For thousands of years, Martian rocks have bombarded Earth, sent flying through space after being ejected from their homeworld by violent impacts or volcanic processes. But as we collect these tiny samples, scientists have started to learn something interesting: the age of these Martian rocks doesn’t line up with what we know about Mars’ age as a whole. They’re a lot younger.

Mars is really old. Scientists believe the planet finished forming around 4.56 billion years ago, roughly 90 million years before our own planet. Further, evidence suggests that most of the Martian surface is old. So, why are chunks of Martian rock showing such a young age?

Mars landscape captured by the Pathfinder lander. Image source: NASA/JPL

The answer, they say, most likely lies in the constant bombardment of the Martian surface by meteorites and asteroids. With roughly 200 bombardments that create 4-meter craters each year, the Martian surface is constantly spewing more rock into space, some of which finds its way to Earth. The reason the Martian rock’s age doesn’t seem to add up is because the younger rock is replacing the older rock as it gets ejected from the planet.

This means that the younger rock from under the surface, which is still being replenished by volcanic activity, is eventually exposed to the surface and thus becomes the ejecta that meteorites send flying into space. This, a group of scientists explain in a paper published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters, could help us understand why the Martian rocks found on Earth appear so young.

Understanding how Mars is changing – both inside and out – is important as NASA and others prepare for the first manned missions to Mars. Further, scientists are constantly looking for new ways to understand how the planets within our solar system formed, and how that can teach us more about the universe’s evolution as a whole.

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Future missions to the Moon could see astronauts growing the first plants on the lunar surface. But, getting lunar soil to grow plants has been a tricky process. Scientists may have finally had a breakthrough in the process and believe putting Earth microbes into lunar soil could make it more habitable for plants.

Previous research into growing plants within soil from the Moon has shown that the soil on our satellite contains several elements vital to plant growth. However, experiments using lunar soil have shown that the Moon is just bad at hosting crops. So how do we fix that?

Well, the trick in getting lunar soil to grow plants more reliably may have to do with adding Earth’s microbes to the mix. See, microbes on our planet have helped make it more habitable over the years, and adding those microbes to the soil on the Moon could help us unlock those vital nutrients that we’ve discovered traces of.

Being able to grow plants in lunar soil could help us establish moon bases more reliably. Image source: designprojects / Adobe

This would then allow us to create lunar greenhouses effectively, allowing future missions to the Moon – like Artemis III – to set up growing areas and grow crops. This would also be important for creating sustainable Moon bases, which NASA and other space agencies hope to do within the next fifty to sixty years.

Of course, there are more variables at play than just getting lunar soil to play nice. But this is a vital first step that astronomers and astronauts need to solve if we ever hope to create actual, sustainable colonies on other planets and planetary bodies.

A new study helps highlight the important role that microbes could play in making the soil on the Moon more habitable for plants. Tests run on simulated lunar soil showed that plants grown with three species of bacteria (or microbes) had longer stems and roots after just six days of growth than those grown in normal simulated lunar soil without the additional microbes.

With so much attention on colonizing space beyond our own planet, these kinds of logistical problems are important to solve early on, especially if we want such missions to last beyond their initial windows.

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NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and the now-aging Hubble telescope have joined forces to capture observations of a beautiful galactic collision. The new images captured by the observatories help astronomers see even deeper into the universe, getting a deep look at details that are only possible by combining the power of these two flagship observatories.

The two telescopes – old and new – came together to capture images of the galaxy cluster MACS0416, which is located 4.3 billion light-years from Earth. MACS0416 showcases two colliding galaxy clusters that astronomers say will eventually combine into an even larger cluster.

Hubble captured images of the galactic collision as part of its Frontier Fields mission in 2014, which sought super-deep views of the universe. While Hubble pioneered the search, Webb’s infrared view has allowed astronomers to peer even deeper into Hubble’s previous targeted observations, providing new details.

Image source: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI

While Webb’s observations of MACS0416 do provide more detail on their own, they were actually part of four epochs of observations in an effort to find objects varying in observed brightness. These transients, they hoped, would help them learn more about the multiple-star systems that exist within our universe.

