars occur when supermassive black holes are surrounded by vast amounts of gas and dust that they feed on, in regions called active galactic nuclei (AGNs). The immense gravity of these cosmic titans causes the surrounding gas and dust to glow brightly, meaning that AGNs can outshine the combined light of every star in the galaxies that house them. But that isn't all; matter that isn't feasted upon is channeled to the poles of the black hole, from where it is blasted out as twin jets of plasma moving at near-light speed.

These events are called quasars, but when the jets are directed straight down our line of sight, the quasar is classified as a blazar. Light from this high-energy blazar, designated Blazar OP 313, has been travelling to Earth for 8 billion years, meaning it is seen as it was just 5 billion years after the Big Bang during a crucial transitional phase in cosmic history.

"Around 11 billion years ago, the universe experienced a period of peak activity known as the 'cosmic noon,' characterised by an intense rate of star and galaxy formation," research team member Axel Arbet-Engels said in a statement."When this phase of intense activity slowed down and galaxies began to evolve and mature, the universe entered a calmer phase, which continues to this day."

The dawn of cosmic noon

Cosmic noon marked the period during which OP 313 emitted its powerful burst of very high-energy photons in the form of gamma-rays.

That emission was first observed in December 2023, with astronomers following up on the discovery with the Large-Sized Telescope (LST-1) prototype and the Major Atmospheric Gamma-ray Imaging Cherenkov (MAGIC) telescope, both of which are located at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory, La Palma, Spain.

This revealed high-energy gamma-rays originating 8 billion light-years away. The analysis of these gamma-rays revealed how the supermassive black hole at the heart of this blazar is acting as a cosmic particle accelerator.

As these gamma rays traversed the cosmos, they interacted with the total accumulated radiation from all the stars, galaxies, and other AGNs throughout cosmic history, known as the extragalactic background (EBL).

When gamma rays interact with this fossil light, they create electron-positron pairs, a process known as pair production. This depletes the number of gamma-ray photons in this signal. Using the LST-1 and MAGIC, the team was able to characterize this depletion, revealing that the intense gamma-ray emission was fueled by a dense population of so-called 'relativistic' electrons. Relativistic means travelling at speeds near that of light, with the blazar's central supermassive black hole as the engine that accelerated these particles.

"In what is known as the leptonic scenario, electrons have been accelerated to speeds close to the speed of light within a powerful plasma jet ejected by the central supermassive black hole of OP 313," team member Domenico Della Volpe of the University of Geneva said. "Upon colliding with lower-energy photons surrounding the black hole, the electrons transfer part of their considerable energy to these photons, thereby propelling them to energy levels corresponding to very high-energy gamma rays."

That means these findings could represent a major step forward for our understanding of quasars, some of the most powerful cosmic events ever detected by humanity.

The team's research was published on Tuesday (Oct. 6) in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

The moon is a historical landmark — a celestial body continually peppered with robotic landers shot from our home planet, as well as human footprints planted there by a dozen visiting moonwalkers from 1969 to 1972.

A recent gathering in Italy of the International Scientific Committee on Aerospace Heritage (ISCAH) looked at protecting lunar heritage with an eye toward developing guidelines for spacecraft deorbiting onto the moon's surface.

Particular attention was paid to the risks posed by the impacts of deorbited satellites and rocket stages, recently highlighted by the crash of a SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage into the moon last August.

As pointed out in the meeting, as lunar traffic increases, controlled crash landings of moon orbiters and rocket stages are becoming an attractive end-of-mission disposal strategy.

And that's a problem.

Limited knowledge

There is limited knowledge regarding ejecta modeling and the effects produced by these impacts, said Luca Forassiepi. He spoke at the Sept. 14 meeting in Piza, which was called "Protecting Lunar Heritage: Developing Guidelines and Recommendations for Controlled Lunar Deorbiting."

"These effects have only been observed, and only partially, in a handful of historical cases. As a result, much of our current understanding relies on simulations, which necessarily involve a number of simplifications compared with reality," Forassiepi told Space.com.

Strong incentive

"Because the moon is an airless world, any movement on the surface is going to stir up sticky, abrasive dust that erodes human materials," pointed out associate professor Alice Gorman, an Australian archaeologist and heritage consultant at Flinders University.

"This is a problem for cultural heritage sites," Gorman said. "Imagine the iconic Apollo 11 landing module, the Eagle, being worn away until it crumbles into dust itself."

"It's also going to be a problem for habitation and mining installations," she added. "So there is a strong incentive for [the] space industry to minimize the impacts of rocket and satellite crashes, protecting both heritage places and new surface missions."

End-of-life planning

Gorman pointed to 51 hard spacecraft impacts on the moon to date, a number that includes nine rocket bodies and 19 lunar orbiters.

"We've reached an inflection point where spacecraft craters aren't just new archaeological sites, they're an environmental hazard that may cause irreversible damage," Gorman told Space.com.

Under the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, Gorman observed, nations are liable for any damage their space hardware causes to the property of other nations. "We could be looking at a situation where a state could demand compensation for a rocket body crash harming its cultural heritage. End-of-life planning is going to become critical."

Cultural landscape

Also taking part in the meeting was Beth O'Leary, a cultural anthropology and archaeology specialist and college professor emerita at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces.

"The moon is part of the cultural landscape of Earth," she said. As such, its environment and heritage deserve international attention.

It's now been more than 60 years since the first successful soft landing on the moon, that of the Soviet Union's Luna 9 spacecraft in February 1966. And lunar traffic is poised to increase greatly in the coming years, as both the United States and China aim to build bases near the moon's south pole.

Given this landscape, "we seek to address the challenges of lunar traffic from crashes, deorbiting spacecraft, and intentional landings and to understand those risks to our aerospace heritage. Our committee attempts to estimate the real consequences of the impacts," O'Leary said.

With global experts in planetary geoarchaeology, site formation processes and heritage management, ISCAH is analyzing and increasing the knowledge base that could prevent the irreversible destruction of the significant historic cultural resources on the lunar surface.

Far-reaching consequences

"Our recommendations should inform consensus-based decisions and support international best practices and policies," said O'Leary.

The ongoing work of the group provides the best opportunities for lunar preservation and protection by and for humanity, she added.

"In our short three years," O'Leary said, "we will have had three conferences, created a mission statement, received World Monuments Fund listing, and will continue as a delegation to the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space."

O'Leary told Space.com that all these issues are complex scientifically and legally, "but it is so important to rely on excellent research and proven heritage management principles in order to make good decisions about preservation which have far-reaching consequences."

Planetary geoarchaeology

One goal the group is addressing is a "post-mission gap," particularly regarding lunar projects.

That is, what happens to lunar heritage following the completion of a successful mission and in the decades that follow?

Also, what are the appropriate end-of-mission practices, and how can we ensure the long-term protection of spacecraft, robotics and other material remains associated with these missions?

Those questions are being deliberated by Justin Holcomb, an assistant research professor with the Kansas Geological Survey, a research unit of the University of Kansas in Lawrence.

Planetary geoarchaeology provides one way to address this issue, by identifying the natural (geological) and anthropogenic (human) processes operating within these environments "that may threaten lunar heritage, while also identifying environmental settings that are more conducive to its long-term preservation," Holcomb told Space.com.

Lunar practices

Forassiepi said that future points of action are on the agenda.

"There is certainly ongoing and continuous work by the ICOMOS International Scientific Committee on Aerospace Heritage on this aspect," said Forassiepi.

ICOMOS is the International Council on Monuments and Sites, a non-governmental organization working to conserve and protect cultural heritage sites on our planet — and off it as well.

"In active collaboration with the World Monuments Fund, we will further refine our research into the potential risks associated with deorbiting and crash landings," Forassiepi noted.

Over the coming months, Forassiepi said, the group will move into a second phase focused on listening and dialogue with all relevant stakeholders in the sector, from space agencies and the scientific community to private actors, heritage experts and communities with social and religious values associated with the moon that could be affected or disrupted by certain lunar practices.

Ultimate goal

"The aim is to initiate an open dialogue and exchange among all these different actors, with a view to collectively developing guidelines based on broad consensus," Forassiepi said.

These will then be presented in the context of the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space in 2027, with the hope that, over time, they may evolve into "internationally recognized standards of behavior" and be adopted and followed by all space actors, Forassiepi added.

"The ultimate goal is to build a lunar future that is sustainable not only from an operational perspective, but also in terms of scientific research and the protection of the earliest traces of human presence in the history of space," he stressed. "These are two irreplaceable forms of heritage, and their damage would represent an enormous loss for future generations."

Earth and Mars formed in the same part of the solar system, but their chemistry suggests the two planets were built in different ways, according to new research.

The finding adds to growing evidence that suggests planets do not all form in one way. It also has implications for a long-running open question about how exactly the disk of gas and dust around the young sun formed the planets of today's solar system around 4.5 billion years ago.

"The most surprising result was that Earth and Mars appear to have formed in different ways," Anders Johansen, a professor of planetary sciences at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark who co-led the study, said in a statement. "You might have expected that two planets formed side by side in the same solar system would share a more similar formation history."

Around 4.5 billion years ago, the solar system was a crowded place. The young sun was ringed by a rotating disk of gas and dust with the first building blocks of planets taking shape within it.

In one long-standing picture, dust grains collided and stuck together to form pebbles, which grew into kilometer-wide rocky bodies known as planetesimals. Those planetesimals repeatedly crashed into one another and merged, building planets over a few tens of millions of years.

Whether Earth and Mars were built by one process or a mix of both has not been settled. The Copenhagen team set out to test the competing ideas by studying the chemistry of the planets' crust and mantle.

The researchers focused on volatile elements such as sodium, zinc and potassium, which evaporate easily at high temperatures. So whether those elements are present or missing acts as a chemical fingerprint of the heat and violence a planet went through while forming, according to the researchers.

"It is a major detective job to figure out what happened back then when most of the evidence disappeared long ago," Johansen said. "But even after 4.5 billion years, the compositions of Earth's and Mars' mantles remain the same."

What formation route suits best?

The team fed the data about the reservoirs of volatile elements of both Earth and Mars into computer models to test which formation scenarios fit best, and the results favor a hybrid model.

At least 75 percent of Earth's mass appears to come from two young planets, known as protoplanets, that grew large by gathering pebbles, while planetesimals supplied up to 25 percent, the study found.

For Mars, the team thinks that this balance was reversed, with roughly three-quarters of its mass appearing to come from planetesimals, and the remaining quarter from pebble accretion.

The exact chemical makeup of the raw material that became Earth and Mars is unknown, so the calculations depend on assumptions, the study notes. Nevertheless, adjusting those assumptions did not change the main conclusion, according to study co-lead Haiyang Wang of the University of Copenhagen.

The team argues that its method is more direct than the isotope-based approach widely used in the field, which "can often be interpreted in multiple ways," according to Wang.

The technique used by the researchers could eventually be applied to worlds beyond the solar system, extrasolar planets, or exoplanets.

As future missions find Earth-like planets around other stars, judging whether those worlds could be habitable will require some sense of what they're made of.

"If we understand how planets lose volatile elements during their formation, we can also become better at predicting how much water and other life-supporting substances they ultimately retain," Johansen concluded.

This research is described in a paper published Sept. 25 in the journal Nature Astronomy.

What might look like a "photo negative" of this swirling galaxy is actually the same view in another wavelength.

What is it?

As you can see in this dual image, two different observatories looked at the same galaxy and ended up with totally opposite results.

M83, or Messier 83, is a spiral galaxy found 15 million light-years away. A popular target for observation, the galaxy has a picture perfect swirl. But depending on how you look, it can completely transform.

In the galactic view on the left, we can see the galaxy as it looks in submillimeter wavelengths, which is found between far-infrared and microwave wavelengths. This orange and black view, which evokes Halloween vibes, was captured by ALMA (the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array) in Chile.

To the left of this spooky view, we can see M83 in visible light. This sparkling purple, pink, blue and gray look comes from observations with the Wide Field Imager at the European Space Observatory's La Silla Observatory, also in Chile.

Why is it incredible?

The universe is not always as it seems. While we might learn remarkable truths about a galaxy by looking at it in visible light, an infrared or submillimeter view could reveal details we never would have seen otherwise.

By exploring the universe with different observatories, different wavelengths and different points of view, we can glean more information than we ever could otherwise. This diversity is essential to our growing understanding of the cosmos.

This is why, when new space telescopes like NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launch, they aren't intended to replace other, older telescopes, but rather add to a collective and varied power.

With these two views of M83, we can see the incredible structures of gas and dust that make up the galaxy's signature spiral in visible light, but we can also see the cold molecular gas only visible in submillimeter wavelengths.

Using NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers are investigating turbulent planetary systems in which worlds violently collide. This investigation could shed light on the hypothetical collision between Earth and a Mars-sized planetary body called Theia, which is thought to have spilled matter around our planet that coalesced to forge the moon billions of years ago.

Young planetary systems are notoriously violent, featuring young stars surrounded by disks of gas and dust called protoplanetary disks. Within these disks, small bodies called planetesimals collide and stick together to begin the process of forming planets. However, NASA's now-retired Spitzer Space Telescope discovered that there is a class of protoplanetary disks that are even more violent than usual, so-called extreme debris disks. These systems contain unusually large amounts of warm dust close to the young star, in the region similar to that occupied by rocky planets in the solar system.

Investigating extreme debris disks is challenging, partially because they are so rare. Scientists estimate that such systems exist around just 1% of stars. It is suspected that our sun was one of these rare stars.

A team of scientists set about investigating 21 extreme debris disks with the incredible observing power of the JWST. This included follow-ups on four of the five of these environments from Spitzer's archival data and 16 from the JWST, with 12 newly observed disks

"This is the first time we have gathered enough systems to truly understand this subclass that we call extreme debris disks," team leader Kate Su of the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado, said in a statement. "Before the JWST, we had limited information. We knew that they are weird and very different from the typical cold debris disks that we know, like Vega and Fomalhaut.

"Now that we have more data, we can pin down what these disks represent for planet formation and evolution."

Extremely violent and just as rare

The researchers discovered that there are three properties common to extreme debris disks. They contain smaller dust grains than those found in "classic" protoplanetary disks, a high concentration of warm dust, and irregular variations in brightness.

The next step was to discover what was driving these features. To do this, the team investigated the minerals that composed the disks they investigated, finding they could be categorized as silica-rich or silica-poor.

