An intense demolition derby of at least six galaxies smashing into one another has been found lurking in the early universe by the James Webb Space Telescope. This merger is also expected to fuel the growth of a supermassive black hole and trigger the formation of what will eventually become one of the most massive galaxies in the cosmos.

"What makes this special is that we can follow both the build-up of a giant galaxy and the growth of the black hole at its center," Huub Röttgering, an astronomer at the Netherlands' Leiden Observatory, said in a statement.

The discovery came after a tip-off from radio astronomers who had noticed emissions that seemed to be coming from an undiscovered active black hole. When the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) looked closer, it found a surprise.

"We didn't find a single galaxy, but an entire complex of at least six galaxies," said Aayush Saxena of the University of Oxford.

These six galaxies sit at a redshift of 4.0, which equates to a time about 12 billion years ago, just 1.8 billion years after the Big Bang.

Through the vision of the JWST's Near-Infrared Camera the six galaxies appear fuzzy, reminiscent of a faraway version of Stephan's Quintet, which is a collection of five galaxies, four of which form a compact group that are on course to merge to become a giant elliptical galaxy.

Similarly, the six galaxies spotted by the JWST, and collectively termed TGSSJ1530+1049, will undergo a series of rapid mergers to become what is known as a 'brightest cluster galaxy,' which is an enormous elliptical galaxy of the kind found at the center of galaxy clusters.

"We call structures like this protoclusters: the precursors of the vast collections of galaxies we see today," said Leiden's Roderik Overzier. "These are places where matter came together very early on. We think we are seeing a rare moment when several massive galaxies still exist separately, but are already in the process of forming one much larger galaxy."

Already a supermassive black hole has formed at the heart of this galactic maelstrom, and radio observations with the European VLBI (very long Baseline Interferometer) Network and the U.K.'s e-MERLIN (enhanced Multi-Element Remotely Linked Interferometer Network) at a resolution on the scale of a 100 milliarcseconds have identified radio lobes and hotspots typical of an active black hole's jet interacting with the gas surrounding it.

"Using a network of connected radio telescopes, we were able to produce a very sharp image of TGSSJ1530+1049," said Krisztina Gabányi of Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary. "The radio emission is produced as material falls into the black hole, while some of it is expelled again at high speed."

The jet doesn't seem to extend as far as all the galaxies in TGSSJ1530+1049 yet, implying that the black hole is still fairly young.

The six galaxies of TGSSJ1530+1049 span a volume only a few tens of thousands of light-years across, which is smaller than our Milky Way galaxy — and yet, they pack in a humungous amount of stars, equivalent to hundreds of billions of solar masses and a star-formation rate somewhere between 70–163 solar masses per year. That's a frenetic pace compared to the Milky Way, which produces much less than ten solar masses per year.

TGSSJ1530+1049 is one of the densest collections of heavyweight galaxies found in the early universe so far, and is giving exciting clues as to how the most massive galaxies, clusters and black holes in the universe formed.

The JWST observations are reported in The Open Journal of Astrophysics, while the radio measurements are described in a paper in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Earth's moon is due for a human-made impact this August courtesy of a spent SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage.

The Falcon 9 upper stage is left over from the launch that sent Firefly's Blue Ghost-1 lander to the moon on Jan. 15, 2025 by way of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative. Also sent moonward on that flight was the Hakuto-R Mission 2, called Resilience, a robotic lunar lander developed by the Japanese company ispace.

This striking event is expected to occur close to Einstein Crater near the moon's western limb and could be visible by ground and space-based telescopes. Varying forecasts have sparked debate on whether or not we'll be able to see the rocket body slam into the moon on Aug. 5, and, if so, how both citizen scientists and astronomers can best observe it it.

'This wonderful environment of the moon'

The consequences of this rocket mission's leftover hardware is on target for a "limb shot," meaning it could strike the far western edge of the moon. Another possible impact site is Bell Crater, just out of sight on the moon's far side.

Earlier this month, NASA's Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute (SSERVI) hosted a discussion with experts regarding the approaching impact. Taking part in the meeting of moon-watching specialists was Brian Day, SSERVI's lead for citizen science and community development.

"One of the things that is really important here with this impact that is coming up is it serves as a reminder to us that the moon is a dynamic environment. We think of it as being static. It is not. It is being whacked. It is changing," Day said.

Citizen scientists can actually get involved to help understand the dynamic environment of the moon thanks to the Impact Flash! program, said Day.

"And that can be done either with instrumentation you have in your own backyard or you can use ours in orbit around the moon," Day added. "This impact is a great reminder of this wonderful environment of the moon."

Moon viewing maybe

But will the impact be visible from Earth? Any assured answer is in a hedge-your-bet, yes/no mind bender.

"I've gone from 'probably' to 'probably not,' and more recently, to 'maybe,'" said Bill Gray of Project Pluto, creator of a telescope-tracking application used worldwide by professional and amateur astronomers alike to keep tabs on asteroids, comets, and other near-Earth objects.

It was Gray's work with Project Pluto that got the word out about the roughly four metric ton Falcon 9 upper stage intersection with the moon at over two kilometers a second. In September 2025, his software for computing orbits analyzed the observations and projected an impact with the moon on Aug. 5, 2026.

"Even though we have tracked it since launch, our idea of when and where it's going to hit are currently fuzzy by minutes and dozens of kilometers," Gray said. "But we will refine that and get an idea of where it's going to hit."

Out on a limb

"I think it's going to be very subtle. I think it's going to be very, very hard to see, if not impossible. But there's always a chance," said William Cooke, program manager of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

Cooke quickly added that, along with a rapid-fire impact flash, the upper stage impact will kick up huge amounts of lunar regolith, the dust that coats the surface of the moon.

"It will excavate that out of the crater and this may create a plume that will be illuminated by the sun," Cooke said. "So, it's not only important to look for the impact flash, but if this occurs close enough to the limb, you may be able to see that plume of material rising, and that would be significant as well."

Time and inclination

Still, concerning the spotting of that over-the-limb plume, it remains a guessing game.

How much material might be lofted, and how high will it go? Given the moon's one-sixth gravity, how long will it take for that material to fall back onto the lunar surface?

"So, no good feeling for how long the plume will be up there," Cooke said.

Putting aside all the unknowns, it is Cooke's view that "if you've got the time and the inclination, it might be worth a look."

Regarding the possibility of seeing the ejecta plume, Gray of Project Pluto, later told Space.com he agreed. "We pretty much shrugged about this and said "we dunno' and we should look and see if we can observe it."

On-location orbiters

Speaking of time and inclination, there is an on-location witness to the before and after results from the rocket stage plummeting into the moon.

Brent Garry is the project scientist for NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. LRO will be passing over the projected crash site about seven days prior to the impact and about seven days after the impact, Garry said.

"After the impact we might have a little bit more knowledge of where it is. We can do some additional targeting about a week after the impact and get some targeting over where the site is," said Garry.

Different observers

This event emphasizes that when you're looking for impact flashes on the moon, either anthropogenic or natural, there's a need for as many observers as possible, said SSERVO's Day.

"Because these flashes are so short, they can very much mimic a cosmic ray impact on your detector and just be a sudden blip," said Day.

What really helps researcher's distinguish between cosmic ray impacts and actual flashes on the moon is to have different observers in different locations observing that flash at the same time, Day said.

"And if you see that, if you have that coincidence of events," Day said, "that's one of the reasons why we like to have as many people looking as possible."

Twice each year, we celebrate what we call a solstice when Earth is at its maximum tilt toward or away from the sun. And during this June's summer solstice, a European weather satellite managed to capture a striking image of the celestial moment from space.

What is it?

This image of the solstice was captured on June 21 by the European Space Agency's (ESA) Meteosat Third Generation (MTG) mission. This is a fleet of Earth-monitoring satellites that capture images of our home planet to support weather monitoring over Europe, Africa and regions of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. The first Meteosat satellite launched in 1977 as ESA's first Earth-observing mission, and to date, there have been 11 satellites launched as part of this series.

In this image, the first of the third generation of Meteosat satellites, MTG-I1, captured an image of Earth just six minutes after we passed the moment of summer solstice, according to ESA. This image shows clearly Earth's "terminator line," or the fuzzy "line" that divides nighttime and daytime on a planet.

Why is it incredible?

On the day of a solstice when Earth is at its maximum tilt, there is almost exactly the same amount of daytime as there is nighttime. In the northern hemisphere, the June solstice marks the longest day of the year, or the day with the most sunlight. And, in the southern hemisphere, the June solstice marks the shortest day of the year.

In June, those in the northern hemisphere celebrate their extra hours of sunlight before the days start getting shorter again. Historically, solstices have been celebrated around the world, folded into cultural traditions and practices. As humans invented agriculture, and our food systems rely on things like available sunlight, it makes sense that throughout time, the changing duration of sunlight would be tightly intertwined with all aspects of our day-to-day lives.

If you stand outside the old Corn Exchange in Bristol, you'll see a clock with two minute hands above the entrance. One hand is set to London time, the other to Bristol's — ten minutes behind. The lag is because the sun reaches its peak over the second city a little bit after the first.

Of course, when it comes to scheduling anything with bounds beyond one city, having two poses an issue. This is why, in 1840, the British company Great Western Railway imposed what it called "Railway Time" across its whole network of trains, establishing Greenwich Mean Time as the first standardized time. And it's still the time zone used in the U.K. today. However, when several towns refused to adopt the time established by the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, the solution was to use two minute hands instead of one. And so the three-handed clock came to be.

That compromise could soon repeat itself in a less likely location: the moon.

The U.S. and China, the two largest space powers, disagree on what time it is on the moon. That's a problem because experts say satellites from one country will be unable to coordinate with spacecraft from the other during future space missions — which could risk accidents.

The White House has tasked NASA with establishing Coordinated Lunar Time (LTC) as a universal time on the moon, which would set the standard for NASA's LunaNet satellite system. But China has other ideas.

China's Chang'e Program, named after the Goddess who flew from the Earth to the moon in Chinese folklore, is the only space program with active lunar relay satellites, Queqiao-1 and Queqiao-2. These relay satellites are the first basis of a moon-wide GPS system meant for future space missions could rely on, meaning they compete with NASA's LunaNet — and because of the way GPS works, these satellites will need a standardized time situation. China is also the only space power to have landed spacecraft on the far side of the moon, where radio signals from Earth are blocked, proving it can coordinate landings without relying on commands from home.

In other words, while the U.S. surpasses China in terms of total space missions, the relay satellites could give China the edge when it comes to establishing the first lunar GPS system for future moon landings. China also hasn't agreed to use LTC for this system, raising the prospect that timekeeping standards could diverge.

Moon Race 2.0

Last year, experts warned U.S. Senators that China is set to win the moon race — the 21st century race to secure lunar resources establish a human presence on the moon — unless space operations receive more funding. Scientists further pointed out funding issues that could impact U.S. leadership in the lunar arena and wavering political commitment to Gateway, the space station intended to serve the Artemis moon program.

Private space-faring companies are also looking to governments to set international standards before spending money on expensive equipment. If China sets the standards before the US, private companies might gear with investments for Chinese customers, giving the country the edge over competitors.

"If everybody has their own standards, the complication increases for the user and manufacturers," says Bijunath Patla, a theoretical physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). "So there is a chance of making some mistakes, errors, and interchanging, and then having a mishap."

GPS works by having satellites broadcast time signals. If the clocks on the satellites disagree, even by a microsecond, the GPS positioning can shift by hundreds of meters. In an emergency landing, that difference could prove expensive, or even fatal in the case of a human spaceflight mission.

If you take out the cellphone in your pocket, or look at the right-hand corner of your laptop to check the time, the precise time has been coordinated by hundreds of atomic clocks.

Atomic clocks created by NIST measure the oscillation of microwaves, the upwards and downwards swings of energy. Cesium atoms in the clocks absorb microwave energy only when oscillations reach 9,192,631,770 cycles per second.

Because all cesium atoms are the same, every atomic clock measures the exact same second as every other atomic clock. Their invention led to the universal standard of time we use today, superseding the time set by the Royal Greenwich Observatory in the 1800s.

International Atomic Time developed from the atomic clock, set by NIST’s optical "lattice clocks" and "cesium fountain clocks”, with the recently invented “nuclear clock” set to make the standard even more precise by ticking according to the fluctuations of thorium-229 nuclei.

The time on our screens comes from over 80 countries working with their own atomic clocks to work out the time. The U.S. Naval Observatory is one of these, submitting the time of its atomic clocks in Washington D.C. and Colorado to an international timekeeping organization in France.

Based in a suburb of Paris, the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM) collects the time from dozens of scientific labs across the world and uses the input from their atomic clocks to produce the weighted average time, what we call Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).

BIPM sends back corrections to each country, which recalibrate their own clocks to UTC. Countries beam these corrections to their satellites, which then transmit the standardised time to cell towers. The result appears on our phones.

But while our timekeeping methods are universal, time itself is not.

Spacetime

If the international atomic standard had been running since the Big Bang, NIST claims, it would not have gained or lost a single second since the universe began.

The way we experience time depends on gravity. The gravity we feel on Earth is determined by the mass and radius of our planet. Away from the Earth's gravity, spacetime behaves differently.

If one identical twin stayed on Earth, but the other travelled to a black hole, where matter is compressed, then both would experience time differently. Should the twin in the black hole take an atomic clock, and somehow survive, they would return to Earth to find that their twin had died, along with everyone they knew. Hundreds of millions of years would have passed by, according to the clock that remained on Earth, whereas their atomic clock would have ticked away only a short time.

"That person's time is being slowed down by gravity, their time is ticking slower," says Patla. "It's the same thing with the Earth and the moon. The clocks really tick faster."

Because of the physics of spacetime, coordinating missions with satellites away from the Earth's gravity gets increasingly difficult.

On the moon, clocks run around 56 microseconds faster than clocks on Earth. While everyone agrees on the math, not everyone agrees on who should wind the clock.

Because of the difference, space powers need to agree to convert the discrepancy into UTC, or an equivalent that works on satellites coordinating space missions. Without agreement, engineering equipment that relies on GPS could diverge, and missions could prove dangerous in the years ahead, particularly with the projected increase in space landings.

Aiming to land a crew on the moon by 2030, the Chinese space agency plans to establish a moon base by 2035, from which asteroid mining operations or future missions to Mars could be prepared. Atomic clocks on Mars tick about 477 microseconds faster per day, leading to suggestions of a Mars time zone. But Patla says a separate time zone for Mars may prove too complicated.

About time

Almost all space powers are targeting the south pole of the moon, where loads of frozen water presumably found there can be converted to hydrogen to use as rocket fuel for future space missions. Exiting the moon is less fuel-consuming than exiting the Earth's atmosphere, though assembling rockets on the moon has never been attempted.

But the south pole of the moon is scarred by impact craters and jagged mountains, which could make landing there more risky. In a historic moment, India was the first nation to land a spacecraft there in 2023 — and hundreds of launches from various countries are scheduled over the coming decades to achieve the same feat. As these launch attempts start to happen, converting between differing satellite times in an emergency could prove dangerous.

Luckily, there's more collaboration between the agencies than some might suspect. NIST has check-ins with China's Purple Mountain Observatory, which according to Patla are purely advisory, so the two countries can better coordinate their activities in space.

China has announced its own mathematical framework for timekeeping, the Lunar Time Ephemeris (or LTE440), which could complement NASA’s Lunar Time, building towards a more robust conversion between the two countries. The math and physics are not in dispute, Patla adds, a fact that should give policymakers some comfort.

"Most of the world uses UTC, and so there is an incentive for everybody to take the best route to get there," says Patla. "If we want to have a lunar economy and if we want to have a sustained presence on the moon, then the standards would be helpful to link moon time to Earth time."

The oldest known asteroid impact site on Earth was created 3.02 billion years ago in what's now Western Australia — not far from where we've seen the oldest traces of life on our planet.

A rock formation in Western Australia's Pilbara region seems to offer evidence of an asteroid slamming into Earth's newly-formed rocky crust around 3.02 billion years ago. That makes the formation, called the North Pole Dome, the oldest evidence of an asteroid impact on Earth, according to a recent study, which dated crystals in the rocks shocked and reshaped by the impact's tremendous heat and pressure.

It's the latest salvo in an ongoing debate about the age of the crater (or what's left of it after billions of years of erosion), and there's more at stake than bragging rights: a crater dating back this deep in Earth's distant past could shed light on the rise of the continents and the origin of life.

A rare glimpse

Inside most rocks in Earth's crust, tiny grains of mineral called zircon quietly record the passage of eons. Zircon contains tiny amounts of uranium, which slowly but steadily breaks down into lead; that steadiness is key, because the ratios of those two elements reveal how long it's been since a grain of zircon crystallized from hot, molten rock. In this case, zircon grains told Kirkland and his colleagues that it had been about 3.02 billion years since the tremendous heat and pressure of an asteroid impact melted zircon crystals in the rocks around North Pole Dome.

"Some zircons at the North Pole Dome have unusual branching, skeletal shapes," Kirkland said in an emailed press release. "We interpret these as impact-modified crystals, formed when older zircon was disrupted, partly recrystallized, and in places, regrown during the intense heating caused by the impact."

If Kirkland and his colleagues are right, the area, also called the Miralga Impact Structure, is the oldest trace of an asteroid colliding with our planet. The newly published date makes Miralga a relic of a tumultuous period in our solar system's history, called the Late Heavy Bombardment, when the giant planets were still jockeying for position in their orbits around the sun, flinging asteroids and comets toward the inner solar system in the process (or so cosmologists theorize). Amid this rain of space rocks, Earth was midway through the Archaean Eon, with the planet's surface finally cooling to form a thin crust of solid rock. Earth's surface lay beneath an orangish haze of methane, a little like a warmer version of Saturn's moon Titan.

And somewhere in there, the first life took shape.

The oldest traces of that early life are just a few kilometers from North Pole Dome: limestone stromatolites, made of layers of tiny sediment grains trapped in, and eventually left behind by, sheets of early bacteria. The ones in Pilbara are about 3.5 billion years old, another date courtesy of zircon grains. If the Miralga impact happened 3.02 billion years ago, it struck a world already teeming with overlapping mats of bacteria.

The oldest known Earth rock, a 4.35-billion-year-old sandstone formation (also dated using zircon), lies just a few hundred kilometers south of Pilbara, in the Jack Hills. Why is all of this — the oldest rocks, the oldest asteroid crater, and the oldest traces of life — in Western Australia? It's reasonably likely that crust formed, life emerged, and meteors smashed into the ground millions of years earlier, in places all over the world, but the evidence just happened to be preserved in this area of Australia. Most of Earth's very oldest rocks have long since been reworked by plate tectonics or erosion, basically erasing the first chapters of our geological record.

A heated debate about heated rock

"While the site had previously been identified as an ancient impact crater, its exact age remained uncertain," said Kirkland.

Last year, Kirkland and his colleagues proposed that the impact dated back to 3.47 billion years ago, almost the same age as the nearby stromatolites. In that same paper, the team suggested that the original crater – whose outline has long since eroded away, leaving behind only impact-shocked rocks and tantalizing hints – might have been up to 62 miles (100 km) wide. The 22-mile-wide (35-kilometer-wide) North Pole Dome itself seemed to mark the crater's center; rock in the middle of large craters often rebounds upward after the impact, leaving a peak or dome behind (picture the way the middle of a trampoline flexes upward, captured in a freeze frame).

But another group of geoscientists published a paper a few months later, arguing that Miralga (a name they gave the crater, based on the local Aboriginal peoples' name for the area) couldn't be any more than 2.7 billion years old, and only 10 miles (16 km) wide. That's still substantial, and old enough to be interesting, but too young and too small to have played much of a role in shaping the region's life, or its continental crust.

"By the time of the impact, the Pilbara was already quite old," wrote the study’s authors in an essay at the time (of the paper, not the impact).

The teams agreed on, basically, one thing: the area around North Pole Dome was definitely an impact site, and dating very old rocks is not easy. Both 2025 papers looked at the placement of rocks called shatter cones, which form when the shockwaves of an impact (or, sometimes, an underground nuclear bomb test) pass through rock, leaving behind ripples, striations, or cracks. But based on where the shatter cones appeared in relation to other rock layers, the two teams of scientists drew very different conclusions.

