Astro Blog

By Phie Jacobs , Science.  Excerpt: Researchers...aren’t quite sure why...the corona, is so much hotter than the Sun’s surface—or why it can violently eject huge volumes of plasma that can mess with Earth’s magnetic field and scramble power grids. ...air turbulence in Earth’s atmosphere blurs our view of it, making it hard to discern fine details. Now, using an adaptive optics system installed at Big Bear Solar Observatory (BBSO), the authors of a new  Nature Astronomy  study have removed this blur—producing  the clearest images and videos to date of the Sun’s atmosphere . In  a statement , BBSO optical engineer and study co-author Nicolas Gorceix likened the new technology to “a pumped-up autofocus and optical image stabilization in your smartphone camera, but correcting for the errors in the atmosphere rather than the user’s shaky hands.” ...researchers also captured a phenomenon known as coronal rain, where city-size droplets of hot plasma in the Sun’s corona...

By Dennis Normile , Science.  Excerpt: Following its successes retrieving lunar samples from both the near and far sides of the Moon, China is planning an encore, sending a probe to snatch material from a near-Earth asteroid. The target of the Tianwen-2 mission, which is expected to launch by the end of the month, is a chunk of rock named 469219 Kamo‘oalewa. It is one of just seven asteroids that fall into a little-understood class known as quasi-satellites of Earth—and it could also be the first known asteroid comprised of lunar material. That hypothesis could be confirmed by laboratory studies of fragments collected by Tianwen-2, which are due to be returned to Earth about 2.5 years after launch. ...Kamo‘oalewa was discovered in 2016 by the Pan-STARRS 1 asteroid survey telescope on Haleakalā in Hawaii. It ... has been in its current orbit for about 100 years  and will likely remain there for another 300.... University of Arizona planetary scientist Benjamin Sharkey and colle...

By Daniel Clery , Science.  Excerpt: Researchers have found promising hints that the atmosphere of a distant planet contains gases linked to life,  BBC reports today . A team led by University of Cambridge astronomer Nikku Madhusudhan reports in  The Astrophysical Journal Letters  that it  used NASA’s JWST telescope to detect the signatures of the gases  dimethyl sulfide (DMS) and dimethyl disulfide (DMDS) in starlight that had passed through the atmosphere of K2-18b, a massive planet 120 light-years from Earth. On Earth, those gases are produced by marine phytoplankton and give sea air its distinctive scent. ...It’s also possible that DMS and DMDS are produced on the planet  by some nonbiological process . Last year, a different team of researchers reported signs of DMS  within the dust and gas of the definitively lifeless comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko , calling into question the gas’ usefulness as a biosignature....  See also New York Tim...

By Jenna Ahart , Science.  Excerpt: Like the fictional planet Tatooine in  Star Wars , some exoplanets ...orbit binary pairs of stars, which cast their worlds in double sunrises and sunsets as they themselves orbit each other. Now, researchers report today in  Science Advances  that they have found  an especially unusual example of such a planet : one that orbits over and under the poles of two failed stars that loom in its skies. ...only 16 exoplanets had ever been confirmed to orbit around a binary pair—and all of those planets orbit within the plane of the stars’ orbits around each other, not over the poles. ...this peculiar planet, known rather prosaically as 2M1510 (AB) b, ...orbits... brown dwarfs, failed stars that aren’t massive enough to spark on. ...In binary systems like this one, the elliptical orbit of each object in the binary will gradually shift its orientation over time, like the axis of a spinning top tracing out a circle as the top wobble...

By Molly Herring , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: Researchers have found salts in samples from asteroid Ryugu. Combined with similar salty discoveries from asteroid Bennu, the finding suggests that aqueous incubators of life’s first ingredients may have been relatively common in the early solar system. ...The results from  Ryugu  were reported in  Nature Astronomy  in November 2024, and those from  Bennu  were reported in January 2025. The parallel discoveries paint a compelling picture of the early solar system. ...“We can now say, for the first time, that 4.5 billion years ago—long before most of us thought it could happen—we had both the ingredients and the environment in which the early stages of organic evolution towards life could begin,” said  Tim McCoy , a curator of meteorites at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History who studied the Bennu samples. Such evolution “didn’t happen on a large, icy moon or a large, warm planet like Earth. It...

By Robin George Andrews , The New York Times.  Excerpt: The vermilion, amethyst and jade ribbons of the northern and southern lights are some of Earth’s most distinctive features. But our planet doesn’t have a monopoly on auroras. Scientists have spied them throughout the solar system, ... Mars , Saturn,  Jupiter  ...some of Jupiter’s  fiery and icy moons ... Uranus , too. But auroras around our sun’s most distant planet, Neptune, have long eluded astronomers. That has changed with the powerful infrared instruments aboard the James Webb Space Telescope. In a study published on Wednesday in the journal  Nature Astronomy , scientists reveal unique auroras that spill over either side of Neptune’s equator, a contrast with the glowing gossamer seen arcing over other worlds’ poles..  Full article at https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/26/science/neptune-aurora-nasa-webb-telescope.html . 

By Paul Voosen , Science.  Excerpt: NASA’s Curiosity rover has detected what could be a chemical relic of long-ago life on Mars: long-chain organic molecules. Found after painstaking reanalysis of data on a sample drilled from a lake that dried up billions of years ago, the molecules likely derived from fatty acids, a common building block of cell membranes on Earth. The finding,  published  today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is not a definite detection of past life; the fatty acids could also have formed without life. But it’s another in a series of tantalizing hints....  Full article at https://www.science.org/content/article/curiosity-rover-detects-long-chain-carbon-molecules-mars .