The posided magnetic fields of Uranus and Neptune may stem from extreme conditions lying within their deep interior. Unravelling the mystery behind the magnetic fields of these worlds is giving us new insight into the little-known interiors of the ice giants.

Only one spacecraft has ever visited Uranus and Neptune, the Voyager 2 spacecraft which spend past Uranus in January 1986 and Neptune in August 1989. Voyager 2 found that their planetary magnetic fields were, to put it bluntly, wonky. Uranus’ magnetic field was offset from its rotational axis by 59 degrees and isn’t even centered on the planet’s core, but instead is only two-thirds of the way down. Neptune is similar, with a disordered magnetic field offset by 47 degrees and centered halfway between the core and its visible cloud tops.

If we compare these planets to Earth, which has a stable magnetic field tilted by just 11 degrees to our planet’s rotation, we can see how extreme the magnetic fields of the ice giants are.

Various explanations for the strange magnetic fields of the ice giants have been put forward over the years. Uranus as a whole is tilted by 97 degrees and effectively rolls around the sun, and speculation is that billions of years ago it was knocked on its side by a collision with a long-lost Earth-sized planet. Could this collision have also skewed its magnetic field?

This might be a plausible explanation were Neptune’s magnetic field also not similarly skewed without having experienced a collision. Clearly, whatever the cause, it must be intrinsic to the nature of the two ice giant planets. Now, a new study by scientists in the U.S. and the UK, based on computer simulations and Voyager 2’s measurements of the two planets’ magnetic fields, may have found a solution.

The solution to the weird magnetic fields of the solar system's ice giants may come down to how planets generate their magnetic field through the dynamo effect. This arises from the swirling, convective motion of an electrically conducting liquid within a rotating body, which is able to generate and maintain a powerful magnetic field.

Inside Earth, the electrically conducting fluid is the molten iron in the outer part of our planet’s core, and the magnetic field that it generates has clear north and south poles – what we call a dipole, a phenomenon that we can also see in the two magnetic poles of a simple bar magnet.

However, the conditions inside Uranus and Neptune are somewhat different. As ice giants, they contain a lot of volatiles – ammonia, hydrogen, helium, methane, and water surrounding a probable rocky core. Furthermore, Uranus and Neptune are substantially larger than Earth, with 14.5 and 17 times the mass of our planet, respectively. This increased mass creates crushing conditions within the interior of the ice giants.

"Deep inside Uranus and Neptune, pressures and temperatures become extremely high," research team leader Chi Yan of the University of Texas at Austin, who led the new findings, said in a statement. "Under those conditions, which can cause water molecules to break apart into ions, the material may become increasingly electrically conductive with depth."

Given the increasing electrical conductivity and the compositions of the two planets, the computer simulations were able to replicate the bizarre magnetic fields of Uranus and Neptune. This showed how the magnetic-field structure co-evolves alongside changes in the fluid motion driven by convection and the temperature inside the planets.

It also seems that this co-evolution might not yet be over. The simulations indicate that the magnetic fields of both planets can change quite significantly in the space of just a few decades.

"Earth’s magnetic tilt drifts by only a degree or so over 50 years," said Yan. "Our models show the ice giants can behave very differently. In some stretches, the tilt swings by tens of degrees within decades. In others, it shifts only slightly over the same span."

NASA have prioritized a new mission to return to Uranus in the early 2040s, while the China National Space Administration’s Tianwen-4 mission launching to Jupiter in 2029 will deploy a small probe to carry onwards to Uranus via a gravitational slingshot. Until then, scientists are coming up with creative ways to not have to rely only on the 40-year-old Voyager 2 measurements of the magnetic fields.

For example, Tom Stallard of Northumbria University in the UK, who is a co-author with Yan on the new research paper, has been leading James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) observations of the faint infrared auroral lights on both Uranus and Neptune. Aurorae are generated when charged particles on the solar wind interact with a planet’s magnetic field, driving some of those charged particles into the atmosphere above the magnetic poles. (Neptune actually has a quadrupolar component, muddling its defined north and south magnetic poles.) As such, the location of aurorae is a good indicator of what’s going on with a planet’s magnetic field.

"We are busy working on what’s contained within these observations, but the shape and structure of the aurora, as well as other weird patterns in the ionosphere [upper atmosphere], promise to provide us with a way of understanding how the magnetic fields have changed, [which is] an important stepping stone," said Stallard.

The hope is that by combining JWST’s observations of the aurora with Voyager 2’s magnetic-field measurements and the results of the computer simulations, it will be possible to estimate the configuration of the magnetic fields on Uranus and Neptune today and see how they compare to the 1980s.

This would provide an experimental test to help show whether the new model describing the magnetic fields is on the right track, although we won’t know for sure until a new mission arrives in the ice giants’ backyard.

The findings were described on 3 November in the journal Communications Physics.

NASA's Curiosity Mars rover is sizing up its next dig site on the Red Planet.

The Curiosity team will characterize the surface composition of the Mars site, informally named "Nazca," as thoroughly as possible before drilling into it.

What is it?

Curiosity snapped the close-up image on Oct. 18, 2026, using its Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI). The image shows multiple roughly disk-shaped potential crystal formations at the rover's next drill target.

MAHLI is located on the turret at the end of the rover's robotic arm. It uses an onboard focusing process to make a composite of images of the same target acquired at different positions to focus on multiple features in a single image.

Why is it incredible?

Scientists theorize that the "discs and needles" texture takes its characteristic shape as crystals, or "crystal forms," grow.

The relatively large sizes of the crystal forms at "Nazca" may provide clues about the temperatures at which they grew, as well as information about the abundance of salts and fluids in the area at the time. Complicating this picture, however, is the fact that mineral crystals can be replaced by other minerals after their original crystallization. The new minerals are known as "pseudomorphs," because they have the same shape as the original minerals but not the same composition or molecular structure.

The Curiosity team will characterize the surface composition of Nazca — which shares its name with an ancient South American civilization that's famous for the large designs it etched into the rock and dirt — before drilling begins. The NASA researchers will then be able to compare the deeper composition to the surface-level composition.

Twin NASA spacecraft are wrapping up a year-long escapade, ready to make a beeline to the Red Planet.

The Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers (ESCAPADE) spacecraft launched in November 2025 on the second-ever flight of Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket. But rather than head straight to Mars, the two spacecraft dawdled through a looping trajectory. Now, they are back in Earth's neighborhood where they tackled a crucial engine burn unusually close to Earth that — if all goes well — will set them on track for Mars.

"No NASA mission has ever done this before," said Rob Lillis, a planetary and space physicist at the University of California, Berkeley and principal investigator of the ESCAPADE mission. "For most missions, it just isn't necessary."

That's because traditionally NASA's Mars missions have been carefully choreographed within cosmic launch constraints, leaving Earth during a brief window of planetary alignment that only occurs every 26 months. ESCAPADE was meant to launch in October 2024, when Earth and Mars were favorably aligned, but delays with the New Glenn rocket forced the mission to sit out the precious launch window.

Rather than wait to launch this fall, NASA decided to try something new. ESCAPADE mission planners designed a "loitering" orbit, shaped like a kidney bean. It called for the twin probes to loop through that trajectory to be back at Earth in early November 2026, ready to continue on to Mars.

Once they arrived, however, the twin probes faced a major hurdle: Each had to perfectly execute an engine burn within Earth's gravity well. The maneuver is similar to the slingshot flybys that spacecraft regularly conduct to adjust their trajectories — but here, the probes had to fire their engines to amp up the effect of the burn rather than acting alone.

The first spacecraft tackled the feat on Nov. 7; the second did so on Monday (Nov. 9). And according to NASA, the burns went perfectly. "This is the first time NASA has used a powered Earth flyby to propel a spacecraft toward Mars, and we've now executed this maneuver twice, flawlessly, in just two days," Asal Naseri, acting associate flight director for NASA's Heliophysics Division said in a statement.

After just a few minor course corrections, ESCAPADE will be sailing toward a September 2027 Mars arrival.

A scenic detour

The twin ESCAPADE spacecraft have made the most of their extended tour. Each spacecraft is about the size of two refrigerators and equipped with three scientific instruments and a couple cameras. All are tailored for studying the strange magnetic field of Mars, which is created both globally by charged particles from the sun interacting with the atmosphere and locally by areas of highly magnetic crust.

Earth's magnetic field is much stronger and generated by the planet's core. But it too is affected by the solar wind, as scientists call the constant stream of charged particles flowing off the sun and across space. On the side of Earth opposite the sun, the solar wind stretches the magnetic field to form an elongated tail structure, like a terrestrial windsock.

A range of missions have studied this magnetotail at various points up to nearly 800,000 miles (1.27 million kilometers) away from Earth, but beyond that, it has been a mystery. Conveniently, the two ESCAPADE spacecraft traveled through the structure over the course of about 10 days early last year at a much greater distance from Earth — some 1.19 million miles (1.91 million km) away.

"We were able to capture the magnetic field structure of that distant tail, how it flaps, how it moves, how the plasma flows within it," Lillis said, gathering data that he called "unprecedented." "And not only that but for the first time, we were able to do that with two spacecraft simultaneously."

A second shot at the magnetotail came over the summer, when the spacecraft were much closer to Earth but the moon was also passing through the magnetic structure. The two ESCAPADE spacecraft were able to partner with twin ARTEMIS-THEMIS spacecraft at the moon to observe the structure from four different perspectives simultaneously.

That's a huge boon when trying to study the magnetotail and its intricate and ever-changing magnetic field lines and plasma, Lillis said. "These are generally not things you can measure remotely," he said. "You kind of have to be there."

Ever since NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) started observing the early universe, it has been providing almost as many surprises as it has answers. One such surprise are the so-called Little Red Dots, cosmic objects that seemingly disappear completely before the universe is two billion years old.

New research suggests that Little Red Dots may actually be connected primordial black holes, tiny black holes born not from dying stars but rather from fluctuations in the density of matter just after the Big Bang, in the earliest moments of cosmic history. Should they exist, primordial black holes would predate stars, galactic dust particles, and elements heavier than hydrogen and helium.

Now, researchers have used JWST data to test whether one particular Little Red Dot, known as blackAbell 2744-QSO1 (QSO1), could host a primordial black hole.

"A black hole is an object born from the gravitational death of a star. Primordial black holes are a very different story," study team member Valerio De Luca, of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Johns Hopkins University (JHU) in Maryland, said in a statement.

"They come from the physics of the early universe that predates the first stars, when the universe was expanding exponentially in time and space. So the mechanisms for creating primordial black holes are different," De Luca added.

Little Red Dots could be the smoking gun of primordial black holes

Though scientists have theorized about the existence of primordial black holes since they were first proposed by Stephen Hawking in the 1970s, no hard evidence has presented itself. One of the issues scientists have puzzled over is how to tell the difference between a primordial black hole and a "traditional" or astrophysical black hole formed from the supernova death and collapse of a massive star.

"Little Red Dots could surround astrophysical black holes, and most probably many of them do, but they could also be primordial black holes, if primordial black holes exist," De Luca said. "So the question becomes, Which ones are primordial and how can we tell?"

De Luca and colleagues turned their attention to QS01, located around 13.1 billion light-years from Earth, which is seen as it was just 700 million years after the Big Bang. What makes this Little Red Dot stand out is the fact that it is almost entirely composed of hydrogen and helium. Because these were the universe's first elements, it could be more unspoiled and primordial than other Little Red Dots.

The team modeled how a Little Red Dot like QS01 could form from a primordial black hole. That was necessary because the circumstances under which this could happen would have to be very specific.

"There are constraints on primordial black holes from cosmological observations," said team member Loris Del Grosso, also of JHU's Department of Physics and Astronomy. "There can only be so many primordial black holes in the universe, for example, and there cannot be too many of them in a given cluster."

Considering three possible scenarios, the team found that the most likely situation is a smaller primordial black hole consuming surrounding gas and energy until it grew to be the size of QSO1.

"The door was open on this theory — that Little Red Dots could be primordial black holes," Del Grosso said. "We've now cracked it open a little farther by showing some scenarios are more likely than others."

Del Grosso and crew now intend to look at the other 100 or so Little Red Dots seen by the JWST to determine how many of them could have started life as primordial black holes.

Then scientists may finally have the evidence to say these long-theorized ancient black holes actually existed.

"We don't have a clear understanding of what happens in the early universe right after the Big Bang," De Luca concluded. "If primordial black holes do exist, then something had to happen to make them in the first place, which would be a groundbreaking discovery in physics."

The team's findings were published in June in the journal Physical Review Letters.

Sometimes science can seem really counter-intuitive. For example, occasionally in astronomy, you can see more with less light. Case in point: the emergence of a giant planet in observations made by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), when astronomers found a way to block out light from the planet's parent star.

The extrasolar planet, or exoplanet, in question is 51 Eridani b (51 ERI b), a gas giant with the same mass as around 11 Jupiters that orbits a star located around 97 light-years away. 51 ERI b was discovered back in 2015 by ground-based telescopes, but the planet was missing from observations of the system made by the JWST. That wasn't a failing of the JWST itself; no one is doubting the observing capabilities of the most powerful telescope humanity has ever hoisted into orbit around Earth. Instead, it was a result of starlight from the star 51 ERI A obscuring this intimidatingly massive world.

The brightest planets are 100,000 times fainter than their host stars, meaning spotting them is like observing a firefly hovering around a lighthouse. Even using a tool called a coronagraph to block the star isn't enough to reveal the planet, as that doesn't stop all the starlight.

The only solution to this glaring problem is a computer program to wipe out the starlight.

"For the past 20 years, astronomers have tackled this problem by observing a different star and using its image as a reference," Jason Wang of Northwestern University explained in a statement. "Then, they subtract that reference image from the original observation to remove the unwanted glare to reveal faint planets that otherwise might be hidden."

There is a problem with this process, however. Even the most stable telescopes "wobble." For instance, the JWST requires cryocoolers to keep its NIRCam instrument super cold, and those coolers have little motors that can cause the mirrors to vibrate. This movement, however slight, causes a scatter in starlight.

The result is enough glare remaining to obscure a planet, but Wang and colleagues developed a new approach to this problem.

Telescopes their more stable digital twins

The new approach taken by the team is dubbed Physics-based Learning for Imaging Planets (FLIP), and it involves creating a digital "twin" of a telescope. Essentially a virtual replica that simulates how starlight travels through the telescope's mirrors and reaches its detectors.

This twin is then fine-tuned to account for millions of tiny imperfections in the original telescope. The digital twin is then tweaked until it aligns with observations from the actual telescope. Astronomers can then remove the simulated glare from the original image.

To assess the validity of the technique, the researchers took a second look at JWST observations of two star systems with known exoplanets, HIP 65426 and 51 Eridani, and one system, TYC 5899, with no known planets.

The researchers found that, in terms of detecting faint exoplanets, FLIP outperformed conventional image-processing techniques two to 15 times. This led to ERI b emerging from data collected by the JWST two years ago.

"We showed that we can actually recover a planet that people previously couldn't see," Wang said. "This is real data in a real scenario. It was science left on the table because we didn’t have the right tools to analyze the data in the most optimal way."

The team hopes that FLIP can now be adopted by other astronomers in a bid to recover hitherto undiscovered exoplanets that have been hidden by the glare of their stars.

This could be a major boon for NASA's proposed Habitable Worlds Observatory, which aims to directly photograph Earth-like planets orbiting distant sun-like stars.

"We know of no planets around other stars that are like those in our own solar system," team leader Rodrigo Ferrer-Chavez of Northwestern University said. "It's not that they don’t exist. It's that we cannot see them.

"Every time we improve our techniques, we discover new types of planets. By finding more planets, we can better understand how planetary systems form and evolve, and ultimately how typical our own solar system truly is."

The team's research was published on Wednesday (Nov. 4) in the journal Nature.

A rose-colored rock discovered in the Sahara Desert may hold some clues to Mars' ancient geological history.

The meteorite, named Teghaza 001 after the salt plain in Mali where it was discovered in 2022, weighs roughly 1.8 pounds (800 grams) and formed more than 4.1 billion years ago. Blasted off Mars by an impact before eventually landing on Earth, it is one of the three oldest Martian meteorites ever found.

The extraordinary age and unusual mineral composition of Teghaza 001 offer a rare glimpse into the formation of Mars' early crust and how volcanic materials may have been altered by water, according to a statement from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.

"It was only after we started looking closely that we realized this meteorite is really unique,” research leader Yang Liu of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California said in the statement. "One of the paper’s reviewers called it a Rosetta Stone for Mars."

A Rosetta Stone for Mars

Unlike many Martian meteorites, Teghaza 001 contains a distinctive combination of igneous minerals and textures that preserve evidence of its complex history. Its mineral composition resembles materials observed in Mars' southern highlands by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

Although researchers can’t pinpoint exactly where the meteorite originated on Mars, they have identified 13 potential locations on the planet where it may have formed.

"This is really our first piece of Martian crust from a part of Mars we’ve never had a sample of before," team member Lee Saper, NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, said. "It records interactions of water and rock and maybe even an imprint of the Martian atmosphere as it was losing water."