"Ancient craters are incredibly difficult to date, because over billions of years, rocks are altered by heat, pressure, and fluids, which can obscure or reset the original impact signatures," said Kirkland, whose team now argues that the zircon crystal dates are much more precise than either team's previous efforts. "What we've been able to do here is separate the moment of impact from its long geological history."

Curtin University geoscientist Chris Kirkland and his colleagues published their work in the journal Geology.

In 2025, the European Space Agency dark universe detective spacecraft Euclid turned its attention to the heart of the Milky Way for just 26 hours. In just over one day, Euclid was able to create the largest and most detailed photo of this region of our galaxy ever made.

The image, packed with 60 million stars, could help scientists hunt for extrasolar planets, exoplanets, in this region known as the galactic bulge.

Euclid is designed to study dark energy, the mysterious force that drives the accelerating expansion of the universe, by studying distant galaxies. That means the space telescope is powerful enough to distinguish individual stars in the central bulge of the Milky Way. Other telescopes fail to do this because they are too blinded by the densely packed stars in this region.

Euclid was requested to monitor the central bulge of the Milky Way to assist astronomers in the hunt for exoplanets because this is the perfect region for so-called "microlensing" events to occur.

"To catch microlensing, you need to observe parts of the sky that are crowded with stars, such as close to the center of our galaxy," team leader Jean-Philippe Beaulieu of the Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris in France said in a statement.

Microlensing is a weak form of gravitational lensing that occurs when objects with mass cause the very fabric of space to warp. When light from a background source passes through this warping of space, its path is curved. This can be used to study the background source; for example, scientists have used it to great effect with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to study some of the most distant and early galaxies. However, the curvature of light from background sources can also be used to detect faint objects like planets.

Spotting planets using microlensing requires one star to pass in front of another and act as a gravitational lens. The presence of a planet causes a tiny perturbation in the lensing of light from the background star. It's a small effect, but one that has been used very effectively in the detection of exoplanets.

"During the last twenty years, almost 300 exoplanets have been discovered using this technique, all with ground-based telescopes and all towards the center of our galaxy," Beaulieu said. "This image from Euclid includes 51 known planetary systems – and it will assist in studying many more that will be found."

Despite Euclid's study of the central bulge pointing the way forward in observing new microlensing events, there are no such events in the data from the ESA spacecraft. That is because detecting such events takes around 20 days.

Instead, it will be up to telescopes like the forthcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope to observe this region for longer periods and compare with this day's worth of Euclid data to find microlensing events.

"In 24 hours, Euclid has already captured the stars involved in all the future microlensing events that the Roman space telescope will detect, but before the stars and planets involved have aligned," team member Natalia Rektsini of the Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris said.

"This means that anyone who detects a microlensing event in the same region, for example, with Roman, will be able from now on to use Euclid data as a time reference in the past and see how the stars looked before they overlapped. Since Euclid can clearly separate individual stars, one can then measure how fast they move over time and use that information to confirm the existence of a planet and determine its mass. This would not be possible with data from one point in time."

One reason this is so exciting to exoplanet hunters is that other techniques used to spot these distant worlds tend to excel at detecting hot and massive planets close to their host stars.

Microlensing, however, can be used to detect more diminutive planets much farther from their host stars and with chillier temperatures. That means it could be used to detect ice giants like Uranus and Neptune in wide orbits around central bulge stars.

"This result shows what a relatively small, dedicated team can achieve within a large international mission," says Valeria Pettorino, Euclid Project Scientist at ESA.

"That's why this Euclid data will be a time reference for past and future missions and enable studies of exoplanets and their masses. This data can also be used for other scientific applications, from brown dwarfs and binary stars to stellar motions and dust across our galaxy."

Could Martian mudstones be holding evidence of ancient microbes? New findings strengthen the case that the Red Planet once held life.

New data from NASA's Perseverance rover has revealed complex carbon in two Martian mudstones found in Mars' Jezero crater, the same location where previous evidence of possible ancient life has been found. Scientists think this macromolecular (meaning large) complex carbon, could hold evidence that ancient microbial life once existed in the same sedimentary material, according to one new paper describing these observations. "Measurements of two mudstones show hundreds of organic detections, making this the most robust organic detection in Jezero crater," the paper reads.

This comes soon after the news last year that Perseverance found what has been dubbed the strongest evidence of potential biosignatures, or hints of life, on Mars.

"Carbon is the primary building block for life on Earth, and all living things are made up of complex organic macromolecules," co-lead author Ashley Murphy, a researcher at the Planetary Science Institute, told Space.com. "On Earth, [macromolecular carbon] is often found in extremely old rocks and in some cases it is the only organic evidence of past microbial life.

"Since early Mars may have been more similar to Earth," Murphy added, "we may anticipate finding [macromolecular carbon] in old Martian rocks too, so we are searching for these organic macromolecules on Mars and other planetary bodies to determine whether the necessary chemical ingredients and environmental conditions to support life have ever existed there."

Perseverance landed on Mars in 2021 in Jezero Crater, an expansive crater thought to once be a lake that could have possibly harbored life. This landing site was in fact chosen because scientists thought it could have some of the best evidence for possible ancient life on the planet. And so far, in Perseverance's extensive explorations — which have now officially taken the rover the distance of a marathon on Mars — that prediction seems like it's turning out to be true.

In this new research, a team of scientists co-led by Murphy used Perseverance's spectrometer SHERLOC (the Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals), which uses lasers to identify an area or object's chemical and mineral makeup, to map the distribution of organic matter in the individual mudstones. The crew found organic carbon inside two mudstones.

Furthermore, these carbon-filled mudstones were found in the same location as the last year's discovery of a potential biosignature found in a sedimentary rock on the Red Planet, which scientists say is still the strongest evidence that life could have once existed on early Mars. In this discovery, Perseverance found a rock now-named "Cheyava Falls" with distinctive "leopard spots."

These types of rock marking can be created in high heat or extremely acidic temperatures, but neither of these conditions are thought to have existed in the area. However, the markings can also be formed by the presence of life. So, while this rock wasn't conclusive evidence of past life on Mars, it certainly provided significant evidence that is now supported by this new data.

With these observations, the rover has made two main findings.

First, Perseverance has found organic, large, complex carbon in mudstones in Bright Angel, a rocky area on the northern and southern edges of Neretva Vallis, which is an ancient river valley in the Jezero area. And not only did Perseverance make hundreds of detections of organic carbon in these rocks, but the researchers also state that this is "the only detection of macromolecular carbon on a natural rock surface on Mars."

"This is also the first detection of MMC in a mudstone on Mars outside of Gale Crater, suggesting that the availability of organics may have been widespread across the planet billions of years ago," co-lead author Kyle Uckert, the SHERLOC deputy principal investigator at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told Space.com.

While both studied mudstones have organic carbon in their interiors, according to these observations from Perseverance, there were some differences between the two rocks. The carbon in one mudstone was found mixed with primarily silicate minerals, while the other was filled with carbon mixed with secondary carbonate and sulfate minerals. The team also found that the carbon in both rocks was relatively intact, meaning the specimens might be resistant to radiation and oxidation or that it may have been recently exposed to the Martian surface.

Secondly, the team found that, in this identified carbon, Perseverance has detected evidence of potential biochemical interactions. These interactions left behind features in the two mudstones that look just like features created by microscopic life in sediments on Earth. This begs the question: Did ancient microbes on Mars really live in the sediments in this once-flowing river?

Maybe, maybe not. While that would certainly be one explanation, it's also possible that the carbon could have been created without life.

"There are multiple potential pathways to form abiotic organics on Mars," the authors state in this paper, clarifying that this, even compounded with other existing data, cannot conclusively say whether or not life created what Perseverance has observed.

"The science payload of the Perseverance rover was not designed to distinguish between abiotic and biotic processes, but was instead selected to identify compelling rocks to be collected for possible return to Earth for more rigorous testing," Uckert told Space.com. Uckert added that there could be many non-life reasons behind the presence of this complex carbon, "for example, it may have been delivered to the surface via meteoritic infall, or formed through hydrothermal geologic processes," he said.

For now, we can only wait until the next juicy bit of evidence about ancient life on Mars reveals itself.

This work was described in a paper published June 24 in the journal Science Advances.

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope is finding clues that are leading scientists closer to understanding the origins of the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS.

What is it?

Comet 3I/ATLAS captured the world's attention when it was discovered nearly a year ago on July 1, 2025. The comet was first spotted by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS), and is only the third interstellar object every discovered.

The comet swooped through our solar system, passing by Earth at a far (and safe) distance on its tour of our cosmic neighborhood. It is on a long trajectory that will take it out of our solar system, never to return.

In observations from the James Webb Space Telescope, scientists were able to look in the direction the comet as it began moving away from the sun in December of last year. While in close proximity to our star, the sun's heat warmed the comet, making it extra bright and easy to observe.

With this view, astronomers were able to calculate some of the ratios of the chemicals present in the comet. This further highlighted that the object is from out of our solar system, as they found ratios of carbon and heavy hydrogen not found in comets in our solar system.

Researchers described their results in a new paper published June 22 in the journal Nature.

Why is it incredible?

Being only the third interstellar object ever found, people were excited about 3I/ATLAS. They were so excited, in fact, that conspiracies about the object sprouted up quickly. Due to it being from outside of our solar system, some claimed that the comet could be some sort of alien spaceship, similar to the initial suspicions about the interstellar object 'Oumuamua found years earlier.

But with new information coming in from space telescopes, and astronomers eager to understand this object better, these clues are leading us closer and closer to the true origins of this strange comet.

A bright, dense cluster of hot, massive stars in a galaxy that existed 1.4 billion years after the big bang has been found helping to end the early universe's foggy days during which neutral hydrogen gas was draped across the cosmos, obscuring ultraviolet light from luminous objects.

The cluster was found emitting ultraviolet light in a small but quickly growing galaxy by the Hubble Space Telescope. The presence of this ultraviolet light, and the star-forming history of the cluster producing it, suggests that bursts of star formation contributed to waves of ionizing radiation that gradually cleared out the opaque neutral hydrogen.

In the aftermath of the big bang, the universe was filled with neutral hydrogen gas that is opaque at short wavelengths of light, such as ultraviolet. However, this ultraviolet light was the neutral hydrogen's worst enemy, gradually ionizing the gas across the universe. Once ionized, hydrogen gas cannot absorb ultraviolet light — and so, the cosmos became transparent at those wavelengths.

Because of this, the first billion or so years are called the Epoch of Reionization. It is referred to as "reionization" rather than ionization because, technically, the gas had already been ionized once before during the first 379,000 years after the Big Bang.

While investigating what brought about this epoch, astronomers had identified two chief suspects that could have produced sufficient amounts of ultraviolet light to ionize the neutral hydrogen. One is active supermassive black holes and the other is the first generations of hot, massive stars. The problem is, given that neutral hydrogen is adept at absorbing the ultraviolet light, astronomers have had difficulty tracing that ultraviolet back to its source and identifying which of the two suspects are the main culprit.

In 2023 the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) made a major breakthrough, finding a galaxy that existed just 900 million years after the Big Bang that was producing enough energy to ionize the neutral gas surrounding it.

Now the Hubble Space Telescope has gone further, detecting ultraviolet light from a galaxy called MXDFz4.4. This ultraviolet light should only be visible if the surrounding gas had already been ionized.

"Observing a galaxy like this was thought to be impossible," said Ilias Goovaerts of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, who led the discovery, in a statement. "Researchers expected the 'fog' of neutral hydrogen that filled the early universe would be too thick and obscure our view of its ionizing light. Hubble not only spotted that light, but it also helped reveal incredible details about the galaxy's characteristics."

MXDFz4.4 was first identified in the MUSE eXtremely Deep Field (MXDF), with MUSE being the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer on the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile. The "z4.4" part of its name tells us that the galaxy exists at a redshift of 4.4, meaning that it existed 12.37 billion years ago. As the universe has expanded in the time since then, the ultraviolet light has been redshifted into visible wavelengths that were detected by Hubble.

"Astronomers have found many galaxies that existed at this point in the history of the universe, but we haven't detected ionizing photons from any of them, making MXDFz4.4 one of a kind," said Marc Rafelski, who is the Hubble Deputy Mission Head at STScI.

MXDFz4.4 is 100 times smaller than our Milky Way galaxy but is forming stars ten times faster than our galaxy is. Many of those stars are being born in the tight, luminous cluster producing the ionizing ultraviolet.

The cluster contains "A lot of young, hot, massive stars in a small space [that] do a better job of blasting through opaque gas," said Goovaerts.

Furthermore, by comparing Hubble's observations of MXDFz.4.4 with those of the JWST, which probed for cooler, older stars in the galaxy, Goovaerts and Rafelski's team discovered that the stars in the cluster had formed in bursts, each burst producing fresh quantities of ionizing ultraviolet radiation that helped to clear out more and more of the neutral gas over time. We now see the galaxy about 250 million years after it finished reionizing the surrounding gas. These hot, massive stars in the cluster end their lives after a few million years as supernova explosions, the blast waves and radiation from which can create bubbles in the gas light years across, creating further pathways for ultraviolet light to escape and be detected by Hubble.

The observations seem to nail down the theory that clusters of hot, massive, luminous stars in young galaxies in the early universe played a dominant role in ionizing the universe's neutral gas.

"Hubble's observations of MXDFz4.4 let us test our hypotheses much closer to the Era of Reionization than ever before," said Rafelski. "Finding more galaxies, especially at slightly later cosmic times where larger samples are within reach, would let us refine these measurements and figure out what cleared our view as that era was ending."

The results were published on June 23 in The Astrophysical Journal.

Using NASA's exoplanet-hunting spacecraft TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite), scientists have discovered a planetary system that scientists are calling "improbable." It could change how we think about the mechanisms behind planet formation.

The reason for the unusual arrangement of this planetary system is a failed star or brown dwarf designated TOI-201 c. Objects like this get the slightly unfair nickname of "failed stars" because, despite forming from a collapsing cloud of gas and dust like other stars, they fail to gather enough mass to trigger nuclear fusion of hydrogen to helium in their cores. Brown dwarfs have masses between 13 and 80 times that of Jupiter, or 0.013 to 0.08 the mass of the sun. That puts them right between the most massive planets and the smallest stars.

TOI-201 c is on a highly elliptical orbit, taking 2,881 days to orbit its star, which has resulted in planets including a super-Earth named TOI-201 d and a warm Jupiter named TOI-201 b, forming in a narrow zone within its orbit, something that isn't just new to astronomers; it is completely unexpected based on planetary formation models.

The 5.8-day orbit of TOI-201 d and the 53-day orbit of TOI-201 b are both perfectly aligned with the orbit of the brown dwarf. The brown dwarf creates gravitational instability at distances equivalent to the distance between Mars and the sun, but this didn't prevent planets from forming in the system.

"This discovery provides a crucial insight into how planets form even around massive, eccentric objects," team member and INAF researcher Aldo Bonomo said in an emailed statement.

The system challenges the idea that gas giant planets form at distances equivalent to 2 to 3 times the distance between Earth and the sun in the disks of gas and dust that surround stars during their infancy.

"The presence of the brown dwarf on such an elliptical orbit forced the planets to form and survive by occupying the innermost and hottest edges of the primordial disk," team member Luca Naponiello of the National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) said in the statement. "Furthermore, the data show that during the close approach of the brown dwarf, the warm Jupiter undergoes strong and sudden variations in its transit timing, bearing witness to an intense and vigorous dynamic interaction currently underway between the two giants."

The system was discovered by TESS using a rare mono-transit event, which describes a planetary body making one crossing of the face of its star, causing a dip in starlight. This was followed by an observing campaign conducted from the ground.

It is extremely rare to discover objects like TOI-201 c with such long and eccentric orbital periods using transits they make of their parent star. This brown dwarf is the first one of these objects to have its mass confirmed, making it an important step forward in astronomy.

"It [TOI-201c] is the transiting object with the longest orbital period for which the mass is known," Naponiello said.

The team's results were published on Wednesday (June 17) in the journal Nature.

A huge, shining bauble of stars called Terzan 5 could be a clump of our galaxy's central bulge that hasn't been smoothed out into the mix, and has instead survived as a fossil relic leftover from the birth of the Milky Way galaxy.

"Terzan 5 may provide direct evidence that can help explain how bulges formed in galaxies throughout the universe," said Barbara Lanzoni of the University of Bologna in a statement. Lanzoni is a member of a team of astronomers, led by Bologna colleagues Giorgia Zullo and Francesco Ferraro, who tackled Terzan 5 with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

Terzan 5 is a globular cluster — a huge sphere of stars with a total mass two million times greater than our sun's and a total luminosity 800,000 times greater. The problem is, Terzan 5 lies about 18,800 light-years away in the bulge of the Milky Way galaxy. This means dense lanes of intervening galactic dust block our view, significantly dimming Terzan 5's apparent brightness. That's why it wasn't discovered until 1968 by the Turkish–French–Armenian astronomer Agop Terzan.

Globular clusters tend to be ancient. They also tend to have formed all their stars in one giant burst. As such, all their stars should be the same age, 12 to 13 billion years old. Yet, a select few globular clusters show evidence of having more than one generation of stars. These include Omega Centauri, NGC 2808 and NGC 1783 in the Milky Way galaxy, as well as NGC 411 in the Small Magellanic Cloud and NGC 1696 in the Large Magellanic Cloud. Several explanations have been put forward, including the possibility that they are the core remnants of dwarf galaxies that have been stripped of most of their stars by gravitational tidal forces emanating from the Milky Way. Or perhaps these clusters were simply massive enough to retain some molecular gas for future stellar generations.

When the Hubble Space Telescope took a look at Terzan 5 in 2009 and then again in 2016, it found that it too was among the ranks of weird globular clusters with two generations of stars, dating back 12.5 and 4.7 billion years. However, because it is behind so much galactic dust, not even Hubble has the clearest of views.

The JWST, however, does. Its near-infrared vision can see through the dust.

"Webb's new near-infrared observations, cross-referenced with Hubble's archival observations, have given us a much clearer picture of the history of Terzan 5," said study leader Giorgia Zullo, who is a Ph.D. student at Bologna.

The JWST detected two further generations of stars, one generation born 3.8 billion years ago and another 2.5 billion years ago. Four generations of stars is hard to explain for any globular cluster, which is why the team think that Terzan 5 could be something more primordial: a leftover building block of the Milky Way's bulge that was never quite assimilated by our galaxy.

"For some reason, this peculiar clump of stars formed separately from the bulge and was not destroyed as the bulge itself formed," said Ferraro. "Terzan 5 is what we now call a bulge fossil fragment because it resembles the primordial clumps that contributed to the formation of the bulge."

Disk galaxies sport two main components: a relatively narrow disk formed from spiral arms, and a bulbous core called the bulge. Galactic bulges tend to be the oldest parts of galaxies, forming billions of years before the disks, at least in the Milky Way's case. The JWST is seeing this process occurring in the early universe, revealing clumpy, young galaxies, but given the great expanse of space and time that JWST is looking across, the observations of the building blocks that go into making these galaxies are still not totally clear. With Terzan 5, we could be looking at one of the building blocks of the Milky Way's bulge relatively close-up, and it could provide new insights into the birth of our galaxy.

Terzan 5 is probably not the only bulge fossil fragment either. As well as those other aforementioned globular clusters, some of which might be fossil fragments and others might be the cores of dwarf galaxies, the globular cluster Liller 1 close to the center of our galaxy shares many of Terzan 5's properties, including its high abundance of heavy elements produced by multiple generations of stars that have died either in supernova explosions.

The team are now looking to chase up another 40 or 50 globular clusters in the bulge to see if they could also be bulge fossil fragments, or whether they are just regular globular clusters.

The findings were presented at the 248th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Pasadena, California which took place between June 14 and June 18. A paper describing the JWST observations has also been published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

The expansion of the universe is still accelerating under the influence of dark energy, despite recent claims to the contrary, according to new research. This means that dark energy, the mysterious force that dominates the universe, is not weakening but continues to get stronger, considered something of a "cosmological crisis" as it was so against expectations.

