That effort, undertaken by NASA for many years, could be given to the U.S. Space Force, which has a much bigger new budget.

On the other hand, is a Space Force takeover of taking out potentially dangerous asteroids warranted, and what might be the ramifications of this switch?

From detection to deflection

Last May, the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee staged a hearing called "From Detection to Deflection: Evaluating NASA's Planetary Defense Strategy." In the hearing's opening statement, committee chairman Brian Babin (R-Texas) flagged several key facts:

• NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office (PDCO) leads the nation's mission to protect Earth from potentially dangerous near-Earth objects (NEOs) — asteroids and comets that come close to our planet at some point in their orbits. The vast majority of NEOs are harmless, but the big ones could cause serious damage if they line Earth up in their crosshairs.
• The U.S. has been keeping tabs on hazardous NEOs since the 1990s, but our efforts ramped up significantly with a major initiative that was passed as part of the 2005 NASA Authorization.
• That initiative, called the George E. Brown Jr. Near-Earth Object Survey Act, directed NASA to detect, track and catalogue 90% of all NEOs at least 460 feet (140 meters) wide within 15 years. Space rocks of that size can cause significant regional destruction if they hit Earth.
• Though we're five years past the original deadline set by that act, just 44% of those big, dangerous NEOs have been catalogued to date.

"Protecting our planet from threatening asteroids and comets must be a top priority for NASA," Babin said in the statement.

Defensible space

"In my opinion, planetary defense is an operational mission which should be formally tasked to U.S. Space Command, and it should fall to the Space Force to develop an operational capability," said Peter Garretson, a senior fellow in defense studies with the American Foreign Policy Council and a strategy consultant with a focus on space and defense.

Garretson told Space.com that planetary defense is a "whole-of-nation" mission, involving NASA, Department of Energy labs, the National Nuclear Security Administration and the Department of Defense and its assortment of research and development agencies.

NASA has taken the initiative and leadership in standing up the PDCO, enhancing detection and executing the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission. DART was the first-ever demonstration of planetary defense technology, successfully altering the orbit of an asteroid by intentionally crashing a spacecraft into it.

DART successfully impacted the asteroid Dimorphos in the fall of 2022 and effectively altered the object's trajectory.

Golden Dome

"Hopefully, the administration and Congress will continue to fund the efforts of the PDCO," Garretson said. However, he added, "this is an obvious defense mission, and U.S. Space Force is tasked with space domain awareness for national security and to protect the nation's interest in space."

In Garretson's view, planetary defense is a natural extension of Golden Dome, President Donald Trump's proposed multi-layer defense system, which includes the use of space-based assets and is intended to detect and destroy various foreign threats.

"We are now at a point where we could develop an operational capability at relatively modest cost," Garretson said, "and that could be a major legacy for this administration."

Soft power

Arguments about NASA's advantage in soft power and international cooperation are nonsense, Garretson suggested.

"The DoD already has among the largest footprints for international cooperation, including regular and formal contact with Russia and China," he said. "Any cooperation on planetary defense is most likely among the spacefaring and nuclear powers, and therefore likely to take place between militaries anyway."

Garretson believes that "it is well past time to move this from a science and discovery additional duty at NASA to an operational space domain awareness and space control mission formally tasked to the Department of Defense."

Ordering this to happen could be via the President's Unified Command Plan, he added.

Public confidence

Not everyone agrees with Garretson. A handover of planetary defense to the U.S. military is a non-starter, according to Rusty Schweickart, who flew on NASA's Apollo 9 mission in 1969 and is now a leader in protecting Earth from having a run-in with a civilization-snuffing space intruder.

"One of the things we realized very early on, after bringing the planetary defense challenge to the U.N. Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space, is that there needs to be very widespread public confidence in the agency or entity in charge of providing legit information, making the critical decisions and actually executing the deflection, if required," Schweickart told Space.com.

Given that these activities will begin four to seven years prior to the predicted impact, the actual impact site will not be precisely known at the time, Schweickart said. "In fact, the probability of Earth impact may well be only one in five, or even one in 20 or so."

Planetary response

But if responsible action is to be taken, and if the public is to have confidence in what it's being told, the information should not come from any nation's military, Schweickart continued. "Any such designation would absolutely guarantee widespread public suspicion of self-serving national interest," he said.

Fundamentally, an asteroid impact and the planetary defense response to that threat, "is a planetary event, and a planetary response is what is demanded, not competing national — and presumably self-serving — entities," Schweickart cautioned.

That case was made clear in a 2008 report issued by the Association of Space Explorers International Panel on Asteroid Threat Mitigation, which Schweickart chaired.

Logical thinking is needed, Schweickart concluded. "But if what you want is to dispose of the threat and avoid widespread public chaos and panic, do not have any, and especially the U.S, military involved, other than, for example, internal domestic emergency response."

NEO Surveyor

Meanwhile, in the midst of NASA budget turmoil, the space agency's Near-Earth Object Surveyor (NEO Surveyor) mission is seemingly moving forward for launch no earlier than September 2027.

NEO Surveyor will find potentially hazardous objects because of its optimized sensitivity in the infrared part of the spectrum and observation cadence, according to NASA's Fiscal Year 2026 Budget Technical Supplement, which was issued on June 9.

That document notes that NEO Surveyor's primary goals are to: "(1) identify impact hazards to the Earth posed by NEOs by performing a comprehensive survey of the NEO population; (2) obtain detailed physical characterization data for individual objects that are likely to pose an impact hazard; and (3) advance the understanding of potential impact energies of potentially hazardous NEOs through characterizing physical properties, including object size, to inform potential mitigation strategies."

Getting the bright-eyed NEO Surveyor off the ground and on duty assumes, however, that it is not blind-sided by budget cuts.

"You know we haven't done enough research into the effects of cosmic rays!"

Ben Grimm, Fantastic Four #1, 1961

Ben may have been right way back when Stan Lee and Jack Kirby created him and the rest of the Fantastic Four 64 years ago, but we know a heck of a lot more about cosmic rays today.

Back then, Grimm, who became the Thing, was right to be concerned. After all, it was during his next trip to space as he piloted a rocket built and designed by mission commander Reed Richards and carrying Sue and Johnny Storm that Ben and his comrades were bombarded with cosmic rays that gifted (or cursed in Ben's case) them with fantastic powers.

Thanks to cosmic rays, the Fantastic Four was born, heralding the "Marvel Age of Comics" and a period of unrivaled creativity for Lee, Kirby, Ditko, Romita, and many others.

Now, thanks to a six-minute special sneak peek of the upcoming movie Fantastic Four: First Steps on Disney+, we know that in the latest live-action iteration of these seminal heroes and their introduction to the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), the team will also derive their powers from the "cosmic turbulence" or cosmic rays.

It's also how the Red Ghost and his Super-Apes got their powers in Fantastic Four #13, 1963, but let's not worry too much about them (the Fantastic Four never did).

So, before "Fantastic Four: First Steps" arrives in theatres across the globe on Friday (July 25), what better time to ask, what exactly are cosmic rays, and what would happen if a group of four intrepid space explorers were bombarded with this cosmic radiation?

What are cosmic rays made of?

Like the origins of other Marvel characters in the 1960s, Stan Lee plucked the term "cosmic rays" from actual science textbooks. Just like the gamma-rays that belted Bruce Banner to birth the Hulk, Lee and Kirby weren't too concerned with the details of what cosmic rays would actually do to humans.

Though discovered via a series of balloon experiments in 1912 conducted by particle physicist Victor Hess, the term "cosmic rays" emerged in 1925, when it was coined by the University of Chicago scientists Robert Millikan.

Simply put, cosmic rays are high-energy particles from space that travel at nearly the speed of light. They begin life as atoms, which have their outer layers of electrons stripped away in a process called ionization.

Cosmic rays are predominantly composed of protons, accounting for around 90%, helium atomic nuclei (around 9%), with the remaining 1% composed of the nuclei of heavier elements, up to elements like iron and uranium. There is also a tiny fraction of cosmic rays that is made up of antimatter particles like positrons, the antimatter equivalent of electrons.

So when the usually very smart Reed Richards says in Fantastic Four #1 that cosmic rays are "only rays of light," he's wrong. Seems like Ben was right about the further research, Reed!

As for the energy of cosmic ray particles, this can vary from around 1 million electronvolts (1 MeV) to energies equivalent to 100 million times the energies generated by the Large Hadron Collider, Earth's most powerful particle accelerator.

The most energetic cosmic ray particle ever detected was given the brilliant moniker, the "Oh My God" particle. Detected in 1991 via a glowing streak in the sky, it had 320 exaelectronvolts (EeV) of energy, the same energy as a baseball travelling at 55 miles per hour, all packed into a subatomic particle.

Where do cosmic rays come from?

Cosmic rays bounce across the universe in all directions, meaning Earth is bombarded from all sides by trillions of them. That endlessly rebounding effect occurs because, as charged particles, cosmic rays interact with magnetic fields in space that push and pull them in different directions.

This pinball-like effect makes cosmic rays pretty hard to trace back to their source, but the energies of these particles give scientists a good idea of the type of mechanisms that could launch them.

As you might imagine, it takes a pretty violent event or some extreme conditions to create a multitude of high-energy cosmic rays.

Some cosmic rays we receive here on Earth come from the sun, launched during powerful solar flares. However, the majority appear to come from beyond the solar system and from the wider Milky Way. Cosmic rays that come from the sun are often called "solar energetic particles" today, with those from the Milky Way referred to as galactic cosmic rays.

A small sample of cosmic rays that reach Earth seems to have originated from beyond our own galaxy. They are known as "extragalactic cosmic rays."

Events that create cosmic rays that stream into the solar system include the supernova deaths of massive stars, events in which supermassive black holes devour copious amounts of gas, dust and even stars that they have ripped apart with their immense gravity.

Cosmic rays can also be blasted out by highly magnetized stellar corpses called neutron stars, or when entire galaxies smash together and merge.

This means that cosmic rays can provide a window to cosmic laboratories that lie well beyond Earth, serving as "cosmic messengers" for some of the most violent events in the cosmos.

Additionally, when cosmic rays strike material in the solar system, they can create new isotopes of elements. Thus, when these space rocks fall to Earth, these unique decaying isotopes can be used to date their arrival on Earth.

In fact, humanity's discovery of subatomic particles other than electrons, protons, and neutrons, specifically positrons and muons came in 1933 via observations of cosmic rays.

Clearly, cosmic rays aren't as "terrible" as Johnny Storm, the Human Torch, said decades ago. They have a litany of uses for scientists. But that doesn't mean you'd want to be directly exposed to them.

What would cosmic rays do to you?

Particles with high energies are classed as ionizing radiation. That means they have the potential to rip electrons away from the atoms in our bodies.

"Ionizing radiation is like an atomic-scale cannonball that blasts through material, leaving significant damage behind," NASA explains. "More damage can also be created by secondary particles that are propelled into motion by the primary radiation particle."

The results of unprotected bombardment from cosmic rays would be damage to our DNA, which, rather than leaving us with incredible powers, could result in nasty medical conditions, including cancer.

Trillions of cosmic rays hit Earth every day, but the vast majority of them are blocked by our planet's atmosphere and its magnetic field, or magnetosphere. That means we are protected from the harsh effects of cosmic rays.

When these charged particles collide with molecules in the atmosphere, they create showers of secondary particles called "air showers."

These can be used to detect cosmic rays, but scientists can also hunt for ultraviolet light released when secondary particles are created.

To get direct measurements of cosmic rays before they encounter the atmosphere, scientists send balloons to high altitudes right on the edge of space.

Satellites and spacecraft are also sent into Earth's orbit or further afield into the solar system to detect cosmic rays.

NASA and other space agencies are hard at work developing more and more sophisticated and advanced shielding to protect both astronauts and equipment from cosmic rays when they venture beyond the limit of our planet's protective atmosphere.

Clearly, in a spaceship with inadequate shielding, just like Reed's in Fantastic Four #1, cosmic rays could prove to be more troublesome than a Doctor Doom team-up with the Yancy Street Gang.

Like a burst of cosmic rays, "Fantastic Four: First Steps" bombards theaters across the Earth on Friday (July 25).

Our first meeting was a bit awkward. One of us is an archaeologist who studies how past peoples interacted with their environments. Two of us are geophysicists who investigate interactions between solar activity and Earth’s magnetic field.

When we first got together, we wondered whether our unconventional project, linking space weather and human behavior, could actually bridge such a vast disciplinary divide. Now, two years on, we believe the payoffs – personal, professional and scientific – were well worth the initial discomfort.

Our collaboration, which culminated in a recent paper in the journal Science Advances, began with a single question: What happened to life on Earth when the planet’s magnetic field nearly collapsed roughly 41,000 years ago?

Weirdness when Earth’s magnetic shield falters

This near-collapse is known as the Laschamps Excursion, a brief but extreme geomagnetic event named for the volcanic fields in France where it was first identified. At the time of the Laschamps Excursion, near the end of the Pleistocene epoch, Earth’s magnetic poles didn’t reverse as they do every few hundred thousand years. Instead, they wandered, erratically and rapidly, over thousands of miles. At the same time, the strength of the magnetic field dropped to less than 10% of its modern day intensity.

So, instead of behaving like a stable bar magnet – a dipole – as it usually does, the Earth’s magnetic field fractured into multiple weak poles across the planet. As a result, the protective force field scientists call the magnetosphere became distorted and leaky.

The magnetosphere normally deflects much of the solar wind and harmful ultraviolet radiation that would otherwise reach Earth’s surface.

So, during the Laschamps Excursion when the magnetosphere broke down, our models suggest a number of near-Earth effects. While there is still work to be done to precisely characterize these effects, we do know they included auroras – normally seen only in skies near the poles as the Northern Lights or Southern Lights – wandering toward the equator, and significantly higher-than-present-day doses of harmful solar radiation.

The skies 41,000 years ago may have been both spectacular and threatening. When we realized this, we two geophysicists wanted to know whether this could have affected people living at the time.

The archaeologist’s answer was absolutely.

Human responses to ancient space weather

For people on the ground at that time, auroras may have been the most immediate and striking effect, perhaps inspiring awe, fear, ritual behavior or something else entirely. But the archaeological record is notoriously limited in its ability to capture these kinds of cognitive or emotional responses.

Researchers are on firmer ground when it comes to the physiological impacts of increased UV radiation. With the weakened magnetic field, more harmful radiation would have reached Earth’s surface, elevating risk of sunburn, eye damage, birth defects, and other health issues.

In response, people may have adopted practical measures: spending more time in caves, producing tailored clothing for better coverage, or applying mineral pigment “sunscreen” made of ochre to their skin. As we describe in our recent paper, the frequency of these behaviors indeed appears to have increased across parts of Europe, where effects of the Laschamps Excursion were pronounced and prolonged.

At this time, both Neanderthals and members of our species, Homo sapiens, were living in Europe, though their geographic distributions likely overlapped only in certain regions. The archaeological record suggests that different populations exhibited distinct approaches to environmental challenges, with some groups perhaps more reliant on shelter or material culture for protection.

Importantly, we’re not suggesting that space weather alone caused an increase in these behaviors or, certainly, that the Laschamps caused Neanderthals to go extinct, which is one misinterpretation of our research. But it could have been a contributing factor – an invisible but powerful force that influenced innovation and adaptability.

Cross-discipline collaboration

Collaborating across such a disciplinary gap was, at first, daunting. But it turned out to be deeply rewarding.

Archaeologists are used to reconstructing now-invisible phenomena like climate. We can’t measure past temperatures or precipitation directly, but they’ve left traces for us to interpret if we know where and how to look.

But even archaeologists who’ve spent years studying the effects of climate on past behaviors and technologies may not have considered the effects of the geomagnetic field and space weather. These effects, too, are invisible, powerful and best understood through indirect evidence and modeling. Archaeologists can treat space weather as a vital component of Earth’s environmental history and future forecasting.

Likewise, geophysicists, who typically work with large datasets, models and simulations, may not always engage with some of the stakes of space weather. Archaeology adds a human dimension to the science. It reminds us that the effects of space weather don’t stop at the ionosphere. They can ripple down into the lived experiences of people on the ground, influencing how they adapt, create and survive.

The Laschamps Excursion wasn’t a fluke or a one-off. Similar disruptions of Earth’s magnetic field have happened before and will happen again. Understanding how ancient humans responded can provide insight into how future events might affect our world – and perhaps even help us prepare.

Our unconventional collaboration has shown us how much we can learn, how our perspective changes, when we cross disciplinary boundaries. Space may be vast, but it connects us all. And sometimes, building a bridge between Earth and space starts with the smallest things, such as ochre, or a coat, or even sunscreen.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

"Spain wants and can be the home of the future of astronomy and astrophysics," she said, according to a press release translated from Spanish. "We have the capacity and the political will to do so."

Originally, the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) was planned to adorn a mountain in Hawaii called Mauna Kea. This is a very popular observing site because of how strikingly dark its skies are and how great the weather tends to be; indeed, it already is home to several other large, ground-based telescopes like the Keck Observatory and the Very Long Baseline Array. However, the TMT's development has been riding a bumpy road, and the biggest challenge came recently: The Trump administration's fiscal year 2026 (FY26) budget proposal for the National Science Foundation (NSF), which is funding the TMT's design and development work, requests removing that funding altogether.

As a result, the Spanish government has offered up its sizeable sum of money with the hopes that the TMT can be moved to the island of La Palma in the Canary Islands and continue construction there.

"If completed, it will involve not only the construction of the telescope, but also decades of scientific operations, the creation of skilled employment and an economic and social boost for the island," Morant said.

Trump's FY26 NSF budget request actually isn't the first time the TMT has been subjected to whispers of a halt. Even before Trump took office, the NSF was facing pressure from the U.S. government to build only one giant, ground-based telescope with a budget capped at $1.6 billion — this was a worry because there are already two giant telescopes in the works. One is the TMT, and the other is known as the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) that's being built in the clear-skied deserts of Chile.

They were meant to work in tandem, with the GMT watching over the Southern Hemisphere while the TMT watches the Northern Hemisphere. They also have complementary skillsets. So, slap their observations together and astronomers believed that'd paint a beautiful picture of the night sky in its totality.

But as the days go by, it's looking more and more like this utopic situation isn't going to work out.

Trump's NSF budget request for the upcoming year specifically states the GMT can move forward to the "final design phase," but the TMT cannot. However, it also states that "NSF has received assurances from the GMT project that it can complete the final design phase without further investments. Moving into the final design phase does not guarantee that a project will be approved for construction, and doing so does not obligate the agency to provide any further funding."

In other words, the future of the GMT may not be 100% certain either.

In fact, the administration's budget proposal for the agency was aggressive all around: It could shut down one of two sites that comprise LIGO (the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory that studies black holes), completely halt operations for DKIST (Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope), which is the world's most powerful solar telescope that started delivering data relatively recently, and reduce the number of people involved in NSF science from over 330,000 to just around 90,000. And that's just a few of the blows.

"While some countries are cutting back on investments in science and even denying it, Spain is a haven for science, the home of scientists seeking to advance and develop their projects," Morant said.

Furthermore, in addition to allowing the project to move forward, the change of location may be received positively by communities living near Mauna Kea in Hawaii. The mountain isn't only revered for its excellent astronomy observation conditions — it's also considered sacred for many native Hawaiians.

