News by Subject Space & Planetary

Scientists revealed strong isotope effects in photodissociation of the water isotopologue (HOD) using the Dalian Coherent Light Source.

University of Washington researchers have developed a method that uses a gaming graphics card to control plasma formation in their prototype fusion reactor.

An international physics team with the participation of the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) has proposed a new concept that may allow selected cosmic extreme processes to be studied in the laboratory in the future. A special setup of two high-intensity laser beams could create conditions similar to those found near neutron stars, for example. An antimatter jet is generated and accelerated very efficiently, as the experts report in the journal Communications Physics (DOI: 10.1038/s42005-021-00636-x).

A team at the Natural History Museum (NHM), London is paving the way for future rovers to search for meteorites on Mars. The scientists are using the NHM's extensive meteorite collection to test the spectral instruments destined for the ExoMars rover Rosalind Franklin, and develop tools to identify meteorites on the surface of the red planet. The project is being presented today (23 July) at the virtual National Astronomy Meeting 2021.

New high-resolution observations clearly show a moon-forming region around exoplanet PDS 70c. The observations have allowed astronomers to determine the ring-shaped region's size and mass for the first time.

Using recordings of marsquakes, seismologists have gained a precise picture of the structure and thickness of the red planet's crust / findings from NASA's InSight mission published in 'Science'

A new approach to analysing the development of magnetic tangles on the Sun has led to a breakthrough in a longstanding debate about how solar energy is injected into the solar atmosphere before being released into space, causing space weather events. The first direct evidence that field lines become knotted before they emerge at the visible surface of the Sun has implications for our ability to predict the behaviour of active regions and the nature of the solar interior.

According to the latest cosmological models, large spiral galaxies such as the Milky Way grew by absorbing smaller galaxies, by a sort of galactic cannibalism. Evidence for this is given by very large structures, the tidal stellar streams, which are observed around them, which are the remains of these satellite galaxies. But the full histories of the majority of these cases are hard to study, because these flows of stars are very faint, and only the remains of the most recent mergers have been detected.

Not a moonshot: Karan Jani explores possibility of lunar observatory to better understand fundamental physics, astronomy and cosmology