When massive stars die, they don’t go quietly. For years, astronomers have been able to watch these stars tear themselves apart in a bright explosion. Now they can also detect something new: radio waves. Read more from Earth.com:
Scientists have known about the Ring Nebula for nearly 250 years, and they’re still learning more: This time, a glowing bar of iron has caught their attention. Read more from @:
You might not develop hazardous buildups of electric charge while driving on any given road. But it’s a concern for the several space agencies figuring out how the moon’s surface could be explored with wheeled rovers. Phys.org takes a closer look:
#BBCSkyAtNight magazine has an article today about Philip T. Metzger's work on what are known as PSI (plume-surface interactions) with the slightly click-baity headline 'Humans may be too heavy to land on Mars'.
The article is based on a paper on arXiv by Metzger et al., dated 2021. That may seem all fine and dandy, but in fact what is on arXiv is in reality this conference paper, dated January 2009.
There have been 17 years of work in the field since then, and there is so much more that BBC Sky At Night could have pointed to, including a lot more work by Metzger just for starters.
Metzger had at the time of that paper only restarted research in this field, which had lain dormant for almost 3 decades, a few years earlier in 2004.
[…Continued]
For one overview of what has happened experimentally in those 17 years since, as well as background on the research in this field that occurred from 1966 to 1976, see this 2025 article in Acta Astronautica by Claudia Jimenez Cuesta et al..
It has all sorts of interesting stuff, from experiments done with multi-coloured layers of simulated Martian regolith, to people at the University of Glasgow (amongst others) using crushed walnut shells in their Martian simulation experiments in the 2020s — a subject that I am sure would appeal to a British popular astronomy magazine.
NASA lost contact with its MAVEN probe on Dec. 6 and has been scrambling to make contact with the spacecraft in orbit around Mars ever since. NBC News has more:
It might be hard for a lot of people to buy in to the idea of extraterrestrial life existing beyond our planet. Astrobiologists are not among them. @ tells us more about the growing number of experts who believe we’re not alone:
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has zoomed in on a stormy and highly active spiral galaxy named NGC 1792, providing a deeper view of the tumultuous activity taking place over 50 million light-years away. Read more from @nasa.gov:
From @sciencefocus: "Scientists have developed a new way to hunt for hidden signals of past life, and say it could assist in the search for extraterrestrial organisms on other planets."