NASA’s upcoming Psyche mission will send a small probe to a unique metal asteroid—a curious object that may be the exposed heart of a former planet. But to prepare for the 280-million-mile journey, engineers have had to attend to a million little details over the course of years of planning and construction. Working those out took more time than anticipated: NASA delayed Psyche’s launch last year, prompting concerns about the mission’s future and triggering an investigation into what caused the set back. On Monday, NASA announced that Psyche is thriving and on track for a new launch date in October 2023.

“The 2023 launch date is credible, and the probability of mission success is high,” said A. Thomas Young, chair of the independent review board that assessed Psyche’s missteps, at a news conference. NASA Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) Director Laurie Leshin confirmed the fall blast-off: Psyche is “green across the board, and on track for October launch.” Of the 18 weeks to go until launch, seven are buffer time—a pretty impressive margin for such an intense engineering project.

Psyche, announced in 2017, was first delayed in June 2022 when issues with its flight software arose during testing. NASA commissioned the review board soon after, which delivered its findings last fall. The review cited issues across the entire laboratory—understaffing, a lack of experienced managerial oversight, budget strain, and the COVID-19 pandemic—as factors contributing to the mission’s woes. JPL’s reckoning with this review had ripple effects, including the controversial indefinite pause of the VERITAS mission to Venus.

[Related: 5 ways we know DART crushed that asteroid (but not literally)]

Now, in May 2023, the review board has reassessed JPL’s readiness. The Psyche debacle may have raised questions about the ability of JPL to juggle building more than a dozen spacecraft, but NASA officials emphasized the concerns plaguing the center’s operations has been addressed. The progress made at JPL is “not only outstanding, but world-class as determined by our review board,” said Nicola Fox, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.

JPL’s changes include hiring more experienced staff (including luring back talent that left JPL for commercial spaceflight companies), reorganizing the engineering teams to focus on high-priority work, and updating their hybrid work policy to bring more people back in-person to the lab. “We’ve overcome our workforce issues, our missions are staffed,” said Leshin.

[Related: The asteroid that created Earth’s largest crater may have been way bigger than we thought]

If Psyche leaves Earth as scheduled in the fall, it will arrive at the asteroid 16 Psyche in 2029. The mission will hopefully reveal information about how planets form, and will confirm if 16 Psyche is the leftover metal core of a failed planet as hypothesized. Some companies even see the Psyche mission as a potential first step toward mining asteroids for precious metals, as the space rock contains approximately 10 quintillion dollars worth of materials. 

And things are looking up for other missions, too—especially since JPL recently delivered the NISAR Earth-radar satellite on schedule and is making good progress for next year’s launch of Europa Clipper. The laboratory’s strong progress is a good sign for the hopeful restart of VERITAS, which would be a huge win for planetary scientists and a monumental return to our sister planet.

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When you look up at the clouds, what do you see? A blob, a wisp, perhaps an elephant-shaped clump. It’s fun to get creative with the descriptions, but scientists have a formal classification system that can be useful to the everyday cloud watcher, too. We’ve made a field guide to types of clouds, so next time you’re enjoying a day outside, you can put your newfound knowledge of the skies to work.

What’s in clouds and their names?

Clouds are made up of droplets of water or tiny ice crystals floating in the planet’s atmosphere. They hold clues about the weather—like if it’s going to rain, snow, or worse—and the interesting physical and chemical cycles churning through the air.

“They are such an amazing feature of Earth that are simply fun to look at and study,” says Vanessa Maciel, an atmospheric scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles. Clouds are shaped by the many changing characteristics of the atmosphere: temperature, moisture, winds, and more. 

[Related: Make your own weather station with recycled materials]

Just like animal species, climate scientists have a system for naming clouds with genera, plus smaller subdivisions of species and varieties. These designations are based on their shape, appearance, and how high they are in the atmosphere. Each genus of clouds can be described as one of four main shapes, first categorized in 1803: cirro-form, cumulo-form, strato-form, and nimbo-form. Cirro-type clouds are the thin wisps; cumulo-type clouds are huge and fluffy; strato-type clouds are wide and flat layers; and nimbo-type clouds are the quintessential gray rain clouds. 

The astonishing diversity of clouds might seem overwhelming to a beginning cloud-gazer, but Maciel has advice on where to start. “A great way to narrow down the type of cloud you are seeing is to first try to estimate whether it is in the lower, middle, or high atmosphere,” she says.

High clouds

The highest clouds are the wispiest: cirrus, cirrocumulus, and cirrostratus. They generally form above 20,000 feet, and typically indicate a coming change in the winds or weather. In certain regions of the tropics, they can even indicate that hurricanes are on the way. Generally, the air gets colder higher up in Earth’s atmosphere, so cirrus and friends are made up of ice crystals that are stretched and spread by the winds, giving them their thin, strand-like shapes.

Cirrus are the thinnest wisps, whereas cirrocumulus appear more like a thin, rippled white sheet. Cirrostratus are a more homogenous sheer veil. If you see a bright halo forming around the sun, that might be the cirrostratus. When cirrus clouds stack together like ridges, almost like a rack of ribs, the variety is called vertebratus.

Maciel’s favorite cloud looks a bit like a cirrus cloud, but is actually something quite different. Nacreous clouds, also known as mother-of-pearl or ice polar stratospheric clouds, are made of very cold ice. When the sun goes down they catch the light and reflect brilliant colors. “These colors occur only during sunrise and sunset, and are created by the interaction between sunlight and the cloud’s ice crystals, which are smaller than that of a standard ice cloud,” says Maciel. “They are also pretty rare as they only occur at high atmospheric altitudes and high latitudes.” Your best bet of seeing them is near the planet’s poles.

Mid-level clouds

In the middle of the atmosphere, we start to see more clumps: altostratus and altocumulus. They can be found 6,500 to 20,000 feet up, and tell very different tales when it comes to weather—altocumulus often mean you’ve got a pleasant day ahead, but altostratus indicate a long bout of rain or snow. 

Altostratus appear as large, flat sheets that aren’t quite thick enough to block out the sun entirely. Altocumulus, on the other hand, look like a horde of little cotton balls scattered in the sky. You’ve likely seen a few different species and varieties of altostratus and altocumulus before, particularly cavum. This variety is a continuous sheet of cloud with a big chunk missing. Stratiformis is another common species of altocumulus, where high clouds appear like a patchy, ridged sheet. Similarly, if there are layers of cloud that cover the sun entirely, they may be a variety known as opacus.

Low clouds

Many kinds of clouds start close to the ground—6,500 feet or below—and extend high into the atmosphere. These clouds are called nimbostratus, stratus, stratocumulus, cumulus, and cumulonimbus. These clouds are made up of water droplets from the surrounding warm air, creating their quintessential fluffy look.

Nimbostratus are the gray gloomy clouds that indicate rain. Stratus clouds also create gloomy days as they cover the sky in a low sheet of dingy white. Stratocumulus are somewhat similar to altocumulus, but they have a darker shadow and don’t appear quite as bright white as their higher altitude counterparts. 

Cumulus and cumulonimbus clouds are the behemoths of the bunch. Cumulus are huge white clouds reaching high up into the sky—the classic cotton balls. Cumulonimbus, on the other hand, are imposing and a bit foreboding, with a high, flat top and a promise of rain storms.

[Related on PopSci+: Cloudy with a chance of cooling the planet]

Low clouds come with some of the oddest and most interesting varieties and features. This is where tubes or vortexes appear from clouds, called tuba. They can also show—for a brief moment, anyway—a feature that looks like a set of perfect crashing waves, known as fluctus. Although the fluctus pattern looks almost too good to be true, it’s a somewhat common consequence of the physics of fluid motions. Stratocumulus clouds can also put on a cow costume: That is, they can grow little nubs on their undersides that almost look like udders, known as mamma. Cumulus clouds can even put on a hat, an accessory cloud called pileus that pops up at the top of one of these huge cloud formations.

What clouds to look for now

This summer, you can expect all the fair weather clouds, plus some of the weirder ones that pop up with summer storms like pileus. “Summer usually has clear skies, unlike the overcasts typical of winter,” adds Maciel. “But as summer also has a lot of convection due to the warm surface temperature, you can expect to see cumulus clouds, which are your iconic fluffy and bright white clouds.”

Clouds are just as complex as their classifications, and they’re changing not just with the seasons, but also with the climate. As Earth’s temperature warms, the varieties we see might change, too. “In spite of their ubiquity, there is still a lot about clouds that we don’t know,” says Maciel. For now, though, see how many you can spot—and enjoy the beautiful views provided by our planet’s magnificent atmosphere.

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Our solar system has a suite of eight planets—rocky Mars and Earth, the ice giants, and massive gas planets—but other stars often have a much smaller group. Some suns have just one exoplanet orbiting around them. These loner worlds are often one specific type: A huge gas giant that orbits very close to its star, known as a hot Jupiter.

A newly discovered exoplanet, however, has challenged this view, showing that maybe not all hot Jupiters go solo. Last week, astronomers announced that a hot Jupiter orbiting a star 400 light years away has a pal: It shares its solar system with WASP-84c, a rocky planet so large it’s known as a super-Earth. This discovery was made public as a preprint, a research paper that has yet to undergo peer review, and submitted to the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society for official publication.

Hot Jupiters are a weird kind of planet. We don’t have any in our own solar system. Until the first was spotted, astronomers never expected them to exist. Gas giants like Jupiter usually only form far away from their stars, where things are cool enough for gas to stay safe from blazing solar heat. If a Jupiter-like planet has to be born at a distance, then, how can it get so close to its star? 

Astronomers have three main theories for how this happens. Two are gentle, and one is catastrophic. First, a hot Jupiter could move inward from its birthplace due to little gravitational nudges from the protoplanetary disk, a collection of dust and gas used to form planets in a star’s youth. Second, maybe we’re wrong about the theory that Jupiter-like planets must form far from stars. Instead, these planets are simply born where we see them. Both of these scenarios would allow hot Jupiters to have smaller friend planets hanging out nearby.

[Related: Ridiculously hot gas giant exoplanet is about to be swallowed by its dying sun]

But the third option is the most dynamic. Jupiters could form far out, but then encounter other planets that change the gas giants’ orbits. The gravity of the other planets would force a hot Jupiter into a stretched out, elliptical path, and then the gravity of the star would pull the gas giant in close, resulting in a circular, super-short orbit. In this violent dance, any low mass planets would be destroyed—creating the lonely hot Jupiter.

The best theory for the origin of this particular hot Jupiter, named WASP-84b, is the first—that a disk helped shepherd the planet through the solar system. Previous observations showed that the gas giant’s spin is aligned with the star’s, a sign that the large planet migrated within the protoplanetary disk instead of pinballing around with other planets. The discovery of super-Earth WASP-84c now adds more evidence to the case that this hot Jupiter formed with a nudge, not a planet-destroying bang—and that scenario may be more common than previously thought.

WASP-84c joins a growing list of smaller planetary buddies to hot Jupiters: WASP-47 b, Kepler 730 b, and WASP-132 b, to name a few. “The discovery of low-mass planetary companions like WASP-84c suggests that not all hot Jupiter systems formed under violent scenarios, as previously thought,” says lead author Gracjan Maciejewski from the Institute of Astronomy of the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun, Poland.

Maciejewski and his colleagues used NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) to spot WASP-84c. TESS hunts for exoplanets using the transit method, where a telescope watches a star for teensy dips in its brightness, caused by a dark planet passing in front. 

[Related: A deep-space telescope spied an exoplanet so hot it can vaporize iron]

WASP-84c “was too small in radius to have been discovered by the original WASP survey, who discovered the hot Jupiter,” according to Caltech astronomer Juliette Becker, who is not affiliated with the new discovery. “It’s a great example of what TESS can do,” she adds.

With the transit method, astronomers can figure out a planet’s dimensions. However, to find out how much it weighs, they need different data, from another exoplanet-detecting technique known as the radial velocity method. When WASP-84c’s discoverers gathered this extra data, they determined that the planet has about 15 times the mass of Earth. Like our Blue Marble, it’s probably made of iron and rocks, too.

Jonathan Brande, a University of Kansas astronomer not involved in the discovery, thinks such discoveries will become even more common as the James Webb Space Telescope brings in new exoplanet data, deepening our understanding of how these planet pairs came to be. “I would not be surprised if we see further results on this system in the near future,” he says.

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A team of more than 1,000 astronomers and college students just took a step closer to solving one of the long-lasting mysteries of astronomy: Why is the sun’s outer layer, known as the corona, so ridiculously hot? The solar surface is 10,000°F, but a thousand miles up, the sun’s corona flares hundreds of times hotter. It’s like walking across the room to escape an overzealous space heater, but you feel warmer far away from the source instead of cooler, totally contrary to expectations.

The research team used hundreds of observations of solar flares—huge ejections of hot plasma from our star’s surface—to determine what’s heating up the sun’s corona, in results published May 9 in The Astrophysical Journal. What’s really striking about this result, though, is how they did it: with the help of hundreds of undergrads taking physics classes at the University of Colorado, totaling a whopping 56,000 hours of work over multiple years.

Lead author James Paul Mason, research scientist and engineer at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, calls this a “win-win-win scenario.” He adds, “We were able to harness a ton of brainpower and apply it to a real scientific challenge, the students got to learn firsthand what the scientific process looks like.”

[Related: Volunteer astronomers bring wonders of the universe into prisons]

The classroom project began in 2020, when University of Colorado physics professor Heather Lewandowski found herself teaching a class on experimental physics, which suddenly had to pivot online due to the COVID-19 pandemic—quite the challenge, especially for a hands-on science course. Luckily, Mason had an idea for a solar flare project that needed a lot of hands, and Lewandowski, who usually researches a totally different topic in quantum mechanics, saw that as an opportunity for her students. 

“The question of why the sun’s corona is so much hotter than the ‘surface’ of the sun is one of the main outstanding questions in solar physics,” says Lewandowski. There are two leading explanations for this dilemma, known as the coronal heating problem. One theory suggests that waves in the sun’s mega-sized magnetic field push heat into the corona. The other claims that small, unseen solar flares called nanoflares heat it up, like using a thousand matches instead of one big blow torch. 

Nanoflares are too small for our telescopes to spot, but by studying the sizes of other larger flares, scientists can estimate the prevalence of these little radiation bursts. And, although artificial intelligence is improving every day, automated programs can’t yet do the kind of analysis that Mason and Lewandowski needed. Groups of students in Lewandowski’s class each used data on a different solar flare, getting into nitty-gritty detail to measure how much energy each one dumped into the corona. Together, their results suggest nanoflares might not be powerful enough to heat up the corona to the wild temperatures we see.

[Related: Small ‘sparks’ on the sun could be key to forecasting dramatic solar weather]

The scientific result is only half of the news, though. Lewandowski and Mason pioneered a new way to bring real research into the classroom, giving students a way to not only learn about science, but do it themselves. This type of large-scale student research effort is more common in biology and chemistry, but was pretty much unheard of in physics—until now. “The students participated in all aspects of the research from literature review, meetings with the principal investigator, a proposal phase, data analysis, and peer review of their analysis,” says Lewandowski. The involvement of many students, and their work in groups, is also a reminder that “science is inherently a collaborative endeavor,” she adds.

“I hope that we inspire some professors out there to try this with their classes,” says Mason. “I’m excited to see what kinds of results they’re able to achieve.”

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Our asteroid belt is home to more than a million space rocks, varying in size from a dwarf planet to dust particles, which float between Jupiter and Mars. Astronomers have just discovered another such belt—but this one circles a different star, not our sun.

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) detected this asteroid belt around the star Fomalhaut, only 25 light-years away. For years, scientists have studied Fomalhaut’s debris disk, a collection of rocky, icy, dusty bits from all the collisions that happen while planets are being created. This new data, published today in Nature Astronomy, shows the system in unprecedented detail, uncovering fingerprints of hidden worlds and evidence for planets smashing together.

Many telescopes have pointed to Fomalhaut over the years: the Spitzer Space Telescope, the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) in the high desert of Chile, and even the Hubble Space Telescope. Fomalhaut, which is much younger than our sun, may be a good likeness of our solar system near birth; since astronomers can’t time travel back to our sun’s formation, they instead observe other young stars, using these still-forming planetary systems as examples of what the process of making planets can look like.

Fomalhaut is an appealing choice to astronomers because it’s nearby, meaning it’s easier for astronomers to notice fine details. “This system was definitely one of the first we wanted to observe with JWST,” says co-author Marie Ygouf, research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab.