The meteorite was initially identified as Martian based on its oxygen isotopes. To determine its age, scientists then examined tiny zircon crystals embedded in the rock. Using a specialized rubidium-strontium dating technique, researchers analyzed individual mineral grains on its surface, preserving it for future analysis.

The results revealed that Teghaza 001 was altered by water around 4.1 billion years ago, suggesting the rock itself formed even earlier. The mineral and chemical evidence points to a dynamic water cycle on ancient Mars, when liquid water interacted with the planet's crust and potentially left traces of its atmosphere as it gradually lost water.

Scientists believe further analysis of Teghaza 001 could reveal more about how water shaped the Martian surface and influenced the planet's evolution. The study also marks the first time researchers have used rubidium-strontium dating to analyze an ancient Martian meteorite, opening the door for the technique to be applied to other samples in the future.

"We've only scratched the surface," Liu concluded.

Their findings were published on Thursday (Oct. 29) in the journal Science. A separate study examining the meteorite's water content was published on June 10 in the journal Science Advances, offering additional insight into early Mars.

Earth has caught itself a new mini-moon, and it is sticking around for Christmas.

The space rock, designated 2026 QQ8, was first observed in August 2026 after entering orbit around Earth in April 2026. The discovery was reported by the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center on Thursday (Oct. 29).

The stay of QQ8 is a temporary one. The mini-moon will remain in the thrall of Earth's gravity through December before breaking away in 2027.

Scientists have recreated the orbital path of QQ8, finding that it takes 359 days, or about 0.98 of an Earth year, to orbit the sun. QQ8 closely approaches Earth around once every ten years, but this time the object came so close that Earth has been able to gravitationally seize it.

According to the Minor Planet Center, the closest QQ8 will come to our planet during this stay is around 353,000 miles (568,000 kilometers). That is around 110,000 miles (177,000 km) further out than the average distance between Earth and the moon.

Even if QQ8 were to come close enough to collide with Earth, it would likely be completely destroyed in our planet's atmosphere before it reaches the surface, as it is only around 6 feet (2 meters) in diameter.

This is far from the first time Earth has snagged itself a mini-moon, more accurately called a temporary satellite. In fact, research last year suggested that our planet could be orbited by as many as six mini-moons at any given time, with many of these being fragments of our more permanent natural satellite, the moon.

While QQ8 is tiny, it is larger than the average mini-moon. That is according to modelling earlier this year that suggested the average size for a temporary satellite is 75 centimeters (30 inches) across.

The same modelling suggested the average stay for such an object would be around nine months.

So if QQ8 was captured in April 2026, that means it should move away in January 2027.

The researchers behind those findings suggested that, were Earth to gravitationally grip a space rock around 10 feet (3 meters) wide, it could serve as a mini-moon for 10 to 20 years.

China has given us some details about the epic moon landing it plans to pull off a few years from now.

Chinese officials laid out the roadmap for its crewed lunar campaign at the 7th Manned Space Symposium, which was held Oct. 31 and Nov. 1 in Beijing. The campaign consists of four missions, culminating in a crewed touchdown "before 2030," according to media reports.

That timeline — which is consistent with previous statements made by the China Manned Space Agency — keeps the pressure on the U.S., which aims to put its own astronauts down on the moon in 2028, via NASA's Artemis program.

China shooting for the moon

The first mission in China's four-part lunar campaign is scheduled to fly in 2027, according to CNSpaceflight, an X account that keeps a close eye on China's activities in space. The outlet cited an X user who shared a presentation slide of the plan.

That launch — the first of of China's new Long March 10A rocket — will send an uncrewed Mengzhou spacecraft to low Earth orbit (LEO) for a series of tests. Mengzhou, whose name means "Dream Vessel," is the next-gen crew capsule that will carry Chinese astronauts to lunar orbit.

Mission number two, launching in 2028, will involve a different set of hardware — the more powerful Long March 10 rocket and the Lanyue ("Embracing the Moon") lunar lander. This will also be an uncrewed flight, and it will mark the debut of the Long March 10, which will send Lanyue to orbit around the moon. If all goes to plan, Lanyue will touch down on the moon and then launch itself back to lunar orbit.

Mission number three, flying in 2029, will also target an uncrewed lunar landing, but it will feature two Long March 10 launches — one apiece for Mengzhou and Lanyue. The two spacecraft will conduct a rendezvous and docking rehearsal in lunar orbit, then separate for Lanyue's trip down to the surface.

This will set the stage for mission four — the real deal, in which two Long March 10s launch a crewed Mengzhou and an uncrewed Lanyue "before 2030." The two vessels will dock in lunar orbit, and the astronauts will move into Lanyue for their historic lunar landing.

Three astronauts will apparently launch on Mengzhou, and two of them will land on the moon aboard Lanyue, according to CNSpaceflight. The duo will spend three days on the lunar surface, conducting moonwalks on each of those days.

And about that "before 2030" timeline: The wording may have been chosen very carefully.

"One reading is that 2029 coincides with the 80th anniversary of the current government, creating a strong internal incentive to achieve the landing that year. At the same time, the technical schedule (new Long March 10 family, Mengzhou, Lanyue, dual-launch operations) remains aggressive; committing publicly to 2029 would create significant political exposure if any major test slips," CNSpaceflight wrote in a Nov. 2 X post.

"Using 'before 2030' therefore functions as deliberate wording flexibility: a 2029 landing can still be presented as an early historic success, while a slip into 2030 remains inside the stated goal without requiring a formal target revision. You just need to put 'year-end' after 'before 2030,'" the outlet added.

NASA's plan

NASA's Artemis program has already sent astronauts around the moon, doing so this past April on the Artemis II mission. The agency is currently gearing up for Artemis III, a crewed flight to LEO that will test rendezvous and docking procedures between NASA's Orion capsule and one or both of the Artemis program's two private crewed landers — SpaceX's Starship and Blue Origin's Blue Moon.

Artemis III is currently on track to fly in the summer of 2027, NASA officials have said. But an on-time liftoff is far from guaranteed, as both Starship and Blue Moon still have some boxes to check.

Starship just reached Earth orbit for the first time on Sept. 28, for example, and it has yet to demonstrate off-Earth refueling, which will be a crucial part of any Starship mission beyond Earth orbit. And Blue Moon has yet to leave the ground at all. The Blue Origin lander is scheduled to fly for the first time next spring, on an uncrewed test mission that will send it to the lunar surface.

If all goes well on Artemis III, NASA will be clear to start prepping for Artemis IV, which will put astronauts down near the lunar south pole aboard either Starship or Blue Moon. (It's unclear at the moment which lander NASA will choose.)

NASA is currently targeting early 2028 for the launch of Artemis IV. If that schedule holds, the agency will beat China and pull off the first crewed lunar landing since Apollo 17 back in 1972.

But the new moon race won't end there, because this one isn't all about flags and footprints. Both NASA and China aim to build bases on the lunar surface over the next decade or so, setting up humanity's first true outpost on a world beyond Earth. The stakes are high, NASA and U.S. military officials have stressed: Whoever does so first can claim the best spots and get the best access to key lunar resources such as water ice. The leader will also get to establish norms of behavior on the moon, which at the moment is a bit of a Wild West of exploration.

Scientists have long suspected that Mars is geologically "dead," but new spacecraft observations suggest the Red Planet's volcanoes are merely sleeping.

That means that Olympus Mons, the extinct Martian volcano that at around 16 miles (26 kilometers) above the surrounding Martian plains is the largest mountain in the solar system, may in fact be a slumbering giant.

The observations were made with the European Space Agency (ESA) mission ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) as it studied volcanic fissures along the Alba Mons region of the Red Planet. Alba Mons is in the Tharsis region of Mars, the same area that is home to Olympus Mons. While the latter is the tallest volcano in the solar system, at 374 miles (600 km) across, about the size of Arizona, the Alba Mons region is the largest volcano when considering surface area.

TGO detected gas containing hydrogen chloride making its way to the surface of Mars through the Alba Mons fissures. The same gas is commonly found escaping from magmatic vents on Earth, with the compound coming from hot magma beneath the surface. Detecting it on Mars is a sign of dormant Martian volcanism.

Orbital imagery had previously shown some volcanoes appear to have been active within the last few million years, and seismometers have detected the rumbling of "marsquakes," both implying the Red Planet is volcanically active. However, eruptions and lava flows have been conspicuous by their absence.

"Our findings suggest that Mars has retained enough internal heat to support volcanic activity until recently, and possibly still does," team co-leader and scientist at the Space Research Centre of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Daniel Mège, said in a statement sent to Space.com via email. "The TGO was able to find the smoking gun. It was like looking for a needle in a haystack."

Evidence of dormant Martian volcanism is rising

Mège and colleagues were first alerted to something strange happening on Mars when they noticed spikes of hydrogen chloride during Martian summer and on the northern hemisphere of the Red Planet. That is both a time and place at which hydrogen chloride shouldn't be detected.

The gas usually peaks in the northern hemisphere during winter on Mars, disappearing in the summer. This variation is connected to the water and dust cycle on Mars. An exception to the rule occurs over volcanic fissures on the flanks of the Alba Mons volcano, in early summer.

The TGO followed up on this by detecting fresh and narrow fissures, in some cases hundreds of feet long, in the Alba Mons region. A clear sign of volcanism.

"It's truly amazing that it spotted a handful of molecules from a perhaps intermittent source, whilst moving continuously along its orbit to monitor the whole Martian atmosphere," Mège said.

The team thinks that these gases have been rising from the interior of Mars during the Martian winter, becoming blocked by ice. When this ice sublimates, changes directly from solid to gas, during summer, the gas is released, prompting spikes in hydrogen chloride seen by the TGO.

"Looking at the spatial distribution of the seeping, it became instantly obvious to me that there was something volcanic behind it, but it had to be demonstrated," said Mège. "A huge part of the work consisted of examining all the possible chemical processes going on in the Martian atmosphere.

"We needed to be rigorous, critical and creative to explain the presence of hydrogen chloride. The data were complex, but also excellent brain food."

Implications for life on Mars?

Mège and colleagues theorize that the gas is connected to "volcanic plumbing" in the form of a dormant magma chamber under the surface of Mars.

Regions like this could become hotspots (pun not intended) in the search for life on Mars. That is because magmatic gases like hydrogen chloride would have been more abundant in the past, creating a thicker Martian atmosphere and warmer climate.

Not only would this have led to liquid water covering much of the Martian surface, but when lava bubbled through the Martian crust and met groundwater, warm habitable niches ideal for microbial life could have been forged.

"Looking for Martian life in the seeping fissures of the Alba Mons region would make a lot of sense. If hydrothermal systems are active, they could contain the ingredients and energy needed for microorganisms to develop, and shield microorganisms from the hostile and changing environment above the surface," Mège concluded.

The team's research was published in the journal Science Advances on Wednesday (Nov. 4).

NASA is reviving discussions to rescue the Hubble Space Telescope, which is operating well but is on track to reenter Earth's atmosphere about six years from now.

The agency issued a request for information (RFI) on Oct. 29 for "in-space servicing" capabilities, which could include boosting Hubble's orbit (which is naturally degrading due to atmospheric drag), or even a mission to "enhance its capabilities" in some way.

Hubble, which launched in April 1990 in partnership with the European Space Agency, was serviced five times by astronauts on space shuttle missions, the most recent being in 2009. The observatory's groundbreaking achievements include helping to show that the expansion of the universe is accelerating — a discovery that won the Nobel Prize — as well as a swath of finds about planets, galaxies, stars and other parts of the universe.

Hubble also regularly teams up with other telescopes for science work, and its observations have led to the publication of at least 23,000 scientific papers, NASA figures suggest. And, despite its age, Hubble remains in high demand. "Astronomers request about seven times as much observing time as is available each year," the agency stated in September.

Hubble is also widely appreciated by the public. People have long enjoyed and celebrated its iconic images, such as the Eagle Nebula's "Pillars of Creation," a gorgeous shot that has been revisited several times over the decades. As such, this is not the first time in recent years that discussions have opened about keeping the famed observatory running for a while longer.

In 2022, for example, billionaire tech entrepreneur Jared Isaacman proposed using SpaceX hardware to mount a Hubble-servicing mission. (Isaacman also purchased and commanded two crewed SpaceX missions to Earth orbit, which flew in September 2021 and September 2024.) NASA declined, however, citing possible risks to the healthy observatory.

But things have changed, apparently. Isaacman, who in December 2025 became NASA administrator, said in an Oct. 30 agency statement that Hubble's science return means the agency should "be looking at every reasonable opportunity to keep it delivering for as long as possible" — especially if doing so would be a cost savings compared with launching another mission.

In an Oct. 30 post on X, Isaacman added that it's "still worth exploring the options" and noted that NASA had previously considered "a far lower-cost solution" to keep the observatory flying. "That was then. Still worth the effort — Hubble deserves it," he added.

The new RFI also allows for alternative scenarios, however, which could include a "safe, controlled reentry into Earth's atmosphere or orbital disposal at the end of Hubble's mission."

Hubble will naturally enter the atmosphere in 2033 or 2034 due to orbital drag, so any attempt to service it would have to be in 2032, the agency stated.

Earlier this year, NASA worked with Katalyst Space Technologies on a $30 million mission that aimed to boost the orbit of the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, which is also falling back to Earth due to orbital drag.

That long-shot rescue mission — which was developed quickly to race against accelerated solar activity, which ballooned Earth's atmosphere and increased drag — launched successfully this summer. But control issues prevented Katalyst's LINK spacecraft from meeting up with Swift. Swift is expected to reenter Earth's atmosphere tomorrow (Nov. 4) after 22 years of operations — far past its two-year design lifetime.

New research suggests that collisions between stars in the early universe were common, which could help explain the rapid growth of supermassive black holes and the existence of strange Little Red Dots seen by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

The team behind this research performed simulations of the early universe and found stellar systems were densely packed, leading to stars frequently slamming into each other. While rapid collisions would have destroyed the stars involved, slower collisions would have led to repeated mergers, creating single over-massive stars, which could collapse and form larger-than-usual black holes at the end of their lives. These could be the seeds of the first supermassive black holes.

Dense stellar environments do still exist in the modern universe at the hearts of galaxies; however, these aren't conducive to the types of collisions that would birth ultra-massive stars. That is because there are already supermassive black holes at the hearts of modern galaxies, and their immense gravitational influence speeds up orbiting stars, meaning collisions that do occur are high-speed and destructive, thus failing to birth overmassive stars.

"Perhaps the strangest outcome of our simulations is that stars can merge repeatedly within the cluster until they form one gigantic star with a mass equal to that of an entire cluster," team member Claire Williams, of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), said in a statement. "When a star this huge reaches the end of its life, models suggest that it may have no option but to collapse into itself and form a massive black hole."

My, haven't you grown? How did supermassive black holes get so big so fast?

The existence of supermassive black holes before the universe was even 1 billion years old is something that has puzzled astronomers since the JWST started spotting them in 2022.

This is because black holes should need at least 1 billion years to complete the feeding and merger processes that result in a "supermassive" status of possessing millions or billions of times the mass of the sun.

One suggestion put forward by scientists to explain this is that supermassive black holes don't start out from scratch. Instead, they form from black hole seeds called intermediate-mass black holes.

Normally, when a massive star collapses, it births a stellar-mass black hole possessing a mass between 10 and 100 times the mass of the sun. This is considerably smaller than supermassive black holes that dominate the hearts of all modern galaxies with masses millions to billions of times the mass of our star.

Intermediate-mass black holes are thought to sit between these two families of cosmic titans with masses between 100 and 100,000 times that of the sun. The problem is, no single star should have enough mass to collapse and create an intermediate-mass black hole. But that is valid only for the conditions we see in the "modern" 13.8-billion-year-old universe in our immediate cosmic vicinity. Conditions were very different further out into the universe and further back in time.

Indeed, such seeds emerged from these new simulations in environments of dense star clustering, which could solve this mystery by allowing those growth processes to get a head start.

"Dense star clusters provide a natural birthplace for massive black-hole seeds in our model," Williams said. "The same environment that forms the black hole can also provide stars and gas that influence its subsequent growth."

However, this could be a two-for-one deal. The JWST has also been routinely discovering astronomical bodies called Little Red Dots in the early universe. Little Red Dots are curious because they seem to have completely disappeared by the time the cosmos reached 2 billion years old.

Little Red Dots the cosmic elephant in the room

Little Red Dots are extremely compact objects in the early universe that get their moniker from the fact that they look like red dots.

"Little Red Dots are a hot topic in astronomy. You can compare studies of people trying to understand Little Red Dots to the tale of blind people who are trying to describe an elephant by touching it, and each person describes it differently based on what part they’re touching," team member and UCLA researcher Smadar Naoz said. "Our research connects several of those perspectives together and may help us see more of the elephant."

There have been many suggestions about the true nature of these objects, but one theory suggests that they possess a rapidly growing black hole at their hearts.

The team's simulations suggest that Little Red Dots may be dense star clusters that are constantly being rocked by repeated stellar collisions. This results in a very large star, which eventually collapses to become an intermediate-mass black hole.

But if that is the case, why were there no Little Red Dots around to celebrate the 2 billionth birthday of the universe?

