New experimental results have cast doubt on earlier proposals suggesting that spherical, cell-like membranes could form in the methane lakes of Saturn’s largest moon. Through results published in Science Advances, Tuan Vu and Robert Hodyss at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory suggest that exobiologists will likely need to explore alternative routes when considering the possibility of […]

Using the Australian SKA Pathfinder (ASKAP), astronomers have discovered a new long-period radio transient source, which received the designation ASKAP J142431.2–612611 (ASKAP J1424 for short). The newfound transient has a period of approximately 36 minutes and its nature is unknown. The finding was reported in a paper published March 9 on the arXiv preprint server. […]

One particularly well-known fact about the moon is that it doesn’t have much of a magnetosphere to speak of. There’s no blanket to protect it from the solar wind ravaging its surface, blowing away its atmosphere and charging the notoriously dangerous dust particles that make up its regolith. However, scientists have also known for around […]

The Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) is one of the Milky Way’s closest galactic neighbors—a small, gas-rich galaxy visible to the naked eye from the southern hemisphere, and bound to our galaxy by gravity, alongside its companion, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). All three galaxies have been interacting for hundreds of millions of years.

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Here is a problem that has been quietly gnawing at astronomers for decades. The standard approach to detecting life on other worlds involves scanning exoplanet atmospheres for oxygen, methane, and ozone, whose presence is difficult to explain without biology. It’s a clever idea, but it carries a hidden flaw. That entire shopping list was written […]

Discovered in the Pictor II dwarf galaxy, star PicII-503 has an extreme deficiency in iron—less than 1/40,000th of the sun. This signature makes it the clearest example of a star within a primordial system that preserves the chemical enrichment of the universe’s first stars. PicII-503 also has an extreme overabundance of carbon, providing the missing […]

A thick layer of haze around the ultra-low-density planet Kepler-51d likely obscures not only the strange planet’s composition, but also its origin, according to a new study. A team led by Penn State researchers used NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to take a deeper look at the “super-puff” planet that defies planetary formation models. […]