Before JWST, other observations revealed that Fomalhaut is surrounded by a ring of dust analogous to our own solar system’s Kuiper Belt, which contains all the little bits of ice and rock beyond Neptune. The new data from NASA’s superlative space telescope spot not only this outer ring, but also an inner ring more analogous to the asteroid belt. There’s a third feature, too—a giant clump of dust, lovingly referred to as the Great Dust Cloud. 

[Related: These 6 galaxies are so huge, they’ve been nicknamed ‘universe breakers’]

Between Fomalhaut’s outer Kuiper-Belt-like ring and its inner asteroid-belt-like ring is a gap. “The new gap that we see hints at the presence of an ice-giant mass planet, which would be an analog of what we see in the solar system,” like Neptune or Uranus, says lead author András Gáspár, astronomer at the University of Arizona. This unseen planet could be “carving out the gaps” via gravity, explains fellow Arizona astronomer and co-author Schuyler Wolff.

Fomalhaut’s asteroid belt has a curious tilt, appearing at a different angle from the outer ring, as though something knocked it off kilter. A knock, in fact, might explain the misalignment, the researchers say—a major collision could have tilted the asteroid belt, creating the massive dust cloud, too. 

All signs in Fomalhaut “point to a solar system that is alive and active, full of rocky bodies smashing into each other,” says co-author Jonathan Aguilar, staff scientist at Space Telescope Science Institute, home of JWST’s mission control.

JWST was uniquely suited to take these photos of Fomalhaut’s dust. The dust glows brightest in the mid-infrared, at long wavelengths unreachable by most other observatories. A particularly powerful telescope is necessary, too, to resolve enough details—and JWST is the only scope with both these features. The space telescope’s Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) also has a coronagraph, a small dot to block out a bright star and reveal the surrounding dust.

“Mid-infrared wavelengths are so important for debris disk observations because that’s where you observe dust emission, and the distribution of dust tells you a lot about what’s going on,” says Aguilar. The new view of Fomalhaut “showcases the scientific power of JWST and MIRI even just a year into operations,” he adds.

[Related: NASA sampled a ‘fluffy’ asteroid that could hold clues to our existence]

It’s certainly interesting to see what our solar system may have looked like in its infancy—but Fomalhaut isn’t an exact clone. Fomalhaut’s Kuiper Belt and asteroid belt doppelgangers are more spread out and contain more material than those features in our solar system. Although Fomalhaut has more movement and smashing than our solar system does now, our planets had a similar phase in the distant past, known as the Late Heavy Bombardment. Astronomers hope debris disks seen by JWST will help them figure out the details of how solar systems are born, and how they grow up to look like our own set of planets.

“We are at this frontier of unexplored territory, and I’m especially excited to see what JWST finds towards planet-forming disks,” says University of Michigan astronomer Jenny Calahan, who was not involved in the new findings. “Looking at these JWST images I was reminded of the moment that I got glasses for the first time,” adds Calahan. “It just changes your whole perspective when the world (or a debris disk) comes into focus at a level that you aren’t used to.”

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Our Earth has siblings—the seven other planets in our solar system—but it doesn’t have a twin with which to share its ring of space. Earth sails through its orbit all alone. Other solar systems, though, might have zanier families that chase each other around a sun: twins, triplets, or even quattuorvigintuplets (that’s 24 Earth-sized planets in a single orbit!). 

Computer simulations by an international team of astronomers illustrated how two dozen planets can share the same orbit, in research published this spring in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. These wacky configurations can be stable for billions of years, even outliving the stars they’re around. It’s pretty unlikely that nature would create packed planetary orbits, though, which is why researchers suggest a detection of such a system could be a sign of intelligent alien life—possibly even an interstellar message that could exist for eons.

“Our paper explores one additional branch of possible planetary systems that could potentially exist,” says lead author Sean Raymond, CNRS Researcher at the Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Bordeaux. “I love that it’s so unexpected and weird, and that so many planets can end up sharing the same orbit.”

Multiple planet systems, like our solar system, are often referred to as peas in a pod. But these co-orbiting planets could be “pearls on a necklace,” says University of Kansas astronomer Jonathan Brande, who was not affiliated with the new research.

Nobody had proposed observing two planets in the same orbit, though, until an article posted to the preprint server arXiv last week—but most exoplanet astronomers are skeptical, especially since the signal wasn’t seen in data from other major exoplanet-hunting telescopes like TESS. This paper was written by a group of amateur astronomers who captured observations with small, commercially-available telescopes. “I don’t think it’s the sort of thing you’d be able to pull off in your backyard,” says Brande, regarding the supposed detection. 

[Related: These 6 exoplanets somehow orbit their star in perfect rhythm]

There are a few known examples of co-orbits that involve smaller objects. Our solar system actually has a few such strange orbits, known as horseshoe or tadpole orbits, depending on their shapes. Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids—soon to be visited for the first time by the spacecraft Lucy—share the gas giant’s orbital path as tadpoles, oscillating around points before and after Jupiter in its track around the sun. Two of Saturn’s moons, Janus and Epimethus, orbit the ringed planet together in a horseshoe, periodically swapping places. 

Since objects in our solar system share orbits, it seems reasonable that there might be exoplanets out there that share paths as well. “There are plenty of exoplanet systems in which the planets seem to fill every available niche of stable real estate,” says Raymond. This new research pushes this concept to the extreme, seeing how many planets can cram into the same orbit and remain stable. 

The research team’s simulations also reveal that such co-orbiting planets would have distinct signals for astronomers here on Earth to observe. The Kepler Space Telescope and other space observatories can reveal so-called transit timing variations (TTVs), where the gravitational tug between nearby planets ever-so-slightly changes when a planet passes in front of its star. The TTVs from a system of 24 planets with the mass of Earth sharing an orbit would be large enough for astronomers to see, but it would take months to years of regular monitoring to notice the effect, according to NASA Jet Propulsion Lab astronomer Rob Zellem.

Although academics haven’t been persuaded by the latest observation of supposed co-orbiting planets, there is certainly an important role for amateur astronomers in exoplanet science, Zellem adds.“Given the capability of the observers..we could definitely use their expertise,” he says, especially through citizen science projects such as NASA’s Exoplanet Watch. 

[Related: This alien world could help us find Planet Nine in our own solar system]

A robust detection of co-orbiting planets could be truly exciting, though—not only an observation of nature’s extreme diversity, but possibly even a sign of alien life. “Something like an engineered co-orbiting planetary might not be unambiguously artificial, but would be weird enough to prompt intensive further study,” says Brande.

The study authors think these odd orbits would actually be a perfect technosignature, or sign of intelligent life beyond Earth. Co-author David Kipping, an astronomer at Columbia University, explains that once an advanced civilization constructs an unnatural ring of co-orbiting planets, it wouldn’t require any power to maintain and would be visible for billions of years—a perfect combo for an interstellar message. “The likelihood of this happening really comes down to whether anyone is out there with the capability and will to do this,” he says. “We have no idea. But if we don’t look, we’ll never know.”

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On April 19, 2021, a little more than a century after the Wright Brothers’ first test flight on Earth, humans managed to zoom a helicopter around on another planet. The four-pound aircraft, known as Ingenuity, is part of NASA’s Mars2020 exploration program, along with the Perseverance rover.

The dynamic duo made history again this month, as Ingenuity celebrated its landmark 50th flight. The small aircraft was built to fly only five times—as a demonstration of avionics customized for the thin Mars air, not a key part of the science mission—but it has surpassed that goal 10 times over with no signs of slowing down.

[Related: InSight says goodbye with what may be its last wistful image of Mars]

“Ingenuity has changed the way that we think about Mars exploration,” says Håvard Grip, NASA engineer and former chief pilot of Ingenuity. Although the helicopter started as a tech demo, proving that humans could make an aircraft capable of navigating the thin Martian atmosphere, it has become a useful partner to Percy. Ingenuity can zip up to 39 feet into the sky, scout the landscape, and inform the rover’s next moves through the Red Planet’s rocky terrain.

In the past months, Perseverance has been wrapping up its main science mission in Jezero Crater, a dried-up delta that could give astronomers insight on Mars’ possibly watery past and ancient microbial life. Ingenuity has been leap-frogging along with the rover, taking aerial shots of its robotic bestie and getting glimpses into the path ahead. This recon helps scientists determine their priorities for exploration, and helps NASA’s planning team prepare for unexpected hazards and terrain.

Unfortunately, the narrow channels in the delta are causing difficulties for the helicopter’s communications with the rover, forcing them to stay close together for fear of being irreparably separated. Ingenuity also can’t fall behind the rover, because its limited stamina (up to 3-minute-long flights at time) means it might not be able to catch up. Over the past month, the team shepherded the pair through a particularly treacherous stretch of the drive, though, and they’re still going strong—even setting flight speed and frequency records at the same time. Meanwhile, Percy has been investigating some crater walls and funky-colored rocks, of which scientists are trying to figure out the origins.

Ingenuity has certainly proven the value of helicopters in planetary exploration, and each flight adds to the pile of data engineers have at their disposal for planning the next generation of aerial robots. “When we look ahead to potential future missions, helicopters are an inevitable part of the equation,” says Grip.

What exactly comes next for Ingenuity itself, though, is anyone’s guess. “Every sol [Martian day] that Ingenuity survives on Mars is one step further into uncharted territory,” Grip adds. And while the team will certainly feel a loss when the helicopter finally goes out, they’ve already completed their main mission of demonstrating that the avionics can work. All the extra scouting and data collection is a reward for building something so sturdy. 

[Related: Two NASA missions combined forces to analyze a new kind of marsquake]

They’re now continuing to push the craft to its limits, testing out how far they can take this technology. For those at home who want to follow along, the mission actually provides flight previews on Ingenuity’s status updates page. 

“It may all be over tomorrow,” says Grip. “But one thing we’ve learned over the last two years is not to underestimate Ingenuity’s ability to hang on.” 

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Humans have used radio waves to communicate across Earth for more than 100 years. Those waves also leak out into space, a fingerprint of our presence propagating through the cosmos. In more recent years, humans have also sent out a stronger signal beyond our planet: communications with our most distant probes, like the famous Voyager spacecraft.

Scientists recently traced the paths of these powerful radio transmissions from Earth to multiple far-away spacecraft and determined which stars—along with any planets with possible alien life around them—are best positioned to intercept those messages. 

The research team created a list of stars that will encounter Earth’s signals within the next century and found that alien civilizations (if they’re out there) could send a return message as soon as 2029. Their results were published on March 20 in the journal Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific.

“This is a famous idea from Carl Sagan, who used it as a plot theme in the movie Contact,” explains Howard Isaacson, a University of California, Berkeley astronomer and co-author of the new work. 

[Related: UFO research is stigmatized. NASA wants to change that.]

However, it’s worth taking any study involving extraterrestrial life with a grain of salt. Kaitlin Rasmussen, an astrobiologist at the University of Washington not affiliated with the paper, calls this study “an interesting exercise, but unlikely to yield results.” The results, in this case, would be aliens contacting Earth within a certain timeframe.

As radio signals travel through space, they spread out and become weaker and harder to detect. Aliens parked around a nearby star probably won’t notice the faint leakage from TVs and other small devices. However, the commands we send to trailblazing probes at the edge of the solar system—Voyager 1, Voyager 2, Pioneer 10, Pioneer 11, and New Horizons—require a much more focused and powerful broadcast from NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN), a global array of radio dishes designed for space communications.

The DSN signals don’t magically stop at the spacecraft they’re targeting: They continue into interstellar space where they eventually reach other stars. But electromagnetic waves like radio transmissions and light can only travel so fast—that’s why we use light-years to measure distances across the universe. The researchers used this law of physics to estimate how long it will take for DSN signals to reach nearby stars, and for alien life to return the message. 

The process revealed several insights. For example, according to their calculations, a signal sent to Pioneer 10 reached a dead star known as a white dwarf around 27 light-years away in 2002. The study team estimates a return message from any alien life near this dead star could reach us as soon as 2029, but no earlier. 

[Related: Nothing can break the speed of light]

More opportunities for return messages will pop up in the next decade. Signals sent to Voyager 2 around 1980 and 1983 reached two stars in 2007: one that’s 26 light-years away and a brown dwarf that’s 24 light-years away, respectively. If aliens sent a message right back from either, it could reach Earth in the early 2030s.

This work “gives Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence researchers a more narrow group of stars to focus on,” says lead author Reilly Derrick, a University of California, Los Angeles engineering student.  

Derrick and Isaacson propose that radio astronomers could use their star lists to listen for return messages at predetermined times. For example, in 2029 they may want to point some of Earth’s major radio telescopes towards the white dwarf that received Pioneer 10’s message.

But other astronomers are skeptical. “If a response were to be sent, our ability to detect it would depend on many factors,” says Macy Huston, an astronomer at Penn State not involved in the new study. These factors include “how long or often we monitor the star for a response, and how long or often the return signal is transmitted.”

There are still many unknowns when considering alien life. In particular, astronomers aren’t certain the stars in this study even have planets—although based on other exoplanet studies, it’s likely that at least a fraction of them do. The signals from the DSN are also still incredibly weak at such large distances, so it’s unclear how plausible it is for other stars to detect our transmissions.

“Our puny and infrequent transmissions are unlikely to yield a detection of humanity by extraterrestrials,” says Jean-Luc Margot, a University of California, Los Angeles radio astronomer who was not involved in the recent paper. He explains that our radio transmissions have only reached one-millionth of the volume of the Milky Way. 

“The probability that another civilization resides in this tiny bubble is extraordinarily small unless there are millions of civilizations in the Milky Way,” he says. But if they’re out there, there might be a time and place to capture the evidence.

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Since 1995 scientists have found more than 5,000 exoplanets—other worlds beyond our solar system. But while space researchers have gotten very good at discovering big planets, smaller ones have evaded detection.

However, a novel astronomy detection technique known as microlensing is starting to fill in the gaps. Experts who are a part of the Korea Microlensing Telescope Network (KMTNet) recently used this method to locate three new exoplanets about the same sizes as Jupiter and Saturn. They announced these findings in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics on April 11. 

How does microlensing work?

Most exoplanets have been found through the transit method. This is when scientists use observatories like the Kepler Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope to look at dips in the amount of light coming from a star. 

Meanwhile, gravitational microlensing (usually just called microlensing) involves searching for increases in brightness in deep space. These brilliant flashes are from a planet and its star bending the light of a more distant star, magnifying it according to Einstein’s rules for relativity. You may have heard of gravitational lensing for galaxies, which pretty much relies on the same physics, but on a much bigger scale.

The new discoveries were particularly unique because they were found in partial data, where astronomers only observed half the event.

“Microlensing events are sort of like supernovae in that we only get one chance to observe them,” says Samson Johnson, an astronomer at the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab who was not affiliated with the study. 

Because astronomers only have one chance and don’t always know when events will happen, they sometimes miss parts of the show. “This is sort of like making a cake with only half of the recipe,” adds Johnson.

[Related: Sorry, Star Trek fans, the real planet Vulcan doesn’t exist]

The three new planets have long serial-number-like strings of letters and numbers for names: KMT-2021-BLG-2010Lb, KMT-2022-BLG-0371Lb, and KMT-2022-BLG-1013Lb. Each of these worlds revolves around a different star. They weigh as much as Jupiter, Saturn, and a little less than Saturn, respectively. 

Even though the researchers only observed part of the microlensing events for each of these planets, they were able to rule out other scenarios that could confidently explain the signals. This work “does show that even with incomplete data, we can learn interesting things about these planets,” says Scott Gaudi, an Ohio State University astronomer who was not involved in the published paper.

The exoplanet search continues

Microlensing is “highly complementary” to other exoplanet-hunting techniques, says Jennifer Yee, a co-author of the new study and researcher at The Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian. It can scope out planets that current technologies can’t, including worlds as small as Jupiter’s moon Ganymede or even a few times the mass of Earth’s moon, according to Gaudi.

The strength of microlensing is that “it’s a demographics machine, so you can detect lots of planets,” says Gaudi. This ability to detect planets of all sizes is crucial for astronomers as they complete their sweeping exoplanet census to determine the most common type of planet and the uniqueness of our own solar system. 

Astronomers are honing their microlensing skills with new exoplanet discoveries like those from KTMNet, ensuring that they know how to handle this kind of data before new space telescopes come online in the next few years. For example, microlensing will be a large part of the Roman Space Telescope’s planned mission when it launches mid-decade. 

