Astrophysical jets are enormously powerful and energetic phenomena. Black holes launch them from their poles and they can extend enormous distances into space, disrupting star formation in adjacent regions. Astrophysicists want to be able to forecast when they're launched so they can understand theire extreme physics better. New research is making progress in understanding when they are triggered.
Uranus and Neptune, the Solar System's ice giants, have interiors unlike the other planets. As a result, they also have magnetic fields unlike the others. They're messy and tilted, and Voyager 2, the only spacecraft to even flyby them, showed us how messy they are. New research uses models to try to understand what's going on with the pair of planets and their weird fields, and found that it's likely they change on very short timescales. They could already be much different than when Voyager 2 visited in the late 1980s.
TESS watched an exoplanet about 1,000 light years away as it repeatedly transited in front of its star for seven years. But astronomers were surprised to find that the hot Jupiter disappeared. Of course, planets don't just disappear. Something interrupted its transits from our point of view, and astronomers think they've figured out what happened. An unseen, nearby giant planet companion tugged on it until TESS couldn't see it anymore.
There's a strange gamma-ray emitter in the Large Magellanic Cloud that has astronomers stumped about its source. It lies within the ashes left behind by a supernova that created a compact object that's part of the system. The supernova remnant provides some evidence for the emissions, but not the whole story.
The MeerKLASS international collaboration achieves the first direct measurement of the large-scale clustering of cosmic hydrogen in the Universe.
Thousands of so-called zombie satellites orbit Earth in the critical Low-Earth Orbit regime. They're either inactive or have stopped alerting other satellites to their presence. Researchers are building a system called CORTEX that can guide a repair satellite to autonomously dock with these zombies.
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.