This told the scientists which type of collisions were occurring in those disks and producing impact debris. These collisions may also help account for its variability in brightness seen in these systems.

"To just see their mid-infrared emission and beautiful spectral features with the JWST, which allowed us to identify their compositions, was the most exciting thing for me," team member Agnes Kospal of Konkoly Observatory in Budapest, Hungary, said. "We have no other way to study these planetary embryos directly because they are too small."

The researchers think that silica-rich disks are produced by high-energy impacts of Mars-sized objects, in which most of the material is vaporized. Silica-poor disks are created by less energetic events from roughly moon-sized bodies grazing each other.

From their sample, around one-third of extreme debris disks are silica-rich disks. These were found only around stars younger than 300 million years.

Silica-poor disks, on the other hand, were found around stars with a broad range of ages. They also often show greater brightness variability than silica-rich disks. The researchers propose that this variability in brightness is caused by the rapid evolution of fresh debris through further impacts and changes in the orbits of the system's occupants.

The findings can now be applied to the solar system to build a better picture of its 4.6-billion-year evolution. Simulations recreating the earliest era of the solar system show that terrestrial planets, such as Earth, should form within the first few hundred million years.

That lines up with the ages of observed silica-rich extreme debris disks and also aligns with the estimated formation of the Earth and the moon around 100 million years after the sun formed.

The solar system likely also went through a silica-poor extreme disk phase during a period called the Late Heavy Bombardment. It is during this period that scientists think collisions may have caused the solar system's gas giants to migrate from close to the sun to the positions they now occupy.

"How rocky planets formed and giant planets evolved are part of the broader story of the solar system’s formation. It’s all one story," said Su. "Our work on extreme debris disks helps us bring together the big picture of what we currently understand."

The team's research was published on Thursday (Oct. 1) in The Astrophysical Journal.

An ancient crater buried underneath the Oklahoma town of Ames has been discovered to be almost 100 million years younger than thought, consequently connecting it to one of the big five mass extinction events in Earth's history.

The crater, which spans about 10 miles (16 kilometers) in diameter, is buried under 9,000 feet (2.7 kilometers) of sedimentary rock and was not discovered until seismic readings revealed it in 1991.

Initial estimates of the crater's age came from the discovery of the tooth in a rock found within the impact site. It was identified as belonging to an ancient eel-like creature called a conodont, which existed during the middle of a geological period known as the Ordovician, in a rock found within the impact site. This period was marked by a dramatic bombardment of asteroids known as the Ordovician Meteor Event 467.5 million years ago, which left nearly two-dozen craters spread around the world, all within 30 degrees of the equator. This equatorial pattern suggests there may have been a ring of material from a broken-up asteroid encircling the Earth's equator.

However, a team led by Elizabeth Catlos of the University of Texas at Austin has arrived at a different conclusion, finding that the crater is 370 million years old instead. So rather than being part of the Ordovician Meteor Event, this new dating places it around the time of the Late Devonian mass extinction, also referred to as the Frasnian–Famennian boundary extinction.

"With this research, we're basically taking a major pawn out of the Ordovician Meteor Event and dumping it into the Frasnian–Famennian event and saying, 'this is where this impact belongs'," said Catlos in a statement.

The new evidence for the age of the Ames crater comes from zircon crystals. Zircon is a silicate mineral, and zircon crystals can be dated by analyzing the amount of uranium and lead contained within them. When zircon crystals form they contain uranium and thorium, but the formation process pushes out lead atoms. A newly formed zircon crystal therefore contains no lead, but over time uranium radioisotopes decay into lead atoms, so the more lead a zircon crystal contains, the older it is.

The pressure of the impact that gouged out the Ames crater would have formed new zircons. Working with a team at NASA's Johnson Space Center, Catlos' group were able to image the zircon crystals using cathodoluminescence and electron backscatter diffraction. Cathodoluminescence bombards materials with electrons, which causes materials to emit photons at different wavelengths depending upon the material's composition. Electron backscatter diffraction, on the other hand, is a technique that uses a scanning electron microscope to study how electrons are diffracted at different angles by different atoms.

"No matter what technique we used, it was coming back to this younger signal," said Catlos.

So what about the fossil conodont teeth? The teeth were probably in the rock a long time before the impact, and just got jumbled in the violence that formed the crater.

While the impact alone was not big enough to cause a mass extinction, it may have contributed. Other possible causes of the extinction include a reduction in oxygen, super-volcanism or a nearby supernova, or possibly all these events operating in tandem.

When the impact occurred 370 million years ago, what is now Oklahoma was submerged beneath a shallow sea, which is how the 1.6 miles (2.7 kilometers) of sedimentary rock that today covers the crater was laid down. The impact also fractured the Earth's crust beneath it, and these fractures have allowed oil and natural gas to seep up. Wells struck oil three kilometers down inside the crater and since 1991 it has produced 17.4 million barrels of oil and a volume of 79.5 billion cubic feet (2.25 billion cubic meters) of natural gas.

Danny Stockli, who is the Dean of the Jackson School of Geosciences at the University of Texas at Austin and a co-author of the research, is effusive in his praise of using zircon crystals to date the ages of craters.

"These small crystals allow us to go back in time and learn about the major changes to Earth's ancient landscapes," said Stockli. "It would be great to do this for more of the meteor impact sites across the continent so we could get a more accurate timeline for these major events."

The findings were published in July in the journal Meteoritics and Planetary Science.

Astronomers have discovered a rare second-generation planet orbiting the ashes of the dead star from which it was born, a smoldering white dwarf.

Though scientists have long suspected that reborn planets could orbit more massive stellar remnants called neutron stars, this is the first time astronomers have discovered a second-generation planet orbiting a white dwarf. The discovery matters for our understanding of the future of the solar system, since a the sun will leave behind a white dwarf stellar remnant when it dies in about 6 billion years.

The astronomers behind this discovery say it was a total surprise. "Second-generation planets are worlds that form out of the material a star casts off as it dies. They're incredibly rare, and finding one around a white dwarf was completely unexpected," team member Jamie Williams of the University of Warwick said in a statement sent to Space.com. "It's a bit like finding a planet that has risen from the ashes of the very star it once orbited."

Cosmic death and rebirth

White dwarfs are created when stars around the size of the sun exhaust the hydrogen in their cores needed to fuel nuclear fusion and create helium. The end of this nuclear process also ends the outward pressure that stops stars from collapsing under the inward push of their own gravity.

As the cores of these dead stars collapse, the outer layers where nuclear fusion is still occurring swell out, beginning a short-lived red giant phase. When our sun undergoes this process, it will puff out to around the orbit of Mars, swallowing the inner planets, including Earth.

These puffed-out outer layers continue to expand until they form a disk of material far out from the star called a protoplanetary disk, leaving behind a cosmic ember in the form of a smoldering white dwarf. Some white dwarfs can strip material from the planets that remain orbiting around them, and this process can be investigated by the detection of rock-forming elements like silicon and iron.

The white dwarf at the heart of this research is HS 0209+0832, located around 790 light-years from Earth. The atmosphere of this stellar remnant contains unusually high levels zinc, copper, and, most notably, niobium, with concentrations around 1,000 times greater than the sun. That told this team something remarkable about the planet that this white dwarf has been snacking on.

"This pattern of elements is a telltale sign of the 's-process,' a nuclear reaction that builds heavy elements inside dying stars during their bloated red giant phase," said Nicholas Stone, of the Department of Astronomy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "It's a chemical signature no ordinary, 'first-generation' planet should carry, which told us that this new planet was something different."

The team thinks that this unique chemical signature indicates this white dwarf is stealing material from a planet that formed in the protoplanetary disk of material shed by the dying star during its red giant phase.

"Forming the protoplanetary disc in this situation is not easy and helps explain why these planets are so rare. A single, isolated star dies and sheds mass in a roughly symmetrical way," Williams added. "To form a disc of material necessary to birth a planet, HS 0209+0832 likely required a companion star that pulled the ejected material back into orbit, rather than letting it escape."

What else do we know about this Phoenix planet?

The team further investigated this second-generation planet using NASA's exoplanet hunting spacecraft TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite), which searches for planets beyond the solar system by observing the dips in light they cause as they cross the face of their parent stars.

The dip in light from HS 0209+0832 indicated this Phoenix world has an orbit of around 4.4 Earth days and is a Jupiter-sized gas giant. The stellar radiation the planet experiences due to its proximity to its white dwarf will eventually boil its atmosphere away. And as that radiation strikes the white dwarf it gives rise to the unique chemical signature seen by the team.

That chemical signature might be a way forward that could help astronomers hunt for more of these 'rebirth' planets.

"What's remarkable about the planet around HS 0209+0832 is that this isn't a planet from somewhere else, or a survivor from the system's birth; it looks like it was built from the very material its own star cast off as it died. In a sense, this system has given birth to a new world using the foundations of the old one," team member Boris Gänsicke of the University of Warwick said.

"Finding this one example raises the question of how many more might be out there and might our own solar system host a second-generation planet formed from the ashes of our sun."

The team's research was published on Monday (Oct. 5) in Nature Astronomy,

The water ice at Mars’s north pole is not as dusty as planetary scientists thought, which could change how we think about the Red Planet’s past and present climate. That could, in turn, improve our understanding of Mars' prior habitability.

When dust is present in ice it acts as an insulator, absorbing sunlight and consequently causing the ice to melt or sublimate depending on the air pressure. Previous estimates suggested that the water-ice in Mars’ north polar cap and extended polar regions contained as much as 25% dust by mass.

"We know there is water-ice in the area surrounding the north pole of Mars, but there has been widespread disagreement as to how dusty that ice is," Aditya Khuller of the University of Washington said in a statement. "If it is dustier, the ice will be darker. Just like a dark t-shirt in the sun makes you warmer, dusty ice gets warmer and vaporizes faster on Mars."

However, a new analysis by Khuller and graduate student Pari Mohan using an alternate method has now concluded that the ice contains merely 3% dust by mass.

This means that not only does the ice absorb less sunlight, reducing the amount of ice that vaporizes into the Martian atmosphere, it also reflects more sunlight back into space because it is cleaner and therefore brighter.

The reflectivity of a planet is referred to as its albedo, and the more sunlight is reflected, the less is retained to help warm Mars, which needs all the warmth it can get sitting on the outer edge of the solar system's habitable zone.

A new way to look a Martian ice

This new conclusion is a consequence of Khuller realizing that the technique previously used by planetary scientists to determine the properties of Mars’ water ice was not the best model.

That technique was based on the properties of lunar regolith (dirt) on Earth’s Moon, but when Khuller applied it to ice on Earth, he found the results were not accurate. If it had problems describing the properties of Earth’s ice, was it really suitable for deducing the properties of Mars’ ice?

So Khuller and Mohan applied a tried and trusted technique derived by Steve Warren, professor emeritus at the University of Washington.

"His methods had been used successfully to study snow and ice on Earth for decades," said Khuller. "So I thought it would be interesting to adapt these Earth-tested methods to Mars."

Khuller and Mohan ran the numbers, which is when they came to the conclusion that the ice at Mars’ north pole was not as dusty as previous models had suggested. But what does that mean for Mars’ climate history?

Mars has ice caps at both its poles, and during winter they are covered in a frosty layer of carbon dioxide ice.

At the south pole, this layer is tens of feet deep, but at the north pole it is shallower, about a meter deep. In summer, that carbon dioxide ice sublimates into the air, and this happens faster at the north pole because of the relative thinness of the carbon dioxide. Exposing the more permanent water-ice cap beneath.

This is called the North Polar Residual Cap, which sits on top of numerous mile-thick layers of water-ice deposits, some dustier than others, collectively called the North Polar Layered Deposits. The residual cap is just the most recent active layer of what Khuller refers to as an "ice-cream sandwich."

The different layers of ice in this sandwich contain different amounts of dust, with dirtier layers sandwiching cleaner ones. Depending upon which layer was exposed to the air at the time, it would have affected Mars’ climate differently. The current residual cap appears to be scarce in dust and is contributing to Mars’ cold environment. However, these differences can even occur on an annual timescale with the coming and going of the carbon dioxide frost.

Orbiting satellites such as Europe’s Mars Express and NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Mars Odyssey have been imaging and mapping the Martian surface, including the polar caps. These observations have noted the ice caps changing in brightness seasonally as the carbon dioxide ice builds up and then sublimates.

"By looking at how the brightness changed over time, we figured out that there is a frost that forms in the winter and it’s more dusty," said Khuller. "In the Martian summer it goes away, exposing cleaner, older ice."

There could also be a connection with possible habitable environments on Mars.

Mars wasn't always so barren and dry

In the past, when the dustier layers of the polar cap’s ice-cream sandwich were exposed, they would have absorbed enough sunlight to melt the bottom of their particular layer of ice. This would have created pockets of liquid water that would be rich in nutrients provided by the dust.

On Earth, shallow pools of dusty meltwater are usually teeming with microbes that become dormant when the water freezes again in winter and then reactivate when the ice melts in summer.

Mars' ice caps could therefore have provided the perfect habitat for microbial life, but as of yet we have not found any life on the Red Planet.

"The fact that Mars and Earth both have these similar layers of water-ice and dust is interesting," said Khuller. "Why does one planet have life and the other doesn’t?"

Khuller and Mohan’s research was published on 8 September in the journal npj Space Exploration.

Blue Origin just unveiled its "Power Tower," which is designed to provide solar electricity for an upcoming base on the moon.

The space company, which was founded by billionaire Jeff Bezos, posted an animation of the tower on X on Sept. 25, showing the hardware landing on the moon and then deploying above the lunar surface.

"Our Power Tower is a 20-meter-tall, vertically deployed solar array system designed to provide more than 10 kilowatts of power for Moon Base operations at the lunar south pole," Blue Origin wrote in the post.

The X post also links to a YouTube video, which shows a real deployment test that occurred here on Earth on July 22, 2026. From the low vantage point of the camera, you can see a pole extending up from the base, before arms branch out from the center to deploy solar arrays that fold down.

"Its modular architecture will support future surface networks, extending power beyond the lander to the assets that need it most," reads the Blue Origin post.

The power tower appears to be an evolution of an earlier technology called Lunar Array Mast and Power System (LAMPS), which was developed by Honeybee Robotics, a Blue Origin subsidiary, and tested at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston in 2024.

Honeybee Robotics is one of the companies that have been working under NASA's Vertical Solar Array Technology (VSAT) project, which has been developing solar arrays to create the necessary power for a sustained presence on the moon in the future.