“We’ll increase the number of planets we know by several thousand with Roman, maybe even more,” says Gaudi. “We went from Kepler being the star of the show to TESS [NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite] being the star of the show … For its time period, Roman [and microlensing] will be the star of the show.”

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On Wednesday and Thursday, a particularly strange “hybrid” eclipse is coming to Australia, Indonesia, and some other parts of Southeast Asia, but you don’t have to be there to watch. Don’t miss it—the next one won’t happen for nearly another decade.

How to see the April 20 solar eclipse in person

The exact time of the eclipse will vary depending on your location, so you’ll need to check when it will be visible for you. Timeanddate.com has a particularly handy tool for figuring this out. To use it, click Path Map at the top of the page and see if you’re going to be under any part of the eclipse’s path. If so, zoom in to pinpoint where you are and click on the map to bring up an information box that shows when the event will be visible in local time.

Even if you’re in the partial eclipse zone, it’s worth stepping outside to take a peek at this celestial happening. “We are going to get coffee and freak out about the sky. It’s going to be fun,” says University of Melbourne astronomer Benji Metha about his eclipse plans. The moon will cover only about 10 percent of the sun where he is in southeastern Australia.

[Related: April 2023 stargazing guide]

If you’re in the eclipse’s path, be sure to come prepared. Never look directly at the sun. Eclipse glasses are readily available online, but make sure the ones you’re buying aren’t fake. Too late to buy? You can make your own eclipse projector instead. Unlike almost every other astronomical event, solar eclipses happen in the daytime, so you won’t really be able to spot other stars or deep sky objects at the same time. The sun and moon will be the only ones on stage.

Timeanddate is also hosting an eclipse livestream in collaboration with Perth Observatory in western Australia, where roughly 70 percent of the sun will be covered. Like Exmouth, Perth is 12 hours ahead of New York City, so live video will start at 10 p.m. ET on April 19 and continue until the partial eclipse ends around 12:46 a.m. ET on April 20.

Tune in, and you’ll be joining solar scientists around the world who are particularly interested in this event and the data they can gather from it. “I look forward to this eclipse, because it is a long-anticipated party,” says Berkeley heliophysicist Jia Huang. “A hybrid eclipse is very rare.”

When is the next eclipse?

If you miss the show, there are sure to be some incredible photos posted from the event, and you will be able to watch recordings online afterward. But if you want to see an eclipse in person, a few are coming to the States soon enough.

First, an annular solar eclipse will travel from Oregon to Texas on October 14, 2023, followed several months later by the next North American total solar eclipse from Texas up through Maine on April 8, 2024.

What to know about the four types of solar eclipses

Solar eclipses happen whenever Earth’s moon gets between us and the sun, aligning to block out the sunlight and cause an eerie daytime darkness. Eclipses are predictable, thanks to centuries of observational astronomy across many cultures, and “we can now forecast these events with incredible accuracy,” Metha says. It’s a good thing we know when they’re coming so we’re not surprised. “Imagine how many car accidents a sudden solar eclipse would cause if people were not expecting it,” he adds.

These celestial events come in a few flavors: total, partial, annular, and hybrid. In a total eclipse, the moon fully blocks out the sun. For a partial eclipse, the sun and moon aren’t quite lined up, so only a chunk of the sun is covered. Similarly, for an annular eclipse, some of the sun remains exposed—but this type happens when the moon is at its farthest point from Earth and appears smaller, creating a ring of light when it lines up with the sun. Hybrid eclipses, like the one happening this week, shift between total and annular due to the curvature of Earth.

Solar eclipses trace paths along Earth’s surface, with a path of totality—where you can see a total eclipse—in the center, surrounded by various shades of partial eclipse. The upcoming April 20 eclipse path of totality clips the northwestern corner of Australia and passes through the islands of Timor, Indonesia, and Papua New Guinea. The entirety of Australia, the Philippines, Malaysia, and parts of other Southeast Asian countries will experience at least a partial eclipse.

[Related: How worried should we be about solar flares and space weather?]

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Few places in the solar system get hotter than the surface of the sun. But contrary to expectations, the tenuous tendrils of plasma in the outermost layer of its atmosphere—known as the corona—are way more searing than its surface.

“It is very confusing why the solar corona is farther away from the sun’s core, but is so much hotter,” says University of California, Berkeley space sciences researcher Jia Huang. 

The solar surface lingers around 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit, while the thin corona can get as hot as 2 million degrees. This conundrum is known as the coronal heating problem, and astronomers have been working on solving it since the mid-1800s.

“Simply speaking, solving this problem could help us understand our sun better,” says Huang. A better understanding of solar physics is also “crucial for predicting space weather to protect humans,” he adds. Plus, the sun is the only star we can send probes to—the others are simply too far away. “Thus, knowing our sun could help understand other stars in the universe.”

A brief history of the coronal heating problem

During the 1869 total solar eclipse—an alignment of the sun, moon, and Earth that blocks out the bulk of the sun’s light—scientists were able to observe the faint corona. Their observations revealed a feature in the corona that they took as evidence of presence of a new element: coronium. Improved theories of quantum mechanics over 60 years later revealed the “new element” to be plain old iron, but heated to a temperature that was higher than the sun’s surface.

[Related: We still don’t really know what’s inside the sun—but that could change very soon]

This new explanation for the puzzling 1869 measurement was the first evidence of the corona’s extreme temperature, and kicked off decades of study to understand just how the plasma got so hot. Another way of phrasing this question is, where is the energy in the corona coming from, and how is it getting there? 

“We know for sure that this problem hasn’t yet been resolved, though we have many theories, and the whole [astronomy] community is still enthusiastically working on it,” says Huang. There are currently two main hypotheses for how energy from the sun heats the corona: the motion of waves and an explosive phenomenon called nanoflares.

Theory 1: Alfvén waves

The surface of the sun roils and bubbles like a pot of boiling water. As the plasma convects—with hotter material rising and cooler material sinking down—it generates the sun’s immense magnetic field. This magnetic field can move and wiggle in a specific kind of wave, known as Alfvén waves, which then push around protons and electrons above the sun’s surface. Alfvén waves are a known phenomenon—plasma physicists have even seen them in experiments on Earth. Astronomers think the charged particles stirred up by the phenomenon might carry energy into the corona, heating it up to shocking temperatures.

Theory 2: Nanoflares

The other possible explanation is a bit more dramatic, and is kind of like the sun snapping a giant rubber-band. As the sun’s plasma tumbles and circulates in its upper layer, it twists the star’s magnetic field lines into knotted, messy shapes. Eventually, the lines can’t take that stress anymore; once they’ve been twisted too far, they snap in an explosive event called magnetic reconnection. This sends charged particles flying around and heats them up, a happening referred to as a nanoflare, carrying energy to the corona. Astronomers have observed a few examples of nanoflares with modern space telescopes and satellites.

The coronal heating mystery continues

As is usually the case with nature, it seems that the sun isn’t simply launching Alfvén waves or creating nanoflares—it’s more than likely doing both. Astronomers just don’t know how often either of these events happen.

[Related: Hold onto your satellites: The sun is about to get a lot stormier]

But they might get some straightforward answers soon. The Parker Solar Probe, launched in 2018, is on a mission to touch the sun, dipping closer to our star than ever before. It’s currently flying through some outer parts of the corona, providing the first up-close look at the movements of particles that may be responsible for the extreme temperatures. The mission has already passed through the solar atmosphere once, and will keep swinging around for a few more years—providing key information to help scientists settle the coronal heating problem once and for all.

“I would be very confident that we could make big progress in the upcoming decade,” says Huang.

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Astronomers recently detected an explosion so large they dubbed it the BOAT—the brightest of all time. This explosion—known now as GRB 221009A—was a gamma-ray burst (GRB), a flash of extremely high-energy light that resulted from the death of a colossal star.

This detonation is the brightest burst at X-ray and gamma-ray energies since human civilization began. It is 70 times brighter than any observed before. Papers describing this result and others related to the burst were published in a focus issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters in March.

“A burst this bright arrives at Earth only once every 10,000 years,” says Eric Burns, a Louisiana State assistant professor and astronomer involved in the detection. 

[Related: Black hole collisions could possibly send waves cresting through space-time]

So-called long GRBs—gamma-ray bursts that last longer than two seconds—materialize when a massive star runs out of fuel and collapses into a black hole. This catastrophic collapse causes powerful jets of material to stream out, collide with gas around the former star, and produce high-energy gamma rays. We can see this explosion from Earth if the jet is pointed directly at our planet. 

Astronomers are constantly monitoring the sky for GRBs and other bright, short-lived bursts of light—and that’s how they found the BOAT. The research team that works with NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, is notified each time a certain camera, known as the Burst Alert Telescope (BAT), spots a new GRB.

“This one was bright enough to trigger BAT twice,” says Maia Williams, a Penn State astronomer and lead author of one of the GRB 221009A papers. 

The initial detection of the burst was based on data gathered from the Ultraviolet/Optical Telescope onboard SWIFT and NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. After “it was seen by instruments on more than two dozen satellites,” explains Burns. These include the NICER x-ray telescope on the International Space Station, NASA’s NuSTAR x-ray telescope, NASA’s new Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) satellite, and even one of the Voyager spacecraft.

With this vast trove of information on the BOAT, astronomers realized it was a “more-complicated-than-usual GRB,” says Huei Sears, a Northwestern University astronomer and graduate student not involved in the discovery.

Why was the BOAT so bright? First, it’s nearby (in cosmic terms, about 1.9 billion light-years away), which adds to its extreme shine—just like a light bulb appears brighter to your eyes closer up than across a room. But its brightness isn’t just a quirk of its proximity. It’s also “intrinsically the most energetic burst ever seen,” says Burns. 

Astronomers suspect the jets blasted out of the black hole that created the BOAT were narrower  than usual. Imagine the jet setting on a garden hose—and by lucky coincidence this particular hose was aimed directly at Earth. However, why these jets behaved like this is not understood. 

“Scientifically, the BOAT has proven most of our existing models for these events to be incomplete,” says Burns.

[Related: Astronomers now know how supermassive black holes blast us with energy]

Gamma-ray bursts are at their brightest in their first moments but continue with an afterglow for much longer—possibly several years in the case of the BOAT. Williams and her team plan to continue observing the BOAT once a week with SWIFT as long as they can. They’ll also use NASA’s powerhouse James Webb and Hubble space telescopes to get a look at other wavelengths, capturing as much as they can from this rare happening.

“The BOAT is so important because it is one of those events that breaks what we know,” says Sarah Dalessi, a University of Alabama astrophysicist and graduate student involved in the detection. “This is truly a once-in-a-lifetime event.”

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I’ve always loved learning about the planets and stars, but it sure takes a lot to get me outside on a cold, dark night to see them with my own eyes. This week, though, there’s a celestial lineup I don’t want to miss—and you shouldn’t either!

What’s the big deal here?

Although there have been some wild theories about strange happenings during planetary alignments—like an increase in natural disasters—those have generally been debunked. Instead, the reason a planetary alignment is a big deal is that it’s simply cool to see. “You get to see pretty much the whole solar system in one night,” says Rory Bentley, UCLA astronomer and avid stargazer.

Usually, the planets are spread across the sky, visible at different times of the night (even into the early morning). They’re technically always in some version of a line—all our solar system’s planets appear on the ecliptic, an invisible arc across the sky tracing the plane where everything orbits the sun. If the planets are close enough together, though, they appear to be in an almost straight line. 

[Related: Astronomers just mapped the ‘bubble’ that envelopes our planet]

That’s precisely what’s happening on March 28. The five planets will come within 50 degrees of each other, a tight bunch compared to their usual spread, giving stargazers of all ages an opportunity to meet our planetary neighbors.

How to see the March 28 alignment

The time to spot this planetary parade is right after sunset on the March 28—no more than about 45 minutes after sundown, since Jupiter and Mercury will both disappear below the horizon fairly quickly. You’ll want to make sure you have a clear view of the western horizon, where the sun sets and Jupiter and Mercury will follow close behind. 

Jupiter will be closest to the horizon, easy to spot even in the lingering sunlight of dusk since it’s so bright. Mercury will be nearby—possibly visible to the naked eye, and definitely visible with binoculars. A bit higher up in the sky you’ll find Venus, shining intensely from its ultra-reflective thick clouds. It’s accompanied by Uranus, just a bit above—and for this one, you’ll definitely need those binoculars. Bringing up the tail end of the parade is Mars, up even higher in the sky near the crescent moon. (Bonus: you can see the moon, too, while you’re at it.)

If you’re not completely sure how to tell what’s a planet, know that the planets you see with your naked eye will generally be brighter than everything around them, and if you look really closely they won’t twinkle quite like stars.

You should be able to spot at least three of the parade participants (Jupiter, Venus, and Mars)—possibly even a fourth (Mercury)—with just your eyes if you’ve got good eyesight and/or a clear sky. Grab some binoculars or a telescope, and you can collect all five planets. Venus and Uranus will be visible until they dip below the horizon about three hours after sunset, and Mars stays out past midnight.

Another benefit to using a decently sized pair of binoculars or a telescope is that you’ll get to see a slew of neat planetary features as the alignment glides by. You should be able to spot Saturn’s famous rings, and possibly even some of the colorful cloud bands of Jupiter. Although you won’t notice any surface features on Venus, you will be able to determine what phase it’s in, since Venus has phases (crescent, full, etc.) similar to our moon. Keep in mind that it’s easier to see details when you have clear, still skies, and are looking overhead. The closer your target gets to the horizon, the more of Earth’s atmosphere you end up looking through, making viewing more difficult.

The Pleiades, a star cluster known across many cultures as the seven sisters, also shines between Venus and Mars. You may recognize this particular arrangement of stars from the logo on Subaru automobiles—it’s no coincidence, because Subaru is actually the Japanese name for this cluster. You’ll likely be able to see this one with just your eyes, even in a big city like Los Angeles.

[Related: Why we turn stars into constellations]

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Since its discovery in 2017, the interstellar object ‘Oumuamua has been a point of fascination—and sometimes obsession—for astronomy fans. As the first object we’ve seen from another solar system, it’s naturally drawn a lot of interest, with its strange tube-like shape and surprisingly small size. It even accelerated at one point in its orbit, which happens regularly with comets—but ‘Oumuamua didn’t have the usual gassy tail, leading some to even propose it may be an alien ship.

A new hypothesis, published on March 22 in the journal Nature, proposes a different explanation for ‘Oumuamua’s anomalous orbit. Astronomers Jennifer Bergner and Darryl Seligman say the half-mile-long object is just a comet after all, but that its time in interstellar space changed its chemistry. Instead of water causing the extra propulsion, ‘Oumuamua released nearly invisible hydrogen.

“It’s exciting that we can explain the strange behavior of ‘Oumuamua without needing to resort to any exotic physics,” says Bergner, an astrochemist at the University of California, Berkeley and lead author on the new paper.

“Hopefully this discovery will put to rest any outlandish ideas about ‘Oumuamua being an alien probe,” adds University of Washington astrobiologist Kaitlin Rasmussen, author of the upcoming book Life in Seven Numbers: The Drake Equation Revealed.

Comets are chunks of ice and debris left over from the process of planet formation, lurking at the edge of our solar system. On their extremely long and stretched out orbits, they occasionally dive in towards the sun. There, the sun’s bright rays vaporize some of the comet’s ice and dust to make the fuzzy coma and the sweeping tails we see. 

[Related: Scientists finally solve the mystery of why comets glow green]

‘Oumuamua may have begun its life as a typical comet around another star—rich with water ice—before being thrust out into open space by the chaos of a young solar system. (Our solar system likely spewed out similar chunks of detritus in its early days.) On its voyage between the stars, Bergner and Seligman propose that ‘Oumuamua was bombarded with energetic particles known as cosmic rays. These high-energy particles broke the bonds between hydrogen and oxygen in water molecules, creating molecular hydrogen (H₂) trapped in the crystalline structure of the ice.

Once ‘Oumuamua swung by the sun, the heat rearranged the crystals of its ice, releasing the molecular hydrogen to propel the interstellar interloper and cause its observed acceleration, almost like a rocket booster. “It’s more plausible than the other ideas,” says UCLA astronomer David Jewitt, “including those relying on carbon monoxide (which was not detected), nitrogen ice (which is relatively hard to find), and, of course, the spaceship idea.”

“I think the authors have a very interesting hypothesis,” agrees Caltech planetary scientist Qicheng Zhang, who is not affiliated with the research team. The real significance of this result, though, will come with further observations, he adds. 