In 1998, via the study of cosmic explosions called Type Ia supernovas, astronomers discovered that not only is the universe expanding, but that the speed of that expansion is increasing. "Dark energy" was the name given to the mysterious force driving this accelerating expansion. Since then, scientists have discovered that dark energy accounts for around 70% of the universe's matter and energy.

In November 2025, research was published that suggested the expansion of the universe was slowing, meaning dark energy would be weakening. But this new research suggests that these findings from last year might not be a cosmic hand grenade thrown into the cosmological apple cart, but instead may have actually emerged from a scientific misunderstanding.

"Thankfully, we have averted this crisis, but the mystery about why the rate of expansion of the universe is still accelerating remains," lead author of the new refuting research, Phil Wiseman, from the University of Southampton in the UK, said in a statement. "The previous and well-accepted measurements were, in fact, fine, and our current understanding of the fate of the universe remains robust. By proving our measurements are correct, we can get back to trying to understand what this dark energy actually is, rather than wondering if it exists at all."

The research from 2025 that suggested dark energy was weakening was based upon a reassessment of the brightness of Type Ia supernovas, which occur when a dead star called a white dwarf overfeeds on a companion star. This causes a runaway nuclear explosion of such uniform brightness that it can be used to measure cosmic distances. In fact, these explosions are so uniform that astronomers refer to them as "standard candles."

This prior research determined, incorrectly it now seems, that as the universe has aged, the brightness of Type Ia supernovas had changed, leading to incorrect measurements of distances based on them as well as incorrect estimates of the speed of the universe's expansion. Both of these led to the suggestion that dark energy is weakening.

But Wiseman and colleagues found this previous team had made an error in how they calculated the ages of exploding white dwarfs, finding they had assumed the ages of these stars would be the same as the ages of the galaxies in which they exploded.

They also found the 2025 research hadn't accounted for a common correction used in cosmology that factors in the masses of galaxies in which Type Ia supernovas occur.

"Extraordinary claims require especially careful testing," team member Adam Riess, who in 2011 shared the Nobel Prize for the discovery of dark energy, said. "What we find is that when we calibrate these supernovae, accounting for different host environments and populations, the evidence for cosmic acceleration remains remarkably consistent."

While the challenge to dark energy's growing dominance over the universe seems now to have been refuted, the back and forth on this topic shows how ideas in science aren't dogma and remain open for revision.

"This is how progress is made," team member Mark Sullivan, also from the University of Southampton, said. "Although this idea did not turn out to be correct, it has opened up new ways of thinking about how supernovae explode and how we can measure dark energy more accurately."

The team's research was published on June 10 in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

GOLDEN, Colorado — The moon is in need of good and accurate artists!

As NASA's Artemis program hits its stride, and in a few years "reboots" our moon with a human presence, there's an urgent need to guard against artistic misrepresentations of the lunar landscape, experts say.

We've all seen those alluring lunar renderings of vehicles and astronauts bounding about while setting up equipment and putting in place a moon base.

Reality versus depictions

"We are telling the public the moon is easy — it is not!"

That's the matter-of-fact warning from Daniel Britt, the Pegasus Professor of Astronomy and Planetary Sciences in the Department of Physics at the University of Central Florida. He's also the director of the Center for Lunar and Asteroid Surface Science.

Britt spoke about and showcased artists' misconceptions during a "reality versus depictions of the lunar surface" talk here at a Space Resources Roundtable, held from June 2 to June 5 on the campus of the Colorado School of Mines.

"I wish I could say that engineers and managers know better, but they don't. We are training a generation of engineers to not worry about terrain. If the artists are getting it wrong, it is our fault. Let's stop fooling ourselves," Britt said.

Well versed in what the lunar surface truly offers, Britt scolded a number of arty accounts of lunar territory promulgated by both NASA and commercial space ventures. He spotlighted what's wrong with those pictures — for starters, small craters and ever-present lunar dust, along with dirty astronauts, dirty equipment and dirty habitats.

Facts of life

A flat, dustless moon is not the one we are sending Artemis astronauts to, said Britt. Crews will experience coarse terrain, pervasive dust, and a surface unlike anything here on Earth. These are the facts of life on the moon, he said.

The Apollo moon-landing missions learned this first hand. But those astronauts explored equatorial areas. The Artemis program is targeting the lunar south polar region, which will be tough to deal with thanks to the low angle of the sun.

"When you look into the sun, it will be blasting into your face. But at least you'll see the shadow of that crater you are about to trip into," said Britt. "But looking down-sun, you won't see diddly squat."

"There's need to stop deluding ourselves," Britt told Space.com, advocating the creation of a 1-to-10 scoring system for lunar art, with prizes for the worst and best visualizations

"What I want to do is land on the moon way safer and easier," he added, "so you need to ask yourself what's missing from these depictions. We are training the public to think this is easy."

False impression

To support his concern, Britt spotlighted both Apollo moonwalker-taken imagery and the scenery as projected by artists, be it using paint brush or artificial intelligence-guided computer work.

"The sun angle washes out the rough terrain. Almost all the pictures taken from the surface give the very false impression of a flat, gentle terrain," Britt said. "The reality is that the lunar surface is heavily cratered, rough, very dusty and covered in regolith."

Most Apollo surface images were taken "down-sun" because looking "up-sun" was hard. "This leaves a very false impression of a flat moon with gentle terrain," Britt said.

Tilt problems

Apollo was pretty lucky, Britt said, observing that several of the six human moon landings experienced tilt problems. For instance, Apollo 14 experienced a 7-degree tilt on landing, and Apollo 15 had an 11-degree tilt on touchdown.

Apollo 11 had to dodge a boulder field. Apollo 12 and Apollo 16 landed on the edge of big craters. "Even small craters can be meters deep," said Britt, recalling problems encountered by astronauts on their descent to the moon.

"The dust went as far as I could see in any direction and completely obliterated craters and anything else … I couldn't tell what was underneath me," astronaut Pete Conrad said during an Apollo 12 debriefing. "I knew I was in a generally good area, and I was just going to have to bite the bullet and land, because I couldn't tell whether there was a crater down there or not."

Similarly, Apollo 16 commander John Young said: "I couldn't judge slope out the window worth a hoot, and that's the truth. Even down low. The ground looks flat, but I'm sure it would look flat if it had been a 6-8 degree slope, too. I don't see any way around that."

Getting it wrong

A flat, crater-free, dustless moon is a staple of imagery issued by NASA, the European Space Agency, other space agencies, and even private space firms, said Britt.

"Yes, these are artists' impressions," Britt said, "but somebody is telling the artists what to draw. I love the idea of landing and operating on a moon without dust, small craters, and rough terrain. However, we see the misconception of a flat, gentle moon everywhere."

"Commercial providers are just as bad. No dust, almost no small craters, no tipping problems. Yes, these are artists' impressions, and they are getting it wrong," said Britt. "NASA knows better. All these people should know better, but don't. Let's not fool the public. We owe them better data."

Scientists have discovered that dying stars don't go down without a fight. New research suggests that when stars like the sun enter their red giant phase, they spit out blobs of plasma and receive a corresponding "kick" in the opposite direction.

Stars become red giants when the hydrogen in their cores is exhausted, and that core collapses. This results in the outer layers of the star where nuclear fusion is still occurring, puffing out and expanding the star's radius to as much as 100 times its original size. Those outer layers are eventually lost altogether, leaving behind a dense stellar remnant known as a white dwarf. The sun itself will undergo this transformation in around 5 billion years, swelling out to around the orbit of Mars and engulfing the inner rocky planets, including Earth.

California Institute of Technology researcher Jim Fuller calculated that before a star becomes a white dwarf, it will receive around 10,000 little kicks over the course of hundreds of thousands of years. The cause of these kicks is the ejection of blobs of plasma from the red giant stars.

"In this model, blobs of matter are chaotically being ejected from the surface of the bloated stars in an asymmetric fashion," Fuller said in a statement. "And every time that happens, the star gets a little kick in the opposite direction. Like Newton said, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction."

The blobs of plasma will be chaotically ejected in random directions, but this will still result in an overall net push on the red giant, a phenomenon mathematicians call a "random walk." This is akin to randomly flipping a coin to decide whether to move north or south and still eventually finding yourself moved from your starting position.

Fuller determined that for a red giant, this random walk would see a movement in a random direction at a speed of around 2,200 mph (3,540 km/h). This may seem like a lot, but it pales in comparison to the kicks received by massive stars that explode as supernovas.

The lack of an explosion in the transformation of an average-sized star into a white dwarf makes these events less dramatic, but we have still seen evidence of this happening.

Caltech researcher Kareem El-Badry has previously discovered that widely separated binaries are less common in cases when one star has undergone the transformation into a white dwarf. One possible explanation is that repeated kicks during the red giant phase eventually break apart these loosely bound stellar pairs.

"If the orbital speed of the binaries is less than the kick speed, the wide binaries will become gravitationally unbound," Fuller said. Fuller's model also suggests something that astronomers are yet to see. He predicts that in some cases the kicks received by a red giant could send it pinballing toward a stellar companion, causing a massive explosion when the two collide.

Astronomers could now search the cosmos for such events, the discovery of which would help verify Fuller's model.

Fuller's results were presented at the 248th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Pasadena. The study has been submitted to the Proceedings of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific.

The image of the day for Monday (June 22) shows the star-forming clouds of Orion A in stunning detail.

Released as the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) Picture of the Month, the image further demonstrates the impact the $10 billion space telescope has had on our view of the cosmos since it began operations in July 2022.

What is Orion A?

Located around 1,300 light-years from Earth and situated to the south of Orion's Belt in the night sky, Orion A is one of the largest and closest molecular clouds to our planet. Shaped like a filament, this structure of gas and dust is around 290 light-years long.

Part of the Orion molecular cloud complex, Orion A is a packed stellar nursery. Over the last few million years alone, it is estimated that Orion A has given birth to around 3,000 stellar objects.

The molecular cloud is also host to many young protostars surrounded by platters of gas and dust called protoplanetary disks, which, as the name suggests, will form planets. Thus, studying regions like Orion A could be key to understanding how the solar system came to be around 4.6 billion years ago.

GOLDEN, Colorado — Scientists are engaged in research with an eye toward transforming the cold climes of Mars into a far more habitable place for Earthlings in the future.

One notion proposed is the dispersion of an aerosol meant to help warm up Mars' atmosphere. The idea is projected to be a first step toward terraforming the Red Planet. Also emerging recently as a new field of study is "applied astrobiology," which seeks to appraise what would be needed to create sustainable habitats and biospheres beyond Earth.

Scientists have drawn up a research blueprint for assessing the viability of warming the Red Planet, outlining what it might take to make Mars a place in space where life can thrive. Importantly, that roadmap does not presuppose that warming Mars is desirable. Rather, its purpose is to identify what is required for Mars to be warmed, what it would cost and what could go wrong.

Keep the option open

Edwin Kite, an associate professor of geophysical sciences at the University of Chicago, detailed the plan here at a Space Resources Roundtable, which was held from June 2 to June 5 on the campus of the Colorado School of Mines.

Kite's talk showcased a mission concept prototype to validate aerosol dispersal to warm Mars' atmosphere as a first step toward terraforming the Red Planet.

"Creating sustainable habitats and biospheres beyond Earth is an enormous scientific and technical challenge, but it's one we'll have to surmount if we're going to extend life beyond Earth," Kite told Space.com.

"We do not yet know enough to create a biosphere from scratch," he added. "Applied astrobiology, like planetary science, requires contributions from many disciplines."

Kite said that relatively modest research investments can keep open the option of extending life beyond Earth as the scientific exploration of Mars continues.

The roadmap, Kite explained to Space.com, identifies several approaches to warming Mars. Solid-state greenhouse membranes, he said, offer the nearest-term benefits, with direct applications to moisture farming and life support at human bases on Mars.

Strengthening Mars' natural greenhouse effect might warm large regions of the globe, Kite noted, although many aspects remain to be worked out. Each approach carries scientific and technical risks that research must address, he added.

A centuries-long process

Whether Mars can support a biosphere, however, is unknown. But, if activated, a biosphere on Mars would help sustain large numbers of people in bases beyond Earth, sparking the conditions for a centuries-long process of atmospheric oxygen buildup.

The questions raised by the possibility of warming Mars are numerous. But the immediate unanswered questions are identifiable, Kite suggested, and can be addressed with a focused research campaign.

He acknowledged that a consensus on moving forward requires more data on two fronts: whether Mars could support life in the future, and whether there's life on Mars today.

An approach to warming Mars would be inherently modular, in that it could be done by many sites in parallel, Kite suggested. An aspect of the endeavor may well involve orbiting reflectors for warming intermediate-sized areas, such as human bases.

Prototyping progress

Kite is also a resident researcher at the Berkeley, California-based Astera Institute, which was founded to steer science and technology towards an abundant future. And he's a participating scientist on the mission of NASA's Curiosity Mars rover, which has been exploring the Red Planet since August 2012.

Being scoped out by Kite and fellow researchers is a potential technology demonstration on Mars, an automated payload that would test an aerosol release concept. It would discharge less than 2 pounds (about 1 kilogram) of sub-micron artificial particles and laser track that dispersal to an altitude of roughly 1,500 feet (500 meters), to confirm ascent of the plume into the skies of Mars.

Kite said that dispenser requirements are particularly challenging. For example, researchers will need to show that it works on Earth before launching a demonstration mission to Mars.

There has been "prototyping progress," Kite said, with an experimental setup designed and built for rapid deployment.

To trial-run the particle dispersal concept and plume tracking technology, the plan calls for use of NASA's Planetary Aeolian Laboratory (PAL) at Ames Research Center in California this year. PAL is a unique facility used to support experiments under different planetary atmospheric environments, including Earth, Mars and Saturn's largest moon, Titan.

Filling big gaps

To help evaluate the feasibility of terraforming Mars, Kite points to the need for better maps of subsurface water ice on that world; climate-monitoring orbiters to observe the planet's natural variability; the return of Red Planet samples to Earth for study; and international cooperation.

"Mars sample return will be done by China's space agency. The original plan for their Tianwen-3 mission was to grab some rocks from wherever and then head back to Earth," Kite said. "The new plan is to go around with a helicopter and collect rocks from a wide area. I'm hopeful that they share their Martian samples, allowing all the world's labs to have a crack at them."

Then there's the prospect of an International Mars Ice Mapper, Kite said, a proposed Mars orbiter that's been studied by NASA, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) and the Italian Space Agency (ASI). However, that mission appears at this moment to have been shelved.

"It's a good idea and could always come back," said Kite. "We should search for deep aquifers using electromagnetic soundings — that's the best strategy. We don't know whether there's still liquid water deep underground. There are big gaps in our knowledge about Mars."

Demonstrations on Mars

Kite reported that warming Mars with artificial aerosol appears feasible, backed by workshops about creating a "Green Mars" and applied astrobiology.

If early findings from aerosol release demonstrations on Mars prove positive, Kite said, those results would provide the quantitative basis for "government-scale programs" to evaluate whether extending habitable conditions beyond Earth is achievable, at what cost and on what timescale.

"Even under optimistic assumptions, warming at kilometer scale is at least a decade away, and wider environmental modification would require sustained investment over many decades beyond that," states the recent research paper, which Kite led.

"Relatively modest research investments would keep open the option of extending life beyond Earth as Mars’ scientific exploration continues," Kite and his colleagues concluded.

One of the most hotly debated mysteries in astronomy is set to continue, as new research fails to rule out self-annihilating dark matter as the source of gamma-ray emissions from the heart of the Milky Way. Known as the Galactic Center Excess, a spherical gamma-ray glow extending out for thousands of light-years from the core of our galaxy, this high-energy light has baffled researchers for over a decade.

While several possible explanations for the Galactic Center Excess have been put forward, including a population of rapidly spinning neutron stars called pulsars, one of the most prevalent has been a specific type of dark matter particle. Dark matter is the mysterious stuff that accounts for 85% of the universe's matter. It is effectively invisible because it doesn't interact with light or with "ordinary" matter composed of atoms. That fact has led to many possible dark matter candidate particles being proposed, including some that self-annihilate. This is akin to what happens when an electron meets its antimatter counterpart, or positron. The two annihilate each other, releasing energy into the cosmos.

For self-annihilating dark matter, these particles would be their own antiparticles, meaning when they interact, they would annihilate and release energy as gamma rays. With dark matter outweighing ordinary matter by a ratio of five to one, one might expect this annihilation to be occurring constantly, flooding the cosmos with gamma rays, but dark matter rarely interacts with itself in this model. Thus, dark matter annihilation is only a factor when this mysterious stuff is densely clustered in a region like the heart of a galaxy.

Unfortunately, investigating the heart of the Milky Way is challenging indeed.

"Interpreting the signal is particularly difficult because the Galactic Center is an exceptionally bright and crowded region of the gamma-ray sky," team member and University of Vienna researcher Florian List said in a statement.

Getting to the point

To investigate if annihilating dark matter could indeed account for the Galactic Center Excess, List and colleagues turned to machine learning trained on more than a million simulated gamma-ray observations. Previous similar approaches had pointed to comparatively bright, unresolved light sources as a potential source of the Galactic Center Excess. However, this new research showed that these point sources, including pulsars, would be extremely faint, and that is good news for scientists who favor annihilating dark matter as the cause of these gamma rays.

That is because, whereas previous research has suggested just a few hundred pulsars could be enough to account for the Galactic Center Excess, these findings indicate that the pulsar population at the heart of the Milky Way would have to be greater than 35,000.

"Our new analysis shows that the sources would have to be so faint that they would be almost indistinguishable from the emission expected from annihilating dark matter," team member Nick Rodd, a scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, said.

While this research may keep dark matter in the game as a plausible explanation, it far from confirms the annihilation of this mysterious stuff as the source of the Galactic Center Excess. "The origin of the Galactic Center Excess is one of the longest-running debates in astrophysics," List said. "Our work does not show that dark matter is responsible for the signal. However, it suggests that it is still too early to rule out this possibility."

The team's research was published on Thursday (Feb. 5) in the journal Physical Review Letters.

Astronomers have used a technique called echo mapping to detect hints that supermassive black holes, such as the cosmic titan at the heart of the Milky Way, known as Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), are surrounded by dense clouds and clusters of dark matter. The research could teach us more about this mysterious substance and the environments around supermassive black holes.

Dark matter is the universe's most mysterious stuff, outweighing ordinary matter in the cosmos by a ratio of five to one — but remaining effectively invisible because it doesn't interact with electromagnetic radiation, including the light we use to see. The only way scientists can even infer the presence of dark matter is via its interaction with gravity, and the impact that this interaction has on objects made of traditional matter like stars. For instance, the gravitational effect of dark matter allows stars at the edges of galaxies to whip around at much greater speeds while not flying loose than the visible matter of those galaxies would allow.

This team decided to test the gravitational influence of dark matter at the hearts of galaxies, environments dominated by supermassive black holes which can have masses millions or even billions of times that of the sun. Ordinary matter around these supermassive black holes is often very visible, especially when spiraling into the maw of one of these cosmic titans from a flattened cloud called an accretion disk. This is because the gravitational influence of those black holes generates immense amounts of friction, causing them to grow brightly. That wouldn't work for dark matter; it can't feel friction because it doesn't interact with itself or with ordinary matter, and it can't glow because it doesn't absorb or emit light.

Clearly, dark matter can't be spotted around supermassive black holes even using the most advanced telescopes such as the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), which has captured glowing rings of material around Sgr A* and around a more distant supermassive black hole that rules the heart of the galaxy Messier 87 (M87).

While discussing the problem of detecting dark matter around supermassive black holes, Mayank Sharma, a physics graduate student at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech), hit on an interesting solution.

"We could actually test this prediction using a technique in astronomy, which allows you to measure the distance to the surrounding gas by looking for echoes of light," Sharma said in a statement. The technique Sharma refers to is "reverberation mapping," and it has become a trusted method of determining the mass of black holes.