The X post mentions that the power tower will be used for operations at the lunar south pole. Blue Origin likely envisions the solar tower as part of NASA's planned moon base, which the agency aims to build in the area via its Artemis program. NASA's Moon Base project is currently in its first phase, which lasts until 2029. The current timeline has the moon base up and running by 2032.

MEGATRON is a good guy!?! Well, at least to cosmologists who are using this simulation to transform (sorry, couldn't resist) our understanding of the universe's first stars. Of course, in this case Megatron isn't the diabolical leader of the Decepticons who killed Optimus Prime in the Transformers franchise, but the most detailed simulation to date of the early universe.

Beginning in 2023 and set to run until 2030, MEGATRON uses James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) data to combine cutting-edge cosmological simulations with sophisticated models of radiation, chemistry, and galaxy formation. This allows researchers to investigate how the first galaxies and the first stars, known as Population III (POP III) stars, lit the shadows of the cosmic dark ages.

This is an important quest; POP III stars were primarily composed of hydrogen and helium, the lightest elements, and all that was available in the universe's infancy. However, during their lives, POP III stars forged heavier elements, which astronomers call metals. Upon their supernova deaths, POP III stars distributed elements like nitrogen, carbon, and oxygen to become the building blocks of the next generation of stars, their planets, and eventually life itself, be it here on Earth or anywhere else it exists in the cosmos.

"The elements that make our world and life possible – carbon, oxygen, iron and many others – were forged by stars. To understand where those elements came from, we need to understand how the first stars formed and enriched their surroundings," Martin Rey from the Department of Physics at the University of Bath said in a statement. "MEGATRON allows us to test these ideas directly by comparing detailed simulations with observations from JWST and the chemical fingerprints preserved in ancient stars."

This new research represents the first major finding from MEGATRON. So what did it find?

MEGATRON saves the day!?!

The first MEGATRON results demonstrate the importance of the interplay between starlight, gas, and newly forged elements in connecting astronomical data of galaxies in the early universe provided by the JWST and chemical fingerprints found within ancient stars in our galaxy, the Milky Way.

"The JWST gives us a direct glimpse of the infant cosmos, while stellar archaeology allows us to study the relics of those earliest times in our own galactic neighborhood," Rey explained. "MEGATRON provides a physical bridge between the two."

This unification could reconstruct the properties of POP III stars, in turn revealing how they enriched their surroundings with metals.

MEGATRON did this by simulating the evolution of a young galaxy that had the potential to grow into a system similar in mass to the Milky Way, beginning with pristine unspoiled hydrogen and helium gas. The simulation tracked the motion of gas, the passage of starlight, and the change in chemical concentrations, thus revealing how stars shape the gas in and around galaxies over billions of years.

The findings imply that some cosmological models may underestimate just how important the radiation emitted by stars and the chemical changes in gas around galaxies are to cosmic evolution.

With high-resolution reconstructions of these factors, MEGATRON recreated structures in the gas that fail to manifest in simpler models. This could improve predictions for current and future astronomical observations.

The team will now continue to use MEGATRON to forge even stronger links between astronomical observations and theory. This will become even more vital as the JWST continues to transform our understanding of the earliest galaxies and as large-scale astronomical surveys provide increasingly detailed information about ancient stars in our cosmic backyard.

"MEGATRON provides a common physical framework for interpreting two of astronomy's most exciting new datasets: JWST's view of the earliest galaxies and the stellar fossil record," Rey concluded. "Together, these complementary observations allow us to test competing models of the first stars in ways that weren't previously possible."

The team's research was published across four papers in the Open Journal of Astrophysics, with more to come.

Astronomers have caught a white dwarf, the type of stellar remnant the sun will leave when it dies, in a rare stage of its evolution. The white dwarf orbits a "cosmic lighthouse" in the form of a neutron star spinning hundreds of times a second sweeping twin beams of radiation across the universe, a so-called millisecond pulsar.

The binary system, designated NGC 362D, serves as a rare laboratory to study what happens after a star has spent millions of years donating stellar material to a neutron star before it "dies" to birth a white dwarf. NGC 362D was discovered recently using the MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa, with the white dwarf companion found in archival data from the Hubble Space Telescope collected between 2006 and 2016. This data also helped to reconstruct the evolutionary history of this system.

This revealed that the white dwarf in this binary system is the youngest white dwarf ever seen to be partnered with a millisecond pulsar. Additionally, this stellar ember also seems to be emitting less ultraviolet radiation than it should. This indicates that when the white dwarf stopped transferring matter to its neutron star companion around 600 million years ago, it was left in an envelope of ejected material that is now blocking UV radiation.

"What makes this system particularly interesting is the possibility of observing it at a very early stage of its evolution," team leader Greta Ettorre of the University of Bologna, Italy, said in a statement sent to Space.com. "Moreover, the attenuation of the signal that we observed in the ultraviolet could indicate the presence of material still surrounding the white dwarf."

A tale of two dead stars

The young white dwarf isn't the only dead star in this system. Like all neutron stars, the pulsar component of NGC 362D was born when a star with between eight and 12 times the mass of the sun died in a massive supernova explosion.

This sees the star's core, with a mass between one and two times that of the sun, crush down to a width of around 12 miles (20 kilometers). The resulting neutron star is therefore composed of matter so dense that if a teaspoon of it were scooped out and brought to Earth, it would weigh around 10 million tons. That is the equivalent of stacking 85,000 adult blue whales on a spoon.

There is another extreme consequence of this rapid stellar core shrinkage. Think of an ice skater here on Earth drawing in their arms to increase their rate of spin, which happens due to the conservation of angular momentum. The same happens with a newborn neutron star but on a much grander scale; some pulsars have been measured to spin in excess of 700 times per second.

This speed can be boosted in systems like NGC 362D, in which a neutron star is snatching material from a donor star because that material carries with it angular momentum. This is referred to as "pulsar recycling."

The theft of this material results in the companion star losing its outer layers, pushing it toward transforming into a white dwarf. This seems to have happened relatively recently for the white dwarf in NGC 362D.

"NGC 362D currently offers us a unique opportunity to study what happens in the immediate aftermath of the millisecond pulsar recycling process," team member and National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) researcher Emanuele Dalessandro said. "In this context, the possible presence of material around the white dwarf is particularly interesting.

"In fact, it could produce signatures at radio wavelengths in addition to the optical, similar to those observed in systems with non-degenerate companions, and could therefore help us correctly interpret the properties of other young systems."

That means that the team's findings could be of great value in the understanding of other similar systems, especially those at these rare evolutionary stages. The results could also be of use in the continuing effort to use populations of pulsars as "cosmic clocks" in so-called "pulsar timing arrays."

"Millisecond pulsars rotate with extraordinary regularity and can be used as true natural clocks. Measuring the arrival times of their pulses with extreme precision allows us, among other things, to study gravity under extreme conditions and to carry out increasingly precise tests of general relativity," Ettorre concluded. "Understanding their surroundings and reconstructing their evolutionary history is therefore essential to fully exploit what these remarkable cosmic laboratories can tell us."

The findings were published on Wednesday (Sept. 30) in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics Letters.

Scientists have discovered how jets launched by supermassive black holes can determine how their host galaxies "die." The research answers the long-standing question of why galaxies don't have more stars.

After all, large galaxies, including the Milky Way, are surrounded by huge cocoons of gas and dust called the circumgalactic medium, and that material serves as the raw building blocks for stars. During intense star-forming phases, this gas moves into galaxies and fuels this process, but eventually something stops this material from cooling, clumping, and birthing stars, or from moving into galaxies at all, effectively "killing" them.

This research suggests that when feeding supermassive black holes blast jets of plasma from around them, this reaches far beyond the center of galaxies where these cosmic titans reside and beyond their outer limits, thus disrupting the gas around galaxies. This has a major effect on how galaxies form stars and thus how they grow and evolve.

"This is a pathbreaking result that solves the long-standing mystery of how black holes influence galaxies, their stars, and life as we know it," team co-leader Sanchayeeta Borthakur of Arizona State University said in a statement. "This work opens a new direction to explore further the intricacies of the connection between the supermassive black holes trillions of miles from where we are to how we came to be here."

Black holes maybe small (relatively) but they pack a punch

Ok, supermassive black holes can't exactly be called "small," packing a mass millions or billions of times that of the sun into a width about that of the solar system. But compared to galaxies, which can host 100 billion similarly sized star systems, even these cosmic titans are relatively small in stature.

Even though feeding black holes can pour vast amounts of energy back into their cosmic environments via jets and radiation, the effect they have is still somewhat perplexing.

"The surprising question is: How can something so small energetically impact something so enormous?", team co-leader Namrata Roy of the Raman Research Institute said.

Roy and Borthakur focused their investigation on feeding or active black holes, using observations of hundreds of galaxies with active jets, collected by the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) survey and radio jet measurements from the LOFAR Two-meter Sky Survey (LoTSS). They found points at which ionized gas glows brightly along their jets. This represents the plasma hitting and passing through clumps of surrounding gas, energizing it.

This indicates that black hole jets don't influence gas around galaxies in a uniform manner, but at preferred points. The greatest impact was seen close to the outer edges of galaxies, where plasma jets first hit the circumgalactic medium, and at the outer edge of the circumgalactic medium itself. That latter region is where the jets release the most energy.

The team's findings reveal clear fingerprints of the impact black hole jets have in disrupting potential star-forming material even right out to the circumgalactic medium. That's key in understanding how star formation is cut off and how galaxies are killed.

"What excites me most is the scale of the connection," Roy said. "A black hole is incredibly small compared to a galaxy, but its impact can reach hundreds of thousands of light-years, far into the galaxy’s outer reaches. The jet carries the energy outward, and the gas lights up along its path."

The findings also offer a new way for scientists to test the impact of black hole jets on galaxies.

The team's research was published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

NASA's Perseverance rover has been busy exploring Mars' "Wild West."

What is it?

Perseverance has been exploring the Martian surface for more than five years. Starting this year, the rover began its journey through "Lac de Charmes," an area that the mission team considers the "Wild West frontier" for the rover, according to a recent update.

This region, which is west of the rim of Jezero Crater where the mission landed, is home to valleys and ridges, as well as some of the oldest rocks the rover has encountered yet.

To get to the "Wild West frontier," the mission team had Perseverance snake through different interesting areas. On the journey to "Lac de Charmes," the rover collected data that the team can use to better piece together the story of how the region formed and how it has evolved over the years.

Why is it incredible?

In this latest update, the mission team shared that, not only is Perseverance continuing to explore this region, but it's doing so with the help of a repurposed processor originally intended to allow the mission to talk to the Ingenuity helicopter.

With observations Perseverance has made so far, the mission has found that the igneous rocks in this area may have formed from cooling lava or magma, or even as the result of a violent impact, according to the update.

The rocks in this region are so old that they "formed when Mars was still a young planet bombarded by asteroid impacts, long before the sedimentary rocks inside Jezero Crater formed in rivers and lakes," Athanasios (Thanos) Klidaras, a Ph.D. candidate at Purdue University, said in the mission update.

"They therefore could teach us much about the earliest era of Martian history — and, more broadly, how rocky planets evolved during the tumultuous early history of our solar system," Klidaras added.

Those of us still humming on back-to-school energy can add some Red Planet flavor: We just marked the beginning of a new year on Mars.

The Martian new year officially clicked over today (Sept. 30) at 4:16 a.m. EDT (0816 GMT), when the Red Planet once again began its nearly 687-Earth-day journey around the sun.

But if you're a Martian, you wouldn't use Earth days. A Mars day, or "sol," lasts 24 hours and 39 minutes — the time it takes the Red Planet to rotate once. There are 668 sols in a Martian year.

Sept. 30 as New Year's Day on Mars is something of a human construct: Astronomers chose it because Sept. 30 marks the northern equinox, when spring begins in Mars' north and autumn starts in the south.

"Like Earth, Mars has four seasons — winter, spring, summer and autumn," officials with the European Space Agency (ESA) stated in a post about the Martian new year.

"Unlike Earth's seasons, Martian seasons are not of equal lengths due to Mars' more elliptical orbit," they added. "The planet's axial tilt causes the northern hemisphere to receive more sunlight during the northern summer, and the southern hemisphere to receive more sunlight in northern winter."

The strange seasons on Mars also bring a consequence: dust. In the back half of the long Martian year, the Red Planet gets closer to the sun and sees its atmosphere warm up. The warmth brings dust, as winds loft particles from the regolith on the surface.

"Once airborne, these brownish particles heat up and redistribute some of that warmth to the surrounding atmosphere. This process can rapidly pump a lot of dust," ESA stated.

Daily conditions on Mars are also tough, no matter the season. At noon in summer, for example, temperatures range between 32 degrees and 140 degrees Fahrenheit (0 and 60 degrees Celsius), but winter sees the mercury plunge to as low as minus 166 degrees F (minus 110 degrees C).

You can check out the conditions on Mars up close, by following along with NASA's Perseverance and Curiosity rovers. These six-wheeled robots send back images nearly daily, and the agency generally provides a few updates about their activities each month.

The bright blue lagoon waters of Venice, Italy and its iconic canals stand out in this true-color satellite image.

What is it?

Have you ever seen the gondoliers of Venice pushing their gondolas through the canals, singing all the way? Well, if you zoom out all the way into orbit, this is what they look like.

This image, snapped by the European Space Agency's IRIDE satellite fleet back in May of this year, shows the Venetian Lagoon, a bay of the Adriatic Sea that encompasses the city of Venice.

The IRIDE network consists of six satellite constellations that orbit our planet, capturing comprehensive data and imagery of Earth.

Why is it incredible?

Venice is famous for its Grand Canal and canal networks, where you can find people traveling by gondola. Made up of a group of islands, this coastal city is intrinsically linked to the waters it inhabits.

In this view from space, you can see just how intertwined every curve of the city is with the surrounding waters.

There is bright blue water, whose brilliant color is created by suspended sediment, as well as mud flats and salt marshes, which appear as dark brown and green in the top-right of the image.

The great variety of watery ecosystems in this region have created a home for not only humans in the city but an incredible array of wildlife, such as birds in the salt marshes.

While Venice's waters exude an incredible natural beauty, as seen in this image, they also put the city and its residents at risk as sea levels continue to rise. Because Venice is so intertwined with its surrounding water, it is especially vulnerable to sea level rise caused by climate change, and every year the city essentially "sinks" roughly 1/16th of an inch (2 millimeters).