Less than 1 billion years after the Big Bang, the universe was devoid of well-ordered spiral galaxies, but was instead filled with dense and chaotic clusters of star birth. As these regions were rocked with frequent star collisions, the conditions were right for ultra-massive stars to form and collapse into intermediate-mass black holes.

However, as the universe cooled and expanded, these sites became the building blocks of far less chaotic galaxies. Thus, if Little Red Dots are chaotic star clusters needed to form intermediate-mass black holes, progress toward an equilibrium state could explain why they suddenly disappeared from the universe. The cosmos just wasn't extreme enough to maintain Little Red Dots anymore.

The team's research was published on Monday (Oct. 26) in the Astrophysical Journal.

Using the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have investigated a cosmic cat's tail, finding it likely formed after two Pluto-sized bodies smashed together.

The feature, nicknamed the Cat's Tail, extends out from the debris disk known as Beta Pictoris which is located in a planetary system located 63 light-years away. This tail would put that of the average tabby to shame: It's so long that it could curl around the sun-Earth system about 500 times. That's about as long as 200 trillion house cats.

The major difference between our solar system and the planetary system that hosts the Cat's Tail is the latter's relative youth. While our solar system is around 4.6 billion years old, Beta Pictoris is a cosmic kitten no more than a few million years old. That means it is still host to collisions between planetary bodies similar to the ones that rocked the solar system during its infancy.

The team behind this research gained new insights into the Cat's Tail using 14 years of observations. This allowed them to solve the long-standing mystery of the violent conditions under which it formed.

"The Cat's Tail is thought to be the aftermath of a collision between large bodies — think something like Pluto," team leader Arin Avsar of the University of Arizona said in a statement. "Oddly, this feature had previously only been seen with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which detects infrared light, but remained invisible at shorter wavelengths, which has puzzled the community for a while."

Cosmic cat tail is also pleasingly fluffy

Comparing Beta Pictoris and our solar system, one thing rapidly becomes apparent: our cosmic neighborhood is relatively well-ordered. The planets orbit the sun with most space rocks neatly delegated into bands: the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, and the Kuiper belt out beyond the orbit of Neptune.

However, this is a stark contrast to the solar system's violent and chaotic youth. Back then, the solar system was host to an infant star surrounded by a swirling disk of gas and dust in which collisions between bodies called planetesimals — the building blocks of planets — were commonplace.

Astronomers can't look back to the solar system's infancy, so to learn more about how our cosmic backyard took shape, they study nearby young planetary systems. Systems like Beta Pictoris. That doesn't mean it has been quick to divulge its secrets, though.

"We think the Cat's Tail has eluded our observations in visible light until now because of what it's made of," Avsar explained. "It consists almost entirely of what we call organic refractory material, which is heavily carbon-based. These long chains of carbon atoms absorb visible light, so they're quite black."

This new study revealed that the feline feature is cat-like in more ways than just its shape. It's also pleasingly fluffy, Hubble observations suggest. That's because the grains that compose it are extremely porous.

"How you can get dust grains that small that are as porous as we see here no one really understands, and that's part of why we study this feature," Avsar said.

"It's possible that the velocities involved in the collisions were so high that the carbon grains vaporized, turned into gas, and then recondensed as they cooled, and that's how they became so porous," team member Kevin Wagner of the U of A said.

The scientists also discovered a hitherto undiscovered feature in the Cat's Tail — a warp that seems to be the result of an interaction between the trail of material and one of the planets in the system, Beta Pictoris b, a gas giant planet 10 times more massive than Jupiter.

"This gives us another line of evidence into how giant planets influence comets through their immense gravitational force," Avsar said. "It's a testament to how much these massive planets really influence their surrounding dust and icy bodies out to hundreds of astronomical units [one astronomical unit being the distance between Earth and the sun]."

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

Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), scientists have found that the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS was built from tiny grains of ice mixed with dust that are quite different from the solar system’s comets.

These ice grains do, however, bear striking similarities to some icy bodies located at the edge of the solar system, beyond the orbit of Neptune, so-called trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs).

3I/ATLAS was discovered entering the solar system in the summer of 2025. It was only the third object found entering the solar system from farther afield in the Milky Way after 1I/'Oumuamua, seen in 2017, and 2I/Borisov, detected in 2019. This meant the interstellar comet offered a rare chance to glimpse the conditions under which such bodies form in other star systems. Thus, the JWST was quickly on the trail of 3I/ATLAS.

"We designed [JWST] to be ready the moment an active interstellar comet was found and to follow it over time," Martin Cordiner of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and the Catholic University of America said in a statement.

Cordiner leads the JWST program to study objects such as 3I/ATLAS, and he is a co-author on a new research paper describing some of the findings.

The unclear origins of 3I/ATLAS

Researchers know that 3I/ATLAS wasn't born in the solar system, but nobody knows around which star 3I/ATLAS formed. What scientists are more sure of is the fact that this interstellar comet was produced within a planet-forming disk of gas and dust around a young star, possibly as long ago as 10 to 12 billion years. That's over twice the age of our solar system. It was then ejected from its home system somehow and left to wander interstellar space before encountering our solar system.

Like the familiar comets in our solar system, 3I/ATLAS is composed of grains of ice less than a micron – a millionth of a meter – in size. When the surface of the comet is warmed by the sun, gas erupts outwards, carrying ice grains into the cloud of ice and dust surrounding the comet, its coma, and its tail, where JWST can detect them.

When viewed spectroscopically, the water-ice in comets native to our solar system creates a strong absorption line in a comet’s spectrum at a wavelength of three microns, as well as less-prominent absorption lines at 1.5 and two microns.

Yet when the JWST’s Near-Infrared spectrograph (NIRSpec) instrument viewed 3I/ATLAS three times between August 2025, before its closest approach to the sun, and after closest approach in April 2026, scientists found the 1.5- and two micron absorption lines were missing, though the three-micron line remained strong.

"That combination was a puzzle," research lead author Silvia Protopapa of the South-west Research Institute said. "The strong three-micron band points to water-ice in the coma, but the weak or absent shorter-wavelength bands suggest the ice is not in the form we usually see in solar system comets."

The JWST's muddy 3I/ATLAS findings

Whenever presented with an unusual observational signature such the JWST delievered for 3I/ATLAS researchers turn to modeling to find the physical characteristics that best fit the spectrum.

The modeling suggested to Protopapa’s team that 3I/ATLAS was composed of sub-micron grains of dirty water-ice, rich in dust. In comparison, the grains from the solar system’s indigenous comets are much cleaner, with almost pure water-ice relatively uncontaminated by dust.

"What seems to set [3I/ATLAS’ grains] apart is how much dust is mixed into the ice," said Protopapa. "Those grains hold clues to the conditions where the comet was born."

Comets are made of primordial material found in the planet-forming disk of gas and dust that surrounds a young star, and therefore the composition of comets can provide a window into the conditions in which planets form.

Whereas solar system comets tell us about the birth of Earth, an interstellar comet can tell us about conditions in which planets formed around another star, and how similar or dissimilar those conditions were to the birth of the solar system.

Yet comets are not the only icy remnants that date back to such primordial times. There are various families of bodies in the outer solar system, and 3I/ATLAS’ spectrum bears a resemblance to the spectrum of some medium-sized TNOs that are rich in carbon-dioxide ice and organic compounds (organic meaning containing carbon atoms). Indeed, in a separate 2025 study led by Cordiner, the JWST found 3I/ATLAS to have one of the greatest abundances of carbon dioxide ever seen in a comet.

TNOs are sizable bodies that are located far beyond the orbit of Neptune, The TNOs in question would have formed in a different part of the Sun’s protoplanetary disk than most comets and their composition reflects that.

On the other hand, the results imply that 3I/ATLAS was formed around its star of origin from similar icy material to that which produced some of the TNOs in our solar system, showing that the building blocks of planets around other stars share a common range of properties with the building blocks that formed our solar system. Indeed, 3I/ATLAS could even be a fragment of a TNO-like body that was shattered in a collision.

"At first glance, 3I/ATLAS looks different from the icy comets we know," said Protopapa. "But when we placed it alongside distant icy worlds in our own solar system, it no longer looked out of place.

"This suggests that the icy building block of planets, here and around other stars, may share ice in the form of tiny, micron-scale grains, ranging from relatively pure ice to ice mixed with dust, with 3I/ATLAS toward the dusty end."

What this tells us is that these sub-micron-sized icy grains must form first in planet-forming disks, to then be incorporated into large bodies such as comets and protoplanets.

The team's findings were published on Monday (Oct. 26) in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

This rainbow-hued rocky plain looks like the landscape of an alien world. And, it turns out, it is.

What is it?

In this image, we can see an ancient, rocky hill on Mars. In the Red Planet's Southern Highlands, this alien terrain is chock-full of minerals, which we can see clearly defined in this color-enhanced view of the region.

This image was snapped by the HiRISE camera aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), which has been studying the planet's surface, atmosphere and climate since arriving in Martian orbit in March 2006.

But this isn't exactly what the surface of the planet would look like through our eyes; the image is color-enhanced. Why would scientists take a natural-color image and turn it rainbow? Doing so enhances the slight color differences in these rocks, allowing researchers to pick out the different minerals.

Why is it incredible?

As pointed to above, enhancing colors in scientific images can be an incredibly useful tool for exploration.

For instance, in this image, the blue- and green-toned rocks could be full of minerals like pyroxenes and olivine, according to scientists analyzing the image. And they think that the yellow, orange and red patches may contain minerals formed by past interactions with liquid water.

By exploring the mineral content of rocks like this, researchers can peel back the layers of history within the Martian bedrock. The discovery of certain minerals, for example, can show that water flowed on Mars long ago, pointing to potentially habitable conditions.

So, as we can see, this striking rainbow image isn't just a beautiful landscape; it's also hiding serious clues to Mars' history.

Something spooky is stirring in the shadows of the infamous star Betelgeuse, a cosmic poltergeist that is disrupting the atmosphere of the red supergiant.

New radio observations have shown Betelgeuse's smaller stellar companion, Siwarha (not Betelguese Betelguese, unfortunately), cutting through the supergiant's extended atmosphere and leaving a wake in its path, like a jet boat slicing through a lake.

Because the name of this red supergiant star located about 650 light-years away from Earth, marking the shoulder of constellation Orion, is Betelgeuse, which means "the hand of al-Jawza" in Arabic, the companion was named Siwarha, meaning "her bracelet."

"This companion is orbiting so close to the star that it actually passes through its extended atmosphere," Lynn Matthews, the principal research scientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Haystack Observatory who led the new observations, said in a statement.

Astronomers turn cosmic ghost hunters

Using data collected from 2021 to 2026 using the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array in New Mexico and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile, Matthews and colleagues found that Betelgeuse's atmosphere stretches into an egg shape when the companion star is farthest away and rounds out when the companion passes in front of or behind it.

The same data also showed that Betelgeuse itself has largely recovered from the "Great Dimming" that made headlines in 2020. This recovery comes after the red supergiant "sneezed" in 2020, dramatically ejecting tons of gas and dust and fading to its dimmest in more than a century.

Among the long-standing mysteries of Betelgeuse, scientists have puzzled over a brightening and dimming cycle that lasts roughly 2,100 days. Recent studies pointed to a low-mass companion orbiting deep inside the star's atmosphere, and its existence was confirmed in early 2026.

Though Siwarha itself is too faint to detect directly at radio wavelengths, its influence shows up in the star's shape, the new study found. To confirm the effect, the researchers say, they will need to observe more of the companion's orbit, especially at radio frequencies that have so far been sparsely sampled.

The Next Generation Very Large Array, a planned telescope, should make this kind of monitoring far more routine, according to the team. With sharper vision, researchers could see how red supergiants like Betelgeuse shed their material as they near the end of their lives, and how a close companion might affect that process by tugging on that ejected matter.

This research is described in a paper published in The Astronomical Journal.

This "cat's head" would work perfectly in a witch's cauldron, glowing red "eyes" and all.

Just in time for Halloween, we have new, ghostly views of the Cat's Eye Nebula haunting the outer reaches of the cosmos.

What is it?

This nebula earned its name from its distinctive "cat's head" shape, which you can see on the left-hand side of these two images snapped by both the Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes. In these new images, you can even see the cat's glowing red "eye," which experts suggest could be a young star trapped in the nebula's dusty clutches.

Found about 7,500 light-years away from Earth, this star-forming region can be found within the larger Carina Nebula.

As the stars in the Carina Nebula continue to form, grow and evolve over time, the Nebula itself will change and eventually, this "cat's head" won't look much like a cat anymore. But for now, we can enjoy this vision of a domestic cat somehow depicted in this colossal tour of gas and dust.

Why is it incredible?

As a special Halloween treat, we have not one, but three new images of the cosmic cat's head.

In the snapshot captured by Hubble, we can see the nebula in visible light. This view shows the nebula as a brown pillar of dust embedded in a hazy, almost rainbow field of dust and gas. These colors are captured through Hubble's filters that can see the light coming from oxygen, hydrogen and sulfur and the light scattered by nebula dust.

JWST also took a look at this cat's head, observing the nebula in near- and mid-infrared wavelengths.

By looking at the same objects in space through different wavelengths and with different instruments and telescopes, we can uncover completely new and different details about these far-off celestial objects.

Earth would be terrifying if we celebrated Halloween every 11 hours, a possibility on a super-Earth investigated by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). That is, if this extrasolar planet, or exoplanet, wasn't so hellishly hot that no life could survive on its surface.

The exoplanet in question is the rocky lava planet TOI-561 b, located around 280 light-years away, which was discovered by NASA's exoplanet-hunting spacecraft TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) in 2020. The planet is located so close to its star, TOI-561, that not only does it complete an orbit every 11 hours, but its surface temperatures reach in excess of 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit (1,800 degrees Celsius).

That is so hot that astronomers once believed that TOI-561 b couldn't possibly possess an atmosphere. With 37 hours of JWST observations covering nearly four full orbits of TOI-561, scientists have now found this horrific planet is buried in a reflective layer of vaporized silicate mineral clouds, the same family of compounds that make up quartz and sand.

"We measured how the planet's brightness and heat changed throughout its orbit," team member Lisa Dang of the University of Waterloo said in a statement. "This technique, known as a phase curve, revealed that the planet reflects a significant amount of light from its star, and that heat is being redistributed around the planet instead of only on the sunlit side. Together, these point to the presence of an atmosphere."

The hemispheres of lava super-Earth are day and night

The proximity of TOI-561 b to its star has another consequence. The planet is tidally locked, meaning it doesn't turn like Earth. Thus, TOI-561 b has one blisteringly hot "dayside" permanently facing its star, and a cooler "nightside" facing out into space in perpetuity.

Dang and colleagues investigated the fact that the bare rock of the dayside seemed to be cooler than should be expected. They theorized that missing heat could be carried around to the night side or the heat may be reflected away before TOI-561 b can absorb it.

By using the JWST to observe full orbits of TOI-561 b, the team was able to observe the planet's nightside for the first time. They found it isn't warm enough to account for all the heat missing from the dayside.

That means TOI-561 b must reflect roughly three-quarters of the starlight that hits it. That is comparable to the most reflective planet in the solar system, Venus, which reflects around 75% of incident sunlight compared to the 30% reflected by Earth.

The team determined that this high reflectivity is the result of clouds of silicate minerals, including silicon dioxide and magnesium silicate, forming on the planet's dayside and acting like sunscreen. These clouds could also help TOI-561 b hang on to an atmosphere.

Of course, the team can't yet be sure what this atmosphere is composed of. It could be a dense carbon dioxide fog like that seen on Venus, or it could be a blanket of sulfur dioxide like that of the most volcanic body in the solar system, Jupiter's moon Io. That would be the case if, like on Io, volcanic activity is replenishing the atmosphere of TOI-561 b.

"The next big question we will seek to answer is whether TOI-561 b's atmosphere resembles Venus or an extreme version of Io," Dang said. "Observing the planet at longer wavelengths with JWST could give us insights and help explain how a planet this hot has held on to an atmosphere for billions of years."

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

"Sometimes dead is better." Who can forget the immortal words of Jud Crandall, delivered by the incomparable Fred Gwynne in the 1989 film adaptation of Stephen King's Pet Sematary? Turns out Crandall could have been talking about somewhere just as otherworldly as the cursed Chumash burial ground at the heart of one of King's most terrifying works of fiction.

That's because astronomers have discovered two husks of two zombie planets shuffling through the gory remains of what was once their planetary neighbors around a long-deceased star, or white dwarf. The shattered planets were revealed by a clear gap in the debris around the white dwarf J1328−1450, located around 1,600 light-years away from Earth. One of the remnants is estimated to be no larger than the size of the average solar system asteroid, while the other is estimated to be between the size of the moon and the dwarf planet Pluto.

If this wasn't creepy enough, this haunting planetary system could be a grisly warning about the future of our own solar system after the inevitable death of the sun.

White dwarfs like the one at the heart of this system are formed when stars around the same mass as the sun run out of hydrogen in their cores. This means they can no longer fuse hydrogen into helium, the nuclear fusion process that provides the outward push that supports a star against the inward push of its own gravity.