For that reason, it's been rather controversial to have so many telescopes dotting the mountain; the total number currently sits at 13. In fact, back when construction on the TMT was supposed to begin in 2014, protestors blockaded the area, and many activists continue to speak out today.

"Faced with the risk of paralyzing this major international scientific project, the Spanish government has decided to act with a redoubled commitment to science and major scientific infrastructures for the benefit of global knowledge," Morant said.

A new Mars exploration idea seemingly would drop a hornet's nest of helicopters from high above the Red Planet.

The idea comes from the world of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) concepts here on Earth, but is designed for exploring another world: Mars.

AeroVironment of Arlington, Virginia and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory today debuted "Skyfall," a concept for deploying next-generation Mars helicopters that could help pave the way for human landing on Mars through autonomous aerial exploration.

Half-dozen drones

"Skyfall is designed to deploy six scout helicopters on Mars, where they would explore many of the sites selected by NASA and industry as top candidate landing sites for America's first Martian astronauts," AeroVironment said in a statement.

The "Skyfall Maneuver" would see the half-dozen devices let loose from their entry capsule during its plunge through the Martian atmosphere. Viewed as a cost-cutting concept, Skyfall would eliminate the need for a landing platform, which in the past has been one of the most expensive, complex and risky elements of any Mars mission, states AeroVironment.

After deployment, each helicopter would operate independently. Among their duties would be transmitting high-resolution surface images back to Earth, as well as collecting radar data about what lies beneath the Red Planet's rocky surface. That information is key for safely landing crews at areas on the Martian surface that hold water, ice and other resources.

Building on Ingenuity

The Skyfall scheme builds upon the Ingenuity Mars helicopter program within Jezero Crater. It chalked up 72 flights in just under three years and achieved the first powered flight on another world on April 19, 2021.

In an AeroVironment statement, Skyfall is touted as offering a revolutionary new approach to Mars exploration, one that is faster and more affordable than anything that's come before it.

That's the word from William Pomerantz, head of space ventures at AeroVironment. "With six helicopters, Skyfall offers a low-cost solution that multiplies the range we would cover, the data we would collect, and the scientific research we would conduct – making humanity's first footprints on Mars meaningfully closer," he stated.

AeroVironment has begun internal investments and coordination with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory to facilitate a potential 2028 launch of Skyfall.

The study's scientists say tackling this growing climate threat will require better forecasting tools, smarter adaptation strategies, and faster action toward curbing climate change, which is primarily driven by human activities like burning coal for cheap power.

"The North Atlantic [marine heatwave], lasting 525 days, revealed the scale of persistent ocean warming," wrote the research team in the paper published in the journal Science, "whereas the Southwest Pacific [heatwave] surpassed previous records with its extensive spatial coverage and prolonged persistence. In the Tropical Eastern Pacific, [marine heatwaves] peaked at 1.63°C during El Niño development, and the North Pacific sustained an ongoing anomaly over 4 years."

These prolonged periods of abnormally high sea surface temperatures can severely disrupt marine ecosystems, often triggering mass coral bleaching events and ecological stress. Beyond environmental consequences, the impacts ripple into human systems — reducing fishery yields, straining aquaculture and affecting industries that rely on stable ocean conditions.

While the impacts of marine heatwaves are increasingly clear, the processes that drive their onset, persistence and intensification remain only partially understood, though experts have indeed connected them to regional climate shifts as well as global warming.

A climate tipping point?

In their analysis, the researchers based in China explored the regional forces behind these extreme ocean warming events, linking them to broader disruptions in Earth's climate system. To do this, they looked to high-resolution ocean data from the ECCO2 (Estimating the Circulation and Climate of the Ocean, Phase II) reanalysis project as well as satellite-based OISST (Optimum Interpolation Sea Surface Temperature) measurements.

They also incorporated a mixed-layer heat budget to help track where heat in the upper ocean is coming from and where it's going. The goal was to understand how different physical processes contribute to the extreme warming observed.

"This comprehensive approach leverages the strengths of ECCO2's capabilities and OISST's observational accuracy, providing critical insights into the variability and mechanisms sustaining [marine heatwaves] across different regions," they wrote.

They report that several key phenomena were contributing to 2023's record-breaking year. In the North Atlantic, fewer clouds let more sunlight reach the ocean surface, warming the water. At the same time, weaker winds led to a thinner surface layer, which made the ocean heat up more quickly. Together, these changes caused a noticeable rise in sea surface temperatures. In the Southwest Pacific, a similar story played out — less cloud cover meant more solar heating, and changes in wind patterns further helped trap that heat at the surface.

In the North Pacific, stronger sunlight and less heat escaping from the ocean led to steady warming, with these factors accounting for most of the temperature rise. Some additional warming came from deeper waters being pushed upward. In the Tropical Eastern Pacific, marine heatwaves were mainly driven by changes linked to El Niño, which moved warm water around.

Their findings highlight how local ocean-atmosphere dynamics are being reshaped by global warming — potentially setting off feedback loops that could make such events more frequent and severe. Worryingly, these patterns may be early indicators of a 'climate tipping point,' the scientists say, where interconnected systems begin to shift rapidly and irreversibly.

"These events can stress ecosystems beyond recovery thresholds, potentially triggering coral reef collapse, reducing species richness, increasing mortality rates, and causing redistribution of fish species, which has already led to the decline of key fisheries, such as the Pacific cod fishery," wrote the scientists.

Since nearly 90% of the excess heat trapped by Earth's climate system ends up in the ocean, understanding what’s driving these record-breaking marine heatwaves is more important than ever. Protecting marine ecosystems, coastal economies, and the communities that depend on them must be a global priority as ocean heatwaves continue to intensify.

NASA has unveiled a dazzling new collection of cosmic images from the Chandra X-ray Observatory, capturing spectacular stellar, nebular and galactic activity in unprecedented detail.

The collection showcases nine composite images that combine Chandra's X-ray data with observations from other space and ground-based telescopes across the infrared, optical and radio spectrum, according to a statement releasing the new images on Wednesday (July 23).

Among the highlights are spectacular views of the star-forming region N79 in the Large Magellanic Cloud, the vibrant spiral galaxies M83 and NGC 1068, and the Milky Way's own Westerlund 1 — the most massive star cluster in our galaxy and one of the closest super star clusters to our solar system. Each image illustrates Chandra's unique ability to detect high-energy phenomena, such as stellar winds, supernova remnants and black hole activity.

The stunning new image of N79 — a nebula spanning roughly 1,630 light-years, whose vast clouds of gas and dust act as a stellar nursery — was created using X-ray data from Chandra and infrared data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The X-ray data reveals the hot gas created by young stars, which helps astronomers better understand how stars like our sun formed billions of years ago, officials said in the statement.

The spiral galaxy M83 is captured face-on, providing a clear view of its full structure. Chandra's X-ray data reveals remnants from widespread stellar explosions, or supernovas, while ground-based optical observations highlight its sweeping arms and mix of hot, young blue stars and cooler, older red ones.

Another mesmerizing spiral galaxy featured in this latest collection is NGC 1068, located relatively close to the Milky Way. It hosts a central black hole twice as massive as our own, from which a million-mile-per-hour winds stream and light up the galaxy's core in X-rays captured by Chandra.

The composite image of NGC 1068 also includes radio observations from the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico, as well as optical data from the Hubble Space Telescope and JWST. Together, the data reveals different layers of the galaxy's structure and energetic processes, highlighted by bright gold light in the image.

Chandra's latest glimpse of Westerlund 1 offers a dazzling view of the star cluster, abundant with intense star formation. Chandra's X-ray data, combined with observations from the JWST and Hubble, reveals thousands of stars emitting X-rays within this bustling stellar nursery.

Other featured targets include the colliding galaxy pair IC 1623, the starburst galaxy M82 with its X-ray-blown gas plumes, star-forming hotbeds IC 348 and NGC 346, and an edge-on spiral galaxy NGC 2146, which boasts a dusty arm that blocks the view of its center from Earth's perspective.

Now in orbit for over 25 years, Chandra remains one of NASA's most powerful space telescopes, delivering ultra-sharp images that help astronomers map cosmic structures in remarkable detail.

The full collection of new images is available online.

Located about 35 light-years from Earth, L 98-59 is a cool, dim red dwarf star already known to host a compact system of small, rocky planets. The latest discovery, led by researchers at the Université de Montréal's Trottier Institute for Research on Exoplanets, confirms the presence of L 98-59 f, a super-Earth with a minimum mass 2.8 times that of our planet.

The newly discovered exoplanet follows an almost perfectly circular 23-Earth-day orbit around its star. The world receives roughly the same amount of stellar energy as Earth, placing it in the star's habitable zone — a range of distances where liquid water could exist under suitable atmospheric conditions, according to a statement from the university.

"Finding a temperate planet in such a compact system makes this discovery particularly exciting," Charles Cadieux, a postdoctoral researcher at the university and lead author of the study, said in the statement. "It highlights the remarkable diversity of exoplanetary systems and strengthens the case for studying potentially habitable worlds around low-mass stars."

L 98-59 f was discovered by reanalyzing data from the European Southern Observatory's (ESO) HARPS (High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher) and ESPRESSO (Echelle Spectrograph for Rocky Exoplanet and Stable Spectroscopic Observations) spectrographs. Since the exoplanet doesn't transit, or pass in front of, its host star from our perspective, astronomers spotted it by tracking subtle shifts in the star's motion that are caused by the planet's gravitational pull.

By combining the spectrograph data with observations from NASA's TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) and James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) — and using advanced techniques to filter out stellar noise — researchers were able to determine the size, mass and key properties of all five planets.

The study shows that L 98-59 b, the innermost planet, is just 84% the size of Earth and half its mass, making it one of the smallest exoplanets measured. Tidal forces may drive volcanic activity on the system's two innermost planets, while the third's unusually low density suggests it could be a water-rich world unlike any in our solar system. This diversity offers a rare opportunity to investigate the formation and evolution of planetary systems beyond our own, team members said.

"These new results paint the most complete picture we've ever had of the fascinating L 98-59 system," Cadieux said. "It's a powerful demonstration of what we can achieve by combining data from space telescopes and high-precision instruments on Earth, and it gives us key targets for future atmospheric studies with the James Webb Space Telescope."

Because L 98-59 is small and nearby, its planets are especially well-suited for follow-up atmospheric studies. If L 98-59 f has an atmosphere, telescopes like JWST may be able to detect water vapor, carbon dioxide — or even biosignatures.

The new study was published July 12 in the journal Earth and Planetary Astrophysics.

Over the past year, massive surveys of galaxies by both the Dark Energy Survey (DES) and the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) have revealed that dark energy — the mysterious force that's accelerating the expansion of the universe — might be changing with time. If this observation holds, it would be a paradigm-shifting result because it would mean our simplest model of dark energy, called the cosmological constant, is wrong.

With this new result, there is plenty of room for theoretical exploration into possible explanations and radical new theories of the cosmos. One of those, presented in a paper in June but not yet peer-reviewed, proposes a complex model for dark energy that allows for surprising behavior.

In this model, there are two components that contribute to dark energy. One is an axion, a hypothetical ultralight particle that hardly ever interacts with matter. These particles would soak the entire universe, and their average energy would drive the current period of accelerated expansion.

However, in this model, there's another component: the cosmological constant. This is a bare number in Einstein's theory of general relativity that can also explain dark energy. However, in this model, the cosmological constant has a lower value, as some of the accelerated expansion can be attributed to the axions.

In fact, the researchers behind the new study found that the best way to fit the DES and DESI data was to have the axions working in tandem with a negative cosmological constant. This would mean we are in a temporary period of accelerated expansion, driven largely by the axion field. But as time goes on, the axions will dilute and lose steam, allowing for the negative cosmological constant to take over, the authors propose.

A negative cosmological constant would do the exact opposite as a positive one: It would decelerate the universe's expansion rate instead of accelerating it. This would mean that, at some point in the future, the expansion of the cosmos would slow down, stop and begin to reverse — beginning a new "Big Crunch" phase.

The end of that process would be the mirror image of the Big Bang: Galaxies would merge, and the universe would get smaller, hotter and denser, ultimately meeting its end in a new singularity.

The theorists predict that the beginning of the end will be in about 10 billion years — less than the present age of the universe. The cosmos will then spend another 10 billion years collapsing, with the universe reaching its final singularity state after a total lifetime of just over 33 billion years.

Although this model would mean the universe is not quite at its midlife stage, it is well over halfway to its maximum size.

But this idea is deeply hypothetical. The DES and DESI results are preliminary findings and may not hold up to further scrutiny. And even if we do find that the cosmological constant is lacking, it doesn't make this model correct. We'll just have to wait and see.

What is it?

4MOST is an instrument made of approximately 2436 individual fibers, with each collecting light from different sources simultaneously. This allows the telescope to scan and analyze many objects at the same time, an incredible superpower astronomers look forward to using.

Where is it?

4MOST is currently located at ESO's Paranal Observatory in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile. Scientists and engineers are working to add the instrument to the 4.1-meter Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy, or VISTA for short.

Why is it amazing?

With its thousands of fibers, 4MOST will be able to provide astronomers with key details about our universe. In a recent test, the instrument was able to control each of its 2,436 fibers individually. This is key, as each fiber will analyze an object and break its light down into a spectrum of corresponding colors, which can tell scientists what chemicals something in space is made of, how fast it is moving and other variables.

Over the next five years, 4MOST will analyze around 25 million different sources in a patch of sky bigger than 60, 000 full moons. From this survey and the spectrum breakdown, astronomers can understand what our early universe was made of, and how it has evolved since then.

Want to learn more?

You can read more about the European Southern Observatory's recent research, as well as other telescopes in Chile.

Hints at the evolution of dark energy, which accounts for around 70% of the universe's mass and energy, were first delivered last year by the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI). This indication was shocking because the best description we have of the cosmos, the standard model of cosmology, or the Lambda Cold Dark Matter (LCDM) model, predicts that dark energy should be constant over time.

These new results, provided by the Supernova Cosmology Project and consisting of 2,087 detonating vampire stars, otherwise called standardized Type 1a supernovas, constitute another line of evidence that dark energy is not constant and that the LCDM may need revision.

If dark energy is weakening, this would have ramifications for our understanding of how the cosmos will end.

"Dark energy makes up almost 70% of the universe and is what drives the expansion, so if it is getting weaker, we would expect to see expansion slow over time," team leader and University of Hawaii at Mānoa researcher David Rubin said in a statement. "Does the universe expand forever, or eventually stall, or even start contracting again? It depends on this balance between dark energy and matter.

"We want to find out which wins, and we want to understand this underlying piece of our universe."

Exploding vampires and cosmic rulers

Type 1a supernovas involve stellar remnants called white dwarfs that are left behind when stars around the size of the sun die. When in close binary partnerships with other stars, these stellar corpses can steal matter like a cosmic vampire.

This material builds up on a white dwarf until the dead star is tipped over the so-called Chandrasekhar limit, around 1.4 times the mass of the sun. Exceeding this limit means the white dwarf can go supernova.

The resultant explosions are Type 1a supernovas — and they are useful as a measurement tool for astronomers because their light output is uniform from event to event. By comparing Type 1a supernovas at different distances and seeing how their light has been redshifted by the expansion of the universe, the value for the rate of expansion of the universe (the Hubble constant) can be obtained. Then, that can be used to understand the impact of dark energy on the cosmos at different times.

This story is fitting because it was the study of 50 Type 1a supernovas that first tipped astronomers off to the existence of dark energy in the first place back in 1998.

Since then, astronomers have observed a further 2,000 Type 1a supernovas with different telescopes. This new project corrects any differences between those observations caused by different astronomical instruments, such as how the filters of telescopes drift over time, to curate the largest standardized Type 1a supernova dataset ever. It's named Union3.

Union3 contains 2,087 supernovas from 24 different datasets spanning 7 billion years of cosmic time. It builds upon the 557 supernovas catalogued in an original dataset called Union2.

Analysis of Union3 does indeed seem to corroborate the results of DESI — that dark energy is weakening over time — but the results aren't yet conclusive.

What is impressive about Union3, however, is that it presents two separate routes of investigation that both point toward non-constant dark energy.

"I don't think anyone is jumping up and down getting overly excited yet, but that's because we scientists are suppressing any premature elation since we know that this could go away once we get even better data," Saul Perlmutter, study team member and a researcher at Berkeley Lab, said in a statement. "On the other hand, people are certainly sitting up in their chairs now that two separate techniques are showing moderate disagreement with the simple Lambda CDM model."

And when it comes to dark energy in general, Perlmutter says the scientific community will pay attention. After all, he shared the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering this strange force.

"It's exciting that we’re finally starting to reach levels of precision where things become interesting and you can begin to differentiate between the different theories of dark energy," Perlmutter said.

The team's Type 1a supernova dataset will grow with a further three datasets due to be added next year. Two of these will be high-redshift supernovas seen at great distances, while one will contain more local low-redshift supernovas. That should help better calibrate the new results, the researchers say.

"We wanted to set a baseline before we bring in several hundred new low-redshift supernovas, which is one of the areas where the calibration is most crucial and where we have some of the weakest datasets in the results so far," Greg Aldering, study team member and a researcher at Berkley Lab, said in the statement. "We think we really understand the calibration in a way no one has before, and we’re excited to add more supernovas and see what they can tell us about dark energy."

This analysis will be further bolstered when data starts rolling in from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. Rubin is projected to potentially uncover 1 million Type 1a supernovas over its ten-year-long Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) survey.

This research could really deliver when it is once again combined and compared with observations of fluctuations in the early matter concentrations called baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO) measured by DESI.

"BAO can look further back in time to when dark energy played less of a role in the universe, and supernovas are particularly precise in the more recent universe," Perlmutter said. "The two techniques are getting good enough that we can really start saying things about the dark energy models.

"We've been waiting to reach this point for a long time."

Although meteorological satellites orbit Earth and scan the skies around it, their imaging range extends into space, allowing them to occasionally catch glimpses of other celestial neighbors, such as the moon, stars and other planets in our solar system.

"This started by chance," explained Gaku Nishiyama, a postdoctoral researcher at the German Aerospace Center (known by its German acronym, DLR) in Berlin in an interview with Space.com. "One of my best friends, who has a Ph.D. in astronomy and is a certified weather forecaster in Japan, found lunar images in Himawari-8/9 datasets and asked me to look."

At the time, Nishiyama was focused on lunar science, and he began using the Himawari-8 and Himawari-9 weather satellites — which launched in 2014 and 2016, respectively — in an unconventional way: as space telescopes. By analyzing the light the moon emitted in infrared wavelengths, he and his team were able to test the satellites' ability to capture temperature variations across the moon's surface as well as determine its physical properties.

"During this lunar work, we also found other solar-system bodies, namely Mercury, Venus, Mars, and Jupiter, in the datasets. We were interested in what phenomena were recorded there," Nishiyama explained.

To spot Venus in the Himawari data, the team used the precise imaging schedule and position of the satellites. "Because we know almost exactly when and where Himawari is looking," Nishiyama said, "we can roughly predict where Venus will appear in each image. From there, we isolate the pixels corresponding to Venus."