Echoes of dark matter

Reverberation mapping is based upon the fact that as matter falls into a black hole, it releases a burst of energy that causes the accretion disk it comes from to pulse. This pulse of light travels from the accretion disk to gas in the wider environment of the black hole. This gas absorbs that light and also pulses, with this secondary pulse serving as an echo of the first.

Because we know the speed of light, when astronomers see the first pulse of light and then its echo, they can use the time between pulses to estimate the distance between the black hole and the gas on the outskirts of its environment. The size of a black hole and the distance between it and outer gas clouds can be used to determine its mass, and could also be used to determine the mass of dark matter clustered around it.

The team applied their method to 14 different galaxies, finding in five cases that mass increases moving away from the central black hole in a way that couldn't be accounted for by visible matter alone. Despite the early success of this research, it far from proves that supermassive black holes are indeed gathering places for dark matter. The team's findings do point an interesting way forward for the investigation into the universe's most mysterious substance and its most mysterious regions.

"These galaxies are definitely showing a hint that there is extra material that cannot be explained by just the supermassive black hole," Sharma said. "The prospects are exciting."

The team's research was published in the journal Physical Review D.

An asteroid now bears the name of beloved musician Elliott Smith, thanks to one ambitious filmmaker.

Elliott Smith passed away at the age of 34 in 2003, but his impact and his music continue to connect with people around the world. And his influence has now extended to space, thanks to independent filmmaker Orlando Campopiano, who worked to get an asteroid named "Elliottsmith."

"I hope this introduces at least one new person to Elliott's brilliant discography, and I'm happy to see a permanent legacy in the stars! To have this tribute to him blessed by the estate and discoverers is also a great honor," Campopiano told Stereogum.

While listening to the song "Shooting Star," from Smith's album "From a Basement on the Hill," which was released in 2004 following his death, Campopiano had the idea to try and get an asteroid named after Smith, he told Stereogum.

He took this inspiration and ran with it, connecting with Smith's estate and working together to submit a proposal to the International Astronomical Union (IAU), which gives official names to cosmic objects, including asteroids. Maybe there are some Elliott Smith fans at the IAU, because the organization actually said yes.

With this positive response, Asteroid (861969) 2014 OS439 is now officially "Elliottsmith."

The asteroid was discovered back in 2014 by the Pan-STARRS 1 (Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System) project in Hawai'i.

The IAU's announcement of the renaming reads: "Steven Paul 'Elliott' Smith (1969–2003) was an influential, Oscar-nominated American songwriter. His intricate music left a lasting impact on many musicians. Asteroid 861969 honors his birth date, August 6, 1969. Smith often used celestial motifs in his work, notably in the song 'Shooting Star,' which, in hindsight, symbolizes his brief but brilliant light."

As this classification states, this asteroid is more than just a random rock in the sky. Its previous, numerical name 861969 happens to perfectly mirror Smith's birthday. This cosmic alignment makes it feel like this naming was truly meant to be.

You can get a look at the asteroid's place in our solar system on the small-body website of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which you can find here.

Last year, NASA's Lucy spacecraft encountered a bi-lobed asteroid that is a chunk of an even larger rocky body that was smashed apart in an almighty collision 155 million years ago. This little pitstop happened on Lucy's way to a rendezvous with the Trojan asteroids that shadow Jupiter around the sun.

The asteroid 52246 Donaldjohanson, better known as "DJ" to Lucy's mission scientists and named after the paleoanthropologist who discovered the Lucy hominin fossil in Ethiopia in 1974, orbits the sun in the inner part of the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

The true Lucy fossil dates back in time 3.2 million years and is an important link in the evolutionary chain that led to homo sapiens. Likewise, primitive asteroidal bodies are somewhat like fossilized remnants of the building blocks of the solar system's planets, including Earth. Understanding the make-up of these asteroids and where they formed versus where they are now can provide crucial insights into how Earth was assembled and where its organic materials and water may have come from.

Lucy flew past DJ in April of 2025. It is a pretty primitive asteroid, meaning that it has, or once upon a time had, certain volatile materials such as water-ice, as well as plenty of carbon — all things that can be removed thermally over time. Most objects that contain volatiles originate in the outer solar system, where it is cold enough that the volatiles do not sublimate away.

Within DJ's composition, Lucy detected iron-bearing phyllosilicates, which are a mineral formed in the presence of liquid water.

"Phyllosilicates are an indication that water was present and there was some degree of aqueous alteration," Simone Marchi, a planetary scientist from the South-west Research Institute and lead of the study into DJ, told Space.com.

However, for DJ to have had water, it must have formed further out from the sun, possibly in the outer asteroid belt.

"But DJ belongs to the inner asteroid belt so that's already intriguing," said Marchi.

The spectral evidence also indicates DJ was only partially altered by water, which Marchi says tells us something about its history.

"The aqueous alteration terminated early, and though we don't know why, we can speculate. In order to have aqueous alteration there needs to be some internal heating [usually via radioactive elements] and if something forms later than everything else then there will be less heat [since many of the radioactive elements will have already decayed]. Or perhaps there was just less water to start with where it formed."

What we do know is that DJ was once part of a much larger asteroid that suffered a giant impact 155 million years ago, causing the parent body to break apart into a number of chunks, the largest being the 45-mile-wide (73-kilometer-wide) asteroid 163 Erigone. Consequently, the remains of this parent asteroid, including DJ, are collectively referred to as the Erigone family.

DJ's violent origin may also explain its shape, which features two lobes joined together by a narrower and relatively smooth neck.

"We have now seen many small bodies in the solar system that appear to have this bi-lobed shape, and that's across a wide range of sizes," said Marchi.

For example the near-Earth asteroids 25142 Itokawa, which was visited by the first Japanese Hayabusa mission in 2005, and 4149 Toutatis that was encountered by China's Chang'e 2 in 2012, are both bi-lobed. So too is the tiny asteroid Selam, which is a satellite of the asteroid 152830 Dinkinesh visited by Lucy in 2023. Then there are cometary bodies including 67P Churyumov–Gerasimenko visited by the Rosetta mission and comet 19P/Borrelly, imaged by NASA's Deep Space 1 spacecraft in 1999.

These objects are all different sizes, different types and in different locations, but they all share the same structure. However, Marchi cautions that they might not all form the same way. For example, the neck between the lobes of comets such as 67P might form through erosion via sublimation and outgassing as the comet gets closer to the Sun, whereas for asteroids it might indicate a history of being involved in a giant impact, the resulting fragments coming together to be bound by gravity – a so-called contact binary.

Lucy now continues onwards, scheduled to encounter its first trojan asteroid, known as 3548 Eurybates, in August 2027. Trojans are asteroids that have been captured by Jupiter's gravity at the L3 and L4 Lagrange points, 60 degrees in front and 60 degrees behind Jupiter itself.

"We think that the Trojans, based on our understanding of the solar system, formed further out and then were captured where they are today following the early shuffling of the planets," said Marchi. "This shuffling could also have been the origin of DJ, so there could be a connection there between DJ and the Trojans."

Compositionally, the majority of trojans are expected to be even more primitive than DJ, containing more carbon, water and other volatile materials that would sublimate if they got too close to the sun.

That is all except one: Eurybates.

"It is the only one of our targets that from spectroscopy appears to be relatively similar to DJ. It's not identical, but it is closer in composition to DJ than the other Trojans, so it will be intriguing to compare them," said Marchi.

Indeed, any similarities will help tell us how asteroids were herded around during the first few hundred million years of solar system history following the formation of the planets. Jupiter and Saturn, especially, began migrating inwards and then out again. In doing so, their gravity pushed and pulled minor bodies all over the place, as did the gravity of Uranus and particularly Neptune as they edged outwards. These migrations led to the formation of the asteroid belt and the Kuiper belt, and ejected trillions of bodies into the wide orbits of the Oort Cloud.

"The key question is, if DJ has been relocated in the inner asteroid belt, then how many other asteroids came along with it and ended up being closer to the Earth, where they could have delivered some water, some organics and other things to our planet?" asked Marchi.

Lucy will visit six of Jupiter's trojans, which in total number over 15,300 discovered so far. Far from lumps of rock, the trojans, along with DJ and Dinkinesh (which is the Ethiopian name for the Lucy fossil), are windows into the past, and the storytellers of the Earth's most ancient history.

Lucy's findings from Donaldjohanson were published on Thursday (June 18) in the journal Science.

Using the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have discovered that the well-known "Pink Planet" harbors a salty surprise and an exotic atmospheric chemistry. The discovery marks an advancement in the study of cold objects beyond the solar system.

Initially discovered in 2013, GJ504b orbits a sun-like star located around 57 light-years from Earth. With a mass around 25 times that of Jupiter, this Pink Planet may not be a planet at all despite its moniker. It may instead be a brown dwarf, a failed star that formed like a star but was unable to gather enough mass to achieve the nuclear fusion of hydrogen to helium in its core. Thus, astronomers refer to it as a "planetary-mass companion," which means a planet-size object orbiting a parent star.

GJ504b remains one of the coldest planetary-mass companions discovered using ground-based telescopes, with a temperature of around 550 degrees Fahrenheit (290 degrees Celsius). Although, that still makes it hot enough to bake bread. Now, James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) data reveals it has a key ingredient for bread making too: salt located in its atmospheric clouds, unlike anything astronomers have seen before.

"The Pink Planet is the coldest companion ever discovered using ground-based instruments," team leader Aneesh Baburaj of Northwestern University said in a statement. "Many teams all around the world performed follow-up observations to study its light, but it was too faint for ground-based instruments. That made it a perfect target for JWST.

"When we finally obtained its spectrum, it immediately looked interesting. But once we started digging deeper into the data, we realized it was not like anything we have analyzed before."

The Pink Planet is cold and old

The team studied this planetary companion by measuring its faint electromagnetic radiation emissions and filtering out the bright glare of its parent star.

They found the relative coolness of the Pink Planet is a result of the planet's age. Both gas giant planets and brown dwarfs are born blisteringly hot but cool off as they get older. This new research estimated that GJ504b is between 2.5 billion and 4 billion years old.

Breaking down light from the Pink Planet into individual wavelengths, the team was also able to determine its chemical composition. This is possible because elements absorb and emit light at characteristic wavelengths, meaning they leave "fingerprints" on light passing through their atmospheres.

"In the past, other astronomers observed the companion for an entire night with some of the biggest telescopes in the world to obtain a spectrum," Baburaj said. "And they could not see the object. With JWST, our entire observation took around two hours, and we were successful."

The JWST data revealed a rich cocktail of chemicals in the atmosphere of the Pink Planet that included water, carbon dioxide, methane, and ammonia. However, these observations didn't match modeling of the planetary companion's atmosphere until the team factored in something completely unexpected: clouds of salt deep in the atmosphere.

"We ran simulations with clouds, and the results aligned with what we know about cold planets," Baburaj said. "We tried three different types of clouds, and salt clouds fit best. When we accounted for salt clouds, it subdued the signature of molecules hidden deeper in the companion’s atmosphere. Then, the results became physically possible.

"This is the first time we've found that salt clouds are critical to explaining the spectrum of an object. It's a good reminder to account for clouds in our models."

Though this mystery may be solved, there are still questions surrounding GJ504b that will only be solved with further investigation. The Pink Planet seems to be unusually rich in elements heavier than hydrogen and helium, which astronomers call metals. This means the team still can't pin down the origin of the Pink Planet; did it form like a planet, or like a star?

That means they aren't quite ready to determine if GJ504b is a gas giant planet or a brown dwarf... or should that be Pink Dwarf?

The team's research was published on Thursday (June 18) in The Astronomical Journal.

Astronomers have a cosmic mystery on their hands, investigating a celestial crime scene to determine if a distant star has eaten a super-Earth exoplanet. The star may have had an accomplice — a failed star or "brown dwarf" companion — which may have steered the unfortunate planet toward its fiery doom.

The team charged with investigating this mystery first discovered hints of the crime when they found the star, TOI-5882, located around 1,300 light-years away, is surprisingly rich in the element lithium.

"You are what you eat, right?" team leader Brooke Kotten of the University of Michigan said in a statement. "We know that there's much more lithium in planetary material than there is in stars. So if a star eats a planet, it's going to take on a bunch of lithium."

So-called engulfment events such as this one occur very rapidly, on a timescale of a few days to a couple of weeks, which means catching stellar beings in the act of enjoying a planetary meal is extremely rare. Thus, astronomers have to act as cosmic crime scene investigators to reconstruct these events with the evidence at hand.

"That's what makes this field so exciting. You really are solving a mystery," Kotten said. "We can't just watch the crime happen, so we have to work with all the clues we're given to figure out whodunit."

One of the aims of these investigations is to discover the ways in which a star can devour a planet. One of the most common engulfment scenarios happens when a star runs out of hydrogen at its core at the end of its main sequence lifetime. This results in it swelling out to up to 100 times its original diameter, engulfing its attendant planets during its so-called red giant phase. This will occur in the solar system in around 5 billion years when the sun will puff out to around the orbit of Mars, swallowing the inner rocky planets, including our own.

However, Kotten and colleagues know this isn't what has happened in the TOI-5882 system, as this star hasn't yet become a red giant. Instead, the researchers think the sun-like star had assistance from its brown dwarf companion.

Companion brown dwarf of partner in crime?

Brown dwarfs get their slightly unfortunate nickname of "failed stars" because, despite forming from collapsing clouds of gas and dust, just like stars, they fail to grow to the masses needed to trigger the nuclear fusion of hydrogen to helium in their cores, the process that defines what a main-sequence star is. They're quite mysterious by existing in this sort of limbo between planet and star.

This particular brown dwarf has around 20 times the mass of Jupiter, or around 2% of the mass of the sun. That's not massive enough to trigger nuclear fusion, but is massive enough for it to have enough of a gravitational influence over planets orbiting TOI-5882. That means the team suspects this brown dwarf could have perturbed the orbit of this unfortunate planet enough to send it plummeting into its star.

This is something the scientists will need to investigate further. They may not have enough information yet to determine this planet's cause of death, but they do have some evidence that helps them identify the kind of world it would have been before it was obliterated. This comes from observations of the chemical composition and lithium content of 62 stars with similar ages and masses to TOI-5882.

"Lithium atoms delivered by planetary engulfment to a star are like sports fans arriving at a stadium," team member Seth Jacobson of Michigan State University said. "There may already be a few early arriving fans present, representing the initial amount of lithium in the stellar atmosphere, but they are quickly outnumbered."

From the lithium abundance they measured, the team has determined that this planet was a so-called super-Earth with a mass somewhere between two times that of our planet and the mass of the solar-system ice giant Neptune, which is around 18 times as massive as Earth.

"The fact that we can look at a star 1,300 light-years away and say with confidence, 'This star has more lithium than you would expect,' is a testament to both the precision of modern instrumentation and the hard interpretive work that goes into making sense of that signal," said Melinda Soares-Furtado, a senior author of the study and assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin. "And it's not like you have to cherry-pick the data to make it stand out. It's robust. No matter how you slice it, TOI-5882 is so enriched in lithium it shows up as being at least in the 97th percentile."

Soares-Furtado added that TOI-5882 is one of the few stars she has seen demonstrating evidence of planetary engulfment, although a few of the other stars in the control sample were enriched in lithium, albeit not to the extent of TOI-5882. That leaves another mystery for the team to solve, something that Soares-Furtado may well be quite content with.

"When I was growing up, I dreamed about becoming a private investigator," she said. "I think that explains a lot about where I ended up. I do feel like a detective."

The team's research was published on Monday (June 15) in The Astrophysical Journal.

It's always a treat to be reminded that we have spacecraft orbiting Mars right now, and a new image from one of these Red Planet probes does just that.

The European Space Agency's (ESA) Mars Express has beamed to Earth a beautiful view of a region on Mars known as Mamers Valles. This is a sweeping valley system that stretches across nearly 600 miles (1,000 kilometers) of land. And if your day is feeling a little dry, there's a little game you can play while looking at the image.

I spy 30 dust devils hidden in the crevices of these Martian valleys.

What are we looking at?

Dust devils are basically small tornadoes that pick up dust as they whirl around. They're common on Earth and on Mars: Rovers and orbiters have imaged these phenomena many times on the Red Planet. One time, for instance, a mission team tracked about 1,000 of them speeding across the Red Planet. Another time, NASA's Perseverance rover watched two of these devils merge into one large devil. We've even heard them "crackle" before, thanks to another Perseverance video.

Mars' dust devils are far larger than those of Earth, reaching heights of almost 5 miles (8 km) and sometimes racing at speeds of about 148 feet (45 meters) per second.

In the image below, you can see the full picture of the valleys; the devils, ESA says, are small yellow dots with pinkish trailing shadows. You can try to spot the devils on your own, but if you need some help, ESA has outlined precisely where each one is just here.

Why is it noteworthy?

Scientists are so interested in Martian dust devils because they help map the planet's otherwise invisible wind. That can aid in future Mars mission planning as well as helping researchers decode the general Red Planet environment— information that could lead to discoveries about Mars' watery past or its evolution through time.

But besides dust devils, the region depicted in the image, Mamers Valles, is worth admiring, too.

Thanks to its vastness, Mamers Valles actually connects Mars' ancient southern highlands with its northern lowlands, according to an ESA statement. Plus, all around the valleys of this 3.8-billion-year-old area lie many other land features — including what used to be full-on glaciers. Now covered in debris, these glaciers should hold water ice underneath, which would be a great target for a future Mars mission to explore.

As for when that future mission could take off, only time (and probably the success of NASA's Artemis program) will tell.

Supermassive black holes are notoriously messy when devouring a star, but they can also linger over their meals, letting out massive radio "burps" months or even years after their cosmic feast appears finished.

Now, scientists tracking these events have found there is no one-size-fits-all model for how black holes digest stellar material. Speaking Monday (June 15) at the 248th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in California, Kate Alexander, an astronomer at the University of Arizona who has been studying these events, said the behavior depends instead on their shifting dietary phases.

"Sometimes, after it seems like they are done eating, they may get indigestion and they may let out a large radio 'burp,'" Alexander said during a press conference on Monday. "These late-time radio burps can appear when the black hole eats too fast or eats too slowly, so you should always eat the right speed if you want to avoid indigestion."

Her recent research focuses on Tidal Disruption Events, or TDEs, which are cosmic catastrophes that occur when an unlucky star wanders too close to a supermassive black hole. As the star nears the behemoth, intense gravitational fields shred it into a spaghetti-like stream of gas debris in a process known as "spaghettification."

Because these events are rare, occurring roughly once every 100,000 years in any given galaxy, astronomers must monitor a large number of galaxies just to spot them. Historically, targeted radio follow-up of these disruptions ceased if no emission was detected within the first year or so, leaving their long-term behavior unstudied.

"When we first started looking at them, we just stopped looking," she said. "But, it turns out that we should have kept looking, because this is often when some of the most really interesting things are happening."

Over the past six years, astronomers have been using the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) telescope in New Mexico to conduct the first large-scale, systematic radio observations of several dozen nearby TDEs. A 2024 paper, by radio astronomer Yvette Cendes of the University of Oregon and co-authored by Alexander, first reported that roughly 40% of all TDEs are detected in radio months to years after the initial disruption, long after the visible light has dimmed.

Now, published this year in The Astrophysical Journal, the new study led by Alexander sets out to explain why these long-dormant systems reactivate. To solve the mystery, the researchers combed through decades of data, analyzing 91 TDE candidates discovered between 1990 and 2019 before narrowing their focus to a gold-standard sample of 31 events with comprehensive, multiwavelength tracking.

By blending VLA radio data with archival optical and ultraviolet observations, plus fresh follow-up X-ray measurements, the team mapped how much gas the black holes actually consumed at any given point in time. Matching that feeding timeline against the exact moments the radio flares emerged revealed precisely how fast the black holes were eating when they unleashed their outflows, Alexander explained during the press briefing.

The data revealed that these delayed flares ignite at two opposite extremes, either while the black hole is rapidly overgorging on gas, or after its feeding rate has slowed to a crawl. In both scenarios, a fraction of the incoming gas is flung outward instead of being fully consumed, the team found. This expelled material then slams into the gas surrounding the black hole, triggering particle-accelerating shock waves that produce the radio emissions — effectively creating the cosmic "burps."