‘Oumuamua was only invisible for a short time when it passed within 15 million miles of Earth in 2017; now on Pluto’s fringes, it’s far beyond the reach of even our largest telescopes. As an alternative to direct data, Bergner and Seligman suggest studying a similar effect on ‘Oumuamua-sized comets from our own solar system. But there’s one catch—we haven’t spotted any solar system comets that small yet. Astronomers hope the next generation of telescopes, including NASA’s recently launched James Webb Space Telescope, will spot the first of those objects.

[Related: The Milky Way could have dozens of alien civilizations capable of contacting us]

Casey Lisse, an astronomer at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab, also suggests that a comet’s H₂ may be observable if it splits apart into two hydrogen atoms under the influence of the sun’s ultraviolet rays. The signal on a ‘Oumuamua look-alike could be picked up by certain satellites like SOHO, NASA’s long-running solar space telescope, “which are known to measure bright comets,” he says.

Astronomers also expect to root out many more interstellar objects in the coming years; they recorded the second one, known as comet 2I/Borisov, in 2019. “There’s approximately one similar object in the inner solar system at any given time,” says Seligman, Cornell astronomer and co-author on the Nature study. “When we get the Rubin Observatory and the NEO [Near-Earth Object] Surveyor going, we’ll be discovering way more.”

Astronomers think of these interstellar objects as a window into other solar systems: the closest peek we’ll get at the building blocks of other planets. “Any object of interstellar origin is incredibly valuable to us because it’s bringing clues about the processes going on beyond our solar system,” says Bergner.

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Water is key for life here on Earth, and it will be key for humans to travel around the solar system as well. It’s a heavy resource to lug aboard a spacecraft, so it’s best to get it from your destination when possible. Thankfully, there’s already some water on the moon—and astronomers just got a better look at where it is exactly.

New observations from the SOFIA airborne observatory (which completed its final flight in September 2022) produced a detailed map of water molecules near the moon’s South Pole. These results, recently accepted to the Planetary Science Journal and presented at the annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference last week, are answering a critical question for both geology and future human exploration: Where can we find water on the moon?

“We don’t really know the basics of where [the water] is, how much, or how it got there,” says Paul Hayne, a planetary scientist at the University of Colorado not affiliated with the new research.

[Related: Mysterious bright spots fuel debate over whether Mars holds liquid water]

NASA’s 2010 LCROSS mission first sparked interest in the southern end of the moon when its radar revealed frozen water stored in places where the sun’s light can’t reach, like the bottoms of craters. A slew of follow-up observations by India’s Chandrayaan probes added further evidence for lunar water, but there was a catch—what astronomers identified as possible water molecules (H₂O) could have been a different arrangement of hydrogen and oxygen called hydroxyl (OH). SOFIA, however, had the power to search for a wider range of molecular signatures, meaning it could scan for a surefire sign of water instead of something that could be confused for hydroxyl. 

“These observations with SOFIA are important because they definitively map the water molecules on the sunlit surface of the moon,” says NASA Lunar scientist Casey Honniball, co-author on the new study. An accurate map of the icy areas can help planetary scientists distinguish between different ways water moves across the lunar surface, and learn how the life-giving compound got there in the first place. 

“We see more water in shady places, where the surface temperature is colder,” says William T. Reach, director of SOFIA and lead author on the paper. This is similar to how ski slopes facing away from the sun retain more of their snow here on Earth.

Researchers are considering two main scenarios to explain the origins of lunar water: evaporating water from comets that crashed into the moon, or water trapped in volcanic minerals created long ago. The SOFIA data hasn’t helped them to narrow down the source yet. “These are observations, and they don’t come labeled with a nice, tidy explanation,” adds Reach.

Although his team is still figuring out the provenance of the observed water, detecting it at all could be a boon for future human space exploration. A confident claim of water on the south pole of the moon explains “why we are targeting these regions so intently for the next phase of human and robotic lunar exploration,” says UCLA planetary scientist Tyler Horvath, who was not involved in the project.

Unfortunately, SOFIA can’t continue mapping the moon’s water—the modified Boeing 747 and telescope are now retired to the Pima Air & Space Museum in Tucson, Arizona. “I hope these results help pave the way for another one of these airborne observatories to be developed in the near future,” says Horvath.

[Related: Saying goodbye to SOFIA, NASA’s 747 with a telescope]

Despite the project’s untimely end, SOFIA managed to complete a large number of observations of the moon—among other celestial targets—in its final flights. In fact, it produced so much data that scientists are still sorting through it all. SOFIA’s discoveries “will continue for years to come,” says Honniball, and could prepare teams for future missions, all tackling questions about H₂O. Some prime examples include CalTech’s Lunar Trailblazer orbiter launching later this year, NASA’s water-hunting Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER), and of course, the US Artemis program, which aims to land humans on the satellite’s southern regions as early as 2025.

These upcoming projects also promise the tantalizing prospect of delivering lunar soil samples back to Earth, something that hasn’t happened (for Americans, at least) since the Apollo program. “In the lab, even a single grain is like a world of its own revealing stories about the history and evolution of the material on the moon,” says Reach. Actually working with samples of lunar ice in a hands-on experiment could finally determine what form water takes on the moon.

Until then, planetary scientists will keep working through SOFIA’s moon maps, squeezing out every last drop of information they can.

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The universe has a dark side—it’s filled with dark matter and dark energy. Dark matter is the unseen mass floating around galaxies, which physicists have searched for using giant vats of ice, particle colliders, and other sophisticated techniques. But what about dark matter’s stranger sibling, dark energy? 

Dark energy is the term given to something that is causing the universe to expand faster and faster as time goes on. The great puzzle facing cosmologists today is figuring out the identity of that “something.”

“We can tell you a lot about the properties of dark energy and how it behaves,” says astrophysicist Tamara Davis, a professor at the University of Queensland in Australia. “However, we still don’t know what it is. That’s the big question.”

How do we know dark energy exists?

Astronomers have long known that the universe is expanding. In the early 1900s,  Edwin Hubble observed galaxies in motion and created Hubble’s Law, which relates a galaxy’s velocity to its distance from us. At the end of the 20th century, though, new detections of supernovae in far-off galaxies revealed a conundrum: The expansion of the universe isn’t constant, but is instead speeding up.

“The fact that the universe is accelerating caught us all by surprise,” says University of Texas at Austin astrophysicist Katherine Freese. Unlike the attractive force of gravity, dark energy must create “some sort of repulsive behavior, driving things apart from one another more and more quickly,” adds Freese.

Many observations since the 1990s have confirmed that the universe is accelerating. Exploding stars in distant galaxies appear fainter than they should have been in a steadily-expanding universe. Even the cosmic microwave background—the remnant light from the first clear moments in the universe’s history—shows fingerprints of dark energy’s effects. To explain the observed universe, dark energy is a necessary component of our mathematical models of cosmology.

[Related: Dark matter has never killed anyone, and scientists want to know why]

The term dark energy was coined in 1998 by astrophysicist Michael Turner to match the nomenclature of dark matter. It also conveys that the universe’s accelerating expansion was a crucial, unsolved problem. Many scientists at the time thought that Albert Einstein’s cosmological constant—a “fudge factor” he included in general relativity to make the math work out, also known as lambda—was the perfect explanation for dark energy, since it fit nicely into their models. 

“It was my belief that it was not that simple,” says Turner, now a visiting professor at UCLA. He views the accelerating universe as “the most profound problem” and “the biggest mystery in all of science.” 

Why does dark energy matter?

The Lambda-CDM model, which says we live in a universe that consists of only 5 percent normal matter—everything you’ve ever seen or touched—plus 27 percent dark matter and a whopping 68 percent dark energy, is “the current paradigm in cosmology, says Yale astrophysicist Will Tyndall. It “rather ambitiously seeks to incorporate (and explain) all of cosmic history,” he says. But it still leaves a lot unexplained, including the nature of dark energy. “After all, how can we have so little understanding of something that supposedly constitutes 68 percent of the universe we live in?” adds Tyndall. 

Dark energy is also a major deciding factor in our universe’s ultimate fate. Will the universe be torn apart in a Big Rip, in which everything is shredded apart atom by atom?  Or will it end in a whimper? 

These scenarios depend on whether dark energy changes with time. If dark energy is just the cosmological constant, with no variation, our universe will expand eternally into a very lonely place; in this scenario, all the stars beyond our local cluster of galaxies would be invisible to us, too red to be detected.

If dark energy gets stronger, it might lead to the  event known as the Big Rip. Maybe dark energy weakens, and our universe crunches back down, starting the cycle all over with a new big bang. Physicists won’t know which of these scenarios lies ahead until they have a better handle on the nature of dark energy.

What could dark energy actually be? 

Dark energy shows up in the mathematics of the universe as Einstein’s cosmological constant, but that doesn’t explain what physically causes the universe’s expansion to speed up. A leading theory is a funky feature of quantum mechanics known as the vacuum energy. This is created when pairs of particles and their antiparticles quickly pop into and out of existence, which happens pretty much everywhere all the time. 

It sounds like a great explanation for dark energy. But there’s one big issue: The value of the vacuum energy that scientists measure and the one they predict from theories are wildly and inexplicably different. This is known as the cosmological constant problem. Put another way, particle physicist’s models predict that what we think of as “nothing” should have some weight, Turner says. But measurements find it weighs very little, if anything at all. “Maybe nothing weighs nothing,” he says. 

[Related: An ambitious dark energy experiment just went live in Arizona]

Cosmologists have raised other explanations for dark energy over the years. One, string theory, claims that the universe is made up of tiny little string-like bits, and the value of dark energy that we see just happens to be one possibility within many different multiverses. Many physicists consider this to be pretty human-centric in its logic—we couldn’t exist in a universe with other values of the cosmological constant, so we ended up in this one, even if it’s an outlier compared to the others.

Other physicists have considered changing Einstein’s equations for general relativity altogether, but most of those attempts were ruled out by measurements from LIGO’s pioneering observations of gravitational waves. “In short, we need a brilliant new idea,” says Freese.

How might scientists solve this mystery?

New observations of the cosmos may be able to help astrophysicists measure the properties of dark energy in more detail. For example, astronomers already know the universe’s expansion is accelerating—but has that acceleration always been the same? If the answer to this question is no, then that means dark energy hasn’t been constant, and the lives of physics theorists everywhere will be upended as they scramble to find new explanations.

One project, known as the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument or DESI, is already underway at Kitt Peak Observatory in Arizona. This effort searches for signs of varying acceleration in the universe by cosmic cartography. “It is like laying grid-paper over the universe and measuring how it has expanded and accelerated with time,” says Davis. 

Even more experiments are upcoming, such as the European Euclid mission launching this summer. Euclid will map galaxies as far as 10 billion light-years away—looking backward in time by 10 billion years. This is “the entire period over which dark energy played a significant role in accelerating the expansion of the universe,” as its mission website states. Radio telescopes such as CHIME will be mapping the universe in a slightly different way, tracing how hydrogen spreads across space.

New observations won’t solve everything, though. “Even if we measure the properties of dark energy to infinite precision, it doesn’t tell us what it is,” Davis adds. “The real breakthrough that is needed is a theoretical one.” Astronomers have a timeline for new experiments, which will keep marching forward, recording better and better measurements. But theoretical breakthroughs are unpredictable—it could take one, ten, or even a hundred-plus years. “In science, there are very few true puzzles. A true puzzle means you don’t really know the answer,” says Turner. “And I think dark energy is one of them.”

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Star Trek fans knew they would lose the planet Vulcan someday in a fiery implosion at the hands of the Romulans—but they probably didn’t expect it to lose the planet in real life, too. Now reality is once again following fiction: The exoplanet once considered to be the real Vulcan has been erased, based on a new analysis of old data.

The 2018 discovery of the exoplanet known as 40 Eri b, which is located around the real-life star canonically orbited by Spock’s fictional homeworld, has turned out to be a false alarm. In a new research paper accepted for publication in the Astronomical Journal, astronomers used years of observations to re-analyze many previous exoplanet detections, including that of 40 Eri b. Unfortunately, astronomers hadn’t actually found Vulcan after all.

“As we continue to study objects with better and more precise instruments, reevaluating things we thought we already knew can lead to new conclusions about what’s really going on,” says Ohio State University astronomer Katherine Laliotis, lead author on the new work. In the case of 40 Eri b, the signal previously thought to be a planet turned out to be activity on the star’s surface. This work, she adds, is “a reminder that re-studying and reproducing already published results is a very valuable use of time.”

40 Eri b was originally detected using the radial velocity method, in which astronomers analyze the different wavelengths of light coming from a star. As a planet orbits a star, it’ll tug on its sun ever so slightly. When this tug pushes the star away from Earth, the star appears redder—thanks to the Doppler effect—and if it moves toward us, it appears bluer. With this method, astronomers believed they found 40 Eri b: A Neptune-sized planet 16 light-years away, so close to its star that a year would last only 42 days. This wouldn’t have been a particularly pleasant or habitable planet, but it made waves thanks to its sci-fi ties.

[Related: Newly discovered exoplanet may be a ‘Super Earth’ covered in water]

Some astronomers, such as NASA astronomer Eric Mamajek, immediately expressed doubts about the supposed detection. That’s because the time it took for this planet to complete one orbit was suspiciously close to the time the star takes to rotate. His suspicions were right. By tracing a feature of the light spectrum known to be part of the star, Laliotis and collaborators confirmed the star’s rotation rate, marking the end of the possible planet 40 Eri b. 

They didn’t specifically set out on a mission to kill Vulcan, though. This work was part of a bigger analysis, looking into all of NASA’s top picks for future exoplanet exploration—and 40 Eridani just happened to be on the list. Astronomers are always collecting new data, observing different stars, but “​​many planetary systems haven’t been officially updated since they were published in the early 2000s,” according to Laliotis.

Astronomers are already starting preparation for the next big space telescope, known as the Habitable Worlds Observatory. This future NASA mission aims to take photos of Earth-like planets around sun-like stars, allowing scientists to directly look into these exoplanets’ atmospheres for oxygen and other signs of life. Laliotis’s work fits right into this plan—she says this study aimed to figure out “what [planetary] systems we already understand well, what systems we have a misunderstanding of, and what systems need to be observed a lot more in the coming years.” This review will help make sure the future telescope’s precious observing time is used wisely.

“NASA is planning to spend billions of dollars on future missions to fly telescopes to study planets,” says Jessie Christiansen, project scientist at NASA’s Exoplanet Archive. “Imagine if this had been one of the targets! It’s not real!”

Although astronomers are, of course, glad to see rigorous scientific work being done, they’ll also admit that they are a bit sad about losing an exoplanet with such a cool sci-fi crossover. “I’m sad whenever any planet gets disproven, but this one hit especially hard because I’ve been using it for a few years now as a provocative, intriguing tie between the real worlds we’re discovering and the fictional worlds we know and love,” says Christiansen, who also started a lively Twitter conversation on the topic.

[Related: In a first, James Webb Space Telescope reveals distant gassy atmosphere is filled with carbon dioxide]

This doesn’t completely rule out a real-world equivalent of Vulcan, though. The Neptune-sized planet discovered in 2018 isn’t there, but it’s possible a smaller planet—one we haven’t seen yet—still exists around the star 40 Eridani. With current technology and observations, astronomers simply can’t detect any planet smaller than 12 times Earth’s mass on an orbit similar to Earth’s. “This means there’s still a chance that Vulcan exists. In fact, there’s even a chance that Vulcan could be in the habitable zone for the star,” says Laliotis.

Even if Vulcan is gone for now, Trekkie astronomers will still find ways to have fun with sci-fi and outer space. “There are still many other planets in the Star Trek universe that haven’t been disproven,” adds Louisiana State University astronomer Alison Crisp. One potential planet orbiting Wolf 359, for example, could still exist—the site of a major Star Trek battle. 

UCLA astronomer Isabella Trierweiler actually sees a way this saga fits into Star Trek canon. “Until 2063, Vulcans are just observing Earth and waiting for us to develop warp capabilities,” Trierweiler says. “Maybe they were able to adjust our observations to hide the planet, maybe they found super strong cloaking devices, or maybe Vulcan was briefly one of those planets that phases in and out of dimensions!” Whatever Vulcan’s fate, humanity has a few more years of technological development ahead of us until we reach these sci-fi dreams. And perhaps those lofty goals will help us find a real planet around 40 Eridani.

The post Sorry, Star Trek fans, the real planet Vulcan doesn’t exist appeared first on Popular Science.

