For a long time, planetary scientists thought that giant impacts drove a young planet's atmosphere away into space with all the heat they generated. But it turns out the opposite could be true. The mass a young planet gains through a giant impact increases its gravitational hold on its atmosphere.
Researchers have created a model lifeless Earth that couples the atmosphere with interior planetary processes. The model can reproduce Earth's modern habitable state without including life, showing that a planet that appears habitable isn't necessarily inhabited. The tool will be useful when and if the Habitable Worlds Observatory is launched, by helping identify false positives.
This summer, a team of students and researchers at the University of Alabama in Huntsville successfully conducted three rocket-motor firing tests on a prototype lunar landing pad. The tests showed the prototype’s ability to capture and redirect rocket exhaust through an integrated vent system, marking an important milestone in developing landing infrastructure for future Moon base operations.
When we make our home on other worlds, who will be in charge? Will it be an emperor? A billionaire? A rebel alliance? Or none of the above? Astrobiologist Jacob Haqq Misra runs through the legal and political options.
Astronomers are finding more dusty disks around white dwarf stars, and some of them are home to asteroids. But how these rocky asteroids are turned to dust and form these rings isn't clear. New research shows that the white dwarf's gravity alone can't shred them to dust.
The Vera Rubin Observatory has detected two more of the Milky Ways' dim, hard to see satellites. One is an ultra-faint dwarf galaxy, and one is a globular cluster. Each one is a missing piece of the puzzle in the Milky Way's merger history. By finding more of these satellites, our understanding of galaxy growth, and the role dark matter plays in it, will improve.
Astrophysicists think that black holes grow through a hierarchical merger framework. But the elusive Intermediate Mass Black Holes are the missing link between stellar mass black holes, and the gargantuan supermassive black holes like the one at the center of the Milky Way. The JWST may have found the ancient sources of IMBH heavy seeds: young massive clusters in the high-redshift Universe.
