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PUNCH mission spacecraft producing unprecedented images of Sun

After less than a year in orbit, the Southwest Research Institute-built PUNCH spacecraft have made major accomplishments, imaging the sun in context while tracking comets and enormous space weather events as they traveled through the inner solar system. SwRI’s Dr. Craig DeForest discussed the achievements of NASA’s PUNCH (Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere) mission during a media roundtable at the AGU25 conference on Dec. 16.

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The next frontier in space is closer than you think: Welcome to the world of very low Earth orbit satellites

There are about 15,000 satellites orbiting Earth. Most of them, like the International Space Station and the Hubble Telescope, reside in low Earth orbit, or LEO, which tops out at about 1,200 miles (2,000 kilometers) above Earth’s surface.

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Webb observes pulsar-orbiting planet whose composition defies explanation

Scientists using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope have observed a rare type of exoplanet, or planet outside our solar system, whose atmospheric composition challenges our understanding of how it formed.

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A universal law could explain how large trades change stock prices

Financial markets are often seen as chaotic and unpredictable. Every day, traders around the world buy shares and sell assets in a whirlwind of activity. It looks like a system of total randomness—but is it really?

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‘Agent of chaos’: BWC shows Mich. officers shoot man who carjacked bystander, fired at ATF agents

The suspect, linked to 11 shots fired incidents, was critically injured after raising a gun at officers during a foot pursuit captured on bodycam

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Dazzling cosmic jet reveals time-stamped history of star birth

An international team of astronomers has uncovered the most unmistakable evidence yet that the powerful jets launched by newborn stars reliably record a star’s most violent growth episodes, confirming a long-standing model of how these jets propagate through their surroundings.

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A subtle return of La Niña

A weak La Niña emerged in the equatorial Pacific in late 2025, and scientists are watching how it may help shape weather and climate in the months ahead.

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SpaceX squeezes in 100th Space Coast launch, but weather delays ULA, 2nd SpaceX mission

SpaceX managed to find a lull in the winds early Monday, but a second SpaceX launch as well as one from United Launch Alliance opted to wait at least a day before trying to add to the Space Coast’s rocket mission total.

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Rare brown dwarf discovered orbiting ancient star

Astronomers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) and elsewhere report the discovery of a new brown dwarf about 60 times more massive than Jupiter. The newfound substellar object, designated TOI-7019 b, is a brown dwarf known to orbit a star that is part of the Milky Way’s ancient thick disk. The finding is detailed in a paper published December 5 on the arXiv preprint server.

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Man sentenced to 20 years in prison after assaulting, strangling ICE officer

Diego Barron-Esquivel, described as a Mexican national, “did intentionally and forcibly assault, resist, oppose, impede, intimidate and interfere with” an ICE agent, court documents show

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Forget stardust—it was star ice all along

Carl Sagan famously said that “We’re all made of star stuff.” But he didn’t elaborate on how that actually happened. Yes, many of the molecules in our bodies could only have been created in massive supernovae explosions—hence the saying—and scientists have long thought they had the mechanism for how settled: the isotopes created in the supernovae flew here on tiny dust grains (stardust) that eventually accreted into Earth, and later into biological systems.

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NASA’s Roman telescope will observe thousands of newfound cosmic voids

Our universe is filled with galaxies, in all directions as far as our instruments can see. Some researchers estimate that there are as many as 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe. At first glance, these galaxies might appear to be randomly scattered across space, but they’re not. Careful mapping has shown that they are distributed across the surfaces of giant cosmic “bubbles” up to several hundred million light-years across. Inside these bubbles, few galaxies are found, so those regions are called cosmic voids. NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will allow us to measure these voids with new precision, which can tell us about the history of the universe’s expansion.

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Massive stars make their mark in Hubble image

This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features a glittering blue dwarf galaxy called Markarian 178 (Mrk 178). The galaxy, which is substantially smaller than our own Milky Way, lies 13 million light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major (the Great Bear).

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The hidden physics of knot formation in fluids

Knots are everywhere—from tangled headphones to DNA strands packed inside viruses—but how an isolated filament can knot itself without collisions or external agitation has remained a longstanding puzzle in soft-matter physics.

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Integrative quantum chemistry method unlocks secrets of advanced materials

A new computational approach developed at the University of Chicago promises to shed light on some of the world’s most puzzling materials—from high-temperature superconductors to solar cell semiconductors—by uniting two long-divided scientific perspectives.

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