A Common Food Emulsifier Could Solve One of Rocketry’s Oldest Fuel Problems

In propulsion system design, engineers have long faced a trade-off between solid and liquid rocket fuels. Each has advantages and disadvantages, and in an effort to try to min/max the efficacy of different types of fuel, researchers have long placed an emphasis on a hybrid between solids and liquids - in other words they’ve been working with gels. Unfortunately, gels have their own sets of problems to deal with. But a new paper published by Pranay Mudaliar and Jerin John of Concordia in the journal Langmuir uses an uncommon ingredient to elegantly solve some of those problems, but which is typically used in a completely different area of human activity - lecithin.

A Stellar Odd Couple at an Unusual Stage of Evolution

Millisecond pulsars are fascinating objects that serve as natural clocks in the Universe. They form by drawing material and angular momentum from a companion. This mass transfer can rapidly accelerate the companion's evolution to a white dwarf. Astronomers have detected a millisecond pulsar's white dwarf companion that appears to be observed just as the mass transfer completed. They can still see some of the debris.

Nearby Dwarf Galaxies Show Surprising Lack Of Oxygen, Says Paper

A new study of more than three dozen dwarf galaxies has surprised researchers with just how little oxygen they have been able to retain over cosmic time. The results reveal that we still have major gaps in our understanding of galaxy evolution.

Our Sun’s Undiscovered Stellar Nemesis Is Still Out There, Says Physicist

The decades old idea that our solar system’s Oort Cloud is continually perturbed by a heretofore undetected low mass Red Dwarf star remains the best explanation for periodicities found in Earth’s impact record. Or so says a well known physicist who has long championed this idea.

The ELT Can Probe Ultra-Diffuse Galaxies and Their Dark Matter Mysteries

Ultra-Diffuse Galaxies are strange because they're as large as the Milky Way, but have far fewer stars. It's as if they're puffed up for some reason. Determining what's going on with them could help confirm the Lambda-CDM model. A new proposed instrument for the Extremely Large Telescope could give astronomers their best look yet at these strange galaxies.

NASA's Twin Spacecraft Will Execute Powered Slingshot Maneuvers on Their Way to Mars

NASA's ESCAPADE mission features a pair of identical spacecraft on their way to Mars. They launched outside of the normal launch window, so they'll perform powered slingshot maneuvers to boost their speed. Once there, they'll "fly" in formation and study how the solar wind interacts with what remains of Mars ancient magnetosphere.

Earth's Gravity May Have Kept the Early Moon's Volcanic Heart Beating

We typically think of the Moon as a static, floating object that has remained the same for basically its entire lifetime, with an occasional asteroid impact serving as an exception. That understanding is grounded in physics - the Moon should have cooled rapidly after forming when a huge protoplanet hit the early Earth around 4.5 billion years ago. But, some lunar material returned from the Chang’e-5 mission was notably formed only around two billion years ago, yet appeared to be volcanic in origin. So how did a world that was supposed to have settled down without volcanism remain hot enough to create these materials more than two billion years after its violent birth? A new paper from Miao Chen of the Chengdu University of Technology and his colleagues, and recently published in the journal Planet, offers an explanation - tidal heating.