This cosmic feeding mechanic operates identically across all scales, working the exact same way whether the black hole is a relative lightweight or a behemoth millions of times more massive than our sun, Alexander noted.

"For those of us who are astrophysicists," she said, "this is really cool because we are now starting to understand how physics operates in these very different mass regimes."

The team also found that TDEs destined to flare up later leave a distinct chemical fingerprint in their early optical spectra in the form of helium emission lines. This signature indicates that the star's shredded debris is taking its time settling into a tidy, ingestible disk around the black hole — virtually guaranteeing a delayed case of cosmic indigestion, said Alexander.

"These are the black holes that are having longer lasting meals," she said.

Based on these findings, the team suggests that a window of two to six years post-discovery is the most productive timeframe to hunt for these late-rising radio signals.

Ultimately, the team says the predictive chemical blueprint could serve as an invaluable screening tool. By filtering out the quiet eaters early on, astronomers can maximize highly competitive telescope time, focusing precious resources on the black holes most likely to put on a late-stage show.

Could you run a marathon on Mars? And also — would you want to?

NASA's Perseverance rover just completed an off-Earth marathon: It has now traveled more than 26.2 miles (42.2 kilometers) across the Martian landscape after landing in February 2021, according to the mission team. The only other rover to complete a marathon on the Red Planet is Opportunity, which took over 11 years to traverse the distance. But as NASA looks toward potentially landing humans on the Red Planet some day, it makes me wonder: What would it be like to complete a marathon on Mars … on foot?

Here on Earth, I have run a few marathons — in Philadelphia, New Jersey, and Florida, I've managed to wheeze, sweat, and drag my feet over the finish line. You'll never catch me on the leaderboard, but I've felt all the unique stings and challenges of the race. From the unexpected charley horses to the mental hurdles you overcome, no marathon is easy. But on Mars? We're not comparing humans to rovers, and Perseverance has spent these past five-plue years not just traveling but exploring and conducting scientific investigations. But if we imagine a future where we successfully send humans to Mars, let's explore what it might really be like to travel 26.2 miles on foot across the Red Planet.

Mars is brutal

For starters, Mars is cold. And while completing a marathon is difficult at any temperature, the cold presents unique challenges, like aggravating breathing troubles and causing your joints to stiffen. The freezing temperatures that you'd find on Mars could certainly pose a challenge for joints and muscles, and depending on how cold it is, sweating due to physical exertion in extreme cold could even increase your risk of hypothermia.

Mars' atmosphere is very thin, so heat from the sun escapes very quickly on the Red Planet. And because Mars is millions of miles farther from the sun than Earth, temperatures on the surface can plummet to as low as minus 225 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 153 degrees Celsius).

That's not to say it's always that cold. If you stood exactly on Mars' equator at noon, you could feel soothing, springtime temperatures of up to 70 degrees F (20 degrees C), according to NASA. But generally speaking, the surface of Mars is quite cold.

A heavy weight

Mars' air isn't breathable, either; it's about 95% carbon dioxide. So you'd have to walk around in a spacesuit, meaning you'd never feel those spring-like temperatures directly anyhow. But you might warm up a bit, carrying the weight of that suit.

While the lower gravity on Mars would help out a bit, current spacesuits and their accompanying life support backpacks weigh well over 200 pounds (90 kilograms), and on Mars they could still weigh close to or over 100 pounds (45 kg), it has been reported. We don't yet know how future astronaut suits will be built or how much they might weigh, but if we assume they will be at least fairly similar to previous iterations, they will add a considerable amount of weight as you try to maneuver across the Martian surface.

Completing a marathon in athletic clothing and sneakers is a monumental challenge in and of itself. I can only imagine that attempting such a feat (however slowly) in a spacesuit would be incredibly difficult and take an extraordinary amount of energy, strength, stamina and time.

The good(ish) news

There is one thing about traveling 26.2 miles on Mars that would make it easier than on Earth: the gravity. On Mars, a human would experience 62.5% less gravity than they would on Earth, which would certainly make the marathon a little easier on your joints — spacesuit excluded. However, I can only imagine that between the spacesuit and the lower gravity, covering such a long distance on Mars might be a bit awkward.

And while your joints might be glad for the reduced gravity, that doesn't mean that a Mars trek would be a picnic. Astronauts who complete spacewalks from the International Space Station do so with almost no gravity, but they still report that these excursions are monumentally strenuous and challenging.

"It's a lot of hard work on your muscles, mostly upper torso and arms and hands," NASA spokesman Kelly Humphries previously told Space.com. "You're essentially in an inflated balloon, which creates resistance against your movements. Crew members are notoriously ravenous when they come in from spacewalks."

Boots on Mars

Exploring how astronauts might travel across the Martian surface isn't just a thought experiment. As crewed missions journey to the moon for the first time in over 50 years with NASA's Artemis program, we are once again reminded of the incredible time and hard work that it takes the teams across the agency and its partners to accomplish these missions.

Nevertheless, the space agency is pushing toward not just landing humans back on the lunar surface with Artemis 4, but with grander long-term plans of moon bases and longer residencies on the lunar surface. These efforts are part of an even longer-term plan by the agency, with support from commercial space companies, to one day send humans to Mars.

However soon a crewed flight to Mars may happen, one thing is for sure: it won't be easy.

If some future Mars traveler dares to attempt a marathon, whether walking or even running on the Red Planet, they have their work cut out for them.

Astronomers have discovered chemical differences between binary stars that indicate one is a cosmic cannibal that has devoured at least one planet.

Binary stars should have the same chemical composition because each star is formed from the same vast cloud of gas and dust; however earlier this year the team behind this new research discovered that the two stars of HD 81809, located around 101 light-years away, are chemically different. One of the stars, HD 81809B, has a much greater concentration of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium, which astronomers call "metals," at its surface than its binary partner HD 81809A.

This new research suggests that the reason for the metal enrichment of HD 81809B is that this star has consumed an exoplanet which was between 50 and 75 times the size of Earth.

"This is the first binary system to be found with this chemical difference, which is very unusual," team leader Nuno Moedas of the Technical University of Denmark told Space.com. "Binary systems are 'like siblings' in that they are born from the same molecular cloud, meaning they have the same chemical composition. As with siblings, some differences in element abundances can appear due to physical processes. However, these differences will be much smaller than those of HD 81809."

Moedas added that there are only two possible explanations for the differences between HD 81809B and HD 81809A.

"One is that the stars are not 'real siblings' and were born from different molecular clouds containing different elements," Moedas said. "The other explanation is that star HD 81809B suffered a more drastic event during its evolution, such as ingesting a planet, which could have changed its chemical composition."

There is a "smoking gun" piece of evidence that planetary engulfment is the correct explanation for the metal enrichment of HD 81809B, however.

"It could be very hard to distinguish the two scenarios, but the main evidence for a planet's engulfment is the high abundance of lithium in HD 81809B that is not normal," Moedas said. "Lithium is a very volatile element, and it is easily destroyed in stars, so we expect very low abundances of this element when observing stars. For the case of HD 81809B, the most viable explanation for the large presence of lithium is an ingestion of a planet."

The team isn't quite sure how HD 81809B came to feast on one of its planets, but Moedas suggests it could be the result of gravitational interactions between the binary stars disrupting the orbit of the unfortunate planet, resulting in it falling into one of its stars. The question also remains of how many planets HD 81809B has devoured.

"We can only estimate the amount of planetary material required, which we find to be 75 times the mass of Earth. It is possible that the star ingested three planets, each 25 times more massive than Earth," Moedas said. "The event happened a few million years ago, and there are physical processes in the star that will 'clean up' the evidence and try to make the star's chemical abundance similar to that before the event."

Because of the physical processes within HD 81809B, the team can't tell much more about the planet, or planets that were devoured. However, there is a possibility that this information may be recovered from a dusty disk of debris detected in this system.

"We still do not know the exact location, but if it is around the secondary star, it could be the remains of a planet falling into the star," Moedas said. "We could use this to understand the composition of the planet. However, we are far from being able to study this debris disk with the current instruments we have. We probably still need to revisit this system, as there is still a lot we don't know.

"There is a lot to discover."A pre-peer-reviewed version of the team's research appears on the paper repository site arXiv.

If you thought summer here on Earth could get pretty brutal, spare a thought for the extrasolar planet, or exoplanet, designated HD 80606 b. Using the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have discovered that this gas giant exoplanet, located 217 light-years away, is being roasted by its host star.

The planet, it seems, really puts the "hot" in "Hot Jupiter," a category of gas giant planets that come so close to their stars that they can complete an orbit in a matter of days, sometimes even hours.

The 111-day orbit of HD 80606 b brings the exoplanet so close to its host star that the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) saw its temperature soar to an incredible 1,100 degrees Fahrenheit (600 degrees Celsius). This causes an extreme change in the chemistry of this world, which makes it an ideal case study for the JWST.

"Hot Jupiters are already considered some of the most extreme exoplanets we know of, but even among that population, HD 80606 b is one of the most extreme," team leader Tiffany Kataria of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California said in a statement. "We typically think of hot Jupiters as hot gas giants sitting right next to their stars, but this planet's highly eccentric orbit creates a completely different beast."

Who ordered the roasted exoplanet?

Kataria and colleagues investigated HD 80606 b, its temperature and its chemistry using a technique in astronomy called spectroscopy, which breaks light down into individual wavelengths. This can reveal a world's chemistry because elements absorb and emit light at characteristic wavelengths.

Thus, when light from a star passes through the atmosphere of a planet, the chemicals in that atmosphere leave their fingerprints on this spectrum.
Using the JWST's MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument), the team observed this Hot Jupiter before, during, and after its close approach to its parent star, HD 80606. This required a great deal of planning given the extremely elliptical orbit of HD 80606 b.

This isn't the first time astronomers have studied HD 80606 b, the roasted exoplanet was previously investigated using NASA's now-defunct Spitzer Space Telescope.

"Spitzer did amazing work on this exoplanet, and now the JWST is building on that legacy by enabling us to drill down to distinguish specific chemical signatures like methane and carbon dioxide, which is just amazing progress," team member Ryan Challener of the Cornell Center for Astrophysics and Planetary Science said in the statement. "There's so much to learn from this one dataset here — we really are just getting started deciphering what the JWST has to tell us."

The JWST has followed that work to present a far more detailed picture of this exoplanet than before. In fact, the $10 billion space telescope has revealed that HD 80606 b is even more violent than anticipated.

"The JWST has shown that the planet’s increase in temperature was even more extreme than we anticipated based on Spitzer data," Kataria said.

The team's findings were presented Tuesday (June 16) at the 248th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Pasadena, California.

On Sunday (June 14), the Hawaiian volcano Kīlauea erupted for the 49th time that we know of — marking its 49th "episode," as scientists say.

And during the show, the GOES-18 weather satellite caught the action: the volcano blasting lava about 700 feet (210 meters) into the air. A gif of the footage can be seen just below.

What are we looking at?

Specifically, in this GOES-18 satellite imagery of the Kīlauea eruption, take note of the bright red spot toward the bottom right of the island. That color indicates warm to hot fire, per the scale visible at the bottom of the gif.

The gif itself is also sped up, showcasing a timespan from 3:01 p.m. EDT (1901 UTC) on Sunday to 10:31 p.m. EDT the same day (0331 UTC the following day).

Why is it noteworthy?

It's a treat to witness Hawaii's Kīlauea volcano erupting for many reasons, one being its grandeur. It's considered the most active volcano on Earth, having consistently erupted for the last 200 years or so.

It's also huge, with a 4,090-foot (1,250-meter) summit that has a depression about 3 miles (5 kilometers) long and 2 miles (3.2 km) wide. This very large depression is what's known as a "caldera." You can think of it as a huge crater on the volcano's summit.

That crater is called Halema'uma'u, and is in fact where the eruptions of this volcano originate. This particular eruption lasted about seven and a half hours, according to the U.S. Geological Survey's Hawaiian Volcano Observatory, but no lava was reported exiting the caldera territory. In conjunction with the eruption, however, the USGS reported three earthquakes within Kīlauea caldera.

Another reason this GOES-18 satellite is pretty amazing is it illustrates once again how a weather satellite's data can be very versatile. Satellite imagery of natural disasters in particular can help scientists monitor the status of hazardous areas in order to aid relief efforts, if needed.

That's going to be especially important as human-driven climate change, caused by practices like burning coal for cheap power, continues to grow in severity. Global warming is directly correlated with increases in serious disasters like hurricanes, cyclones and wildfires. The more satellite eyes we have on these events, the better.

There are other benefits to satellite images as well — things like penguin safety and solar eclipse views, for example. And some satellites are even able to watch over humanmade disasters, such as this one that caught Blue Origin's rocket explosion from space.

As for this erupting volcano, now that it's quieted down, scientists have been trying to predict when the next outflow could occur. According to the USGS, the 50th episode is forecast to occur "between June 24 and June 29 with June 25-26 most likely."

Following months of unsuccessful recovery efforts, NASA has officially begun decommissioning the MAVEN orbiter, bringing to a close an 11-year mission that transformed scientists' understanding of Mars and became one of the agency's most valuable assets at the Red Planet.

The decision follows the loss of contact with the spacecraft in December 2025. That loss happened after a routine communications blackout while the probe passed behind Mars. Mission controllers spent months attempting to restore contact, including sending commands designed to reboot the spacecraft's computers, but MAVEN remained silent.

A review board convened by NASA in February found the spacecraft had been operating normally in the weeks leading up to the anomaly. Fragments of telemetry later recovered from recorded radio signals indicated that MAVEN emerged from behind Mars in a safe mode while spinning at roughly 2.7 revolutions per minute — an unexpected state for a spacecraft that was not designed to rotate during normal operations. Investigators found that the rotation likely drained the spacecraft's batteries over several hours, eventually causing its communications system to lose power.

The underlying cause of the anomaly remains unknown, however, and a final report is expected later this year.

"The conclusion is that the spacecraft is not recoverable," Mike Moreau, MAVEN's project manager at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, said during a press conference earlier this month. "The team really has experienced the loss of a loved one with the end of the mission."

Yet as scientists mourn the spacecraft, they are also celebrating a mission that far exceeded its original goals.

"The team is certainly broken up about this," said Shannon Curry, MAVEN's principal investigator and a scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder. "But at the same time, we are incredibly proud of the science we've accomplished over the last decade."

Launched from Cape Canaveral in November 2013, MAVEN — short for Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution — arrived at Mars less than a year later as NASA's first mission devoted to understanding the planet's atmosphere. Originally planned to last just two years, the spacecraft was tasked with determining how Mars lost the thick atmosphere that once allowed liquid water to persist on its surface.

Long before MAVEN arrived, scientists knew Mars had not always been the cold, dry world seen today. Ancient river valleys, lake beds, deltas and other geological features pointed to a wetter past, when liquid water flowed across the landscape. For those conditions to exist, Mars would have required a much denser atmosphere than the thin envelope of gas surrounding the planet today.

For more than a decade, MAVEN circled Mars in a highly elliptical orbit, measuring particles escaping into space and observing how the atmosphere responded to solar activity. Among its most significant findings was evidence that solar storms can dramatically accelerate the loss of atmospheric gases, helping explain how Mars evolved from a potentially habitable world into the cold, barren planet seen today.

The mission also discovered new types of planetwide auroras, revealed how global dust storms can accelerate the loss of water from Mars, and provided the first direct observations of atmospheric sputtering, a process in which energetic particles strike the upper atmosphere and eject atoms into space.

"We now have a better understanding of atmospheric escape at Mars than at any other planet, including Earth," Curry said.

Over its lifetime, the mission contributed to more than 800 scientific publications, according to NASA, helping establish the clearest picture yet of the forces that transformed Mars over billions of years.

As NASA's fleet of Mars missions grew, MAVEN's importance came to extend well beyond atmospheric science. Although it supported just over 8% of relay sessions during its lifetime, the spacecraft returned nearly 18% of all science data transmitted from the Martian surface, underscoring its value as a high-capacity communications asset.

The four remaining active orbiters — Mars Odyssey, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, Mars Express and the European Space Agency's Trace Gas Orbiter — have adjusted operations to compensate, and NASA is exploring a future commercial telecommunications network to help fill the void.

Its loss leaves a noticeable gap in the network, but not an unmanageable one, scientists say.

"There is a slight delay on occasion, because we don't have as many assets in view, to getting our science data back, and MAVEN was critical in returning science data versus operational data," said Tiffany Morgan, the director of NASA's Mars Exploration Program. "The Mars Relay Network is resilient enough at this point in time to accommodate, for the most part, the loss of MAVEN with the added delay."

The timing of its loss does bring some missed opportunities. MAVEN will no longer be able to complement observations from NASA's ESCAPADE mission, a pair of spacecraft launched last year to further investigate the Martian magnetosphere and atmospheric escape.

Even in retirement, however, MAVEN's story may not be entirely over.

Curry said mission scientists may attempt additional imaging campaigns later this year using cameras aboard Mars rovers, although previous efforts to spot the silent spacecraft from the surface have proven unsuccessful. Beyond offering a final glimpse of the orbiter, any successful observation could provide investigators with additional clues about the spacecraft's final movements.

The spacecraft is expected to remain in orbit around Mars for another 50 to 100 years before atmospheric drag eventually pulls it into the planet's atmosphere, where it will burn up like a shooting star.

Asked what she would write on MAVEN's tombstone, Curry did not hesitate:

"Best. Mars. Mission. Ever."

Astronomers using NASA's Chandra X-ray spacecraft have obtained the most detailed image yet of the jet erupting from the supermassive black hole at the heart of the galaxy Messier 87 (M87).

If this black hole sounds familiar, that is because it made history in 2019 when it was revealed as the first black hole to be imaged by humanity.

M87* is located around 55 million light-years from Earth and is ravenously feeding on infalling gas and dust. As it does so, matter is channeled to the poles of this black hole, which has a mass 6.5 billion times that of the sun. This matter is blasted out at speeds approaching the speed of light as powerful jets that stretch out for thousands of light-years.

Jets of M87* have been imaged before in other wavelengths of light, such as optical light and infrared, but this is our most detailed look at these jets in X-rays. And the X-rays revealed a complex flow of material through the jets that's more dynamic than previously seen.

"We could already see changes in the jet, but never with this level of detail in X-rays," Camille Poitras, a Ph.D. student in the Faculty of Science and Engineering at Laval University and lead of the study, said in a statement. "Structures that previously appeared blended together can now be distinguished, allowing us to better follow the jet's evolution over more than a decade of observations."

Some structures in the jets appeared to be moving at speeds five times faster than the speed of light. Of course, that isn't possible; according to Albert Einstein's theory of special relativity, nothing with mass can move at the speed of light or faster. This so-called superluminal motion isn't a universe-breaking discovery, but rather an optical illusion created when matter moves at near-light speed directly toward Earth.

The Chandra observations of the jet of M87* are a major step forward in understanding the physics of these outflows and how the particles that comprise them are accelerated to such high speeds and great energies. Additionally, because these jets are how supermassive black holes pour energy back into their surroundings, the observations could also help build a better picture of how these cosmic titans influence the evolution of their home galaxies.

"These results demonstrate how uniquely powerful Chandra remains for tracking the evolution of extreme phenomena over long timescales," team member Gerrit Schellenberger, an astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA), said in the statement. "They help us better understand how energy released near a supermassive black hole is carried through its jet and deposited into the surrounding galaxy."

The team's research was presented at the 248th meeting of the American Astronomical Society. The study is also available as a preprint on arXiv.

Imagine a world where the weather forecast calls for winds blowing at 11,000 miles per hour (18,000 kilometers per hour) and nighttime showers of liquid metal, rubies and sapphires.

This is the chaotic reality astronomers have pieced together for WASP-121b, an "ultra-hot Jupiter" that ranks among the most extreme planets known beyond the solar system.

The gas giant orbits its host star at such a punishingly close distance that a single "year" there lasts just 30.5 hours. At that proximity — so close that if it got any closer, stellar gravity would start ripping it apart — the host star's immense tidal forces have warped the planet from a sphere into a football-like shape. Temperatures on its dayside climb high enough to vaporize metals, while previous studies have suggested that iron may condense and fall as rain on the cooler nightside. Now, astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have added another piece to the world's meteorological portrait.