Parents know the joy of the first ultrasound scan of their babies. Astronomers have now achieved the planetary equivalent, imaging a pair of twin planets as they form in the womb of gas and dust around their parent star.

The imaging of these forming exoplanets (or extrasolar planets, worlds outside of our solar system), comes courtesy of the 66 radio antennas that comprise the Atacama Large Millimeter/ submillimeter Array (ALMA). It brings astronomers closer than ever before to understanding the processes behind planet formation.

The ALMA image focuses on the system around the binary stars WISPIT 2, located around 437 light-years away. WISPIT 2 has an estimated age of around 5.4 million years. If that makes this star sound anything but an infant, consider that our middle-aged star, the sun, is 4.6 billion years old. Surrounding the young star is a disk of gas and dust known as a protoplanetary disk that serves as a prenatal envelope in which two planets, WISPIT 2b and WISPIT 2c, are forming.

The image shows clear evidence of how forming planets interact with their prenatal cocoon. Visible is a channel created in the protoplanetary disk by WISPIT 2b, a gas giant that already has a mass five times that of Jupiter, as it orbits its parent star, collecting material to facilitate its further growth.

WISPIT 2c is a little behind its sibling in terms of development, but it is still making its mark in its protoplanetary disk home.

"We clearly see both planets shaping their environment. WISPIT 2c has carved a cavity, and WISPIT 2b a gap," team member Myriam Benisty of the Planet Formation and Exoplanets (PFE) department at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, said in a statement. "Around WISPIT 2b, we find swirls of gas that had been predicted by simulations of disk-planet interactions, but never actually seen before. Now there is an image of them!"

What makes WISPIT 2 so special?

With this new ALMA data, WISPIT 2b has become the only protoplanet for which astronomers can see three important elements of planet formation: the protoplanetary disk, the planet itself, and evidence that the planet is still gathering, or accreting, matter, and, as the final piece of the puzzle, the gas interacting directly with the planet. That adds up to observing planet formation in action.

Many of these elements have been seen around infant stars before, notably in the system PDS 70, but not in unison.

"Hopefully, observations like this will teach astronomers to distinguish between disk features that indicate the presence of a protoplanet and features that don't," team leader Stefano Facchini of the University of Milan said.

The results are also remarkable because of how far WISPIT 2b is located from its parent star. The planet is accreting matter at a distance of 57 times the distance between Earth and the sun, or almost twice the distance between Neptune and our star. That is an orbit wider than that of almost any other currently known exoplanet.

Additionally, the techniques the team used to obtain these observations could be crucial when the next generation of telescopes starts to look at budding extrasolar planetary systems.

That includes upgrades to ALMA itself and the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) currently under construction in the Atacama Desert region of northern Chile, both of which could deliver an even more detailed picture of the WISPIT 2 system and how it is being shaped by its formation planets.

The ALMA results are available in two papers on the repository site arXiv.

Scientists have discovered a new planet that defies all expectations. It's a lava world, but it's also cold. In fact, it's the coldest lava world we've ever seen with an atmosphere.

Researchers spotted HD 3167 b, a rocky super-Earth covered in lava, orbiting a star 154 light-years away. This planet orbits so closely to its star that a "year" on the world (one revolution around its star) takes only one Earth day. But it's not just a lava-covered rock  — it's the smallest lava world researchers have ever found. And yet, it has managed to hang onto its atmosphere.

"What's so surprising is that the closer a rocky planet orbits its star, the harder it should be to have an atmosphere, because it's bombarded by stellar wind and gets more high-energy photons from the star. But it seems that many of these lava worlds do," co-author Edwin Kite, an associate professor of geophysical sciences at the University of Chicago said in a statement.

Since the first exoplanet (or planet outside of our solar system) was confirmed over 30 years ago, scientists have so far discovered over 6,300 different exoplanets. From hot Jupiter-like gas giants to small Neptune-like worlds, an incredible variety of planets has been found. Amongst those are a handful of "lava worlds," or rocky worlds that are hot enough that their surfaces are melted into burning lava.

In this new study, the team was able to make observations with the James Webb Space Telescope's MIRI (mid-infrared instrument), which can see the planet in mid-infrared light, allowing researchers to estimate planet temperatures and see if there are any signs of an atmosphere. With this instrument, they observed the planet during what's called a "secondary eclipse," meaning they looked for differences in mid-infrared light that occurred when the planet went behind its star.

This planet is tidally locked, which is common amongst lava worlds. This means that it has one side that always faces its star and one side that is perpetually shrouded in darkness. But this newly-found world is a little different from the rest. If the planet had no atmosphere, its dayside would be "as hot as theoretically possible," being so close to its star, lead author Brandon Park Coy, a graduate student in Kite's group, said in the same statement. But that's not what they found. The team found an unusually cool planet with an atmosphere, a planet that "is noticeably cooler than its expected maximum," Coy added.

The researchers concluded that the planet appears to have an atmosphere that cools its dayside by reflecting light from its star and essentially redirecting that heat to the planet's nightside. So while it's hot enough to be a lava world, it's the coolest one ever spotted with an atmosphere.

Strangely, while this planet's temperature helped this team to conclude it likely has an atmosphere, scientists have previously spotted atmospheres on ultra-hot lava worlds. This raises a number of questions about how these planets form their atmospheres and at what temperatures.

This discovery is part of a larger program which aims to answer this question. This program, led by astronomer Megan Weiner Mansfield at the University of Maryland, is examining a group of 10 different lava worlds to see at which temperatures these planets tend to form atmospheres.

With these findings, this discovery also supports a growing conclusion amongst scientists that the majority of lava worlds likely have atmospheres. Scientists are expanding what is possible in the field of exoplanet science by exploring strange, far-off worlds that can help us better understand our own planet and how life might form and survive in the universe.

"These planets are too hot for life, but by studying them, we can say something about the processes that matter for other rocky worlds," Kite said.

"Despite how inhospitable they are for life, we're also interested in studying these kinds of planets because we think early Earth might have looked a lot like a lava world," Coy added. "We think that very early in the solar system's history, when the terrestrial planets formed, they were extremely hot due to the energy from all of the planetesimal collisions. Earth had what's known as a magma ocean stage with an entirely liquid surface. This result gives us a window into studying what conditions may have been like in Earth's first couple of million years."

This work is described in a new study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

New research suggests that mysterious Little Red Dots discovered in the early universe may actually be overfeeding supermassive black holes, killing two metaphorical birds with one stone.

While the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has undoubtedly improved our understanding of the cosmos immensely in its four years of operation, the $10 billion NASA instrument has also delivered some problems with our understanding of the universe.

Primary among these quirks in our understanding of the cosmos is the discovery of supermassive black holes with masses billions of times that of the sun that exist in the universe before it was 1 billion years old. That is before any black hole should have had a chance to grow to such monstrous masses via mergers or ordinary feeding. Arguably even more perplexing is the observation of so-called "Little Red Dots", objects that are found 600 million to 1 billion years after the Big Bang but disappear before the universe is 1.5 billion years old.

Among the scientists tackling the nature of so-called Little Red Dots and the presence of supermassive black holes in the early universe is a team that has found both objects emerge naturally from simulations of the conditions found in the early universe. The team also found a connection between these two mysteries.

"The most exciting result is that objects resembling Little Red Dots emerge naturally in our cosmological simulations," team leader Sunmyon Chon of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, Germany, told Space.com. "Massive black holes form and grow extremely rapidly, and during this growth they become surrounded by a very dense and optically thick gas envelope. This naturally produces several of the characteristic properties of observed Little Red Dots."

The team's research was published on Sept. 16 in the journal Nature.

How do overfeeding black holes connect to Little Red Dots

Running their cosmological simulation, Chon and colleagues uncovered a connection between Little Red Dots and massive black holes that relates to how the latter feed on matter.

"When a black hole is supplied with gas at an extremely high rate, the gas cannot simply disappear into the black hole immediately. A large amount accumulates around it and forms a dense, optically thick structure due to the angular momentum," Chon explained. "In a sense, we are seeing an extremely overfed black hole wrapped in its own fuel."

The researcher added that the glow of Little Red Dots comes from the fact that electromagnetic radiation produced near the black hole has to pass through this envelope of black hole fuel. This leads to the wavelengths of that radiation being changed, with the result being a compact object with a very red spectrum and broad hydrogen emission lines — key characteristics of Little Red Dots.

This overfeeding could explain how black holes reached such huge masses before ordinary feeding and merger processes should have allowed such growth. As for why this could happen in the early universe but doesn't happen today, the team also has a solution.

"The early universe provided an extraordinary supply of gas. Galaxies were growing very rapidly, and large amounts of dense gas were continuously flowing into their centers," Chon said. "In our simulations, strong radiation from nearby star-forming galaxies also plays an important role. It suppresses star formation in neighboring clouds, allowing a large amount of gas to accumulate before it finally collapses. This first creates supermassive stars, which then collapse into massive black-hole seeds.

"These black holes are therefore born in environments with an enormous reservoir of dense gas already available to feed them."

Answering the question of how supermassive black holes grew so big so fast is satisfying for the team. After all, it was the primary reason for the simulation being created.

"In our simulation, the process begins with supermassive stars reaching several hundred thousand solar masses. They collapse after roughly two million years and leave behind massive black-hole seeds. Because these seeds are already very massive and are born in gas-rich environments, they can then grow extremely rapidly," Chon said. "So Little Red Dots may actually be showing us some of the missing stages in the formation of the first supermassive black holes."

As satisfying as this is, the team's research doesn't answer every puzzle surrounding the JWST's observations of the early universe or Little Red Dots.

Why did these cosmic dinosars go extinct?

As mentioned above, one of the biggest puzzles surrounding Little Red Dots is the question of why they are absent in the last 11 billion or so years of cosmic history. And that remains an open question.

"Our simulations do not yet explain why Little Red Dots seem to disappear at later cosmic times. This is still a big mystery," Chon said. "I think understanding this cosmic evolution will be an important next step for both simulations and observations."

The fact that the simulation didn't answer all questions about Little Red Dots isn't too surprising to the team. In fact, they weren't expecting these curious objects to emerge in simulations at all.

"We originally designed these simulations to investigate the formation of massive black-hole seeds in the early universe," Chon explained. "We did not design them to produce Little Red Dots. But once the black holes formed and began growing, we found that they naturally became surrounded by dense gas and developed properties remarkably similar to Little Red Dots."

That wasn't the only surprise the simulation delivered. The team found that something that had previously been considered a rather exotic theoretical possibility emerged naturally from the evolution of the simulated universe.

"Another surprising result was that what forms around these rapidly growing black holes can be regarded as a type of quasi-star — a black hole embedded in a massive, optically thick gaseous envelope," Chon continued. "Our simulations showed for the first time that such a quasi-star-like system can form naturally in a cosmological simulation."

The next step for the team is to determine if the formation of overmassive black holes and Little Red Dots occurs in the simulation when environmental conditions of the early universe are varied. The researchers also intend to make more detailed predictions that can be compared to observations made by the JWST.

"Observations of Little Red Dots are progressing extremely quickly," Chon concluded. "As theorists, our challenge now is to make predictions at the same pace so that we can use these new observations to determine what these remarkable objects really are."

Most people never forget their first home, carrying their memories with them as they travel. New research suggests that this adage may be true for wandering black holes too. That's because it seems that rogue black holes that break away from their cosmic homes may carry with them the histories of the galaxies they may eventually escape.

These rogue black holes can be displaced when their home galaxies collide and merge. This begins journeys of billions of years that carry these black holes far from the point at which they formed. This process can be even more pronounced in smaller galaxies in which the gravitational influence is weaker, and the black holes are less likely to be strongly bound to the galactic center.

Scientists have known that the activity of supermassive black holes at the heart of galaxies strongly influences the evolution of their host galaxies, but these findings indicate that though rogue black holes may be less influential, they may be important witnesses to the processes that shape galaxies.

"Our results show that considering wandering black holes, in addition to centered black holes, is essential for understanding the origins and dynamics of massive black holes and the histories of their host galaxies," team leader Emma Jane Weller of Yale University said in a statement.

Evidence of 'heavy seeds' in the early universe

There is currently some debate regarding how black holes first started growing in the infant cosmos. Some scientists suggest that the first massive stars died and collapsed to create smaller black holes or "light seeds." Others theorize that black hole growth gets a head start when dense patches in vast clouds of gas and dust directly collapse to create much more massive black holes, or so-called "heavy seeds."

If wandering black holes carry with them a record of their birth, then they could help settle the light seed vs. heavy seed debate.

"What is exciting about our findings is that black holes seem to remember more than the circumstances of their birth," team member Priyamvada Natarajan of Yale said. "Their present-day locations carry the imprint of everything that has happened to their host galaxies. By separating black holes at galactic centers from those that are wandering, we can begin to disentangle these two histories."

To do this, the team turned to a cosmological simulation called ASTRID, which is capable of tracing roughly 13.5 billion years of cosmic history, modeling the interplay between dark matter scaffolding, gas dynamics, and star formation right back to just 300 million years after the Big Bang.

Using ASTRID, the team modelled galaxies with masses between 10 million and 1 billion times that of the sun tracking their evolution over around 12.6 billion years. ASTRID has a strength that was important to this particular investigation. It doesn't pin black holes down to the heart of their galaxies; instead, it allows them the leeway to roam.

The team confirmed that black holes were more likely to wander in low-mass galaxies, also finding that such galaxies seem to retain information about their initial seed population even after billions of years of growth and collisions and mergers with other galaxies. They also found that low-mass galaxies with a central black hole stopped forming stars before those with wandering black holes.

"Some of the universe's most revealing black holes may be the ones that have wandered away. Black holes are remarkable cosmic archivists," Natarajan said. "Their abundance tells us something about how they were born, while their locations preserve a record of how their galaxies were assembled."

By teaming this approach with X-ray, radio, optical, and infrared astronomical observations, scientists could get closer than ever before to understanding the origins of black holes.

"Each of these methods can probe different parts of the population," Weller concluded. "By combining observations with the results from simulations, we may be able to identify the imprints of black hole formation and galaxy evolution."

The team's research was published on Sept. 7 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Unusual formations in Mars' Arabia Terra region reveal the Red Planet's climate history.

What is it?

Like the wavy structures of a coral reef, layered deposits in the Arabia Terra region of Mars showcase the planet's strange beauty and even stranger past.

