For some time, astronomers have theorized that there is a connection between planetary mass and rotation. In the Solar System, Jupiter and Saturn both rotate rapidly, completing a rotation in roughly ten hours, while accounting for a significant fraction of the Solar System's rotational energy. Using the W.M. Keck Observatory on Maunakea, Hawai'i, a team of astronomers tested this predicted relationship by studying 32 gas giants and brown dwarfs in distant star systems - 6 giant planets larger than Jupiter and 25 brown dwarf companions

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are making a growing contribution to astronomy. As powerful telescopes and large automated surveys become more commonplace, the vast quantities of data they generate demand equally powerful diagnostic tools. The Vera Rubin Observatory and its enormous data-generating capacity drive the point home. The observatory's Legacy Survey of Time and Space generates up to 20 terabytes of data each night, and that data is processed at a dedicated facility.

The early universe is absolutely so far outside our understanding of how the world works it's hard to describe in words. Back then, the cosmos wasn’t filled with stars and galaxies but with a boiling soup of quarks and gluons, with a few microscopic black holes thrown in, occasionally detonating like depth charges. That’s the early universe theorized by a new paper, available in pre-print from arXiv, from researchers at Vrije Universiteit Brussel and MIT anyway.

The planet Mercury is the closest planet to the Sun, and also the most difficult for spacecraft to visit and explore. This is because as spacecraft get closer to Mercury, the Sun’s enormous gravity pulls in the spacecraft, greatly increasing its speed and making it hard to slow down without large amounts of fuel. But what if a spacecraft could both travel to and explore Mercury without fuel? This could drastically reduce mission costs while delivering impactful science.

The planet Venus is often called “Earth’s twin” due to the similar sizes, but the reality couldn’t be farther from the truth. Unlike Earth, which is hospitable to an estimated billions of lifeforms, Venus is not hospitable to life as we know it, at least on its surface. This is because the surface of Venus not only experiences an average temperature of 464 degrees Celsius (867 degrees Fahrenheit), but it also has crushing pressures approximately 92 times of Earth, or equivalent to approximately 1 kilometer (3,000 feet) below the ocean. These extreme surface conditions are why the longest spacecraft to survive on the Venusian surface is just over two hours.

With tomorrow’s launch of the Artemis II mission to the moon, NASA’s focus on our natural satellite is again gaining traction. To that end, two recent papers in the journals Earth and Space Science* and Icarus* point out how ordinary fiber optic technology could be deployed on the lunar surface to detect our ancient neighbor’s seismic activity.