As a result, the stars' cores collapse while the outer layers, where nuclear fusion is still proceeding, puff out. This so-called red giant phase can see stars increase their radius by many 100s of times. When it happens to the sun in around 5 billion years, our star will expand to consume the inner planets, including Earth.

The red giant phase ends when the outer layers disperse along with the wreckage of consumed planets, leaving a smoldering stellar core, now a white dwarf, surrounded by the disk-shaped remains of its outer layers and cannibalized planetary children. But this may not be the final death of all the planets that once orbited the now-dead star.

"We have known for some time that planets may survive beyond the transformation of their central star, but this is the first example of a complex system with a double debris disc and potentially two surviving planetesimals," research leader Nicola Gentille Fusillo, an astronomer at the Università degli Studi di Trieste, Italy, said in a statement.

Violent stellar death can't kill these two planetary Jason Voorhees

This system differs from others seen because of the large gap between the remarkably stable inner and outer rings. All previously known debris discs around white dwarfs have been surrounded by single, flat, rotating disks, not a double structure like this.

"The system is a rare glimpse of the violent, chaotic process by which a planetary system meets its end, and it hints that dead stars can have disc structures far more complex than previously realized," team member Gentle Fusillo of the Astronomical Observatory of Trieste said.

The team thinks that this unique double structure is evidence of planets that weren't completely vaporized during this white dwarf's red giant phase.

That means just like the residents and campers of Crystal Lake couldn't finish off Pamela Voorhees' baby boy, even an expanding star couldn't finish these two planets.

The team's observations, made with the Very Large Telescope (VLT), revealed the presence of calcium, oxygen, magnesium, and iron in the disk around the white dwarf. This indicates the destroyed planets had a composition similar to the rocky planets of the inner solar system.

The researchers also found evidence of a diversity of composition in the destroyed planets. The chemistry of the outer rings deviated from that of the inner rings, indicating that at least two of the consumed planets had very different compositions.

"The system therefore offers a remarkable glimpse of what the future of planetary systems, including systems like our own, might look like," Lagos-Vilches explained.

The team's research was published on Monday (Oct. 26) in the journal Nature Astronomy.

An iceberg has quickly escaped from the Weddell Sea in Antarctica, on its way to an icy new destination.

What is it?

As captured by a satellite in orbit, the Antarctic iceberg A-81 has quite quickly (for an iceberg) parted ways from its icy home, breaking off to drift toward a shallow underwater shelf in Georgia.

The 600-square-mile (1,550-square-kilometer) iceberg first broke off from the Brunt Ice Shelf in January of 2023. Now, generally speaking, giant icebergs don't travel that fast. But In just three years, this massive iceberg has traveled 1,400 miles (2,300 kilometers) north of the Brunt Ice Shelf. For an iceberg, that's really fast.

Over this time period, the iceberg drifted through the Weddell Sea in Antarctica's Southern Ocean before reaching the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, floating further into the Scotia Sea and then finally now reaching the edge of a remote island in South Georgia.

In this satellite snapshot captured on Oct. 20, 2026, we can see the iceberg in its current location near an underwater shelf off the coast of South Georgia. While it isn't abnormal for icebergs like A-81 to break off from larger ice shelves, Brunt has recently had multiple large icebergs break off one quickly after the other, according to a statement from NASA.

Why is it incredible?

This image was captured by the MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer), an instrument on board NASA's Terra satellite.

Earth-observing satellites like Terra keep a close eye on changes on our home planet. In addition to this image, observations from Terra have showed how the iceberg has traveled over the last few years.

With satellites like Terra, scientists can keep a close eye on these changes in Antarctic ice, which is becoming increasingly important as climate change continues to progress across the globe, affecting everything from Arctic ice to sea levels rising, worsening natural disasters and more.

The powerful Vera Rubin Observatory has spotted what seems to be a dwarf planet circling the sun in the frigid depths beyond Neptune.

The icy object, known as 2026 ED138, is likely between 600 and 1500 kilometers (373 to 972 miles) wide, scientists say. It's therefore probably big enough to be sculpted into a sphere by its own gravity — a key characteristic that separates dwarf planets from asteroids and other small space rocks.

And if 2026 ED138 is indeed a dwarf planet, that's a pretty big deal, as astronomers have confirmed just five of them to date: Pluto, Ceres, Eris, Haumea and Makemake.

2026 ED138 was discovered by Matthew Holman, who works at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA). The big moment came on Oct. 13, when Holman was running previously collected Rubin data through a search code that he developed with his CfA colleague Kevin Napier.

That search revealed a mysterious object beyond Neptune's orbit. Despite its immense distance from the sun, this body was relatively bright, suggesting that it's larger than the average trans-Neptunian object.

"My first reaction was one of excited disbelief," Holman said in a statement on Tuesday (Oct. 27), the day the discovery of 2026 ED138 was announced. "Objects like this are very rare, so I immediately started checking whether I or the code had done something wrong."

Those checks involved a thorough search through Rubin's catalog. And that catalog is pretty heft, even though Rubin is a pretty new scope.

The Vera Rubin Observatory sits atop Cerro Pachón, an 8,799-foot-tall (2,682 meters) mountain in northern Chile, and features a primary mirror 28 feet (8.4 m) wide. The scope achieved first light in April 2025 and began its main project, the 10-year-long Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), in June of this year.

During the LSST, Rubin images the entire southern sky every few days using a 3.2-gigapixel camera, the largest digital camera ever built for astronomy. This work creates a high-resolution time-lapse "movie" that can reveal a great deal about the cosmos.

For example, astronomers think Rubin will shed light on dark energy and dark matter, the mysterious stuff that together makes up most of the universe's mass-energy budget. Its observations will also serve as a solar system inventory, helping scientists map out our cosmic backyard like never before. Rubin has already discovered more than 11,000 new asteroids, for example, with many more surely to come.

The LSST inventory will likely include a number of new dwarf planets as well — including, possibly, 2026 ED138. For the object definitely exists: Holman and his colleague Mario Jurić, who works at the University of Washington and serves as Rubin Solar System Lead Scientist, found that Rubin spotted 2026 ED138 30 separate times on 20 nights between March 4 and July 11 of this year.

And further digging revealed that the Dark Energy Camera (DEC), an instrument on the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, also spotted 2026 ED138. Indeed, DEC observations of the object go all the way back to 2016.

The data show that 2026 ED138's orbit is tilted by about 25 degrees relative to the plane of the solar system. It therefore likely had a gravitational interaction with Neptune, which knocked it off kilter, scientists say.

2026 ED138 currently lies about 46 astronomical units (AU) from the sun. (One AU is the Earth-sun distance — about 93 million miles, or 150 million kilometers). This puts it beyond Pluto's average distance from the sun, which is roughly 40 AU.

There is still much to learn about the object, however. For example, we won't know whether or not it's a dwarf planet until astronomers nail down its size. And that will require observations in infrared light, the range of wavelengths that NASA's James Webb Space Telescope is optimized for.

So stay tuned: There's doubtless more news about 2026 ED138 coming, and Rubin could turn up more worlds like it in the coming months and years.

"If confirmed as a dwarf planet, ED138 would join a very small family of worlds," Holman said. "Rubin will image the whole southern sky again and again for 10 years, so any others hiding in the places earlier surveys skipped are now within reach."

Scientists have long known that when two black holes collide, they merge to create a more massive black hole. These events are so violent that they set the very fabric of space ringing with ripples called gravitational waves.

Now, new research suggests that the opposite may happen, too: single black holes may be able to split in two. But this can only happen if that progenitor black hole is spinning at maximum possible speed. That speed prevents the black holes from immediately falling back on each other.

There are physical laws in place that would usually prevent black holes from splitting in two; the team behind this research investigated whether there are conditions in which these laws can be temporarily bypassed.

One of the key aspects of physics that prevents black holes from bifurcating comes from thermodynamics. Black holes possess a characteristic called "entropy," which is essentially a measure of disorder within a system.

Imagine a toddler's crayon box. When entropy is low, the crayons are neatly arranged by color. As entropy is increased, the crayons are scattered and no longer in order. To get the crayons back in order, it requires a parent to put energy into the system and neatly reorder the crayons. In other words, the entropy of a system can't be reduced without some intervention and energy being added from outside that system. Parenting would be a little easier if it could.

A black hole splitting in two would represent a decrease in entropy, strongly disfavored by the laws of thermodynamics, but only if the black hole is not rotating. The situation could be different for a rapidly rotating black hole.

This team of scientists found that a loophole exists for such a black hole.

"The two resulting black holes must also be able to separate rather than immediately fall back together," team member Francesco Sannino of the University of Naples Federico II in Italy said in a statement. "When we include this requirement, the window largely closes again, except possibly for black holes rotating close to their maximum possible rate."

Black hole trousers?

The team calculated just how such a black hole split could occur, finding that the division of the black hole's outer boundary, or "event horizon," proceeds in an oddly trouser-like shape, with one resulting black hole slipping down each "leg."

They termed this "pair-of-pants topologies."

The researchers also determined that a split is more likely to take place if one of the resultant black holes is considerably smaller than its newly born twin.

"We cannot yet give a single probability for a black hole to split. It depends on how gravity behaves beyond Einstein's theory, and we are working to quantify this," Sannino said. "We expect small primordial black holes to be more prone to splitting than much larger astrophysical black holes."

Sannino added that such black hole splits may be detectable in high-energy light called gamma-rays.

"We may detect a split indirectly: gamma-ray telescopes such as Fermi-LAT can search for signals from tiny black-hole fragments that might form during mergers," the researcher concluded.

The team's research was published on Oct. 22 in the journal Physical Review D.

Scientists are still learning about a cosmic "string of pearls," a unique celestial relic left by a supernova explosion that humanity witnessed around 850 years ago.

That is thanks to the most detailed observation of the dandelion-shaped chains of gas and supernova debris that comprise Pa 30, the only supernova remnant of its type observed in the Milky Way. What makes Pa 30 even more unique is that it has a rare "zombie star" at its heart.

Supernovas like the one that created Pa 30 are called Type Ia supernovas; they happen when a dead star called a white dwarf overfeeds on a companion star like a cosmic vampire. This overfeeding triggers a runaway nuclear explosion that usually destroys the white dwarf. But on rare occasions, the supernova doesn't completely destroy the star, and a shattered stellar body remains, called a zombie star. These events are called Type Iax supernovas.

Pa 30 was first identified in 2013 by a citizen scientist in 2013, but scientists soon linked it to a cosmic explosion recorded independently in the year 1181 in Japanese, Chinese, and Arabic historical documentation. That makes this one of only five supernovas seen before the invention of the telescope.

"Reliable historical records of stellar explosions extend back only about a thousand years. For all we know, there might well be similar remnants still lurking in the dark in our own galaxy," team member Ilaria Caiazzo, assistant professor at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA), said in a statement.

"Today, we are lucky to study an intriguing object we know was observed by astronomers who made three independent historical records of the event centuries before the invention of the telescope."

Solar system-sized pearls

Pa 30 is a good laboratory to study supernovas because, at around 7,500 light-years away, it is relatively close to Earth on cosmic scales. For instance, the heart of our galaxy is around 26,000 light-years away. "We can see this much detail because of Pa 30's proximity to Earth," said Caiazzo. "This proximity makes Pa 30 uniquely valuable for study."

It is also an important subject of study because it is the only supernova remnant in which we can see a zombie star.

Using the Gemini North telescope, Caiazzo and colleagues zoomed in on Pa 30, discovering knots along the strands of gas radiating out from the site of the cosmic explosion, like pearls on a string.

These pearls are each wide enough to encompass the orbit of Neptune, the most distant planet from the sun, ten times over.

"The planetary region of our solar system could fit in each knot about ten times with room to spare," said Caiazzo. "The knots are quite strikingly uniform. We are excited to try to model them."

The team also discovered that the zombie star sits almost perfectly at the heart of Pa 30. When these cosmic explosions happen, they should provide any debris, including zombie stars, with a kick. The fact that this "living dead" star still sits dead center of this wreckage suggests that when this explosion happened, it was roughly symmetrical and the kick was relatively light.

"Explosions conserve momentum. If the explosion itself was perfectly symmetric, the ejecta should also be symmetric, and the surviving star should not receive a substantial kick," Caiazzo said. "We were able to measure a precise upper limit of the remnant star's transverse kick speed, showing that it was surprisingly small. We practically don't see the star moving away at all."

While there are still many mysteries surrounding Pa 30 and its zombie occupant, one of the most exciting prospects emerging from this research is the possibility it will help identify the wreckage of other Type Iax supernovas in our galaxy.

"While we can see Type Iax supernovas in distant galaxies as point sources of light, resolving the remnants of such explosions is only possible in our own galaxy and in very few nearby ones," Caiazzo concluded. "Eventually, we plan to use Pa 30's distinctive properties to search the Milky Way and nearby galaxies for similar objects."

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

In 1927, Norwegian civil engineer and amateur radio operator Jørgen Hals made an unusual discovery: while monitoring transmissions from a shortwave radio station in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, he began hearing odd, "delayed" radio echoes, arriving approximately three seconds after the original transmissions, that sometimes accompanied the station's signals.

"From where this echo comes I cannot say for the present," Hals wrote of his peculiar discovery, adding that he could "only confirm that I really heard it."

Almost a century after Hals' discovery, the exact cause of this unusual phenomenon — known today as long delayed echoes, or LDEs — remains unknown. Their baffling nature has prompted a range of potential explanations, most of which focus on a variety of unexplained natural phenomena occurring in Earth's atmosphere. However, a few more far-out possibilities, including potential evidence of extraterrestrial technology, have also been considered.

What do we know?

A curious discovery

The enigma of long-delayed echoes has perplexed scientists since their initial detection by Hals, who at the time reported his odd findings to Norwegian physicist Carl Størmer. This prompted an investigation by Størmer with physicist Balthasar van der Pol, during which the duo was able to reproduce the phenomenon but were unsuccessful in determining its cause.

Since those early observations, ongoing reports of long-delayed echoes have continued to be recorded. Under normal conditions, radio echoes occur whenever a radio signal reflects or "bounces" off an object, although other conditions such as signals traveling through a delayed path can also cause echoes to occur.

Long delayed echoes, by contrast, are generally characterized by radio signals that return after more than 2.7 seconds following their original transmission, although the terminology has sometimes been applied more broadly.

Complicating investigations into this unusual brand of radio phenomena over the years has been their unpredictable nature, along with significant reported variances in the timing and nature of the delays, which has made it difficult for researchers to narrow down a single cause.

Possible explanations

Despite the challenges presented by this unique class of space mysteries, there are several theories that have been put forward over the years about what could cause long-delayed echoes.

In the mid 1980s, researchers R. J. Vidmar and F. W. Crawford conducted experiments in Alaska that aimed to detect long-delayed echoes, which built on earlier research they published involving possible detections in 1970. According to their findings at the time, Vidmar and Crawford hypothesized that radio signals could be captured between ionized layers in the atmosphere and "guided" over long distances.

More recently, University of Oslo researcher Sverre Holm has advanced a similar concept that he calls magnetospherically ducted echo (MDE), in which radio waves may become trapped within electrically charged regions of Earth's upper atmosphere and guided along magnetic field lines extending far into the magnetosphere. Under certain conditions, these signals may reach as far away as the opposite hemisphere before they are "bounced" back toward Earth, resulting in the delayed echo effect.

According to Holm, MDE "is the best understood mechanism for long delayed echoes" out of five promising explanations he outlines, adding that based on the MDE model, such long delayed echoes "can be predicted to what seems like about 5 ms accuracy using a simple model for the magnetic field lines."

Still, one problem that arises involves the relatively short delays associated with this mechanism, which may not necessarily account for the much longer, multi-second echoes reported in some historical observations. Since radio waves travel at close to the speed of light, a signal could theoretically cover distances equivalent to the planet's circumference several times in a single second. While this doesn't prove the signals actually followed such paths, it does imply that some of the reported instances of long-delayed echoes might correspond to dozens of journeys around the planet.

Speaking with Space about historical cases involving much lengthier long-delayed echoes, Holm was clear in expressing that the MDE theory also has its limitations.

"In my view," Holm told Space in an email, "Magnetospheric Duct Echoes cannot [account] for those historical LDEs at all."

To illustrate this, Holm points to two primary differences. First, the historical echoes were detected at approximately 9.55 MHz, well above the 1–4 MHz frequency range typically associated with MDEs. Additionally, historical LDEs reportedly exhibited delays ranging from 3 to 30 seconds, whereas MDEs generally produce delays of only a few hundred milliseconds.

By contrast, "MDES are only a few hundred milliseconds," Holm explained, meaning that they cannot account for all the characteristics of the earlier historic observations of long-delayed echoes.

Other theories that might be capable of filling some of the gaps in the long-delayed echo mystery include the idea that electromagnetic radio energy could be coupled into slower plasma-wave "modes" while traveling through Earth’s upper atmosphere, which, according to Holm’s review of the earlier work by Vidmar and Crawford, could potentially create much longer delays than ordinary radio propagation would allow.