In this new image captured by the HiRISE (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) camera aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, you can see lighter deposits layered on top of larger formations in Martian impact craters.

And while the image itself is quite striking, it's more than just a pretty picture. This kind of visual data can help researchers better understand what has happened on the Red Planet over the years.

"Researchers have proposed that the rhythmic nature of the layers and their extensive coverage across much of Arabia Terra could be due to global cyclic processes, such as dust storms, perhaps involving groundwater," HiRISE co-investigator Cathy Weitz said in a recent blog post.

"The deposits are currently undergoing erosion, which has produced crenulations, pits, and jagged edges. Darker wind-blown (aeolian) ripples and debris has more recently covered and infilled portions of the layered deposit," Weitz added.

Why is it incredible?

This image stands out, first and foremost, for its unusual appearance. Peaks and valleys ranging from a light sandy color to a deep blueish-gray create an almost hypnotic landscape.

And it is amazing that, with a picture taken by a robotic spacecraft orbiting a planet that lies millions of miles from Earth, scientists can trace through billions of years of that world's climate history.

Every rock, every valley and every winding, sandy, fragmented feature holds an incredible amount of information about the planet it belongs to. So, even just through images from orbit, scientists have been able to slowly piece together Mars' history and the incredible changes the planet and its climate have endured.

Billions of years ago, something happened in our solar system that gave rise to one of the most peculiar planetary mysteries: what caused Uranus to spin on its side?

Although most planets spin with their rotational axes generally upright with respect to their orbital plane, Uranus exhibits an extreme axial tilt, causing its spin to resemble something more akin to a steady roll.

The exact reason for the planet's unusual tilt has long perplexed astronomers, and debate continues over what might have led to its present-day appearance. However, recent research suggests that at some point in the distant past, interactions between Uranus and a hypothetical "lost" moon could hold the key to what instigated this modern planetary mystery.

What do we know?

An atypical ice giant

Compared with its neighboring planets, Uranus is quite the outlier. Not only is it the coldest planet in our solar system, but Uranus is accompanied by at least 27 moons that share its unusual tilt, and some evidence suggests there could be even more Uranian satellites that presently remain hidden.

The earliest recorded observations of Uranus date back to the late 1600s, at which time it was initially thought to be a star. By 1781, British astronomer William Herschel concluded, based on initial observations he made with a home-built telescope, that the object was most likely a comet. Ongoing monitoring would eventually lead to its confirmation as the seventh planet from the sun.

Herschel's early observations of Uranus led to him noticing the odd paths of its moons, which had been one of the earliest indications that the planet possessed an extreme orientation. However, it wasn't until the early 20th century that the first serious attempts to measure the ice giant's rotation occurred, leading to the eventual confirmation of its unusual, tilted appearance.

Compared to Earth's rotational axis of around 23.5 degrees, Uranus's roughly 98-degree tilt causes several notable effects. For instance, according to NASA, because Uranus requires close to 84 Earth years to complete an orbit around the sun, each pole is exposed to direct sunlight for close to a quarter of the Uranian year, leaving the opposite side to cool over a 21-year-long winter. Equally unlike seasonal phenomena on Earth, sunlight falls almost directly onto Uranus's equatorial region during the planet's equinoxes.

What remains unknown?

Uranus's extreme spin

While such seasonal effects are well characterized, the mystery of what caused Uranus to end up on its side remains a matter of debate among astronomers.

One popular explanation suggests that at some point early in our solar system's violent history, Uranus may have collided with a large planetary body, while other theories suggest that no single impact would be necessary, and instead focus on ancient gravitational interactions between the giant planets, which may have gradually altered Uranus's orientation.

In 2022, a team of researchers led by Paris Observatory astronomer Melaine Saillenfest revisited the idea that Uranus may have been gradually tilted long ago by the presence of a large object. However, instead of a planet-sized object, Saillenfest and his colleagues suggested that, based on simulations, an ancient moon of significant enough size could have driven Uranus toward its extreme tilt through gravitational interactions before eventually crashing into the planet.

"The migration of a moon modifies the precession frequency of the planet's spin-axis," Saillenfest recently told Space in an email. "As this frequency increases or decreases, at some point it becomes equal to the precession frequency of the planet's orbital plane (or a harmonic of it). This creates a resonance between the two frequencies."

"Once locked into this resonance, the two frequencies remain equal, and the planet gets more and more tilted as the moon migrates farther and farther away," Saillenfest explained.

According to Saillenfest, the presence of a hypothetical moon and its gradual migration could have pulled Uranus toward a 90-degree tilt, although going beyond 90 degrees would have required an additional step. What the researchers propose in their 2022 study is that as Uranus approached the 90-degree tilt, this would have caused instability in the moon's orbit. The resulting motion would have been chaotic enough to drive the planet's tilt even further, bringing it to the roughly 98-degree tilt observed today.

"During this phase of instability, the planet's obliquity evolves chaotically and it can go beyond 90 degrees up to the observed state of Uranus," Saillenfest told Space. Although the final act in this planetary drama would have been the hypothetical moon's collision into Uranus, Saillenfest says he doesn't think this cataclysmic event is likely to have contributed significantly to the tilting process.

"The satellite is too small to noticeably alter Uranus's spin axis through the collision in itself," Saillenfest said, although noting that the eventual collision of this suspected "lost" moon into the planet is nonetheless a requirement for the team's scenario to work.

"This is because today Uranus has no moon with the mass range needed for this mechanism to work," Saillenfest adds, emphasizing that the planet's existing moons are too small to account for the effects he and his colleagues have modeled.

The mystery continues

Ultimately, the team found that in simulations where the unstable moon exhibits forces against Uranus over time and eventually crashes into it, the planet becomes tilted at about 98 degrees — the same tilt observed today, which Saillenfest calls "quite interesting."

"In order for Uranus to be tilted all the way to beyond 90 degrees, the previous moon of Uranus must have migrated across quite a long range," Saillenfest adds. "This means that internal processes inside Uranus must be able to dissipate a lot of energy through heat."

Saillenfest and his colleagues suggest there are two primary ways their ancient-moon hypothesis can be tested. First, if observations of Uranus's moons revealed them to be moving outward by as much as several centimeters each year, this would provide evidence of such energy dissipation occurring within Uranus — meaning that an ancient moon could potentially have also migrated far enough that it played a role in tipping the planet over. Rapid migration could also suggest that the present-day Uranian moons may even be debris produced during an earlier disruption of Uranus's satellite system.

"This would give support to the idea that [they] could have formed as a second generation of moons, potentially from the debris of the previous moon," Saillenfest says, adding that afterward "they would [have] migrated away from Uranus up to their current locations."

Second, the ages of the planet's current moons could also provide clues. Current estimates indicate that they could be almost as old as the solar system itself, although such values remain uncertain. However, if the present-day Uranian moons were proven to be younger, this could lend support to the idea that they may be debris left over from an earlier collision with a larger singular moon.

Additional observations will be required to confirm the suspected role of this hypothetical ancient impact, but Saillenfest and his colleagues remain optimistic about what future data could reveal.

"If these age estimates are revised in the future, in a way that the current moons of Uranus are estimated to be substantially younger than the solar system, then this would be another hint

The asteroid Bennu was shaped on the boundary between hot and cold in the dusty disk that formed the planets 4.5 billion years ago, meaning the samples brought back from this space rock by NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission give us our best look at the primordial material from which the planets assembled.

"Bennu may offer our best glimpse of the original mix of chemical elements from which the terrestrial planets were ultimately built," said Maria Schönbächler, a professor of isotope geochemistry at ETH Zurich in Switzerland, in a statement.

Bennu is a near-Earth asteroid that NASA visited with its OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer) mission between 2018 and 2021. Then, on Sept. 23, 2023, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft which parachuted down to Earth a sample of 0.26 pounds (120 grams) of regolith from Bennu.

The material in that sample was subsequently shared out among researchers around the globe, including half a gram being received by Schönbächler's lab. The findings of Schönbächler and her team had subsequently changed what we thought we knew about the birth of Bennu.

They analyzed isotopes — variations of elements with greater or lesser numbers of neutrons — of iron, titanium and chromium in the sample, finding iron and titanium in particular to be well mixed throughout. Bennu's composition is also remarkably similar to another asteroid, Ryugu, from which Japan's Hayabusa2 mission has also obtained a sample. A rare breed of meteorite, called CI chondrites, also share a similar isotopic composition with Bennu and Ryugu, suggesting a common birthplace.

And that's where things get really interesting. Both Bennu and Ryugu are pieces of larger bodies that at some point were smashed apart. Some scientists have suggested that those parent bodies probably formed far from the sun in the outer solar system, maybe even alongside comets, and that they formed later than the planets since processes that far out are relatively slow.

However, the isotopic analysis of the Bennu sample by Schönbächler's team begs to differ. The even mixing of the isotopes suggests that it was formed from fine dust grains rather than clumpy, coarser material. The presence of water molecules also implies it formed closer to the sun than had been thought.

Schönbächler's team posit the following scenario: that Bennu formed close to the snow line, which was the dividing line in the planet forming disk beyond which temperatures were too cold for water vapour, the water instead froze as ice. Inside the snow line the temperatures were hotter, causing ice to sublimate into a gas or melt into a liquid. This snow line between fire and ice existed roughly where Jupiter does today. Material from both sides of this line flowed together to assemble the parent objects of Bennu, Ryugu and CI chondrites, with ice acting like glue to bond the fine dust particles together.

And Jupiter had a role to play in this process too. The giant planet formed fairly soon after the sun (within a million years). As it grew and came to dominate its orbit, it acted as an obstacle to heavier, coarser clumps of dust while finer grained dust was able to flow around it and feed into the zone where Bennu formed. This explains why the isotopes are so well mixed rather than clumped, and also tells us that Bennu's parent probably formed not long after Jupiter did. The prevalence of water-bearing minerals in the Bennu sample also suggests that water-ice that sublimated into vapor just inside the snow line was also part of the material that was transported into the region where Bennu and its cousins were built.

"Bennu is a hybrid," said Schönbächler. "The material does not clearly match either the inner or the outer solar system." Instead, Bennu has characteristics derived from both regions.

What's more, the well-mixed fine-grained material more closely matches the composition of the pre-solar nebula and hence the sun itself. This means that Bennu is stuffed full of primordial material that was the foundation for the formation of the solar system, and can help us better understand the material out of which the planets, including our Earth, came to be.

What's intriguing is that both near-Earth asteroids, Bennu and Ryugu, which have been destinations for successful sample-return missions should both have very similar origins. Is that pure coincidence, or is it telling us something about where the population of near-Earth asteroids came from?

"We are now wondering whether other asteroids have the same isotopic signature as Bennu and Ryugu," said Schönbächler.

The only way that can be answered is by going and obtaining more samples. A Chinese mission called Tianwen-2 arrived this summer at the near-Earth asteroid Kamo'oalewa, to bring back a sample next year, while Japan's Martian Moons eXploration mission, set to launch this August, plans to bring back a sample from Phobos in 2031. While designated a moon of Mars, Phobos is thought to possibly be a captured asteroid. If so, its isotopic composition might have more in common with Bennu than with Mars.

The latest findings from Bennu were published on Sept. 23 in the journal Science Advances.

Throughout the history of the planets, the outer solar system has proven to be a dangerous place with many collisions smashing small bodies apart — but new simulations have shown that violent smashes do not necessarily prevent the formation of potentially habitable sub-surface oceans. This is true for large, icy moons, at least.

"These simulations were pretty much the biggest collisions we could come up with," said the University of Maryland’s Marc Neveu, who led the research, in a statement. "If those don't make a difference, it's unlikely smaller ones would either."

The planets of the outer solar system are replete with frozen moons that could potentially harbor oceans of liquid water deep beneath their surface. However, we know those moons have been peppered with impacts over the course of their 4.5-billion-year history, with some collisions large enough to smash the moons apart entirely. We can see this in Saturn's moon Iapetus, which appears to be the relic of a moon that has been smashed apart. In some cases, the damaged moon can reform through its own gravity pulling its parts and pieces back together again. For instance, Uranus' moon Miranda has a patchwork quality to its surface, giving the impression of it having been broken apart and then reformed.

Neveu's team, which also includes Raluca Rufu, Alyssa Rhoden and Kevin Walsh from the South-west Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado and Yuval Steinberg from Israel's Weizmann Institute, have now conducted detailed simulations in their quest to learn whether such titanic collisions affect the likelihood of an icy moon supporting an interior ocean.

They found that if an icy moon is large enough, not even the largest collisions can prevent it from having a subsurface ocean.

"What we found was that those big collisions don't really matter as far as oceans are concerned," said Neveu. "If there was an ocean before, there's likely to be an ocean after and vice versa."

Neveu and his colleagues combined two different types of simulation, both revolving around moons of two different sizes, 620 miles (1,000 kilometers) and 1,240 miles (2,000 kilometers) wide. One type of simulation focused on what happens to the moons when a giant impact breaks one apart, describing how it would shatter, melt and then reform through the mutual gravity of itself and its partner. The second type of simulation modeled the interior of each size of moon over 4.5 billion years, showing how heat leaks out from their core to keep a layer of liquid warm.

The simulations showed that moons smaller than 620 miles across were unlikely to retain an ocean after a cataclysmic impact. A small moon born with an ocean can retain enough heat for an ocean because it has not fully differentiated — or, in other words, the dense material hasn't all sunk into the core and the moon's outer layers are still an insulating jumble of ice and rock. After an impact disrupts the moon, however, the rock is able to sink down into the core, and the outer layer no longer insulates as well as it did, so heat leaks out into space and the ice remains frozen and does not form an ocean.

For larger moons, however, the ocean can actually deepen after the moon coalesces back together again following an impact.

"In larger moons, the energy of the crash converts into extra heat that can actually thicken up an existing ocean for a couple of billion years," said Neveu.

And in both cases, if the moon did not have an ocean to begin with, the simulations showed that a collision could not create one.

Casting his eye around the solar system, Saturn’s moon Rhea catches Neveu's attention as potentially having reformed following an impact. The second largest moon of Saturn, Rhea is 949 miles (1,528 kilometers) across and its craters appear softened as though they have melted. Neveu likens it to how a snowman will appear deformed once the sun's heat begins to melt it.

"Rhea's craters look smoothed out like that, but it wasn't the sun," he said. "The heat came from below. A long-ago collision that boosted an interior ocean could help explain why the moon appears that way."

