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Jupiter’s Lightning: Up to a Million Times More Powerful Than Earth’s
14 days ago•Source: The Daily Galaxy
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3.155 min•16 days ago
Hubble’s Fresh View Reveals Dynamic Crab Nebula Filaments
Hubble released a new image of the Crab Nebula, the remnant of a supernova observed in 1054 A.D., showing that its outer gas filaments have evolved and are moving faster than the inner regions over the past 25 years, a motion driven by the nebula’s central pulsar.
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Mars Might Host a Planetwide Subsurface Water Network
The Daily Galaxy•20 days ago
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Massive asteroid defies spin limits with a 1.9-minute rotation
The Daily Galaxy•20 days ago
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Cosmic fossil star unlocks secrets of the universe's first generations
Astronomers identified PicII-503, an extremely metal-poor second-generation star in the dwarf galaxy Pictor II, with just 1/40,000th the Sun's iron and a striking carbon overabundance. This rare star acts as a fossil record of the universe's earliest element production, offering clues about how the first stars enriched later generations and linking to signatures seen in Milky Way halo stars; the discovery was reported in Nature Astronomy.
XRISM captures a monster black hole’s awakening blasting a starburst galaxy with fast winds
XRISM observed the waking of the supermassive black hole IRAS 05189-2524 in a merging, star-forming galaxy, detecting high-velocity, bullet-like outflows up to about 0.14c that carry far more energy than slower winds. The finding shows how black-hole winds can shape the host galaxy and regulate star formation, shedding light on the co-evolution of galaxies and their central engines.
Ryugu asteroid yields DNA and RNA building blocks, study finds
Two samples from asteroid Ryugu returned by JAXA’s Hayabusa2 contain the five nucleobases adenine, guanine, cytosine, thymine and uracil—the building blocks of DNA and RNA. The find suggests these compounds can form in space without life and may have been distributed across the early solar system, with Ryugu showing different base concentrations than Bennu and meteorites, hinting at diverse formation histories and a wide cosmic availability of life's chemical ingredients.
JWST uncovers a sulfur-rich lava-ocean exoplanet, redefining planet types
Space-based and ground observations reveal L 98-59 d as a 1.6× Earth's size exoplanet with a global magma ocean and a sulfur-rich atmosphere likely dominated by hydrogen sulfide and sulfur dioxide, suggesting it formed from a larger sub-Neptune and cooled over billions of years. This lava-world represents a new class of planets and highlights the surprising diversity of worlds beyond our solar system.
Nearby galaxy groups hint at slower local expansion, easing Hubble tension
Two studies of the Centaurus A and M81 galaxy groups estimate a local Hubble constant around 64 km/s/Mpc, slower than some nearby measurements and closer to the CMB/LCDM value, suggesting less dark matter may be needed and that the Hubble tension could be mitigated by analyzing more galaxy groups with upcoming 4MOST data.
Lava-World Exoplanet Points to a New Class of Planets
New JWST observations and simulations identify L98-59d as a 1.6 Earth-radius exoplanet with a global magma ocean, a molten core, surface temperatures near 1900°C, and a hydrogen-sulfide atmosphere shaped by strong tidal forces; this suggests molten planets may be more common than thought and that some planets in the habitable zone might not be habitable after all.
A buried neutrino telescope may hear the ghosts of ancient stars
An upgrade to Japan’s Super-Kamiokande underground neutrino detector could soon pick up neutrinos from supernovae that exploded billions of years ago, enabling scientists to study the deaths of stars across cosmic history through these ghost particles that rarely interact with matter.
Neutron Stars May Harbor the Big Bang’s Quark–Gluon Plasma
Scientists propose that the ultra-dense interiors of neutron stars could contain quark-gluon plasma—the same state of matter that existed moments after the Big Bang—and by analyzing how tidal forces in binary neutron-star systems imprint oscillation modes on gravitational waves, researchers hope to infer the stars’ interior structure and their equation of state, though current detectors aren’t yet sensitive enough; next‑generation observatories may confirm the presence of this exotic matter.
Sun's Galactic Escape Traced Through Solar Twin Migrants
Using Gaia data, scientists found that the Sun and thousands of Sun-like stars formed near the Milky Way's center about 4–6 billion years ago and migrated outward in a synchronized wave, likely aided by the galaxy's central bar, reshaping our understanding of the Sun’s origin and the Milky Way's history.
New Benchmark Earth-Sized World Around a Nearby M-Dwarf Promises Atmospheric Insights
A nearby mid-M-dwarf hosts TOI-4616 b, an Earth-sized planet (1.22 Earth radii) with a 1.55-day orbit and an equilibrium temperature around 525 K, making it a key benchmark for studying atmospheres and atmospheric loss in strongly irradiated rocky worlds around M-dwarfs; its well-documented history and extensive transit follow-up make it a prime target for comparative atmospheric studies, potentially with JWST.