By tracking subtle changes in starlight passing through WASP-121 b's atmosphere as the planet crossed in front of its star, researchers detected differences between atmospheric conditions at dawn and dusk, according to the study.

"With its unprecedented observational quality, JWST gives us the most detailed glimpses into distant planets to date," study lead author Cyril Gapp of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany, said in a statement.

"By measuring how star light absorption changes as WASP-121 b rotates, we probe its atmosphere longitude by longitude," Gapp said.

The observations suggest that the planet's evening terminator — the region rotating out of daylight — is hotter than its morning counterpart. The finding is consistent with powerful winds transporting heat from the planet's intensely hot dayside toward its cooler nightside, researchers say.

Because WASP-121 b is tidally locked to its star, one hemisphere permanently faces the star while the other remains in darkness. Yet, during a transit, the planet rotates just enough from JWST's vantage point for different regions of its atmosphere to come into view.

By examining how the atmospheric signal changed over time, Gapp and his team found that the evening side absorbed slightly more starlight than the morning side, the study reports. The researchers also detected changes in signals associated with water vapor and carbon monoxide, which they interpret as evidence of temperature differences across the atmosphere.

The hotter evening side appears warm enough to break apart water molecules in the upper atmosphere, the study notes. The cooler morning side, meanwhile, may be partially obscured by clouds made of silicate minerals, although the study notes more sophisticated models will be needed to determine whether such clouds are indeed present.

The findings add to a growing body of research of turbulent weather on WASP-121 b, including recent data from the Very Large Telescope in Chile that revealed complex, layered and violent wind patterns and jet streams spanning half the world.

Previous observations with the Hubble Space Telescope also found evidence that magnesium and iron were escaping from the planet's atmosphere, likely driven by intense ultraviolet radiation from its host star.

The team's new technique could eventually be applied to other ultra-hot planets, allowing astronomers to compare atmospheric conditions across a broader sample of distant worlds, the study notes.

The study was published Wednesday (June 10) in the journal Nature Astronomy.

NASA's Chandra X-ray spacecraft has detected the supernova wreckage of a dead star near the supermassive black hole that sits at the heart of the Milky Way, around 26,000 light-years from Earth.

The team behind the discovery believes the star that died to create this wreckage erupted around 1,700 years ago. This represents the closest supernova debris found to our central supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*).

The supernova wreckage sits within a bubble of ionized hydrogen gas, which is a bright source of radio waves, and has been dubbed Sagittarius C (Sgr C). The wreckage was detected by Chandra and the XMM-Newton X-ray space telescope as a "blob" of X-rays. The shell of ejected material appears to be moving at a staggering 2 million miles per hour (3.2 million kilometers per hour).

Supernova wreckage like this is important for the chemical enrichment of galaxies, including the next generation of stars and planets.

That's because when massive stars like the progenitor star of this debris explode, the heavy elements they have forged from hydrogen and helium are jettisoned into their surroundings.

Eventually, these elements mix with surrounding clouds of interstellar gas and dust. Later, cool and dense regions in these molecular clouds collapse under their own gravity, forming new stars. The envelopes of material around these infant stars eventually form clumps that gather more and more mass to become planets.

There is still some ambiguity surrounding this wreckage, however. The team behind the observation didn't find increased amounts of the elements that would have been blasted out by the exploding star.

This could be because this debris has already mixed with the surrounding gas and dust. Alternatively, it could suggest this X-ray blob isn't the result of a supernova explosion at all, but rather comes from gas heated by the hot massive stars in this region of the Milky Way.

The team behind this research doesn't consider this explanation likely. That is because this X-ray emission is around ten times brighter than the typical emissions from clusters of hot massive young stars.

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

The world followed the exploits of NASA's Artemis 2 moon mission in near real-time thanks to a high-tech laser link between the astronauts and Earth that enabled high-definition streaming video and images.

Transmitting data optically, in this case by infrared light, is referred to as 'lasercom', and was at the heart of what made Artemis 2 so successful in the eyes of the public. Thanks to the high-res imagery that was made available on a daily basis, it felt like we were all riding with Artemis 2 commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, and mission specialists Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen every step of the way on their voyage around the moon.

This was made possible by a device called the Orion Artemis 2Optical Communications System (O2O), developed by researchers at MIT's Lincoln Laboratory. An infrared laser, it transmitted data to Earth at bit rates of up to 260 megabytes per second — faster than some home broadband internet. Infrared signals, rather than radio, were chosen for a variety of reasons. For one thing, near-infrared light can pass through thin clouds, so an obscured sky wouldn't prevent communication. And secondly, optical light operates at a higher frequency than radio, enabling more data to be packed in.

"Our goal was to demonstrate O2O's operational utility for human spaceflight, extending the high-bandwidth connections that Internet users enjoy on Earth to astronauts in deep space," said Farzana Khatri, who is the lead systems engineer in Lincoln Laboratory's Optical and Quantum Communications Group, in a statement. "We not only demonstrated the first use of a lasercom on a crewed mission beyond low Earth orbit, but also attracted massive public engagement as the astronauts shared multimedia from their journey in near real-time."

Imagery was very important on the Artemis 2 mission. The fantastic photos such as "Hello, World" and "Earthset" didn't happen by accident. The crew had been trained at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston to observe and photograph the moon and Earth, and the O2O system ensured that their best images could be beamed back to Earth and spread across news sites and social media within hours of taking them.

The O2O system has its origins in a similar project developed by the Lincoln Laboratory team called the Modular, Agile, and Scalable Optical Terminal (MAScOT). It flew to the International Space Station (ISS) and was tested for the first time in 2023, itself following on from earlier lasercom tests such as NASA's Optical Payload for Lasercom Science (OPALS) instrument that beamed a 165-megabit video from the ISS in 2014.

O2O is an evolution of MAScOT. It is composed of three modules. One is an optical module featuring a 4-inch telescope that focuses the laser and gimbals to help point it. A second module contained a modem that converted electronic data into optical data. Finally, the third module consisted of a controller that interfaced with the spacecraft to help point the telescope.

The laser targeted one of three ground stations, principally NASA's White Sands Test Facility in New Mexico and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Table Mountain Facility in California, with a third, experimental ground station at the Australian National University's Mount Stromlo Observatory.

Initially, the intention was to have an operating window of 1 hour per day, but because O2O proved so successful at transmitting data efficiently its use increased as the mission went on. NASA mission managed even decided to adjust the Artemis 2 Orion capsule's attitude (its orientation in space) at times in order to extend the period in which it was in line of sight of a ground station, allowing even more data to be downlinked. In total, O2O transmitted half a terabyte of data over the course of the 10 day flight.

"O2O was able to downlink all the data stored on multiple onboard cameras, allowing mission control to erase the memory cards and refill them with new photos and videos," said Khatri, who also emphasized how downlinking the data via O2O actually protected that data. "For any space mission, scientists and spacecraft engineers are concerned that data not sent down during the mission can become corrupted or get destroyed. And, when the spacecraft capsule returns, downloading the data can sometimes take months. The lasercom capability provided by O2O ensured the data were preserved and immediately available for analysis."

On Earth, we already use lasers to transmit data down optical fibers, and for decades lasers have been considered the future of space communications. Radio, while simpler, has a slower data rate thanks to its low frequency limiting its bandwidth — this is why even the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) is now looking for optical signals as well as radio. Lasers can transmit 10 to 100 times more data per second than radio waves, and Khatri reckons that O2O can even improve on this and increase the downlink rate by at least another factor of 10 over what was possible during Artemis 2.

This enhanced data rate will allow the world to follow future Artemis missions even more closely, and when a human finally does set foot on the moon for the first time since the Apollo era, thanks to O2O we will feel like we are right there with them.

The Hubble Space Telescope has captured a striking image of an irregular dwarf galaxy.

And while this galaxy might be faint and far away, it certainly takes the spotlight in this spectacular new image.

What is it?

23 million light-years away from Earth lies the irregular dwarf galaxy ESO 490-017. Being a dwarf galaxy, it's only about 12,000 light-years across. The use of "only" here might sound strange. After all, one light-year is 5.88 trillion miles (9.46 trillion km). However, while 12,000 light-years is ... a lot ... our own Milky Way galaxy is at least 100,000 light-years across.

In this image from the Hubble Space Telescope, we can see the faint galaxy speckled with stars with a spectacular bright star at the photo's center.

The galaxy has low surface brightness, so the stars in the image's background appear faint and almost hazy. This makes the foreground stars stand out even more, with beaming diffraction spikes emanating outward.

Hidden in the background of this photo is more than just fuzzy stars, however. The red, orange, and even beige spots in the cosmic backdrop of this image aren't just colorful stellar bodies, but rather other galaxies scattered throughout space.

The primary galaxy imaged is found in the constellation Canis Major, which contains Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky.

Why is it incredible?

This image was captured as part of a Hubble observing program studying galaxies and galaxy clusters as well as how they move throughout the universe. While you might think of galaxies as these stoic, far-reaching cosmic structures, they're really constantly on the move.

This image is just one piece of a larger collection of data that scientists have captured with Hubble to better understand the "cosmic flow" of galaxies and other massive structures in the universe.

This image also shows off Hubble's power. While this galaxy is very far away and fairly faint, the portrait captures it clearly, highlighting the galaxy, its stars, and even other galaxies all in one fantastic view.

Scientists may have finally seen the sun telegraph an eruption hours before it happened — and the one caught was one of our star's most powerful explosions.

Drawing on a rare dataset collected in the hours leading up to a massive solar flare, scientists identified a series of changes in the sun's atmosphere that offer new clues about how major eruptions begin. Eventually, these results could help improve space weather forecasting.

"I was not expecting what I found," Louis Seyfritz, a graduate researcher at the New Jersey Institute of Technology who led the new study, told Space.com.

Solar flares are powerful bursts of radiation from the sun driven by the sudden release of magnetic energy. The more powerful of these eruptions can disrupt radio communications, damage satellites and contribute to geomagnetic storms that affect infrastructure on Earth. Yet, despite decades of study, scientists still do not fully understand what causes these eruptions to occur.

Part of the challenge is practical. While spacecraft continuously monitor the sun, detailed observations of the conditions leading up to a flare are difficult to obtain. High-resolution instruments typically focus on active regions already producing solar activity, and researchers often begin tracking a flare in earnest only after it erupts — when it's possible to trace its path through space and assess its potential impacts on Earth.

In the new study, Seyfritz and his colleagues were able to take advantage of an unusually fortuitous dataset that captured the buildup to an X9-class solar flare that erupted on Oct. 3, 2024.

Their analysis identified several changes in the sun's atmosphere hours before the explosion, offering new clues about how major flares begin and potentially revealing early warning signs of future events.

The active region that produced the eruption had already generated several powerful flares in the preceding days, prompting scientists to keep multiple solar observatories focused on the area. Among them was NASA's Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph, or IRIS, a spacecraft designed to study a narrow slice of the sun's atmosphere in extraordinary detail.

And indeed, because IRIS was already observing the region, researchers obtained nearly five uninterrupted hours of observations before the flare erupted, providing a rare window into the processes unfolding in the sun's atmosphere before the explosion.

"I chose that event because I was expecting the flare to be big enough to see those signs," Seyfritz said. "There's very few that reach that amount of power."

Using data from IRIS, the researchers tracked three properties of plasma in the sun's atmosphere — its brightness, its motion toward or away from observers, and a quantity known as non-thermal velocity, a measure of turbulence and small-scale motions within the plasma. Together, those measurements allowed the team to reconstruct conditions in the hours before the flare, the study notes.

The results showed all three properties began increasing roughly three hours before the eruption, suggesting the sun's magnetic field was gradually becoming more unstable.

Such a long buildup of preflaring signatures is rarely observed, Seyfritz said.

The team also found that the plasma's brightness, motion and turbulence rose and fell in regular cycles before the flare. One repeated every seven to 10 minutes, while another appeared roughly every 18 to 21 minutes. The fluctuations were concentrated near a boundary where oppositely directed magnetic fields meet — a region where scientists suspect magnetic stress builds up before flares.

Scientists do not yet know exactly what causes the oscillations. They may reflect waves moving through the solar atmosphere or a series of small-scale magnetic reconnection events occurring before the larger eruption.

"If we see those oscillations happening before the flare, it can be a strong indicator that a flare is going to happen," Seyfritz told Space.com.

Roughly 15 to 20 minutes before the flare erupted, the sun's atmosphere appeared to shift into a more volatile state, with turbulence surging and plasma streaming outward — changes that may reflect the sudden release of magnetic energy that drives solar flares, the study notes.

No single measurement appeared to provide a definitive warning sign on its own. Instead, Seyfritz said, it was the combination of increasing brightness, rising turbulence and coordinated oscillations that stood out as a possible precursor signature.

To be clear, the findings do not immediately mean scientists can now predict solar flares hours in advance. The study examined a single eruption, and researchers do not yet know whether the same signatures appear consistently before other events. Answering that question will require analyzing many more flares — a challenge made difficult by the scarcity of suitable observations.

The next step, Seyfritz said, is to determine whether the same patterns emerge across a much larger sample of eruptions. If they do, the signatures could eventually become part of future space-weather forecasting systems.

"That's the goal," he said.

The results were published in May in the journal Solar Physics.

For decades, scientists have searched for a fifth fundamental force of nature that can explain mysterious aspects of the universe such as dark energy and dark matter. These are pieces of our cosmos that simply can't be accounted for by the four fundamental forces we know of: gravity and electromagnetism as well as the strong and weak nuclear forces.

In addition, while the hunt for this force has been ongoing, researchers have also been desperately hunting for a theory of quantum gravity. That's because quantum gravity can unite the best description we have of the universe on large scales — Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity — and the physics of the subatomic, aka quantum mechanics. Both theories emerged at the start of the 20th century and have been experimentally confirmed time and time again, yet they steadfastly refuse to overlap in a single unified theory.

But now, these two scientific quests have overlapped. New research built a quantum gravity framework — finding that it actually offers clues about potential fifth fundamental forces of nature.

The team's findings reveal that not all potential suggestions for a fifth fundamental force, which would manifest as a small deviation from Isaac Newton's law of gravitation at very small distances and would be described by two parameters: its strength and the range it acts over. In essence, the research could narrow down the search for a fifth fundamental force.

"One of the main challenges was overcoming a primarily conceptual obstacle: quantum gravity is often seen as an extremely abstract topic, almost impossible to connect to observable phenomena," Alfio Bonanno of the National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) said in an emailed statement translated from Italian. "In some ways, it's like standing in front of a mountain face that everyone considers unscalable. The first step isn't technical, but mental: convincing yourself that a possible path actually exists. This work stems precisely from this idea: seeking a concrete connection between the physics of infinitesimally small scales and phenomena potentially observable in the real world."

The framework of quantum gravity explored by the team is called "asymptotic safety," which asserts that gravity can remain consistent and controlled even at high energies thanks to a halting in the strength of gravitational pull. If this theory is to remain valid at high energy levels, Bonanno and colleagues found that the range and strength of a fifth fundamental force were limited, resulting in an excluded region of these parameters.

"The most exciting aspect is that part of the theoretically excluded region has not yet been explored experimentally," Bonanno said. "This means that future high-precision measurements of gravitation could directly test — and potentially falsify — this class of quantum gravity-inspired models."

Usually, physicists hypothesize new forces and then determine if they could be detected by experiment; this research takes a different approach by ruling out certain possibilities for the characteristics of a proposed force. The fact that much of the region excluded by the team hasn't been explored experimentally lays the groundwork for making precise measurements of gravity to test quantum gravity.

"Our study shows that quantum gravity may not only be a valid theory at extreme and unattainable energies, but may also have concrete and testable consequences at much larger scales," Emiliano Glaviano of the INAF said in the statement. "The physics of infinitesimally small distances could leave observable traces in the macroscopic world: some possible new forces of nature would be ruled out not by experiments, but directly by the fundamental laws of the theory."

This research applies to physics on the tiny scales of quantum physics, where quantum gravity should emerge, to the scales of planetary objects. Thus, traces of this quantum gravity theory or a fifth fundamental force appearing as deviations from Newton's laws should be testable with a wide range of experiments. That includes using a technique called atomic interferometry or quantum sensors to make measurements across the solar system, such as lunar laser ranging, or on wider astronomical scales such as measuring the dynamics of planets.

The team's research was published in the May edition of the journal Physical Review Letters.

A team of scientists is astounded to have discovered that bright and turbulent regions of galaxies — called active galactic nuclei, which are powered by feeding supermassive black hole engines — could be the birthplace of millions of planets. And these regions are brilliant. They often outshine the combined light of every star in their wider home galaxy.

Active galactic nuclei (AGNs) occur when supermassive black holes are surrounded by vast amounts of gas and dust that swirl around them in flattened, platter-shaped clouds called accretion disks. These accretion disks gradually feed some matter to the black hole. Meanwhile, other matter is channeled to the poles of the black hole, from where it is blasted away as high-energy plasma jets travelling at near-light speeds. The immense gravity of the central supermassive black holes, which have masses of millions or even billions of times that of the sun, generates intense friction in the gas and dust within accretion disks, causing them to glow brightly across the electromagnetic spectrum.

The discovery is so surprising because even though AGNs are rich with gas and dust — the building blocks of planets — the turbulent conditions within the disks wouldn't generally be considered ideal for forming planets. However, the edges of these disks may have temperatures and conditions akin to the planet-forming protoplanetary disks found around infant stars. Over time, could enough dust clump together and grow into planets?

To investigate this possibility, these scientists created a computer model of a supermassive black hole and its accretion disk and added data about the conditions at the edges of these disks. They then observed how rapidly dust clumped together and how the budding planets grew over millions of years.

"We discovered millions of Jupiter-mass planets could form at a distance of tens of parsecs [one parsec is around 3.3 light-years] from supermassive black holes, which are also AGNs," team member and University of Colorado Boulder researcher Bhupendra Mishra told Space.com. "These are dust giants exceeding Jupiter's mass. They will look like lava balls."

Mishra added that because the disk around an AGN supermassive black hole is more gas-rich compared to those that would exist around a star like the sun during its infancy, the potential of planet formation is enhanced from a few possible worlds around stars to maybe millions of planets around a supermassive black hole. He explains that the underlying mechanism of planet formation around supermassive black holes would be a phenomenon called "streaming instability" that allows multiple large filaments of dust to form. These are the birthplaces of vast amounts of planets. That eventually leads to millions of planets lurking in the outskirts of an AGN disk.

However, such planets may fly the nest quite quickly. The team's estimate confirms that these are stable planets — but while these planets will survive, they will likely migrate radially away from the supermassive black hole and the edge of the AGN.

"We were astonished! This has not been found in AGN disk context before using a streaming instability model," Mishra said. "My colleague Wladimir Lyra, an astronomy professor at New Mexico State University (NMSU), is world-renowned in the field of planet formation, and we both were totally amazed when we noticed this mass and size range of planet formation."

Mishra added that the outskirts of AGN disks are not very well understood, meaning the team's findings could help develop a much clearer picture of the hearts of active galaxies. Of course, it is early days for the team's theory, and the detection of planets around supermassive black holes would be a helpful confirmation of the team's conclusion. A useful tool in this investigation would be the curvature and the amplification of light from a background object that happens when a massive foreground object sits between it and Earth, a phenomenon known as gravitational lensing.

"Gravitational lensing could help to identify the cluster of these planets in the outskirts of the AGN disk. However, finding such an AGN is not easy unless we get lucky," Mishra concluded. "I believe we could detect these planets, but we have to study this model further."

A preprint version of the team's research is available on the paper repository site arXiv.

A Japanese-built spherical transforming rover, just 3 inches (8 centimeters) in size, successfully took a sojourn on the moon — and, in doing so, it demonstrated autonomous navigation and wireless communication with another lander that then relayed data back to Earth. The robotic rover, named SORA-Q after the Japanese words for "space" and "sphere,", aims to pave the way for more miniature autonomous lunar robots.