Nishiyama and his colleagues were analyzing subtle changes in the intensity of light Venus was emitting. Such data allows scientists to track how a celestial body's brightness varies over time, which in turn reveals details about it.

The Himawari satellites ended up capturing one of the longest multiband infrared records of Venus ever assembled. This unique dataset revealed subtle, year-to-year changes in the planet's cloud-top temperatures, as well as signs of phenomena called thermal tides and Rossby waves.

"Thermal tides are global-scale gravity waves excited by solar heating in the cloud layers of Venus," Nishiyama explained. "When the atmosphere is stratified, like on Venus (i.e., a warm upper layer atop a cold lower layer), a restoring force acts upon heated air parcels, and the resulting vertical oscillations propagate as gravity waves. Rossby waves [also seen in Earth's oceans and atmosphere] are also a global-scale wave caused by variations in the Coriolis force with latitude.

"Both types of waves are crucial for transporting heat and momentum through Venus' atmosphere," he continued. "Tracking how these waves change over time helps us better understand the planet's atmospheric dynamics, especially since other data, like wind speeds and cloud reflectivity, have shown variations that play out over several years.

"Specifically, we succeeded in detecting variations in temperature fields caused by Rossby waves at various altitudes for the first time, which is important to understanding the physics behind the years-scale variation of the Venus atmosphere," said Nishiyama.

These new observations help fill a crucial gap in our understanding of Venus' dynamic upper atmosphere and open a new frontier in planetary monitoring from Earth orbit. The team's findings also challenge the calibration of key instruments on dedicated Venus spacecraft, like the LIR camera aboard Japan's Akatsuki Venus orbiter.

"To understand the atmospheric structure of Venus, determination of temperature at infrared wavelengths is crucial," said Nishiyama. "LIR was expected to provide accurate temperature information; however, LIR has faced several issues in instrument calibration."

Comparing images taken by LIR and Himawari satellites at the same time and under identical geometric conditions, the team found discrepancies and suspects that LIR may be underestimating Venus' radiance. "Our comparison between Himawari and LIR sheds light on how to recalibrate the LIR data, leading to a more accurate understanding of Venus' atmosphere," Nishiyama said.

The team is also hopeful that Himawari will complement data from missions such as Akatsuki and BepiColombo, a joint Japanese-European mission that's currently establishing itself in orbit around Mercury. Nishiyama explained that, compared to Akatsuki, Himawari covers a wider range of infrared wavelengths and provides information across various altitudes. In contrast to BepiColombo, which observed Venus only during a flyby, Himawari can monitor the planet over a much longer timescale.

"Earth-observing satellites [like Himawari] are generally calibrated so accurately that they can provide reference data for instrument calibrations in future planetary missions," he said. "Unlike meteorological observation on the Earth, there are often time gaps between planetary missions. Since meteorological satellites continue observation from space for decadal timescales, these satellites can supplement data even when there are no planetary exploration spacecraft orbiting around planets."

Nishiyama said that the team has already archived other solar-system bodies, which are now being analyzed. "We believe that continuing such activities will further expand our horizon in the field of planetary science," he concluded.

The team reported their findings last month in the journal Earth, Planets and Space.

Hydrogen peroxide forms as a byproduct when energetic particles break apart water molecules, leading to the recombination of OH radicals — highly reactive molecules with unpaired electrons.

H2O2 was first observed on Europa by the Galileo Near Infrared Mapping Spectrometer, a scientific instrument aboard NASA's Galileo Jupiter orbiter that was designed to study the composition and surface features of the gas giant's moons and atmosphere using infrared light. Later, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) noticed elevated levels of hydrogen peroxide in unexpected areas on the Jovian satellite.

Lab studies predicted that higher concentrations of hydrogen peroxide would be found in Europa's colder polar regions — but JWST observations showed the opposite, detecting higher levels in the moon's warmer equatorial regions. These areas, known as chaos terrains, are marked by broken blocks of surface ice that appear to have shifted, drifted and refrozen.

"Europa's peroxide distribution does not follow the temperature dependence predicted for pure water ice," wrote the team in their paper. Lab studies consistently show that colder ice has more H2O2, while warmer ice has less.

In a new study, scientists report that they have noticed higher levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the chaos terrains alongside elevated levels of H2O2. This is probably the result of CO2 escaping Europa's subsurface ocean through cracks in the ice, the researchers say.

The team therefore wondered if the presence of CO2 might be changing the ice's chemistry.

"Could the presence of CO2 drive the enhanced peroxide production in Europa's chaos regions, signaling a surface composition more conducive to the formation of this radiolytic oxidant?" they wrote in their paper. "Supporting this hypothesis are preliminary experiments on irradiated H2O-CO2 ice mixtures that show increased H2O2 yields compared to pure water ice."

To find a definitive answer, they "simulated the surface environment of Europa inside a vacuum chamber by depositing water ice mixed with CO2," Bereket Mamo, a graduate student at The University of Texas at San Antonio and a contractor with the Southwest Research Institute, said in a statement. "We then irradiated this ice mixture with energetic electrons to see how the peroxide production changed."

The experiment confirmed what the team had suspected: Even small amounts of CO2 in water ice can greatly boost hydrogen peroxide production at temperatures similar to those on Europa's surface, helping to explain the unexpected JWST observations.

This occurs because CO2 molecules behave as "molecular scavengers," grabbing hold of any stray electrons produced when radiation hits the water ice. By capturing these electrons, the CO2 helps protect hydrogen peroxide from being broken apart by further impacts or reactions.

"Synthesis of oxidants like hydrogen peroxide on Europa's surface is important from an astrobiological point of view," said study co-author Richard Cartwright, from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. "In fact, an entire NASA mission, the Europa Clipper, is en route to the Jovian system right now to explore the icy moon and help us understand Europa's habitability.

"Our experiments provide clues to better understand JWST Europa observations and serve as a prelude to upcoming close-range investigations by Europa Clipper and ESA's [the European Space Agency] JUICE spacecraft," Cartwright added.

The new study was published in the Planetary Science Journal on Monday (July 21).

The team also found a mixture of organic molecules, silicates and carbon based minerals on the object, meaning 3I/ATLAS resembles asteroids found at the outskirts of the solar system's main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

The team's observations, made with the SpeX instrument on the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF), perched upon the mountain Mauna Kea in Hawaii, and the Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph equipped on the Gemini South Telescope in Chile.

Discovered on July 1 by the ATLAS survey telescope, 3I/ATLAS is just the third object astronomers have discovered passing through the solar system from outside its boundaries.

The previous two interstellar bodies discovered in the solar system were the cigar-shaped 1I/'Oumuamua, seen in 2017, and the seeming asteroid/comet hybrid 2I/Borisov, detected two years later in 2019.

Some scientists estimate there could be as many as 1 million interstellar visitors in the solar system at any one time. It's thought that many of these could lurk in the Oort cloud, a shell of comets located at the very edge of the solar system. The study of 3I/ATLAS and other interstellar interlopers could reveal what conditions are like in other planetary systems.

"3I/ATLAS is an active comet. It clearly shows a coma and likely contains a significant amount of water ice," Bin Yang, the leader of this new research and a scientist at the Universidad Diego Portales, told Space.com. "Its physical activity confirms its classification as a comet. The most exciting finding was the presence of water ice features in the coma."

Comas are the nebulous envelopes of gas and dust that surround comets. This material has been expelled from within a comet's nucleus — that means analyzing it with a technique called spectroscopy can tell astronomers what the rock and ice of that comet is composed of.

"We obtained visible and near-infrared spectra of 3I/ATLAS as it approached the sun," Yang said. "However, no gas emissions were detected."

Yang and colleagues found that while 3I/ATLAS is undoubtedly a comet, some of its spectroscopic characteristics and its dust composition resemble D-type asteroids. These are bodies from the main asteroid belt with organic molecule-rich silicates and carbon with water ice in their interiors.

"Its reflectance properties are most similar to D-type asteroids and some active comets," Yang said. "The spectrum of 3I/ATLAS can be matched by a combination of Tagish Lake meteorite material and water ice. This suggests a mixture of organics, silicates, carbonate minerals and a significant amount of water ice."

This could also offer deeper insight into the evolution of the Milky Way. That's because separate research has used the trajectory of 3I/ATLAS to infer that it comes from a region of our galaxy with stars that formed around 2.5 billion years prior to our 4.6 billion-year-old sun.

That gives 3I/ATLAS a prospective age of 7 billion years, which would make it the oldest comet humanity has ever seen.

"If the initial water ice detection is confirmed, it could indeed represent some of the oldest and most pristine water ever observed, formed in another planetary system and preserved throughout its interstellar journey," Yang said.

Yang emphasized that there is yet to be a direct detection of individual compounds around 3I/ATLAS, with these results representing an inferred composition.

"3I/ATLAS is only the third confirmed interstellar object. Observing it near perihelion [its closest approach to the sun gave us a rare opportunity to study how interstellar material behaves under solar heating, an exciting and scientifically valuable event," Yang said. "The structure of water ice carries rich information about the object's formation conditions."

Yang and colleagues are now awaiting complementary data from other teams using large telescopes like the Very Large Telescope and the Keck Observatory.

"Our goal is to combine these spectra to confirm the ice detection and to search for gas emissions as the object approaches the sun," Yang concluded.

Clearly, 3I/ATLAS is set to keep scientists busy for years to come.

A pre-peer-reviewed version of the team's research appears on the paper repository arXiv.

I was preparing for my early morning class back in January 2025 when I received a notice regarding an asteroid called 2024 YR4. It said the probability it could hit Earth was unusually high.

As defending Earth from unexpected intruders such as asteroids is part of my expertise, I immediately started receiving questions from my students and colleagues about what was happening.

When scientists spot an asteroid whose trajectory might take it close to Earth, they monitor it frequently and calculate the probability that it might collide with our planet. As they receive more observational data, they get a better picture of what could happen.

Just having more data points early doesn’t make scientists’ predictions better. They need to keep following the asteroid as it moves through space to better understand its trajectory.

Reflecting on the incident a few months later, I wondered whether there might have been a better way for scientists to communicate about the risk with the public. We got accurate information, but as the questions I heard indicated, it wasn’t always enough to understand what it actually means.

Numbers change every day

The 2024 YR24 asteroid has a diameter of about 196 feet (60 meters) – equivalent to approximately a 15-story building in length.

At the time of the announcement in January, the asteroid’s impact probability was reported to exceed 1%. The impact probability describes how likely a hazardous asteroid is to hit Earth. For example, if the impact probability is 1%, it means that in 1 of 100 cases, it hits Earth. One in 100 is kind of rare, but still too close for comfort if you’re talking about the odds of a collision that could devastate Earth.

Over time, though, further observations and analyses revealed an almost-zero chance of this asteroid colliding with Earth.

After the initial notice in January, the impact probability continuously increased up to 3.1% on Feb. 18, but dropped to 1.5% on Feb. 19. Then, the impact probability continuously went down, until it hit 0.004% on Feb. 24. As of June 15, it now has an impact probability of less than 0.0000081%.

But while the probability of hitting Earth went down, the probability of the asteroid hitting the Moon started increasing. It went up to 1.7% on Feb. 24. As of April 2, it is 3.8%.

If it hits the Moon, some ejected materials from this collision could reach the Earth. However, these materials would burn away when they enter the Earth’s thick atmosphere.

Impact probability

To see whether an approaching object could hit Earth, researchers find out what an asteroid’s orbit looks like using a technique called astrometry. This technique can accurately determine an object’s orbit, down to only a few kilometers of uncertainty. But astrometry needs accurate observational data taken for a long time.

Any uncertainty in the calculation of the object’s orbit causes variations in the predicted solution. Instead of one precise orbit, the calculation usually gives scientists a cloud of its possible orbits. The ellipse enclosing these locations is called an error ellipse.

The impact probability describes how many orbital predictions in this ellipse hit the Earth.

Without enough observational data, the orbital uncertainty is high, so the ellipse tends to be large. In a large ellipse, there’s a higher chance that the ellipse “accidentally” includes Earth – even if the center is off the planet. So, even if an asteroid ultimately won’t hit Earth, its error ellipse might still include the planet before scientists collect enough data to narrow down the uncertainty.

As the level of uncertainty goes down, the ellipse shrinks. So, when Earth is inside a small error ellipse, the impact probability may become higher than when it’s inside a large error ellipse. Once the error ellipse shrinks enough that it no longer includes Earth, the impact probability goes down significantly. That’s what happened to 2024 YR4.

The impact probability is a single, practical value offering meaningful insight into an impact threat. However, just using the impact probability without any context may not provide meaningful guidelines to the public, as we saw with 2024 YR4.

Holding on and waiting for more data to refine a collision prediction, or introducing new metrics for assessing impacts on Earth, are alternative courses of action to provide people with better guidelines for future threats before adding confusion and fear.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Evidence of the death-defying star was spotted in the form of a flare that was followed by a near-identical second flare around two years later (700 days). The double-flare has been given the designation AT 2022dbl. The team behind this research ruled out the possibility that it was caused by two stars being devoured by this black hole, leaving them to conclude the flares came from two "bites" of the same stellar snack.

The discovery is the first evidence of a star escaping a destructive encounter with a supermassive black hole and then coming back to let it take a second bite. The big question is, did the star survive to return for a second rematch with the black hole?

It could therefore change our view of so-called "tidal disruption events" or "TDEs" in which black holes rip apart stars and devour their remains, indicating this could just be the first act of a longer cosmic performance.

Some black holes prefer a lighter meal

Supermassive black holes with masses equal to that of millions or billions of suns dwell at the heart of all large galaxies.

TDEs occur when unfortunate stars wander too close to these cosmic titans and experience their immense gravitational influence. This generates terrific tidal forces within the star that simultaneously squash it horizontally while stretching it vertically.

This process, vividly known as "spaghettification," results in shredded stellar pasta, some of which falls around the black hole, wrapping around it like spaghetti around a fork, and is gradually fed to it. The rest of this material is blasted out from around the supermassive black hole.

The material that remains swirls around the black hole at incredibly speeds, generating friction that causes bursts of light, and the ejected material also flares. These flares last weeks to months, illuminating the region around the supermassive black hole, allowing it to be studied.

However, over the last decade, some TDEs have been observed that don't behave the way scientists would expect. That is because both the temperature and brightness of some TDEs have been lower than expected. AT 2022dbl could explain this by implying that some black holes like to savour their stellar meals rather than immediately and totally destroying them.

The team now wants to know if the third time is the charm for this daring star. If it survived its second black hole encounter, the star will swoop back toward the black hole, causing a third flare around 700 days after the second.

"The question now is whether we’ll see a third flare after two more years, in early 2026," team member and Tel Aviv University researcher Iair Arcavi said in a statement. "If we see a third flare, it means that the second one was also the partial disruption of the star.

"So maybe all such flares, which we have been trying to understand for a decade now as full stellar disruptions, are not what we thought."

Should a third flare not erupt in two years, it would indicate that the star's second encounter with the black hole was fatal. Should this be the case, the similarity between the first flare and the second one would imply that non-fatal and fatal TDE flares, or partial and full disruptions, look the same.

That is something that scientists had previously predicted but have never evidenced with observations.

"Either way, we’ll have to rewrite our interpretation of these flares and what they can teach us about the monsters lying in the centers of galaxies," Arcavi concluded.

The team's research was published on July 1 in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

What is it?

The Atacama Desert is situated in an area that makes it nearly impossible to receive storms like it recently did. This is due to the Chilean Andes mountain range, which creates a rain shadow over the area.

However, sometimes a cold-based cyclone penetrates the area, bringing precipitation as either snow or rain. In the case of the June 2025 snowfall, meteorologists said it was the first snow in the region for over a decade.

Where is it?

The Atacama Desert is found between the Andes Mountains and the coasts of Chile and Peru to the west.

Why is it amazing?

This image was taken by the MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) instrument on NASA’s Terra satellite from low Earth orbit. It shows how the snow blanketed the Chilean landscape.

While telescopes in the upper mountains like the Southern Astrophysical Research (SOAR) Telescope received minimal snow, others lower down like the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) received more, forcing it into "survival mode" and temporarily suspending all scientific research.

Want to learn more?

You can read more about telescopes in Chile along with the research happening at ALMA.

The structure, named the Midpoint cloud, is an example of a Giant Molecular Cloud (GMC). It was discovered by the team using the Green Bank Telescope. Peeling back the layers of the Midpoint cloud, they found dynamic regions including several potential sites of new star formation and dense lanes of dust feeding the heart of our galaxy.

"No one had any idea this cloud existed until we looked at this location in the sky and found the dense gas," team leader and National Radio Astronomy Observatory scientist Natalie Butterfield said. "Through measurements of the size, mass, and density, we confirmed this was a giant molecular cloud."

The active region of the GMC and its thick lanes of matter could reveal how material flows from the Milky Way's disk to the very heart of our galaxy.

"These dust lanes are like hidden rivers of gas and dust that are carrying material into the center of our galaxy,” Butterfield continued. "The Midpoint cloud is a place where material from the galaxy’s disk is transitioning into the more extreme environment of the galactic center and provides a unique opportunity to study the initial gas conditions before accumulating in the center of our galaxy."

The gas within the Midpoint cloud exists in a turbulent state, which mirrors conditions found within gas at the Milky Way's center. This chaotic motion could be triggered by material flowing along dust lanes itself or by clashes between the Midpoint cloud and other molecular clouds.

Also within the Midpoint cloud are several clumps of dense gas and dust that could be about to collapse and birth new stars.

One clump, designated Knot E, appears to be a small but dense cloud of gas that is in the process of being eroded by the radiation blasted at it by stars in its proximity. Formations like this are referred to as free-floating evaporating gas globules (frEGGs).

The astronomers also discovered a new source of intense microwave radiation called a "maser" that could be further evidence of intense star formation within the Midpoint cloud.

The researchers didn't just discover evidence of stellar birth with this GMC, however. A shell-like structure in the Midpoint cloud appears to have been caused by the explosive supernova deaths of massive stars.

The research conducted by the team suggests the Midpoint cloud is vital to the flow of matter from the disk of the Milky Way to its heart.

This would feed star formation in the thick central stellar bar that churns around the center of our galaxy. Similar structures of dense stars are found in other barred spiral galaxies.

That means further investigation of this cloud and its surroundings could help develop a clearer picture of how the building blocks of stars gather at the center of galaxies.

"Star formation in galactic bars is a bit of a puzzle," team member and Green Bank Observatory scientist Larry Morgan said. "The strong forces in these regions can actually suppress star formation.

"However, the leading edges of these bars, such as where the Midpoint is located, can accumulate dense gas and trigger new star formation."

The team's research was published on Wednesday (July 16) in The Astrophysical Journal.

Although we may not see it with our eyes or in the photos we capture with our standard cameras or phones, the sun is constantly changing. Structures on the surface or lower atmosphere of the sun can vary from day to day, or even from hour to hour. In this guide, we'll outline what you'll need to safely photograph our ever-changing sun and what structures you can hope to image.

Safety: Take precautions

It is important not to look directly at the sun. Doing so for even short durations can permanently damage your eyes. If you want to look up at the sun for reference, use a pair of certified solar eclipse glasses. Check out some of the best solar viewing gear, but note that some products allow you to photograph the sun safely through a camera or a telescope, but are not rated for direct observation with your eyes. See our guide on how to observe the sun safely.