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The fabric of space and time is wrinkly and warped. Gravity tugs on this fabric, causing indents and wiggles—some of which are observable to humans as gravitational waves. When two black holes, neutron stars, or other extremely massive objects smash into each other, they emit these waves, which were first heard by the revolutionary LIGO experiment in 2016.

After that first detection seven years ago, physicists thought their mathematical models described the data well enough. Now, physicists have just determined that gravitational waves released from collisions between two black holes are more complex than previously thought. Two new studies from Caltech and Johns Hopkins—concurrently published on February 22 in Physical Review Letters with matching results—use computer models to reveal so-called nonlinear effects in black hole collisions, in which gravitational ripples influence each other like waves on a shore.

“Nonlinear effects are what happens when waves on the beach crest and crash,” said Keefe Mitman, Caltech astronomer and lead author on one of the studies, in a press release. “The waves interact and influence each other rather than ride along by themselves. With something as violent as a black hole merger, we expected these effects but had not seen them in our models until now.”

[Related: ‘Rogue black holes’ might be neither ‘rogue’ nor ‘black holes’]

These new studies investigate a particular part of the black hole-black hole merger, known as ringdown because it resembles the vibrations of a struck bell. When black holes collide, they temporarily form one lumpy and unstable large black hole that needs to settle down into a simple, round shape. This settling and shifting releases the gravitational waves that make up the ringdown. Since the mathematics describing this process is unwieldy, prior work assumed gravitational waves don’t interact with each other. 

But this new work tackles those complicated events and discovered the waves in fact influence each other. In computer simulations, the Caltech group modeled what happens when two black holes collide in orbits that aren’t perfect circles, and the Johns Hopkins team smashed two black holes together head-on at almost the speed of light. Both these scenarios are particularly energetic, leading to the nonlinearities they expect to see. 

To explain why energetic collisions have this result, Mitman likens this to two people on a trampoline. Two jumpers who gently hop up and down shouldn’t affect each other that much, as he points out in the press release. “But if one person starts bouncing with more energy, then the trampoline will distort, and the other person will start to feel their influence,” Mitman said. “This is what we mean by nonlinear: the two people on the trampoline experience new oscillations because of the presence and influence of the other person.”

Without accounting for nonlinear effects, physicists may be wrong about the size and other properties of the black holes they detect—of which there have been many with LIGO over the past few years. Plus, these details are key for making sure our understanding of the laws of physics are fully correct, such as checking the intricacies of Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity.

[Related: We’re still in the dark about a key black hole paradox]

“Black hole ringdowns offer a great playground to test Einstein’s theory of relativity,” says Sumeet Kulkarni, a University of Mississippi astronomer not affiliated with the study. “But to use ringdowns as a test, one must understand them completely. This study takes us a step closer to this understanding.”

For now, however, nonlinearities are only seen in the realm of supercomputers. Humanity’s best black hole detectors aren’t sensitive enough to spot these small effects. Future detector projects are already in the works, though, and researchers are already starting to plan for the future. 

“An obvious next step is to gauge whether these effects will be detectable in LIGO or next generation detectors,” says Mark Ho-Yeuk Cheung, physicist and lead author of the Johns Hopkins study. The Cosmic Explorer and the Einstein Telescopes are two upcoming gravitational wave experiments that may be able to do the job. “While the prospects are promising,” Cheung adds, “we still need to quantify more precisely how and when they will be detected.”

Not only do the pair of simulations shed new light on the mysteries of black holes, they also illustrate the beauty of the scientific process: two teams of scientists producing independent results, complementing and supporting the others’ findings. As Mitman tells Popular Science, “I’m just charmed that we have yet another beautiful example of theorists and numerical relativists coming together to discover something fascinating about the way black holes work.”

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In our solar system neighborhood, there’s one planetary family that we haven’t met properly: the ice giants, Uranus and Neptune. Thanks to Voyager mission flybys, we’ve said hello and we know their faces—but we’ve never stopped over for a visit. Now, planetary scientists have decided to make long-overdue plans to walk over and ring the doorbell for a house tour.

The 2022 Planetary Science Decadal Survey, an influential document for planning future missions run by the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, recommended NASA prioritize sending an orbiter and probe to Uranus in the coming decades. Past decrees from this process have launched some of the most exciting projects of the 2020s, including the Mars Sample Return and the upcoming Europa Clipper mission.

With eight planets and countless smaller rocks to explore in our solar system, how could planners possibly settle on a single destination—especially when that decision involves millions, or billions, of dollars and affects hundreds of careers? In a recent commentary for Science, Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab planetary scientist Kathleen Mandt argues why Uranus is the right choice—and other researchers seem to agree.

“We’ve sent missions to every other planet, to comets, to asteroids, and to trans-Neptunian objects. We’ve sent missions out of the solar system and to the surface of the sun…. Uranus and Neptune are the enigmas of the solar system,” says Will Saunders, an astronomer at Boston University who studies Uranus’s atmosphere.

Humanity’s last up-close glimpse of Uranus, and its sibling ice giant, Neptune, was back in the 1980s with the Voyager probes. Although Neptune would be nearly equally scientifically interesting—its captured Kuiper Belt Object moon, Triton, is of particular curiosity due to its icy volcanoes and more—the extra billion miles to that planet was the dealbreaker.

“The main reason that we chose Uranus first is because it is easier to get to,” Mandt tells Popular Science. “And we have already waited more than three decades for a mission to these planets. Going to Uranus first means less risk and a mission that can arrive at the planet sooner.”

For a planetary mission, “soon” means within the next few decades—the trip to Uranus takes 10 to 15 years, and engineers still need to design and build the spacecraft. As of now, the plan is to launch by 2032, hopefully reaching Uranus by the mid-2040s. The mission would have two parts: an orbiter, which would circle the planet for at least five years, and a probe to dive into the clouds and collect information about the Uranian atmosphere. 

Some key measurements that astronomers have for Jupiter and Saturn are still missing for Uranus, such as the amount of noble gases and the ratio of different types of nitrogen. The probe will measure these chemical markers because they’re fingerprints of how and when the planet formed. “The formation of the four giant planets and the way they moved to new locations had a major impact on the whole solar system,” says Mandt. This planetary rearrangement “may be how we got water on Earth,” she adds, and that motion launched many of the objects in the Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud to their current positions.

[Related: Expect NASA to probe Uranus within the next 10 years]

Plus, Uranus is the only planet fully knocked on its side: It’s tilted 98 degrees, which is wild compared to Earth’s 23-degree angle. That causes some quirks in its atmosphere. Planetary scientists are puzzled by the resulting patterns of clouds and wind on Uranus, which they hope to resolve in this mission.

Uranus also has 27 moons, some of which may host oceans below their thick icy surfaces. Subsurface oceans are, of course, one of astrobiologists’ favorite targets for extraterrestrial life, and the satellites of Uranus are no exception. One of the major surprises from Voyager was that Uranus’s five largest moons—Miranda, Ariel, Umbriel, Titania, and Oberon—weren’t “cold dead worlds,” as Mandt describes in the article, but were instead geologically active.

“Simply put, I want another picture of Miranda before I die,” says Adeene Denton, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory. “Miranda is, to me, one of the coolest and most unusual places in the solar system, covered in geologic terrains we haven’t seen anywhere else.”

The lessons from Uranus aren’t bound to our solar system, either. In the past few decades, exoplanet astronomers have found that Uranus-sized worlds may be the most common type of planet out there. An up-close study of our local example will be invaluable for astronomers trying to understand distant exoplanets—particularly helpful will be determining properties of Uranus’s core and internal structure, such as whether it’s made of rock or ice.

[Related: Uranus blasted a gas bubble 22,000 times bigger than Earth]

“We have not seen Uranus up close since before I was born. That was before we knew about the existence of exoplanets,” says University of Bristol astronomer Hannah Wakeford. “This mission to Uranus is going to change our understanding of our solar system, and planets across our galaxy.”

The upcoming Uranus orbiter and probe mission has the potential to be a revolutionary event in science, bringing our understanding of the ice giants up to par—doing what Cassini did for Saturn and Juno for Jupiter. “An orbiter is really what we need to do profound science that characterizes the entirety of the Uranian system,” says Denton. “There is so much to see and do, and committing to an orbiter is really truly worth it.” 

Plus, it will return incredible images of the edges of our solar system, certain to excite and inspire future scientists and space fans. Whenever NASA comes knocking, it always packs cameras, and this meet-and-greet is no exception.

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Astronomy outreach programs in states, which usually consist of visits to K-12 schools or public lectures, are expanding their reach into prisons, such as at Princeton’s Prison Teaching Initiative and the University of Washington eSTEAM (Education in Science, Technology, Engineering, Astrobiology/Art, and Math) program.

Access to education is a key issue in the mass incarceration epidemic facing America. As of 2010, statistics from the Prison Policy Initiative show at least 25 percent of incarcerated people haven’t finished high school, compared to 13 percent of Americans as a whole. Similarly, far fewer incarcerated individuals have done any post-secondary education before their time in prison—and, to make the situation worse, they lack access to such education once inside. 

Prison college courses in the US are often under-funded (particularly due to a 1994 law barring incarcerated students from Pell Grants), or even entirely absent, leaving millions with no opportunities for educational progress during their sentences. Youth under 18 are required to have some access to education, but these programs are often inadequate and inconsistent as well. Yet, prison education is well-known to have incredibly positive effects—it reduces long-term costs of incarceration, reduces recidivism, and reduces violence within prisons. “If you don’t have a degree, the likelihood that you’ll return to prison in the first year is 70 percent. And if you do have a degree it’s like 13 percent,” explains Erin Flowers, Princeton astronomy PhD candidate and Prison Teaching Initiative Fellow.

Prison education also significantly improves outcomes for incarcerated individuals, such as lower unemployment rates, higher incomes, better health, and increased opportunities for their kids and families. And importantly, education reconnects incarcerated people with the fundamental human rights of knowledge and curiosity, including the ability to know about space. Astronomy courses, in particular, are key to promoting science literacy—an important part of any education in today’s tech-driven world.

[Related: On surviving—and leaving—prison during a pandemic]

Princeton’s Prison Teaching Initiative (PTI) started in 2005 with astronomy faculty and postdoc researchers teaching math classes to incarcerated students, and has now grown into a large program offering coursework across multiple disciplines towards Associate’s and Bachelor’s degrees from partner institutions to local adult prison populations. More than 350 students have earned their degrees across multiple institutions within the New Jersey Department of Corrections. It incorporates full 15-week introduction to astronomy courses and lab-based physics courses through Raritan Valley Community College, which fulfill students’ general science requirements. Flowers explains that her incarcerated students take these courses to further their education and post-education goals as active learners in the program, and many have expressed that they “appreciate having [the program] as an outlet, and they appreciate having something to set their minds to.” 

University of Washington’s eSTEAM program, on the other hand, is only a few years old, and builds off the legacy of other programs such as PTI and NASA’s Astrobiology for the Incarcerated by bringing prison education to the Seattle community. eSTEAM uniquely focuses on tutoring and teaching imprisoned dozens of kids under the age of 18. The program currently helps with astronomy, physics, and any other subjects that the youth need support in. Their goal is to keep students on track with their education, filling in the gaps of their primary classes and supporting them with one-on-one attention and tutoring. The teaching team is also currently designing experiments in astrobiology, the study of life beyond Earth, to bring to the facilities, given that the kids generally don’t get much exposure to fun topics beyond the standard curriculum. One of their working ideas is to have students make a Winogradsky column, a sort of test tube environment that shows how chemistry, physics, and biology intertwine to enable life.

Both programs face significant challenges, as teaching in a prison environment is far different from the usual classroom. With the New Jersey Department of Corrections, instructors must follow facility guidelines regarding dress, behavior, and materials, says Flowers. “For a lab-based class, there’s been a lot of MacGyvering and trial and error trying to adapt those lessons” for use inside the prison, she continues. “Many items we take for granted in a traditional physics classroom are prohibited for safety reasons, and thus suitable alternatives must be found that still maintain the intellectual rigor required for the course.”

Internet access within facilities is also often limited, preventing students from doing their own research outside class or looking into possible careers. Samantha Gilbert, a University of Washington astrobiology graduate student and eSTEAM volunteer, considers a key part of her role as “being that connection to the outside world” for the incarcerated individuals she works with.

She goes on to describe widespread challenges beyond logistics—particularly, how the prison system is designed to punish those incarcerated, even if the supposed goal is rehabilitation. She says the system tends to consider their outreach work “rewarding the students, rather than the basic things that any kid should have access to, regardless of the mistakes they’ve made in their life.”

Although many teachers and volunteers inside prisons want what’s best for the students, there are still many who treat them as lesser due to their status. Gilbert recalls a particularly heartbreaking scene, where she was “watching a child grab all of the work that they had been doing out of the trash, because apparently a security guard got really mad and threw it all away.”

Both Flowers and Gilbert see their astronomy and education outreach as crucial to building a future where prisons are no longer a place to discard people from society. Instead, they dream of a future where prison is more rehabilitative, or even abolished entirely in favor of other community-based solutions.

Gilbert says her work in juvenile facilities makes “you feel even more strongly that they should be allowed to turn their lives around.” She continues to say that this is true of the adult population as well, even if they tend to garner less instinctual sympathy from many people. She urges community members to build connections with their local incarcerated populations in whatever way they can.

[Related: A Palestinian brings stargazing to his homeland, and finds wonder alongside heartbreak]

Educational outreach provides new hope and possibilities for incarcerated people, and re-opens the door to science for many who have been denied it previously—especially groups who are disproportionately affected by policing. “The problem isn’t that marginalized people aren’t excited about science early on. The problem is the way marginalized people are systemically pushed out of science,” says Gilbert.

The factors impacting participation in astronomy and other sciences stretch far beyond traditional school systems, and outreach programs are finally expanding their efforts to match. “By using the knowledge that we have and the resources that we have,” says Gilbert, they’re opening prisons up to the planets, stars, and all the space that lies between.

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ChatGPT’s cousin was just hired by NASA. On February 1, NASA and IBM announced a new partnership between the two major organizations, aimed at applying artificial intelligence (AI) tools to climate science, scanning research literature for quick answers and identifying features in Earth science data.

This is far from NASA’s first foray into artificial intelligence, or even the agency’s first collaboration with IBM. In 2014, NASA collaborated with the tech giant to infer measurements of the sun’s extreme radiation when a sensor failed on the Solar Dynamics Observatory. A year later, NASA started a summer bootcamp to bring scientists together with Silicon Valley engineers, known as the Frontier Development Lab. 

Plus, since the dawn of machine-learning techniques, scientists across NASA’s domains have been using these tools in their own projects, from looking at the sun to designing autonomous data-gathering robots. As AI has grown in power and complexity, though, it has become harder for individual researchers to harness the full potential of these tools. Each time they start a new project, many NASA engineers and scientists build a bespoke model for each dataset. To solve that problem, in 2020, NASA hosted a workshop on AI. It sought answers to large-scale, extra-challenging problems, dreaming bigger than one-off models for each problem—and IBM’s tech seemed like a perfect match for their needs.

“We have all heard and seen the magic” of widely-applicable machine learning models, especially language models like ChatGPT, said IBM lead developer Priya Nagpurkar in a press conference. “We are at this unique point where it’s time to take those advances and apply them to different domains…as well as advancing science.”

[Related: Is ChatGPT groundbreaking? These experts say no.]

This collaboration is the first time a particular kind of AI—a flexible, broadly-applicable technique known as a foundation model, which IBM is at the forefront of developing—has been applied to Earth sciences. “While NASA and IBM have discussed using AI to solve various problems for the past few years, IBM’s foundation model research was the catalyst for the current collaboration,” says IBM representative Danielle Cerasani.

As described in a recent press release, the collaboration plans to tackle two main projects: answering questions based on scientific literature, and analyzing large datasets of Earth to identify patterns and trends. NASA is providing access to its vast collection of Earth-observing data and its scientists, while IBM is adding AI development expertise and their existing research into this tech.

The literature search is based on technology similar to ChatGPT, and NASA hopes it will serve as a sort of ultra-advanced search engine for scientists.One of its key selling points is that its answers will come with citations—direct links to the research papers it’s pulling information from—unlike other tools that act more like a mysterious black box.  Rahul Ramachandran, senior research scientist at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, said in a press conference this technology could be ready as early as mid-2023. 

Still, some scientists are skeptical. “The ability of the model to summarize information and answer questions, which is the most innovative aspect especially for the broader community, is also at higher risk of bias,” says Viviana Acquaviva, physicist and AI specialist at the City University of New York. “We have seen how state-of-the-art models like ChatGPT can easily produce biased or incorrect answers, while sounding plausible and confident.” In an advertisement for Google’s new Bard chatbot, for instance, the AI incorrectly stated that the James Webb Space Telescope imaged the first exoplanet, when the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope had done so years prior.