Neveu's impact simulations are not the entire story. Tidal heating from a giant planet can keep an ocean liquid even in small moons, as we see in the case of Saturn's 310-mile-wide (500-kilometer-wide) moon Enceladus, and so small moons that have been disrupted through a collision will not necessarily freeze solid if they are close enough to their parent planet to experience strong gravitational tidal forces that keep their interiors warm.

Ultimately, Neveu hopes that simulations will become so detailed that we'll be able to replay the evolution of icy moons in planetary systems such as our own.

"Down the line, I would love to press play on a moon system and watch the moons move, how they smash into each other and how their interiors change as a result," he said. While Jupiter's Galilean moons, being almost planet-sized, are relatively impervious to impacts, "Maybe we can reconstruct what happened around Saturn, Uranus and Neptune."

The results were published on 20 August in Nature Astronomy.

Using the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have discovered that just 500 million years after the Big Bang, galaxies were already pumping heavy elements into their surroundings. That means the early universe wasn't as pure and unspoiled as previously believed, potentially impacting our theories of cosmic evolution.

Soon after the universe began, it was filled with the lightest element, hydrogen, and a little helium. As such, the first stars formed from these elements — but as these stars aged, they forged heavier elements, which astronomers collectively call "metals." These metals were dispersed when these first, or POP III, stars exploded at the end of their lives. This meant the next generations of stars, POP II and POP I, stars were progressively more metal-enriched.

This we all knew, but new James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) research suggests the process occurred earlier than previously thought. What this means is the gas surrounding galaxies was richer in metals like oxygen and carbon when the universe was just 3% of its current age.

"If you start out with pure vanilla ice cream but start mixing in sprinkles soon after, it won't be long until you can no longer find any pristine, plain, vanilla ice cream," team leader Yongda Zhu of the University of Arizona said in a statement. "We observed that heavy elements escaped from galaxies very, very early in cosmic time.

"Not only were the galaxies producing these elements, but they were also dispersing them, possibly seeding other galaxies."

Back to the beginning

To better understand the composition of the early cosmos, Zhu and colleagues used the JWST data to observe three galaxies that are seen as they were around 13.3 billion years ago. This corresponds with an important point in the evolution of the universe called the Epoch of Reionization.

At this time, the light from the first stars was stripping electrons from the hydrogen gas between them, a process called ionization. This allowed light to travel more easily through the cosmos, ending the so-called cosmic dark ages.

"We used the galaxies themselves as background light sources," said Zhu. "As light from the galaxies traveled toward Earth, it passed through surrounding gas, and we were able to look at the light's absorption patterns to detect specific elements."

That's possible because elements absorb and emit light at characteristic wavelengths, meaning when starlight passes through interstellar clouds, the elements within those clouds leave distinct fingerprints in that light.

The observations revealed gas containing oxygen, carbon, silicon and other metals flowing from these early galaxies into intergalactic space.

The chemical fingerprints of this gas more closely resembled those of modern galaxies than was expected. That means early galaxies were already pumping metals into the cosmos.

"Think of these elements, which originated from the galaxies' stars, as food dye dropped into a cup of water," said Zhu. "The color begins to spread through the water, and, in a similar fashion, these heavy elements from early galaxies began to escape into space and 'enrich' their surroundings."

The discovery could explain why astronomers have thus far struggled to find POP III stars. They have been looking for signs of starlight illuminating pristine hydrogen gas, but this gas was gone much earlier than they knew.

The team's research was published on Thursday (Sept. 24) in the journal Nature Astronomy.

Life on Earth has never existed without the shelter of the planet's magnetic field, and according to new research, that constant presence may be quietly woven into the basic biology of living organisms, with possible implications for aging and future treatments for diseases like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.

Generated deep within Earth's core for at least 3.7 billion years and extending far out into space, this invisible cocoon is popularly credited with helping preserve Earth's habitability, shielding the planet from harsh solar winds and helping retain the water that makes life possible. Scientists have also long known that migratory birds and animals such as sea turtles can sense this field and use it to navigate. However, its more fundamental influence on biology has remained poorly understood, researchers say.

"We live our entire lives within the Earth's magnetic field," Lisa Chakrabarti, a professor at University of Nottingham's School of Veterinary Medicine and Science, said in a statement. "It passes through our bodies, our cells and every living organism on the planet, yet we know surprisingly little about whether and how this invisible force affects the way our cells work."

To get some answers, the research team, co-led by Chakrabarti, tried switching it off. Using a special magnetic shielding system, the researchers reduced the ambient field to near zero and compared two groups of fruit flies, healthy flies and flies with a defect in Pink1, a gene associated with inherited early onset Parkinson's disease in humans. Starting from the moment each fly reached adulthood, the researchers tracked both groups for 70 days, scoring them alive or dead each day, the team reports in a new paper.

The researchers found shielding the diseased Pink1 flies from Earth's magnetic field increased their lifespan by around 20%. However, the environment also reduced their physical performance, which the team measured by placing the flies at the bottom of a small vial and timing how well they climbed. Meanwhile, the group of healthy flies showed the opposite pattern, with shorter lifespans but improved physical performance under the same conditions, according to the study.

"I was really confused at first," study co-lead Jacob Reed, a Ph.D. student in bioscience at the University of Nottingham, told the independent news website 404 Media. "I was thinking: 'Why are these Parkinson's flies living longer than some of the wild-type flies?' I had to double-check all of my data."

The researchers link the source of these effects lies in the mitochondria, the structures inside cells that generate energy, specifically to part of the mitochondria's energy-producing machinery known as Complex II.

Shielded healthy flies showed a significant rise in Complex II activity alongside elevated levels of a reactive molecule called superoxide, which is a byproduct of energy production that in high amounts can damage cells over time and a likely explanation for their shortened lifespan. In the Pink1 mutant flies, that same rise in Complex II activity appeared to compensate for their underlying genetic deficit, producing a "beneficial, life-extending response" effect instead, the study notes.

The findings raise the possibility that such non-invasive hypomagnetic conditions could eventually offer a therapeutic benefit for diseases like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, the study notes.

"Understanding how cells sense and respond to magnetic fields could ultimately reveal new ways of manipulating mitochondrial function in aging and disease," Chakrabarti said in the statement.

The findings also build on a scattered but suggestive body of prior research. For instance, earlier human studies have linked reduced magnetic field exposure to slightly worse performance on problem-solving tasks and small changes in pupil size. Meanwhile, studies in rats examining magnetic fields and bone density have produced inconsistent results, with some finding weaker bones and others finding no effect at all.

Taken together, the research is messy and sometimes contradictory, but one pattern keeps emerging, the study notes, that magnetic fields "can affect fundamental cellular processes" and that responses differ "depending on the cell type."

The new work may also carry implications beyond Earth, the researchers say. As space agencies look toward longer missions to the moon and Mars, astronauts will spend extended stretches beyond the reach of Earth's magnetic field. Scientists already know that this exposes them to harmful cosmic radiation, but how the absence of the field itself, separate from radiation, might affect human physiology is not very well understood.

"The link with interplanetary space travel is absolutely key," Chakrabarti told 404 Media. "Unless we know what those parameters are to measure, we're going to be sending astronauts up there that are potentially going to really suffer over the short, or even or the longer, term."

This research is described in a paper published Sept. 23 in the journal Aging.

Hurricane Polo continues to swirl in new satellite observations as heavy rains start to hit.

What is it?

Already being labeled "one of the strongest storms ever," Hurricane Polo is a Category 5 maelstrom that has already started with heavy rains offshore in Mexico and is expected to hit land this weekend.

In new observations by NOAA's GOES-18 satellite captured on Tuesday (Sept. 22), we can see the storm in progress, swirling violently off the coast of Mexico as strikes of lightning light up the view.

"#HurricanePolo continues to swirl in the Eastern Pacific Ocean off the coast of Mexico this #TimeLapseTuesday. The Geostationary Lightning Mapper instrument on board @NOAA’s #GOESWest (#GOES18) helps show the lightning flashing in the cyclone’s eye in this imagery captured over a two-hour period earlier today," NOAA shared over social media.

As we watch the storm progress off of the coast, satellite imagery like this can help experts better understand how the storm is operating and what might be expected next.

Why is it incredible?

Hurricane Polo is predicted to be extremely powerful and therefore likely incredibly damaging.

"This is one of the strongest storms ever in the (Pacific) Basin," Kristen L. Corbosiero, a professor at the University at Albany's Department of Atmospheric & Environmental Sciences, told NPR.

Satellite views like this from GOES-18 are incredibly important for our understanding of storms like Hurricane Polo. Satellite imagery can help experts categorize hurricanes and give us up-to-date information on where storms are going, how quickly they're moving and what we might expect if and when they hit land.

This kind of information could be critical for coastal communities to be prepared for storms that could carry the risk of destroying homes and businesses, or even cause injuries or deaths.

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has now circled Earth 200,000 times, marking another extraordinary milestone for an observatory that was designed to operate for just 15 years.

The Hubble Telescope completed its 200,000th orbit on Sept. 19, more than 36 years after it launched aboard the space shuttle Discovery in April 1990. During that time, the telescope has traveled more than 5 billion miles (8 billion kilometers) around Earth and made more than 1.7 million observations of the universe.

This most recent milestone came while Hubble was working on a cosmic mystery tied to one of its most important scientific legacies: measuring the expansion of the universe, according to a statement from NASA.

Hubble is repeatedly observing the galaxy cluster MACS J0417 in an effort to catch the reappearance of a distant stellar explosion, or supernova, called Athena. The enormous cluster acts as a gravitational lens, bending and magnifying light from objects behind it. Because that light can travel along different paths around the cluster, the same supernova can appear multiple times in Hubble's view, potentially separated by months or even years. Tracking those appearances could help astronomers map the cluster's mass and refine measurements of the universe's expansion rate.

The recent observations of MACS J0417 are just the latest chapter in Hubble's remarkable journey. Travelling roughly 300 miles (483 kilometers) above Earth's surface at about 17,000 mph (27,000 kph), Hubble circles the planet roughly 15 times per day, which is about one lap every 95 minutes.

Its low-Earth orbit is also what gives Hubble its remarkable view of the cosmos. By operating above most of Earth's atmosphere, the telescope avoids the atmospheric distortion that blurs observations from the ground and can observe wavelengths of ultraviolet, visible and near-infrared light that are difficult or impossible to study from Earth.

The 200,000-orbit milestone follows a string of achievements that demonstrate just how long Hubble has remained scientifically productive. In 2008, it completed its 100,000th orbit and in 2011, it made its millionth science observation. More recently, Hubble adapted to operating with just one working gyroscope in 2024, captured an enormous 2.5-billion-pixel mosaic of the Andromeda Galaxy in 2025 and celebrated 35 years in orbit.

Yet Hubble is no longer a telescope that can simply be repaired whenever something breaks. Its final astronaut servicing mission took place in 2009, and no additional servicing missions are currently planned. NASA says the observatory is expected to remain scientifically productive into the next decade, while atmospheric drag slowly lowers its orbit. Hubble is not expected to re-enter Earth's atmosphere until the mid-2030s at the earliest, with NASA planning for a future controlled disposal of the aging observatory.

For now, Hubble is still circling Earth, continuing to turn those seemingly ordinary trips around our planet into extraordinary views of the universe.

Astronomers have discovered the first microblazar in the Milky Way, a black hole-powered particle accelerator that is blasting near-light-speed plasma jets at Earth.

The system known as IRAS 18293−0941 is located around 12,000 light-years away and consists of a black hole feeding on material stripped from a massive companion star, which it orbits every 11 Earth days. Some of this material escapes the black hole after being channeled to its poles, from where it is blasted out as twin jets travelling at near light-speed. The difference between a blazar and a microblazar is that the former consists of a supermassive black hole with a mass millions or billions of times that of the sun, feeding on surrounding matter and firing jets directly at Earth. In the latter, and thus in IRAS 18293−0941, the feeding object is a much smaller stellar-mass black hole with a mass of up to a few hundred times that of our star.

If you think such a system should be highly conspicuous, you would be right. Yet, despite microquasars having been theorized to exist within our galaxy for around three decades, this one has avoided detection because it is blocked by a thick wall of interstellar gas and dust.

"Everything about IRAS 18293−0941 was hiding in plain sight," said Josep Martí of the University of Jaén, Spain. "It sits behind so much dust that it is essentially invisible in ordinary optical images. It was catalogued decades ago and then more or less forgotten."

A flicker of a discovery

Sometimes in science, big discoveries begin with just a tiny hint. That is definitely the case with the unveiling of IRAS 18293−0941.

Astronomers first got a hint of its existence when they noticed the light of the system's star was flickering. This revealed the 11.4-day orbit of a companion black hole, which scientists realized they were observing almost face-on.

Further observations made in radio waves then revealed the existence of a one-sided jet, with the other jet not visible because it isn't pointed almost directly toward us, but directly away from Earth.

High-resolution observations made using the network of radio telescopes called the European VLBI Network (EVN) confirmed the orientation of the jet and that it originated from the system IRAS 18293−0941 and not from a distant galaxy that happens to lie in the same direction as the star the team was studying.

"This was the moment the result became solid," explained Benito Marcote from the Joint Institute for VLBI in the Netherlands. "The resolution achieved by the EVN position together with the known position of the star from the Gaia satellite confirmed it: the jet belongs to the stellar system."

Though the jet travelling away from us isn't observable directly, astronomers did manage to detect its effects using the MeerKAT radio observatory in South Africa. This revealed a 100 light-year-wide bubble where the jet strikes interstellar gas and dust. At one edge of that bubble is a "hotspot" where the collision between the jet and the material is accelerating particles, warming dust, and causing the hydrogen gas to glow.

This point is also the source of high-energy gamma-rays, each photon of which carries ten times the energy of particles accelerated by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), Earth's largest and most powerful particle accelerator.

The jet carries 500,000 times the energy radiated by the sun and explains the mystery of how feeding black holes become such powerful cosmic particle accelerators and generate such high-energy gamma-ray photons.

The elegance is that the accelerator engine and the target are two different objects, tens of parsecs apart," team member Pedro Luque-Escamilla of the University of Jaén said. "The jet does the accelerating. The cloud does the shining."

The discovery of a microblazar much closer to us than any fully-fledged blazar, found in the heart of distant active galaxies, offers a unique opportunity to study how such systems evolve.

