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    A weird ice that may form on alien planets has finally been observed

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    A strange type of ice thought to dwell deep in the oceans of alien planets has finally been proven to exist.

    For the first time, researchers have directly observed a sort of hybrid phase of water called plastic ice, which forms at high temperatures and pressures and exhibits traits of both solid ice and liquid water. The observations, reported February 12 in Nature, may help researchers better understand the internal architecture and processes of other worlds in our solar system and beyond, some of which might be habitable. More

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      A fast radio burst from a dead galaxy puzzles astronomers

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      A staccato blast of electromagnetic energy has been tracked to an old, dead galaxy for the first time. The discovery supports the idea that there are more ways to produce such flares, called fast radio bursts, than originally thought.

      Fast radio bursts, or FRBs, are millisecond-long eruptions of intense radio waves. Astronomers have observed thousands of these blasts, but only about 100 have been traced back to their origins, says astronomer Tarraneh Eftekhari of Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. Almost all of them came from lively neighborhoods full of young stars. More

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      The moon’s two grand canyons formed in less than 10 minutes

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      A giant impact 3.8 billion years ago sent a curtain of rock flying away from a point near the moon’s south pole. When that curtain fell, its rocks plunged up to 3.5 kilometers into the lunar surface with energies 130 times greater than the global inventory of nuclear weapons, new calculations show.

      And that’s how a hailstorm of boulders carved out two gargantuan canyons on the moon in less than 10 minutes.

      “They landed in a staccato fashion, bang-bang-bang-bang-bang,” says planetary geologist David Kring of the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, who reports the finding February 4 in Nature Communications. More

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      Ancient rocks reveal when rivers began pouring nutrients into the sea

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      Rivers may have operated on a global scale around 3.5 billion years ago.

      The new find comes courtesy of ancient rocks in China and South Africa. A change in rock chemistry around that time provides the earliest known chemical evidence for the weathering of Earth’s continents and the subsequent delivery of nutrients from land to ocean, geobiologist Kurt Konhauser and colleagues report December 12 in Geology.

      Water chips away at rocks on land, removing minerals and washing them away. “As soon as you get weathering, you’ve got a nutrient influx to the oceans, which can lead to … life thriving in coastal waters,” says Konhauser, of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. More

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      A cosmic ‘Platypus’ might link two astronomical mysteries

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      NATIONAL HARBOR, MD. — A bright blip in a distant galaxy may link two mysterious categories of cosmic flares. The event, which astronomers playfully call the Platypus, could also offer a new way to understand the origins of supermassive black holes that reside at the centers of most galaxies.

      The brilliant burst, spotted in a dwarf galaxy about 6.5 billion light-years from Earth, has many of the hallmarks of a tidal disruption event, the final flash of a star being ripped apart by a black hole. But it also resembles another type of flash, dubbed an LFBOT, which astronomers think might be a class of exploding star. More

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      Galactic chaos at cosmic noon may have stunted Milky Way planet formation

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      The Milky Way keeps its planets close to its chest. Stars in a thin, flat disk bisecting the galaxy have more planets on average than stars in a thicker, enveloping disk — and astronomers now think they know why.

      Stars that currently live in the galaxy’s thick disk were born during a time of galactic chaos, says MIT astrophysicist Tim Hallatt. The stars’ violent upbringing hindered their ability to grow and retain planets, he and astrophysicist Eve Lee, formerly of McGill University in Montreal, report January 22 in the Astrophysical Journal. More

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      A crumbling exoplanet spills its guts

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      NATIONAL HARBOR, MD. — For the first time, astronomers have taken a direct look at an exoplanet’s insides.

      An exoplanet about 800 light-years away is spilling its guts into space, and new observations with the James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST, have let astronomers read the entrails, astronomers report this week at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

      “If this is true, it’s super cool,” says astronomer Mercedez López-Morales of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, who was not involved in the new work. “For the first time you can study directly what the interior of an exoplanet is made of. That’s exciting.” More

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      Pluto may have captured its moon Charon with a kiss

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      Pluto and Charon’s meet-cute may have started with a kiss. New computer simulations of the dwarf planet and its largest moon suggest that the pair got together in a “kiss-and-capture” collision, where the two bodies briefly joined up before settling into their current positions.

      “It’s a U-Haul situation,” says planetary scientist Adeene Denton of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., who reports the results January 6 in Nature Geoscience. “They kiss and they say, ‘Yeah, this is it. I want to build a system together with you.’ And then they do.” More

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      Scientists are building underwater neutrino telescopes in the Mediterranean

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      Deploying a telescope in space is one thing. Making two of them deep under the sea is a task in a league of its own.

      On a ship bobbing in the Mediterranean Sea, physicists — not typically known for their sea legs — brave weeklong voyages and rough waters, working around the clock to deploy the telescopes’ detectors.

      The telescopes are designed to detect not light, but neutrinos. These subatomic particles are spewed at high energies from mysterious, unidentified realms of space. But such high-energy neutrinos are so rare, and so stealthy, that the detectors that study them must be enormous. So scientists are outfitting a cubic kilometer of the Mediterranean with light-collecting devices designed to snag them. More