After this proposed coupling into a plasma-wave mode, the signals may be converted back to ordinary electromagnetic signals and bounced back down to lower levels of Earth's atmosphere. Finally, a similar line of investigation has looked at whether clouds of plasma originating from the sun might also be able to produce the well-characterized echo effect.

What remains unknown?

Extraterrestrial origins?

Although scientific research has identified several promising explanations for long-delayed echoes, the mysterious nature of these events has also inspired more speculative theories over the decades, including some involving the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

This unique dimension to the LDE mystery has its roots in the theories of Australian physicist Ronald Bracewell, who was the first to propose the idea that autonomous interstellar probes might be used by an advanced civilization as a means of establishing contact.

According to Bracewell, the initiators of such a hypothetical contact scenario might choose to reveal their presence by intercepting and re-transmitting radio signals rather than engaging in direct communication. Carl Sagan explored a similar concept in his novel "Contact", in which transmissions from the 1936 Olympics — the earliest broadcast signals to leave Earth's ionosphere — are intercepted and rebroadcast back to Earth as a data-encoded message originating from the Vega system.

However, more than a decade before the publication of Sagan's famous novel, Scottish writer Duncan Lunan attracted international attention for his 1973 article in the journal "Spaceflight" outlining his belief that he had successfully decoded a radio message dispatched from an extraterrestrial probe. According to Lunan, the initial detection of this "hidden" alien signal had taken place decades earlier in 1927, with the famous discovery of long-delayed echoes by Jørgen Hals.

Lunan's theory essentially went like this: an extraterrestrial civilization in the Epsilon Boötis system had deployed a hypothetical autonomous communications probe (known as a Bracewell probe) to Earth in the distant past, which had been comfortably orbiting in one of Earth's gravitationally stable Lagrange points for thousands of years.

Using the original long-delayed echo detections from Hals and Størmer's research decades earlier, Lunan placed the transmitted sequence on a vertical axis, while placing the recorded echo delay time on a horizontal axis, revealing what he believed to be a view of the constellation Boötes as it might have looked 15,000 years ago — right around the time the suspected space probe would have been dispatched to Earth.

Despite Lunan's imaginative theory, an alternative hypothesis proposing a natural cause behind long-delayed echoes was subsequently advanced by Anthony Lawton, which ultimately garnered an award from the British Interplanetary Society. By 1976, Lunan had withdrawn his ideas in an article published in the Journal of the Society of Electronic and Radio Technicians, although he would eventually revisit a version of the theory in the 1990s.

The mystery continues

While few modern researchers seriously consider extraterrestrial hypotheses to explain long-delayed echoes, these obscure phenomena remain intriguing, even as ongoing research sheds light on their possible causes. Explanations such as Sverre Holm's magnetospherically ducted echo model offer promising mechanisms that may account for at least some of these unusual signals, although important questions remain unanswered.

For now, long-delayed echoes serve as a reminder of the challenges of studying electromagnetic phenomena, and how even seemingly familiar aspects of our physical world can harbor mysteries that resist straightforward explanations, even after nearly a century of investigation.

The NASA/ESA James Webb Space Telescope has captured a breathtaking view of a majestic star-forming region shining 161,000 light-years from Earth in a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way known as the Large Magellanic Cloud.

What is it?

The deep-space image reveals a 230-light-year-wide swathe of the glowing emission nebula N159, threaded with denser filaments of reddish molecular hydrogen that hide countless energetic young stars.

Ghostly blue clouds of ionized hydrogen gas (H II) glow in the center of the image, having been energized by the ultraviolet radiation pouring out from nearby stars, whose winds helped create the chaotic structure of the vast stellar nursery.

The ethereal pockets are surrounded by roiling orange clouds of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons — a type of organic molecule that may account for 30% of all carbon in the universe, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.

Why is it incredible?

N159 is estimated to be less than 3 million years old, making it one of the youngest star-forming regions in the Large Magellanic Cloud. It also has a markedly different composition than the stellar nurseries that spawn stars in our Milky Way, boasting a lower metal content that could mirror environments that existed in the early universe.

By pointing JWST at N159, astronomers open a window to the distant past. They can compare the characteristics of stars at varying stages of evolution, including pre-main-sequence stars that are still in the process of forming, or accreting from the vast interstellar cloud.

Want to know more?

Be sure to check out our JWST explainer page to discover everything that you need to know about the space telescope, and peruse our astronomy coverage for the latest discoveries made possible by its 21.3-foot-wide (6.5-meter) golden eye.

Black holes more massive than entire galaxies are not a major component of the mysterious dark matter that's thought to make up most of the matter in the cosmos, a new study finds.

For decades, to explain why galaxies do not spin apart at the speeds at which they whirl, scientists have suggested the existence of an unseen substance known as dark matter, whose gravitational pull helps keep galaxies together. Dark matter is thought to make up about five-sixths of all matter in the universe.

Much remains unknown about dark matter, however — including whether or not it actually exists. Black holes make good potential contenders for dark matter, since they are extremely massive and are difficult to spot in the dark depths of space.

In the new study, researchers investigated whether dark matter could be made of "stupendously large black holes," ones with masses greater than 100 billion times the mass of the sun. Stupendously large black holes greater than 1 million billion to 10 million billion suns in mass would be heavier than entire galaxies.

So far, astronomers have not detected any stupendously large black holes — currently, the largest black hole known may weigh about 36 billion suns. Since researchers have not seen any even after looking at many galaxies, the new study noted they cannot make up all of dark matter — but team members wondered if the exotic objects still might constitute a significant portion of the puzzling substance.

Often, dark matter is thought of "as a fine dust spread everywhere," study co-author Christopher Gerlach, a theoretical physicist at the Mainz Institute for Theoretical Physics in Germany, told Space.com. However, if dark matter is packed into a handful of gigantic objects such as stupendously large black holes, "the universe becomes grainy on very large scales. And we can check that."

Specifically, the scientists analyzed the light from the dawn of the universe, study co-author Yann Gouttenoire, a theoretical physicist at the Mainz Institute for Theoretical Physics, told Space.com.

For the first 380,000 years after the Big Bang, the cosmos was filled with a hot plasma in which light was trapped. Eventually, the expansion of the universe let the cosmos cool enough for the plasma to largely dissipate and form atoms. This in turn let light shine freely, "and that light is still arriving today," Gerlach explained. "We call it the cosmic microwave background, a snapshot of the infant universe covering the whole sky."

The temperature of the cosmic microwave background "varies from place to place by about one part in 100,000," study co-author Antonio Iovino, a theoretical physicist at New York University, Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates, told Space.com. "That pattern tells us how matter was spread back then."

Analyzing the cosmic microwave background revealed it is not grainy the way stupendously black holes would have made it. "So these black holes can't be a significant part of the dark matter," Nicholas Leister, a theoretical physicist at the Mainz Institute for Theoretical Physics, told Space.com.

The researchers cautioned that the new findings do not suggest that stupendously large black holes cannot exist, only that they do not make up a major fraction of dark matter. They added that another candidate for dark matter — relatively tiny black holes the size of asteroids — might potentially exist. They are now investigating whether they can rule out such itty-bitty black holes as a major constituent of dark matter.

The scientists detail their findings in a study that will be published Oct. 26 in the journal Physical Review Letters.

Researchers think they might have pinpointed the exact night sky that we see depicted in Vincent van Gogh's iconic painting "The Starry Night."

Perhaps one of the most famous paintings in modern history, Van Gogh's "The Starry Night" carries a legacy that continues to inspire and mystify generation after generation. But while you might see in its swirls of color and bright spots of starlight a night sky derived purely from imagination, some scientists think it represents an actual view — one that includes a waning crescent moon, Venus and the Hyades cluster. And they may know exactly when this sky appeared..

In a new study, researchers suggest that "The Starry Night" depicts the pre-dawn sky seen around July 22, 1889 from Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, where Van Gogh painted it. But while this sky happens to perfectly match the one depicted in the artwork, art historians have long thought that Van Gogh painted this piece in June. Could these findings shift the date of this legendary artwork?

Finding a painted sky

This investigation started decades ago with art historian Albert Boime and astronomer George Abell at UCLA in 1984 and continued in the following years with astronomer Charles Whitney at Harvard University. However, these earlier analyses did not agree with one another, and there was no true consensus about exactly when the sky matched with the painting.

So the question remained, lingering in the minds of those with a shared love for both art and space. And a team led by Elijah Jeong-hyun Kim, the CEO of South Korean robotic telescope company SLLAB and a Ph.D. candidate at Kyung Hee University's School of Space Research, picked up the search once more.

"When they see a fragment of a starry sky, observational astronomers like me and amateur astronomers alike will want to solve the puzzle. I am simply someone who pursued that process a little more actively," Kim told Space.com.

But how did Kim's team come to their conclusion, after others had failed to nail down a date over the decades? In short, "we analyzed the painting astronomically, analyzed documents about his situation in July 1889, and then carried out ecological and meteorological investigations," Kim said.

To start with, the team analyzed the sky from the exact location in Saint-Rémy where Van Gogh is said to have painted "The Starry Night." They then used observational geometry to map the historical night sky.

"Modern telescopes are equipped with a function called astrometry, which compares an image of the night sky with celestial coordinates stored in a computer and automatically extracts the coordinates of the image," Kim said. "We used Procrustes analysis, a method that compares only the 'shape' of two sets of points. After matching their position, size and rotation, it measures how similar the two shapes are from the differences that remain (the residuals)."

"Because a star cluster on the canvas may be larger or smaller than in reality and slightly tilted, this method was the right fit. It allowed us to explain, in quantitative terms, what earlier studies had described only qualitatively as 'resembling a certain constellation,'" Kim added.

But this quantitative analysis wasn't enough to say for sure that this was the right-fitting sky, as different constellations could fit to a similar degree, Kim explained. To get closer to their answer, the team combined their analysis with a deep dive through history.

"We also checked whether the stars were actually in that part of the pre-dawn sky on that date, whether they fall within the painter’s field of view, and whether the appearance of the moon and Venus matches the painting. It was the Hyades that satisfied all of these conditions," Kim said.

Exploring astro-art history

As mentioned, the date of this matching sky comes in late July, a month after art historians think Van Gogh painted "The Starry Night." But the researchers suggest that their findings could provide evidence to support the idea that the work was actually painted in July.

Letters written by Van Gogh as early as 1888 describe his desire to paint a star-filled sky. A letter dated April 12, 1888 reads: "A starry sky, for example, well — it’s a thing that I’d like to try to do, just as in the daytime I’ll try to paint a green meadow studded with dandelions."

Kim followed these letters through the months to try and find more information that could potentially alleviate the discrepancy between the matching skies and the actual month the painting was created. Kim pointed to a letter from between late May and early June 1889 that reads: "This morning I saw the countryside from my window a long time before sunrise with nothing but the morning star, which looked very big."

Kim drew on "personal imagination" to find ties between Van Gogh's sky observations in these months and what they might mean for the painting's timeline, Kim shared, so this doesn't definitively change the view of this painting's history. However, Kim suggested that these records could indicate that Van Gogh was repeatedly looking up and watching the pre-dawn sky, which could have led to him seeing this exact sky on July 22.

The painting itself even ignites uncertainty among art historians. As the researchers cite in their new paper, leading art historians see "The Starry Night" as stylistically different from Van Gogh's other works during the month of June, drawing further questions over the date painted.

"What our study shows is that the sky in the painting matches, in both observation and shape, the real pre-dawn sky around July 22. So, what we propose is the possibility that Vincent conceived the idea in June and completed the painting after July 22," Kim said.

However, "I think further research in art history and conservation science could shed more light on this question," Kim added.

This work was described in a study published Oct. 22 in the journal Scientific Reports.

From the dangerous Sydney funnel-web to the common huntsman, Australia is home to its fair share of spiders. It even has a crater shaped like one.

What is it?

One stretch of the vast Western Australia wilderness is imprinted with a curious crater, which likely formed after a meteor impact hundreds of millions of years ago. Geologists think the spider-like pattern in the crater's center was created when its floor rebounded following the initial impact, NASA has said.

In the hundreds of millions of years since the initial impact, erosion has continued to carve this formation into its current, signature shape. Complete with "legs," the planetary imprint has earned its name Spider Crater.

This image shows the impact structure in its entirety, which stretches 8 by 7 miles (13 by 11 kilometers) in full, with the central "spider" piece measuring 2.5 miles (4 km).

Why is it incredible?

In this image, we can see this "spider" from space. This snapshot shows the geologic feature as captured by the OLI (Operational Land Imager) aboard the Landsat 9 satellite, an Earth-observing craft that launched back in 2021.

The satellite, a collaborative effort between NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey, is the ninth in the Landsat Earth-observing series, which goes all the way back to the launch of Landsat 1 in 1972. On a near-weekly basis, Landsat 9 delivers observations of everything from deforestation to water quality and crop growth.

The series of Landsat satellites have been a critical piece in the modern understanding of how our planet continues to change. Whether it's the repercussions of climate change or fluctuations in agriculture, observations from orbit do more than provide interesting photos of our home world; they also capture critical data.

If you were approaching the edge of a spiral galaxy, arriving from afar through the cosmos, it might look something like this.

What is it?

In this new snapshot by the Hubble Space Telescope's Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS), we can see the edge of the spiral galaxy NGC 1827. Found about 37 million light-years from Earth, this galaxy sparkles in this side-on view.

Not all spiral galaxies are the same. This galaxy is what is known as an "intermediate" spiral, which means that its structure sits somewhere between that of a barred and unbarred spiral galaxy. Barred galaxies have a distinctive central, bar-shaped structure, while the unbarred variety lacks this bar and can look more like circular spirals.

NGC 1827's spiral shape isn't clear from the side, however. From this perspective, we see its twinkling edge, speckled with stars and woven together with brown ribbons of dust.

Why is it incredible?

Beneath the beauty of this spiral edge lies an expansive, cosmic landscape. Bright blue stars dot the spiral's side, with one particularly luminous star taking the spotlight with four diffraction spikes — created by light bending through the inner workings of Hubble's camera — emanating from its center.

This image was captured as part of a larger Hubble survey that's exploring 260 satellite galaxies, which are galaxies gravitationally bound to larger hosts. Hubble is specifically looking to survey satellite galaxies that lie near host galaxies similar to our own Milky Way.

So far, Hubble has spotted 111 such satellites and will continue to observe, hunting for the rest.

By studying satellite galaxies like this one, which also happens to be an especially low-mass galaxy, researchers could better understand the complicated dynamics both within the galaxies themselves and between them and their host galaxies.

On Sept. 30, NASA formally concluded OSIRIS-REx, the historic first U.S. mission to pluck a pristine piece of an asteroid and deliver it safely back to Earth.

The van-sized OSIRIS-REx spacecraft — whose name is short for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer — visited and sampled Bennu, an ancient space rock holding pristine remnants from the dawn of our solar system more than 4.5 billion years ago. Among those cosmic relics are raw organic building blocks, the kind that may have seeded life on Earth.

"I have known this day was coming for a long time, but it is still difficult to see it arrive," OSIRIS-REx Principal Investigator Dante Lauretta, who's based at the University of Arizona, said in a post on LinkedIn. "I feel enormous pride in what we accomplished together, and real sadness that this journey has come to an end."

For the mission team, the farewell capped a decade of high-stakes engineering, on-the-fly troubleshooting and nail-biting close calls that ultimately delivered to Earth the largest asteroid sample ever collected in space, one that held secrets from the early solar system.

Long before launch, the team faced obstacles that nearly thwarted the endeavor — chiefly, two rejections from NASA — before finally securing the green light for the $1 billion project under the New Frontiers Program in 2011.

When OSIRIS-REx launched on Sept. 8, 2016, on a two-year journey across the inner solar system, Bennu was little more than a point of light in telescopes. Scientists expected the asteroid’s surface to be a smooth, sandy sphere where OSIRIS-REx could seamlessly touch down. Much to their surprise, however, when the probe arrived at the asteroid in late 2018, it revealed Bennu to be a treacherous, loosely bound amalgamation of jagged boulders.

"Our expectations about the asteroid's surface were completely wrong," Lauretta said in an Oct. 7 statement from the University of Arizona. "There was no obvious place to collect a sample anywhere."

When OSIRIS-REx touched down on a small crater named Nightingale, Bennu offered so little structural resistance that scientists said its surface reacted more like fluid than a hard, rocky shell. The spacecraft's sampling head sank directly into the asteroid, stopping after burrowing 20 inches (51 centimeters) deep by firing its thrusters at the right time to pull away, with the precious sample in hand.

Then came another nail-biting moment: The sample collector lid got jammed in a partially open position because so much material was scooped up, allowing fragments of the precious cargo to escape. In a race against time to prevent further loss, the mission team quickly stowed the sampler head directly inside the return capsule, securing the cosmic treasure for its journey back to Earth.

Even the final return to Earth, on Sept. 24, 2023, kept the team on edge: A parachute failed to deploy properly during reentry, forcing a tense but ultimately safe landing in the Utah desert.

"Successful exploration missions are not those that avoid surprises; they are those that are deliberately designed to adapt to them," Lauretta said in the statement, quoting a line from the mission's final report to NASA.

"That certainly describes OSIRIS-REx," he said. "Again and again, the mission presented us with circumstances we had not expected, and again and again, this team found a way forward."