Cameras, lenses and settings

No matter how you adjust the settings, even on the best cameras for astrophotography, the sun will remain too bright for you to successfully image any detail if you don't use the right equipment. Therefore, to photograph the sun, you must significantly reduce its effective brightness.

You can do this with a neutral-density filter, which attaches to the end of your camera lens. Neutral-density filters are used in all kinds of photography, but many will not have the power to block out enough sunlight to image the sun. Therefore, you should look for a neutral-density filter designed especially for solar photography.

With this filter attached to your camera, you will be able to successfully photograph the sun in optical light. Different filters may also change the apparent color of the sun in your image, with gray/white and orange/yellow being common filter options.

It's important to note that although a purpose-made filter can reduce the sun's brightness enough to image the star, it is not enough to protect your eyes from sunlight. Therefore, while using a neutral-density filter for solar photography, do not look into the optical viewfinder on your camera (if you have one). Instead, use the digital display. Similarly, do not use the filter to look directly at the sun.

The size of the sun in your image will depend on the focal length of your camera lens. At a minimum, you'll need a 200-millimeter telephoto lens. However, as shown in the images below, this will leave a lot of empty space in your camera frame. The longer the focal length, the larger the sun will appear in your image, and thus the higher the resolution of the sun will be. The images below show how the sun looks in a selection of focal lengths on the Nikon D850, a full-frame DSLR camera.

Once your lens and filter are sorted, you can play around with your camera settings.

1. Set your camera to aperture-priority mode. Typically, an aperture between f/5.6 and f/8 will give the best performance for most lenses, but you can play around with it to see what works best for your setup.

2. Adjust your exposure time. The exposure time you set may depend on several factors. If you do not have a tripod or you are using a tripod in strong wind, you will want to shorten your exposure time. This will reduce the total wobble throughout the exposure and lead to a sharper image. If you have a strong tripod and wind is not an issue, you can afford to increase the exposure time, which will decrease the noise levels.

3. Set your ISO. You do not want an ISO sensitivity high enough to saturate the image, but you need it high enough to avoid adding noise. A longer exposure time will allow for a shorter ISO, without introducing too much noise. Play around with these settings to find a combination that works for you. As with nighttime astronomy, another good tip is to not take the photograph immediately by clicking the capture button (if you're using a tripod), as your interaction with the camera will cause the system to wobble. Instead, set a timer for 10 seconds or longer, or use a remote control to take the shot.

Photographing the sun with telescopes

If you are feeling more ambitious, you can photograph the sun with one of the best telescopes. We won't dive much into the camera setup here, as it will be similar to that used in nighttime astronomy. You can either mount your usual camera to the telescope directly or use a purpose-made eyepiece camera. Either way, the important pieces of equipment typically sit at the other end of the telescope that's pointing at the sun.

Different filters allow us to see different layers of the sun, so let's quickly recap these layers of our local star. The surface of the sun is called the photosphere. This is the layer of the sun that emits the sunlight visible to the human eye. Above the photosphere, which has a temperature of around 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit (5,500 degrees Celsius), is a layer called the chromosphere. The chromosphere is cooler and less dense than the photosphere, with a temperature around 7,200 F (4,000 C). Above the chromosphere, temperatures rapidly increase through a thin transition region, before reaching the solar corona. The corona is the tenuous outer atmosphere of the sun, with temperatures of around 1.8 million F (1 million C), which becomes visible to us during a total solar eclipse.

Just like on your camera, you can attach a purpose-made solar filter to the end of your telescope. Alternatively, you can use a dedicated solar telescope, which utilizes a system of internal filters. Filters block the majority of sunlight, allowing only a small amount of light into your telescope. Different filters allow in light from different layers of the sun, thus changing the features of interest available to your photography. The three primary filter types are white light, H-alpha and Ca K.

A white-light filter removes over 99.9% of the intensity of incoming sunlight, but it does not filter by wavelength. With a white-light filter, you will receive sunlight from the sun's surface. If you have a larger telescope aperture or you plan to point at the sun for a long time, an ultraviolet and infrared (UV/IR) filter is also recommended. This will not affect your photo, but it will remove excess light to prevent it from heating up your telescope system.

Unlike white-light filters, which image the photosphere, H-alpha and Ca K filters image a higher layer of the sun, the chromosphere. These filters work by filtering light by wavelength, instead of just intensity, to allow in light from a narrow part of the solar spectrum.

H-alpha is light emitted by hydrogen plasma at a specific energy level that is dominant in the chromosphere. This light is at a wavelength of 656.28 nanometers, which sits in the red part of the visible spectrum. When you use an H-alpha filter, the sun therefore appears red. H-alpha filters can be broadband (about 1 Å) or narrowband (0.5 Å). These will alter the view of the chromosphere slightly. Some filters are also tunable, which allows you to adjust the wavelength range of the filter. Ca K filters filter a wavelength of light emitted by calcium plasma at 393.4 nm, which appears blue to the human eye.

When you're using an external filter on your telescope, do not remove the eyepiece from the viewfinder scope. Whether you're using a dedicated solar telescope or an external filter on a nighttime telescope, different filters will show different features on the sun. The images below show the sun photographed through the H-alpha and Ca K filters discussed above. White-light images are shown earlier in this article.

Features on the sun

Now that you have your full setup, let's take a look at the structures you can hope to see on the sun.

Sunspots

The easiest feature on the sun to photograph are sunspots. Sunspots are cooler parts of the photosphere created by strong regions of concentrated magnetic field. The intense magnetic field above sunspots is what creates solar flares and coronal mass ejections.

A sunspot looks like a dark structure with a darker inner section (the umbra) and slightly lighter (yet still darker than the surrounding photosphere) penumbra around it. Sunspots can exist for weeks or months, but they can change significantly over a few hours as new magnetic fields emerge, or cancel out, within the region. Sunspots are visible in the photosphere through white-light filters and solar telescopes. They are still visible in chromospheric filters (H-alpha and Ca K), but the contrast is not as stark.

Filaments

At higher altitudes, a different type of magnetic structure is visible. Filaments are twisted magnetic structures full of chromospheric material. They are rooted in the lower solar atmosphere, but they stretch into higher altitudes in the corona. Because they are composed of material from the chromosphere, filaments are not visible with standard white-light filters. Instead, they require either H-alpha or Ca II filters to be seen. At these wavelengths, filaments appear dark against the bright solar disk.

Prominences

Whereas filaments are viewed against the sun's surface, prominences are the same structure but seen over the edge of the sun. Against the background of space, prominences appear bright. They can be photographed with the same filters as filaments, and they can also be seen with the naked eye during the totality phase of a total solar eclipse. A tunable narrow H-Alpha filter will really make prominences and filaments pop against their background. You can also play around with the exposure time to change the contrast of the prominences against the dark background.

Solar eclipses

Although the advice outlined in this article can be used to photograph the sun anytime, it is also valid during the partial phases of a solar eclipse, when the sun is partially blocked by the moon. The moon's edge provides a new feature to photograph, with the intricate irregularities of craters along the moon's silhouette visible. For further advice on photographing the partial or total phases of a solar eclipse, check out our guide on how to photograph a solar eclipse.

If you want to read more about the science of observing the sun and the history of our relationship with it, check out my book "The Sun: Beginner's guide to our local star (Collins, 2023).

A giant parachute built for Europe's beleaguered ExoMars mission has aced a drop test with a mock lander during a test campaign in the Arctic.

The double parachute system consists of a 50-foot-wide (15-meter) first-stage chute and a secondary 118-foot-wide (35m) chute, which is, according to ESA, the largest ever designed to land an object on Mars.

If all goes well, it will lower the 683-pound (310-kilogram) Rosalind Franklin rover to the surface of the red planet in 2028, so that it can commence its delayed search for traces of Martian life.

The parachute system had had a complicated journey with many test failures but was deemed ready for the planned launch in 2022 before the mission was suspended after Russia invaded Ukraine. Since Europe withdrew from its collaboration with Russia, who had provided the landing platform and a few other bits of technology for the mission, the parachute has been stored waiting for a new landing platform to be built in Europe.

"We are running this campaign to confirm our readiness for Mars, and to verify that the parachutes are still performing as expected after the long storage," Luca Ferracina, ESA's ExoMars Entry Descent and Landing Module system engineer, said in a statement.

That's good news for the mission, which has been in limbo since the Trump administration's draft NASA budget was released in May. NASA committed to provide a few hundred million dollars to help ESA get ExoMars off the ground in 2028, but the Trump budget culled that funding as part of its widespread science mission cuts. But the U.S. Senate's Appropriations Committee rejected those cuts in its report published on Friday, July 18, suggesting that Trump's budget may not find support among legislators.

ESA is surely following the discussions closely as NASA's withdrawal would likely cause further delays to the heavily delayed mission.

Earlier this year, ESA signed a $194 million contract with the European aerospace giant Airbus to build the new landing platform. During the parachute tests, its mock-up descended to the ground at Sweden's Esrange Space Center in Kiruna from the altitude of 18.6 miles (30 kilometers) after having been dropped from a high-altitude balloon. The capsule, according to ESA, experienced about 20 seconds of free fall before the first of the parachutes unfurled.

Although the atmosphere of Mars has only about 1% of the density of Earth's atmosphere, the engineers fine tuned the test to recreate the forces the landing assembly will experience on Mars.

"The combination of velocity and low atmospheric density in this test is exactly the same as what the parachutes will experience on Mars," Ferracina said.

During the Mars landing, the capsule will hit the red planet's tenuous atmosphere at a mind-boggling speed of 13,050 mph (21,000 km/h) but will slow down to about 1,000 miles per hour from natural drag before the first parachute opens. During the tests, the mock-up capsule reached about that speed after its short freefall through the thin stratospheric air.

"We are happy to confirm that we have a parachute design that can work on Mars — an ambitious system with the largest parachute ever to be flown outside Earth," Ferracina said.

What is it?

The Vera Rubin Observatory is designed to study dark matter, which makes up 85% of our universe but is still unknown to scientists. Dark matter can create various effects in space thanks to its gravity, such as lensing, which astronomers can capture with the observatory's telescopes, hoping to find more about what makes up dark matter.

Astronomers are also using these telescopes to study dark energy as well as the Milky Way galaxy and other structures in our universe.

Where is it?

The Vera Rubin Observatory is located in Cerro Pachón in Chile at an elevation of 5,200 feet (1,600 meters) above sea level.

Why is it amazing?

In this image, the observatory's opening can be seen thanks to the glow of its its calibration LEDs. As the telescope scans the skies once every three days with the world's largest digital camera, the calibration process helps ensure all the equipment is working properly.

The observatory has just begun its decade-long Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) mission, where it will repeatedly scan the southern sky. Using the largest camera, the observatory captures detailed images that are so large they require a "data butler" to help manage them. Despite the size, the images could be the key to cracking the case of what dark matter truly is.

Want to learn more?

You can read more about the Vera Rubin Observatory, the legacy of Vera Rubin, and the hunt for dark matter.

Prior to 3I/ATLAS, the previous two "interstellar invaders" were 1I/'Oumuamua, spotted in 2017, and 2I/Borisov, detected in 2019. Both have now left the solar system, though other interstellar bodies are predicted to dwell undetected in our cosmic backyard.

As Space.com reported on July 11, recent research suggested that 3I/ATLAS could be even more exciting than initially perceived, as its trajectory through the solar system indicates it comes from a region of the Milky Way older than our 4.6 billion-year-old solar system. With an estimated age of 7 billion years, that would make 3I/ATLAS the oldest comet we've ever seen.

Astrophysics undergrad student astrafoxen alerted his followers to the Hubble images of 3I/ATLAS via this Bluesky feed.

"Hubble Space Telescope images of interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS are out! These were taken 5 hours ago. Plenty of cosmic rays peppering the images, but the comet's coma looks very nice and puffy. Best of luck to the researchers trying to write up papers for this... " the post reads.

Hubble Space Telescope images of interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS are out! These were taken 5 hours ago. Plenty of cosmic rays peppering the images, but the comet's coma looks very nice and puffy. Best of luck to the researchers trying to write up papers for this... archive.stsci.edu/proposal_sea... 🔭

— @astrafoxen.bsky.social (@astrafoxen.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2025-07-22T09:45:35.680Z

One such paper is already available, albeit as a preprint. Describing optical and near-infrared spectroscopy performed on 3I/ATLAS, the research reveals that: "3I/ATLAS is an active interstellar comet containing abundant water ice, with a dust composition more similar to D-type asteroids than to ultrared trans-Neptunian objects."

D-type asteroids are space rocks packed with organic molecule-rich silicates and carbon with water ice in their interiors.

The arrival of 3I/ATLAS into the solar system has initiated an exciting period for astronomers. Since the solar system interloper was spotted on July 1, 2025, by the ATLAS survey telescope, an array of other instruments have attempted to get in on the act by spotting the comet.

One project that will be trying to get a good look at 3I/ATLAS is the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, which observes the universe near and far with the largest digital camera ever built. That is fitting, as the comet from beyond the solar system was actually first spotted as scientists were preparing to make observations with Rubin.

The new observatory, which released its first images of the cosmos on June 23, 2025, is expected to discover between 5 and 50 interstellar objects as they zip through the solar system during the observatory's decade-long Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST).

In the meantime, 3I/ATLAS can enjoy the undivided attention of astronomers aiming to study interstellar bodies with a view to painting an intimate picture of planetary systems beyond our own.

The Hubble images of 3I/ATLAS are available to download from this database.

For decades, scientists pictured Europa's frozen surface as a still, silent shell. But the new observations reveal that it's actually a dynamic world that's far from frozen in time.

"We think that the surface is fairly porous and warm enough in some areas to allow the ice to recrystallize rapidly," Richard Cartwright, a spectroscopist at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory and lead author of the new study, said in a statement.

Perhaps even more exciting is what this surface activity reveals about Europa's subsurface ocean. The presence of geologic activity and ongoing cycling between the subsurface and surface make "chaos terrains" — highly disrupted regions where blocks of ice seem to have broken off, drifted and refrozen — especially valuable as potential windows into Europa's interior.

The study focused on two regions in Europa's southern hemisphere: Tara Regio and Powys Regio. Tara Regio, in particular, stands out as one of the moon's most intriguing areas. Observations from JWST detected crystalline ice both at the surface and deeper below — challenging previous assumptions about how ice is distributed on Europa.

Related: Explore Jupiter's icy ocean moon Europa in NASA virtual tour (photos)

By measuring the spectral properties of these "chaos" regions using remotely sensed data, scientists could gain valuable insight about Europa's chemistry as well as its potential for habitability, they explained in the paper, which was published May 28 in The Planetary Science Journal.

"Our data showed strong indications that what we are seeing must be sourced from the interior, perhaps from a subsurface ocean nearly 20 miles (30 kilometers) beneath Europa's thick icy shell," Ujjwal Raut, program manager at the Southwest Research Institute and co-author of the study, said in the statement.

Hidden chemistry

Raut and his team conducted laboratory experiments to study how water freezes on Europa, where the surface is constantly bombarded by charged particles from space. Unlike on Earth, where ice naturally forms a hexagonal crystal structure, the intense radiation on Europa disrupts the ice's structure, causing it to become what's known as amorphous ice — a disordered, noncrystalline form.

The experiments played a crucial role in demonstrating how the ice changes over time. By studying how the ice transforms between different states, scientists can learn more about the moon's surface dynamics. When combined with fresh data from JWST, these findings add to a growing body of evidence showing that a vast, hidden liquid ocean lies beneath Europa's icy shell.

"In this same region […] we see a lot of other unusual things, including the best evidence for sodium chloride, like table salt, probably originating from its interior ocean," Cartwright said. "We also see some of the strongest evidence for CO₂ and hydrogen peroxide on Europa. The chemistry in this location is really strange and exciting."

These regions, marked by fractured surface features, may point to geologic activity pushing material up from beneath Europa's icy shell.

JWST's NIRSpec instrument is especially well suited for studying Europa's surface because it can detect key chemical signatures across a wide range of infrared wavelengths. This includes features associated with crystalline water ice and a specific form of carbon dioxide called ¹³CO₂, which are important for understanding the moon's geologic and chemical processes.

NIRSpec can measure these features all at once while also creating detailed maps that show how these materials are distributed across Europa's surface. Its high sensitivity and ability to collect both spectral and spatial data make it an ideal tool for uncovering clues about what lies beneath Europa's icy crust.

The team detected higher levels of carbon dioxide in these areas than in surrounding regions. They concluded that it likely originates from the subsurface ocean rather than from external sources like meteorites, which would have resulted in a more even distribution.

Moreover, carbon dioxide is unstable under Europa's intense radiation environment, suggesting that these deposits are relatively recent and tied to ongoing geological processes. "The evidence for a liquid ocean underneath Europa's icy shell is mounting, which makes this so exciting as we continue to learn more," Raut said.

Another intriguing finding was the presence of carbon-13, an isotope of carbon. "Where is this ¹³CO₂ coming from? It's hard to explain, but every road leads back to an internal origin, which is in line with other hypotheses about the origin of ¹²CO₂ detected in Tara Regio," Cartwright said.

This study arrives as NASA's Europa Clipper mission is currently en route to the Jovian moon, with an expected arrival in April 2030. The spacecraft will perform dozens of flybys, with each one bringing it closer to Europa's surface to gather critical data about the ocean hidden beneath the moon's icy crust.

The proposed mission, called CosmoCube, aims to "listen" for these ancient signals from the far side of the moon. It will target the "cosmic dark ages" — a critical-but-mysterious era roughly 50 million to 1 billion years after the Big Bang, when the first stars, galaxies and black holes in the universe formed.

"It's incredible how far these radio waves have travelled, now arriving with news of the universe's history," David Bacon, a cosmologist at the University of Portsmouth in the U.K. who's involved with the mission, said in a statement. "The next step is to go to the quieter side of the moon to hear that news."

Observing this distant epoch is notoriously difficult, astronomers say. At that time, the universe was filled with a dense fog of neutral hydrogen gas that blocked visible light from traveling freely through space, rendering the early cosmos opaque.

However, hydrogen, which is the most abundant element in the universe, emits a characteristic radio signal at a frequency of 1,420 megahertz, corresponding to a wavelength of about 8.3 inches (21 centimeters). As the first luminous objects ignited, they subtly transformed the hydrogen around them, altering the strength and profile of this signal. Capturing these variations could offer a pristine view into how the first luminous objects formed, according to the statement.

While this signal has been studied extensively in the nearby universe, detecting its much fainter counterpart from the universe's earliest days is far more challenging. Capturing these ancient signals requires near-total radio silence, which is virtually impossible to achieve on Earth, where electronic devices and atmospheric interference create a constant background hum.

"It's like trying to hear that whisper while a loud concert is playing next door," Eloy de Lera Acedo, an associate professor of radio cosmology at the University of Cambridge who's involved with the CosmoCube mission, said in the statement. "This makes it really hard to pick up those faint signals from billions of years ago."

The CosmoCube mission would take advantage of the moon's far side, which acts as a natural shield from Earth's radio emissions, according to the statement. From this unique vantage point, the probe aims to deploy a sensitive radiometer designed to detect low-frequency radio signals.

The mission data could also help to resolve the Hubble tension, the long-standing puzzle in cosmology involving conflicting measurements of the universe's expansion rate based on observations of the early universe versus the local universe.

