News by Subject Space & Planetary

A new study, led by a theoretical physicist at Berkeley Lab, suggests that never-before-observed particles called axions may be the source of unexplained, high-energy X-ray emissions surrounding a group of neutron stars.

Magnetars in the Milky Way have a distinctive X-ray signature, which allowed astronomers to associate rare giant gamma-ray bursts with these neutron stars. But how to identify extragalactic magnetars, which are too distant to display the faint signal that characterizes galactic magnetars? A recently discovered short gamma ray burst was localized to a star-forming region in a nearby galaxy, leading astronomers to believe they've found a fingerprint that will help locate more extragalactic magnetars.

Chinese scientists have established the world's first integrated quantum communication network, combining over 700 optical fibers on the ground with two ground-to-satellite links to achieve quantum key distribution over a total distance of 4,600 kilometers for users across the country.

A Southwest Research Institute-led team of scientists has identified a potentially new meteorite parent asteroid by studying a small shard of a meteorite that arrived on Earth a dozen years ago. The composition of a piece of the meteorite Almahata Sitta (AhS) indicates that its parent body was an asteroid roughly the size of Ceres, the largest object in the main asteroid belt, and formed in the presence of water under intermediate temperatures and pressures.

Researchers are using?Cold?War spy satellite images to explore changes in the environment, including deforestation in Romania, marmot decline in Kazakhstan and ecological damage from bombs in Vietnam.?

Using data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft, scientists at Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) modeled chemical processes in the subsurface ocean of Saturn's moon Enceladus. The studies indicate the possibility that a varied metabolic menu could support a potentially diverse microbial community in the liquid water ocean beneath the moon's icy facade.

An international research team led by the University of Bern has discovered an exotic binary system composed of two young planet-like objects, orbiting around each other from a very large distance. Although these objects look like giant exoplanets, they formed in the same way as stars, proving that the mechanisms driving star formation can produce rogue worlds in unusual systems deprived of a Sun.

From the perspective of future societies, in extremely closed environments such as a space station, self-sufficiency in food cultivation and waste management is critical. However, the technology to achieve this is still lacking. In a new study, scientists from Japan shed light on their most recent breakthrough: a cheap and efficient method to make liquid fertilizer (ammonia) from simplified artificial urine, serving an ideal dual purpose of growing food and treating waste.

Astronomers think planets can exist in orbits far from their star, and propose a two-step process: interactions with the star or inner planets kick it out of the inner system, and then a passing star stabilizes the orbit to keep it bound. Such a scenario could explain the hypothesized "Planet Nine" in our solar system. Astronomers has now confirmed that one binary star system, HD 106906, has a planet in a bound, highly eccentric orbit.