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Space mission "BepiColombo" delivers data from the innermost planet in our solar system for the first time On December 1, 2024, the BepiColombo mission flew past Mercury for the fifth time and has now become the first spacecraft to observe the surface in the mid-infrared using the MERTIS ("Mercury Radiometer and Thermal Infrared Spectrometer") infrared spectrometer.

Webb telescope's largest study of universe expansion confirms challenge to cosmic theory The findings offer a crucial cross-check for previous Hubble Space Telescope measurements of the universe's mysterious expansion New observations from the James Webb Space Telescope suggest that a new feature in the universe-not a flaw in telescope measurements-may be behind the decadelong mystery of why the universe is expanding faster today than it did in its infancy billions of years ago.

This artist's concept shows interstellar object 1I/2017 U1 ('Oumuamua) after its discovery in 2017. While itself not a dark comet, 'Oumuamua's motion through the solar system has helped researchers better understand the nature of the 14 dark comets di. Credit: European Southern Observatory / M. Kornmesser" These celestial objects look like asteroids but act like comets now come in two flavors.

The team's detection method, which identified 138 space rocks ranging from busto stadium-sized, could aid in tracking potential asteroid impactors. The asteroid that extinguished the dinosaurs is estimated to have been about 10 kilometers across. That's about as wide as Brooklyn, New York. Such a massive impactor is predicted to hit Earth rarely, once every 100 million to 500 million years.

For millennia humans have been inspired by the stars but this may soon be a thing of the past due to a significant increase in the numbers of satellites, potentially limiting our view of the night sky.

A team of astronomers has identified a potential new mechanism for bringing water to Earth, offering a promising departure from previous theories. Based on numerous observations of the Solar System, as well as observations of extrasolar debris disks by the ALMA radio telescope, the results are published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics .

A team of astronomers has found that Venus has never been habitable, despite decades of speculation that our closest planetary neighbour was once much more like Earth than it is today. The researchers, from the University of Cambridge, studied the chemical composition of the Venusian atmosphere and inferred that its interior is too dry today for there ever to have been enough water for oceans to exist at its surface.

What can exploding stars teach us about how blood flows through an artery' Or swimming bacteria about how the ocean's layers mix' A collaboration of researchers, including from the University of Cambridge, has reached a milestone toward training artificial intelligence models to find and use transferable knowledge between fields to drive scientific discovery.

A pulsar within a few thousand light-years of Earth could have accelerated electrons and positrons to the extreme energies now measured by the H.E.S.S.-Observatory Five telescopes of the H.E.S.S.-collaboration in Namibia are used to study cosmic radiation, especially gamma radiation. In data from ten years of observations, the researchers have now been able to detect cosmic electrons and positrons with an unprecedented energy of more than ten tera-electronvolts (1 TeV corresponds to 10^12 electronvolts).

By analyzing a Martian meteorite, scientists from the University of Lausanne and Curtin University have discovered traces of water dating back 4.45 billion years in the crust of Mars, i.e. to the beginning of the Red Planet's formation. This new information reinforces the hypothesis that Mars may have been habitable at some point in its history.

Remarkable encounter during 2022 Niagara fireball event leads to discovery of tiniest asteroid known In an international study led by Western University and Lowell Observatory , scientists describe a pioneering, integrative approach for studying near-Earth asteroids based largely on a November 2022 fireball event that dropped meteorites in the Niagara region.

Scientists from NASA and our Department of Physics have used supercomputer simulations to reveal that Mars' moons may have been formed from destroyed asteroid fragments. The researchers found that an asteroid passing near Mars could have been pulled apart by the planet's gravity, with the resulting rock fragments strewn into a range of orbits.

Key Takeaways A complex analysis of DESI's first year of data provides one of the most stringent tests yet of general relativity and how gravity behaves at cosmic scales. Looking at galaxies and how they cluster across time reveals the growth of cosmic structure, which lets DESI test theories of modified gravity - an alternative explanation for our universe's accelerating expansion.

GRACE satellites measure gravity as they orbit the planet to reveal shifting levels of water on the Earth (artist's concept). Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech" A team of researchers identified this decrease in freshwater using observations from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites.

The ATLAS collaboration at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) reported the first observation of top quarks in collisions between lead ions in a talk held at CERN last week. Members of the research group of Matthias Schott from the Physikalisches Institut at the University of Bonn have been contributing to this new study.

Scientists from the CNRS, a consortium of German universities, and the Max-Planck-Institut für Kernphysik working at the H.E.S.S. observatory have recently identified electrons and positrons with the highest energies ever recorded on Earth. They provide evidence of cosmic processes emitting colossal amounts of energy, the origins of which are as yet unknown.

Astrochemistry, a relatively new field, focuses on exploring chemistry in interstellar spaces to uncover insights about the origins of life on Earth. This discipline has seen significant advancements in recent years. Born in the late 1930s with the development of spectroscopy and radio astronomy, astrochemistry, a field at the intersection of astrophysics and chemistry, is now mature.

Uranus's upper atmosphere has been cooling for decades - and now scientists have shown why. Observations from Earth have shown Uranus' upper atmosphere has been cooling for decades, with no clear explanation. Now, a team led by Imperial College London scientists has determined that unpredictable long-term changes in the solar wind - the stream of particles and energy coming from the Sun - are behind the drop.

An international team led by the University of Geneva has discovered three ultra-massive galaxies in the early Universe forming at unexpected speeds, challenging current models of galaxy formation. An international team led by the University of Geneva has identified three ultra-massive galaxies - nearly as massive as the Milky Way - already in place within the first billion years after the Big Bang.

An international team that includes the University of Bath has discovered three ultra-massive galaxies in the early Universe forming at unexpected speeds. An international team that was led by the University of Geneva (UNIGE) and includes Professor Stijn Wuyts from the University of Bath has identified three ultra-massive galaxies - each nearly as massive as the Milky Way - that had already assembled within the first billion years after the Big Bang.