Lab prototypes of the instruments are already undergoing environmental testing. The team plans to launch CosmoCube within the next four to five years, with the goal of reaching lunar orbit by the end of the decade, the team said in the statement.

Now, scientists have discovered that these celestial bodies may have more in common than once thought. The star clusters may share a common origin mechanism, they say, despite the fact that the three clusters are all different ages and are located at different distances from Earth.

This new research suggests looking at the three star clusters is like looking at three snapshots taken of the same person at three different stages of their life, from infancy to old age.

The youngest of these open clusters is the ONC at 2.5 million years old. Located around 1,350 light-years away and packed with thousands of young stars embedded in the stellar cloud that created them, it is one of the most active star-forming regions in the Milky Way.

Located 444 light-years from Earth, the Pleiades is less densely packed than the ONC, but it is much more ancient at 100 million years old. However, the Hyades, located 151 light-years away, has fewer stars that are even more thinly spread out and is around 700 million years old.

Yet, as diverse as these star clusters seem, the team's new research suggests they share a particular kind of ancestor.

"Our highly precise stellar dynamics calculations have now shown that all three star clusters originated from the same predecessor," team member and University of Bonn researcher Pavel Kroupa said in a statement.

Star clusters on the same cosmic family tree

The team compares the varied ages and conditions in these three star clusters to looking at the same human being through photos that document the stages of their life. The densely packed ONC is the baby, the more dispersed Pleiades is the adolescent, and the Hyades is the elderly person.

Though the three clusters didn't form from the same molecular cloud of dense gas and dust, they can be compared to the same person being born three times in different parts of the globe.

"From this, we can learn that open star clusters seem to have a preferred mode of star formation," Kroupa explained. "It appears that there is a preferred physical environment in which stars form when they evolve within these clouds."

The question is: How does a cluster like the ONC develop into one like Pleiades and then age into a cluster like the Hyades? Kroupa and colleagues, including team leader Ghasem Safaei from the Institute for Advanced Studies in Basic Sciences, set about answering this question with computer simulations.

Star clusters grow old gracefully

The team's simulations revealed the forces acting between stars in a cluster. This allowed the scientists to model the life cycle of such a collection of stars from a gas-rich, dense infancy through gradual expansion and gradual gas and star loss over the course of 800 million years.

The results obtained by the team closely reflected the changes in structure and composition between the phases we see exemplified by the ONC, the Pleiades and the Hyades.

"This research shows that it is entirely plausible that star clusters such as the ONC follow a development path that transforms them into systems like Pleiades and later on Hyades," Hosein Haghi, study team member and a researcher at the University of Bonn, said in the statement.

The team's results indicated that clusters like the ONC can lose up to 85% of their stellar population and yet hang on to coherent structures when they reach ages similar to that of the Hyades while passing through a stage that resembles the Pleiades.

The team's research also suggests that the fact these three clusters appear close together in the night sky over Earth, despite being widely separated in the cosmos, may be more than a mere coincidence. This positioning could, in fact, be related to the way star clusters form and evolve in relation to our galaxy.

"This research gives us a deeper understanding of how star clusters form and develop and illustrates the delicate balance between internal dynamics and external forces such as the gravitational pull of the Milky Way," team member Akram Hasani Zonoozi of the University of Bonn said in the statement.

Beyond the research's importance for our understanding of star clusters and their evolution, the team's work demonstrates the power of combining simulations with astronomical observations.

This research was published on Friday (July 18) in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

New evidence found in shavings from a meteorite known as Northwest Africa 12264 — a 50-gram (1.8 ounces) piece of space rock that is believed to have formed in the outer solar system — suggests that rocky planets like Earth and distant icy bodies may have formed at the same time. This challenges the long-standing belief that planets closer to the sun formed before those in the outer solar system, the ones that lie beyond the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

Planets form within the rotating disks of gas and dust that surround young stars, where particles collide and stick together through a process known as accretion. As developing rocky planets heat up, they begin to differentiate, forming separate internal layers known as the core, mantle and crust.

Scientists have thought that our solar system's inner rocky planets — Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars —formed first (around 4.566 billion years ago), while gas giants and icy bodies in the outer solar system came together slightly later (4.563 billion years ago), due to the colder temperatures at a greater distance from the sun. Rocky planets farther out were also thought to form more slowly because their higher water and ice content would have delayed internal heating and core development.

Analyzing the composition of the meteorite (which was purchased from a dealer in Morocco in 2018) revealed a ratio of chromium and oxygen that indicates it came from the outer part of the solar system. Using precise isotopic dating methods, the researchers found that the rock formed 4.564 billion years ago — just two to three million years after the solar system’s earliest solid materials.

Until now, such early formation was thought to be limited to bodies from the inner solar system, according to a statement announcing the new study.

Evidence that rocky planets beyond Jupiter formed as rapidly, and at the same time, as the inner planets could transform our understanding of how planets take shape — not only in our solar system, but in planetary systems throughout the universe, the researchers said.

Their findings were published on July 4 in the journal Communications Earth & Environment.

After a long wait, astronomers have finally seen the stellar companion of the famous star Betelgeuse. This companion star orbits Betelgeuse in an incredibly tight orbit, which could explain one of Betelgeuse's longstanding mysteries. The star is doomed, however, and the team behind this discovery predicts that Betelgeuse will cannibalize it in a few thousand years.

The fact that Betelgeuse is one of the brightest stars in the sky over Earth, visible with the naked eye, has made it one of the most well-known celestial bodies. And ever since the first astronomers began inspecting this fixture in the night sky, they have been baffled by the fact that its brightness varies over periods of six years.

This mystery is now solved.

The six-year dimming of this red supergiant star is not to be confused with an event that saw it drop sharply in brightness over 2019 and 2020. This event, known as the "Great Dimming," sparked intense interest across the globe. The Great Dimming was so unexpected that it led some scientists to theorize that it could signal Betelgeuse was approaching the supernova explosion that will one day mark the end of its life.

That supernova speculation was well-founded. After all, though it is only around 10 million years old, the fact that Betelgeuse is 700 times the size of the sun means it has burned through its nuclear fuel much faster than our 4.6 billion-year-old star. That means its supernova death is likely approaching. However, in 2023, the Great Dimming was explained by a giant obscuring cloud of dust emitted by Betelgeuse.

Even though the mystery of the Great Dimming was solved, this event spurred a renewed interest in this ever-so familiar star, the tenth brightest in the night sky. That renewed interest included the desire of astronomers to solve the less dramatic but more regular periodic dimming of Betelgeuse.

The lesser dimming of Betelgeuse

Betelgeuse has a primary period of variability that lasts around 400 days, as well as a second, more extended dimming period lasting around six years.

Unlike the Great Dimming, which perplexed scientists for only a few years, this regular "heartbeat" of Betelgeuse has baffled humanity for millennia!

It was while reviewing archival data that scientists began to theorize that the six-year variability of Betelgeuse could be the work of a hidden companion star. However, deeper investigation with the Hubble Space Telescope and NASA's X-ray space observatory Chandra left scientists coming up empty-handed in terms of a companion star.

Undeterred, NASA Ames Research Center scientist Steve Howell led a team of astrophysicists who set about investigating Betelgeuse with the Gemini North telescope and its 'Alopeke (Hawaiian for "fox") instrument.

"Gemini North's ability to obtain high angular resolutions and sharp contrasts allowed the companion of Betelgeuse to be directly detected," Howell said in a statement. "Papers that predicted Betelgeuse's companion believed that no one would likely ever be able to image it."

The 'Alopeke instrument uses a technique in astronomy called "speckle imaging" that uses short exposure times to remove distortions from images that are caused by Earth's atmosphere. This provided the Gemini North telescope with the high-resolution capability to detect the faint companion of Betelgeuse for the first time ever.

Howell and colleagues were able to do more than just image the companion star of Betelgeuse; they were also able to determine some of its characteristics.

What do we know about Betelgeuse's companion?

The team thinks the star has a mass around 1.5 times that of the sun and that it is a hot blue-white star orbiting Betelgeuse at a distance equivalent to four times the distance between Earth and the sun, fairly close for binary stars. That means it exists within the extended atmosphere of Betelgeuse. This represents the first time a companion star has been detected so close to a red supergiant.

The team also theorizes that this star has not yet begun to burn hydrogen in its core, the process that defines the main sequence lifetime of a star. Thus, the Betelgeuse system appears to consist of two stars that exist at opposite ends of their lives, despite the fact that both stars formed at the same time!

That's because larger and more massive stars don't just burn through their nuclear fuel more rapidly; they also initiate the fusion of hydrogen to helium earlier. However, in this case, this delay doesn't mean that Betelgeuse's companion is in for a long life; the intense gravity of Betelgeuse is likely to drag the smaller star into it, devouring it.

The team estimates this cannibalistic event could happen within the next 10,000 years.

In the meantime, astronomers will get another look at the stellar companion of Betelgeuse in November 2027 when it achieves maximum separation from the infamous red supergiant star.

Beyond this research's implications for Betelgeuse and its ill-fated companion, it tells scientists more about why red supergiants undergo periodic changes in brightness how periods of many years.

"This detection was at the very extremes of what can be accomplished with Gemini in terms of high-angular resolution imaging, and it worked," Howell said. "This now opens the door for other observational pursuits of a similar nature."

The team's research was published on Monday (July 21) across two papers in The Astrophysical Journal.

ESA has chosen five rocket companies to pass through to the next round of its competition to encourage and support the development of new launch vehicles.

The agency announced on July 7 that it had selected German companies Isar Aerospace and Rocket Factory Augsburg (RFA), Maiaspace from France, Spain's PLD Space and Orbital Express Launch, or Orbex, which is based in the United Kingdom, to proceed to the next stage of its European Launcher Challenge.

The European Launcher Challenge (ELC) is a new scheme to promote new small and medium-sized launch vehicles and boost competitiveness in Europe, which for decades has relied on large Ariane rockets.

The challenge was announced in November 2023, followed by a request for information and a formal call for proposals in March 2025, leading to ESA announcing the preselected challengers. The ELC has two components. The first is for launch services to be performed for ESA from 2026 to 2030, while the second is for development and demonstration of larger, upgraded launchers.

Each chosen company will be eligible for up to 169 million euros ($198 million US) in support to cover one or both of these components. The ESA member states will finalize funding decisions in November at the agency's crucial ministerial council, which will set funding for projects for the next three years.

Both Isar Aerospace and RFA have made it to the pad already. Isar's Spectrum rocket had a first, short-lived flight in March from Norway, with the launcher exploding seconds in flight. RFA's RFA One rocket exploded on the pad in the Shetland Islands back in August 2024 during a static fire test.

PLD Space conducted a suborbital flight of its Miura 1 rocket in 2023, as a stepping stone toward launching the orbital Miura 5. Orbex, meanwhile, is working on its Prime microlauncher, while Maiaspace is developing its reusable Maia rocket.

These are not the only European companies engaged in developing new rockets, with Skyrora (U.K.), Latitude (France) and HyImpulse (Germany) at various stages of developing their rocket concepts.

Astronomers have seen what appears to be a forming planet carving out a complex pattern in a disk of gas and dust around a young star. The discovery of this spiral architect could help us better understand how planetary systems like the solar system came to be.

The infant extrasolar planet, or "exoplanet," is creating a spiral arm pattern in the planet-forming protoplanetary disk of the 10 million-year-old star HD 135344B, also known as SAO 206462, located in the Scorpius OB2-3 star-forming region. If 10 million years old doesn't seem particularly young, remember the sun is considered middle-aged — and its around 4.6 billion years old.

The discovery of the potential planetary culprit for this swirling spiral pattern was made using the Very Large Telescope (VLT) and its Enhanced Resolution Imager and Spectrograph ERIS) instrument. It may represent the first time astronomers have witnessed a planet actively forming within a protoplanetary disk.

"We will never witness the formation of Earth, but here, around a young star 440 light-years away, we may be watching a planet come into existence in real time," Francesco Maio, study team leader and a researcher at the University of Florence, said in a statement.

Maio and colleagues estimate this budding planet is around twice as large as Jupiter. It orbits HD 135344B at a similar distance to Neptune's orbit around the sun. That's about 30 times the distance between Earth and the sun.

And as this potential planet seems to carve channels into the protoplanetary disk of HD 135344B, it is gathering material to further facilitate its growth.

Baby exoplanet sweeps up stellar leftovers

Stars form from overly dense cool patches in vast clouds of interstellar gas and dust, which collapse under their own gravity. As these stars continue to grow, swirling clouds of gas and dust called protoplanetary disks settle around them. It is within this disk that planets will be born.

Astronomers predict that when this happens, these infant worlds sweep up material to build their own masses, creating intricate structures like rings and channels similar to the grooves in a record, and spirals resembling the spiral arms of the Milky Way. However, catching these exoplanet sculptors has been challenging.

Exemplifying this is the fact that astronomers had previously detected the spiral structure of HD 135344B's protoplanetary disk, using the VLT Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet Research (SPHERE) instrument — but had missed evidence of a planet causing it.

However, ERIS allowed the VLT and its operators to dive deeper into this protoplanetary disk, revealing a prime suspect for its shape: a hidden exoplanet sculptor.

This potential baby planet lurks at the base of one of the disk's spiral arms. That is exactly where scientists have predicted such a spiral-sculpting infant planet should dwell.

"What makes this detection potentially a turning point is that, unlike many previous observations, we are able to directly detect the signal of the protoplanet, which is still highly embedded in the disk,” Maio explained. "This gives us a much higher level of confidence in the planet’s existence, as we’re observing the planet's own light."

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

The difference will be just 1.34 milliseconds less than the standard 24 hours — not something you'll notice — but it's part of a puzzling trend in Earth's rotational behavior that has been unfolding in recent years. If it continues, a second may need to be subtracted from atomic clocks around 2029 — a so-called negative leap second, which has never been done before.

The speed of Earth's rotation isn't fixed. Long ago, a day was much shorter than the 24 hours — or 86,400 seconds — we're now accustomed to. According to a 2023 study, a day on Earth was approximately 19 hours for a significant part of Earth's early history, due to a balance between solar atmospheric tides and lunar ocean tides. However, over deep time, a day on Earth has become consistently longer. The primary culprit has been tidal friction from the moon, which has caused it to gradually move farther away from Earth. As it moves away, the moon saps Earth's rotational energy, causing Earth's rotation to slow and days to lengthen.

So why the sudden reverse?

From when records began (with the invention of the atomic clock) in 1973 until 2020, the shortest day ever recorded was 1.05 milliseconds less than 24 hours, according to Timeanddate.com. But since 2020, Earth has repeatedly broken its own speed records. The shortest day ever measured occurred on July 5, 2024, when Earth's rotation was completed 1.66 milliseconds faster than usual.

Looking ahead to 2025, scientists predicted that July 9, July 22, and Aug. 5 could be the shortest days of the year. However, new data suggests that July 10 took the lead as the shortest day so far in 2025, clocking in at 1.36 milliseconds less than 24 hours. On July 22, Earth is expected to complete its spin 1.34 milliseconds early, making it a close runner-up. If current predictions hold, Aug. 5 will be about 1.25 milliseconds shorter than usual, leaving July 22 as the second-shortest day of the year.

There are signs the acceleration may be easing. The rate of decrease in day length appears to be slowing, but the underlying cause of the recent rotational changes remains elusive.

One 2024 study suggested that the melting polar ice and rising sea levels may be influencing Earth's spin. However, rather than driving the acceleration, this redistribution of mass might be moderating it. A more likely culprit is deep below our feet — the slowing of Earth's liquid core, which could be redistributing angular momentum in a way that makes the mantle and crust spin slightly faster.

"The cause of this acceleration is not explained," Leonid Zotov, a leading authority on Earth rotation at Moscow State University, told Timeanddate.com. "Most scientists believe it is something inside the Earth. Ocean and atmospheric models don't explain this huge acceleration."

Zotov predicts Earth’s rotation may soon decelerate once again. If he’s right, this sudden speeding-up could prove to be just a temporary anomaly in the planet’s long-term trend toward slower rotation and longer days.

The nation wants to build a moon base by 2045, The Korea Times reported on Thursday (July 17), citing a long-term exploration road map that the Korea AeroSpace Administration (KASA) laid out that same day during a hearing at the National Research Foundation of Korea in Daejeon.

That road map "outlines five core missions, including low Earth orbit and microgravity exploration, lunar exploration, and solar and space science missions," The Korea Times wrote.

KASA, which was established just last year, aims to develop homegrown lunar landing and roving technology, as well as the ability to extract and exploit moon resources such as water ice.

Some of this work is already underway. For example, the Korea Institute of Geoscience and Mineral Resources recently deployed prototype lunar rovers in an abandoned coal mine, testing tech that could be used for space mining down the road.

And South Korea already has some experience at and around the moon. In August 2022, the nation launched its first moon probe — called the Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter or Danuri — atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Danuri reached lunar orbit four months later and is still going strong, studying the moon with its suite of instruments.

South Korea had already been aiming for the lunar surface; officials have said they want to put a robotic lander on the moon by 2032. But the newly revealed road map ups the ante. The nation plans to develop a new, presumably more capable moon lander by 2040, "with the goal of building a lunar economic base by 2045," The Korea Times wrote.

South Korea isn't the only nation with moon-base ambitions. The United States also plans to build one or more lunar outposts in the next decade or so, via NASA's Artemis program. China is working toward the goal as well, in partnership with Russia and other nations. And India has said it wants to build a moon base by 2047.

The moon isn't KASA's only distant destination, by the way; the agency also wants to pull off South Korea's first-ever Mars landing by 2045.

As interest in human missions to Mars grows, scientists are focusing on how to sustain life in space without constant resupply from Earth. A team of researchers led by Robin Wordsworth of Harvard University demonstrated that green algae can not only survive but thrive inside bioplastic chambers designed to mimic the extreme environment of the Red Planet.

"If you have a habitat that is composed of bioplastic, and it grows algae within it, that algae could produce more bioplastic," Wordsworth said in a statement. "So you start to have a closed-loop system that can sustain itself and even grow through time."

In laboratory tests, Wordsworth and his team cultivated a common type of green algae called Dunaliella tertiolecta inside a 3D-printed chamber made from polylactic acid, which is a biodegradable plastic derived from natural sources. The chamber was engineered to replicate the thin, carbon dioxide–rich atmosphere of Mars, which has a surface pressure less than 1% that of Earth.

Despite these extreme conditions, the algae were able to perform photosynthesis, according to the statement.

"We have demonstrated that habitable conditions can be maintained in extraterrestrial environments using only biologically produced materials," the researchers wrote in a paper published earlier this month in the journal Science Advances. "The results reported here represent an important step forward, but many additional steps are needed to enable robust ecosystems to be sustained long-term beyond Earth."

Wordsworth and his team attribute the experiment’s success to the bioplastic chamber, which shielded the algae from harmful ultraviolet radiation while still allowing sufficient light to penetrate. Though liquid water cannot normally exist at such low pressures, the team created a pressure gradient within the chamber that stabilized liquid water, enabling biological activity.

The results suggest that bioplastics could be a viable material for constructing habitats on Mars and other celestial bodies, scientists say. Unlike conventional industrial materials, which are expensive to transport and difficult to recycle off-Earth, bioplastics can potentially be produced and reused on-site using biological processes, according to the statement.

