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NASA switched two of the three science instruments on its Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory back on Wednesday, Aug. 26, resuming observations suspended since February. The Ultraviolet/Optical Telescope…
A ten-author team posted a laboratory analysis on Aug. 26 reporting three distinct phases of organic matter inside Antarctic micrometeorites of probable cometary origin, one of them nitrogen-rich and…
A gold-coated copper plate, chilled to 10 kelvin and sitting in an ultra-high vacuum, makes a serviceable stand-in for a grain of interstellar dust. Freeze the right gases onto it, warm it slowly,…
In 2023, the German astrophotographer Marcel Drechsler was working through online hydrogen-alpha sky-survey images of a patch of Sagittarius, far off the plane of the Milky Way, when he noticed a…
A laboratory group led by Arvind Paunikar reports the first measurement of the infrared absorption spectrum of naphthalene in its lowest excited triplet state, in a preprint posted to arXiv on Aug.…
Astronomers at Lowell Observatory report that two carbon gases released by the interstellar comet 2I/Borisov rose sharply against a third as the comet neared the Sun in 2019, a change the team calls…
Arianespace launched EUMETSAT's MTG-I2 weather satellite from Europe's Spaceport in French Guiana Aug. 27, on a flight the launch company says was the Ariane 6 rocket's first mission to geostationary…
Astronomers have mapped the jets and winds streaming away from 72 planet-forming disks and report that the outflows shift from molecular to atomic as the star draws in less material. The survey,…
More than four and a half billion years ago, a lump of ice and dust in the outer Solar System got warm enough to melt inside. Water seeped through the rock, dissolved what it could, and eventually…
Nobody has ever watched a black hole's jet move. The plasma thrown out of the quasar 3C 345, in the constellation Hercules, has been under observation for half a century, but always as stills, an…
Astronomers have measured the mass and the size of a candidate planet that never passes in front of its star, working from the light it reflects. The result was published Aug. 25 in Astronomy &…
The mantle beneath the southern highlands of Mars still preserves a thermal anomaly of 200 to 400 °C. The study, published Aug. 26 in Nature, inferred this internal temperature from radio tracking of…