When brought together, the observations created a spectacular image that almost makes the cluster look like a Christmas tree, earning it the name of the Christmas Tree Galaxy Cluster. Astronomers say they have discovered transients everywhere within the galactic collision thanks to Hubble and James Webb’s combined powers.

Despite Hubble’s age, the space telescope has captured some of the most iconic observations of our universe. When combined with the power of the James Webb, we’re able to look even deeper into the universe, revealing details that we hadn’t even dreamed of finding before. Together, Webb and its predecessor are an unstoppable force that could help us uncover the mysteries of the cosmos.

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Scientists have now captured direct detections of oxygen on the daylight side of Venus. This discovery could teach researchers more about the atmosphere on Venus. Scientists previously discovered direct detections of oxygen on Venus’s nightside, and theoretical models have long shown that atomic oxygen should exist in the planet’s atmosphere.

Discovering direct detections of oxygen on Venus’s dayside is exciting, especially as scientists have long yearned to learn more about “Earth’s evil twin.” Where Earth is lush and verdant, Venus is a hellscape. A hot planet with choking clouds that are composed of carbon dioxide.

One good way to look at Venus is to imagine a greenhouse environment with average temperatures up to 867 Fahrenheit. That’s so hot that all the probes sent to the surface have melted within minutes, making it difficult to learn more about Venus’s surface. 

Venus is a hellscape made up of a rocky surface overlooked by a deadly atmosphere. Image source: NASA/JPL

But atomic oxygen isn’t like the oxygen we breathe, so Venus isn’t a planet that we can breathe on or anything – even if we could survive the extreme heat. Instead, atomic oxygen is highly reactive and usually bonds to other atoms. It’s abundant at high altitudes on Earth, but it seems to be much more abundant on Venus. 

Directly detecting oxygen on Venus’s dayside could teach us more about how the carbon dioxide that fills Venus’s atmosphere is created. Based on the data, scientists believe that when the carbon dioxide atoms travel to Venus’s dayside, they separate, becoming atomic oxygen and carbon monoxide. However, when it travels back to the nightside, the molecules connect again, creating carbon dioxide.

Learning more about Earth’s sister planet will help us better understand how Venus came to be the hot death pit that it is today. And it could help us better understand how climate change and other global effects may change the way that our planet looks and operates for thousands of years to come.

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Earlier this month, NASA’s Lucy probe completed its first flyby of the asteroid Dinkinesh, discovering that it actually was part of a binary pair with a smaller asteroid satellite orbiting it. Now, though, the probe has revealed even more information about Dinkinesh. It isn’t just the larger asteroid that is part of a binary pair. Dinkinesh’s unanticipated satellite is actually a contact binary itself.

According to a new post shared by NASA, the data captured by Lucy’s Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (L’LORRI), Dinkinesh’s smaller satellite is actually made up of two smaller objects touching each other. The reason that this wasn’t seen before, when the first satellite was discovered, is because the two asteroids were lined up perfectly, hiding one behind the other.

Contact binaries are relatively common within our solar system, John Spencer, Lucy’s deputy project scientist of the Boulder, Colorado branch of San Antonio’s Southwest Research Institute, shared in the NASA post. However, I don’t think anyone expected to find evidence of one during Lucy’s first flyby of an asteroid like Dinkinesh.

Image source: NASA/Goddard/SwRI/Johns Hopkins APL

Spencer continued, “We haven’t seen many up-close, and we’ve never seen one orbiting another asteroid. We’d been puzzling over odd variations in Dinkinesh’s brightness that we saw on approach, which gave us a hint that Dinkinesh might have a moon of some sort, but we never suspected anything so bizarre!”

The discovery of this additional contact binary during Lucy’s Dinkinesh flyby is both exciting and puzzling. Scientists are already confused about why the two components of the satellite are similar sizes, as well as how they came to join together the way they have. Perhaps we’ll see future research that will help us understand that.

Lucy’s flyby of Dinkinesh was just the start, of course. The probe will now continue its mission deeper into our solar system, capturing data and images of other asteroids as it does. The second photo, which revealed the second component of the satellite, was taken roughly 960 miles beyond where the first was taken, showcasing just how important perspective is to the data we capture about our universe.