The latest proof of concept experiment builds on earlier work by Wordsworth’s team, which showed that silica aerogels could replicate Earth’s greenhouse effect to support life in cold, low-pressure environments. By combining algae chambers for bioplastic production with aerogels for heat and pressure regulation, the researchers say they are making real progress toward self-sustaining space habitats.

Next, the team plans to test their bioplastic systems in vacuum conditions relevant to moon and deep-space missions.

"The concept of biomaterial habitats is fundamentally interesting and can support humans living in space," Wordsworth said in the statement.

"As this type of technology develops, it's going to have spinoff benefits for sustainability technology here on Earth as well."

Recent research has suggested that Roman, currently set to launch no later than May 2027, will discover as many as 100,000 powerful cosmic explosions as it conducts the High-Latitude Time-Domain Survey observation program.

These powerful and violent events will include supernovas that signal the deaths of massive stars, kilonovas, which happen when two of the universe's most extreme dead stars, or "neutron stars," slam together, and "burps" of feeding supermassive black holes. Roman could even detect the explosive destruction of the universe's first generation of stars.

These explosions could help scientists crack the mystery of dark energy, the placeholder name for the strange force that is causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate, and a multitude of other cosmic conundrums.

"Whether you want to explore dark energy, dying stars, galactic powerhouses, or probably even entirely new things we’ve never seen before, this survey will be a gold mine," research leader Benjamin Rose, an assistant professor at Baylor University, said in a statement.

Roman will hunt white dwarfs that go boom!

The High-Latitude Time-Domain Survey will obtain its explosive results by scanning the same large region of space every five days for a period of two years.

These observations will then be "stitched together" to create movies revealing a wealth of cosmic explosions.

Many of these will be Type Ia supernovas, a type of cosmic explosion that occurs when a "dead star" or white dwarf feeds on a companion star so ravenously that it blows its top.

These cosmic explosions are vital to astronomers because their light output and peak brightness are so regular from event to event that they can be used to measure cosmic distances. This regularity means astronomers refer to Type Ia supernovas as "standard candles."

This new research, which simulated Roman's entire High-Latitude Time-Domain Survey, suggests the space telescope could reveal up to 27,000 new Type Ia supernovas. That is about 10 times as many of these white dwarf destroying explosions as the combined harvest of all previous surveys.

By looking at standard candles across differing vast distances, astronomers are essentially looking back into cosmic time, and that allows them to determine how fast the universe was expanding at these times.

Thus, such a wealth of Type Ia supernovas should reveal hints at the secrets of dark energy. This could help verify recent findings from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) that suggest this strange force is actually weakening over time.

"Filling these data gaps could also fill in gaps in our understanding of dark energy," Rose explained. "Evidence is mounting that dark energy has changed over time, and Roman will help us understand that change by exploring cosmic history in ways other telescopes can't."

Dying stars tell the tale of the stellar life cycle

The team estimates that as many as 60,000 of the 100,000 cosmic explosions that could be detected by Roman will be so-called "core collapse supernovas."

These occur when massive stars at least 8 times heavier than the sun reach the end of their nuclear fuel and can no longer support themselves against gravitational collapse.

As these stars' cores rapidly collapse, the outer layers are blasted away in supernovas, spreading the elements forged by these stars through the cosmos to become the building blocks of the next generation of stars, their planets, and maybe even lifeforms dwelling on said planets. Core collapse supernovas leave behind either neutron stars or black holes, depending on the mass of the progenitor star.

This means that while they can't help unravel the mystery of dark energy like Type Ia supernovas may, they can tell the tale of stellar life and death.

"By seeing the way an object's light changes over time and splitting it into spectra — individual colors with patterns that reveal information about the object that emitted the light—we can distinguish between all the different types of flashes Roman will see," research team member Rebekah Hounsell from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center explained. "With the dataset we've created, scientists can train machine-learning algorithms to distinguish between different types of objects and sift through Roman's downpour of data to find them.

"While searching for Type Ia supernovas, Roman is going to collect a lot of cosmic 'bycatch'—other phenomena that aren't useful to some scientists, but will be invaluable to others."

Rare cosmic gems and pure gold kilonovas

One of the rarer events that Roman could also detect occurs when black holes devour unfortunate stars that wander too close to them.

During these tidal disruption events (TDEs), the doomed star is ripped apart by the tremendous gravitational influence of the black hole via the immense tidal forces it generates.

Though much of the star is consumed by the black hole, these cosmic titans are messy eaters, meaning the vast amount of that stellar material is vomited out at velocities approaching the speed of light.

This jet of matter and the stellar material of the destroyed star that settles around the black hole in a flattened swirling cloud called an accretion disk generate emissions across the electromagnetic spectrum.

Roman will hunt these emissions to detect TDEs, with this team predicting that the High-Latitude Time-Domain Survey will turn up around 40 of these star-destroying events.

Even more elusive than TDEs are kilonovas, explosive bursts of light that occur when two neutron stars smash together and merge.

The team estimates that Roman could uncover around 5 new kilonovas, and while this is a small harvest, these observations could be vital to understanding where precious metals like gold and silver come from.

Though most of the elements we see around us are generated at the heart of stars, even these stellar furnaces lack the pressures and temperatures needed to form elements heavier than iron. The environments around neutron star collisions are thought to be the only furnaces in the cosmos extreme enough to generate elements like gold, silver and plutonium.

These would start life as even heavier elements that are unstable and rapidly decay. This decay releases the light seen as kilonovas, and thus studying that light is vital to understanding that process.

The study of kilonovas could also help determine what types of celestial bodies are created when neutron stars merge. This could be an even larger neutron star that rapidly collapses into a black hole, an immediately formed black hole, or something entirely new and unthought of.

Thus far, astronomers have only definitively confirmed the detection of one kilonova, meaning even another five would be a real boon to science.

Roman looks for instability in the first stars

Perhaps the most exciting cosmic explosion discovery that Roman could make would be the observation of the strange explosive death of the universe's first stars.

Currently, it is theorized that these early massive stars may have died differently than modern stars.

Rather than undergoing the core collapse described above, gamma-rays within the first stars could have generated matter-antimatter pairs in the form of electrons and positrons. These particles would meet and annihilate each other within the star, and this would release energy, resulting in a self-detonation called a "pair-instability supernova.”

These blasts are so powerful that it is theorized that they leave nothing behind, barring the fingerprint of elements generated during that star's lifetime.

As of yet, astronomers have dozens of candidates for pair-instability supernovas, but none have been confirmed. The team's simulation suggests that Roman could turn up as many as ten confirmed pair-instability supernovas.

"I think Roman will make the first confirmed detection of a pair-instability supernova," Rose said. "They're incredibly far away and very rare, so you need a telescope that can survey a lot of the sky at a deep exposure level in near-infrared light, and that's Roman."

The team intends to perform a further simulation of Roman's study of the cosmos, which could indicate its capability to spot and even wider array of powerful and violent events, maybe even some that haven't yet been theorized.

"Roman's going to find a whole bunch of weird and wonderful things out in space, including some we haven't even thought of yet," Hounsell concluded. "We're definitely expecting the unexpected."

This research was published on Tuesday (July 15) in The Astrophysical Journal.

NASA's Tandem Reconnection and Cusp Electrodynamics Reconnaissance Satellites, or TRACERS for short, mission represents a pair of satellites that will fly in a sun-synchronous orbit — meaning they are always over the dayside of the Earth — and pass through the polar cusps. The cusps are, in essence, two holes in Earth's magnetosphere, where the field lines dip down onto the magnetic poles.

When an influx of solar wind particles slam into Earth's magnetosphere, they can overload the magnetic-field lines, causing them to snap, disconnect and then reconnect. Magnetic reconnection, as the process is called, can release energy that accelerates charged particles down the funnel-shaped cusps and into our atmosphere, where they collide with molecules and, if a solar storm is intense enough, generate auroral lights.

When TRACERS launches — expected to be no earlier than late July — it will seek to learn more about the magnetic-reconnection process and how space weather affects our planet.

"What we'll learn from TRACERS is critical for understanding, and eventually predicting, how energy from our sun impacts not only the Earth, but also our space- and ground-based assets, whether it be GPS or communications signals, power grids, space assets or our astronauts working in space," said Joe Westlake, Director of NASA's Heliophysics Division, in a NASA teleconference.

Historically, the problem in studying magnetic reconnection has been that when a satellite flies through the region of reconnection and captures data, all it sees is a snapshot. Then, 90 minutes or so later on its next orbit, it takes another snapshot. In that elapsed time, the region may have changed, but it's impossible to tell from those snapshots why it's different. It could be because the system itself is changing, or the magnetic-reconnection coupling process between the solar wind and Earth's magnetosphere is moving about — or maybe it is switching on and off.

"These are fundamental things that we need to understand," said TRACERS' principal investigator, David Miles of the University of Iowa, in the same teleconference.

That's why TRACERS is important, because it is two satellites working in tandem rather than being a lone magnetic explorer.

"They're going to follow each other at a very close separation," said Miles. "So, one spacecraft goes through, and within two minutes the second spacecraft comes through, and that gives us two closely spaced measurements."

Together, the twin spacecraft will measure the magnetic- and electric-field strengths where magnetic reconnection is taking place, as well as what the local ions and electrons trapped in the magnetosphere are doing.

"What TRACERS is going to study is how the output of the sun couples to near-Earth space," said Miles. "What we're looking to understand is how the coupling between those systems changes in space and in time."

TRACERS will not be alone out there, and will be able to work with other missions already in operation, such as NASA's Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission (MMM), that studies reconnection from farther afield than TRACERS' low-Earth orbit 590 kilometers above our heads. There's also NASA's Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere (PUNCH) mission, and the Electrojet Zeeman Imaging Explorer (EZIE), which both study solar-wind interactions with our planet from low-Earth orbit.

"TRACERS joins the fleet of current heliophysics missions that are actively increasing our understanding of the sun, space weather, and how to mitigate its impacts," said Westlake.

The $170 million TRACERS is set to launch no earlier than the end of July on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that will be carrying several other small missions into orbit at the same time. The answers that TRACERS could provide about how magnetic reconnection works will allow scientists to better protect critical infrastructure for when solar storms hit.

"It's going to help us keep our way of life safe here on Earth," said Westlake.

The object, designated 2020 VN40, is part of a family of distant solar system objects called trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs). 2020 VN40 is the first object discovered that orbits the sun once for every ten orbits Neptune makes. Considering that one Neptunian year lasts 164.8 Earth years, that means 2020 VN40 has one heck of a long year, lasting around 1,648 years or 19,776 months on Earth!

The team behind this research thinks that 2020 VN40's ponderous orbital dance with Neptune may have come about when it was temporarily snared by the gravity of the ice giant planet. Thus, this discovery could help researchers better understand the dynamics of bodies at the edge of the solar system.

"This is a big step in understanding the outer solar system," team leader Rosemary Pike from the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian said in a statement. "It shows that even very distant regions influenced by Neptune can contain objects, and it gives us new clues about how the solar system evolved."

The orbital rhythm of 2020 VN40 was discovered in data from the Large inclination Distant Objects (LiDO) survey. LiDO uses the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope with backup from the Gemini Observatory and the Walter Baade Telescope to search the outer solar system for weird objects.

In particular, LiDO specializes in hunting TNOs with orbits that take them far above and below the orbital plane of Earth around the sun. These are regions of the solar system that have thus far only been sparsely explored by astronomers.

"It has been fascinating to learn how many small bodies in the solar system exist on these very large, very tilted orbits," LiDO team member and University of Regina researcher Samantha Lawler said.

The highly tilted path of 2020 VN40 finds it at an average distance from the sun equivalent to 140 times the distance between Earth and our star.

However, the most interesting element of the orbit of 2020 VN40 is its resonance with the orbit of Neptune. Other bodies rhythmically aligned with Neptune make their closest approaches to the sun, their perihelion, when Neptune is at its greatest distance from our star, or its aphelion.

Defying this trend, 2020 VN40 is at perihelion when Neptune is also close to the sun. That's if one were looking at it from above the solar system, with the tilt of 2020 VN40 meaning that this TNO and Neptune are not actually close together; the TNO is actually far below the solar system.

This also separates 2020 VN40 from other resonant TNOs, which tend to stay within the plane of the solar system when they make close approaches to the sun.

"This new motion is like finding a hidden rhythm in a song we thought we knew," team member and University of California Santa Cruz scientist Ruth Murray-Clay said. "It could change how we think about the way distant objects move."

Revealing the orbital strangeness of 2020 VN40 suggests that solar system objects with highly tilted orbits can adopt novel and unexpected types of movement.

The hunt is now on for more bodies like 2020 VN40, with the newly operating Vera C. Rubin Observatory set to play a key role in this investigation.

"This is just the beginning," team member and Planetary Science Institute researcher Kathryn Volk said. "We're opening a new window into the solar system's past."

The 2020 VN40 results were published on July 7 in The Planetary Science Journal.

CHIME J1634+44, also known as ILT J163430+445010 (J1634+44), is part of a class of objects called Long Period Radio Transients (LPTs). LPTs are a newly found and mysterious type of celestial body that emits bursts of radio waves that repeat on timescales of minutes to hours. That's significantly longer than the emission of standard pulsars, or rapidly spinning neutron star stellar remains that sweep beams of radiation across the cosmos as they spin.

But as strange as all LPTs are, CHIME J1634+44 still stands out. Not only is it the brightest LPT ever seen, but it is also the most polarized. Additionally, its pulses of radiation seem highly choreographed. And what really stands out about CHIME J1634+44 is the fact that it is the only LPT astronomers have ever seen whose spin is speeding up.

"You could call CHIME J1634+44 a 'unicorn' even among other LPTs. The bursts seem to repeat either every 14 minutes or 841 seconds — but there is a distinct secondary period of 4206 seconds, or 70 minutes, which is exactly five times longer," team leader Fengqiu Adam Dong, a Jansky Fellow at the Green Bank Observatory (GBO), said in a statement. "We think both are real, and this is likely a system with something orbiting a neutron star."

The team discovered the unusual traits of CHIME J1634+44 using ground-based instruments including the Green Bank Telescope, the Very Large Array (VLA), the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) Fast Radio Burst and Pulsar Project, the NASA-operated space-based observatory, and the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory (Swift). The object was, in fact, simultaneously discovered by a separate team of astronomers at ASTRON, the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy, using the LOFAR (Low Frequency Array) radio telescope.

While the team led by Dong believes a stellar remnant at the heart of CHIME J1634+44 is a neutron star, the ASTRON team, captained by astronomer Sanne Bloot, refers to it as J1634+44 and think it is a white dwarf. What both teams agree on, though, is just how strange this LPT is.

This unicorn is speeding up by feeding on a star

Both white dwarfs and neutron stars are dead stars created when stars of differing masses run out of the fuel supplies they need for nuclear fusion at their cores. Once that fuel is over, the stars can no longer support themselves against their own immense gravities.

Neutron stars are stellar remnants that form when massive stars, with masses at least eight times that of the sun, reach the end of their lives and collapse. Smaller stars closer in mass to the sun leave behind a slightly less extreme stellar remnant called a "white dwarf."

Though most of the mass of these dying massive stars is shed in supernova explosions, the cores of the stars maintain a mass between one and two times that of the sun. This is crushed down to a width of around 12 miles (20 kilometers), creating matter so dense that if a teaspoon of neutron star "stuff" were scooped out and brought to Earth, it would weigh 10 million tons (equal to stacking 85,000 blue whales on a teaspoon).

This collapse has another extreme consequence. The dying star maintains its angular momentum, meaning that when its radius is rapidly reduced during collapse, it speeds up greatly. Though the collapse of white dwarfs is less extreme, it also causes an increase in spin speed due to the conservation of angular momentum.

An Earth-based example of this is an ice skater pulling in their arms to increase the speed of their spin.

What this means is some young neutron stars can spin as fast as 700 times every second. However, as neutron stars and white dwarfs age, they should slow down as they lose energy. That's why no matter what CHIME J1634+44 is, the fact that it is speeding up its spin is very strange.

There is a way neutron stars or white dwarfs can increase their spin speed, or "spin up" after their birth. It depends on whether they have a close companion star.

As such, the new study's team suspects CHIME J1634+44 may actually be composed of two stellar objects orbiting each other in a tight binary format. The ASTRON team proposes that this companion is either another stellar remnant (like a white dwarf or neutron star) or is a "failed star" brown dwarf — a body that forms like a star but fails to gather enough mass to trigger the nuclear fusion that defines what a star is.

As these bodies swirl around each other, they would emit ripples in spacetime called gravitational waves. This carries away angular momentum and causes the two stellar bodies to move closer together. This would cause the period of the binary to appear as if it is shortening. This type of orbital tightening has been witnessed before by astronomers in white dwarf binaries.

CHIME J1634+44 gets stranger, however.

Its radio bursts are 100% circularly polarized. This means the electromagnetic waves escaping J1634+44 rotate in a circle (like a corkscrew) as they propagate.

Thus, the electromagnetic radiation escaping CHIME J1634+44 twists around in a perfect spiral as it moves away from its source. Not only is that extremely rare, but it is something that has never been seen in bursts of radiation from either neutron stars or white dwarfs.

That implies the radio wave blasts of CHIME J1634+44 are being generated in a way that is unique for this dead star.

Astronomers have a mystery on their hands with this dead star

What is also weird about these pulses is the fact that they arrive in pairs, but only when the dead star in the CHIME J1634+44 binary has spun several times without emitting a burst.

"The time between pulse pairs seems to follow a choreographed pattern," team member and ASTRON astronomer Harish Vedantham said in a statement. "We think the pattern holds crucial information about how the companion triggers the white dwarf to emit radio waves.

"Continued monitoring should help us decode this behavior, but for now, we have a real mystery on our hands."

The research conducted by these astronomers not only reveals more about neutron stars, the universe's most extreme stellar objects, but also hints at an exciting new phase for radio astronomy.

"The discovery of CHIME J1634+44 expands the known population of LPTs and challenges existing models of neutron stars and white dwarfs, suggesting there may be many more such objects awaiting discovery," Dong concluded.

Both teams' research was published on Thursday (July 17) in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Geologists studying driftwood and lake sediments found in Stanton's Cave — in Marble Canyon, which lies in the eastern part of the Grand Canyon — revealed a possible connection between the area and the famous impact site known as Meteor Crater (also called Barringer Crater) in northern Arizona.

Through excavation and multiple rounds of radiocarbon dating, researchers determined the driftwood is about 56,000 years old. Yet today, the mouth of Stanton's Cave sits 150 feet (46 meters) above the Colorado River. A new study suggests the wood was carried there by an ancient paleolake, formed when a massive landslide dammed the river.

"It would have required a 10-times-bigger flood level than any flood that has happened in the past several thousand years," Karl Karlstrom, co-lead author of the study and an Earth and planetary science professor at the University of New Mexico, said in a statement from the university.

The study claims that the strike that created Meteor Crater could be linked to a paleolake — an ancient lake that existed in the past but has since dried up — in the Grand Canyon that formed at the same time. The impact would have generated an earthquake around magnitude 5.4 to 6, which could have sent a shock wave powerful enough to shake loose unstable cliffs in the Grand Canyon 100 miles (161 kilometers) away and trigger a massive landslide. That event, in turn, could have deposited enough debris to dam the river and form a lake.