SORA-Q flew to the moon in December 2023 on the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency's (JAXA's) Smart Lander for Investigating moon (SLIM) mission. After a few weeks in orbit, SLIM landed on the lunar surface on January 19, 2024. Quickly, it deployed the tennis ball-sized SORA-Q rover along with another robot — a small hopping machine known as Lunar Excursion Vehicle-1 (LEV-1). (SORA-Q was designated LEV-2.) SLIM was the first Japanese mission to soft-land on the moon.

The little transforming SORA-Q rover was developed jointly by JAXA, Sony, Doshisha University and Takara-TOMY. The latter, a toy company, co-owns the Transformers brand with Hasbro and used their expertise and technology developed from designing toys of the Autobots and Decepticons to give SORA-Q its transforming capabilities.

SORA-Q transformed by extending its shape from a sphere to something more like a cylinder, using the hemispheres of its original spherical shape as wheels. A camera flipped up between the wheels and a tail deployed to act as a rear stabilizer. SORA-Q was then able to drive around the SLIM lander and take color images of both the lander and the lunar environment at its landing site. SLIM had touched down close to a885-foot-wide) (270-meter-wide) crater called Shioli inside a larger 61-mile-wide (98-kilometer-wide) crater called Cyrillus, which itself is located in Mare Nectaris on the lunar nearside.

The Lunar Excursion Vehicles were designed by a team led by JAXA's Daichi Hirano. The aim was to provide autonomy in a small package rather than a large rover that would increase the payload mass and cost, and which would be unable to reach cramped spaces such as crevasses.

However, trade-offs have to be made with palm sized rovers such as SORA-Q and LEV-1 as not everything can be built into them. So, the two little robots worked in tandem to explore and relay data back to Earth.

Autonomy in this case involves being able to reach destinations by using camera images to navigate around obstacles such as craters and pits without the involvement of mission control.

"Although the capabilities of an individual small rover are inherently limited, the results highlight the potential of such platforms ... as independent explorers, capable of accessing environments beyond the reach of a primary large spacecraft," Hirano and his team wrote in their research paper describing the results of the mission.

Communications with the little robots ceased after about 100 minutes, 20 or 30 minutes short of SORA-Q's expected lifetime. Hirano puts this premature end to the rover's mission as being down to either something becoming damaged on LEV-1 by its hopping motion, or by LEV-1's battery depletion, either way preventing data from being relayed back to Earth.

You can read a full report on the SORA-Q mission in a paper published in the journal Science Robotics.

A faraway fluctuating quasar has been seen dimming and brightening by an extraordinary amount, changes in luminosity equivalent to 2 trillion times the brightness of the sun . It is the first time that a flickering quasar has been seen in the early universe, this one dating back 12.9 billion years – just around 900 million years after the Big Bang.

Quasars are the extremely active supermassive black holes at the heart of some galaxies, furiously feeding on gas that is being shoveled towards their maw, and growing as a result of this voracious feeding. As the gas circles the black hole's event horizon – the point beyond which nothing can escape the black hole – it grows hot as a result of friction, leading to the gas shining brightly. Additionally, magnetic fields can whip away some of the charged particles in the gas, blasting them away from the supermassive black hole in the form of powerful and bright jets. As such, quasars are some of the brightest objects in the universe.

More than a million quasars have been found across the universe, but only around 200 of these have been found existing in the first billion years after the Big Bang. While most quasars flicker, they usually do so by relatively modest amounts, and such flickering had not been seen in a quasar in the first billion years of cosmic history, until now.

"People have known that quasars in the nearby universe can flicker," Gene Leung of the Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, said in a statement. "The flickering comes from fluctuations in the way the gas is being fed into the black hole, and how the quasar flickers tells us something about the structure of a black hole's accretion disk and the kind of 'bites' that the black hole is eating."

The quasar in question is pumping out energy equivalent to the luminosity of 12 trillion suns, and its light fluctuates by about 20%, or 2 trillion times the luminosity of our sun, a quite remarkable amount indicative of how fast this black hole is growing.

Even so, the quasar is so distant that it is still extremely faint, so detecting these huge fluctuations wasn't easy. Not only has the light traveled a long way for a long time, but the expansion of the universe has also stretched the wavelength of that light to longer, redder wavelengths, a phenomenon called "redshift."

Distant quasar flickers like a cosmic candle

Leung and his MIT colleague Anna-Christina Eilers led a team that found the elusive flickering quasar after searching the archives of NASA's now-defunct NEOWISE (Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) mission. NEOWISE scanned the whole sky for about 14 years, searching for hazardous asteroids, but also capturing a lot going on in the background sky.

The redshift of the quasar's light also lowered the frequency of the fluctuations. Flickering that might have taken place on timescales of days when the light left this quasar was redshifted to months by the time this light reached us. That is why NEOWISE's many years of data were invaluable.

"We saw the quasar flickering randomly over the 14-year period, much like a candle's flame flickers without a fixed pattern," said Leung.

The flickering of the quasar at different wavelengths is connected to variations in the temperature of the gas swirling around this black hole. The closer the gas is to the black hole, the hotter it is. From this, Leung's team could deduce that the gas had settled into a very flat, pancake-shaped accretion disk around the black hole.

For an older quasar, this wouldn't be a surprise, but for such a young quasar, it is potentially revelatory. That's because supermassive black holes grow messily, and the cloud of infalling gas around a young quasar existing only 850 million years after the Big Bang should still be quite puffy, like a thick, chaotic donut-shaped torus. The gas should only flatten into a pancake shape once the quasar has matured. In other words, this quasar appears older than its years.

"I think that what this suggests is that all the messy, very rapid growth phases that we expect all black holes to go through at some point happen very, very early on, before we see them as these very bright luminous quasars," said Eilers. "That's the picture that's emerging."

Astronomers are already gaining evidence that supermassive black holes can form faster than we realized from directly collapsing clouds of gas, as evidenced by the 'little red dots' being discovered by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) in the early universe. The discovery of a mature quasar that existed 12.9 billion years ago bolsters the emerging theory that supermassive black holes formed early and developed fast.

"This means something happened even earlier on that led these systems to look so mature," said Leung.

Now, Leung and Eilers hope to search for even older quasars (the oldest ever seen existed 13.2 billion years ago), perhaps with the JWST, to try and capture whatever happened to cause them to grow up so quickly.

In the meantime, their findings can be read in a paper published on Monday (8th June) in Nature Astronomy.

Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), astronomers may have uncovered new clues about a longstanding mystery in galaxy evolution: why so many massive galaxies in the early universe appear to have died far sooner than expected.

Galaxies are often considered "alive" when they are actively forming stars and "dead" when star formation has largely ceased. In today's universe, dead galaxies are common. But astronomers have been surprised to find large numbers of them in the early universe, when galaxies were expected to be rapidly growing and churning out stars.

Using ALMA and JWST observations of a distant galaxy, researchers have detected a "galaxy-killing" wind — an enormous, high-speed outflow of gas — that is powerful enough to strip a galaxy of the raw material needed to make new stars. The discovery could help explain the puzzling population of massive "dead" galaxies found throughout the young cosmos, according to a statement from the Royal Astronomical Society.

"Dense regions of the universe are like very active cities," Rebecca Davies, lead author of the study from Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, said in the statement. "Galaxies collide and undergo frenzied bursts of star formation. But when the biggest stars burn out, they explode as supernovas, launching powerful winds that blast away the very gas galaxies need to keep forming stars."

Davies and colleagues observed a galaxy called CRISTAL-02 as it appeared just one billion years after the Big Bang, catching it in the midst of a rapid growth spurt.

The observations revealed that CRISTAL-02 is forming stars at roughly twice the rate of similar galaxies from the same era. At the same time, JWST and ALMA detected a vast plume of cold gas extending far from the galaxy — a telltale sign that material is being blown out into intergalactic space, according to the statement.

"The galaxy has a powerful wind that is ejecting material twice as fast as the galaxy forms stars," Davies added. "If this rapid blowout continues, the galaxy could be dead in less than 50 million years, explaining the origin of the mysterious massive dead galaxies in the early universe."

The discovery is particularly intriguing because CRISTAL-02 is not a single galaxy. Instead, it consists of multiple galaxies in the final stages of a merger. During these cosmic collisions, gas is funneled toward galactic centers, triggering intense bursts of star formation, later followed by supernova explosions that drive powerful winds that prevent any new stars from being born.

What's more, observations suggest that nearly half of massive galaxies in the early universe were interacting with nearby companions, indicating that mergers and their galaxy-killing winds may have been widespread. In turn, many of the universe's earliest giant galaxies may have effectively destroyed their own ability to form stars — helping explain why so many of these galaxies seem to have lived fast and died young.

"If many early galaxies collide and experience rapid growth, then it may not be surprising that we see so many dead galaxies in the early universe," Davies said in the statement. "CRISTAL-02 offers a natural solution to the mystery of why these massive galaxies live fast and die young."

The study was published June 10 in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters.

Fragments of ice splintered from a glacier float down an Antarctic lake in a photo captured from aboard the International Space Station.

What is it?

In a new photograph snapped by astronauts on the International Space Station, you can see pieces of the Tyndall Glacier splintering off and floating out into the lake Lago Geikie. Even from space, the chunks of ice falling from the glacier can be seen floating away.

The Tyndall Glacier in southern Chile is part of the Southern Patagonian Icefield. Located between Chile and Argentina, this is the second-largest continuous ice field like it in the world. It measures at over 5,000 square miles of ice (13,000 square kilometers).

It is the larger half of two remaining pieces of the Patagonian Ice Sheet, an almost unbelievably massive sheet of ice that covered southern Chile during the last glacial period over 20,000 years ago.

Why is it incredible?

As of 2025, the worlds glaciers have lost over 300 tons (273 tonnes) of ice in just the last 20 years alone. With the progression of climate change, this ice continues to melt, fragment and contribute to rising sea levels around the globe. And in this image, we can see the process with our own eyes.

The Tyndall Glacier has been shrinking for about 150 years; as more and more pieces of this glacier break off or melt, Lago Geikie continues to grow and expand. In the past four years alone, Tyndall has lost 1.4 miles (2.2 kilometers) in length, according to glaciologist Mauri Pelto of Nicholas College. Interestingly, while glacier shrinking is concerning as it contributes to sea level rise which puts coastal communities in serious danger, this glacial retreat revealed some unexpected findings beyond that. As this glacier has fallen away, it has exposed bedrock where scientists have found ichthyosaur fossils.

Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope may be close to solving the mystery of "little red dots" in the early universe. The team has studied one of these strange objects, designated GLIMPSE-17775, finding evidence it is a black hole star — a ravenously feeding, growing supermassive black hole cocooned in a dense cloud of partially ionised gas.

Little red dots first started to turn up when the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) began sending data back to Earth in the summer of 2022. They were said by some scientists to have "broken cosmology" because they appear in large numbers around 600 million years after the Big Bang, but they appear to disappear before the universe reaches 2 billion years old. Several explanations for little red dots have been proposed, but one that has emerged as a frontrunner is the concept of black hole stars. If black hole stars exist, the little red dot disappearance would be the result of their intense, short-lived growth spurts that cause them to burn out — or, because the growing supermassive black holes at their centers eventually clear away the dense gas and dust obscuring them, changing their appearance as they evolve into more typical active galaxies.

The problem is, however, that astronomers have been unable to gather observational evidence that little red dots are indeed black hole stars. That was until the JWST imaged little red dot GLIMPSE-17775, seen as it was just 1.8 billion years after the Big Bang, while making observations of the gravitational lens galaxy cluster Abell S1063. This data represents the deepest spectrum of light from a little red dot collected to date and, according to this team, contains multiple lines of evidence pointing to a black hole star.

"I think part of the scientific community is converging on a singular picture — that little red dots can be explained by black hole star models. But none of the previous little red dots have all of the pieces of evidence in the same place," Vasily Kokorev at the University of Texas at Austin said in a statement. "With GLIMPSE-17775 we can test these models because of how deep and amazing this source's spectrum is."

Solving the little red dot puzzle with a hand from Einstein

The JWST caught a glimpse of GLIMPSE-17775 while searching for the first generation of stars in our universe, somewhat confusingly called "Population III" stars. The telescope searched for these particular stars in the galaxies that comprise galaxy cluster Abell S1063.

Separately, Abell S1063 is a gravitational lens, meaning its massive gravitational influence actually curves the fabric of space and time (united as a single, four-dimensional entity called spacetime). This, in turn, means an object "behind" the galaxy cluster that's emitting light toward our vantage point would have its light path curved in tandem with the spacetime curve. This can create a magnifying effect.

The concept of gravitational lensing was first predicted by Albert Einstein in his theory of general relativity, and it's how scientists were able to observe GLIMPSE-17775 — essentially turning 30 hours of observing time into just about 80.

"When we saw the spectrum for the first time, it was like having all the pieces of a puzzle scattered on the floor," Kokorev said. "We picked up each piece of the puzzle, measured the lines, and started combining the different pieces into a mosaic. Maybe a few pieces looked like nothing at first, but then a couple of them came together, and we realized that there was something there."

The team identified several lines of evidence in the JWST observations that indicate "little red dot" GLIMPSE-17775 is indeed a black hole star. This includes emissions from elements that don't conform with what would be expected in a rotating gas cloud. The emission lines instead indicate the scattering of electrons, which is expected when a source of radiation is enshrouded by a vast and dense cocoon of gas. Also indicative of a dense shroud of gas were signs of fluorescence and helium-absorbing radiation.

The team also saw spectral lines from iron, which the team dubbed an "iron forest." That is something expected as a result of the high-energy output of a rapidly feeding supermassive black hole: a black hole star.If little red dots are rapidly accreting supermassive black holes shrouded by dense gas envelopes, this would explain why these mystery objects are so faint in X-rays, as these cocoons should absorb this high-energy radiation.

There is something missing from observations of GLIMPSE-17775, however.

Little red dots usually have a strong characteristic dip in the spectra of light they emit, what's known as a "Balmer Break." The team thinks this feature is weaker for this little red dot than others because GLIMPSE-17775 is surrounded by a massive host galaxy. The team's data therefore fits as a missing piece of the puzzle of little red dots, slotting in nicely with our understanding of the evolution of the universe.

"Everything fits, nothing is broken, and I think that makes the puzzle that is our universe even better," Kokorev concluded. "Looking ahead, I’m eager to dive deeper and learn about what is powering the central engines of little red dots. While we think it’s a black hole, there are some other interesting theories being proposed, which is exciting. "Maybe in a year or two, we’ll have the final answer to what powers these sources."

The team's research was published on Wednesday (June 10) in The Astrophysical Journal.

The asteroid impact that doomed the dinosaurs may also have built one of Earth's longest-lasting underground ecosystems.

When a roughly 6-mile-wide (10-kilometer-wide) asteroid slammed into what is now Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula 66 million years ago, it triggered a global catastrophe that wiped out about 75% of life on Earth, including all non-avian dinosaurs.

However, that same impact may also have created a vast underground environment capable of supporting microbial life for at least 8 million years — four times longer than scientists previously believed, according to a new study.

Using updated computer simulations, researchers found that the hydrothermal system generated beneath the famous Chicxulub crater persisted far longer than expected, making it the longest-lived impact-generated hydrothermal system yet documented on Earth.

"Wherever on Earth you find flowing warm water, you find life, and we've known for a while that asteroid impacts create hydrothermal systems," Annemarie Pickersgill, co-author of the study from the Scottish Universities Environmental Research Centre (SUERC), said in a statement. "Previous research undertaken in the early 2000s suggested that the system created by the Chicxulub impact lasted for about two million years. Those findings were based on computer models which were, even at the time, regarded as conservative estimates, but we were still surprised by the outcomes of our research."

The Chicxulub impact excavated a crater nearly 125 miles (200 kilometers) wide and unleashed enormous amounts of heat deep into Earth's crust. In the aftermath, seawater from the Gulf of Mexico infiltrated fractured and melted rock beneath the crater, creating a network of hot, water-filled pores and cracks — conditions that scientists consider highly favorable for microbial life.

The new study combines advanced geological simulations with evidence collected directly from the crater itself. In 2016, scientists drilled into Chicxulub's "peak ring" as part of International Ocean Discovery Program Expedition 364, recovering rock samples from deep beneath the seafloor. Among the materials they collected was a potassium-rich feldspar mineral that formed as hot fluids circulated through the crater after the impact.

Using what are known as argon-argon dating techniques, the researchers determined that these minerals formed over a surprisingly long period, spanning from the time of the impact 66 million years ago until roughly 58 million years ago. This indicates that hydrothermal activity persisted for at least 8 million years, according to the statement.

To understand how the system remained active for so long, the team ran updated computer simulations incorporating modern geological data and more sophisticated models of heat and fluid flow. Their results suggest that several factors worked together to sustain the underground environment, including highly permeable fractured rocks, lingering heat from the impact itself and the region's natural geothermal energy.

"Advancements in computational methods enable researchers to simulate complex natural systems with unprecedented realism, bringing us even closer to unveiling mysteries of chaotic physical processes that shape Earth and other planetary bodies through geological timescales," Evangelos Christou, co-author of the study and former doctoral researcher at the University of Glasgow, said in the statement.

Hydrothermal environments are believed to have played a crucial role in the origin and evolution of life on early Earth. Therefore, if impact-generated systems can remain active for millions of years, they could provide stable habitats where microbial communities can emerge and thrive even after catastrophic events like Chicxulub.

The results of the study may also help guide future searches for life elsewhere in the solar system. Mars, for example, has endured countless asteroid impacts and may have once had surface water billions of years ago. Much like Chicxulub, large impacts on the Red Planet could have created similar underground hydrothermal systems capable of sustaining life long after surface conditions became hostile.

"The porous, fractured rocks created by impacts create microenvironments where microorganisms can be protected from radiation and extreme temperatures," Pickersgill said in the statement. "Those conditions give life the chance to take hold and flourish, and that is likely what happened here on Earth billions of years ago."

Their findings were published June 9 in the journal Communications Earth & Environment.

Be careful: if you stare at this galaxy for too long you might end up hypnotized.

This new image captured by the Hubble Space Telescope shows the Messier 88 (M88) galaxy, also known as NGC 4501, in all of its swirling glory.

What is it?

M88 is an active galaxy, meaning at its center is a supermassive black hole whose inescapable gravity pulls in enormous amounts of gas and dust from surrounding space. It is also a spiral galaxy, meaning it has spiral "arms" that reach out from its center, which is clear from this spiraling, swirling image.

The galaxy is a member of the Virgo Cluster, a cluster of over 1,000 galaxies in the Virgo constellation. M88 can also be found roughly 63 million light-years away in the constellation Coma Berenices, or "Berenice's Hair."

Why is it incredible?

Astronomers captured this image while observing M88 as part of a larger investigation into spiral galaxies and how they operate in different environments, according to a statement. This work was done using Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3, which can see tens of millions of light-years into the universe while still managing to capture incredible details of objects like M88.

The Hubble Space Telescope has been looking out at the cosmos since 1990. For over 36 years, the space telescope has truly opened our eyes to the cosmos, showing the far reaches of our universe in spectacular detail that we had only previously dreamed of.

While the James Webb Space Telescope and the upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope serve unique purposes to expand our understanding of the universe, Hubble remains an incredibly powerful tool to look beyond what we know and explore what we hope to understand.

When we think about a black hole, we probably picture some vast cosmic titan, greedily consuming any matter unfortunate enough to fall within its gravitational influence. Thinking deeper, we probably imagine this ravenous cosmic beast forming from the explosive collapse of the core of a massive star. Maybe we even picture a supermassive black hole at the heart of a galaxy, formed from a multitude of mergers between smaller black holes and reaching masses millions or even billions of times that of the sun.

However, as accurate as this picture is, many scientists have long suspected that it is only the tip of the black hole iceberg, representing a single class of "astrophysical black holes" alone. These researchers theorize that black holes can also form at much more diminutive sizes that do not require the existence and death of massive stars or prior pairs of black holes. In particular, many scientists think that tiny black holes, with masses as small as that of a medium-sized asteroid, could have formed directly from density fluctuations in the hot and dense matter that filled the cosmos moments after the Big Bang. These objects have remained hypothetical as evidence of their existence has proved elusive. That hasn't stopped researchers thinking about non-astrophysical black holes and the routes to their formation, however.