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Astronomers have discovered the most distant black hole we have ever seen. The record-breaking black hole was discovered using the combined data of NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the James Webb Space Telescope. The researchers say the black hole existed as long ago as 470 million years after the Big Bang. 

Akos Bogdan from the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) spearheaded the discovery and was the lead author on a new paper on the discovery that has been published in the journal Nature Astronomy and outlines how the astronomers combined data from the two telescopes to make the discovery.

“We needed Webb to find this remarkably distant galaxy and Chandra to find its supermassive black hole,” Bogdan says. Bogdan also says that the team also took advantage of the magnifying properties of gravitational lensing – which causes light to bend around galaxies and magnify other objects behind them.

Image source: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO/Ákos Bogdán; Infrared: NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/L. Frattare & K. Arcand

This discovery is especially important for understanding how supermassive black holes grow, as well as how they can reach the masses that they do, especially so soon after the Big Bang. As far as we know, there are some kind of limits on how fast black holes can grow once they form. As such, those born massive have a huge headstart, Andy Goulding, a co-author of the paper, explains. 

The researchers believe the record-breaking black hole may have formed out of the collapse of a huge cloud of gas, thus allowing it to reach the size and mass that it showcases in the X-ray images they captured. And, because that black hole existed so long ago, the researchers are captivated to learn more about how it came into existence.

A preprint of the paper is already available on arXiv, and the full paper will be available in the upcoming issue of Nature Astronomy.

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The European Space Agency hopes to create the most extensive 3D map of our universe yet, and it plans to do so with the Euclid space telescope, an observatory built to capture images of the universe and hunt down proof of dark matter and dark energy. Dubbed the agency’s “dark universe detective,” the Euclid has a ton of potential, and the telescope’s first real images are finally here, to dazzling effect.

Scientists estimate that roughly 95 percent of our universe is made up of dark matter and dark energy – both entities we have yet to observe directly. While we don’t understand what these two entities are, we do understand that their presence is key to causing the subtle changes in appearance and the motions of the things we see in the cosmos.

To help reveal more about these dark influences, Euclid will capture razor-sharp images of the sky while looking deep into the distant universe. And to help showcase just how powerful the telescope is, the ESA has released Euclid’s first full-color images, and they’re absolutely baffling.

The ESA has released five images captured by the Euclid telescope. These images include Euclid’s view of the Perseus cluster, a spiral galaxy known as IC 342, the irregular galaxy NGC 6822, the globular cluster NGC 6397, and the Horsehead Nebula. All of the images deliver fantastic quality down to every detail and showcase the true potential of the newest ESA observatory.

The ESA says that its dark universe detective will look out to 10 billion light-years away from Earth during its observations, giving us the potential to make the largest cosmic 3D map that humankind has ever seen. This, along with the detail that Euclid is capable of capturing, should provide a fantastic hunting ground for evidence of dark matter and dark energy, which continue to elude us.

Members of the Euclid Project say that the images are sharper and more beautiful than they could have ever hoped for and that they show many unseen details and features about the areas they photographed – all of which have been heavily studied.

The ESA technically shared Euclid’s first test images several months ago. However, those images were a part of the testing that the telescope underwent after it reached its main point of observation. With Euclid’s first full-color images, we finally get an idea of what the observatory is truly capable of, and a better understanding of how it can capture the cosmos in vivid detail.

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Our Sun is over four billion years old. But, if you could go back in time and take a photo of it, just as it was being born and growing up, you’d see something similar to the latest James Webb photo of a baby star. The star, which is located in the Orion constellation, was captured, throwing out powerful shocks and jets of energy.

Looking at the image, which I’ve embedded below, it’s evident that the birth and subsequent growth of a star is exceptionally violent. As a result, several shockwaves and jets of energy like the ones seen in this image are common when a star is born. The particular star in question this time around is part of an object called HH212.