Other caves high above the river have also been explored for clues about the canyon's geological past. In addition to the driftwood, ancient beaver tracks have been found in areas that would be inaccessible to the water-dwelling animals today, further supporting the idea that a paleolake once existed in the area.

With driftwood and sediment samples found in many caves as high up as 3,084 feet (940 m), the researchers estimate the paleolake would have been about 50 miles (80 km) long and nearly 300 feet (91 m) deep. Over time, the dam that blocked the Colorado River could have been overtopped and deeply eroded, eventually filling up with sediment.

While there is evidence linking the paleolake, the meteorite impact and resulting landslide, the researchers noted that further study is required to eliminate any other possible explanations for the river damming, such as random rockfall or a more local earthquake around the same time.

Their findings were published July 15 in the journal Geology.

A comet, now known as 3I/ATLAS, with 3I short for "third interstellar," sparked immediate excitement on July 1 when it was detected by the Deep Random Survey remote telescope in Chile, exhibiting a hyperbolic and highly eccentric orbit.

It is the third confirmed interstellar visitor, following 1I'Oumuamua in 2017 and 2I/Borisov in 2019. But fleeting visits of high-speed guests from outside our solar system are likely to be detected much more regularly now, thanks to the new Vera C. Rubin Observatory.

The Rubin observatory is located on the mountain of Cerro Pachón in Chile, and saw first light in June after a decade of construction. While it is only in its early commissioning phase, in just 10 hours of observations, Rubin discovered 2,104 new asteroids. Its science objectives include understanding the structure and evolution of the universe, mapping the Milky Way and observing transient astronomical events, but it is also set to revolutionize the detection of interstellar objects (ISOs).

This is thanks to Rubin's gigantic Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) camera— the largest digital camera ever constructed for astronomy, with a staggering 3.2 gigapixels. LSST will scan giant swaths of the sky at once and observe the entire southern sky every few nights. Due to its wide field, depth, and how frequently it observes the same regions of sky, Rubin is uniquely capable of catching fast, faint objects like 1I/'Oumuamua or 3I/ATLAS.

ISOs like 1I/'Oumuamua or 3I/ATLAS move quickly and can easily pass through our sky unnoticed if the sky is not being scanned often and everywhere. Rubin will be looking constantly and broadly, giving astronomers the best chance yet to catch these fleeting visitors, while also being able to detect objects fainter than nearly any ground-based survey before it. Rubin's powerful imaging and automatic image comparison, coupled with an automated alert system — with millions triggered and filtered every night — means it will pick up telltale motion and flag a potential ISO.

So how many interstellar objects might Rubin actually detect? The answer varies widely depending on which assumptions scientists use.

We are in the early days of detecting ISOs, so it is difficult to estimate how many Rubin is likely to pick up; we know little about their overall frequency, size range, brightness, if they exhibit cometary activity, and how LSST performs.

However, a few recent papers on the topic provide some useful context for how many ISOs LSST might be able to detect, depending on a range of variables.

In a 2022 paper, Hoover et al. estimate that LSST will detect on the order of between 0.9-1.9 ISOs every year, or around 15 such objects across Rubin's 10-year observational campaign. It notes that these are lower limits, which can be updated when there is more data on the number density and size frequency of interstellar objects.

Additionally, Hoover et al. estimate the chances that Rubin will find an ISO reachable by the Comet Interceptor and Bridge mission concepts, which would fly by an interstellar object as it passes through our solar system. These missions would be launched to lurk in wait, ready to intercept and rendezvous with a passing ISO. The researchers concluded that there is just a roughly 0.07% chance that LSST would identify an ISO target available to Comet Interceptor, which has limited capability to change its velocity, while LSST could detect around three to seven ISOs reachable by Bridge, a more capable but yet-to-be-approved mission concept.

Another estimate, from a 2023 paper by Ezell and Loeb, expects LSST to detect one small ISO 3 to 164 feet (1 to 50 meters) wide every one to two years.

A more optimistic assessment comes from Marceta and Seligman in a 2023 paper. They find, based on a simulated suite of galactic populations of asteroidal interstellar objects and their trajectories and kinematics, that Rubin should detect between around 0 and 70 asteroidal interstellar objects every year. Again, one of the main factors is how many objects of different sizes actually exist in the population of ISOs, as well as their albedo, or how much light they reflect.

With just three confirmed interstellar visitors so far, much remains unknown about the number, size, and diversity of ISOs. But with the Rubin Observatory coming online, sightings of these fast-moving cosmic messengers may soon shift from rare events to regular science, offering unique insights into the galaxy beyond our solar system.

Using NASA's Chandra X-ray spacecraft, astronomers have witnessed a distant, Jupiter-size world "shrinking" as its host star bombards it with heavy radiation.

The extrasolar planet, or "exoplanet," is named TOI 1227 b and is a cosmic baby at just 8 million years old (remember, Earth is around 4.5 billion years old). And, incredibly, the world orbits its star at a distance of just 8.2 million miles, a fraction of the distance between the sun and Mercury, with a year that lasts just 28 days. This proximity means the star, named TOI 1227 and located around 330 light-years away, is blasting the planet with powerful X-rays.

This radiation is stripping the exoplanet's atmosphere away; in fact, the atmosphere of TOI 1227 b is likely to be completely gone in around 1 billion years. This will reduce the exoplanet to nothing more than a small, rocky and barren core.

The team behind this research estimates TOI 1227 b will have ultimately lost the equivalent of two Earths' worth of mass by the conclusion of its transformation. As of now, the world has a mass around 17 times that of Earth's.

"It's almost unfathomable to imagine what is happening to this planet," Attila Varga, study team leader and a researcher at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), said in a statement. "The planet's atmosphere simply cannot withstand the high X-ray dose it’s receiving from its star."

While this exoplanet's parent star is less massive than the sun (with about 10% the mass of our star) and is cooler and fainter in optical light, it is actually brighter than our star in X-rays.

"A crucial part of understanding planets outside our solar system is to account for high-energy radiation like X-rays that they're receiving," team member and RIT scientist Joel Kastner said in the statement. "We think this planet is puffed up, or inflated, in large part as a result of the ongoing assault of X-rays from the star."

The team used Chandra to determine just how much X-ray radiation is roasting TOI 1227 b. The researchers then used computer modeling to assess the impact of this radiation on the exoplanet and its atmosphere. This revealed that roughly every two centuries, the world loses the equivalent of Earth's entire atmosphere from its own atmosphere.

"The future for this baby planet doesn't look great," Alexander Binks, a study team member and researcher at Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen, said in the statement. "From here, TOI 1227 b may shrink to about a tenth of its current size and will lose more than 10 percent of its weight."

The researchers estimated the age of TOI 1227 b using estimates of its host star's velocity through space and comparing them with the speed of nearby stellar populations with known ages. The team also compared the surface brightness of TOI 1227 with models of stellar evolution.

TOI 1227 b stands out from other exoplanets aged less than 50 million years because, among the set, it seems to have the longest year and a host star with the lowest mass.

The team's research has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal and appears as a preprint on the repository site arXiv.

What is it?

The two telescopes seen in this image are the U.S. Naval Observatory Deep South Telescope and the DIMM2 seeing monitor, both part of the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO), a program of the National Science Foundation's (NSF) NOIRLab.. Both help survey the night skies and provide a place for astronomers in the southern hemisphere to study the stunning and surprising structures in space.

Where is it?

Both telescopes are located 310 miles (500 km) north of Santiago, Chile, at an altitude of 7,200 feet (2,200 meters).

Why is it amazing?

Lunar eclipses are captivating to watch, as Earth passes directly between the sun and the moon, casting its shadow onto the surface of the moon. This only happens when the Earth, sun and moon are all perfectly aligned. According to NOIRLab, this alignment period was used by ancient astronomers as early as 600 BCE and called a "saros." The time between saros periods is around 18 years, 11 days, and 8 hours.

To get the full detail of a lunar eclipse, it helps to have binoculars or a telescope. Astrophotographers looking to upgrade their stargazing gear to capture lunar eclipses, should read our guide to the best cameras for capturing the night sky in 2025.

Want to learn more?

You can read more about lunar eclipses and the telescopes in Chile as researchers continue to study our night skies.

The extrasolar planet or "exoplanet" in question is TOI-2109b, which has five times the mass of Jupiter and is located around 870 light-years from our solar system. The planet orbits so close to its parent star, TOI-2109, that it has a year that lasts just 16 hours.

These characteristics mean that TOI-2109b is classified as an "ultrahot Jupiter," a rare class of planets that account for around 1 in 500 planets in the over 5,000 worlds in the catalog of known exoplanets. But TOI-2109b stands out even among those incredibly hot, star-hugging worlds.

"This is an ultra-hot Jupiter, and orbits much closer to its star than any other hot Jupiter ever discovered," Macquarie University Research Fellow Jaime A. Alvarado-Montes said in a statement."Just to put it into context, Mercury's mass is almost 6,000 times smaller than Jupiter's, but it still takes 88 days to orbit our sun.

"For a huge gas giant such as TOI-2109b to fully orbit in 16 hours, it tells us that this is a planet located super-close to its star."

That makes TOI-2109b the perfect laboratory to study planets' death spirals into their host stars, or more accurately, the phenomenon of orbital decay.

The three deaths of TOI-2109b

Alvarado-Montes and colleagues set about investigating TOI-2109b using archival data from multiple telescopes, including NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) and the European Space Agency (ESA) space mission Cheops.

This constituted data regarding the transits of TOI-2109b across the face of its parent star from 2010 to 2024.

"Using all of the data available for this planet, we were able to predict a small change in its orbit," Alvarado-Montes said. "Then we verified it with our theory and with our planet evolution models, and our predictions matched the observations. That's quite exciting."

The matching theoretical estimations and observational evidence suggested that the orbit of TOI-2109b will decay by around 10 seconds over the next three Earth-years. Though this is a tiny change, it proves TOI-2109b is spiraling toward its parent star.

The ultimate fate of TOI-2109b is uncertain, as there are three possible ways that this death spiral could play out.

The first and most dramatic final fate of TOI-2109b would see the ultrahot Jupiter plunge into its parent star. This will occur if the orbital decay of this planet begins to accelerate.

"The star will absorb it and kill it, of course, in the process – completely burn it, and the planet will disappear," Alvarado-Montes said.

This would create a flash of light that is similar to ZTF SLRN-2020, a signal first observed in May 2020 when a gas giant planet plunged into its red giant stellar parent.

The second possible fate of TOI-2109b is slightly less dramatic, but no less catastrophic.

This would happen if the orbital decay of the planet continues unabated and sees the gravity of its parent star generate destructive tidal forces within the planet. These forces would literally rip TOI-2109b apart.

"The gravitational interactions are so strong that the planet starts being distorted," Alvarado-Montes said. "It starts looking more like an elongated doughnut ... the gravity of the planet is no longer able to hold its spherical shape."

There is a third possible fate which would see the planet transformed rather than being destroyed.

In the third possible scenario for TOI-2109b, the intense radiation experienced by the ultrahot Jupiter strips away the planet's gassy outer layers in a process called photoevaporation. This would expose the rocky inner core of TOI-2109b.

"As the planet gets even closer to the star, all of the gas molecules could start being dissociated, and the planet gets smaller and smaller," Alvarado-Montes explained. "And if the planet shrinks quickly enough, then when the planet reaches the position where its Roche limit would have been, it's not going to be five Jupiter masses anymore, but it will be small enough that the Roche limit moves closer to the star, so it could escape destruction."

This could ultimately result in the creation of a rocky "super-Earth" around the size of Uranus or Neptune.

The team will continue to monitor TOI-2109b over the next three to five years, which should reveal the fate that will befall this doomed world.

The investigation of TOI-2109b has implications beyond its own fascinating and fateful situation. It provides astronomers the chance to study how hot Jupiters evolve and what happens when planets migrate toward their host stars.

"This planet and its interesting situation could help us figure out some mysterious astronomical phenomena that so far we really don't have much evidence to explain," Alvarado-Montes concludes. "It could tell us the story of many other solar systems."

The team's research was published on Tuesday (July 15) in The Astrophysical Journal.

This is the conclusion of a team of scientists from China who have found a one-step method of doing all this. Whether it is economically viable, however, is up for debate.

But the Chinese team thinks that it is. "The biggest surprise for us was the tangible success of this integrated approach," said team-member Lu Wang, who is a chemist from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, in a statement. "The one-step integration of lunar water extraction and photothermal carbon dioxide catalysis could enhance energy utilization efficiency and decrease the cost and complexity of infrastructure development."

They point out that studies have shown that transporting supplies from Earth to any future moon base would be expensive because the greater the mass of cargo, the harder a rocket has to work to launch into space. Studies have indicated that it would cost $83,000 to transport just one gallon of water from Earth to the moon, and yet each astronaut would be expected to drink 4 gallons of water per day.

Fortunately, the moon has plentiful water, although it is not automatically apparent. Brought to the moon by impacts of comets, asteroids and micrometeoroids, and even by the solar wind, water lurks in permanently shadowed craters at the lunar poles, trapped within minerals such as ilmenite.

Extracting the water for drinking is relatively easy and there are numerous technologies that describe how this can be done, including heating the regolith by focusing sunlight onto it. However, the Chinese team has been able to take this one step further.

"What's novel here is the use of lunar soil as a catalyst to crack carbon dioxide molecules and combine them with extracted water to produce methane," Philip Metzger, a planetary physicist from the University of Central Florida, told Space.com. Metzger was not involved in the new research, but he is the co-founder of the NASA Kennedy Space Center's 'Swamp Works', a research lab for designing technologies for construction, manufacturing and mining on planetary (and lunar) surfaces.

Methane would be more desirable than liquid hydrogen as a potential rocket fuel because it is easier to keep stable, thereby requiring less machinery and less cost to keep on the moon. Liquid methane, when mixed with oxygen as an oxidizer, is a potent rocket fuel. Many commercial companies such as China's Landspace are already launching methane-powered rockets.

The water-bearing ilmenite is also a useful catalyst for reacting the water with carbon dioxide to produce oxygen and methane, and the Chinese team have developed a one-step process for doing so. First, they heat the regolith to 392 degrees Fahrenheit (200 degrees Celsius) by focusing sunlight to release the water inside. Then, carbon dioxide such as that which could be breathed out by astronauts is added to the mix, causing the ilmenite to catalyze the reaction between the extracted water and the carbon dioxide. Researchers tested this process, known as photothermal catalysis, in the laboratory using a simulant based on samples of lunar regolith returned to Earth by China's Chang'e 5 mission (the lunar samples are far too previous to destroy in such experiments, which is why a simulant is used instead).

While previous technologies have also been able to accomplish this, they required more steps and more machinery, and used a catalyst that would have to be transported up from Earth. This, the research team believe, makes their process more efficient and less expensive than the alternatives.

However, Metzger is not wholly confident that it will work. For one thing, lunar regolith is a proficient thermal insulator, so heating a sample all the way through would not be easy.

"The heat does not spread effectively deeper into the soil, and this greatly reduces the amount of water that can be produced in a given time," Metzger said. One option could be to 'tumble' the regolith, turning it over repeatedly so that the heat is more evenly applied, but this slows the extraction of water and increases the mechanical complexity of the process. In an environment where lunar dust gets into every nook and cranny, and where temperature fluctuations between night and day can be as great as 482 degrees Fahrenheit (250 Celsius), the risk of breakdown only increases as more moving parts enter the equation.

"It may be doable, but more maturation of the technology is needed to show that it is actually competitive," said Metzger.

There's also a problem with the application of carbon dioxide, something recognized by both the Chinese team and Metzger. Specifically, there's a question mark over whether astronauts could produce enough carbon dioxide through their normal exhalation. Metzger calculates that astronauts could only provide a tenth of the carbon dioxide required. Alternatively, carbon dioxide could be shuttled up from Earth, but this would rather defeat the purpose of the proposed technique, which was to develop a lot-cost means of obtaining water, oxygen and methane with resources largely already available on the moon.

However, in the long-run, perhaps shipping some materials up from Earth will be beneficial. Metzger points out a similar experiment that used an exotic granular catalyst – nickel-on-kieselguhr (kieselguhr is a kind of sedimentary rock) – rather than lunar regolith. Metzger suspects that a material specifically designed to be a catalyst, such as nickel-on-kieselguhr, would be more efficient than lunar regolith. Plus, although it would be expensive to transport from Earth, the nickel-on-kieselguhr can be re-used so you would only need to transport it to the moon once. In a cost-benefit analysis, in the long term it might be more efficient to do this instead.

Regardless, the research team has convincingly shown that using lunar regolith as a catalyst to produce fuel and water works. The next step is to show that the technology can be scaled up to sustain a base on the moon more efficiently than other techniques, and that it can operate in lunar conditions where the gravity is weaker, the temperature swings to large extremes, and there is intense radiation from space.

"I think these are highly interesting results and there may be additional applications to use lunar soil as a photocatalyst," said Metzger. "More work will be needed to show whether this concept can be economically competitive. I am skeptical, but all good ideas have their detractors and you can never really know until somebody does the work to prove it."

There is certainly no immediate rush for the technology. With NASA's Artemis III mission, which aims to finally return astronauts to the surface of the moon in 2027 at the earliest, and funding made available for Artemis IV and V at some indeterminate time in the future, we're not yet in a position to build a permanent lunar base.

However, the Artemis missions are the perfect opportunity to trial some of these technologies and will be greatly important for showing whether we really can live on the moon or not.

The research was published on July 16 in the journal Joule.

China has taken a new step in its long-term planning for lunar exploration with the completion of a "simulated moon underground space."

Researchers have established a practice area in a volcanic lava cave in a forest region near Jingbo Lake in Mudanjiang City, located in the northeastern province of Heilongjiang. The move is in response to research suggesting that lava tube systems are present on the moon and Mars and could provide shielding from those worlds' harsh radiation environments.

"The underground volcanic lava pipes by the Jingbo Lake are the most similar environment on Earth to the underground space of the moon. I hope our forward-looking research can serve China's lunar exploration program," Li Jiaqi, a researcher at Peking University, told China Central Television (CCTV).

Experimental robots are already being used to test conducting autonomous exploration and multi-functional operations in the simulated lunar environment.

"Compared with traditional lunar roving vehicles and exploration robots, it has stronger environmental adaptability and flexibility," said Li Xianglong, a doctoral student from the Harbin Institute of Technology. "When exploring the underground space of the moon for the future, it can possess more precise perception, decision-making and operation capabilities."

Students also set up seismometers in the area to serve as a reference for future lunar experiments. China's Chang'e 7 mission to the lunar south pole, set to launch sometime in 2026, will carry a seismograph to study the moon's interior and detect moonquakes, caused by tidal forces from Earth, and temperature changes affecting the lunar surface. China plans to establish an International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) in the 2030s.

The 311-gram space rock was discovered in 2023 and is known as the Northwest Africa 16286 meteorite — and based on the decay of the lead isotopes that it contains, its formation has been dated to about 2.35 billion years ago.

"Its age and composition show that volcanic activity continued on the moon throughout this timespan, and our analysis suggests an ongoing heat-generation process within the moon, potentially from radiogenic elements decaying and producing heat over a long period," said lead researcher Joshua Snape of the University of Manchester in a statement.

