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The Almahata Sitta 202 meteorite fragment hosts evidence of aqueous alteration at intermediate pressures and temperatures, indicative of a hitherto unknown Ceres-sized parent body. Such intermediate conditions, also seen in the Allende meteorite, might have been more common than our biased meteorite collection indicates.
Pluto’s haze could have a major icy component created by the condensation of organic molecules such as C4H2. This is different from Titan whose haze, despite a similar atmospheric composition, is mostly macromolecular aggregates. Triton’s haze, instead, should be dominated by ices, particularly C2H4.
Flares from K and M dwarf stars drive change, and sustain an altered atmospheric chemistry, in orbiting rocky planets, according to a suite of three-dimensional climate models. The atmospheres of rocky planets around G dwarfs rapidly return to their pre-flare states, however.
A globular cluster-like system in the Galactic bulge hosts two stellar populations with remarkably different ages, identifying it as a site of recent star formation and providing observational proof for the hierarchical assembly of the Milky Way spheroid.
The detection of three ultraviolet emission lines from GN-z11 can be interpreted as the [C iii] λ1907, C iii] λ1909 doublet and O iii] λ1666 at z = 10.957 ± 0.001, confirming GN-z11 as the most distant galaxy known to date and revealing the properties of its dense ionized gas.
A peculiar near-infrared transient with an observed duration shorter than 245 s, coincident with the luminous star-forming galaxy GN-z11 at z ≈ 11, might have arisen from a rest-frame ultraviolet flash associated with a long gamma-ray burst in GN-z11.
Solar imaging and spectral data indicate that impulsive heating through magnetic reconnection in transition region loops is responsible for observed transient brightenings, consistent with ion cyclotron turbulence due to strong currents at the reconnection sites.
The observed oriented directions of galaxy angular momentum vectors correlate with predicted directions based on the initial density field reconstructed from the positions of Sloan Digital Sky Survey galaxies, opening a way to probe fundamental physics in the early Universe.
The Milky Way disk is found to be moving with respect to the outer halo of the Galaxy as a result of the gravitational pull of the Large Magellanic Cloud as it falls into the Milky Way. Dynamical models of our Galaxy need to take this effect into account.
Two further radio bursts associated with magnetar SGR 1935+2154 have been detected with a Westerbork 25 m dish, bringing the total to four. These observations demonstrate that SGR 1935+2154, a putative Galactic analogue of a fast radio burst source, can emit bursts across seven orders of magnitude in energy.
Amino acid glycine is shown here to form in the laboratory at temperatures of <15 K without the need for energetic processing (such as ultraviolet irradiation or particle bombardment). The implication is that amino acids could potentially form at the very earliest stages of star formation and persist until planetary systems are established.
The change in growth of the lunar regolith thickness around 3.5 Gyr ago, a consequence of a change in population of the impactor bodies from planetesimals to asteroids, indicates that the instability of giant planets happened early.
Based on laboratory experiments and predictions, the Europa Clipper
mission is expected to detect the surface ices on the night side of
Jupiter’s moon Europa glowing in the dark, with an intensity that can be
used to determine their composition.
LOFAR reveals diffuse radio emission in massive high-redshift clusters, whose high radio luminosities indicate magnetic field strengths similar to those in nearby clusters, suggesting fast magnetic field amplification in the early Universe.
Precision quantum sensor networks are a useful and viable tool in multi-messenger astronomy for the detection of exotic fields that go beyond standard model theories. They could, for example, detect intense bursts of exotic low-mass fields generated by high-energy astrophysical events.
The Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) looked at the Moon in the 6 µm wavelength region and found a signature of molecular water, distinguishing it from other forms of hydration. The authors estimate water abundances between 100 and 400 µg g−1 at high latitudes, trapped within impact glasses or possibly in between grains.
Observations of the jellyfish galaxy JO206 reveal an ordered, large-scale magnetic field and extremely high polarization, which can be explained by the accretion of magnetized plasma from the intergalactic medium that condenses onto the external layers of the tail.
A reconstruction of the distribution of cold traps on the Moon at spatial scales varying from 1 km to 1 cm shows that the smallest ones are also the most numerous, 10–20% of the total. The total surface area of the Moon that can efficiently trap water is revised substantially upward, to 40,000 km2.
The distribution of boulders on the surface of top-shaped asteroids such as Bennu or Ryugu tells us about the processes driving their evolution. A model shows that the spin-up induced by the Yarkovsky–O’Keefe–Radzievskii–Paddack (YORP) effect can explain simultaneously both the latitudinal behaviour of the boulders and the regolith migration.
Soft X-ray observations of the southern Galactic sky with the HaloSat CubeSat indicate that the circumgalactic medium (CGM) of the Milky Way has a disk-like profile, with an extended spherical halo. Clumps in the CGM correlate with star-formation activity.