[Related: How old is Earth? It’s a surprisingly tough question to answer.]

Meanwhile, applying AI to Earth observations is the more scientifically interesting half of the collaboration, at least to Acquaviva. NASA hosts the world’s largest archives of data on our planet—enough to fill around a million typical iPhones—and they hope to sort it more effectively with IBM’s models.

“Our archive is currently at 70 petabytes and it’s projected to grow within a few years to 250 petabytes…We support 7 billion users worldwide who access our data for research and applications,” Ramachandran told reporters. “Clearly, given the scale of the data that we have, we have a big data problem.” 

With the new AI tech, they hope to easily track weather and natural disasters across the planet—as diverse as tornado tracks to dust clouds. Ramachandran imagined a scenario where a disaster response team could quickly analyze the extent of flooding after a hurricane, enabling faster and more effective emergency aid. The team plans to first analyze a data set known as Harmonized Landsat Sentinel-2, a combination of observations from two powerful NASA satellites. This work has just started, however, with Ramachandran describing it as an “open area” of research.

The collaboration also intends to publicly release the code and other tools they develop through these projects, making them available to anyone interested in their use. “It is exciting to witness progress toward the creation of an inclusive and interdisciplinary community,” Acquaviva says, “that can make climate data and AI tools more accessible to scientists and the public.”

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Being stranded in space sounds like the makings of a dramatic science fiction movie, but reality is a bit less flashy. Real-life space travel involves rigorous preparation, massive teams of support staff, and backup plans for almost every imaginable scenario.

This intense planning is exactly why the recent coolant leak on the Russian Soyuz spacecraft isn’t as dire as it originally seemed. 

In December 2022,  a micrometeorite damaged the Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft docked on the ISS, which affected the capsule’s cooling systems that keep astronauts at safe temperatures on their descent back to Earth. Engineers determined that the craft wasn’t fit for return, except in case of an emergency. The crew originally carried up on the Soyuz was stranded. 

But they were stranded aboard the safest place in space: the International Space Station. “We have the ISS as a safe haven,” says former NASA astronaut Mike Massimino, who flew aboard the space shuttle in 2002 and 2009 to service the Hubble Space Telescope. “If you get stuck up there, you just hang out there for a while until someone comes and gets you.”

The ISS is about the size of an American football field, and made up of almost 40 different modules, as diverse as solar panels to docking ports to pressurized, habitable living areas. Construction on this orbital behemoth began in 1998, and it has been occupied by at least one astronaut since the turn of the century.

[Related: ISS astronauts are building objects that couldn’t exist on Earth]

Its modular design is not only a quirk of its assembly, but a conscious design choice. In the event of an emergency—the top three are fire, depressurization, and toxic air—the crew exits the damaged area, sealing off modules as they go to isolate the leak or other issue. Even if something were to happen aboard the ISS while the crew from Soyuz MS-22 were stuck, “the chances are you’re going to be able to isolate [the problem] until you figure out how to get other folks home,” according to Massimino.

The astronauts are also trained for risky situations. They prepare on the ground before their voyages and aboard the space station. Plus, the American astronauts have to be familiar with the Russian tech on board (and vice versa) and even learn to speak Russian so that they are able to effectively work with their international counterparts.

Yet, among the many different emergencies astronauts prepare for, a damaged return capsule doesn’t feature prominently. The mission teams are more focused on ensuring the ISS remains safe and habitable, and aren’t as concerned about the ferries between space and the ground. “The spacecraft on which astronauts and cosmonauts fly to the space station are the intended spacecraft for their return to Earth,” says NASA media representative Joshua Finch.

[Related: The ISS gets an extension to 2030 to wrap up unfinished business]

In the late 1990s to early 2000s, NASA considered a dedicated “lifeboat” for the ISS, known as the X-38. It would have been a glider, similar to the space shuttle, with the sole purpose of returning astronauts to Earth in emergency situations. Although prototypes were successfully tested, the program was canceled in 2002 due to budget constraints. Instead, astronauts learned to rely on the ever-expanding ISS.

“When we had the shuttle flights after the [Space Shuttle Columbia] accident, there was a real possibility that you might not be able to come back because of your return vehicle,” Massimino recalls. “And we weren’t worried about that because if you inspected the vehicle and you couldn’t repair it, you would just stay on the space station.” Given that people have lived aboard the ISS for as much as a year at a time, a brief layover there while waiting for your connecting spaceflight doesn’t seem so bad.

American and Russian mission support teams also immediately began coordinating their next steps after the recent leak, putting their rigorous training into action while astronauts waited onboard. Numerous plans were considered, from fitting more astronauts into the SpaceX capsule also docked on the ISS to sending up new vehicles to bring them home. “Engineers at each space agency work together to provide safe return options in the event of an emergency situation,” Finch explains, “as NASA and Roscosmos have done while creating the Soyuz 68S crew return plan.”

In early January, NASA and Roscosmos decided the best course of action was to move up the date of the next Soyuz launch, sending up an uncrewed capsule to give the astronauts a ride home. The launch will send up the Soyuz MS-23 on February 20—and until then, the astronauts will continue with business as usual and ride out their stay on the ISS, humanity’s only oasis in space beyond our home planet.

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Sci-fi storytellers love to spin tales about laser-wielding aliens who visit Earth—but in reality, we’re the ones now using sophisticated laser beams to hunt for signs of extraterrestrial life.

Geologists and engineers at the University of Maryland recently created a new piece of technology, designed to fly in space, that uses light to analyze molecules. This work, published last week in Nature Astronomy, takes a common molecule-analyzing lab instrument here on Earth, known as the Orbitrap, and shrinks it down to make it compact and light enough to fit on a NASA solar system mission. They also combine the improved Orbitrap with a laser, which can break up material from a planet’s surface to prepare it for analysis.

“I am excited to see what kind of complex molecules we would be able to detect beyond Earth,” says Grace Ni, University of Maryland geologist and co-author on the study. “The next-generation Orbitrap analyzer offers about 200 times improvements” in the detail of its measurements compared to older systems, she adds. It could fly on missions within the next decade.

The Orbitrap is a tool for mass spectrometry, a go-to technique for scientists that separates molecules by their mass and measures how much of each there is in a sample. Although these machines are found in medical, biological, and other industrial labs across the planet, they’re also huge, weighing around 400 pounds—a little heavier than a giant panda. Offworld missions are often limited in how much they can carry to their destinations. One of these behemoth Orbitraps just would not fly. The new version, though, only weighs about 17 pounds.

[Related: The Milky Way could have dozens of alien civilizations capable of contacting us]

Plus, mission teams must often choose between one big component or multiple smaller tools. Selecting instruments for a space mission is “like choosing what tools you want on your pocket Swiss army knife,” explains Zach Ulibarri, an aerospace engineer at Cornell University who was not part of the new study. “But, at the same time, the tools on a Swiss army knife are smaller and lighter than the tools you keep in your garage, just like the instruments on your spacecraft have to be smaller and lighter than the full-sized ones you keep in a laboratory.”

Before it can measure a molecule, the upgraded laser-wielding tool uses ultraviolet pulses to break up the compounds from a planet’s surface—such as rocks on Mars, the icy outer shell of Enceladus, or other interesting targets for possible life in our solar system. It then funnels them into the miniaturized Orbitrap spectrometer, where the sample’s composition is measured. 

Eddie Schweiterman, a University of California Riverside astrobiologist not involved in the new Orbitrap project, explains that this tool will take the “fingerprints” of molecules related to life, while also providing information about the surrounding geology of whatever planet or moon is being explored. Context is key for signs of life—scientists must be able to rule out non-living sources of the same life-like chemicals. This new laser-Orbitrap system would also allow scientists to do this detailed chemical analysis remotely via a straightforward robotic mission, like a lander or rover, as opposed to a sample return to Earth.

Although there is a lot of ongoing work to detect biosignatures on distant exoplanets, that’s a totally different ballgame than exploring the solar system with a probe via upgraded Orbitrap. The large organic molecules to be analyzed with missions featuring Orbitrap “cannot be easily observed remotely, particularly at interstellar distances,” Schweiterman says. Instead, exoplanets can only be observed from light-years away via our telescopes. But astronomers could send robots equipped with this tool to the surfaces of the planets nearest us.

[Related: Why astronomers are blasting Earth’s location to potential intelligent aliens]

There’s also one more catch. The large amount of data generated from the new system “could be a headache for data storage and transmission during a space mission,” according to Ni. Hopefully, as computer technology inevitably advances, engineers will come up with clever ways to deal with this problem. Even then, data storage isn’t a dream-killer for the Orbitrap—just another thing to consider when designing a spacecraft. As Ulibarri says, “each instrument has its own advantages and disadvantages. There is no perfect instrument; there are only trade-offs between different ones.” 

Building a fully functioning spacecraft is always difficult, but new instrument technologies like the improved Orbitrap expand the possibilities for future missions. “It’s always exciting to add a new tool to the potential spacecraft toolkit,” says Ulibarri. “And the Orbitrap is a particularly powerful tool.”

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The lifetime of the universe is, unfortunately, so long that we can’t just wait and watch what happens to understand how it works. It’s a movie marathon that started billions of years before our species began, and will likely continue after us, too. But what if there was a recording, and we could wind back the tape?

Astronomers are doing just that with the famed James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), using the behemoth flying observatory to rewind through our universe’s history, searching for early galaxies. As a result, astronomers have found hundreds of galaxies from 11 to 13 billion years ago that also show a remarkable diversity of shapes: disks, bulges, clumps, lumps, and more. These star groupings emerged earlier in the universe’s timeline than previously thought, according to new research recently presented at the American Astronomical Society meeting and soon to be published in The Astrophysical Journal.

“It is amazing to be able to see the structures of these distant galaxies with such clarity for the first time,” said Jeyhan Kartaltepe, Rochester Institute of Technology astronomer and lead author on the new study. “They are anything but boring.”

To estimate the ages, Kartaltepe and her team used a well-established method in astronomy. Galaxies farther away from us in space also go back further in the universe’s history, thanks to the finite speed of light. Plus, given that the universe is expanding, galaxies farther away from us appear more red than they would if they were nearer, as their light gets stretched out while traveling the vast, lengthening cosmic distances to our telescopes. This gives astronomers an easy way to mark when something existed in the universe, known as redshift. 

But, this also means targets with a higher redshift literally appear red, or even shine mostly in the infrared. So, a galaxy that looked bright blue billions of years ago may appear bright in infrared light to our cameras. This is the distinct advantage of JWST—because it sees the universe in the infrared, it can spot these distant, red galaxies. The telescope is also quite simply bigger than past space tools, and in the world of telescopes, bigger really is better.

[Related: How the James Webb Space Telescope is hunting for ‘first light’]

With previous data from the Hubble Space Telescope, which sees in the visible and near-infrared, astronomers already knew there were interesting and diverse galaxies in our universe from 11 billion years ago. To find out when the sweeping spirals and rotund bulges (like those in our own Milky Way) first formed, though, researchers needed to rewind the tape a bit further. 

“We do not know what happened in the early universe to create disks and bulges, or when it happened, or where it happened, or how it happened—and we had no way of finding this out until JWST,” says University of Melbourne astronomer Benji Metha, a researcher not affiliated with the new findings. “We can use these [galactic] observations like a fossil record, to dig back through time and see what features existed in these galaxies while the universe was still under construction.”

The team gathered images of 850 galaxies with JWST, and classified them into the typical galaxy shapes: disks (like our own spiral galaxy), clumps, irregulars, or some combination of the three. The data was all analyzed by hand, with astronomers sifting through each and every file. “One thing I love about this paper is how human it is,” says Metha. He explains how a century ago, American astronomer Edwin Hubble used the Mount Wilson Observatory in California to sort different types of nearby galaxies, creating the classification system most astronomers use today. “At its core, this paper uses the exact same method that Hubble used: Look at some pictures, and write down what you see,” Metha adds.

The international group of researchers found lots of disks, which may be precursors to galaxies like the Milky Way. They also spotted lots of irregulars, which are signs of two galaxies whose gravitational fields got a little too close and nudged each others’ stars around, or even merged completely.

“We see all sorts of structures across cosmic time less than a billion years after the Big Bang,” says Olivia Cooper, an astronomer at UT Austin. These new images, she said, “demonstrate what we are able to do with JWST and hint at a universe that hosted evolved galaxies earlier than we thought.”

The fact that there was such a variety of galaxies while the universe was still young is puzzling, and sure to keep astronomers busy as they build better models to learn how these cosmic entities formed and grew. The study also shows that to see the first galaxies, experts will need to keep rewinding that tape, and pushing the boundaries of how far back JWST can peer into the universe’s past.

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Far from our cozy home in the cosmos, stars are performing violent and extreme acts almost beyond our imagination. Neutron stars, the unbelievably dense remnants of huge stars—a teaspoon of their matter weighs as much as Mount Everest—are smashing into each other. This impact creates black holes and releases extremely energetic flashes of light known as gamma ray bursts (GRBs). 

Astronomers have been interested in GRBs since the first one was spotted in 1967. But there’s still much to understand about exactly what goes on when two neutron stars collide. New research, recently published in the journal Nature, reveals helpful signals known as quasi-periodic oscillations (QPOs) in old observations of GRBs. QPOs provide a window for scientists to explore the brief time after the neutron stars collide but before they’ve collapsed into a black hole. They’re the fingerprints of how matter is swirling and mixing together in the merger.

Since the advent of gravitational wave detection in 2016, many astronomers have been focused on exploring neutron star mergers with LIGO and similar experiments. But, those observations provide half the picture, since current detectors are only sensitive to some of the gravitational waves created by the mergers. To detect the higher-frequency waves we’re currently missing, we’d have to wait years—maybe even decades—for new projects like the Einstein Telescope to come online. 

This new research shows that existing technology, using gamma-rays, may be an alternative to probe the same physics that creates higher-frequency waves. QPOs, which are wiggles in the observed gamma-rays that repeat semi-regularly, encode information about the physics of the merger. The study authors analyzed two events that produced QPOs of uncertain origin–they may have originated within our galaxy or far beyond it.

“We’re looking at what happens in the split second between the merger of the two stars and the launch of the gamma ray burst. It is almost frustrating that these signals will only be detectable in gravitational waves some 10 to 15 years from now,” says lead author Cecilia Chirenti, a research scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and the University of Maryland. “But I am impatient and don’t want to wait! It’s exciting that we’re able to start looking for and learning from them now using gamma-rays!”

[Related: Why are big neutron stars like Tootsie Pops?]

The collision of two neutron stars is an excellent laboratory for exploring the physics of these weird, dead orbs. Their ultimate fate depends on an important unknown in high-energy physics: the equation that describes what neutron stars are made of and how that material moves, flows, and interacts with the world around it. 

“The matter in the cores of neutron stars exists in a state seen nowhere else in the universe, including in laboratories on Earth,” says Cole Miller, astronomer at the University of Maryland and co-author on the study. “Measurements of neutron star properties can give us insights into an otherwise inaccessible physical realm.”

In their search for QPOs, the research team explored archives of data from multiple NASA space telescopes: the Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope, the Swift Observatory, and the Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory. Although these GRBs were identified years ago—as early as the 1990s—the enormous complexity of GRB signals has kept these QPO signals hidden from astronomers until now. “One of my colleagues wryly noted that ‘If you’ve seen one gamma-ray burst, you’ve seen one gamma-ray burst,’” says Miller. “This makes it difficult to tell whether there is some signal of oscillation, or whether that’s just GRBs being GRBs.”

[Related: Black holes can gobble up neutron stars whole]

In both events, the QPOs suggest that a mega-sized neutron star may have formed before collapsing into a black hole. Itai Linial, a Columbia and Princeton astronomer not involved with the study, says it is still unclear in general whether a black hole forms immediately or a neutron star appears for a fraction of a second before the collapse to a black hole during a GRB, but agrees these new signals “may be the result of a rapidly rotating neutron star remnant.” 

With the detection of these gamma-ray signals, astronomers now have a new tool to explore some of the weirdest and wildest phenomena in the universe. With a treasure trove of old data to explore, the team now hopes to use this tool to find more examples of these curious mergers.