Additionally, this system presents the chance to examine how jets pour energy from feeding black holes to their surrounding galaxies.

The team's research is available as a preprint on the repository site arXiv and has been accepted for publication in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Black holes come in a vast array of sizes. There are the stellar-mass black holes with a few times the mass of the sun — and then there are the supermassive black holes with billions of times the mass of our star that dominate the hearts of all large galaxies. However, new research suggests the "burps" that black holes emit when feeding on unfortunate stars seem to be remarkably similar — no matter their size.

For many years, scientists have looked at black holes and theorized that despite these objects' immense differences in size and mass, the underlying physics should be the same. That has been incredibly difficult to test, however. This is because supermassive black holes at the heart of galaxies evolve over thousands, or sometimes even millions, of years.

A way around this hurdle, though, is to study tidal disruption events, or TDEs. During these destructive events, the feeding process is compressed into a timescale of a few years, making it observable by human beings during our brief lives.

TDEs occur when a star's orbit brings it too close to a black hole's immense gravitational influence. That proximity causes immense tidal forces within the star. These forces essentially squash the star horizontally while also stretching it vertically, a process called spaghettification.

The plasma pasta then wraps around the black hole like spaghetti around a fork, but just like eating good pasta can be a messy affair, black holes spill a massive amount of stellar food. This material is then channeled to the poles of black holes, from where it is blasted out as near-light-speed jets that can extend for thousands of light-years. This is sometimes referred to as a "burp." Yet the mechanism that powers these jets remains somewhat mysterious, especially when there is a delay between black holes snacking and launching jets.

"Why do some supermassive black holes blast out radio jets right after shredding a star, while others just sit there looking completely dormant, only to suddenly fire up their jets months or even years later?" research author Andrew Mummery of the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) School of Natural Sciences said in a statement. "We really wanted to figure out this massive puzzle."

After all, black hole jets are responsible for shaping entire galaxies.

Mummery and study co-author Adelle J. Goodwin were in a bar in Madrid, Spain, during a conference when they realized that the rules that apply to stellar-mass black hole jets also must apply to supermassive black hole jets.

To test this idea, the duo turned to telescope data across a wide range of electromagnetic radiation to study a sample of 20 TDEs. Of these, they found half could be studied to reliably model the feeding and outflow-blasting behavior of black holes.

What Mummery and Goodwin found was that jet-launching occurs in two distinct phases: the first, perhaps unsurprisingly, occurs when the supermassive black hole is feeding at its most extreme rate. The second phase occurs much later, potentially years after the star has been ripped apart. That is when the supermassive black hole's feeding has dropped to 2% of what is known as the Eddington limit.

The Eddington limit occurs just before radiation from an accreting source becomes so intense that the pressure it generates pushes away further matter that could be consumed. The 2% threshold is significant because that is the point at which stellar-mass black holes launch their own jets. That means no matter the scale of the black hole, a few times the mass of the sun or a billion, jet formation is the same across black holes.

This is an exciting prospect for astronomers, because it means that when looking at future TDEs, they will be able to roughly predict when jets will be launched.

"We hope that our work will pave the way for even more profound discoveries about our universe," Mummery said.

The team's research was published on Thursday (Sept. 17) in the journal Nature Astronomy

A normally arid corner of Western Australia has burst into life, in a transformation so dramatic it can be seen from space.

The spectacular wildflower display has rapidly spread across the rusty red landscape of Western Australia's Murchison region following several wetter-than-usual months, according to the NASA Earth Observatory.

Local experts think this year's bloom could be the best the area has experienced in nearly 20 years.

What is it?

The image was captured by the Operational Land Imager (OLI) aboard the Landsat 8 spacecraft, a joint mission between NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey.

The Murchison region is usually dominated by arid shrubland, including grasses, saltbush and slow-growing evergreen mulga trees. But dormant wildflower seeds can spring into action when conditions are just right, carpeting the landscape with delightful blooms.

That's exactly what happened this year. Above-average rainfall in June and August, along with several cold fronts sweeping across the region, woke the seeds from a lengthy slumber to transform the landscape.

Landsat 8 captured this view on Aug. 30, 2026. A comparison image taken on Aug. 19, 2025 shows just how much greener the region is this year.

Why is it amazing?

Besides potentially being the area's best wildflower display in almost two decades and some threatened plant species having also appeared among this year's blooms, the flowers have sprung up in a place normally better known for looking much farther into the cosmos.

Wildflowers carpeted parts of Inyarrimanha Ilgari Bundara, the CSIRO Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory, where powerful arrays of radio antennas meticulously study objects in the southern sky.

So while the observatory's telescopes usually have their sights set on the universe, this year there's quite a show happening beneath them too.

Using the X-ray spacecraft XRISM (X-ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission), astronomers have observed stellar winds from a hypergiant star feeding an extreme stellar remnant known as a neutron star, left over after a massive star dies.

Neutron stars are considered so extreme because the process that creates them crams between one and two times the mass of the sun down into a sphere with a width of around 12 miles (20 kilometers). This means that the matter that comprises neutron stars is so dense that if a teaspoon of it were brought to Earth, it would weigh as much as 10 million tons, or about the same as 85,000 adult blue whales. In addition to this some young neutron stars, known as pulsars, spin as rapidly as 700 times per second while also blasting twin beams of radiation that sweep across the cosmos like beams of light from a cosmic lighthouse.

Using XRISM and focusing on the system BP Crucis, located about 13,000 light-years away, astronomers investigated what happens when stellar winds from a blue hypergiant star dump ionized gas or plasma on the surface of a pulsar called GX 301-2. The star in question is Wray 977, which has around 40 times the sun's mass and 60 times its size. This means Wray 977 is so hot that it constantly emits a stream of plasma.

GX 301-2 rotates once every 11 minutes and takes around 42 Earth days to orbit its blue hypergiant stellar companion. The team theorizes that the immense gravity of the neutron star creates a dense stream of plasma that it passes through during its orbit, causing flares of X-rays. These flares are more extreme when the neutron star is closest to its stellar donor and thus passing through a denser stream of plasma.

"We've never before seen clear indications of wind plasma falling onto a compact object," team leader Roi Rahin of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center said.

XRISM honed in on BP Crucis using its Resolve instrument in February 2025 for around 16 hours, catching the tail end of one of these extreme flaring events.

From these observations, the team discovered the speed and direction of the plasma stream bombarding GX 301-2. They found the plasma stream is travelling at 335,000 miles per hour (540,000 kilometers per hour), around 200 times faster than the top speed of a Lockheed Martin F-16 jet fighter here on Earth.

"It was clear that these observations were groundbreaking, but at the same time this meant the analysis had to be especially detailed," Nazma Islam, a researcher at the Manipal Center for Natural Sciences, India, said in a statement. "We could see how the dense stream of plasma acts very close to the neutron star."

What's going on around this extreme dead star?

The team theorizes that as the neutron star enters the stellar stream, it sweeps plasma toward itself, creating a thick disk of matter around the stellar remnant. The gas is fed from the disk to the neutron star, causing it to heat up and emit X-rays.

The disk fragments as the neutron star passes further into the densest region of the river of plasma. That is because the matter at this point no longer has enough angular momentum to maintain the disk.

With the disk gone, though it briefly reappears, albeit spinning in the opposite direction, the plasma can directly hit the neutron star's surface, the process that creates the most intense X-ray flaring. The neutron star moves completely through the stream over a period of four Earth days.

"The BP Crucis system is an ideal laboratory for studying wind-fed pulsar accretion, and XRISM's sensitive, high-resolution Resolve spectrometer is an ideal instrument for advancing our understanding of the processes involved," said Brian Williams, the mission's project scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

The team's research was published on Friday (Sept. 18) in the journal Science Advances.

Mars may have been a much wetter and more geologically active world than it is today, with water repeatedly coursing through its rocks in different forms, a new study suggests.

The discovery comes from a region along the edge of Mars' Jezero Crater known as the Margin Unit. NASA's Perseverance rover has been exploring the area since 2023, and its observations reveal evidence of at least three distinct episodes of water interacting with Martian rocks — including one involving hot groundwater circulating beneath the ancient surface, according to a statement from the space agency.

The Margin Unit region hugs the inner edge of the crater and was identified through observations from orbit. Scientists initially expected Perseverance to encounter sedimentary rocks deposited along the shoreline of the ancient lake that once filled Jezero.

Instead, the rover found igneous rocks that originally formed from molten material deep underground or through volcanic activity. That unexpected geology preserved an intricate record of water activity.

"Before we arrived at the Margin Unit, the main hypothesis — derived from orbital observations — was that the carbonate seen from orbit formed from interaction with the lake that existed in Jezero Crater," Candice Bedford, lead author of the study and a research scientist at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, said in the statement. "But now we know that this location became a sort of crossroads for aqueous systems. The Margin Unit findings are important because Jezero Crater sits inside one of the largest exposures of carbonate on Mars, so what we learn here reaches well beyond this crater."

Using Perseverance's SuperCam instrument, researchers analyzed more than 185 bedrock targets across the Margin Unit. They found evidence that water altered the rocks during multiple episodes.

During the first episode, carbon-dioxide-rich groundwater reacted with olivine, a mineral that formed as magma slowly cooled. The reaction produced carbonate minerals within fractures in the rock.

A later episode appears to have involved Jezero's ancient lake. Some of the rocks contain silica, which can form when olivine reacts with water and is particularly abundant in rocks that were once below the lake's waterline.

Then came a third, hotter episode. Mineral veins containing calcium sulfate and fluorite formed in the eastern Margin Unit, suggesting that hot water once circulated through the volcanic rocks.

On Earth, hydrothermal systems can create environments capable of supporting microbial life, making these ancient Martian water systems particularly interesting to scientists investigating the Red Planet's past habitability.

While the researchers are able to reconstruct the sequence of these episodes, they cannot yet determine exactly when each occurred. However, the order of events suggests the Margin Unit was more than simply an ancient lakeshore. It was a place where groundwater, surface water and heated fluids interacted with Martian rocks, potentially preserving a complex record of how Mars' environment evolved over time — one that the carbonate minerals in these rocks could help scientists use to determine when and where Mars may once have provided conditions suitable for life.

"If there is one thing I have learned after 10 years working with Mars rovers, it is that Mars constantly throws surprises at you," Bedford said in the statement. "It is very rare that things are as we expect them to be from orbital data. I hope this work helps reshape how scientists view the history of water in Jezero Crater and across Mars. Ultimately, I hope it helps planetary scientists reconstruct the changing climate and habitability of early Mars."

Their findings were published September 21 in the journal Communications Earth & Environment.

It may not be a slime creature from outer space, but you can finally find "Weird Al" Yankovic's name flying beyond our planet.

The American musician and comedian's name was recently approved for an asteroid, or space rock, that zooms around our solar system about once every four years.

The asteroid is formally known as (14331) Alyankovic, or 1981 EC26. 1981 refers to the year of the asteroid's discovery, and Yankovic's name for it was approved by the International Astronomical Union (IAU), the official body that arbitrates the monikers of things in the universe.

Planetary scientist Allison McGraw, an alumna of the University of Arizona who is now with the Lunar and Planetary Science Institute, backed the nomination with several other planetary science researchers, according to the Tucson Star. On Sunday (Sept. 20), McGraw presented Yankovic backstage with a plaque commemorating the naming of the asteroid, ahead of Yankovic's performance at the Tucson Arena.

"I've been working on not being starstruck, the same way I am every time I meet astronauts," McGraw said in the Tucson Star's report, ahead of the meeting. "I'm gonna do my best not to be starstruck, or I guess 'rock struck', but I have the feeling that he's going to be really cool."

Alyankovic (the asteroid) was discovered in 1981 and resides in the main belt of asteroids found between Mars and Jupiter. It is visible from Earth, but only in a good telescope as its absolute magnitude is 16; for comparison, the faintest stars visible to the naked eye are roughly magnitude 5 or 6, under dark-sky conditions.

Alyankovic joins several other musical-themed celebrity monikers on asteroids, such as 17059 Elvis, 17473 Freddiemercury, 249516 Aretha (after Aretha Franklin), 10731 Dollyparton, and all members of the Beatles (both individually, and as a group for 8749 Beatles.)

Meanwhile, Al Yankovic (the singer) has been belting out funny space-related tunes for decades, including the rap-like "Sir Isaac Newton vs. Bill Nye", an Obi-Wan Kenobi-centered retelling of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace called "The Saga Begins," and the self-explanatory and classic "Attack of the Radioactive Hamsters from a Planet Near Mars."

While living persons can have their names attached to asteroids and other "small bodies" like comets, the process can take years, and any name must meet a multi-page set of requirements as well as the muster of the IAU's working group that names small bodies.

"Names have traditionally been assigned to many small bodies and have drawn from mythological characters, planetary scientists, astronomers, and accomplished scientists, engineers, and technicians in other fields. People who have made contributions to the arts, sports, medicine, and other aspects of society are also recognized. Discoverers have also used names of personal significance to them," the IAU states.

Some of the other institutions or things named in the Sept. 9 IAU notice include:

• (15708) Metsoc = 1988 RB12. It is named for the Meteoritical Society, which has an annual conference and hosts the Meteoritics and Planetary Science journal, in large part to showcase countries that are not as widely represented.
• (20176) Aliciagoyena = 1996 XK29. This is named after Alicia Goyena, an educator and history teacher in Uruguay who was director of the women's section of the Instituto Batlle y Ordóñez in Montevideo.
• (31550) Beckmaier = 1999 DT7. Beck Maier is a telescope operator at the Lowell Observatory's Lowell Discovery Telescope in Arizona.
• (50271) Albertoanunziato = 2000 CW. Alberto Anunziato is an Argentinian amateur astronomer whose work includes founding the Argentine Lunar Society, being secretary of the Ibero-American Astronomy League, and teaching at the Autonomous University of Entre Ríos.
• (74025) Marquette = 1998 HA6. Jean-Baptiste Marquette is a retired French astrophysicist known for mapping the chemistry of interstellar clouds.

New observations with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have revealed what it's really like nearby Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy.

What is it?

In this image captured in mid-infrared with JWST, researchers have captured an incredible, detailed look at the star IRS 3 nearby Sag A*. The star, which is only 0.55 light-years from Sag A*, is nearing the end of its life and as such, it is puffing out and getting cooler and shedding gas out into space. (For comparison, Earth is about 26,000 light-years away from the black hole Sag A*).

