For the past decade, astronomers thought they had a reasonable answer to that question. Around stars like our Sun, the two dominant planet types are sub-Neptunes, worlds resembling a shrunken Neptune, with thick gaseous envelopes and super-Earths, rocky planets up to ten times the mass of our own. Surveys had found them everywhere, orbiting star after star, and the assumption quietly took hold that these planets must be equally widespread across the Galaxy as a whole.
Studying the thing you can never step outside of and look back at is the fundamental problem facing every cosmologist who has ever looked up at the night sky. The Universe is not a laboratory you can peer into from above, it’s the thing you are already inside. The only way to truly test your ideas about how it works is to build a copy of it, run the clock forward from the Big Bang, and see if what emerges matches what your telescopes are actually telling you.
For most of human spaceflight history, the go to for communications has been radio waves, a technology that has served us remarkably well, but one that is beginning to show its age. When NASA's Artemis II mission carried four astronauts around the Moon in April the year, engineers quietly tested a laser communications terminal that could one day rewrite the rules of deep space exploration.
Our Sun is a bit of an outlier in the general stellar population. We typically think of stars as being solitary wanderers throughout the galaxy. But roughly half of Sun-like stars are locked in with more than one companion star. If there are two, it’s known as a “binary” system, but in many cases there are even more stars all collectively tied together by gravity. Astronomers have long debated why this happens, and a new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv from Ryan Sponzilli, a graduate student at the University of Illinois, makes an argument for a mechanism known as disk fragmentation.
There are tens of thousands of Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) that represent some of the most easily accessible resources in the solar system. If we can get to them at least. Planning trajectories to rendezvous with these miniature worlds is notoriously difficult, and requires a massive amount of computational power to calculate. But a new paper from astrodynamicist Alessandro Beolchi of Khalifa University of Science and Technology and his co-authors offers a much less computationally intensive way to find these trajectories, and has the added bonus of finding the much less energy-intensive paths to boot.
Early May is a good time to watch for a powerful yet often elusive meteor shower, the annual Eta Aquariids.
Despite outward appearances, the internal workings of ice giants like Uranus and Neptune are extremely chaotic. Pressures millions of times greater than Earth’s sea level combine with temperatures in the thousands of degrees to make some pretty weird materials. Now, a new paper from researchers at the Carnegie Institution, published in Nature Communications, describes a completely new state of matter that might exist in these extreme environments - a “quasi-1D superionic” phase.
You’re on the fourth human mission to Mars, and you’re told the Odyssey spacecraft designed to take you there will be the smoothest ride you’ll ever take. It features a newly christened electric propulsion engine which was in the late stages of testing during the first three missions. The mission starts and the spacecraft travels at a crawl, and you wonder if it’s broken. A week goes by and you’re now traveling at more than 400,000 kilometers (250,000 miles) per hour, and your mind is blown as to how fast you’re going, how quickly that happened, and that this mission might be more awesome than you thought.
You’re based at Artemis Station on the lunar south pole, and you’re monitoring your 12 autonomous rovers that are exploring the surrounding terrain for signs of water ice or other essentials minerals. They’re about 3 kilometers out when you suddenly get a NASA Alert for an incoming solar storm. You know the rovers won’t return to base before the storm hits, but you’re calm knowing the rovers all recently got retrofitted with the latest hair-thin nanotube shielding to protect them from the harsh electromagnetic waves and radiation.
Mercury is one of the four rocky planets of the Solar System, yet its chemistry is very different from Earth, Venus, and Mars. Missions to the planet show that it has an iron-poor, but sulfur- and magnesium-rich crust, which has implications for its interior makeup. Furthermore, it's known to planetary scientists as the most reduced planet in the Solar system. That means the chemicals it contains are dominated by sulfides, carbides, and silicides, as opposed to oxides like we see here on Earth.
Astronomers don't have to work hard to find binary stars in the Milky Way. They're common, even abundant. For a long time, they thought that these stars are unlikely to host exoplanets. The complex gravitational environment made things so chaotic, so the thinking went, that the planet formation process is disrupted.
One of the most intriguing puzzles in cosmology is the existence of supermassive black holes that seem to appear very early in the history of the Universe. Astronomers keep finding them at times when, by all that they understand about the infant Universe, they shouldn't be there. The standard theory of black hole formation suggests that they hadn't enough time to grow as massive as they appear to be. Yet, there they are, monster black holes with the mass of at least a billion suns. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has found a large population of them in early epochs, and they've been observed in very early quasars as well by such missions as the Chandra X-Ray Observatory.
Laser sail propulsion is an idea that won't go away. By aiming powerful Earth-based lasers at tiny spacecraft with light sails, tiny spacecraft can be accelerated to near-relativistic speeds without carrying fuel or an energy source, and without carrying any kind of propulsion system at all. There are clear advantages to this idea, if it can be implemented.
Our Sun is a patient rotator. Over its lifetime it has shed angular momentum steadily, swept away on the solar wind, slowed by the invisible drag of its own magnetic field. From birth to death, stars typically spin down to between a hundred and a thousand times slower than their original rotation rate. It's one of the most reliable patterns in stellar physics, and astronomers have long assumed that magnetic fields interacting with the churning plasma inside a star were the mechanism behind it.
Think of the night sky and you probably picture stars as individual points of light, scattered at random. But stars are rarely born alone. They arrive in vast clusters, forged deep inside enormous clouds of gas, and within each cluster the variety is staggering. Some stars are cool, dim, and modest, only a fraction of the Sun's bulk. Others are stellar monsters, ten times heavier than our Sun and blazing with a hundred thousand times its brilliance. They burn fast and die young, but while they last, they dominate everything around them.
I have spent a fair amount of time thinking about what happens to the human body and mind under extreme conditions. But here is something I had not fully considered… when astronauts arrive in space after a lifetime on Earth, their brains still think gravity is there. And that turns out to matter rather a lot.
On top of Kitt Peak in the Arizona Desert, a robotic surveyor just completed a five year mission to catalogue the positions of tens of millions of galaxies. The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) has now created the largest, most detailed 3D map of our universe ever constructed. And it’s not done yet, its main mission has been extended through 2028.
You’re in the lab analyzing Martian regolith samples within your cozy Mars habitat serving on fifth human mission to Mars. The power within the habitat has been flowing flawlessly thanks to the MARS-MES (Mars Atmospheric Resource & Multimodal Energy System), including the general habitat lighting, science lab, sleeping quarters, exercise equipment, the virtual reality headsets the crew use for rest & relaxation, oxygen and fuel generation, and water. All this from converting the Martian atmosphere into workable electricity.
Imagine a mountain range many times larger than the entire Earth, floating in mid-air, held up by nothing you can see. It sounds like something from a fantasy novel but that is essentially what solar prominences are and for decades, scientists have struggled to explain how they exist at all.
If you have ever pushed your finger against the hole of a bicycle pump and felt the air grow warm as you compressed it, you already understand the physics at the heart of a new discovery about our own Galaxy. Because it turns out the Milky Way has a hot side and a cool side and the reason why comes down to exactly the same principle.
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