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The James Webb Space Telescope, NASA’s newest and biggest off-world observatory, has been collecting jaw-dropping images of the cosmos since June. Astronomers quickly shared their results online, even before the telescope’s calibrations were finished. Some of these findings were record-breaking, including observations of the most distant galaxies yet found. Significant debate and discussion ensued among researchers—was science moving too quickly by publishing observations before peer review, forsaking rigor for the glory of being first to a new discovery?

As the dust has settled, many astronomers think the early results remain informative. But, in the rush to work with a groundbreaking new observatory and sift through its mountains of data, they report stressful working conditions. That’s a scenario they hope to improve upon in 2023 and beyond, finding a balance between quickly offering exciting results to the public and taking the time needed for rigorous, sustainable science.

“I was actually quite excited to see science happening very fast,” says Klaus Pontoppidan, JWST project scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute. “This is the way science works … if there are issues with calibration, that gets tested by other teams, and any errors get corrected later.”

[Related: A fierce competition will decide James Webb Space Telescope’s next views of the cosmos]

Every day JWST returns around 60 gigabytes of data to Earth, about the amount of information a basic iPhone can hold. This may not seem like much, but the steady stream of data amounts to a whopping 12,000 gigabytes so far—enough to fill a roomful of laptops—with much more to come. Each bit of this valuable data will be subject to the intense scrutiny of astronomers, who are trying to glean as much information as they can about the cosmos with JWST’s new view.

Some of that analysis started almost as soon as the telescope was operational, with programs known as Early Release Science (ERS), which made JWST data publicly available this June and July. 

Hannah Wakeford, an astronomer at the University of Bristol, worked on some of these early release science programs. Although she is excited about the scientific breakthroughs, she also experienced an extremely intense work environment—she hasn’t taken a break since mid-July. She criticizes this initial period of rushed results, saying that usually “fast science results in poorer or incomplete work. This is not necessarily the scientists themselves at fault for this, but the enormous external pressure to get publications.”

On the other hand, Ryan Trainor, an astrophysicist at Franklin & Marshall College, considers this frenzy as just “part of the modern scientific process, particularly given the pressure to be first to any big discovery.” Wakeford and Trainor’s statements are not mutually exclusive—the race to publish is both an accepted part of science and a possible hazard. For those trying to make astronomy their career, publishing an idea first and getting the credit for it is a necessary evil.

As we approach the one year anniversary of JWST’s launch on Christmas Day, the debate about the speed of astronomy has resurfaced again, now in the context of observations proposed by teams of scientists. NASA reportedly planned to make all data available from the telescope immediately, removing so-called proprietary periods that allow astronomers time to work with data they planned and designed. There isn’t currently a clear deadline for this change, but it may fall in line with the White House’s call for open access science by 2026.

Those in favor of removing proprietary periods claim that public access to the data will be more equitable, allowing anyone a chance to explore the wonders of the new telescope. Many astronomers disagree, though, explaining that their field will become impossibly competitive without proprietary periods to protect scientists’ ideas. The rush to publish would undermine work-life balance, and disadvantage those who can’t work as fast: parents who have to contend with childcare, astronomers at smaller schools with fewer resources, early career students who are still learning, and others.

[Related: James Webb Space Telescope reconstructed a ‘star party,’ and you’re invited]

“JWST will produce ground-breaking, paradigm-shifting science over the next 20 years of its observing time,” says Wakeford. “Why not cut the scientists a break and give them time to make sure we can do the work with rigor, while not destroying our mental and physical health at the same time?” 

Lafayette College astronomer Stephanie Douglas agrees, explaining that “this is an equity issue. We need to protect the more vulnerable members of our community.”

The situation is not so simple for the NASA scientists in charge of the telescope, though. They have a responsibility to both scientists and the general public, whose taxpayer money funds the entire program. “I think it’s a balance,” says Pontoppidan. “You’re balancing public programs and proprietary time, and both things you need to do for equity.” The future of proprietary periods is yet undecided, but no matter the outcome it will surely affect the process of science in JWST’s second year. Astronomers are currently preparing for the second round of proposals to use JWST, due just after the holidays in January. “I’m hoping that we’ll see some really ambitious proposals,” says Pontoppidan. The first year of JWST observations explored what the observatory could do—and now astronomers can start pushing the limits of those capabilities.

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In our solar system, there are worlds of ice and worlds of fire. Jupiter’s moon Io is the best example of a world of fire, freckled with volcanoes and cracked by lava spills. 

There are many competing theories to explain the workings of this fire-orb. New research published in The Planetary Science Journal and presented at the 2022 American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting narrows down what could be going on inside the volcanic world using computer simulations, suggesting that it hosts a scorching ocean of magma beneath its surface. 

Magma oceans are thought to have been a common feature of rocky planets and moons earlier in the solar system, but are almost nonexistent now as things have cooled down over time. Io’s searing sea could be the only surviving example, giving scientists the opportunity to observe one up close.

“Whether a magma ocean exists or not essentially changes how Io operates, and it greatly affects the interpretations of various observations of Io,” says Caltech planetary scientist Yoshinori Miyazaki, lead author on the new research paper. 

On Earth, volcanoes are caused by our planet’s shifting tectonic plates. Io’s volcanoes arise from a very different mechanism, called tidal heating. In tidal heating, a large object—in this case, Jupiter—squishes and stretches another object near it through gravity, heating it up with friction. It’s sort of like mushing around clay with your hands until the substance becomes flexible and warm. Thanks to this geological phenomenon, Io has enough warmth to sustain its many volcanoes.

“At Io, tidal heating has run wild, generating one of the most volcanically active worlds in our solar system, with over 100 active volcanoes at any given time,” says James Tuttle Keane, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory who is not affiliated with the research team. “Because tidal heating is so extreme at Io, it makes it the best natural laboratory to understand this process.”

There has been long-standing debate on what resides beneath Io. Before we even saw the surface of the hellish moon, scientists speculated there may be a magma ocean raging under the rocky crust due to Io’s wild tidal heating. However, once Voyager and Galileo revealed Io’s rugged terrain, astronomers began to doubt a subterranean magma ocean could support such heavy mountains. 

Scientists then pivoted to suggest the interior is just rock with little melted bits inside. A recent hypothesis proposed the interior could be something in between pure magma and pure rock—a partially molten mass called a magmatic sponge. “Think of a magma sponge like a dish sponge or a coral sponge, where both the solids and the liquids are entirely interconnected,” explains Tuttle Keane. “This means fluids, be it soapy dishwater or magma, can flow through the sponge, but the sponge still has some structural integrity.”

[Related: We just got an up-close look at the largest lava lake in the solar system]

This new work, though, uses computer models to show the interior of Io is unlikely to be a magmatic sponge—and a magma ocean makes much more sense given the existing observations of the Galilean satellite. 

Based on reasonable assumptions about the conditions inside Io, the computer simulations predicted that a magmatic sponge would quickly separate into different layers of magma and rock, creating the magma ocean. “Melt and rock tend to separate rapidly, just like the ice and water do in a slushie if you leave it for a while,” says University of California, Santa Cruz geologist Francis Nimmo, who wasn’t involved with this study. 

Unfortunately, these models can’t definitively prove if Io does have a magma ocean. For that, we’ll need to send a probe back to the fiery little moon. 

Miyazaki is looking forward to the Juno spacecraft’s upcoming flybys of Io in December 2023 and February 2024, where astronomers will measure a property of the moon called the Love number. This number is a proxy for how rigid or squishy the interior of a planetary body is. “If the Love number is large,” explains Miyazaki, “it will confirm the existence of a subsurface magma ocean on Io.”

Even if a magma ocean is confirmed, “there are still a lot of uncertainties associated with trying to understand Io’s interior structure,” Tuttle Keane says. “We need future missions to explore Io and the Jupiter system…many questions will remain unanswered until a dedicated Io mission is flown that can explore this volcanic moon in detail.”

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An essential part of any space mission is power. If a spacecraft runs out of energy, the communications go down, the craft becomes unsteerable, and life support systems shut off—a scenario that’s the stuff of sci-fi nightmares. 

For a spacecraft, the sun is a particularly vital supplier of energy, and the recent Artemis I mission proved just how powerful it can be to harness solar energy in space. During the nearly month-long flight around the moon, NASA tested all functions of the uncrewed spacecraft, including the Orion crew capsule’s innovative solar panels. The vehicle’s solar panels exceeded expectations, proving themselves to be a key technology for the future of human space exploration.

“Initial results show that the arrays are providing significantly more power than expected,” says Philippe Berthe, an engineer who manages the Orion European Service Module Project Project at the European Space Agency (ESA).

[Related: Welcome back to Earth, Orion]

Engineers from ESA and the European company Airbus collaborated with NASA and Lockheed Martin to build the Orion spacecraft, the component that separates from the launch rockets and will ferry astronauts to their destination and back during subsequent Artemis flights. The Paris-based agency’s main contribution to Orion is the European Service Module, which houses the solar panels and other critical systems. 

Orion has four wings, each nearly the length of a British double-decker bus, that unfolded 18 minutes into its journey while still in low-Earth orbit. Each of these wings holds three gallium arsenide solar panels, a particularly efficient and durable type of solar cell made for space. Together, the four wings generate “the equivalent of two households’” worth of power, according to Berthe. 

This type of solar cell is commonly used by military and research satellites. What’s innovative about Orion’s panels is how they’re maneuvered. “Usually solar arrays have only one axis of rotation so that they can follow the sun,” says Berthe. The ones on the capsule, however, can move in two directions, folding up to withstand the pressures of spaceflight and the heat of Orion’s powerful thrusters.

During Artemis I’s 26-day mission, the combined NASA and ESA team tested all aspects of the solar panels, including their ability to rotate, unfold, and produce power. According to Berthe, the panels worked so well they provided 15 percent more power than what engineers had projected. That has consequences for future Artemis missions: “Either the size of the solar arrays could be reduced,” he says, “or they could provide more power to Orion.” Smaller solar arrays could reduce the cost of missions, but more power could allow for additional capabilities onboard the crewed spacecraft.

These nimble solar panels are also equipped with cameras on their wingtips, which Matthias Gronowski, Airbus Chief Engineer for the European Service Module, likens to a “selfie stick” for the mission. These cameras have provided incredible images of the spacecraft as it cruised between the moon and Earth, and can even help the mission engineers inspect the spacecraft for damage. Because the arrays are maneuverable, they act like robotic arms, providing a “chance to inspect the whole vehicle,” says Gronowski.

[Related: These powerful solar panels are as thin as human hair]

Artemis I is NASA’s first step in testing the technology needed to return humans to the moon, and eventually venture further to Mars using the Orion crew capsule. The new lunar program plans to carry humans beyond low-Earth orbit, where the International Space Station resides, for the first time since the 1970s, including the first woman and first person of color to set foot on the moon.

The solar panels are one part of the pioneering technology of Artemis and Orion, and this first test flight proves they are a reliable technology for distant space travel. Moveable arrays like those on Artemis I will be key for future missions that require even more powerful engines, allowing the panels to shift into a protective configuration as the spacecraft speeds up. 

“We are very proud to be part of the program,” says Gronowski. “And we are very proud to be basically bringing humans back to the moon.”

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When stars are born, more times than not, they arrive into the universe as twins. In the first step of stellar creation, a large cloud of gas and dust collapses due to gravity, often fragmenting into pieces. If each piece collapses again, multiple stars will be birthed from the same gas cloud. These infant suns are then surrounded by a halo of matter, the precursor to planets, known as a planet-forming disk. And, if these stars are close enough, the planet-forming disks around them can even swirl together, creating fantastic spiral tails.

New astronomical images published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society on November 28 reveal three such interacting twin planetary disks in stunning detail. The team took these photos using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile. Although this is not the first time these disks have been imaged, advances in astronomical technology offer a new, more comprehensive vantage of the dramatic cosmic scene.

The stars are all in the Milky Way, fairly nearby by galactic standards. Astronomers photographed these three sets of known twins in polarized light, which can help untangle the dust from each disk. Certain telescope technologies, like those used in this study, can record the specific direction, or polarization, of incoming light waves. Polarized light is a great trick for finding faint structures such as the dusty disks around bright stars. Stars aren’t expected to emit this kind of light, but starlight scattered off dust will become polarized, making the disks and their spirals easier to see. 

Polarization is also a powerful tool for astronomers—it encodes a lot of information about how the light made its way to our telescopes. As a star’s light zooms through space, if it hits small bits of dust, it will bounce off those particles in specific ways. The polarization of that light results from the precise angle of its bounce and what type of matter it hits. “There are loads of intricate processes involved,” says Universidad de Santiago de Chile astronomer Sebastián Perez, a co-author of the new study. The research team used the information provided by polarization to trace which star illuminated each part of the disks, helping them to understand the geometry of the systems.

[Related: The biggest gaseous structure in our galaxy is filled with baby star factories]

Their goal is to understand how neighboring stars influence the planet-forming disks. “A large fraction of stars probably go through such a phase,” Perez says, referring to their sibling-filled childhood, “but we know little about it.” Nearby sibling stars can orbit each other, or one star can drop by for a visit to another, known as a fly-by. These new images are a first step toward determining which scenario happened for each of the three systems.

“We expect that most stars form in dense regions of the galaxy and are surrounded by other stars forming at almost the same time,” says Philipp Weber, astronomer at Universidad de Santiago de Chile and lead author of the study. Despite this fact, astronomers “mainly treat protoplanetary discs as isolated systems,” he adds. 

[Related: NASA releases Hubble images of cotton candy-colored clouds in Orion Nebula]

The new observations by Perez and Weber, who both partake in the research group YEMS Nucleus, suggest that for many star systems, this is a bad assumption to make. Fly-bys “could have lasting effects” on the structure of these planet-forming disks, says Weber, who still has a number of outstanding questions. How common are fly-bys? How do sibling stars change the evolution of disks and their planets? These new data will no doubt keep astronomers busy refining their theories as they seek to understand how planets form.

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In the past few decades, astronomers have discovered thousands of exoplanets around other stars. Many of those worlds look nothing like the planets in our own solar system. One curious type of exoplanet is the Hot Jupiter, a planet similar in size to our own Jupiter–but, unlike our neighborhood gas giant, these are extremely close to their home stars.

A team of Japanese astronomers recently discovered one of the hottest Jupiters to date, around a star known as HD 167768, as part of their long-running Okayama Planet Search Program that began in 2001. To make the situation even weirder, this planet is around an old, dying star—a place no one would have expected a planet to survive. 

Huanyu Teng, astronomer at the Tokyo Institute of Technology and lead author of this discovery, considers this planet “a relatively lucky find” and “a rare case.”

This new planet, named HD 167768 b, is so close to its parent star that one year there is only 20 Earth days long. This planet is technically considered a warm Jupiter, since Hot Jupiters are defined as having a year shorter than 10 Earth days. But HD 167768 b is a whopping 3,000°F, about the temperature of a jet engine, which is hotter than nearly all other known Hot Jupiters, the study authors say. 

Although it takes a little longer than typical for this Hot Jupiter to complete a circle around its sun, this star has inflated, shortening the distance from its blazing surface to the planet. If most Hot Jupiters orbited stars the size of M&Ms, HD 167768 b’s star is something like a golf ball. The distance between the gas planet and its sun is one-and-a-half times the star’s diameter—for context, you could fit almost 108 of our sun’s lengths within Earth’s orbit. 

[Related: A deep-space telescope spied an exoplanet so hot it can vaporize iron]

Teng and co-authors published the discovery in November 2022 as what’s called a preprint paper, a way for scientists to share work before the expert review required for publication in a journal. In this case, the Hot Jupiter study has been accepted in the Publications of the Astronomical Society of Japan.

Astronomers previously thought the aging process of a star would be “fatal to close-orbiting exoplanets” like HD 167768 b, says University of Kansas astronomer Jonathan Brande, who wasn’t involved in the new report. As stars run out of the fuel that sustains their nuclear fusion, they puff up, expanding their outer layers and often engulfing the closest planets—or so astronomers think. There are still many outstanding questions about what happens at the end of a solar system’s life, including whether planets survive or change as their stars die.

“There have been tens of planets discovered around evolved giant stars, but almost all of these planets are at large distances from their host stars,” says Aurora Kesseli, research scientist at the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute. HD 167768 b “helps to answer some of these questions about what happens to planets when their host stars become giants.”

[Related: Newly discovered exoplanet may be a ‘Super Earth’ covered in water]

There are other curiosities about HD 167768 b, too—it’s in a strange part of the galaxy for a planet to exist. Our Milky Way is shaped like a crepe stuffed within a fluffy pancake, where the crepe is known as the thin disk and the pancake is the thick disk. The stars in the thick disk tend to be much older, and are thought to be less favorable environments for planets to grow up around. We’re in the thin disk–but HD 167768 b was found in the thicker one.