JWST looked at the star with its Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI). With this infrared data, researchers were able to spot oxygen-rich dust and water in the envelope of gas and dust surrounding the star. This is the first time that water has been detected there.

Why is it incredible?

These observations show that the star IRS 3 is still able to hold onto oxygen-rich dust and water in its envelope, despite being near a supermassive black hole and its intense gravity.

"Galactic centres are among the most extreme environments, so understanding whether stars can continue enriching their surroundings there is an important question," lead author Florian Peißker of the University of Cologne in Germany, said in a statement. "With Webb, we can directly observe how stars behave under these conditions and see that dust production remains remarkably resilient."

With these observations, researchers can continue to explore the strange environments around supermassive black holes and how they might (surprisingly) affect nearby stars like IRS 3.

The finding of water in these observations was especially surprising and could yield interesting future exploration.

"The detection of water is especially exciting because it shows that molecular material can survive in an environment dominated by intense radiation," co-author Garcia Marin of the European Space Agency, who also serves as Principle Investigator of ESA's Mid-Infrared Characterisation of Nearby Iconic galaxy Centres (MICONIC) program, said in the same statement. "This tells us that even close to a supermassive black hole, stars can continue contributing material back into their surroundings."

Scientists have found that a distant world has a real rebellious streak, outwardly defying its red dwarf host star.

The extrasolar planet, or exoplanet, which is designated GJ 3090 b and is located about 73 light-years away, has a highly misaligned orbit. In fact, it's rotating in the opposite direction to the rotation of its parent star.

This is something scientists could explain if GJ 3090 b had a massive companion, be it a gas giant planet, a brown dwarf, or another star. But it doesn't. No, this world, discovered in 2022, seems to be a singleton.

"To our great surprise, not only is the planet GJ 3090 b on a highly misaligned orbit, but it also orbits retrogradely, in the opposite direction to the rotation of its star," team member Yann Carteret, of the Université de Genève (UNIGE) Department of Astronomy, said in a statement.

Big Psi for rebel exoplanet

Planets form from disks of gas and dust that surround infant stars. This matter rotates in the same direction as the central young star, meaning planets that may emerge should also rotate in the same direction.

Likewise, the planets should also share a similar orbital plane to their parent star. The difference in orientation of a star's angular plane and each of its planets is called Psi, and it emerges as a result of perturbations during the planet formation phase. As an example, Earth's Psi is 7 degrees.

"Measuring the angle Psi provides clues about the formation and evolution of planetary systems. It is therefore natural for us to try to measure it for other planetary systems," Carteret said.

GJ 3090 b has a radius 2.2 times that of Earth and a mass 4.5 times that of our planet, making it a "sub-Neptune." Sub-Neptunes are one of the most common planets in the Milky Way. Yet, when the team studied the world with La Silla Observatory's NIRPS instrument, this exoplanet appeared to possess something far from common: a Psi of 136 degrees.

"It is the performance of NIRPS in the infrared that made it possible to achieve the precision needed to measure the angle between the planet's orbital plane and the star’s equatorial plane for such a small planet," Léna Parc of UNIGE said.

This planetary system is one of only five ever seen with a Psi greater than 70 degrees — but what is really different here is those other systems possess a massive object that clearly seems to have caused the extremely misaligned orbits.

"The absence of a massive companion to explain this unusual orbit will lead us to explore other hypotheses," Vincent Bourrier of UNIGE said, also proposing an explanation for this massive Psi. "In the case of GJ 3090, the star could have accreted a misaligned, retrograde secondary disc in which the planets in the system then formed."

The team's research was published on Monday (Sept. 21) in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

A planetary body's surface is inherently three-dimensional — and not just because of its peaks and valleys but because it must wrap around the whole world.

That's obvious but easy to forget, since Earth is large enough that we experience it as flat in our everyday lives. But it's a major challenge for cartographers looking to create two-dimensional world maps, like the familiar Mercator projection and the design recently endorsed by an overwhelming majority of the United Nations' General Assembly, called the "Equal Earth" projection. And the same difficulties apply beyond Earth, albeit with much lower stakes, at least for now: any map is a mix of accuracy and distortion.

"It's important to know that sometimes, as with statistics or anything else, you can tell a story with a map," Corey Fortezzo, a geologist and map coordinator for the Planetary Geologic Mapping Program operated jointly by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and NASA, told Space.com. "And it's not necessarily the true story."

That's because flattening a three-dimensional surface into a two-dimensional map is an inherently messy endeavor. "Every projection chooses what to preserve—in some, it's the area, some preserve shape, some preserve distance, some preserve the direction — but not all of them at once," Jue Wang, a cartographic data scientist at Washington University in St. Louis, told Space.com. "It's not [about] which projection is correct, it's [about] what are you trying to do with the map."

In the U.S., people tend to be most familiar with the Mercator projection, which dates to 1569, when a cartographer working in what is now Germany designed a map on which any straight represents a constant compass direction. "It's built for the purpose of navigation, so the Mercator projection preserves angles," Wang said. "Which is very useful and why sailors have used the Mercator projection for centuries."

But of course, most of the 8.2 billion people currently living on Earth aren't sailors, and today world maps are less about navigation and more about understanding the world we live in. That means many fewer people are getting lost at sea than are operating under the mistaken impression that Greenland is larger than South America — hence the movement backing the Equal Earth projection to take Mercator's place in common settings like classrooms.

That projection prioritizes preserving the relative area of countries and continents, but sacrifices the accuracy of angles of the Mercator projection. As a result, most north-south longitude lines become curved in the Equal Earth projection, while east-west latitude lines are spaced closer together near the poles, rather than farther away.

Beyond Earth

Mapping worlds beyond Earth is only a smidge younger than the Mercator projection: the oldest known map of the moon dates to 1609. In some ways, the activities are inherently different, since mapping Earth has relied on people's observations in place, whereas the foundation of extraterrestrial mapping is remote data gathered first with telescopes, then with spacecraft.

Often, that data has come in the form of images — themselves two-dimensional, warped representations of a three-dimensional surface. "You're stitching together this quilt of imagery and the problem is all the pieces are curved and you have to figure out where they fit together," Fortezzo said.

Another quirk of the process is that because neither Earth nor any other solar system object is perfectly spherical, projection systems can't seamlessly translate between worlds. And each world needs its own unique definition for 0 degrees longitude, an extraterrestrial translation of Greenwich's supremacy as backed by the British empire.

Mapmakers are still chipping away at these challenges, although the International Astronomical Union has operated a working group dedicated to cartographic coordinates since 1979. Right now, this work may induce yawns, but as long-term exploration efforts of the moon and other bodies become both more serious and more varied, the complexity of mapping these worlds may increase.

Consider the needs of NASA's Apollo program — where landing sites were clustered toward the equator on the moon's near side —compared to the current Artemis program, which intends to focus initiatives at the lunar south pole. While something like the Mercator or Equal Earth projections would both make sense for a map related to Apollo, neither excels at depicting the poles, as their treatment of Antarctica attests.

That, of course, is the starkest difference when map-making goes to space: no other world's surface comes with the complications of Earth's patchwork of continents and oceans, which can influence projection techniques. (Take the so-called "orange-peel" or Goode homolosine projection, a bizarre lobed depiction that keeps continents intact and accurately represents their relative sizes, but breaks up the oceans and polar regions.)

In contrast, except for volcanic Io and Titan's water-ice surface sculpted by organic liquids, an extraterrestrial mapper's material is straightforward. "We are able to just take a piece and that piece is going to have nothing but rock and ice," Fortezzo said.

"It makes it much easier," he said. "There's no feelings involved."

When we think about black holes, we tend to imagine dominant cosmic titans that consume everything around them. However, for many years scientists have mused over the existence of far more diminutive, but short-lived black holes. Using the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's most powerful particle accelerator, scientists have been on the hunt for quantum black holes that are smaller than atoms. This is a tricky proposition, as these black holes would have a lifetime as diminutive as their size.

The discovery of such objects could help solve some of the mysteries surrounding the structure of space and time, united as a four-dimensional entity called "spacetime."

It could also help researchers develop a theory of quantum gravity that unites the thus far incompatible theories of general relativity, our best description of gravity, and quantum physics, the framework that describes the universe on scales smaller than atoms.

"Had we found evidence, we could have begun to directly study quantum gravity," Tamas Vami, a researcher at the LHC experiment Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS), said in a statement. "It's a step toward unifying all of the known fundamental forces, which has been a goal of physicists for more than a century."

Unfortunately, this search has thus far been fruitless, but that doesn't mean that it has been useless. Null results in this case redefine the search parameters for these tiny black holes and help perfect methods that can be used to hunt for new particles beyond the Standard Model of particle physics.

"It's not a dead-end," Incandela Lab researcher Danyi Zhang explained. "The result is an exclusion limit, which is a real, publishable statement: 'If this thing existed with these properties, we'd have seen it. We didn't, so we can rule it out here.'

"That's genuine knowledge about how the universe works."

The hunt for a new paradigm

The answers to the universe's most tantalizing mysteries are theorized to lie in physics beyond the Standard Model. New physics may only manifest at high-energy levels, the sort of energies that the LHC generates by slamming together protons at near light speed.

Thus far, this new physics has failed to manifest at the LHC, but this only makes scientists more keen to hunt for what could represent a paradigm shift on a scale comparable to the development of Einstein's theory of general relativity.

Scientists also think that quantum black holes could emerge from the trillions of proton collisions occurring in the LHC. That has often been misinterpreted as the potential for the LHC to create a potential Armageddon-inducing stable black hole, but the truth is that if the world's most powerful particle accelerator did create a black hole, it would evaporate instantly, certainly too rapidly to gobble up Earth.

A classic astrophysical black hole forms when a massive star collapses under the influence of its own gravity, causing its core to crunch down to an infinitesimally small point. To make a quantum black hole, on the other hand, energy would have to be compressed to a tiny volume.

One theory suggests that this compression could occur in extra "hidden" dimensions of the type required by string theory and other extensions to standard physics that offer a grand unified theory. These hidden dimensions could also explain why gravity is the weakest of the universe's four fundamental forces, something that has puzzled scientists for decades. If this proposal is correct, gravity would "leak" into these extra dimensions in which it becomes substantially stronger.

The extremely high energy generated at the LHC corresponds to distances so small that they are to an atom what an atom is to our bodies. The perfect scale to hunt for quantum black holes.

How do you detect a disppearing black hole

If a black hole disappears instantly, detecting it directly would be impossible even for sophisticated detectors at the LHC. An easier route is to detect such an object via the particles and energy released when it decays.

The decay of a quantum black hole would leave a very unique signature in terms of its shape and energy.

"You form a black hole, and it immediately disintegrates. But it has a very spherical decay signature, lots of things going in all directions," Zhang said. "We know that black holes are very high energy. So we basically just take the energy of these particles that are decay products of whatever was created in the collision and sum them together. And if the sum is large enough, we can say that this is the region where we are likely to find the signal."

Zhang and colleagues used a new technique to scour data collected by the CMS detector up to energies of 12 Tera-electron volts (TeV). They failed to find evidence of quantum black holes or hidden dimensions, but they aren't disheartened.

"Theories don’t predict one exact answer; they predict a whole range of places a particle could be hiding," Zhang said. "Each search clears out part of that range and says 'not here,' and over time the map of where new physics could still be shrinks."

That's a proven technique, especially for LHC research. That process of elimination led to the discovery of the Higgs boson back in 2012. And the search for quantum black holes is definitely worthwhile. It could soothe a headache that has bothered physicists since the development of general relativity and quantum physics during the early years of the 20th century.

As more data is collected and higher-energy domains are explored, the probability of finding a quantum black hole via its products increases. And that would put researchers tantalizingly close to the unification of quantum physics and general relativity.

"We have two big theories that describe nature. If you want to describe things that are small, you go to quantum field theory. We have the Standard Model to describe all the particles, and it performs exceptionally well in practice. And when you go to the very, very big, you have general relativity that would describe how big and massive objects behave," Vami said, also explaining the difficulty in merging these theories emerges from the fact that the conditions at which they overlap would be rarefied..

"That's really hard to do because you don't often have a situation which is really tiny but also extremely heavy."

Quantum effects come into play at the edge of astrophysical black holes, but these effects are even more significant for the tiny black holes that would be created at the LHC.

For that reason, the hunt for quantum black holes is set to continue until research like this leaves these curious objects nowhere left to hide.

The team's research was published in the journal Progress in High Energy Physics.

With a new analysis of James Webb Space Telescope observations, we're one step closer to interstellar weather forecasting — a baby step, at least.

Before astronomers can issue weather forecasts for worlds beyond our solar system, they need to know what drives the atmospheres of those planets and whether their weather follows recognizable patterns. And in a new study based on James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) data, researchers studied SIMP 0136, a world about 20 light-years away, and traced much of its atmospheric variability to two factors: temperature differences and changes in the vertical structure of its clouds.

SIMP 0136 isn't exactly an exoplanet but rather a brown dwarf. Brown dwarfs occupy the murky territory between planets and stars. They are generally more massive than planets but cannot sustain the hydrogen fusion that powers stars. But because astronomers can observe them directly, brown dwarfs offer laboratories for studying the atmospheres of giant, exoplanet-like worlds.

Using a technique called principal component analysis, the team examined subtle brightness changes taking place as SIMP 0136 rotated, distilling down a complicated dataset into a few patterns responsible for most of the variation. The analysis revealed three recurring weather states rotating in and out of view. Some regions were hotter and covered by thinner clouds, while cooler regions had thicker clouds extending higher through the atmosphere.

However, identifying recurring weather states is only part of the story. To make actual forecasts, astronomers also need to know whether an atmosphere plays by the same rules over and over again — and in this case, it did. "We also discovered that these drivers of the weather patterns on SIMP-0136 persist over time, even as the detailed appearance of the atmosphere evolves over more than a dozen rotations," study lead author Merle Schrader, a doctoral candidate at Trinity College Dublin, said in a statement.

The method does not yet let astronomers predict tomorrow's conditions on a distant world, but it offers a relatively quick way to identify the forces shaping an atmosphere before scientists run more computationally demanding models.

"Applying this technique to a wide range of brown dwarfs and giant exoplanets will help us better understand the diverse weather systems that shape worlds far beyond our solar system," study co-author Johanna Vos, an associate professor at Trinity College Dublin, said in the statement.

The research was published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics on Sept. 16.