The meteorite is an important piece in the jigsaw that is the moon's history, filling-in an almost billion-year-long gap in our knowledge. The meteorite is much younger than samples brought back to Earth by NASA's Apollo missions, the Soviet Union's Luna missions and China's Chang'e 6 mission, all of which range between 3.1 billion and 4.3 billion years old, but older than the 1.9-billion-year-old rocks returned by Chang'e 5.

Crucially, meteorite 16286 has a volcanic origin, with geochemical analysis showing that it formed when a lava flow from deep within the moon vented onto the surface and solidified. It contains relatively large crystals of a mineral called olivine, moderate levels of titanium and high levels of potassium. Its lead isotopes also point to a volcanic source deep underground that has an unusually high uranium-to-lead ratio (the lead being a decay product of uranium). This abundance of uranium, and the heat it produced as it underwent radioactive decay, is a potential clue as to what was keeping volcanism going a billion years after the moon's main bouts of volcanism had ceased.

There are only 31 volcanic lunar rocks that have been found on Earth in the form of meteorites, and meteorite 16286 is by far the youngest.

"Moon rocks are rare, so it's interesting when we get something that stands out and looks different to everything else," said Snape.

The meteorite is more evidence that volcanism continued throughout this period on the moon; Chang'e 5 has found such evidence in its samples from the moon's farside of volcanism in the past 123 million years. Together, these discoveries are transforming what we thought we thought we knew about the moon's volcanism and how the moon has remained geologically active, at least in bursts, almost to the present day.

The next step is to pinpoint the meteorite's origin on the moon: likely a crater blasted into the surface by an impact that ejected the meteorite long ago. Once identified, it will be a prime location for a future sample-return mission to learn more about lunar volcanism during this little-known period, from which so few samples exist.

Snape presented the findings at the world's premier geochemistry meeting, the Goldschmidt Conference in Prague held between July 6 and July 11.

Once every 15 years, Saturn's tilted orbit brings its iconic rings — and Titan's orbital path — into an edge-on alignment with Earth. This event, known as a ring-plane crossing, heralds the onset of a season of dramatic 'shadow transits', as Titan's vast umbral silhouette periodically sweeps across the gas giant's surface.

"Sighting a shadow transit of Titan for an amateur astronomer is somewhat the equivalent of a fisherman hooking and reeling in a particularly large or elusive fish," Hayden Planetarium instructor and lecturer Joe Rao told Space.com in an email. "It is so unusual a sight that doesn't happen very often, which is why even veteran skywatchers are excited at the possibility of making such a sighting."

When is Titan's shadow transit?

Titan's next shadow transit will get underway at 3 a.m. EDT (0700 GMT) on July 18, at which time the moon's dark outline will be visible slowly progressing across Saturn's cloudy disk, according to Sky and Telescope.

Look for Saturn in the southeastern sky, just below the stars of the constellation Pisces shining like a bright star to the naked eye, with the moon in the east.

Observers in the U.S. will have a good view of the first two hours of the shadow transit, but by the time Titan's shadow leaves Saturn's disk at 8:05 a.m. EDT (12:05 GMT), the brightening dawn will overpower the view.

How powerful does a telescope need to be to spot Titan's shadow?

At the time of the shadow transit, Titan and Saturn will be separated by approximately 846 million miles (1.36 billion kilometers) from Earth — far beyond the capabilities of the naked eye or binoculars, but well within reach of many amateur telescopes.

We asked Rao for guidance on the kind of scope needed to view Titan's shadow transit. "An 8-inch telescope at 200-power or a 10-inch telescope at 250-power should provide a good view of Titan's shadow, especially on a night of good seeing," Rao explained.

To calculate the magnifcation of your telescope, you need only divide its focal length by the focal length of your chosen eyepiece. For example, a 1000 mm telescope with a 10 mm eyepiece yields 100-power magnification.

Rao also emphasised that stable atmospheric conditions are crucial to obtaining a clear view. This becomes more important when using higher power with a smaller aperture scope. It's best to use one-half magnification/power when viewing distant objects to avoid them appearing to "boil", or "scintilate" when viewed through the eyepiece.

"At least 200-power is necessary for getting a reasonably good view of the dark 'shadow dot' projected on Saturn's disk," continued Rao. "The general rule of thumb is to utilize 50-power for every inch of aperture of the telescope objective, or mirror. So, for a 4-inch telescope, the maximum magnification to be used is 200-power, which is considered the limit for a telescope of that size."

When are the next Titan shadow transits?

After the July 18 event, five more Titan shadow transits will be visible from Earth. Each occurs roughly16 days after the last — a result of Titan's 16-day orbital period — and starting progressively earlier in the night for viewers in the U.S.

The next transit after this week will begin at 2:25 a.m. (0625 GMT) on August 3, while the last chance to catch the moon's shadow fall on Saturn will take place on October 6.

After the October event, stargazers will have to wait another 15 years before the next ring crossing brings Titan — and its shadow — into alignment once more!

Titan's shadow through the eyes of the Cassini spacecraft

Without question, the most spectacular views of a Titan shadow transit came courtesy of NASA's Cassini spacecraft, which witnessed the moon's dark outline fall over Saturn's cloud surface in November 2009, while it travelled a mere 1.3 million miles (2.1 million km) from the colossal gas giant. Cassini has long since found its resting place beneath the cloud surface of Saturn, but amateur astronomers will have an opportunity to follow in Cassini's steps later this week and witness the next Titan shadow transit for themselves when it takes place on July 18.

"Though we, living in the 21st century, have grown accustomed to seeing the Saturnian system through the eyes of Cassini, there still remains the thrill of witnessing, with one's own eyes, a major celestial event in the life of another planet a billion miles away," Carolyn Porco, planetary scientists and imaging team leader for NASA's Cassini mission told Space.com in an email.

Editor's Note: If you would like to share your images of the Titan shadow transit with Space.com's readers, then please send your photo(s), comments, and your name and location to spacephotos@space.com.

That's the theory of a team of researchers who looked at hundreds of extrasolar planets, or exoplanets, observed by NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS).

TESS hunts exoplanets by catching them as they cross the face of, or "transit," their parent star, which causes a tiny drop in light from that star. The study team discovered that light from stars neighboring the one being transited could "contaminate" TESS' data, making it look like the transiting planet is blocking less light than it actually is. And that would make the planet look smaller than it is.

"We found that hundreds of exoplanets are larger than they appear, and that shifts our understanding of exoplanets on a large scale," University of California, Irvine researcher and team leader Te Han said in a statement. "This means we may have actually found fewer Earth-like planets so far than we thought."

Exoplanets throw shade

Exoplanets are so distant and faint that it is only on rare occasions that astronomers can image them directly.

That means the transit method has become the most successful way of detecting worlds beyond the solar system. It requires the planet and its star to be at the right angle in relation to Earth, and for astronomers to wait for the planet to make two transits to confirm its existence.

The transit method is best at spotting short-period planets orbiting close to their host stars, because they make more frequent transits. The method also favors larger planets, which block more light.

"We’re basically measuring the shadow of the planet," said team member and UC Irvine astronomer Paul Robertson.

The team gathered hundreds of TESS observations of exoplanets, sorting them by the width of the exoplanets in question.

They then used computer modeling and data from the European Space Agency's (ESA) star-tracking mission Gaia to estimate how much light contamination TESS is experiencing during its observations.

"TESS data are contaminated, which Te's custom model corrects better than anyone else in the field," said Robertson. "What we find in this study is that these planets may systematically be larger than we initially thought. It raises the question: Just how common are Earth-sized planets?"

Move over Earth-like worlds: ocean planets could be more common

Because of the biases of the transit method mentioned above, the number of exoplanets detected with TESS having sizes and compositions similar to those of Earth was already low.

"Of the single-planet systems discovered by TESS so far, only three were thought to be similar to Earth in their composition," Han explained. "With this new finding, all of them are actually bigger than we thought."

The likely outcome of this is that those exoplanets are larger ocean planets or "hycean worlds" covered by a large single ocean. Those worlds could also be gas giants smaller than Jupiter, like Neptune and Uranus.

That impacts the search for life because, though hycean worlds are packed with water, they could be lacking other ingredients needed for life to arise.

"This has important implications for our understanding of exoplanets, including, among other things, prioritization for follow-up observations with the James Webb Space Telescope, and the controversial existence of a galactic population of water worlds," Roberston added.

The next step for Han, Roberston, and colleagues is to re-examine planets previously deemed uninhabitable due to their size, to see if they are larger than previously thought.

In the meantime, the research is a reminder to astronomers to be cautious when assessing TESS data.

The team's research was published on Monday (July 14) in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The Gemini North telescope in Hawai‘i captured the newfound comet passing through our cosmic neighborhood, about 290 million miles (465 million kilometers) from Earth.

3I/ATLAS was initially detected by ATLAS (Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System) on July 1. It's just the third known interstellar object — meaning it originated outside of our solar system — according to a statement from the National Science Foundation (NSF) NOIRLab, which operates the International Gemini Observatory.

"The sensitivity and scheduling agility of the International Gemini Observatory has provided critical early characterization of this interstellar wanderer," Martin Still, NSF program director for the International Gemini Observatory, said in the statement. "We look forward to a bounty of new data and insights as this object warms itself on sunlight before continuing its cold, dark journey between the stars."

Interstellar objects like 3I/ATLAS are remnants from distant star systems that have been ejected into space. They offer valuable insights into the building blocks of other planetary systems in the universe — including the chemical elements that were present when and where they formed, according to the statement.

3I/ATLAS is only the third interstellar object detected visiting our solar system, after 1I'Oumuamua in 2017 and 2I/Borisov in 2019. While more objects of this nature are believed to regularly pass through our solar system, they are incredibly difficult to capture.

However, at an estimated 12 miles (20 km) in diameter, 3I/ATLAS is much larger than previous interstellar objects, making it a better target for study. The new images from the Gemini North telescope show that the comet has a compact coma — the cloud of gas and dust enveloping its icy core. And other observations have suggested that it may be the oldest comet ever discovered (possibly older than our solar system), hailing from the outer thick disk of the Milky Way.

3I/ATLAS will reach its closest approach to the sun on Oct. 30, passing within 130 million miles (210 million km), or just inside the orbit of Mars. In December, 3I/ATLAS will pass within about 170 million miles (270 million km) of Earth, though it will pose no danger to our planet.

Given 3I/ATLAS' highly eccentric orbit, this will be its one and only visit to our solar system, as its trajectory does not loop back around the sun. That's why astronomers around the world are using a wide variety of telescopes to observe the comet during its brief visit, before it returns to interstellar space.

The pulsar in question is PSR J1023+0038 (J1023), which sits in a binary system located 4,500 light-years away from Earth. This binary consists of a "dead star," or neutron star that spins around 600 times a second, as well as a low-mass star upon which the neutron star "feeds."

The rapid spin of J1023 classifies it as a millisecond pulsar, but because it transitions clearly between an active state — during which it feeds and blasts out beams of radiation from its poles — and an inactive state, it is part of a rare subclass called "transitional millisecond pulsar." One of just three known transitional millisecond pulsars, J1023 is an invaluable target for astronomers.

"Transitional millisecond pulsars are cosmic laboratories that help us understand how neutron stars evolve in binary systems," team leader and National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) researcher Maria Cristina Baglio said in a statement. "J1023 is a particularly valuable source of data because it clearly transitions between its active state, in which it feeds on its companion star, and a more dormant state, in which it behaves like a standard pulsar, emitting detectable radio waves."

The matter this neutron star strips from its companion doesn't fall straight to the surface of the dead star, but instead forms a flattened cloud, or "accretion disk" around the star. As this disk swirls around the neutron star, gradually feeding it, it emits powerful radiation consisting of wavelengths across the electromagnetic spectrum.

Thus, the team was able to examine J1023 using NASA's Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE), the European Southern Observatory's (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT) in northern Chile, and the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico, making this the first survey of binary X-ray source over the X-ray, optical and radio bands of the electromagnetic spectrum.

"During the observations, the pulsar was in a low-luminosity active phase, characterized by rapid changes between different X-ray brightness levels," Baglio said.

Assessing J1023 across three bands of the electromagnetic spectrum allowed the team to determine the polarization of radiation coming from this pulsar. Polarization refers to the orientation of light waves as they propagate.

Of particular note was IXPE's observation that 12% of the X-rays from J1023 are polarized. That is the highest level of polarization ever seen from such a binary star system.

The radio wave and optical light emissions showed lower polarizations of 2% and 1%, respectively. What was particularly interesting about the optical polarization was the fact that it was oriented in the same direction as the angle of X-ray polarization. This suggests a common mechanism behind the polarization of X-rays and the polarization of optical light.

The findings confirm an earlier theory that suggested the observed polarized emissions from binary systems such as J1023 are generated when pulsars' winds, streams of high-energy charged particles flowing from these dead stars, strike the matter in the surrounding accretion disks.

This research could finally help scientists understand what powers pulsars, and it wouldn't have been possible without the sensitivity of IXPE.

"This observation, given the low intensity of the X-ray flux, was extremely challenging, but the sensitivity of IXPE allowed us to confidently detect and measure this remarkable alignment between optical and X-ray polarization," team member and INAF researcher Alessandro Di Marco said. "This study represents an ingenious way to test theoretical scenarios thanks to polarimetric observations at multiple wavelengths."

The team's research was published on July 1 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The first wildfire to directly impact Grand Canyon National Park was the Dragon Bravo Fire, which began on July 4. Dragon Bravo has already scorched thousands of acres and continues to destroy a number of structures, including the monumental Grand Canyon Lodge, along its path within the park’s North Rim. Five days after the Dragon Bravo Fire began, another thunderstorm resulted in the creation of the White Sage Fire, which rapidly grew and expanded during a period of dry and hot weather accompanied by powerful wind gusts.

In order to fight the fires from all angles, firefighters, weather forecasters and community leaders depend on information gathered in space from satellites. Some satellites are equipped with instruments that can monitor a wildfire's progression and growth, as well as provide high-resolution photos of both the fire itself and the associated smoke plume. There are two satellite constellations from NOAA that particularly tag-team with wildfire updates: the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) and the Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS). Together, the satellites can paint a picture using tools they're equipped with, with JPSS tracking the United States in a non-geosynchronous orbit while 512 miles (824 kilometers) above us and GOES orbiting around the Earth at the same speed in a geosynchronous orbit while 22,236 miles (35,786 kilometers) above.

So, how do satellites gather information that's crucial in the fight to contain a wildfire?

There are different filters and spectral bands that can be used to get that information., and tools on the satellites are able to analyze just those two things. These tools capture high-resolution images of the growth and expansion of a wildfire in almost real-time. They can also show, via time-lapse, the direction that fire and smoke are moving. If we look at the time-lapse of images taken by the Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) aboard NOAA's GOES-18 satellite, you can see where the fire originated, its rapid growth and expansion, and how the direction of the wind steered the flames over time (in this view, the winds were blowing from the north/northwest).

Another instrument that regularly provides important information about wildfires lives on NOAA's JPSS satellites, NOAA-20 and NOAA-21. Even after the sun goes to sleep, the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) can continue to snap photos of the wildfire. These details keep first responders and community leaders aware of the fire's behavior — and alert them if any growth, new hot spots, or updates critical with fighting the wildfire can be seen. These monitoring tools thus remain of extreme importance, continuously providing information to help us understand a wildfire with a level of accuracy and precision that ground reports alone cannot offer.

You can find more information on both the Dragon Bravo and White Sage fires through the InciWeb site and any closure details from Grand Canyon National Park are located here.

As wind swirls across the landscape on both Mars and Earth, it sweeps up ground particles that reveal the dry columns. The whirlwinds dance across the landscape, leaving a path revealed by excavated particles. On the active surface of Earth, such paths are hard to spot. But on the nearly inactive surface of Mars, they can remain for months, long after the devils' minutes-long lifetimes.

"Dust devils themselves are difficult to capture in images because they are so short-lived," Ingrid Daubar, a planetary scientist at Brown University and lead author of the study, told Space.com by email. "The tracks they leave behind last longer, so we are able to observe them more thoroughly."

Dusting off the fingerprints

On warm, windy days in Earth's deserts, vortices of sand and debris can form suddenly and move unpredictably. (This author distinctly recalls being "chased" by one such devil in the Mojave Desert as a child in 1990.) Similar conditions on Mars can also produce dust devils. But the whirls on the Red Planet tend to be both wider and taller than their counterparts on Earth, and scientists aren't sure why.

Questions like these led Dauber and her colleagues to study images from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter — the highest-resolution photos of the planet snapped from space. HiRISE can capture features as small as 3 feet (1 meter). But its detailed perspective comes at a price: Its images cover only a small percentage of the Martian surface and are taken by request, though most latitudes and longitudes are well sampled.

Dauber's team studied 21,475 HiRISE images taken between January 2014 and April 2018 — roughly a quarter of the snapshots captured by the instrument as of autumn 2024. Tracks appear in only 798 of those, or just under 4%. Dust devil tracks (DDTs) suggest dust devils are more common at high northern and southern latitudes and are especially active in each hemisphere's summer, peaking in the southern hemisphere's summer.

According to the researchers, Mars' significant orbital eccentricity, or deviation from a perfect circle, causes the atmosphere in the southern summer to circulate more energetically, creating conditions ideal for vortex formation. That, combined with less dust accumulation in the North, makes the southern hemisphere summer an almost perfect storm for dust devils. The observations reflect peak DDT preservation more than dust devil formation, the researchers cautioned, but the culmination coincides with the peak observed by NASA's Spirit rover at Gusev crater, along with global observations of the sand spouts.

The researchers also realized that DDTs most commonly form and are preserved in regions of mixed sand, rocks and bedrock, with little bright dust, the most common surface type identified on Mars. Bright dust scooped up from the surface leaves behind trails that are dark from the underlying landscape.

"The material on the ground is critical to the formation of the DDTs," Dauber said.

Dusty missions

The first Martian dust devil tracks appeared in images sent back from NASA's Mariner 9 mission in 1972 (although they weren't discovered until the images were analyzed in 2014). But it wasn't until 1998, when higher-resolution images were captured by Mars Global Surveyor, that the tracks could be seriously analyzed.

Dust has hindered past ground missions. Mars rovers take their energy from the sun via solar panels. Over time, dust builds up on the panels, limiting their efficacy. The blockage has shuttered missions like NASA's Opportunity rover, which explored the surface for 14.5 years. NASA's InSight lander also succumbed to a dust-related death after four years.

The high winds that birth dust devils can also revitalize robots, however. Opportunity's twin, Spirit, got a second lease on life after a Martian whirlwind cleaned its solar arrays back in 2005.

Understanding where dust devils are most active can help in the selection of landing sites for future missions. High-latitude bands where DDTs and their progenitors occur more frequently could help to scour solar panels and thus enable a more enduring exploration.

"It depends on the mission — every mission is unique," Daubar said. There are many requirements for landing sites and exploration, including regions that will allow for a safe touchdown, alongside complex scientific goals.

"It could be that there are only a few places where the specific science goals can be achieved, and then perhaps this could be a deciding factor between those sites," she said.

A new study of dust devils on Mars was published in May 2025 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.