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Volcanic eruptions may have delivered hidden ice to Mars’s equator

Explosive volcanic eruptions on early Mars may have transported water ice to equatorial regions, according to a modeling study published in Nature Communications. The authors suggest that these eruptions could have led to conditions that allow these ice deposits to still exist under the surface today, which would expand our knowledge of Mars’s terrain for […]

Modular robots could both explore off-world and build infrastructure

Modularity is taking off in more ways than one in space exploration. The design of the upcoming “Lunar Gateway” space station is supposed to be modular, with different modules being supplied by different organizations. In an effort to extend that thinking down to rovers on the ground, researchers at Germany’s space agency (DLR), developed an […]

Arab scholars may have noted the supernovae of 1006 and 1181 AD

It’s great to see old astronomical observations come to light. Not only can these confirm or refute what’s known about historic astronomical events, but they can describe what early observers actually saw.

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Mysterious gullies on Mars appear to have been carved by burrowing CO₂ ice blocks

Did life really exist on Mars after all? Unfortunately, there is no conclusive evidence for this yet. Nevertheless, it would seem that some form of life was the driving force behind the mysterious Martian dune gullies. Earth scientist Dr. Lonneke Roelofs from Utrecht University has investigated how these gullies were formed. In a test setup, […]

Tidal forces heat white dwarfs to unexpected temperatures in tight binary orbits

White dwarfs are the compact remnants of stars that have stopped nuclear burning, a fate that will eventually befall our sun. These extremely dense objects are degenerate stars because their structure is counterintuitive: the heavier they are, the smaller they are.

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Software solution can correct image blurring by James Webb Space Telescope

A pair of Sydney Ph.D. students helped sharpen the view of humanity’s most powerful space observatory—without leaving Earth. As an indelible reminder of this thrilling result, Louis Desdoigts, now a postdoctoral researcher at Leiden in the Netherlands, and his colleague Max Charles, had tattoos of the instrument their work has repaired inked on their arms. […]

Exploring the hidden rings of the Milky Way

Radio astronomy opens a window onto the invisible universe. While our eyes can detect visible light, countless objects in space emit radiation at much longer wavelengths, in the radio portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. Where visible light gets blocked by interstellar dust, radio waves pass through unrestricted, revealing objects that remain completely invisible to traditional […]

Geologists discover the first evidence of 4.5-billion-year-old ‘proto Earth’

Scientists at MIT and elsewhere have discovered extremely rare remnants of “proto Earth,” which formed about 4.5 billion years ago, before a colossal collision irreversibly altered the primitive planet’s composition and produced Earth as we know today. Their findings, reported today in the journal Nature Geosciences, will help scientists piece together the primordial starting ingredients […]

Composing crews for Mars missions: Team diversity may foster resilience

Simulation results highlight how team composition shapes stress, health, performance, and cohesion in long-duration space missions, according to a study published October 8, 2025, in the open-access journal PLOS One by Iser Pena and Hao Chen of the Stevens Institute of Technology, U.S. In particular, team diversity in personality traits may contribute to greater resilience […]

Open source mega-constellations could solve overcrowding

Duplicating expensive resources is expensive and wasteful, and most people would agree it’s unnecessary. However, the planned increase in major satellite constellations is currently causing a massive duplication of resources as individual companies and even countries try to set up their own infrastructure in space.

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Cosmic tug-of-war: Gravity reshapes magnetic fields in star clusters

Astronomers have captured the clearest picture yet of how massive stars are born, revealing a dramatic interplay between gravity and magnetic fields in some of our galaxy’s most dynamic star forming regions. A team led by Dr. Qizhou Zhang from the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) […]

Simulations unveil the electrodynamic nature of black hole mergers and other spacetime collisions

Gravitational waves are energy-carrying waves produced by the acceleration or disturbance of massive objects. These waves, which were first directly observed in 2015, are known to be produced during various cosmological phenomena, including mergers between two black holes that orbit each other (i.e., binary black holes).

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Mars dust devils mapped in detail, revealing faster winds than expected

Combing through 20 years of images from the European Space Agency’s Mars Express and ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter spacecraft, scientists have tracked 1,039 tornado-like whirlwinds to reveal how dust is lifted into the air and swept around Mars’s surface.

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With new analysis, Apollo samples brought to Earth in 1972 reveal exotic sulfur hidden in moon’s mantle

When astronauts returned from NASA’s final Apollo moon mission in 1972, some of the samples they collected were sealed and carefully stored away in the hope that future researchers using advanced equipment might analyze them and make new discoveries.

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3I/ATLAS’s coma proves another cometary formation theory

Interstellar visitor 3I/ATLAS has been constantly changing as it makes its way through our solar system. That’s to be expected, as, for the first time in potentially billions of years, it’s getting close to the energy put out by a star.

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