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Super-puff planets have extremely low densities, and exoplanet scientists aren't sure why. They seem to defy our understanding of how planets form. Researchers used the JWST to observe the atmosphere of Kepler-51d, one of the puffiest of the super-puffs. Unfortunately, even the powerful space telescope found a featureless spectrum. What does it mean?

Space weather is a fascinating subject, but one we still have a lot to learn about. One of the main components of it is the active regions (ARs) of the Sun. These huge concentrations of magnetic fields show up throughout the Sun’s photosphere and are the primary source of solar flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs). They can be simple pairings of magnetic flux or huge, magnetically complex tangles that spend weeks creating massive solar storms before dissipating. But tracking the longest lived of these ARs has been a headache for solar physicists, and a recent paper by Emily Mason and Kara Kniezewski, published in The Astrophysical Journal, both dives into this tracking problem and uncovers some interesting features of the Sun’s most persistent ARs.

Minister of National Defence David McGuinty announced on Monday, March 16th, that the Canadian government is committing $200 million to develop Canada's first commercial spaceport in Nova Scotia, which will be run by Maritime Launch Services.

Pulsars are rapidly rotating neutron stars. The Crab Pulsar, an often studied supernova remnant, is known for its unusual radio emission patterns. New researchs says it's because of a "tug-of-war" between magnetism and gravity. Gravity acts as a focusing lens and plasma in the magnetosphere acts as a defocusing lens.

A team of astronomers were fortunate when their original comet target couldn't be observed with the Hubble. They quickly pivoted to a different target, and caught Comet K1 in the process of breaking apart. This gave them an excellent opportunity to learn more about the doomed object.

In 1959, the Luna 2 probe from the Soviet Union became the very first human-made object to reach our closest celestial neighbor. In the decades since, we have been leaving footprints - both literally and figuratively - all over the Moon. Today, there are over 100 metric tons of human-made material resting on the Moon’s surface - everything from advanced cameras and sensors to literal human waste. But that’s nothing compared to what’s to come. NASA predicts the next decade will see over 100 new lunar missions, equaling or exceeding all the missions previously flown. Which brings up a pressing question about all the stuff that’s already there - how do we protect that history? A new paper by Teasel Muir-Harmony, the Curator of the Space History Department of the Smithsonian and Todd Mosher, a Scholar in Residence at University of Colorado, Boulder, reports on a Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum and the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Summit on Outer Space Heritage that dives into the legal, scientific, and engineering hurdles of preserving these historic sites.

It was an amazing sight witnessed by many during the April 2024 total solar eclipse. For a few precious moments, it seemed like a celestial dimmer switch was thrown, as the Moon eclipsed the Sun. It was one of the very few times you could actually see prominences and the pearly white corona of the Sun in person, without the aid of special equipment. Now, a recent study out of the University of Hawai’i has linked high resolution images taken during totality with observations from missions orbiting the Sun, in an effort to chronicle the evolution of space weather.

The European Space Agency’s (ESA’s) Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE) probe is on its (very long) way to Jupiter, and will finally arrive at the King of Planets in 2031. Its primary mission is to focus on the “big three” icy moons - Ganymede, Europa, and Callisto. But while JUICE is busy mapping Ganymede’s magnetic field, it will also be keeping a sharp eye on the other 94 moons in the Jupiter system. A recent paper published in Space Science Reviews by Tilmann Denk of DLR, Germany’s space research association, and his co-authors showcases just how much “bonus science” JUICE is expected to squeeze out of these other targets.

A strange lack of stellar orbits around the core of the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) mystified astronomers for decades. Not only that, but the SMC has a strange, irregular shape, and sports a tidal. Now, a team of observers led by graduate student Himansch Rathore at the University of Arizona, has tracked down the reason why the stars don't orbit. It's because the SMC crashed directly through its neighbor, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), in the distant past. That huge collision disrupted stellar motions and [sent them on wildly different trajectories](https://www.universetoday.com/articles/something-is-tearing-the-small-magellanic-cloud-apart). It also disturbed the clouds of gas within the SMC and created a tail of gas stretching out across space.

A study led by the University of Oxford has identified a new type of planet beyond our Solar System – one that stores large amounts of sulphur deep within a permanent ocean of magma. The magma ocean has lasted 5 billion years so far, while Earth's magma ocean likely lasted only tens of millions of years.

With the first images from the spacecraft now in hand, the team behind NASA’s Star-Planet Activity Research CubeSat (SPARCS) is ready to begin charting the energetic lives of the galaxy’s most common stars to help answer one of humanity’s most profound questions: Which distant worlds beyond our solar system might be habitable?

Greek mythology has given a name to a great many objects in our solar system. But perhaps one of the least well understood are the Trojans, named after the people of Troy featured in The Iliad. When astronomers refer to them, they are normally talking about a group of over 10,000 confirmed asteroids orbiting at the Lagrange points both in front of and behind Jupiter on its orbit around the Sun. But, more generally, astronomers can now use the term to refer to any co-orbital setup - indeed almost every planet in our solar system has Trojans, though not as many as Jupiter. Which also leads to the belief that “exotrojans” must exist around other stars. Despite our best efforts with initiatives like the TROY project, so far we have yet to find one. But a new paper published in The Astrophysical Journal by Jackson Taylor of West Virginia University and an abundance of co-authors took the hunt to one of the most extreme environments in the universe: pulsar binary systems.

After decades of searching for alien signals in narrow radio and microwave bandwidths, a new paper suggests that we take a wholly different approach. The idea is to broaden the search to a much wider range of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Scientists at Europe's CERN research center say the Large Hadron Collider's LHCb experiment has discovered a "doubly charmed" particle that's like a proton, but four times as weighty.

The WHAT? Yeah, the vortons. It’s not an anime monster-hunting show. It’s not some AI startup company. It’s a…it’s a thing. I think.

Oxygen has been the most important gas in our search for life among the cosmos thus far. On Earth, we have it in abundance because it is produced by biological synthesis. But that might not be the case on other planets, so even if we do find a very clear high oxygen signal in the atmosphere of an exoplanet, it might not be a clear indication that life exists there. A new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv, from Margaret Turcotte Seavey and a team of researchers from institutions like the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and Johns Hopkins University, adds some additional context to what else might be going on in those atmospheres. In particular, they note that if there’s even a little bit of water vapor, it can make a big difference in whether a lifeless rock looks like a living, thriving world.

With the ISS set to retire in 2030, several plans are in place to replace it. These include existing space stations, proposals by rising national space agencies, and commercial space stations. With multiple outposts in orbit, the potential for research, development, and even conflict is considerable!

There may be as many rogue planets or free-floating planets in the Milky Way as there are stars. If there are billions of these worlds, some of them have likely held onto their moons. New research reveals a pathway to habitability for these rogue exomoons.

Every ounce counts when launching a rocket, which is why considerations for the Size, Weight, and Power (SWaP) of every component matters so much. For decades, one of the heaviest and most power-hungry components on a spacecraft has been its optical and communications hardware - specifically the bulky mechanical mirror used for LiDAR and free-space laser communications. But a new paper, published in Nature by researchers at MIT, MITRE, and Sandia National Laboratories, might have just fundamentally changed the SWaP considerations of LiDAR systems. Their technology, which they’re called a “photonic ski-jump” could one day revolutionize how spacecraft communicate.

And yeah, we have a problem.