This curious world also shows signs that it’s not alone. HD 167768 b was discovered via the tried-and-true radial velocity method, where astronomers measure the movement of a star to infer hidden planets. The team noticed two more possible planet signals in the data, hinting at neighboring planets orbiting a bit further away from the star—they would have years 41 and 95 Earth-days long. To find out if these neighbors are real, astronomers will need to take a closer look at this system, such as with the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). Further observations of the new planet will allow astronomers to dig deeper into questions about old planets, now that they have this excellent specimen to analyze.

We don’t have forever to watch HD 167768 b, though. Teng and collaborators calculate that this planet will only exist for 150 million more years—an absolute blink of the eye for the timescales of the universe. (Earth, meanwhile, should stick around for at least another 5 billion years.) This is an exciting opportunity to see a planet so close to the end of its existence.

“Cosmically, this is just about the last possible time we’ll be able to study the planet,” says Brande. “As the host star is continuing to expand, eventually it will totally eat this planet for dinner.”

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NASA engineers devote lots of time and effort to make sure spacecraft are durable enough to survive the hazards of space. Sometimes, though, rockets or probes are designed to crash on purpose!

In 2022, there have been a number of notable space crashes, both planned and unplanned. While unexpected events can be dangerous, planned crashes can provide important information about our solar system—revealing features as diverse as a planet’s atmosphere or the chemicals in an asteroid’s surface. They pave the way for future space missions by testing new technologies, too. And crashing a machine into a space rock can even give data that could one day be used to protect Earth from a threatening asteroid.

The history of space exploration is rich with crashes—humanity’s early voyages to the moon relied on impacts to study the lunar surface in detail, like the Russian Luna 2 that became the first spacecraft to touch the surface of the moon in 1959, and the NASA Ranger program that returned the first close-up images of the moon in the 1960s. This decades-old tradition is carried on by modern missions, from Deep Impact smashing into a comet in 2005 to DART knocking around an asteroid in 2022. It’s very likely there will be more deliberate crashes in the future, too.

The NASA lander designed to crash

One of the riskiest parts of a mission to Mars is the landing. Many mechanical parts and software programs have to work properly to avoid such a situation—a computer glitch caused a European Mars lander to catastrophically crash in 2016. So far, NASA has dealt with this through a variety of technologies: giant bouncing airbags, parachutes designed to slow down the craft in the thin Martian atmosphere, and even their complicated sky crane system—essentially a jetpack that gently lowers a lander to the surface—that the Perseverance rover used.

As successful as these technologies are, they’re also expensive. Engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) are working on a new technique that may reduce costs—a device intended to crash, known as SHIELD. They call it an impact attenuator, something that’s made to absorb all the force of the crash and protect the sensitive electronics inside. It’s made of steel, with the shape of an upside-down wedding cake. When it hits the ground, it crumples, absorbing the shock of the impact just like the “crumple zone” of modern cars.

While the largest and most ambitious missions will always need traditional landing gear, they also take a long time to prepare. SHIELD’s tech allows for smaller, more frequent missions in addition to those. Lou Giersch, a mechanical engineer at JPL and leader of the SHIELD project, says this device could “increase the rate of scientific discovery” by making missions to Mars speedier and cheaper. “It’s sort of a complement to the more conventional Mars landing,” Giersch adds. 

The team tested SHIELD at full Mars-landing speed–a whopping 110 miles per hour–for the first time in August 2022, strapping a smartphone to it. The smartphone survived and remained fully functional, even after hitting a two-inch-thick steel plate, which is much harder than actual Martian dirt. 

NASA hopes this sort of tech will allow it to send more small missions to Mars, maybe even establishing a network of probes across the Red Planet. These could be like the local weather stations we use on Earth. One day, atmospheric scientists might tell you the local daily forecasts for Olympus Mons or Schiaparelli Crater. Being able to monitor the whole globe at once could reveal more about Mars’ dust, its atmosphere, and even marsquakes—and it all may happen after repeated successful crash landings.

A mysterious rocket on the moon

Astronomers puzzled over a surprise crash this year, when a piece of rocket debris smashed into the moon on March 4. NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) later spotted a strange double crater created by the impact. Although some astronomers hoped this impact may be able to give them new information about the lunar surface, nothing much came of it besides a hunt for the wayward rocket’s culprit.

Astronomer Bill Gray first identified it as a SpaceX part, but later realized it was actually part of a 2014 Chinese test mission, called Chang’e 5-T1. Chinese officials deny this was their booster, though, so its origin remains somewhat of a mystery. The biggest takeaway here is how alarming it is that no one was sure exactly what this piece was, or where it came from—and that there are many other lost hunks of space debris just like it.

[Related: What happens when a rocket hits the moon? It’s not always what astronomers predict.]

Although this crash was a loss for lunar scientists, there have been intentional impacts on the moon before—notably  LCROSS, a mission to hit a permanently shadowed crater on the moon’s south pole in 2009. NASA astronomers sent one spacecraft to strike the surface, followed shortly after by a probe containing scientific instruments to measure the materials stirred up by the impact. This mission helped confirm a fact we now take for granted—the existence of water ice on the lunar surface. 

University of Hawaii planetary scientist Chiara Ferrari-Wong notes that LCROSS data is still keeping scientists busy—the materials it revealed on the moon are strikingly different from those on Mercury, which is similarly cratered. “We are working to untangle what happened in each planet’s unique history that makes them similar yet different,” she says.

Knocking around asteroids

A clear highlight of this year in space crashes comes from DART, NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test, a spacecraft that smacked an asteroid to nudge its orbit. This was the first test of  planetary defense technology meant to protect Earth in the event we find an asteroid hurtling toward us.

“Thankfully, no known asteroid big enough to penetrate our atmosphere is a threat to impact Earth at any time in the next century,” says Angela Stickle, planetary scientist at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab and DART team member. But if an as-yet undiscovered asteroid is on a collision course with Earth, she adds, “we want to be prepared.” 

DART targeted an asteroid known as Dimorphos, which orbits another bigger asteroid called Didymos. By measuring the change in the time it takes for Dimorphos to orbit Didymos, before and after the impact, astronomers could determine how big of a punch their impacting spacecraft packed. The spacecraft changed the asteroid’s orbital period by 32 minutes, more than 25 times the goal time NASA set for a successful mission. “This was incredibly exciting and the team is still working on the details of why and how,” Stickle says.

This mission taught scientists about Didymos itself, which is actually a loose collection of rocks known as a rubble pile, showing how diverse the population of asteroids really is. For future asteroid diversions to be successful, astronomers need to know what each asteroid is made of, so they know how big of a push it needs.

[Related: NASA’s first attempt to smack an asteroid was picture perfect]

This isn’t the first time scientists have hit an asteroid, though—the Japanese Hayabusa2 mission shot a small cannon into the asteroid Ryugu in 2019, blowing up the surface just enough to expose the lower layers of dirt and to fling debris toward the main spacecraft for sample collection. But that impact was on a much smaller scale than DART, and meant for a totally different purpose. 

Now, Hayabusa2 is beginning a new mission, one that will contribute to DART’s goals of planetary protection. It’s hurtling toward a little-studied asteroid named 2001 CC21. They won’t collide; instead, the spacecraft is going to experiment with precision navigation around a fairly unknown target, a crucial skill for an asteroid-targeting planetary defense mission.

“My ideal next mission would be a spacecraft hitting an asteroid with one spacecraft watching the whole thing happen,” Stickle said about DART’s impact. “The more times we can test this technology, the better we will get.”

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Disclaimer: The author worked with the New Horizons team as a student researcher while she was an undergraduate.

On New Year’s Day three years ago, a small spacecraft zoomed by a chunk of ice billions of miles away, and scientists on Earth cheered. That was the second time the New Horizons probe got up close and personal with an object in the far-away Kuiper Belt—after capturing images of Pluto, its first target, in unprecedented detail.

Now, New Horizons has a third chance to revolutionize how astronomers see the distant parts of our solar system. On October 1, the spacecraft began the third phase of its life: the 2nd Kuiper Belt Extended Mission, or KEM2 for short.

Every few years, each NASA mission—yes, even the 45-year-old Voyager—undergoes a formal review in which administrators decide whether the project should continue. SOFIA, NASA’s observatory-on-an-airplane, was just a victim of this process, shutting down operations on September 30, the end of the administration’s fiscal year. New Horizons, on the other hand, was successfully renewed this summer for a two-year extension to its operations as it continues flying farther out of the solar system.

In KEM2, because the probe is traveling through a uniquely far-out place in space, New Horizons is going to expand its scope beyond the planetary science of its earlier phases. “New Horizons has become this interdisciplinary observatory in the Kuiper Belt,” says Alan Stern, principal investigator of New Horizons. 

The mission is branching out into two more disciplines: astrophysics and heliophysics. New Horizons is going to measure the solar wind, particles streaming out from the sun, and the probe will eventually reach the termination shock and heliopause, two places that can be considered outer boundaries of our solar system. Although Voyagers 1 & 2 reached the heliopause and made similar measurements, they did so with far less sophisticated tech. 

[Related: NASA’s New Horizons is so far away, it’s seeing stars from new angles]

New Horizons will help heliophysicists better understand the shape of our solar system’s edges and explore the limits of our sun’s influence on space. It’s also the “ultimate dark-sky site” for astrophysicists, allowing them to measure the amount of background light in the universe, a key constraint on the history of galaxies.

Although those aims are departures from its previous goals, it will continue to explore far-off bodies of rock and ice, too. New Horizons has been incredibly successful at exploring the outer solar system, providing the first detailed images of both the dwarf planet Pluto and a smaller Kuiper Belt object (KBO) called 2014 MU69. The Kuiper Belt contains a huge number of these icy objects, which are some of the best-preserved relics of our solar system’s early days—a window for astronomers to look into the past of how our planets formed. 

The spacecraft is currently moving a whopping 32,000 miles per hour, faster than even a rocket launching off Earth. It’s about 54 astronomical units (AU) from the sun, and will move 3 AU further away each year, rapidly approaching the edges of our solar system. It’s in unexplored territory—only four other probes, from the Voyager and Pioneer missions, have made it that far out). And those craft took different paths than New Horizons, carrying the now-outdated technology of the 1970s.

“I am excited about how far out we will be going into the distant parts of the solar system,” says Kelsi Singer, project scientist on New Horizons. In two years, she adds, the probe will be at 60 AU–at an edge of the belt that’s nearly impossible for scientists to explore using Earth-based tools. 

Because Kuiper Belt objects are so extraordinarily far away, even our largest telescopes on Earth have trouble spotting the tiny, faint specks. New Horizons, however, will have a much closer view, embedded within the Kuiper Belt itself. In the first extended mission, the team spotted 36 KBOs using the spacecraft’s onboard cameras, the closest from only 0.1 AU away, and they expect similar observations in KEM2. The team also has the opportunity to use New Horizons for unique images of the ice giants, Uranus and Neptune, from an angle we can’t see here on Earth.

[Related: The New Horizons spacecraft just revealed secrets of the most distant object we’ve ever visited]

Plus, New Horizons has an instrument, the Student Dust Counter, to measure how much space dust it encounters, tracing the distribution of dust near the edges of the solar system. Although we usually think of outer space as totally empty, there’s a good amount of dust floating around there, left over from when planets were formed—again, giving astronomers key insight into the history of the solar system. 

For now, the spacecraft is still in hibernation until it awakens in March 2023. Until then, the team is preparing for the exciting science to come, working tirelessly to hunt for new KBO targets with ground-based observations. And if they’re lucky, KEM2 may be the second of many more extended missions to come.
“The spacecraft is in perfect health, and it has the fuel and the power to run through sometime in the 2040s,” Stern says. “This is not the last hurrah of New Horizons by a long shot.”

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Space agencies like NASA keep a close watch on our nearest neighbor, Mars. With almost a dozen active missions on or around the Red Planet, they can track its daily weather, just like our forecasts here on Earth, and notice even small changes on its surface. 

Today, though, astronomers revealed a much bigger change: two new large impact craters in the Martian crust, observed by both the Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter (MRO) and the InSight lander. These are the largest impact craters discovered by MRO to date and the first detection of seismic surface waves, according to two new studies published in the journal Science.

“We never thought we’d see anything this big,” said Ingrid Daubar, planetary scientist at NASA’S Jet Propulsion Lab and MRO/InSight team member, in a NASA press conference on the new findings. Quakes on Mars, like those resulting from these meteor impacts, reveal more detailed information on its contents, and how rocky planets, including Earth, came to be.

Here at home, we’ve been measuring earthquakes for centuries—but marsquakes are newer territory. The InSight mission, which landed on Mars in 2018, recorded its first marsquake less than a year into its operations and has since recorded more than 1,300 of them. The lander provides NASA and other research teams a unique opportunity to understand what’s going on under the Martian surface, and study its core, mantle, and crust in detail. To fully understand how rocky planets like Mars and Earth form, we need more information on exactly how they’re structured—information that InSight aims to provide. MRO, which has been orbiting around Mars for 16 years, provides detailed images of the surface for birds-eye-view context for observations taken on the ground.

Mars has plenty of quakes caused by its own seismic activity, but without a thick atmosphere to protect it like Earth, astronomers also expect meteors to hit the surface and cause additional waves. The first of the newly detected impacts, known as S1000a, happened in September 2021, and created a cluster of craters in an area of rocky, craggy terrain to the North of Mars known as Tempe Terra. The second impact, called S1094b, hit in December 2021, and was much closer to InSight. It impacted a flat, dusty region on Amazonis Planitia, and formed a larger crater 150 meters in diameter—a distance comparable to the height of the Washington Monument. This created an approximately magnitude 4 quake, which is fairly small by Earth’s standards, but large for our less tectonically active neighbor.

Both of these detections were true displays of teamwork between the various missions. For S1000a, InSight noticed the seismic signatures, and scientists used that to direct MRO’s search to image the crater. For S1094b, on the other hand, the MRO team independently noticed the freshly formed crater, and collaborated with InSight researchers to confirm that the two spacecraft’s seismic signatures were, in fact, from the same event. The impact was large enough that it could even be seen in MRO’s daily weather camera, MARCI, allowing its team to pinpoint the timing of the impact to within a day. From these visuals, they estimated that the meteor that struck Mars was around 5 to 12 meters across, somewhere between the length of a giraffe and a telephone pole. 

[Related: Meteoroids make little ‘bloop’ noises when crashing into Mars]

When quakes happen on a rocky planet, the waves bounce around in different ways depending on the materials they encounter. So far, all the quakes observed by InSight have been characterized as body waves that travel deep within the planet’s mantle. Any major event—volcanoes, earthquakes, landslides, etc.—sends both body waves and shallower surface waves rippling through a planet. This left astronomers wondering about Mars’ crust. 

They finally got a clue with the meteor impact last December. S1094b created large waves that traveled through the crust, making it possible for InSight to measure them. Doyeon Kim, senior research scientist at ETH Zurich and lead author of one of the new studies, says that these kinds of detections, called surface waves, “were already a part of the mission goals of InSight from the beginning.” This marks the first unambiguous detection of surface waves on any planet other than Earth, and revealed that Mars’ crust may be a bit more uneven than previously thought. 

Images of S1094b from MRO’s HiRISE also show peculiar lighter patches on the Red Planet’s surface around the new crater, which the team identified as frozen water dredged up from below the crust upon impact. We’ve known Mars has ice caps for a while, but this is the lowest latitude that ice has been observed at so far. What’s more, the combination of imaging and seismic data gave the researchers particularly precise measurements of the location of the impact and the path the seismic waves took through Mars, providing information on the properties of the rocks along those paths.

This groundbreaking combination of observations opens the door for a much more detailed understanding of Mars and other rocky planets, from the physics of meteor impacts to the structure of planetary interiors and beyond. Unfortunately, this may be InSight’s last hurrah—dust has been slowly covering its solar panels for months, and in around four to eight weeks it will no longer have enough power to operate. The team sees this as a high note to end on: Their observations could pave the way for fresh discoveries on Mars.

[Related: 5 new insights about Mars from Perseverance’s rocky roving]

“The new results on crustal structure far from the InSight landing site will improve our overall understanding of the formation and evolution of the Martian crust,” says Martin Knapmeyer, planetary scientist at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) in Berlin. “In a cooperation kindled by a common goal, international science teams of two different Mars missions joined efforts to obtain the best possible results.”

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