The mission's triumphs began long before the samples reached Earth. For example, the probe set a Guinness World Record when it slid into orbit around the 1,610-foot-wide (490 meters) Bennu, which became the smallest object ever circled by a spacecraft.

The scientific payoff that followed included remote-sensing work that confirmed Bennu's surface is coated in carbon-bearing compounds. Those observations also revealed that Bennu was once part of a much larger, water-rich parent asteroid that shattered in a catastrophic collision in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

The returned sample — which weighs 4.29 ounces (121.6 grams) here on Earth, more than twice the mission's requirement — continues to thrill and occupy scientists.

A wave of research papers, now topping 200, continues to piece together the composition and history of the ancient space rock. Among other findings, Bennu's pristine material has revealed amino acids and sugars that, on Earth, are essential for life, alongside a history of exposure to liquid water that could have served as the "broth" for these compounds to interact.

More discoveries are likely to come. Most of the returned Bennu sample is being preserved for future generations of scientists, who will study it "with questions and instruments we cannot yet anticipate," Lauretta said in the statement.

Though its OSIRIS-REx chapter is closed, the spacecraft itself is far from retired. Renamed OSIRIS-APEX (OSIRIS-APophis EXplorer), the probe is using its remaining propellant to head toward Apophis, another near-Earth asteroid and a different type of space rock from Bennu. It is scheduled to arrive in 2029.

The moon is shrinking, and scientists are narrowing in on exactly how much our natural satellite has dwindled over the years.

The moon is thought to have formed from a violent collision between a massive object and our young Earth roughly 4.5 billion years ago, and its interior is still gradually cooling off from this ancient collision. As it cools, the moon contracts, leading to a long, slow shrinking process. Now, in a new study, scientists think that they have figured out how much smaller the moon is actually getting.

In this new study, scientists analyzing images snapped by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) have spotted over 10,000 young faults, or cracks across the moon's surface. This helped them to figure out how much the moon has contracted over time, and they now estimate that the moon's radius has decreased by about 148 feet (45 meters) over the past 400 to 800 million years.

"The number of these young faults revealed in LROC images is much greater than I ever imagined," study lead Thomas Watters, a geologist and scientist emeritus at the Center for Earth and Planetary Studies at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum, said in a statement. "As the interior of the moon continues to cool and contract, it is expected that the growth of existing faults and formation of new faults continues today."

With these LROC observations, researchers in this study saw a variety of different types of cracks and landforms across the lunar surface. This included lobate scarps, or long, curved structures that form when the moon's surface contracts, cracks and is pushed upwards; and small mare ridges, or narrow "wrinkles" in the lunar surface, across the dark plains on the moon.

Tectonic activity on the moon looks a lot different than it does on Earth. On our own planet, there are about 15 major tectonic plates. On the moon, there are no tectonic plates at all. Instead, the moon has a single-plate body meaning its outer shell is a single piece only broken by faults or other such cracks created by the moon contracting. This means that instead of faults or cracks appearing at tectonic plate boundaries, they are instead scattered all over the moon.

By mapping these thousands of different features, all created from the moon cooling and contracting over time, the researchers are piecing together lunar history. In addition to finding the extent to which the moon has shrunk over time, they also found that some areas of the moon are covered in many more faults than other areas, and the areas with fewer cracks and faults have thicker moon crust.

This led them to conclude that not only are these areas with thicker crust more stable, but they suggest that a great deal of the widespread cracks in the lunar surface were created later in the moon's history as, in its earlier years, its thick crust would have insulated the moon's warm interior and prevented cooling, contracting and cracking.

This work was described in a study published Oct. 14 in The Planetary Science Journal.

Using NASA’s SPHEREx spacecraft, astronomers have studied a host of "failed stars," also known as brown dwarfs.

These strange cosmic bodies straddle the line between planets and stars, possessing a mass between 13 and 80 times that of Jupiter (0.013 to 0.08 times the mass of the sun). They get the nickname failed stars because they form like stars from collapsing clouds of gas and dust but fail to gather enough mass to trigger the fusion of hydrogen to helium in their cores, the process that powers actual stars.

This formation process also means that brown dwarfs are cosmic loners, wandering the darkness of space alone, bereft of the light of a parent star. That description might sound like lyrics from a Type O Negative song ("Black No. 1," anybody?). And that's apt, according to the leader of the new study, which reveals that, chemically speaking, the atmospheres of these dark and cloudy worlds are not unlike those of our solar system's gas giant planets.

"They’re kind of goth," Zafar Rustamkulov, of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), said in a statement. "Unlike exoplanets, free-floating brown dwarfs are completely independent celestial objects that will fade into eternity alone. We’re still learning how complex they are."

Rustamkulov added that, from Earth orbit, SPHEREx — short for Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization, and Ices Explorer — sees wavelengths of light that are nigh-impossible to see with telescopes on the ground because water in Earth’s atmosphere absorbs them. That is important for bringing brown dwarfs into the light.

"We are picking up light from the deep, red clouds of brown dwarfs all over the sky," he said.

A forest (of brown dwarfs)

Brown dwarfs have been somewhat mysterious since their discovery in the 1990s, due to the fact that the small amount of nuclear fusion that occurs within them causes them to emit no more than a faint glow. That means that our understanding of their makeup, their storms, and their evolution really only comes from theory.

To help lift this observational darkness, the team turned to data from SPHEREx. They studied 37 nearby brown dwarfs in a spectrum of light including 102 wavelengths, from the deepest red our eyes can see to the invisible infrared light. These local failed stars spanned the full temperature range for brown dwarfs — from 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit to minus 10 degrees Fahrenheit (2,200 to minus 20 degrees Celsius).

Considering that the temperature of the sun is about 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit (5,500 degrees Celsius), you could definitely say brown dwarfs run cold.

The spectra of brown dwarfs seen by SPHEREx allowed the team to determine that their atmospheres are chemically rich in water, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide and methane.

"We’re seeing the signatures of these molecules and how they change from object to object across the entire temperature regime," said team member J. Davy Kirkpatrick, also of Caltech. "Our paper concentrated on just three dozen, but we have thousands more that we are in the process of analyzing.

"I really want to see what bounds the universe places on the variety of brown dwarfs."

All my colors

Brown dwarfs have been routinely observed by other telescopes, including NASA's James Webb Space Telescope and the agency's now-retired Spitzer Space Telescope, but the wide wavelength coverage of SPHEREx has made it particularly useful in observing these failed stars. That's good news for astronomers waiting for change in the atmospheres of brown dwarfs as they age and grow cold.

The researchers found that some brown dwarfs observed by SPHEREx are at a stage of extreme change in which their clouds are clearing, creating atmospheres rich in methane.

The team may have discovered significant new details about brown dwarfs, but they are still on the proverbial mystery street when it comes to these strange celestial objects,

"The state-of-the-art models are capturing the general chemical trend, but when it comes to these cloudy transitions, the models are struggling to match the data," said Rustamkulov. "No two brown dwarfs are alike. Even at the same temperature, their spectra look quite distinct."

"This journey has turned many of us into accidental meteorologists. We know how hard it is to predict weather on our own planet, and we realize it's going to be just as challenging to explain the phenomena we see in these bizarre, cold objects," Kirkpatrick said. "The findings are a call to action to explore even more of these dark worlds."

As astronomers resond to that call to action, I will ponder how I could have worked Bauhaus' Goth classic "Bela Lugosi is Dead" into this article.

The team's research was published on Sept. 28 in The Astrophysical Journal.

Antarctica is a magnificent sight, and that beauty is visible all the way from space.

What is it?

Orbiting planet Earth, the European Space Agency's (ESA) Copernicus Sentinel-3 mission captured a close-up of West Antarctica.

Winter is ending in the Southern Hemisphere, meaning this is the peak of icy weather and sea ice in the Arctic.

In this image snapped by Sentinel-3, you can see a massive swath of ice which includes Elephant Island on the left-hand side. An ice-covered island off the Antarctic coast, Elephant Island floats in the Southern Ocean. It got its name both from the island's shape, which some liken to that of an elephant's head, and the fact that the island is home to a community of elephant seals.

Why is it incredible?

While a seal-inhabited island on the left floats near the Antarctic coast, across the water is a vast, frozen landscape. In just this snapshot, you can see about between 746 and 1,056 miles (1,200 to 1,700 kilometers) of the icy continent.

This image was captured on Sept. 30, 2026. In the Southern Hemisphere, that was just past the end of winter. The absolute peak for sea ice in Antarctica fell just a couple weeks before, on Sept. 14, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center, ESA reported.

So in this one snapshot, we can see a near-maximum for sea ice in the Antarctic, spanning hundreds of miles. In observing our own planet from space, we are able to peer across vast landscapes, capturing important observational data. This is especially critical for the Antarctic as, with the progression of climate change, this sea ice continues to dwindle, adding to sea level rise among other serious consequences across the planet.

For as long as humans have watched the night sky, we have wondered about the moon, pondering everything from its alien appearance to its influence over phenomena on Earth such as ocean tides, climate stability, and even the natural rhythms of many organisms.

Among the many questions we have about Earth's lone natural satellite, one remains preeminent: what are the moon's origins, and how long has it orbited Earth?

Today, the leading theory among astronomers is that deep in our planet's past — perhaps within roughly the first 100 million years of solar system history — Earth collided with a planet-sized object, creating the moon within a period that may have been as short as just a few hours. Known as the giant-impact hypothesis, this proposed event involves a hypothetical Mars-sized protoplanet astronomers call Theia. The material ejected into orbit by the powerful impact in question would have accumulated afterward, forming the moon that we observe today.

What do we know?

Birth of a lunar origin hypothesis

The evolution of this striking solution to one of the moon's most enduring mysteries goes back to 1946, when geologist Reginald Aldworth Daly was among the first to suggest that an impact event might explain the formation of the moon.

Before Daly, scientists had been leaning toward theories that involved Earth's rapid spin billions of years ago, when each day may have at one time lasted as little as 2 or 3 hours. Decades later in the 1970s, researchers William Hartmann and Donald Davis developed their own models involving collisions of large bodies left over from planetary formation, which could collide with younger planets.

Building on such ideas, other researchers went on to propose similar scenarios between the early Earth and a Mars-sized object. Early in the following decade, the concept eventually claimed its place as the leading lunar-formation process during a landmark conference held in Kona, Hawaii, in 1984.

Evidence of a planetary-scale collision

The popularity of the giant-impact hypothesis can be attributed to the multiple lines of evidence supporting the impact scenario. For instance, researchers have long recognized the similar stable-isotope ratios between both moon rocks and those from Earth, strongly suggesting a link between their origins.

Additionally, the unusually high angular momentum (or spin) of the Earth-moon system, when compared to observations of other rocky planets, also could be explained as one of the effects of a massive collision.

Further clues can be found in the moon's composition, which reveals a relatively small iron core and lower density. This is significant to astronomers, since a hypothetical giant impact would have seen the suspected Theia protoplanet's metallic core merging with the young Earth's interior — meanwhile, lighter mantle and crust material from both worlds would have become dislodged and blasted into orbit, eventually helping form the moon.

Another important piece of evidence involves the relative depletion of volatile substances (a chemical that easily turns into gas or vapor at room temperatures) in lunar material, which again suggests that it might have been lost during an extremely energetic event, an idea further supported by evidence that the early moon once possessed a substantial magma ocean.

What remains unknown?

New research expands on the Theia hypothesis

Still, several significant questions remain, including what precise conditions led to the impact, and how the resulting planetary material evolved into the moon as it appears today.

Recently, a new study by Adeene Denton of Southwest Research Institute and colleagues at the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory put a new spin on the Theia hypothesis, suggesting that the suspected ancient impact may have been significantly influenced by the heat and physical strength of the two colliding bodies.

The team's findings challenge some long-held views about the giant-impact hypothesis, while lending new support to others. For instance, the team's simulations revealed that while some impacts lead to the creation of a disk of debris that later coalesces into a moon, under other conditions, simulations support the idea that the moon could have been formed in a remarkably short period of time — perhaps within around five hours.

However, one of the primary issues with determining the exact conditions of the giant-impact hypothesis involves the ongoing debate over the moon's age.

"There is a large controversy regarding the age of the moon," said Dr. Erik Asphaug, a planetary science professor at the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory and one of the new study's co-authors.

In an email to Space, Asphaug explained some of the issues arising from this, since current estimates place the timing of the moon's formation anywhere from around 40 to 120 million years after the formation of the solar system. Therein lies part of the issue, according to Asphaug, who says this timing could have significant implications for models of the Theia impact.

If it had been an earlier collision, Asphaug says this would have involved a hotter Theia due to the greater degree of radiogenic heating; by contrast, a later impact would have meant a cooler and stronger Theia.

"I don't think we know enough yet to say the moon (and by corollary, the Earth) formed this way or that way," Asphaug told Space. "But knowing how temperature affects the result opens up a new dimension for viewing the problem, and that is always helpful because it shifts our frame of reference, like getting out of the car to have a walk around."

A lunar enigma in time and space

For researchers like Asphaug, understanding the moon's formation requires looking at it as more than just an event in space, but also as one in time. Doing so allows comparisons between three different metrics: isotopic decay, temperature-dependent material strength, and the geological record of debris striking other planets — a process through which he believes tighter constraints could be placed on precisely when the moon-forming impact might have occurred.

Adeene Denton, the study's lead author, also emphasized the introduction of the time component her team's research brings to the table, telling Space in an email that the outcome of the moon-forming impact could have depended significantly on the timing of the collision.

"Before, scientists have generally assumed that the outcome of the collision will be the same regardless of when it takes place," Denton wrote. "But now we know that temperature's effect on material properties, which is dictated by how old and/or cold the proto-Earth and Theia might be, alters things substantially."

By connecting impact simulations to data related to the moon's geochemical record, as well as models of early solar system formation, Denton thinks her team's work could help scientists better constrain precisely how and when the moon formed.

The mystery continues

For now, in terms of which possible scenario — an earlier or later collision event — emerges as being the most likely, Denton says it's still difficult to say.

"It depends on which scenarios for solar system formation you favor," Denton told Space.

"I am generally in favor of an earlier formation of the moon, consistent with a rapid planet-building phase in our solar system," Denton said, "but we can't neglect the possibility that the moon formed late."

While much work remains to be done, Denton and Asphaug believe their findings help significantly advance present efforts to resolve some of the questions about the giant-impact hypothesis — a few of which have lingered now for many years.

For Asphaug, however, such lingering questions may simply be part of the scientific process.

"Science has a way of wandering around for a long time until finally it all comes to focus," Asphaug said.

"I believe that will happen, in part thanks to this work, in the coming decade."

Editor's note: Japan launched its bold MMX sample-return mission to the Mars moon Phobos on Oct. 19) at 3:41 p.m. EDT (1941 GMT).
Watch a replay of the liftoff and read our launch story here.

Japan will launch an epic mission to Mars today (Oct. 19), and you can watch the action live.

The Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) mission is scheduled to lift off atop an H3 rocket from Japan's Tanegashima Space Center today at 3:41 p.m. EDT (1941 GMT; 4:41 a.m. on Oct. 20 local Japan time).

You can watch it live via the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). Coverage will begin at 2:45 p.m. EDT (1845 GMT).

As its full name suggests, MMX will focus on Mars' two moons, Phobos and Deimos. They're both tiny compared to Earth's own moon; Phobos is just 14 miles (22 kilometers) wide, and Deimos is even smaller, with a diameter of about 8 miles (13 km).

They're also quite mysterious. While astronomers have a pretty clear understanding of our own moon's birth — it coalesced from material blasted into space when a Mars-sized planet slammed into Earth long ago — there's no consensus about Phobos and Deimos' origin story.

The duo "may be the remains of a massive impact on Mars that sent material into orbit around the planet, or they could be ancient asteroids that were captured by Mars' gravity billions of years ago," Tom Statler, MMX program executive and program scientist at NASA Headquarters, said in an Oct. 15 statement. (NASA is a partner on the mission, providing a scientific instrument, a technology demonstration, communication support and funding for American scientists on the MMX team.)

"Having the answer will help illuminate that early era when Earth and the other inner planets may have been acquiring much of their water and organic compounds," Statler added.

MMX will help provide that answer, if all goes according to plan.

The spacecraft will arrive in the Mars system in August 2027, then slip into orbit around Phobos a month later. It will study that moon and Deimos from a distance for about 18 months, then deploy the French-German Idefix rover onto Phobos' surface in early 2029.

The 55-pound (25 kilograms) Idefix "has two main tasks: providing information to prepare for the landing of the main spacecraft to collect samples, and analyzing the composition and texture of Phobos' surface," European Space Agency officials wrote in an MMX mission description.

"The gravity on Phobos is so low that Idefix will only weigh the equivalent of 15 grams [0.5 ounces] on its surface!" they added.

The MMX mothership's Phobos landing will occur in 2030. The spacecraft will grab at least 10 grams (0.4 ounces) of samples from the moon, then head back toward Earth with this extraterrestrial bounty. MMX's return capsule will land here in 2031, after which scientists around the world will scrutinize the Phobos sample for clues about the history and evolution of Mars and our solar system more broadly.

