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An international team of researchers combine orbital imagery with seismological data from NASA's Mars InSight lander to derive a new impact rate for meteorite strikes on Mars. Seismology also offers a new tool for determining the density of Mars' craters and the age of different regions of a planet.

A massive balloon, designed to measure the background radiation left over from the 'Big Bang' and help scientists better understand the infancy and evolution of our Universe, has just moved to the next stage of development Thirty years after the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) spectrum was first precisely characterised by NASA's Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) mission, a new experiment - known as BISOU (for Balloon Interferometer for Spectral Observations of the Universe) - is expected to significantly advance these measurements, gaining a factor of ~25 in sensitivity.

An international team has shown the existence of two distinct populations of sub-Neptunes, resolving a debate in the scientific community. The majority of stars in our galaxy are home to planets. The most abundant are the sub-Neptunes, planets between the size of Earth and Neptune. Calculating their density poses a problem for scientists: depending on the method used to measure their mass, two populations are highlighted, the dense and the less dense.

Techniques developed to analyse the ripples in spacetime detected by one of the 21st century's most sensitive pieces of scientific equipment have helped cast new light on the function of the oldest known analogue computer. Astronomers from the University of Glasgow have used statistical modelling techniques developed to analyse gravitational waves to establish the likely number of holes in one of the broken rings of the Antikythera mechanism - an ancient artifact which was showcased in the movie Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny .

A Canadian team led by René Doyon will help design and build the ANDES spectrograph, which will search for signs of life outside the solar system. In 2014, the European Southern Observatory (ESO) began construction of the world's largest telescope, the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), in Chile's Atacama Desert, 3,000 metres above sea level.

For the last seven decades, astrophysicists have theorized the existence of "kugelblitze," black holes caused by extremely high concentrations of light. These special black holes, they speculated, might be linked to astronomical phenomena such as dark matter, and have even been suggested as the power source of hypothetical spaceship engines in the far future.

A team of researchers including French scientists from the CNRS, Université Grenoble Alpes, and the Observatoire de Paris-PSL 1 have for the first time ever observed brown dwarfs orbiting very near bright stars-a feat for precise astronomical imaging. Out of the eight companions 2 imaged, the researchers determined that five were brown dwarfs, substellar celestial objects that are still poorly understood, neither stars nor planets but something in between.

Science + Technology Fragments from the early cosmos help unravel the mystery of our solar system's birth Key takeaways Iron meteorites are remnants of the metallic cores of the earliest asteroids in our solar system. Iron meteorites contain refractory metals, such as iridium and platinum, that formed near the sun but were transported to the outer solar system.

In 2014, the European Southern Observatory (ESO) began construction of the world's largest telescope, the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), at an altitude of over 3,000 m in Chile's Atacama Desert. Scheduled to enter service in 2028, this giant telescope promises to mark a new era in ground-based astronomy.

Observations from several telescopes, including the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT) in the Atacama Desert in Chile, show a galaxy undergoing dramatic changes over the past several years. These dramatic changes in brightness began in December 2019, a phenomenon first noticed by the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) , which operates from the 48-inch Samuel Oschin Telescope at Caltech's Palomar Observatory.

Manchester engineers unlock design for record-breaking robot that could jump twice the height of Big Ben Engineers at The University of Manchester have unlocked the secrets to designing a robot capable of jumping 200 metres - higher than any other jumping robot designed to date. Using a combination of mathematics, computer simulations, and laboratory experiments, the researchers have discovered how to design a robot with the optimum size, shape and the arrangement of its parts, allowing it to jump high enough to clear obstacles many times its own size.

Scientists, through the VELOCE project, have clocked the speed of Cepheid stars - "standard candles" that help us measure the size of the universe - with unprecedented precision, offering exciting new insights about them. Photo: RS Puppis , one of the most luminous Cepheid variable star s, rhythmically brightens and dims over a six-week cycle.

Heidelberg researchers played a leading role in evaluating the data from the Gaia space observatory A mere 2,000 light years from Earth lies a black hole approximately 33 times the mass of the sun. The object known as Gaia BH3 - the most massive black hole ever discovered in the Milky Way - was detected with the aid of the Gaia space observatory of the European Space Agency (ESA).

For more than a decade, Western University planetary geologist Gordon "Oz" Osinski has led expeditions to Kamestastin Lake in Labrador. The environment is a perfect training ground because the properties and rock formations - created by the violent impact (and extreme heat) of an asteroid 36 million years ago - uniquely mimic the surface on the Moon.

Almost four billion light years away from Earth in the centre of the galaxy OJ287, two giant black holes orbit each other, which are approximately 18 billion and 150 million times more massive than our sun. The larger of the two black holes is surrounded by a vast accretion disk, a rotating disk of matter that flows towards the black hole at its centre.

This image is a slice of a much larger simulation depicting the cosmos as NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will see it when it launches. Every blob and speck of light represents a distant galaxy, except for the urchinlike spiky dots, which rep. Credit: C. Hirata and K. Cao (OSU) and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center" Scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory contributed to a project that sets the stage for two telescopes investigating one of astrophysics' biggest mysteries.

High-energy laser experiments led by Johns Hopkins researchers suggest the compound could be the earliest mineral to solidify out of magma oceans in forming "super-Earth" exoplanets Scientists have for the first time observed how atoms in magnesium oxide morph and melt under ultra-harsh conditions, providing new insights into this key mineral within Earth's mantle that is known to influence planet formation.

The structure and function of the kidneys is altered by space flight, with galactic radiation causing permanent damage that would jeopardise any mission to Mars, according to a new study led by researchers from UCL. The study, published in Nature Communications , is the largest analysis of kidney health in space flight to date and includes the first health dataset for commercial astronauts.

Clouds of gas in a distant galaxy are being pushed faster and faster - at more than 10,000 miles per second - out among neighboring stars by blasts of radiation from the supermassive black hole at the galaxy's center. It's a discovery that helps illuminate the way active black holes can continuously shape their galaxies by spurring on or snuffing out the development of new stars.

Astronomy professor Jonathan Gagné will be part of the Landolt space mission, solving problems caused by errors in astronomical calibrations. A major scientific breakthrough will be taking place soon thanks to NASA's Landolt space mission. The mission, at a cost of $19.5 million, will make it possible to measure stellar luminosities more accurately.