One example is new research from scientists from Goethe University, Frankfurt, and the Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien), which suggests that minuscule black holes could form when the very fabric of space and time, united as a four-dimensional entity called "spacetime," undergoes critical collapse and organizes itself into a regular crystal-like arrangement. Though the idea isn't entirely new, the team has become the first to mathematically describe this transformation. And what is most staggering, they did it with nothing more than a pen and paper!

While astrophysical black holes form from some of the universe's most titanic and violent events, like core-collapse supernovas or black hole mergers, that set the very fabric of spacetime ringing with gravitational waves that can be "heard" from millions and even billions of light-years away, the team found these critical collapse black holes could be born with only a tiny nudge.

"Sometimes a tiny, seemingly insignificant cause is enough to trigger a huge and dramatic change," team member Daniel Grumiller of TU Wien told Space.com. "These microscopic black holes would form if you have a spacetime crystal and you inject an arbitrarily small amount of energy - a bit like what you get when you have undercooled water and you shake it so that it crystallizes."

Grumiller explained further that when liquid water is at its freezing point, only a small change is required to cause water molecules to spontaneously arrange themselves into a regular pattern and form an ice crystal. Even a tiny change in the structure of spacetime can allow a repeated pattern to develop, resulting in the emergence of a spacetime crystal, the team theorizes. This can kick-start the process of critical collapse.

"You can think of the critical spacetime crystal as water at freezing point; even though it is still water, it already 'knows' about ice, and small perturbations can convert water at 0 Celsius into ice, or vice versa," Grumiller said.

Enter stage left spacetime

Einstein suggested in his 1915 theory of gravity, general relativity, that particles of mass causethe very fabric of spacetime to curve. That means when particles move through spacetime, they affect the fabric of spacetime itself. That was the revolutionary thing about Einstein's rethink of gravity: to Newton, space and time were merely a stage upon which the actors of the universe, energy and matter, play their roles. To Einstein, spacetime was part of the production. It's that active role that allows for the formation of astrophysical black holes and their diminutive counterparts.

"We say that spacetime is curved by mass," Christian Ecker from the Institute for Theoretical Physics at Goethe University Frankfurt said in a statement. "Large objects such as stars curve spacetime strongly — for example, we can observe this when light rays are deflected by massive stars. But smaller masses also produce spacetime curvature, just to a lesser extent." However, because tiny black holes are hotter than their astrophysical counterparts, they rapidly "leak" thermal radiation called "Hawking radiation" to the cold of space; these spacetime crystal black holes would rapidly evaporate.

"This spacetime crystal is a very peculiar and fascinating object. It is a kind of intermediate state, an unstable point that can evolve in two different directions,” Grumiller continued. "After some time, the instability will kick in and either the spacetime crystals disperse into radiation or collapse into a small black hole. In case the crystal collapses to a black hole, it will be classically stable."

Grumiller explained that one surprise this research delivered was just how simple their mathematical descriptions of this process were while presenting solutions to the equations of general relativity.

"We provided the first paper-and-pencil solutions for spacetime crystals. Before our work, there were only numerical simulations but not exact solutions to the Einstein equations," Grumiller said. "We were astonished that the solutions were so simple that they fit into a few lines and only involved elementary functions - this was quite unexpected given the complexity of corresponding numerical simulations that take thousands of computer processing hours."

Of course, all this is great, but proving that critical collapse black holes could exist and that this route could have created primordial black holes in the dense particle-rich conditions shortly after the Big Bang doesn't actually prove primordial black holes exist.

"If we are lucky, our experimental colleagues will, at some point, discover primordial black holes. But even if this never happens, understanding critical collapse means understanding an important and conceptually rich part of general relativity, our currently best theory of gravity," Grumiller concluded. "Our next step is to find out if our various conjectures about the behavior of critical spacetime crystals are correct."

The team's research was published in the May edition of the journal Physical Review Letters.

Astronomers have discovered a distant quasar — or active nucleus of a galaxy — that's powered by a feeding supermassive black hole blasting out winds at record-breaking speeds of 30% the speed of light, around 201 million miles (323 million kilometers) per hour. This is the fastest black hole wind seen specifically in ultraviolet wavelengths.

The black hole-powered quasar, known as J2318, has an incredible mass of 1.7 billion times that of the sun and is located around 3 billion light-years away. While that is a pretty typical mass for a supermassive black hole, the speed of these winds is anything but typical, according to team member and York University researcher Patrick Hall.

"In terms of its speed, this quasar's wind could be called a category 79 hurricane," team leader and York University researcher Lucas Seaton said in a statement. "Every category of hurricane is about 20% faster than the category below it. Calling it category 79 gives an idea of just how fast it is, but of course this wind is unlike anything on Earth."

All large galaxies are thought to host a supermassive black hole at their hearts with masses of millions, or even billions, of times that of the sun, but not all of these cosmic titans power quasars or emit such incredibly powerful winds. Quasars occur when these central supermassive black holes are surrounded by vast amounts of gas and dust called accretion disks. These disks gradually feed the black holes.

Black hole winds vs. Earth winds

As you might imagine, masses of millions or billions of times that of the sun generate incredible gravitational forces, and this means accretion disks can have powerful tidal forces of their own that create friction and cause them to glow brightly across the electromagnetic spectrum. This radiation also pushes matter away from accretion disks in the form of intense black hole "winds."

"In quasars, we often see winds of gas pushed away from the black hole by the light of the quasar," Seaton said. "The wind in J2318 can be seen at ultraviolet wavelengths at velocities up to 30% the speed of light. Even faster winds can be seen at X-ray wavelengths, but J2318 is the fastest ever discovered at ultraviolet wavelengths."

The fact that black hole winds are radiation-driven, pushed by particles of light called photons bouncing off atoms (and not caused by air pressure) is what makes these cosmic gales so different from Earth's atmospheric winds.

"Quasars put out so many photons that those tiny pushes add up to extreme velocities," Seaton said. "The problem is, the photons can also remove all the electrons from the atoms, making them invisible. How to push the gas to the speeds we see while keeping the carbon and silicon ions we see intact … it's quite a puzzle!"

To tackle this puzzle, the team turned to data observations made by the SDSS-IV Time-Domain Spectroscopic Survey and the SDSS-V Black Hole Mapper as part of the wider Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS).

"Just as a rainbow spreads the sun's light into different wavelengths, colours, the SDSS spreads out the light from certain stars, galaxies, and quasars into what we call their spectra," Seaton said. "From those spectra, with practice, students learn to spot unusual quasars."

These detailed spectra from J2318 revealed the high-speed winds of this quasar in ultraviolet light. The study of black hole winds like this one is important for understanding how galaxies evolve. That is because these winds are how supermassive black holes exchange energy with their galactic homes. In particular, this energy could push away gas and dust that serves as the raw material for star formation, thus quenching star birth in galaxies.

"These extreme outflows carry incredible amounts of energy that can affect the galaxies around them. They serve as a sort of missing link: the elusive feedback between the active central region of a galaxy and the rest of the galaxy," Paola Rodríguez Hidalgo, associate professor at the University of Washington at Bothell, said in the statement. "While this process has been included in simulations of galaxy formation for decades, a lot more work needs to be done to understand it from observations and make sure the simulations handle it correctly."

The team and other astronomers will continue to hunt for high-speed black hole winds in ultraviolet radiation, but aren't confident they will find any as fast as the one from J2318."It won't be easy to find a faster ultraviolet outflow than that of J2318, but we are continuing this search from the nearby universe to the most distant reaches of the universe that we can see," Flores concluded.

The team's research was published on Thursday (June 4) in The Astrophysical Journal.

Galaxies don't grow forever. At some point, even the most prolific star-forming galaxies start to slow down, then stall, then settle into a long quiet retirement. Astronomers have known about this transition for a long time, but we haven't had a clean physical explanation for why it happens, and why it happens at the particular mass scale that it does.

A new paper led by Preetish Mishra of the Korea Institute for Advanced Study, along with an international team of scientists, makes a clear and testable proposal: that the slowdown in galaxy growth is caused by the birth of a stable cloud of hot gas surrounding the galaxy, and that cloud forms at a very specific mass: roughly 10^12.5 solar masses. Above that threshold, galaxies stop being efficient stellar factories, no matter how much raw material they have on hand.

The question is: what flips the switch?

To get to that calculation, the team used the Horizon Run 5 simulation, one of the largest cosmological simulations ever created. It takes a chunk of virtual universe roughly a gigaparsec across, models the full physics of gas, gravity, star formation, supernovas, and supermassive black holes from shortly after the Big Bang to the present day, and lets researchers track individual galaxies through their entire histories. Mishra and colleagues picked out roughly 20,000 of the most massive central galaxies and watched what happened to them over cosmic time.

The key quantity they tracked is the stellar-to-total mass ratio. It's a measure of how much of a galaxy’s entire mass budget (stars, gas, dark matter, black holes, everything) actually ends up locked into stars. Think of it as a galaxy's star-formation efficiency report.

The team found that this ratio peaks sharply in galaxies with total masses between about 10^12.4 and 10^12.7 solar masses. Below that range, galaxies are turning gas into stars roughly as fast as the gas comes in. Above it, they slow down by more than a factor of three. That peak is the critical mass.

Mishra's theory as to why galaxies stop growing is the formation of a hot gas halo that has reached gravitational equilibrium. As a galaxy grows, the gas falling into it gets shock-heated. Up to a certain mass, that gas cools quickly enough to keep raining down and feeding new star formation.

Past the critical mass, the halo gets dense and hot enough to hold itself up against gravity for billions of years. The gas can no longer cool fast enough to fall in and the galaxy is suddenly cut off from its fuel supply. It keeps gobbling up dark matter and dragging in satellite galaxies, but the cool gas that actually makes stars stops arriving.

The paper also rules out a competing explanation. One natural guess is that galaxies above the critical mass simply lose more of their normal matter to outflows from supernovas and active galactic nuclei. The team checked this directly by computing how much of each galaxy's baryon budget actually stayed bound to the system. The variation turned out to be no more than 30 percent. That isn't nothing, but it can't account for the factor-of-three drop in star formation efficiency. The decisive change is on the inflow side, not the outflow side.

A few caveats are worth flagging. Horizon Run 5 is a simulation, not a telescope, and its results depend on the sub-grid physics used to model star formation, supernovas, and black hole feedback. The authors did sensitivity tests and the basic result holds up, but the precise numerical value of the critical mass scale could shift as those prescriptions improve.

The analysis also restricts itself to galaxies above 10^10.8 solar masses to make sure each one has enough simulation particles to be reliably resolved. Smaller galaxies are a story for another simulation.

What makes this work satisfying is that it pins a famous observational pattern to a single, specific physical mechanism. Not just that galaxies above a certain mass quench, but that they quench because their hot gas halos become self-supporting. That is the kind of statement that can be checked against future surveys of galaxy clusters and the warm-hot intergalactic medium, the gas and dust between galaxies.

We will know whether they got the right answer once those surveys roll in.

When severe solar storms hurtle toward Earth, the planet's first line of defense is its magnetosphere, a vast magnetic bubble that deflects the brunt of the sun's dangerous charged particles. Historically, humanity has only attempted to forecast the storms and brace for impact.

Now, however, a team led by Brian Walsh of Boston University has proposed a bold method to actively strengthen that natural defense using a fleet of spacecraft designed to blunt the impact of space weather before it hits.

The concept, dubbed StormWall, uses computer simulations to show that reinforcing the magnetosphere could reduce the intensity of a major geomagnetic storm by more than half. If realized, the researchers say the system could protect vulnerable satellites, global communications networks, GPS systems and electrical grids from potentially catastrophic disruptions.

"People have always thought, 'space is huge, the sun is massive, we just have to sit here and take whatever it gives us,'" Walsh said in a statement. "But what we found is that we can impact it."

During particularly powerful solar eruptions, Earth's natural shield can be breached through a process called magnetic reconnection. When magnetic fields carried by the solar wind align perfectly with Earth's magnetic field, they temporarily link together. This opens a celestial pathway, allowing massive amounts of solar energy to pour into near-Earth space and trigger geomagnetic storms.

The StormWall concept is designed to interrupt this process. The system would deploy six spacecraft into geosynchronous orbit. Each satellite would carry stores of a "mass-loading material"— substances like barium, lithium, sodium, or calcium — that can be stored safely as a solid or liquid and vaporized on command.

If a dangerous solar storm is detected heading toward Earth, mission controllers would command the fleet to release the material. Sunlight would quickly ionize the vaporized particles, transforming them into a cloud of electrically charged plasma, the study notes.

This artificial plasma would drift toward the sun-facing edge of the magnetosphere, effectively thickening the boundary between Earth and the incoming solar wind. By adding mass to this critical frontier, the team found it could stall the efficiency of magnetic reconnection, forcing the harsh space weather to bounce around and past our planet.

"It's like people in a village who see a river flooding — maybe they can predict when that will happen, but probably what's even better is if they could build a storm wall," Walsh said in the statement. "That's what we're proposing here."

To test the viability of the concept, the researchers simulated the historic May 2024 geomagnetic storm, often called the Mother's Day storm. One model recreated the event under normal conditions, while a second simulated the storm with the StormWall plasma shield active.

The results showed that while StormWall would not eliminate a geomagnetic storm entirely, it could reduce its intensity by more than 50%, according to the study. By disrupting the flow of energy at the boundary of the magnetosphere, the artificial plasma would essentially force the space weather to bounce around and past our planet, the paper notes.

"When you apply some really serious physics to it, it does work," Walsh said in the statement. "And the amount of mass we need, the launch capacities — it's all within our capabilities."

To provide enough coverage, the fleet would collectively need to carry a payload equivalent to about a dozen oil trucks' worth of material, according to the statement. That would not be inexpensive, and costs would be further compounded by the fact that once the payload is fired out and photoionizes, the system would be dead and unable to be replenished — making it a "one-and-done" solution.

However, as private companies pour billions into orbital infrastructure and contemplate launching space-based data centers, Walsh and his team argues that the financial math could soon tip in favor of such a proactive defense.

The study also acknowledges that modifying an interconnected system requires careful evaluation of unintended consequences. The risk of long-term contamination using the StormWall approach is low, it adds, because the artificial plasma would leave the system "relatively quickly," getting swept away by the solar wind within roughly six hours rather than re-entering Earth's atmosphere.

And because the magnetosphere blankets the entire globe, StormWall would serve as a collective shield for the entire planet, the researchers say.

"If you built it, if it was deployed, it would help all people on the planet," Walsh said in the statement. "You couldn't make it in a way that helped only one country, one group of satellites."

Further details about the concept were published on June 2 in the in the journal Space Weather.

Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers have "weighed" a sleeping giant — a dormant supermassive black hole located a staggering 10 billion light-years away. That makes this black hole the most distant supermassive black hole scientists have ever measured the mass of.

The supermassive black hole is located at the heart of the galaxy MRG-M0138, which is seen as it was when the universe was just around 4 billion years old — and we now know, thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), that it weighs an incredible 6 billion times the mass of the sun.

Supermassive black holes can be very conspicuous when actively feeding and therefore surrounded by a wealth of matter in a region called an active galactic nuclei (AGN). Because of the black hole's immense gravitational forces, an AGN glows very brightly. However, because black holes are surrounded by a light-trapping boundary called an event horizon, dormant black holes with larders that aren't quite so well stocked are far more elusive. They're practically invisible. Still, even these black holes have gravitational influences that can impact more than the swirling platters of gas and dust — that influence can also affect the motion of stars orbiting the black holes. And those stars are indeed visible.

To detect and measure the mass of this supermassive black hole, the team behind this research used the JWST to track the motion of stars at the heart of MRG-M0138. This star-tracking trick has been used in the past to weigh dormant black holes much closer to Earth — for example, the 4.3-million-solar-mass supermassive black hole at the heart of our own galaxy, Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*). However, Sgr A* and its attendant stars are just 26,000 light-years away, and the most distant black hole this technique, called stellar dynamics, had been used to weigh was located just 700 million light-years away. At about 15 times that previous record-holding distance, this new research is the first time it has been successfully employed to measure the mass of such a distant sleeping giant.

"Determining how stars collectively move within the core of this distant galaxy has allowed us to measure the mass of its otherwise undetectable supermassive black hole," team leader and University College of London scientist Richard Ellis said in a statement. "By demonstrating the feasibility of such a technique for galaxies in the early universe, we can now undertake a more complete census of how black holes develop over time and infer their role in shaping galaxy evolution."

However, determining the motion of the stars at the heart of MRG-M0138 was anything but straightforward. It required a natural cosmic phenomenon known as gravitational lensing, which emerged from Albert Einstein's magnum opus theory of gravity, known as general relativity.

What is gravitational lensing?

General relativity predicts that objects with mass create an actual curvature in the fabric of spacetime, the four-dimensional unification of the three dimensions of space and the one dimension of time. Gravity emerges from this curvature, and because the larger the mass, the greater the curvature, the larger the mass of an object, the stronger its gravity.

Gravitational lensing occurs when a massive object such as a galaxy or a cluster of galaxies sits between a more distant foreground object and Earth. As light from a background source passes the curvature of space caused by the massive foreground object, or gravitational lens, its usually straight path becomes curved.

The closer to the gravitational lens light passes, the more its path is diverted, and that means that light from the same object reaches our telescopes at different times. This can magnify the object and, in extreme cases, can make the same object appear multiple times at different positions in the same image.

The gravitational lensing effect of a galaxy between MRG-M0138 and Earth refocused the light from that distant galaxy, magnifying it by 30 times, allowing Ellis and colleagues to intricately reconstruct the internal details of MRG-M0138.

"By combining JWST data with gravitational lensing, we could peer inside the black hole’s sphere of influence, where its gravity boosts the speeds of stars," Andrew Newman of Carnegie Science in Pasadena, California, said. "This is one of the best techniques we have to weigh a black hole, so we were excited to extend it to a much earlier period in cosmic history."

In addition to investigating this dormant black hole, the team also determined that MRG-M0138 itself is dormant, meaning it is no longer forming new stars. This is likely the result of the supermassive black hole undergoing a ravenous feeding frenzy earlier in its history when it would have appeared as a blazing quasar at the heart of an AGN. The energy released during this phase would have pushed gas and dust away from both the black hole, ending its feeding phase, and from MRG-M0138 itself. This would deplete the galaxy of the raw material for star formation, thus quenching its stellar birth rate.

This means that with these observations, and with more JWST dormant supermassive black hole data, scientists can better understand the relationship between galaxy growth and supermassive black hole growth, as well as the role these cosmic titans play in cutting off star formation in their host galaxies.

The team's research was published on Thursday (June 4) in Science.

French astronaut Sophie Adenot captured the view of a lifetime in a new image of Mount Vesuvius, as seen from aboard the International Space Station.

What is it?

Adenot, an astronaut with the European Space Agency, is currently part of SpaceX's Crew-12 mission aboard the International Space Station (ISS) alongside NASA astronauts Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway and cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev. The crew arrived in February and is slated to complete a six-month stay in space. The crew did take a brief detour from their regular duties, however, on June 5 — temporarily taking shelter in the Dragon capsule during a spacewalk meant to fix a concerning leak on the station.

And before this temporary sheltering, on Day 103 (orbit 1598) of their mission, Adenot captured a striking photograph of Mount Vesuvius from the space station and shared it on social media.

Why is it incredible?

"From orbit, volcanoes are some of the most beautiful natural sights… End of April, Etna caught me by surprise one morning as I opened the shutters. The whiteness of its slopes… and that elegant plume of smoke which is a gentle reminder that it’s only lightly, very lightly, asleep. I just had time to take a quick photo, but I kept an eye out for it the next day to capture a few more! A special thought for my fellow ESA astronaut Luca Parmitano, who is from Catania, at the foot of Etna," Adenot's post read, according to ESA.

"Less than a minute later, and we're flying over Vesuvius, instantly recognisable by the vast crater, the path winding up to the summit, and, most of all, Naples spread out all around it," she continued.