MMX was originally supposed to launch in 2024, but issues with the H3 rocket prevented it from doing so. Mars and Earth align properly for interplanetary launches just once every 26 months, so MMX had to wait a while for its next chance.

Japan already has an impressive sample-return track record. The country's Hayabusa mission brought home pieces of the asteroid Itokawa in 2010, for example, and Hayabusa2 did the same with material from the space rock Ryugu a decade later.

Astronomers estimate that our home galaxy, the Milky Way, has churned out more than 10 million black holes over its 13-billion-year history. Yet so far, they have found only 70.

Now, a group of astronomers in the U.K. is trying to close that vast gap by enlisting the public. Their project, called Black Hole Hunters, is looking for volunteers with a computer and a few spare minutes to sift through troves of data gathered by a NASA space telescope. By flagging recognizable patterns that could point to a "missing" black hole, volunteers can help fast-track a search that would otherwise take years, the team says.

"You'll be narrowing down precisely where we need to point our telescopes next," project co-lead Adam McMaster, an astronomer at the University of Southampton in the U.K., said in a statement, "and you might be the one to discover a black hole."

Cosmic magnifying glasses

Black holes form when massive stars roughly 20 times heavier than our sun run out of fuel and collapse, leaving behind an abyss with gravity so immense that even light cannot escape. While invisible themselves, these cosmic behemoths reveal their presence by bending the light of nearby objects, and the Black Hole Hunters project is searching for one specific manifestation of this effect.

It happens thanks to the fact that massive stars often form in pairs, and a star can sometimes survive the violent supernova explosion that turns its companion into a black hole. When that happens, the two bodies continue to orbit each other. If such a duo aligns just right with Earth, the black hole will periodically pass directly between its companion star and our planet. And when it does, the black hole's gravity acts like a cosmic magnifying glass, bending and magnifying the star's light, causing it to briefly appear brighter to watchful telescopes.

To find these hidden giants, the project relies on data from NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS. Although the satellite's primary mission is to hunt for planets beyond our solar system, its method of data collection — tracking tiny, continuous changes in a star's brightness over time — is ideally suited for identifying black hole magnification events, the project description notes.

"It's a simple task with no expertise required," McMaster said in the statement. "We will show volunteers examples of what to look for so all they have to do is recognise the right patterns."

Automated algorithms conduct a preliminary sweep of the TESS data, screening millions of potential stars for the most obvious black hole candidate locations, according to the project description. But, the researchers say, artificial intelligence struggles with the messy realities of the cosmos, such as stellar flares and the natural pulsations of stars that can trick the algorithms into false positives.

The human touch

That makes human volunteers a key part of the search. To keep errors in check, each graph is shown to multiple volunteers, and their answers are combined so that individual mistakes average out, according to the project's website.

"I can search for black holes on my laptop from my bedroom — and could make a real impact on real space science," Grace Clarke, an undergraduate student of physics and astronomy at the University of Southampton who's involved with the project, said in the same statement. "The data's easy to understand — it's just pattern recognition — and you don't need a degree in astronomy to read it."

The crowdsourced shortlist of promising signals lets astronomers aim follow-up observations at specific stars, such as precise measurements of whether a star is being tugged at by an unseen companion. Those measurements take time and are expensive, so a good shortlist helps researchers spend scarce telescope time wisely, the team says.

Since launching on the Zooniverse platform in October 2021, the project has attracted nearly 23,000 volunteers, who have completed more than 12 million classifications, according to its website.

Before turning to TESS, the team ran a similar search using data from SuperWASP, a ground-based survey that, like TESS, monitored stars for signs of planets from 2004 to 2016. Those results are still being analyzed and are expected to be published soon.

The team also plans to widen its search with observations from other instruments, including the European Space Agency's Euclid mission and NASA's recently launched Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.

"With potentially thousands of new discoveries, we need all the help we can get," McMaster said in the statement.

Using data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers have unraveled some of the atmospheric secrets of a bizarre, blisteringly hot world that has the consistency of marshmallow.

The extrasolar planet, or exoplanet, under the watchful infrared eye of the JWST, is WASP-17b, located around 1,300 light-years away. The exoplanet has a mass around 0.8 times that of Jupiter, but it is around twice as wide as the solar system's largest planet, giving it a "super-puff" consistency comparable to the Earth-based treat. WASP-17 b is so close to its parent star that it completes an orbit in under four Earth days, with this proximity also making the temperature of this "hot Jupiter" skyrocket.

Given the extreme conditions of this exoplanet, it is little wonder that its atmosphere is pretty unusual too. Using a new technique called transmission strings, a team of scientists mapped the contours of the atmosphere of WASP-17b. They found that the atmosphere is shaped like a ring with prominent "gems" rising from it.

"Planets are temperamental, their atmospheres complex and chaotic," team member Hannah Wakeford of the University of Bristol said in a statement. "The fact that all of these numbers came together and showed us this very structured, dynamical picture of this giant world over 1,000 light-years away was just really exciting."

Astronomers like WASP-17b so much they put a ring on it

WASP-17b is so close to its parent star that it is tidally locked, meaning one side permanently faces the star; its dayside is constantly bombarded with stellar radiation. In contrast, the planet also has a cooler nightside, which faces out into space in perpetuity.

By creating incredibly comprehensive 3D views of this exoplanet's atmosphere, researchers found that WASP-17b's atmosphere has a chemical composition and temperature that shift between dayside and nightside according to theory and modelling.

This was possible because the transmission strings technique tracked WASP-17b as it crossed or transited in front of its star, capturing the composition of light around the edge of the planet's atmosphere, or limb, from different angles. This method trumps standard approaches because traditional modelling only maps light as an average across the entire limb.

"Rather than assuming your atmosphere is a circle with the same radius all the way around, our technique allows you to pull out different distances from the center to the edge of the planet," Lili Alderson, of Cornell University, said. "We're able to go around the edge.

"So, we've gone from a ring to understanding where on the ring the gemstones are, so to speak."

The modelling showed just such a "gem," that occurs where hot winds from the planet reach the equator and the nightside of WASP-17b, the atmosphere of the cooler side inflates.

"Theory predicts that the morning and the evening sides should have a strong temperature difference, and WASP-17b fits really nicely in that trend – pretty much bang-on what we thought it would be," Alderson said.

The successful application of the transmission strings method is an exciting step forward in the modelling of the atmospheres of the over 6,000 worlds in NASA's exoplanet catalog.

"This is proof of concept that planets are, in fact, 3D objects, and that, consistently, as they go around their star, what we predict should be happening is happening," Alderson concluded. "To move beyond computational exercises and see it for real is a different matter."

The team's research was published on Wednesday (Oct.14) in the journal Nature Astronomy.

What looks like a neon pink treble clef floating out in space is actually a bizarre source of radio waves spotted deep in the cosmos.

What is it?

Scientists using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory have peered far out into space to look at strange radio waves coming from what they have nicknamed the "treble clef" because of its distinct shape, which looks a lot like the musical notation.

Using Chandra, as well as the German Extended RÖntgen Survey with an Imaging Telescope Array (eROSITA) X-ray telescope, researchers looking at this strange sight spotted a big cloud of blue gas, which we can see in this image, along with radio signals (seen here in bright pink). They think that this object is actually a huge galaxy cluster made up of two different clusters that are in the process of merging.

Why is it incredible?

The researchers think they may have gotten to the bottom of where these radio waves are coming from, they report in a new study.

The team thinks that the treble clef-shaped radio signals were created by an outburst from a supermassive black hole. They believe that this outburst pushed clouds of charged particles and magnetic fields away from the galaxy cluster's center, producing bright radio waves.

According to the scientists, following this bright outburst, there was likely an extreme collision between two galaxy clusters. This cosmic smash-up either compressed or somehow reenergized these charged particles to amplify the radio signal.

When we see beautiful images of objects in space such as this, they can seem just like peaceful, colorful, cosmic clouds. But when you look a bit deeper, these spectacular scenes can actually be evidence of violent, chaotic events.

This work was described in a study published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Two leading space scientists say there is a need to redefine the edge of the solar system by presenting a theory which states that measurements of the Milky Way's gravitational field, including its dark matter, redraws the sun's frontier.

That theory was put forward by Jim Green, former NASA chief scientist and past director of the space agency's Planetary Science Division, along with Ed Belbruno, a professor of mathematics at Yeshiva University and a senior research associate at Princeton University.

The solar system's gravitational frontier extends to nearly 3.8 light-years from the sun, they contend, roughly 241,000 astronomical units (AU), a distance that brings the "edge" of the solar system to within the same scale as the separation between neighboring stars. The edge of our solar system may be defined not by a sharp boundary, but by a "complex dance among forces, energies and trajectories," they write. Green and Belbruno recently made their case in the August 2026 issue of the magazine ROOM - the Space Journal of Asgardia.

Slow moving objects

Moreover, this theory claims that the gravitationally stable Solar Lagrange points L1 and L2 could form a type of "portal" that could funnel future interstellar visitors such as the recent comet 3I/ATLAS into the solar system, perhaps allowing scientists to capture them for future study.

"Discovering the solar-galactic center L1 location is important since slow moving objects that enter this region can be captured by our sun and become part of our solar system," Green told Space.com. "Who knows if there may be a large captured rogue planet on its way into the solar system right now," he said.

Green said there's a need to look at these newly calculated L1 and L2 locations to see what could be found. He is now in discussion about making such observations with the New Horizons spacecraft team that explored Pluto in 2015 and is now operating in the outer heliosphere.

"Even accumulated dust in this region could verify many of the calculations we have made including the extent of the dark matter in our galaxy," said Green.

Ballistic capture

"It's a really nice and significant result," Belbruno told Space.com. The ROOM article, written for a popular audience, draws from his August 2025 keynote lecture at the Niels Bohr Institute. Much of the theory also stems from Belbruno's work on permanent capture into the solar system and weak stability boundaries published in 2024 in the journal Celestial Mechanics and Dynamical Astronomy.

Belbruno authored the book Fly Me to the Moon: An Insider's Guide to the New Science of Space Travel (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2007). In that work, he spells out how to harness low-fuel space travel he likens to "surfing the gravitational field."

"This new work represents a new application of weak stability boundary theory, first applied in 1987 to find new routes to Earth's moon, using ballistic capture for spacecraft," Belbruno said. "Now, its application is substantially extended to ballistic capture into our solar system from interstellar space and in estimating the size of our solar system," he said.

Green and Belbruno point out that the very recent discovery of interstellar objects  — such as interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS in 2025  — passing through our solar system on hyperbolic trajectories "has opened an entirely new window onto the material and processes shaping planetary systems across the galaxy."

Mastery of gravity

The article in ROOM adds some impactful ideas regarding potential distant alien civilizations.

"Interstellar travel requires a mastery of gravity, which an advanced extraterrestrial civilization might use to tour the galaxy, using portals created at Lagrange points for leverage, Green and Belbruno write.

"Remaining at these locations, they could observe the life within a stellar system with essentially no energy expenditure," the researchers add, "so perhaps we should be looking for large space stations at stellar L1 and L2 locations as a techno-signature of advanced intelligent life?"

How awesome would it be if the sun could take on a spooky green glow for Halloween? It turns out that scientists have discovered that our star may indeed go green, but only billions of years from now after its death  — and only if it then starts eating planets like a cosmic zombie.

That's possible because scientists have discovered that white dwarfs, the type of stellar remnants sun-sized stars leave behind when they die, can actually take on a range of colors including green if they snack on their rocky planets like cosmic cannibals.

For stellar scientists, the colors of stars have always been indicative of their temperatures. Cool stars look orange, while stars like the sun look white, and the hottest stars glow pale blue. This is akin to a blacksmith's iron glowing red, then orange, then white-hot as it heats up. Researchers have always assumed that white dwarfs follow the same rule. However, new research suggests that these stellar corpses could glow in a range of colors including green, pink, cyan, yellow, and purple. That means the universe is far more colorful than we suspected.

"Most stars, including most white dwarfs, behave like 'perfect radiators,' so their color is set almost entirely by temperature. But nobody had really looked into what else might be possible for white dwarfs," team leader Mark Hollands of the University of Warwick said in a statement sent to Space.com.

"It turns out these incredibly dense stars caaaaan produce colors nobody expected, and some of them genuinely surprised me."

How white dwarfs break stellar color rules

White dwarfs get their name because when they were discovered, they appeared surprisingly hot and glowed white or pale blue. However, this new research suggests that this slightly bland and uniform appearance is because no white dwarf is close enough for Earthbound astronomers to see their true colors.

The key to the rainbow-like array of colors this team suggests white dwarfs could possess is their density. White dwarfs form when stars with a mass roughly that of the sun run out of fuel and can no longer support themselves against their own gravity, causing their cores to collapse. As a result, the matter that makes up white dwarfs is around the density of water, millions of times denser than the sun's surface, the photosphere.

In these conditions, elements like carbon, calcium, and sodium can interact with the surrounding dense helium plasma and absorb light across a wider range of colors than they would at lower densities. That shifts the colors of white dwarfs away from the white/light blue seen for a perfect radiator of heat.

The researchers found that the colors of white dwarfs would fit into distinct groups tied to the individual chemical makeup of the stellar remnant's atmosphere.

White dwarfs abundant in carbon should be pink or purple, while those that have been enriched with debris from consumed asteroids and comets, and the remains of old planetary systems, would take a more yellow hue. Cooler white dwarfs with mixed hydrogen and helium atmospheres often would glow cyan or pale blue, caused as hydrogen molecules collide with helium atoms in their dense atmospheres.

One of the most striking examples of white dwarf coloration, however, would arise when one of these living dead stars starts feeding on the planets around it like a horror movie zombie.

Zombie white dwarfs go green

The researchers found that some dead star white dwarfs can go a little green around the gills after snacking on orbiting planets.

An example of this is WD J1330+6435, a cool white dwarf located around 326 light-years away, which has been accreting rocky material from a planetary companion. This has enriched its atmosphere with calcium, lithium, and sodium, and the team's model suggests this would have led WD J1330+6435 to adopt a green hue.

But unlike the green-tinged zombies of George Romero's classic Dawn of the Dead, there are no hordes of these green-faced cosmic zombies ... yet.

The researchers think that no other star, living or dead, has ever been credibly reported as green. That makes WD J1330+6435 the first known genuinely green star.

"The traces of sodium in the atmosphere of this white dwarf absorb the orange part of the spectrum, leaving behind a ghostly green glow," Hollands said. "Imagine standing on a planet and looking up at a green star. It feels like something out of science fiction."

Scientists see red

The team didn't just discover that a known white dwarf is the first-ever green star; they also discovered what could be the reddest star ever in the form of the white dwarf WD J1011+2845.

Located just 48 light-years from Earth, this white dwarf has a deep convection zone that carries carbon from its core to its surface. These carbon molecules distort light from the white dwarf, causing a deep salmon-pink glow unlike anything seen in any other star.

Despite this rainbow of white dwarfs, the team theorizes that white is still the most common color for these stellar corpses. Only five of the 151 white dwarfs within around 65 light-years of Earth have extraordinary coloring. Extrapolating this to the total population of white dwarfs, the team estimates that only one in 30 of these dead stars has an unusual color.

"One in thirty might not sound like a huge fraction, but across the entire population of white dwarfs in the universe, that is still a lot of oddly colored stars out there," Boris Gänsicke, Department of Physics, University of Warwick, said. "Yet if we take the median across a representative population of white dwarfs, we found that the average white dwarf really is white."

The team's research was published on Thursday (Oct. 14) in the journal RAS Techniques and Instruments.

NASA is accelerating the development of three helicopters that will be deployed into the sky above Mars after a voyage aboard NASA's Space Reactor‑1 Freedom spacecraft.

Slated for launch in 2028, SR-1 Freedom is the first fission nuclear-powered interplanetary spacecraft and is assigned the duty of dropping off the SkyFall entry capsule loaded with the trio of aerial vehicles at the Red Planet. SR-1's trajectory will deliver the SkyFall helicopters in Mars' northern hemisphere during the planet's spring season to avoid dust storms.

SkyFall is based on the success of the first aerial craft to float about the Red Planet, Ingenuity, which flew over 70 missions at Jezero Crater before it finally broke a rotor. It was designed to fly five. The SkyFall mission will consist of three identical helicopters to be deployed by an entry vehicle in the atmosphere, let loose at roughly under a mile (3,300 feet or 1,000 meters) above Mars, with each of the craft landing independently.

Regions of interest

The SkyFall mission is to conduct investigations that address objectives relevant for science and preparing for human exploration of Mars. Anticipated flights of the vehicles will travel outside of the landing ellipse to regions of interest within a broader exploration zone.

However, there are further science-focused flight paths and regions that have yet to be determined. NASA intends for the SkyFall helicopters to go to multiple regions of scientific interest on Mars.

NASA's Mars Exploration Program, along with the SkyFall project at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), will work together to pick those "why and where" paths to navigate.

A first workshop on potential landing sites for the SkyFall mission and adjacent exploration zones of high scientific value is slated for early next year. And as always, sites and zones on Mars for the choppers means satisfying engineering constraints imposed by the project and spacecraft design.

