Space

James Web telescope finds giant question mark galaxy in deep space.

When JAXA’s Hayabusa-1 spacecraft delivered samples from asteroid Ryugu to Earth in late 2020, anticipation was high. What could the space rock possibly be waiting to tell us?

Asteroids are time capsules of the Solar System, containing material from early in its history. As a 2021 study found, the Ryugu samples contained carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen, all necessary ingredients for life, and a 2022 study discovered evidence of water (and possibly a subsurface lake) that had long since dried up. Ryugu and its parent body were also revealed to carry some of the most ancient rocks in the Solar System. However, the pieces of this asteroid still had more to say.

It turned out that two of the Ryugu samples each had a shard of something that visually stood out. Researchers discovered they were seeing fragments, or clasts, of rock with a chemical composition that differed from the rest of Ryugu. These clasts were higher in sulfur and iron, but lower in oxygen, magnesium, and silicon. That meant they could not have possibly formed with Ryugu, so they had to have been acquired through a later impact; but the asteroid still had more to say.

Astronomers are perplexed by a strange young planet so close to its parent star that its atmosphere is evaporating and its orbit is changing in unpredictable ways.

The planet AU Microscopii b (AU Mic b), according to scientists from Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Center, is showing clear signs of atmospheric loss with the its hydrogen-rich atmosphere puffing out in front of the planet, like a headlight on a fast-bound train.

“We’ve never seen atmospheric escape go from completely not detectable to very detectable over such a short period when a planet passes in front of its star,” study co-author Keighley Rockcliffe said.

“We were really expecting something very predictable, repeatable. But it turned out to be weird. When I first saw this, I thought ‘That can’t be right,’” Dr Rockcliffe said.

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"On August 31, 2012 a long filament of solar material that had been hovering in the sun's atmosphere, the corona, erupted out into space at 4:36 p.m. EDT. The coronal mass ejection, or CME, traveled at over 900 miles per second. The CME did not travel directly toward Earth, but did connect with Earth's magnetic environment, or magnetosphere, with a glancing blow. causing aurora to appear on the night of Monday, September 3. https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/11095

This video was created using source images found here https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/4909."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_thermal_rocket

Hydrogen expelling nuclear space flight. 2 to 3 times more efficient than chemical engines

By measuring the universe’s emptiest spaces, scientists can study how matter clumps together and how fast it flies apart.

Four years from now, if all goes well, a nuclear-powered rocket engine will launch into space for the first time. The rocket itself will be conventional, but the payload boosted into orbit will be a different matter.

NASA announced Wednesday that it is partnering with the US Department of Defense to launch a nuclear-powered rocket engine into space as early as 2027. The US space agency will invest about $300 million in the project to develop a next-generation propulsion system for in-space transportation.

While rovers have made incredible discoveries, their wheels can hold them back, and erratic terrain can mean damage. There is no replacing something like Perseverance, but sometimes rovers could use a leg up, and they could get that from a small swarm of four-legged robots.

On Wednesday, researchers announced the discovery of a new astronomical enigma. The new object, GPM J1839–10, behaves a bit like a pulsar, sending out regular bursts of radio energy. But the physics that drives pulsars means that they'd stop emitting if they slowed down too much, and almost every pulsar we know of blinks at least once per minute.

GPM J1839–10 takes 22 minutes between pulses. We have no idea what kind of physics or what kind of objects can power that.