Image source: NASA, ESA, CSA, Mark McCaughrean & Sam Pearson, CC BY-SA

HH212 is located roughly 1,300 light-years from Earth, and it is actually very close to the three bright and beautiful stars that make up Orion’s Belt, an iconic constellation you can often see in the night sky. James Webb’s photo of this baby star showcases massive and dramatic outflows of gas, which scientists say are probably used to regulate the star’s birthing.

Scientists estimate the protostar to be around 50,000 years old. They also say that our Sun probably looked very similar when it was that age. The jets that we see here, which also show evidence of bowshocks, are likely used to help keep the star from spinning out of control, thus causing it to fly apart.

Unfortunately, you can’t see the protostar in James Webb’s photo of the baby star, as it is hidden behind a dense and spinning disc of gas and dust, a post beneath the image explains. But that doesn’t stop the image from being absolutely breathtaking to look at and yet another reminder of how much James Webb is changing science by giving us unique views into our universe like this.

Scientists are also using the space telescope to study the mysteries of the early universe, which it hopes to unravel as scientists seek more answers about how our universe evolved.

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NASA’s ad-free streaming service, NASA+, will launch this month. The space agency revealed NASA+ in July and said that the service will be wholly ad-free and won’t cost anything to watch, either. On top of offering better access to its various life footage features – like space launches – NASA+ will also feature a slew of original programming to bring people closer to space.

NASA+ will launch on November 8. The streaming service will be available through the NASA app on iOS and Android devices, as well as through Roku, Apple TV, Fire TV, and web browsers. That means you’ll have plenty of ways to access the new content that NASA plans to showcase on its service.

The space agency says that it will include an assortment of original programming based around older missions, like NASA Explorers, which is a multi-episodic look at the agency’s recently finished seven-year mission to deliver asteroid samples from Bennu to Earth. The series will follow OSIRIS-REx’s journey through the cosmos to the asteroid and then back to Earth.

Another series coming to NASA+ after launch is Other Worlds, which will highlight the latest updates and news from the James Webb space telescope, which launched in 2021 after 17 years of development hear on Earth. The space telescope has given scientists a wider-than-ever glimpse into our universe, and this series will help you stay more up-to-date on everything James Webb has uncovered.

NASA also shared details about a NASA+ show called Space Out, which will feature relaxing music and visuals of the cosmos, including images from the surface of Mars to the sunset on Uranus. From the sounds of things, the launch of NASA+ will bring quite a bit to the table, especially with its ad-free, no-cost design.

Whether NASA+ will remain ad-free and no-cost well after launch is unclear at the moment. NASA does not appear to have any plans to charge for its programming, which has me excited about what the space agency could offer here.

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Saturn’s rings will vanish in 2025, but don’t worry, they’ll return. NASA says that the rings around the planet will appear to disappear completely. However, it’s just an optical illusion created by the planet turning edge-on with Earth. So, while the rings are still technically there, we’ll be facing their side, making it almost impossible to see them.

This particular movement isn’t uncommon or unexpected, either, though. As the planet completes its 29.5-year orbit around the Sun, it turns towards our planet, with the edge of its rings facing outward. Then, after a few years, the rings come back into view as the planet spins more, the rings coming back to face Earth in their entirety.

Saturn floats in space as James Webb captures observations of the planet. Image source: JWST/JWSTFeed

It’s an intriguing and fleeting event that will continue until the Sun explodes, destroying our planet and possibly knocking the orbits of other planets into disarray. So, while Saturn’s rings will vanish in 2025, they’re expected to return to view in 2032, when the planet spins back into the correct orientation.

Saturn’s rings were first discovered by Galileo Galilei in 1610, and they have continued to be an iconic part of our solar system, pulling scientist’s eyes to their beauty with ease. Scientists have studied the rings as best they can from so far away, theorizing about how they came to be, what they are made of, and even what spokes in Saturn’s rings could mean.

With the rings set to vanish in 2025, though, that means you have a bit of a time crunch on how much you can observe the rings over the coming months. If you enjoy skywatching and catching glimpses of Saturn’s rings, I suggest getting in as much viewing time as you can over the next several months, as the rings will vanish and stay “invisible” for over five years once they disappear.

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