Given the rapid development cadence of the SkyFall mission, decisions are to be fast-paced, but are geared to maximizing science value of the endeavor.

What Mars researchers are after will be a ranked list of potential landing sites that will be studied in more detail by the SkyFall project and science community, prior to a second workshop to be held in late 2027.

Notional flight trajectories

On the table are potential science value and notional flight trajectories of individual landing sites given the capabilities and payload of the SkyFall helicopters.

Landing site selection will occur after the back-to-back landing site workshops next year, said Matthew Golombek, SkyFall Project Scientist at JPL.

"The project has identified a design reference landing site that targets subsurface water ice deposits with glacial/periglacial terrains," Golombek told Space.com.

Given their deployment, how much real estate will the aerial vessel assault study?

Golombek said that the helicopters are capable of flying one to two kilometers every other sol, so flight traverses of 125 miles to a little over 185 miles (200-300 kilometers) are possible.

"The helicopters are designed to last 6 months, with a goal of one Earth year and each can fly every other sol so multiple flights are expected," Golombek added.

Thanks to the success of the Perseverance rover's unleashing of the Ingenuity rotorcraft, Golombek said that there are a host of lessons learned, as well as engineering additions to be made to the set of SkyFall vehicles.

Nominal payload

"Although the helicopters are slightly larger than Ingenuity, they are being designed to operate in exactly the same way, so all of the experience with Ingenuity operations will be directly relevant," said Golombek.

The nominal payload to be toted around the Red Planet will be identical for all three helicopters, consisting of five instruments, plus engineering navigation cameras. Those instruments are to investigate the subsurface structure of Mars, the geomorphology and geology of surface terrains, as well as look at the meteorology of the atmosphere and the radiation environment.

Although there is no dedicated hardware to directly measure winds, the helicopters themselves can serve as on-the-spot wind sensors, even shifting to "Balloon Mode," whereby a helicopter will drift in the background wind.

Radar love

Each low-flying helicopter is outfitted with a ground penetrating radar (GPR) instrument, one that can detect layering in the near surface, at depths unobservable by orbital radar.

Those layers could be assembled from rocky material, buried ice, or combinations of the two. Detection of near-surface ice is of interest both scientifically as well as in support of future human expeditions to Mars.

Subsurface ice not only preserves a record of past Martian climate but also serves as a "high-priority environment" that might have served as a habitat of past…or Martian life resident today.

SkyFall maneuver

AeroVironment of Arlington, Virginia is partnering with JPL, selected last August to co-design and co-manufacture the SkyFall helicopters. They too are building on their experience as co‑developers of NASA's Ingenuity Mars helicopter that made those 72 flights at Jezero Crater on Mars.

"Now, with SkyFall, we're taking AV's high‑volume uncrewed systems mindset into planetary exploration and showing that Mars helicopters can be built as a repeatable product line, not a one‑off delivery," said Jeff Rodrian, Head of MacCready Works, AV's advanced research and development organization.

A special "SkyFall maneuver" is to be utilized in deploying the three aerial craft. They will be released directly from the carrier spacecraft into the Martian atmosphere, where they separate, deploy, descend, and land under their own power.

"By eliminating the need for a single-use lander stage or a host rover (as Ingenuity required with Perseverance), this approach significantly reduces the technical and financial risk of getting to the Martian surface," explains an AeroVironment statement.

Mountains of data

"Just like here on Earth, Mars helicopters can cover distance quickly and can go places that might be impossible to reach by ground," said Will Pomerantz, Head of Space Ventures at AeroVironment.

The science community may guide these helicopters to locations, Pomerantz said, where the ground penetrating radar can map out the specific spots of ice below the martian surface.

"The three SkyFall helicopters are going to show us parts of Mars we've never seen before and return mountains of data for scientists to pore over," said Pomerantz.

A new image from the European Space Agency's Mars Express spacecraft reveals the powerful erosive forces that have shaped and re-shaped the surface of the Red Planet over long periods of geological time.

What is it?

This new Mars Express image captures Amazonis Mensa, a large, flat mountain on the Red Planet that offers planetary scientists a glimpse into the many factors that can sculpt a world's surface.

In this photograph, several features stand out to help illustrate this. Easiest to make out are the large round craters created by ancient impacts on the surface of Mars. However, many of these craters have been at least partially filled by lava flowing across the surface of the Red Planet around three billion years ago, according a statement from the European Space Agency (ESA) accompanying the image.

More interestingly, rippled structures known as yardangs can be seen to the left and right sides of the image. These ridges "form as loose sand particles are whipped up by wind and deployed a little like a cosmic sandblaster," according to ESA.

In the image, the two groups of yardangs ripple across the Martian surface in two different directions. This is because Amazonis Mensa acts as a windbreak, pushing material blown by winds in separate orientations.

Why is it incredible?

For over 20 years, Mars Express has been providing scientists with an unparalleled look at the Martian surface, helping us better understand the forces that have shaped the Red Planet over eons.

You can tell a lot about how a child will age by looking at their parents, and it turns out that this could be true for planetary systems, too. Scientists have performed cosmic genealogy on planetary systems in the Milky Way, finding two distinct families that influence the evolution and fate of these systems.

The study team, led by researchers at the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF), studied 300 of the best-understood multiplanet systems of the over 1,000 that astronomers have discovered in the Milky Way.

The team's research clarifies how the environments around infant stars directly affect planetary fates and, in turn, the survival of extrasolar planets, or exoplanets, that are potentially capable of hosting life. That could be crucial as astronomers search for life beyond the solar system, pointing them to systems with potentially habitable planets like Earth.

"The fundamental question we started from was: What determines the characteristics of planetary systems as we see them today? Are they established at birth or sculpted by evolution over time? The truth, in the end, turned out to lie somewhere in the middle," team member and INAF researcher Diego Turrini said in a statement sent to Space.com.

"Our results show that there is a genetic link between planetary systems and their stars, and that, depending on the star around which they are born, this link also determines their fate," Turrini added.

What is the genetic code of a planetary system?

The first "family" the scientists identified consists of wide, massive systems, often with total masses between two and 10 times that of our own solar system. The planets in these systems orbit stars more massive than the sun with lower concentrations of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium (which astronomers somewhat confusingly call metals) than seen in our star.

The second family is more compact and lower-mass systems. The members of this family are composed of planets with comparable masses and sizes, a so-called "peas-in-a-pod" configuration. They orbit stars with mass and metallicity equal to or lower than those of the sun, with orbits that are usually much tighter than those of Mercury, the closest planet to the sun.

One of the "genes" Turrini and colleagues selected to sort planetary systems into families was the deviations that planets make from orbiting their star in the same circular plane. That, in turn, reveals a family history of violent gravitational instability caused by events like giant collisions and planetary ejections.

Violent events were common for the first family, but much less so for the second group of planetary systems, the researchers found. They determined that the number of these turbulent events a planetary system experiences can be linked to even modest variations in the environment in which planets form. These variations arise due to different properties of the parent star of those systems.

Thus, the nature of the star in these systems doesn't just fundamentally change the formation of planets in their systems; it influences the system's future evolution, determining whether it will be characterized by phases of marked instability and giant impacts.

"The main difficulty during the data analysis was determining whether the two families of planetary systems were real or just an illusion created by the technological limits of current observational techniques," said team member Camilla Danielski, of the University of Valencia in Spain.

"At the end of the path, it became clear that selection effects acted as the tip of the iceberg, revealing the existence of much deeper structural diversities between these systems," Danielski said.

The scientists tested their conclusions by running simulations of planetary system evolution, all of which began with different conditions.

"The scenarios that best reproduce the dynamical properties of the family of wide and massive systems are those in which the systems are unstable from birth," said research supervisor and INAF researcher Danae Polychroni. "The greater abundance of material from which planets form around their host stars causes them to be born too large, preventing the system from remaining stable."

The team's research was published on Tuesday (Oct. 13) in the journal Nature Astronomy.

Now you see them, now you don't. Scientists have discovered that some of the universe's most powerful explosions, hypernovas, may not happen at all.

These explosions, known as hypernovas, were first proposed to explain unusual stars in the halo of our galaxy, the Milky Way, and in a neighboring dwarf galaxy. It was suggested that these stars could only form from the debris of an explosion 10 times more powerful than the 'average' supernovas.

The team behind these new findings suggests that ordinary supernovas could actually account for these stars when the uneven or non-spherical way they fling out matter is considered.

"If we look at a supernova today, the star's materials are not spread evenly. Oxygen might predominantly fly in one direction, sulphur in another. New stars might form from a mix of pieces of the supernova, not its overall mix of elements," team leader Anmol Aggarwal of University College London (UCL) said in a statement. "We developed mathematical models that took account of this and found in all cases that stars with a very unusual mix of ingredients were most likely formed from ordinary supernovas.

"All the evidence we see for hypernovae is suddenly gone."

Hypernova vs. supernova: What's the difference?

Supernovas occur when massive stars run out of fuel for nuclear fusion, effectively ending their lives. This results in the star's core collapsing, sending shockwaves rippling through its outer layers, causing explosions we call supernovas.

Hypernovas are proposed to occur in a similar way, but for an even more massive and rapidly spinning star. This results in a vastly more energetic explosion.

When supernovas or hypernovas happen, they fling elements that the dying star has forged throughout its lifetime into their surrounding cosmic environments. These elements eventually become the building blocks of the next generation of stars.

That means analyzing the chemical signatures of stars can tell stellar scientists about their family histories.

"Just before a star goes supernova, it has layers like an onion, with heavier elements at the center and lighter ones further out. Our model looks at how much material from each layer or each region would be needed to fit the observed star," Ralph Schoenrich of Mullard Space Science Laboratory at UCL said. "We still don’t know how well the supernova material gets mixed before it forms new stars. That is despite decades of work in this area. Our research suggests some mixing goes on, but incomplete mixing.

"We need to take this into account in our models of how chemicals evolve in galaxies and of how the interstellar medium works."

The team began their investigation by observing four stars that are suspected to have been forged from material ejected in a hypernova explosion. Three of those stars were more likely to have been created after supernovas, the team concluded.

The scientists then studied a single red giant star in the halo of the Milky Way with an odd chemical composition, including an overabundance of heavy elements like silver and uranium. These are too heavy to be forged in the cores of all but the most massive stars, the kind of stars that go hypernova.

Such elements could also be created when two massive and dense stellar remnants called neutron stars collide and merge. However, this star doesn't have certain other heavy elements that would be present after a neutron star collision.

This team considered the origins of this star using a model of the Milky Way that has been rapidly enriched with elements heavier than hydrogen and helium, which astronomers call metals, via the death of the first generation of stars.

The rapid speed at which the star spins and the fact it exists at the outskirts of the Milky Way led the team to conclude that this star escaped a metal-poor dwarf galaxy and was eventually dragged into our galaxy. The event that created it, they concluded, was the combination of a neutron star merger and an ordinary supernova.

No hypernova required. An asymmetrical supernova would be enough, the scientists found.

The team's research was published as two papers in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

On Oct. 13, 1773, a French astronomer named Charles Messier discovered the "Whirlpool Galaxy," also known as Messier 51, or M51.

Charles Messier was scanning the sky for objects that could confuse comet hunters when he catalogued the galaxy as M51. However, Messier wasn't able to see the spiral structure, and he didn't identify it as a galaxy.

Seventy-two years later, another astronomer named William Parsons saw the whirlpool shape, but he thought it was a spiral nebula. Eventually, Edwin Hubble found out that M51 and other features like it were actually galaxies.

Why it mattered

The Whirlpool Galaxy is located about 31 million light-years from Earth and just might be the textbook case of a spiral galaxy. But in 1773, it was just one of 51 (at the time of its discovery) of "comet-like 'objects to avoid'" in the night sky.

The Whirlpool Galaxy's designation as M51 marks it as the 51st non-comet object catalogued by Messier, who was the chief astronomer of the Marine Observatory in Paris dedicated to studying comets. According to a NASA account, Messier stumbled across his first non-comet object, M1 (also known as the Crab Nebula), while studying a comet in 1758. The objects looked like fuzzy blobs like comets, but didn't move like a comet. By 1773, at the time he first spotted M51, he had catalogued over four dozen such objects to help prevent astronomers from mistaking them for comets.

The Whirlpool Galaxy appears as a dazzling spiral in images by the Hubble Space Telescope, and has a magnitude of 8.4 on the brightness scale used by astronomers. That means it can be observed through a small telescope ("most easily during May," NASA says) in the constellation Venatici (the Hunting Dogs) in the northern sky, just below the handle of the Big Dipper star pattern.

Scientists suspsect the Whirpool Galaxy gets is striking spiral shape from a close interaction with its neighbor galaxy NGC 5195, which may have passed through M51's main disk about 500 million years ago, scientists with NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope have said.

"This gravitational tug of war may also have triggered an increased level of star formation in M51," they added in a statement. "The companion galaxy's pull would be inducing extra starbirth by compressing gas, jump-starting the process by which stars form."

Want more space history? Check out our full On This Day In Space Story archive and watch our On This Day In Space videos on YouTube.

The location of Earth's geographic poles has changed several times over the past 320 million years in a process known as true polar wander, according to measurements of ancient flooding brought about by sea level changes resulting from our planet's crust shifting relative to Earth's spin axis.

Such a shift can affect climate, both on local scales and globally, as regions that were by the poles find themselves moving down to lower latitudes and vice versa. This can then affect atmospheric circulation patterns, which affect climate across the world.

The changes would have affected the environments in which life developed and evolved, from the age of the dinosaurs through to some of our oldest primate ancestors.

True polar wander is not the same as a change in the rotational axis of the Earth. Currently, Earth spins at an angle of 23.4 degrees relative to the plane of its orbit around the sun, and this rotational axis can vary periodically over tens of thousands of years as a result of the Milankovitch cycles caused by the gravitational pull of the sun and planets.

True polar wander is different. Here, the angle of Earth's spin axis does not change relative to its orbital plane. Instead, Earth's crust and mantle shift relative to that rotational axis. This is because Earth is not perfectly spherical. Instead, it is oblate, with Earth's rotation causing the equator to bulge out and the poles to slightly flatten. Because Earth is not spherical, it has multiple axes of inertia, the largest one being aligned with the rotational axis.

These axes need to be balanced to prevent Earth's rotation from becoming chaotic. However, plate tectonics and indeed the Milankovitch cycles can upset that balance of mass, for example by causing more continental crust to congregate in one hemisphere than another.

To rebalance things, Earth's crust and mantle must become decoupled from our planet's core, which stays aligned with the rotational axis. In physical terms, if there is more continental crust in one hemisphere, the crust and mantle might rotate in that direction relative to the rotational axis and the Earth's core in order to balance itself. This sees the geographical locations of the poles change, hence the name 'true polar wander'.

Currently, true polar wander takes place at a rate of 10 centimeters (4 inches) per year, but figuring out when and how fast true polar wander has occurred in the past is not without its difficulties, not least since plate tectonics can mask and even mimic the signal of true polar wander.

Previous studies relied on paleomagnetism, the study of residual magnetic traces in ancient rocks, since the orientation of those magnetic traces would have varied depending upon where that rock was located relative to Earth's magnetic field. Alas, it's not a terribly accurate means of measuring true polar wander and scientists arrived at substantially different conclusions using this technique.

Nevertheless, based on paleomagnetism, scientists had concluded that true polar wander had been negligible, or slow to proceed, in the distant past. However, new results from researchers at the Centre for Planetary Habitability at the University of Oslo in Norway, led by Mathew Domeier, have shown this not to be the case.

Domeier's team looked through the geological record to track how sea level has changed across millions of years. True polar wander would bring about an identifiable pattern in sea-level changes as the oceans reacted in response to changes in the mass distribution of the planet. The sea level changes would be equal but opposite between hemispheres — sea level rises on one side of one hemisphere would be matched by rises on the other side of the opposite hemisphere, creating a 'quadrupolar' effect.

By using statistical modeling on maps of sea level changes across intervals of 10 million years, Domeier's team identified four periods of true polar wander: in the early Jurassic period 190—200 million years ago, the late Jurassic — early Cretaceous period 140—150 million years ago, during the mid-Cretaceous 90—100 million years ago and from the Oligocene period 30 million years ago through to the Miocene 20 million years ago.

The results show that, contrary to established opinion, true polar wander can happen in bursts that are relatively fast on geological timescales, with the results showing that during the episodes of true polar wander the Earth's surface shifted by as much as 0.6 degrees per million years relative to the spin axis. This is slow by human standards, but fairly fast on geological timescales, certainly quicker than plate tectonics.

Domeier's team were also able to rule out a suspected case of true polar wander around 300 million years ago when the last great supercontinent, Pangea, migrated northwards. It turns out that Pangea's movements were entirely due to plate tectonics.

The findings were published on Oct. 1 in the journal Science.

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

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

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

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

Why is dark energy so problematic?

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

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

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

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

So how can hydrogen help the investigation of dark energy?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This black hole didn't eat a star

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is it?

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

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

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

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

Why is it incredible?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zero margin for error

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

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

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

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

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

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

Looking ahead

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

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

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

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

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